Night Has A Thousand Eyes (1948)
Alamy
SICKBED NOIR
LAST OCTOBER, AFTER three years of dodging the viral bullet, I finally got Covid (a fairly mild case) and was forced to spend a couple of weeks self-isolating. This gave me a chance to work out what my personal version of comfort-viewing is. It turns out the answer is film noir. I spent over a fortnight in a slightly dissociative state watching non-stop black-and-white movies with tough guys in fedoras and slinky dames up to no good. Often, the titles alone are enough to conjure up a mood —Night Has A Thousand Eyes, Between Midnight And Dawn, The Dark Past, Escape In The Fog, Drive A Crooked Road, I Wake Up Screaming, The Devil Thumbs A Ride, Phantom Lady.
This was the black-and-silver swirling abyss which opened up when I saw two red lines on the test, and I slipped into anxious yet pleasurable oblivion with Gloria Grahame, Ida Lupino, Dan Duryea, Edmond O’Brien and the other tarnished, battered reliable faces of noir.
In the ’40s and ’50s, studios made films they classed as crime stories, melodramas or mysteries. Disparate films only got tagged as noir when the genre was diagnosed by the French. The term was popularised in English by Paul Schrader in an essay; with Taxi Driver, Schrader may have been the first person ever to sit down and deliberately write a film noir. Science-fiction stories with a virtual reality/sim-world premise often evoke noir —from the Holodeck on Star Trek to The Matrix or Dark City.