Joel Coen names his favourite film noirs: “I like the sort of skanky kind”
Some directors like to stick to a specific genre, not the Coen brothers. Since their debut in 1984, Ethan and Joel Coen have tackled all sorts of subjects in a variety of ways. In True Grit and No Country for Old Men, they took on the time-honoured style of the western in two very different directions. Fargo is a crime comedy Hail, Caesar! has a period/mystery edge to it, while Intolerable Cruelty is a straight-up rom-com. However, one area that they keep returning to time and time again is the shady world of film noir.
The Coens’ very first film, a dinky independent production called Blood Simple, paid homage to the great age of noir. Julian, a bartender played by Dan Hedaya, discovers that his wife (Frances McDormand, Joel’s future wife) is having an affair. Julian then hires a hitman (M Emmett Walsh) to kill his cheating spouse and her new boyfriend (John Getz). The siblings continued to revisit the genre once their careers took off. In 2001, they released the George Clooney-fronted The Man Who Wasn’t There, and there are noir influences across plenty of other entries in their filmography.
In an interview with IGN, Joel discussed his love for the medium, which had its heyday in the 1940s. He listed a few of his favourites, which include some absolute classics. “I like the Billy Wilder movie Double Indemnity,” he said. “And then I like the sort of skanky film noirs, the real low budget Edgar G Ulmer kind, you know, Detour kind of movies.”
When it comes to film noir, the two textbook examples are the aforementioned Double Indemnity and John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon, which Coen also brought up. The former, which was released in 1944, stars Fred McMurray as an insurance salesman who falls in with a woman (Barbara Stanwyck) who wants to kill her husband. The two lovers hatch a plan to off their mutual foe and collect on a massive payout, but, predictably, things don’t go as planned.
As for Ulmer, a much more obscure entry into the noir canon, he was an Austrian filmmaker who made his name in the B-movie trade. He had previously worked as a set designer on Metropolis, the ground-breaking sci-fi movie by Fritz Lang. Then, in 1945, Ulmer made Detour. Tom Neal plays Al Roberts, a pianist who decides to hitchhike to Los Angeles to visit his girlfriend, encountering all sorts of trouble along the way. The movie was a huge hit at the time and retains its mystique to date, having been preserved by the US National Film Registry in 1992.
Films like Detour, Double Indemnity, and The Maltese Falcon played a major role in the Coens’ decision to set The Man Who Wasn’t There in the late 1940s. “We were interested in the whole idea of post-war anxiety,” Joel explained. “Atom bombing anxiety and the existential dread you see in ’50s movies, which curiously seems appropriate now.” This prescient interview was conducted in 2001. One wonders if Joel had any idea how much more “appropriate” things would get over the next two decades.
Though it feels firmly entrenched in the mid-20th century, film noir still has a strong following to this day. It’s works like The Man Who Wasn’t There and genuine love for the genre from directors like the Coens that keep it alive.
