|
Italian
and French Film Noir Directors
Elsewhere, Italian director Luchino Visconti adapted
Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice as Ossessione
(1943), regarded both as one of the great noirs and a
seminal film in the development of neorealism. (This was
not even the first screen version of Cain's novel,
having been preceded by the French Le Dernier tournant
in 1939.)
Ossessione
(1943)
In Japan, the celebrated Akira Kurosawa
directed several movies recognizable as film noirs,
including Drunken Angel (1948), Stray Dog (1949), The
Bad Sleep Well (1960), and High and Low (1963).
Among the first major neo-noir films—the term often
applied to movies that consciously refer back to the
classic noir tradition—was the French Tirez sur la
pianiste (1960), directed by François Truffaut from a
novel by one of the gloomiest of American noir fiction
writers, David Goodis.
Noir crime films and melodramas
have been produced in many countries in the post-classic
area, some of them quintessentially self-aware
neo-noirs—for example, Il Conformista (1969; Italy), Der
Amerikanische Freund (1977; Germany), The Element of
Crime (1984; Denmark), As Tears Go By (1988; Hong
Kong)—others simply sharing narrative elements and a
version of the hardboiled sensibility associated with
classic noir—The Castle of Sand (1974; Japan), Insomnia
(1997; Norway), Croupier (1998; UK), Blind Shaft (2003;
China).
Film noir
Neo-noir and echoes of the classic mode
The 1960s and 1970s
|
