John Carpenter names cinema’s quintessential film noir: “That’s an incredible movie”
John Carpenter is one of the most influential filmmakers of the past half century, making a name for himself by turning micro-budget indie horror movies into box office smashes.
The Halloween franchise might be his greatest legacy, but gritty action films like Assault on Precinct 13, Escape from New York, and The Thing hold their own special places in cinema history. In addition to directing, Carpenter is also a musician, scoring many of his own films and helping to define the synth-heavy sound of a generation of horror movies. After semi-retiring from filmmaking in the 2010s, he began releasing solo albums, further adding to his status as a cult hero.
One genre that Carpenter is not associated with, though, is film noir, the brooding, usually black-and-white crime dramas of the 1940s that feature nihilistic protagonists, dangerous women, and moody cinematography. Like many filmmakers, however, Carpenter was profoundly impacted by these movies. Directors like Billy Wilder, Fritz Lang, and Jacques Tourneur pioneered the genre, creating films that were morally ambiguous, visually arresting, and reflective of the darkness surrounding World War II.
There are many film noirs that remain cinema classics, even for people who don’t know what genre they belong to. Howard Hawks’ The Big Sleep, Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious, and Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard are still beloved, even if they only make up the tip of the iceberg for the genre.
During a 2024 interview in Larry Fitzmaurice’s Last Donut of the Night newsletter, Carpenter said that film noir has been more of an influence on his music rather than his movies and offered his choice for the greatest of them all. “Noir can be very dark,” he said. “There’s lots of shadows. The quintessential noir film is Out of the Past, with Robert Mitchum, Jane Greer, and Kirk Douglas. That’s an incredible movie. But there are others, and they’re wide films. Sunset Boulevard is one. That’s a dark movie. But it’s dark in theme! Not just visually.”
In recent years, Tourneur’s Out of the Past has become a touchstone of the genre, but for decades, it languished in obscurity, treasured by ardent film noir fans but all but forgotten by mainstream audiences. Mitchum stars as a former private eye trying to start his life over in a small town. Greer plays a woman from his past who shows up to haunt him, dragging him out of his idyllic new life and back into their sordid past.
The film features all the tropes of film noir – a disillusioned protagonist, a sultry femme fatale, shadowy black-and-white cinematography, and a twisty, crime-ridden plot. But it doesn’t compromise on any of them or fall back on cheap melodrama. Mitchum is soulfully downbeat, resigned to his fate seemingly from the start. Greer plays one of the greatest femme fatales in film noir history, a gorgeous, unreadable con artist with a heart of stone.
It’s one of the more unflinching entries in the genre and has aged better because of it. As Carpenter mentioned, the best film noirs have to be dark thematically as well as visually, and Out of the Past more than hits its marks.
