According to conventional wisdom, the last noir picture show is Touch of Evil in 1958. (If so, the genre went out not with a whimper but a bang). Then descends a limbo where films here and there try to capture the tone and substance of the great years but that Hollywood milieu is gone, along with the public appetite. As the 1970s grow more chaotic and violent, there is a revival of the genre, and thus begins a neo-noir era that still resonates today. 


















What killed classic film noir? Critics offer various explanations. Dominating film imagination for almost two decades, the genre had done it all artistically and grew tired and dated, like a spinning top winding down. New film technologies  – color, special effects, more sophisticated cameras – seduced film makers and audiences away from classical noir aesthetics…Television doesn’t exist when the first noirs are made (circa 1940) but the small screen quickly supplants movies in public viewing time. The new media, beamed free daily into American living rooms, is bound by sanitized standards of virtue and behavior. It made noir seem even more tawdry and bleak, out-of-step. Some think Hollywood deliberately pursued extravaganzas to make it distinct from television, and this came at the expense of lower budget films, especially noirs…Or perhaps it was the economy, stupid. The dismal themes of recovery from war and economic malaise were less relevant as suburban baby booms and prosperity expanded. Hollywood took some time to catch up to the heartland. Noir became irrelevant.
 
In the mid 1970s, as the disruptive counterculture spills into political unrest amid the Vietnam War-Watergate-Energy Crisis, film critics anoint a spate of new movies as “neo-noir.” Director Paul Schrader’s “Notes on Film Noir" led the way followed by a New York Times review of Robert Altman’s movie The Long Goodbye, a reincarnation of detective Philip Marlow. The seminal Chinatown (1974) is chased by other films that try to capture the classic noir narrative and mood, highlighted by The Conversation and Taxi Driver, then Blade Runner and Blue Velvet in the 1980s. The genre returned, many believe, because the troubled and turbulent age demanded it.






















This time around, movies were not bound by a Hays Code straitjacket. Neo-noir could explore dangerous content with explicit details, use cutting edge technology, and had more celluloid time to develop relationships and plumb psychological depths. Old noirs were typically concise, runtimes from sixty to ninety minutes, often designed to fit "double bill" shows.  The average neo-noir is two hours. 
 
Here are ten critically acclaimed neo-noirs since 2000:
 
Drive
The Departed
Girl With the Golden Tattoo
Gone Girl
Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang
Looper
Memento
Mulholland Drive
No Country For Old Men
Sin City

What do aficionados like about the old “classic” form? It is taut and stylized - a runaway train speeding to destiny. There is also nostalgia for the times: the cars and fashion and smoke-filled nightclubs. Perhaps, ironically, it’s the Hays code - or how censorship shaped the relationships and language of film. Noir didn’t invent innuendo, but it turned it into an erotic style. 
 
The constant in old and new noir are the themes and tonality. Defined as such, “noir” is an omnipresent subject in art and literature, from Oedipus to Hamlet to Sam Spade - all the usual suspects, each dressed in the costume of the period. 
 
Modern film noir does not dominate cinema as it did in the glory days. But the genre has become so blended into the social and personal consciousness, we cannot escape, nor should we, that expression of our human condition. 
 
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The Hays Code - officially known as "A Code To Govern The Making of Motion and Talking Pictures,” was a detailed twenty-page set of moral guidelines that governed Hollywood film production from the mid-1930s to the late 1960s. Officially voluntary and studio industry run, it was in practice mandatory, restricting portrayals of sex, crime, violence, religion, and social behavior. Scripts and final versions of all studio films were reviewed, and many had parts deleted or rewritten before release. 

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