As a list that purports to precisely place “the best of the best,” however, it clearly possesses many shortcomings, and I think our effort as aficionados who have been engaged in these efforts for much longer than the Paste Magazine committee is to look for the specific strengths and weaknesses in such evaluative efforts.
I wonder if we would get more use out of this list if we were to separate it into two sections, one for classic noir and one for neo-noir, a process that may well have been the initial process taken by the list compilers. While I agree that the top two choices are odd ones in the context of what we know about the shifting consensus in critical circles (WOMAN IN THE WINDOW and BIG SLEEP strike me as belonging to an approach to noir that reigned in the 1980s and has mostly been supplanted in the intervening years), I think we might still get something more useful from the list if we bifurcate it.
I’ll come back shortly and do that in a subsequent post…
Responses