It sounds so much more melodramatic when I say it in French. Forgive me but yesterday I felt like an extra in one of those sullen art-house movies they used to show on BBC2 on a Saturday night. That plague-dog depression had made one of its (thankfully infrequent these days) returns. All of which makes my last blog entry seem ludicrously optimistic. Hey Ho. Anyway I feel much better today which rather serves to confirm that one of the key ingredients to my condition is stupidity. Keep taking the pills.
So having got that self-indulgent paragraph out of my system, now we can turn to the serious business of the palette of film noir. I saw something on Sky Arts recently that ventured the opinion that Billy Wilder invented the colour palette for film noir in his brilliant
Double Indemnity. I beg to disagree. The palette predates the genre. I was reminded of this when re-watching Fritz Lang's silent masterpiece
Metropolis. The threatening deployment of light and shade and the dagger-like intrusion of shadow are there. The tale itself is a dystopian melodrama with an incongruous happy ending. It is rightly lauded and makes an important companion piece to another Lang masterpiece, the indisputably noir
The Big Heat - this my second favourite film noir (ranking only behind the supreme
Touch of Evil). As for
Metropolis, 89/90. Mind you, there is a more modern restoaration of the film than the one I have and the mark might go up if I ever encounter this purportedly definitive version. Another good reason to look forward and not be depressed.
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