Men/Heroes in Film noir

Men/Heroes in Film noir

By Jake Bromley

The characteristics of men or heroes in film noir are usually conveyed in a dark way, they are usually portrayed as desperate characters trying to survive. These men are most often morally ambiguous, paranoid and involved with violent crime. Throughout the course of these films, most of the men undergo a huge character development starting off as conflicted, insecure loners and continuing down a path to ultimately become disillusioned, obsessive socio-paths. Morality is a key theme in film noir; most of the characters are morally corrupt and often find it difficult separating good from bad and do what needs to be done to survive. Their roles were essential to the progression of the story, storylines were usually twisted and complex, one of the techniques used to tell these stories were a series of flashbacks with background music to add to the suspense of the atmosphere. An Anti-hero is a protagonist that lacks the attributes or characteristics of a typical hero but with whom the audience can identify, they are often morally conflicted but the audience sympathizes for. Some examples of Males/heroes in film noir are as shown here: Private Detective Philip Marlowe (The Big Sleep), Sergeant Dave Bannion (The Big Heat), Aging Boxer, Stoker Thompson (The Set-Up), Harry Fabian (Night And The City), Frank Bigelow (D.O.A).

Websites that is useful for researching Film-noir:
http://www.filmsite.org/filmnoir.html
http://www.filmnoirstudies.com/home.asp
http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/filmnoir
http://www.filmsnoir.net/
http://www.filmnoir.com/