Like bullets in the wind: when noir is tinged with melodrama
Noir, more than a real genre, is an atmosphere, a style, that take hold of a crime story by deforming it, making it dreamlike, desperate, distressing.
In the noir the protagonists, who are policemen, criminals or ordinary people, lose the boundaries of their life and their purposes, the control of their daily lives, they live hunted not only by their enemies, but also by the environments in which they live, made threatening by disturbing cuts of light, shadows, dark alleys, as if they had moved from reality into an expressionist nightmare.
It is no coincidence that shortly before the mother scene of Laura by Otto Preminger the protagonist falls asleep, nor that the return of the dark lady in Out of the Past is staged without any suspense or preparation, with jane greer simply entering painting as if it had never disappeared making Robert Mitchum and the viewer wince. It is no coincidence that in the more original and modern scene of 99 River Street, the metacinematographic one set in a theater, the protagonist is unable to distinguish reality from fiction.
A film noir is a maddened thriller in which the protagonists' loss of control is accentuated by a subtly unrealistic staging.
The engine that triggers the collapse of the protagonists' world are almost always the passions, the meeting with a wrong woman and her entry into her world. The loves of cinema noir are uncontrollable, destabilizing, and this often leads the genre to merge with melodrama, a noble and much older genre with which it shares elements such as impotence in the face of fate, obsessiveness and uncontrollable irrationality.
If two of the films we examined, Laura and Out of the Past, are two of the highest and most celebrated examples of the contamination between noir and melodrama, the third, 99 River Street, is instead a small crooked and forgotten film, even a happy ending, but has a desperate incipit from annals of the genre and a losing protagonist born of annals, but above all it contains one of the most beautiful jokes in the history of the genre: at a certain point the protagonist destroyed by the constant infidelities by his wife, believing that the actress he just met killed a man, he tells her
"There are worse things than murder. You can kill someone an inch at a time. " “There are worse things than murder. You can kill someone an inch at a time. "
The film has just begun, but the boundaries of everyday life are already blurred, the rules of the world are no longer valid, the nightmare is about to begin. Carlo Tagliazucca
