The Daily Rushes: Trailer #1/The Meganoirs

     What exactly is a film noir?  Potter Stewart knew obscenity when he saw it and movie geeks know noir whether it bites them in the ass or not.  Objective standards are as ephemeral as interpretations of the Book of Revelations.  Film noir is in the eye of the beholder...or is it?  Can the most quintessential examples of the genre (or style, as many scholars have it) establish benchmarks for a roughly hewn definition?

     I'm formulating my own inky-shadowed recipe and choosing a racketeer's dozen well nigh indisputable fliques o'noir to fill an imaginary syllabus for a class entitled...

     THE MEGANOIRS (!!!) 

     They are, in chronorder (w/ a touch of alphabetizing):

     1) Double Indemnity (1944)

     2) Fallen Angel (1945)

     3) Scarlet Street (1945)

     4) Nightmare Alley (1947)

     5) Act of Violence (1948)

     6) Force of Evil (1948)

     7) Pitfall (1948)

     8) Criss Cross (1949)

     9) The Set-up (1949)

     10) Side Street (1950)

     11) Where Danger Lives (1950)

     12) The Big Combo (1955)

     13) Kiss Me Deadly (1955)

     I'll detail qualifying criteria for these "meganoirs" in the next installment of "The Daily Rushes".  Some criteria on the list will be standard op, like "chiaroscuro lighting"; others will be more contentious, like "subversion of contemporaneous mores".  Each classic flicker will be intrusively examined as they lean whorishly against a midnite streetlamp of their very own in weeks to come.