The second half of the 1940s can rightly be seen as the golden age of what has come to be called film noir. The immediate post-war period will indeed be a period of doubts and uncertainties in which Hollywood cinema will offer all kinds of symbolic representations, more or less consoling or disturbing, testifying above all to a form of critical disenchantment specific to this period.
Many writers of black novels will be absorbed by the Hollywood machinery which will multiply literary adaptations or even transform various defectors from popular literature into more or less productive screenwriters. Dashiell Hammett, Kenneth Fearing, William Irish and Jonathan Latimer thus appear in the credits of the four films released on Blu-ray and / or DVD by Elephant Films.
If the first three are because one of their novel is the subject of an adaptation, the fourth is because, scriptwriter under contract at Paramount, he worked on three of the proposed titles. The history of cinema has not considered Stuart Heisler, John Farrow or Robert Siodmak as top-notch filmmakers.
These grandmasters, however, have to their credit some indisputable successes in the genre. Yes The Glass Key, by Stuart Heisler (1942), somewhat water down the political virulence of the novel, the film nonetheless contains astonishing moments of sadomasochistic violence. In The Great Clock (1948), the staging of John Farrow, his skill in using long shots transform the detective story (a man is responsible for investigating himself) into an abstract play on time and a sort of almost mythological challenge.
Postmodern strangeness
The other two titles are characterized by the way in which they seem to want to go beyond the boundaries of film noir. The initial project of a social and psychological criticism is there parasitized by an incursion of terror or even the fantastic. This is what makes Eyes of the night (1948), still signed by John Farrow, a curious object, if not entirely convincing. Edward G. Robinson plays a medium whose ability to foresee the future turns his life into a nightmare.
Hands that kill (1944), on the other hand, is one of the most successful works of Robert Siodmak, a German filmmaker who has emigrated to Hollywood since 1939. A woman has only a few days to search, in the New York night, for the author of the murder. the man she loves is accused. The strangeness of certain sequences (a spinning in a deserted metro station, a curious moment of erotic-musical trance in a jazz cellar) or of certain characters (an artist and tormented assassin) would not evoke, as it was said then. , the cinema of Alfred Hitchcock, but would rather announce the modern or postmodern variations on the work of this one that will sign, much later, directors like Dario Argento or Brian De Palma. It should be noted, moreover, supplements of excellent educational value.
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