The genre noir and neo-noir is well captured by the films Double Indemnity by Billy Wilder, Chinatown by Roman Polanski, and Devil in a Blue Dress by Carl Franklin.
The first film entitled Double Indemnity is about Walter Neff, a successful insurance salesman, who gets taken advantage of by his client’s wife named Phyllis Dietrichson. Eventually, Phyllis ropes Walter into a plan to murder her husband. This was thought up so they would be able to take out an insurance claim on his death if its properly faked. To Walters’s surprise, this isn’t what Phyllis “advertised” about her personality when they first met. Noir films around the 40s and 50s seemed to have a common theme of the manipulative wife/ female protagonist. They seem to use their sexuality to lure the opposite gender in and this was, of course, a turn off to Walter. Some of these aspects in Double Indemnity (of Noir) is still evident in Neo-Noir. More specifically the lighting of the scenes, the way the female role is portrayed and the overall creepiness that the actors seem to have.
For example, the second film “Chinatown” by Roman Polanski is a neo-noir genre that has many of the elements of noir but there are some differences that make it “neo.” This movie is about a private divorce investigator with the name of Jake Gittis. Gittis is hired by Evelyn Mulwray to find out the details of her husband’s affair. Later on, it is uncovered that Mulwray isn’t who she says she is. She was a woman trying to take advantage of Hollis Murray, Evelyn’s husband who was the chief of water operations of LA. As compared to Double Indemnity, it seems the same thing is going on with noir films 20 years later. A female role that is manipulating her situation to get to another end goal that benefits her. In this case, it was Evelyns way of deflecting her illegal idea to get water to Los Angeles. We see this exemplified in the text when the real Evelyn says; “ You won’t go to the police if I tell you?” When Evelyn is caught she seems to have known that what she was doing is wrong furthering the point about manipulation.
The last movie “Devil in a Blue Dress” by Carl Franklin, revolves around a character by the name of Easy Rawlins. Easy, who is in search of a job, meets Dewitt Albright who is looking for someone to investigate the disappearance of a missing woman named Daphne Monet. Easy is intrigued by this and offered a job from Dewitt as he is desperate. Unlike the other two movies, the main role was not manipulative or female like the other two films. This film seemed the newest kind of noir out of all of them and we could see this especially with the lighting of the scenes, angles. I think a key part of this film is the role Los Angeles played in the film and how the plot was laid out based on the demographics and social class was shown. Finally, in all three films, we saw a common trend of sudden shift in personality and plot twist. This seems like a usual occurrence with the genre noir and will most likely be shown in future neo-noir films.
Double Indemnity, Chinatown and Devil in a Blue Dress are three films that are essential to understand the dynamic between noir and neo-noir. Los Angeles definitely plays a role in this because it’s a city where people have a preconceived notion that anything could happen which fuels each storyline to be more mysterious.
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