Film noir is a type of film style originating in the 1940s and 1950s that dealt with the dark side of the human psyche. Over and over, characters are destroyed or killed due to greed, revenge, lust and power. The morals of this world are confusing and overlapping, and ‘good’ is not always good; in a sense, film noir created the antihero trope which has redefined protagonists across the board. Many of these films were based on books by crime writers like James M. Cain, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Jim Thompson, David Goodis, and Cornell Woolrich.
Neo-noirs are film noirs not filmed during the Golden Period of the 1940s and 1950s, but still retain the same themes, tropes, crimes, and personalities of noirs. Noir is more a style than it is a genre, therefore many of these films fit into standard suspence pictures, murder mystery movies, or action films (or even dark dystopian science fiction, like Blade Runner), and the style is timeless. Reservoir Dogs, for instance, was a modern crime thriller based on pulp fiction film noirs. The 1970s saw an interesting revitalization of the cynical style of film noir after the free-love decade of the swinging sixties, and these are the best noir movies of the ’70s.
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8 The Big Sleep
United Artists
After Robert Mitchum played detective Philip Marlowe in the film, Farewell, My Lovely based on the Raymond Chandler classic noir, he returned three years later to star in another Chandler story, The Big Sleep (1978), which had already been adapted to the screen once. Mitchum is older than he was when he was making original film noirs like the masterpieces Out of the Past and Night of the Hunter, but he still makes for an excellent Marlowe decades later in this neo-noir. In one of the latest Jimmy Stewart movies, the elderly actor hires Marlowe because he is being blackmailed about his daughters’ involvement in pornography. Marlowe discovers one of the daughters at a homicide scene involving an X-rated shoot.
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Re-investigating it, he runs into the house’s owner, Oliver Reed, who stands out as an extremely unsettling and terrifying powerful figure that you would not want to mess with, and his scenes are some of the best in the film. As Marlowe investigates, he learns that the younger daughter is a maniac and was responsible for a murder that Eddie Mars (Reed) covered up. In the end, Marlowe walks off into the distance, never telling a bedridden Jimmy Stewart the truth. Marlowe is a powerful and likable detective in a world where good and evil and black and white mix up with each other so much that no one really discovers the truth. The film is indicative of the more postmodern and melancholy direction noir went in the ’70s.
7 The Long Goodbye
Several films on this list are based on novels by hard boiled detective writer Raymond Chandler, a pioneering and groundbreaking noir mystery writer and creator of Philip Marlowe, one of the most beloved film noir detectives. The Long Goodbye stars Eliot Gould as an excellent Marlowe, who is quite the sarcastic fellow here.
The film’s other great performance belongs to Sterling Hayden (The Godfather), who plays a mentally disturbed alcoholic Ernest Hemingway-style writer, who disappears for days at a time and in general causes a lot of trouble. It is one his best roles, and he has not acted this volatile since Dr. Strangelove. In the meantime, one of Marlow’s friends is accused of a murder, and soon the two stories connect for a dark scenario involving drug rehabilitation clinics for the vastly wealthy. Robert Altman’s iconic deconstruction of the film noir remains a classic of the ’70s.
6 Farewell, My Lovely
Avco Embassy Pictures
Farewell, My Lovely is the second film version of Raymond Chandler’s book of the same title, which was also released in 1944 as Murder, My Sweet. Private investigator Marlowe, played with great ease by Robert Mitchum, is assigned to find the young Velma, a woman who had run away. In the world of film noir, up is down and vice versa, and Marlowe soon realizes that he has found the wrong person based on a fraudulent photograph he was given.
Marlowe gets involved in other scenarios and runs into some trouble when he investigates, leading him to believe the purpose of finding the woman in the picture was to distract him and get him off the tale of the killer. When Marlowe finally finds Velma, he realizes that she is a psychopathic murderer, and there is a final showdown, ending with Marlowe characteristically walking away. This is an updated noir that deals with prostitution and pornography and other dark interests indicative of the ’70s transformation of noir into more nihilistic movies.
5 Magnum Force
Warner Bros.
After Dirty Harry was criticized as right-wing, pro-police brutality, the producers unleashed a sequel, Magnum Force, followed by all the Dirty Harry movies, such as The Enforcer, Sudden Impact, and The Dead Pool. The tone of Magnum Force is slightly different because instead of a sleazy homicidal maniac as the bad guy, the film focuses on a group of four new police officers who take to vigilante killing to ‘keep the scum off the streets.’
To add to his problems, the old-fashioned Callahan (Clint Eastwood, in one of his best non-Western roles) is assigned a partner. At first, Harry likes the group of new cops, and their advanced shooting skills, but he soon begins to discover that with all the city’s crime lords turning up murdered, the killer or killers must be police officers, and soon they are both pursuing each other as they fight crime. There is a big surprise when we find out who is commanding the vigilante cops. This is a dark, gritty tale, much of it shot at night, filled with violence, paranoia, and a twisted desire for revenge and a better world.
