I Found It at the Movies

Six Things I’ve Learned from Watching Film Noir

Number one: Everyone looks better in a hat.

When movie theaters shut down in the early weeks of the Covid pandemic, I created my own home-based film festival. The festival had a theme: Together with a few like-minded friends, I began streaming film noir — the dark, dangerous, fatalistic movies that emerged in the troubled aftermath of World War II and matured during the paranoid Red Scare of the 1950s. Over email and Zoom, we analyzed the films’ plotlines, actors, cinematography, politics, and style. When theaters reopened, some of us attended Noir City, a traveling film-noir festival hosted by Eddie Muller, founder and chair of the Film Noir Foundation and self-appointed “Czar of Noir.”

More than three years later, the film-noir group is still going strong. Although I’m no longer an active member, I’ve continued to watch and study film noir on my own, and my film diet has led me to reach some sweeping conclusions.

Here they are, in order from frivolous to deadly serious:

1. Everyone looks better in a hat.

Hat-wearing Robert Mitchum (left) as Jeff Bailey and hat-wearing Jane Greer as femme fatale Kathie Moffatt in “Out of the Past” (1947). Everyone else is wearing a hat, too.

From Humphrey Bogart’s fedoras to Claire Trevor’s giddily festooned chapeaux, everyone in film noir wears headgear at least some of the time…