Technicolor My World

The 1960s were truly the most anemic of all decades for film noir. While there were a few stragglers on - such as Cape Fear (1962) and the catalogue of Sam Fuller films - that fit unobtrusively into the noir rubric, the remainder are a heterogeneous bunch stretching noir's stylistic parameters and crossing over into a range of genres. And as there was plenty to be frightened of in the 1960s, (what with the still raging Cold War and all), it would also commemorate the time of the bloodiest manifestation in Vietnam. Life was seemingly more affluent, there would be a focus on youth and youth culture, and the alternative ideas of the latter 1950s were seguing into a disparate chorus of dissenting voices - ranging from hippies to communists and beyond.






In the interim, Hollywood had to adapt to the thunder-stealing onslaught of television, which was competing for the same audience. And to attract the audience the cinemas were once so accustomed to, the studio big wigs decided to bring the people what they would never be able to see on television, and now we were talking Technicolor baby! Technicolor, in all it's widescreen peacock feather glory, which is verbatim, the polar-opposite of film noir.





Toying with Technicolor circa 1953






Ironically, most of the talents who worked  noir's genre,  during its classic days - would now find this cozy home in television, that was on it's own sojourn to generate a wide scope of noir-inflected offerings. 


However this being said, if big screen noir was becoming all but a memory in America, it was certainly explosive in France -where noir thrillers had long been the rage.


American directors would be celebrated and immortalized in the pages of Cahiers du cinema by young critics; namely, Francois Truffaut, Jean Luc Godard and Claude Chabrol. These monsieurs  would soon enough themselves, become the leading lights of the nouvelle vague ( New Wave).  Prolific noir director Jules Dassin churned out his masterpiece of masterpieces in the powerhouse  policier Rififi (1955) ( replete with the most elaborate heist scene to date). Rififi was released  the precise year that Jean-Pierre Melville produced his paean to American crime movies Bob le flambeur. Jean Luc Godard's inventive modern noir A bout de souffle otherwise known as 1959's Breathless would then be followed by Truffaut's engrosser, Tirez sue le pianiste.


The first refined American movie of the 1960s with a profound noir component was Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, and now some 50 years later, this film is still shockingly violent and memorable also for the pathos that ensued, as the audience could easily identify with the victim as well as the murderer. Given it was shot in black and white, it still seemed the norm, for this kind of material which commenced in it's classic urban noir form before sashaying itself into a seamless, dark hour of the soul horror story.


Two slightly more conventional noir spinoffs appeared in the year 1962;  The Manchurian Candidate, an elaborate noir variant based on Richard Condon's eponymous work. The intense Cold War plot of this film would hinge on a pair of veterans of the Korean War, both on a pilgrimage to assassinate the president , concocted by an odd alliance of home-spun neo-facists and foreign Communists. There was an unsettling resonance in the fact that President John F Kennedy's tragedy occured nearly a year to the day after the The Manchurian Candidate's release.



close to noir - but no cigar




In Blake Edwards's Experiment in Terror  we discover  a nubile Lee Remick as she is being terrorized in her suburban garage by a sociopath attempting to extort money from her. And this film, would entail some more of noir's motifs in its own retelling.





But despite these ambitious entries,  it would be apparent that cinematic noir's fad was fading fast.