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Film Noir: Hollywood’s Forbidden Vocabulary

During film noir’s heyday—the 1940s and ’50s—Hollywood maintained a specific list of words and expressions it didn’t want moviegoers to hear. You could murder your husband. Calling him a “louse” was another matter. In 1934, threatened with government censorship and squeezed by public boycott campaigns, Hollywood studios established the Production Code Administration. Its job: enforce the moral guidelines known as the Hays Code, named for Will H. Hays, leader of the Motion Pic

Terry Hamburg

3 hours ago3 min read

Film Noir: The Bare Facts

Burlesque was a natural setting for film noir—a stage set to assemble gangsters, cops, femme fatales, and assorted lowlifes. It fit right into the noir cityscape, nestled among pool rooms, cheap diners, and downtown police stations. Burlesque was all about glamour and style—or at least tried to be. The 1950s witnessed the final spasm of American vaudeville. The old extravaganza had devolved into a whirling dervish of striptease, with the emphasis on tease: the painfully slow

Film Noir Decor

In the opening scene of This Gun for Hire (1942), hitman Alan Ladd wakes up in a flophouse, ready to go to work. That magnificent old wrought-iron bed might have been headed for the junkyard if the seedy hotel hadn’t kept it in service. Today, such an antique could fetch around $2,000—and even more in comparable value during the antiques boom of the 1970s, when the battered furnishings seen in so many film noirs were being hauled out of America’s attics and basements, restore

Film Noir: He Says, She Says

What Women Say About Men "Men are such fools. They think they can buy everything with a smile and a few kind words. Or a gun." ~The Lady from Shanghai “Every guy thinks he’s something special but they’re all from the same assembly line. There’s always a replacement around in case the one you’ve got gets lost or broken. ~ Women’s Prison "Aren’t there any more comfortable men in this world? Now they’re all little and nervous like sparrows, or big and worried like sick bears

REVIEWS: WORTH A LOOK

Detour

Two Seconds

Out of the Past

From the early 1940s through the late 1950s, Film Noir flourished. NOIR LENS explores how the culture of this period shaped Hollywood and the public imagination.