Word: noir
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...Neill (Jack Nicholson)--who has an affair with Bryant when Reed is at a convention--the raging, messy confessional speech he so obviously needs; and so O'Neill puts it in a letter which we never see. They keep Nicholson brooding in the shadows like a character in film noir, relying on our memories of his explosions in other films to know that he has it in him. Real blood-and-guts American rage and confession would expose the tasteful, arid Englishness of the Reed-Bryant quarrels and love scenes (although there's a lulu of a fight when...
...hatch, a husband dies, insurance claims are debated, friendships fray, the lovers quarrel and part explosively. And though Lawrence Kasdan's film is set in today's South Florida, its characters move through an atmosphere that suggests the confluences of decor and demeanor in a 1940s film noir...
...United States--but that was still only a small part of their business. Most of what they did was in the work of surveillance. The man you can't see in Hopper's "Nighthawks,"--the one standing just around the corner and made famous in so many noir films with his crumpled hat and his cigarette--was most likely a Pinkerton man. What made them different, and hence what made Hammett's characters different, was that the Pinkertons had a code...
...PROBABLY impossible to recreate film noir since it is essentially a process of style. The luscious black and whites, the jutting angles, the rainy nights--they're all television staple now and can no longer bear the burden, as they once did, of being some outward reflection of the nation's inner soul...
Even worse, the passions which drove noir seem almost charming today. When Roman Polanski made the mock-noir Chinatown, he had to slice open Nicholson's nostril to get the same effect that was once accomplished by showing a couple of thugs lurking outside the window. Leave it to the Reader's Digest to mourn our passing national innocence--but the real problem is we've lost our faith in passion. Murder and passion seem almost antithetical at the present, and adultery--well, adultery is for adolescents...