27 Movies from the Dark Side

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The three great Hollywood genres are the western, the musical, and film noir. But hold on a moment. Why does one of the quintessentially American genres have a name in French? “When we were making them,” Robert Mitchum once told me, “we just called them B movies.” We were speaking at a tribute at the Virginia Festival of American Film, after a screening of Out of the Past, one of the noir classics included in this little collection.

American crime films of the 1930s and 1940s create great enthusiasm among French movies, and especially that generation of critics who created the auteur theory. One way of describing that theory: the director, not the writer, is the true author of a film, and its quality can be found in its visual strategies more than its words. Out of the Past is a perfectly ordinary pulp story, but it evokes a world in its images. Because of their work in a disreputable genre, such heroes were crowned as Hitchcock, Fritz Lang, John Huston, Otto Preminger, and Billy Wilder.

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