By Meredith Brody  (June 13, 2025)

There’s always room for more noir in my life.

“In Lonely Places: Film Noir Beyond the City” will help out this summer at BAMPFA.

I was thrilled to see a Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive series  devoted to noted film scholar Imogen Sara Smith’s 2011 book of the same name in which she explored the many movies that were based in rural or country areas, defying the received opinion that film noir was always set on dark city streets. I’ve cherished Smith’s book since I bought a copy and she signed it to me in 2015. Smith introduced all four of the films programmed on the series’ opening weekend and presided over a Q&A after each one. The series started with Michael Curtiz’s version of Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not, titled The Breaking Point, and much more faithful to the original book, despite changing its setting from Key West in Florida to Balboa Island in Newport Beach in California. The series continued with The Hitch-Hiker, set on the road in desolate parts of Southern California en route to Baja, by Ida Lupino, the only woman to direct movies in the 1950s.

This was followed by Lewis Allen’s atypical Technicolor fever dream Desert Fury, set in the fictional corrupt gambling town of Chuckawalla, Nevada. Raoul Walsh’s psychological Western, Pursued, in turn of the century New Mexico, closed out the weekend.

I wish she could introduce them all, as her opening remarks perfectly instructed the audience in what to look for and encouraged them to enjoy themselves. Afterwards she fielded questions both intelligent and clueless (my least favorite – the guy who characterized the performances in Desert Fury as “bad acting”) with considerable aplomb. In one case – asked to define what constitutes a film noir in her opinion – her answer was so thoughtful and well-considered that I asked Imogen to repeat it for me in our email exchange after she returned to New York.

Brody: When did you first discover film noir? Do you remember your conversion experience? 

Smith : I’m not sure I had a single conversion experience (which I definitely did with Buster Keaton). I was in the middle before I knew it. But I do recall Out of the Past being one of the first noir films that made a huge impression on me. And the fact that it moves peripatetically through many different settings (including the mountains and Mexico) may have planted a seed.

Q: How did this intriguing idea – film noir outside the city – occur to you?

A: It just happened that in a short space of time I saw The Hitch-Hiker, Raw Deal, and Border Incident, all of which feature striking non-urban settings. I started thinking about how many other films I could come up with that fit this notion of “non-urban noir,” and what common settings there were. I was drawn to the idea of writing about this subject just because I felt it hadn’t been covered in depth before, but I also felt I needed more of a substantial argument about why these films matter. When I began thinking about how they connect to what was going on in postwar America—the growth of suburbs, interstate highways, the rise of the sunbelt, I felt I had a potential book. And then, I dug deeper into how these films also connect with American history, literature, iconography, myth, etc.

Q: I’m impressed with how you respond to audience questions, especially when you defined what defines a film noir for you. (And your explaining why it’s not a genre for you.) If it’s not TOO onerous, could you sum it up in words here?

A: I agree with James Naremore that noir is transgeneric—it is a style/mood/set of themes that can overlap with various genres: gangster films, heist films, murder mysteries, melodramas, as well as westerns, science fiction, etc. It also makes sense to talk about classic-era noir as a cycle or movement. I see noir as inherently a slippery and nebulous category, but I see four primary elements that define it:

• Plot elements (in general, crime and/or other unsavory aspects of human behavior: betrayal, violence, adultery, corruption, and moral deterioration)
• Visual style (most obviously, high-contrast, low-key black and white cinematography, expressionistic angles, and certain types of iconography)
• Narrative style (convoluted plots, often employing flashbacks and voice-over, a psychoanalytic approach to character, mystery, and thriller techniques to increase suspense and uncertainty)
• Themes and mood (pessimism, dread, disillusionment, moral ambiguity, paranoia, fatalism, anxiety, and alienation)

Some films have ALL of these elements (e.g., Double Indemnity), many others have only some, and hence can seem like borderline cases.

Q: How did you come up with the list for this series? I’m sure everyone could come up with something they miss – I’d LOVE to have been able to see again on the big screen On Dangerous Ground, which I think perfectly encapsulates the dichotomy between the city and the country (not to mention between Ida Lupino’s sightless eyes, and Robert Ryan’s anthracite ones), and Ace in the Hole, for its snappy dialogue and astonishing ending. Any others you wish you could have included?

A:  Susan Oxtoby already had a proposed list of films when she contacted me. I suggested adding two—The Breaking Point and The Reckless Moment—and she liked both of those titles. If I had done the curation myself, I do think I might have included On Dangerous Ground, since it is the film people come up with most often (by FAR!) when I say “non-urban noir.” Others I might have considered are Gun Crazy, Moonrise, and Ace in the Hole.

Q:  And have you seen any movies since you wrote this book that you’d include in a new edition?

A: Nothing I feel was a major omission, but I would have been tempted to include Across the Bridge in the Mexican border section, although it is a British film and the book limits itself to American films.

Although Imogen is no longer around to introduce the upcoming films, I urge everybody to attend any and all of the screenings – especially those introduced by our local film authorities David Thomson, Hitchcock’s masterpiece, locally shot in Santa Rosa, Shadow of a Doubt on June 14^th, and Czar of Noir Eddie Muller, who introduces the closing night film, The Phenix City Story, on July 24^th .

Visit our TRAILER GALLERY below for all the films in the series. The shows are likely to sell out in advance. We suggest checking the schedule out now.

If you don’t live in the San Francisco Bay Area check out the Noir City website for upcoming festivals this summer and fall across the U.S. Imogen might just be at some of them and for certain you will see beautiful prints projected on big cinema screens with informed discussions. Other, locally programmed series, may play your city.

There is nothing as satisfying as seeing movies on the big screen with engaged audiences but there are many small screen experiences available as most of the films are on DVD/BluRay with extras, or streaming.

Eddie Muller hosts “Noir Alley” every weekend on Turner Classic Movies. See the 2025 “Noir Alley” schedule here.  Many other Noir and Neo Noir films show on TCM and here is a complete line-up with descriptions.

For a sample of Imogen Sara Smith’s Criterion introductions watch this discussion of non-urban noir on the Mexican border.

Read many of her superb essays on the Criterion website.

More great articles at Film Comment.

“Noir Hits the Road”– A Believer interview about how Smith developed her book.

Imogen Sara Smith is a freelance writer and film historian based in New York City. She is the author of In “Lonely Places: Film Noir Beyond the City” and “Buster Keaton: The Persistence of Comedy.” Her work has appeared in Film Comment, Sight and Sound, Reverse Shot, MUBI Notebook, The Criterion Collection, and many other journals. She currently serves as the Editor-in-chief of NOIR CITY, the e-magazine of the Film Noir Foundation. Imogen has taught film history and criticism at New York University, the School of Visual Arts, and Maine Media Workshops, and she is a frequent commentator and guest programmer on The Criterion Channel.

 

Meredith Brody, a graduate of both the Paris Cordon Bleu cooking school and USC film school, has been the restaurant critic for, among others, the Village Voice, LA Weekly, and SF Weekly, and has written for countless film magazines and websites including Cahiers du Cinema, Film Comment, and Indiewire. Her writings on books, theater, television, and travel have appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and Interview. She also contributes to EatDrinkFilms including her“Meals with Meredith,” where she talks about food and film with filmmakers at restaurants in northern California, writes about vintage cocktails and where she eats during film festivals at the Castro Theatre in San Francisco. A selection of her EDF pieces are found here.

NOIR TRAILERS GALORE- trailers, clips and more for every film in the BAMPFA series.

We couldn’t resist including the theater owner promotional guidelines book for The Hitch-Hiker. Sample page: