From
Wilson Quarterly:
Sometime right after the end of World War II, they staged a parade in Milwaukee, where I was uneasily entering adolescence. The theme of the event was “Don’t Buy Another Depression.” Ads for it featured a shiny apple, a reminder of the fruit some people had desperately sold for a nickel on street corners in the previous decade.
I was too young to understand the anti-inflation message. Two other attractions drew me to the parade. One was its grand marshal, Jim Thorpe, the great Native American athlete who had been stripped of his Olympic medals because he had taken a few dollars for playing semipro baseball, a punishment my father (and everyone else I knew) thought was mean-spirited and hypocritical. The other was that the parade was to feature large inflatables (get it—inflation: inflatables?) of the kind that were the heart of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York.
The event proved to be a disappointment. The day was cold and windy, and the march down Wisconsin Avenue was rather paltry: two or three high school bands, about the same number of big balloons. Jim Thorpe was indeed on view—waving genially to the sparse crowd—but in retrospect, of course, the occasion seems even more pointless. We didn’t buy another depression; we bought (and bought) the longest period of prosperity America has ever known, one that extends to this day and has encompassed virtually my entire senescent lifetime.
It might seem odd to evoke this silly parade to introduce a piece about film noir, but hear me out. Noir, at that same historical moment, was establishing itself as the American movie genre, the predominant style, both visual and narrative, of almost all our seriously intended films, whether or not their subject was crime, in the first postwar decade. There’s some dispute about what the first noir film was, but in my opinion the first truly great one was 1944’s , which displayed most of the genre’s stylistic tics and narrative tricks. Among the classics that followed, we’d have to name Out of the Past, The Big Sleep, The Big Heat, and literally hundreds of others—with their seductive women and seducible men, their betrayal-upon-betrayal plots, and their wee-hour lighting.
Read the rest of the article here.
Austenland
The Mercy Seller
Listen to Rob chat about these two titles.
Velma Still Cooks In Leeway