4 The Killer Inside Me
The Killer Inside Me (1976), remade in 2010, is one of the most haunting and disturbing books ever written from the point of view of the killer, at least according to Stanley Kubrick, who co-wrote his film The Killing with the author, Jim Thompson. Stacy Keach plays a small-time homicidal maniac of a police officer in a dead end town. Sheriff Lou Ford is his name, and everyone believes he’s a good guy, a regular guy, a guy not capable of doing the shocking things we see him engaging in.
He’s also got a past that is vague but disturbed, and a diagnosis for schizophrenia that spins out of control when the pressure builds. In a sense, Sheriff Lou is two people, the friendly, not-too-smart small-time Southern police officer in a small town, and a horrific and sadistic beast capable of the worst kinds of deviant and homicidal behavior. Many of Jim Thompson’s books have been made into great hard boiled noir and neo-noir thrillers, such as The Grifters,After Dark My Sweet,Pop. 1280, two versions of The Killer Inside Me, and more.
3 The Parallax View
Paramount Pictures
The Parallax View is a dark and disturbing film of how assassinations are taken care of so that one ‘fall guy’ is left behind, considered a lone nut who acted by himself, not as a tool of a large and powerful shady mystery organization. Warren Beatty gives a great performance as a reporter who thinks he has caught a story, when in fact the story has caught him after he is recruited by the Parallax Corporation. The film contains one strange psychedelic scene where horrific images are flashed in Beatty’s eyes, A Clockwork Orange style.
The ending is a great nihilistic surprise, and we see that the Parallax Corporation knew what they were doing so that they could fool the masses into believing an assassin was a ‘lone gunman’ and not a massive government conspiracy. This film is the story of a damaged and lonely man thrust negatively into the history books for a high-profile assassination, and it obviously is about how a conspiracy may have killed President John F. Kennedy and left a fall guy behind to take the blame.
2 Dirty Harry
Clint Eastwood is Dirty Harry, a San Francisco cop with a hatred for the Bill of Rights who goes around killing criminals, breaking the law and the Constitution, to get his suspect. A mad killer known as Scorpio (based on the real-life crimes of the Zodiac Killer) is terrorizing San Francisco. He writes to the media, bragging about his crimes, threatening even worse crimes if his demands are not met. He is an evil psychopath, played with panache by Andrew Robinson. His victims can be anybody; he just loves to kill, and because of this no one is safe until Callahan can execute him.
Robinson pays a hoodlum to beat the holy hell out of him, before going right to authorities and claiming that he is a victim of Dirty Harry’s police brutality, and violations of articles of the Constitution. In one of the great American action sequences, due to a sketchy set of circumstances, Dirty Harry must beat, terrorize, stab, torture and interrogate Robinson or a young woman dies. Seen from Dirty Harry’s point of view, his violence and torture are legal and justified in the name of catching a criminal and ridding the streets of one more “scumbag” not worthy to live. Nevertheless, it is a compelling and exciting film, and both Eastwood and Robinson put in amazing performances.
1 Chinatown
Set a few years before the United States entered World War II, Roman Polanski’s Chinatown is one of the biggest and most influential film noirs ever made, and is responsible for many later noir films created in its wake. It was nominated for 11 Oscars, and Robert Towne won one for his screenplay. Chinatown isn’t just a major noir mystery; it’s also one of the best films ever made in any genre, and it has been recognized as a vitally important movie about class consciousness, with the rich feuding over power and the mysteries of the human heart.
Chinatown lies somewhere in the zone between noir and neo-noir, and the character of Jake Gittes sets up one of Jack Nicholson’s best performances, as a detective who finds himself neck deep in the water wars that plagued Southern California. Faye Dunaway plays the potentially dangerous femme fatale who is hiding her own dark secret. John Huston is brilliant in one of the director’s acting roles, playing a rich, powerful, corrupt businessman in the world of Southern California water. The masterpiece is sleek, bold, daring, and startling, and is simply filmmaking at its best.
Complete with femme fatales and corrupt officials, it is full of all the major noir tropes, while subverting many and turning them on their head. Roman Polanski shows up as a hired thug to threaten Gittes by warning him, then slicing his nose up. For the rest of the film, Gittes sports a bandage across his face like a mark of pride, as if to say, “I know you did this and not only hasn’t it stopped me, but also it has emboldened me and made me more of a thorn in your side.” Trivia fans may be interested in the 1990 sequel, The Two Jakes, actually directed by Nicholson; a third film was planned but not made after The Two Jakes underperformed. Chinatown will always be remembered for its shocking and surprising memorable ending and last line.
