As far as I’ve been able to research, the French film industry never fell under the yoke of a censorship regime as sweeping as the Hays Code, which effectively neutered American cinema from 1934 to 1968. Yet Martin Roumagnac, a 1946 crime thriller newly restored and released by Icarus Films ($26.49 Blu-ray), bears the hallmarks of a Hays-era Hollywood noir, its lasciviousness … [Read more...]
The View from Home: Three French noirs from the 1950s
By the late 1950s, American cinema had summited peak noir. As color would soon eclipse black-and-white as the dominant form of visual expression, and as prosperous suburban sprawl replaced hardscrabble city life, the genre of shadows, crime, sex and skewed morality would ease, gradually giving way to neo-noir in the decades to come. But in ’50s France, the genre still found … [Read more...]