The "rules" of the title aren't enumerated, as in "Rule Number One: Have Your Villains Smoke Cigars." The presentation is more intuitive but the connections between the sections are logical and linear.
It's about the best documentary I've seen on the genre. The developmental approach pins down the origins of the moody, cynical, black-and-white films noir. They begin with the flight of German directors, technicians, and composers from Nazi Germany in the thirties, who brought with them some of the conventions of expressionism -- the stark lighting, the shadows, the sense of pervasive evil.
And they borrowed their narratives from the plug-ugly pulp fiction of the time that appeared in magazines with names like "The Black Mask," where writers were paid by the word. It was hardly art. ("Somewhere behind me a .45 chugged and the bullet whizzed past my ear.") According to this production, film noir more or less began with "The Maltese Falcon" and ended with "Touch of Evil." Excerpts are plentiful and, with the help of expert talking heads, they illustrate the use of lighting techniques, directorial tropes, and even the some of the subtleties in the musical scores by émigrés Franz Waxman and Miklos Rozsa, nuances that I'd never noticed before.
It cannot, of course, cover all the bases, so that we learn something about shooting on a shoe string from watching a scene from "Gun Crazy" rather than "Detour." Nothing about the French critics who were exposed overnight to American gangster movies and sang paeans to them. And it doesn't explain really the popularity of the genre or what conditions prompted its appearance in the first place. The heads tell us that people were disillusioned after the war. But the victory that followed the war could just as easily justify a string of happy-go-lucky celebratory comedies. In other words, who knows?
BBC should be applauded. It's a fine piece of work.
It's about the best documentary I've seen on the genre. The developmental approach pins down the origins of the moody, cynical, black-and-white films noir. They begin with the flight of German directors, technicians, and composers from Nazi Germany in the thirties, who brought with them some of the conventions of expressionism -- the stark lighting, the shadows, the sense of pervasive evil.
And they borrowed their narratives from the plug-ugly pulp fiction of the time that appeared in magazines with names like "The Black Mask," where writers were paid by the word. It was hardly art. ("Somewhere behind me a .45 chugged and the bullet whizzed past my ear.") According to this production, film noir more or less began with "The Maltese Falcon" and ended with "Touch of Evil." Excerpts are plentiful and, with the help of expert talking heads, they illustrate the use of lighting techniques, directorial tropes, and even the some of the subtleties in the musical scores by émigrés Franz Waxman and Miklos Rozsa, nuances that I'd never noticed before.
It cannot, of course, cover all the bases, so that we learn something about shooting on a shoe string from watching a scene from "Gun Crazy" rather than "Detour." Nothing about the French critics who were exposed overnight to American gangster movies and sang paeans to them. And it doesn't explain really the popularity of the genre or what conditions prompted its appearance in the first place. The heads tell us that people were disillusioned after the war. But the victory that followed the war could just as easily justify a string of happy-go-lucky celebratory comedies. In other words, who knows?
BBC should be applauded. It's a fine piece of work.