Billion Dollar Noir: Christopher Nolan and the Reconstruction of Film Noir in Hollywood

Year 2010, Issue: 32, 38 - 43, 01.10.2010

Peter Labuza

Abstract

Near the opening of Robert Siodmak’s noir classic The Killers 1946 , young and naïve Nick Adams Phil Brown stares confusedly at Ole “Swede” Andersson Burt Lancaster as he warns him of the two men coming to kill him. The Swede lies smothered in shadows, lying flat, as if ready to enter his coffin. In protest to Nick’s pleas, he mutters “I did something wrong … once” as an explanation. What better line describes the fatalism often displayed in film noir? Our labored hero accepts his guilt and his inescapable fate. As Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton describe in their seminal text, the film noir protagonist is “often the masochistic type, his own executioner […] through a morbid curiosity” 9 .

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