Mean Streets and Raging Bulls: The Legacy of Film Noir in Contemporary American Cinema

Classic film noir was Hollywood's "dark cinema" of crime and corruption, a genre underpinned by a tone of existential cynicism that stripped bare the myth of the American Dream and offered a bleak nightmare vision of a fragmented society that rhymed with many of the social realities of America in the forties and fifties. Mean Streets and Raging Bulls explores how, since its apparent demise in the late fifties, the noir genre has been revitalized during the post-studio era. First exploring the relation of noir to America's sociopolitical history and then moving on to a detailed analysis of representative texts, Martin considers such noir classics as Chinatown (Roman Polanski, 1974), Night Moves (Arthur Penn, 1975), Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976), Blood Simple (Joel and Ethan Coen, 1984), After Hours (Martin Scorsese, 1985), Sea of Love (Harold Becker, 1989), Reservoir Dogs (Quentin Tarantino, 1992), One False Move (Carl Franklin, 1992), and Romeo is Bleeding (Peter Medak, 1994). Not only do these films continue noir's exploration of the collective anxieties of American society but they also reflect a sustained tradition of artistic creativity and technical virtuosity nurtured within the confines of American genre cinema. Such a tradition is epitomized by the work of neo-noir auteur Martin Scorsese, whose own influence on the recent evolution of the genre is considered in some detail.