Crime and Popular Culture – Part One

Professor John Scott will be posting regular blogs about Crime and Popular Culture. Here is the first.

Crime on a Desert Island (Part One)

In recent years cultural criminology has provided a new challenge to the ‘abstracted empiricism’ which strides across much of the criminological cannon.  While cultural criminology has ben given voice at many international conferences and is widely published in leading journals, criminology schools and institutions have been slow to embed this field in the criminology curriculum. Little wonder, as there are few textbooks or even textbook chapters which attest the growing influence of this sub-field.

A few universities in Australia offer units on crime in popular culture, but the terrain of cultural criminology has largely been taken-up in literature or cultural studies departments, showing the ambivalence that mainstream criminology still has with the interpretive in general and the cultural and popular specifically.

In 2015 QUT will offer a unit titled ‘Criminology in Popular Culture’.  It has not been easy designing such a unit, with consideration as to what is ‘popular’, where does popular culture begin, and what sort of textual forms and genres should it include., there is little to draw upon in the way of precedence for this topic. We ended up opting for a series of ‘snapshots’. One of these is film noir.

Like any aesthetic genre, film noir has a contested history. The so-called “main cycle” is usually dated from John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon (1941) to Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil (1958) – both brilliant films but quite arbitrary touchstones in a style that was at its core American but only identified as such by a French critic looking on from outside in the 1940s

Though the end of the 1950s marks the conclusion of the classic noir cycle, the style would continue to pop up in more or less original form, as well as in modern films which expanded upon the type – these were labelled neo-noirs. The most recognisable of these include Roman Polanski’s 1974 classic Chinatown (featuring, in an obvious nod to early noirs, John Huston, this time as an actor) and Curtis Hanson’s splendid LA Confidential from 1997 (which starred the Australians Guy Pearce, Russell Crowe and Simon Baker).

Ok, so enough locating the genre, here are my ‘10 film noir crime movies to see before you get framed for murder’.

Double Indemnity (1944). Directed by Billy Wilder (1906-2002) with Fred MacMurray (1908-1991) as the patsy and Barbara Stanwyck (1907-1990) as the femme fatale

The Maltese Falcon (1941). Directed by John Huston (1906-1987) with Humphrey Bogart (1899-1957) as a hard-boiled detective and Mary Astor (1906-1987) as the femme fatale.

The Third Man (1949). Directed by Carol Reed (1906-1976) with Joseph Cotton (1905-1994) as the patsy and Barbara Orson Welles (1915-1985) as the mysterious Harry Lime

Sunset Boulevard (1950). Directed by Billy Wilder (1906-2002) with William Holden (1918-1981) as the ‘stiff’ in the pool and Gloria Swanson (1899-1983) as a deranged former actress.

Touch of Evil (1958).  Directed by Orson Welles (1915-1985), with Charlton Heston (1923-2008) as a Mexican cop and Orson Welles (1915-1985) his corrupt, small-town nemesis.

The Big Sleep (1939). Directed by Howard Hawks (1996-1977) with Humphrey Bogart (1899-1957) as a gum-shoe detective and Lauren Ball (1924-2014) as the ultimate the femme fatale.

Chinatown (1974). Directed by Roman Polanski (1933-) and in the style of noir greats, with Jack Nicholson(1937-) as the patsy detective and Faye Dunaway (1941-) as the femme fatale.

Body Heat (1981). Directed by Lawrence Kasdan (1949-) with William Hurt (1908-1991) as the patsy detective and Kathleen Turner (1954-) as the femme fatale.

The Big Heat (1953). Directed by Fritz Lang (1890-1976) with Glenn Ford (1916-2006) as a patsy cop and Gloria Graham (1923-1981) as a femme fatale

Angel Heart (1987). Directed by Alan Parker (1944-) with Micky Rourke (1952-) as a confused private investigator and Robert De Nero (1943-) as, well, The Devil.

Next week: Top Ten Films About Serial Killers