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Film noir is a tricky genre to nail down.

The criteria by which a movie is or isn't noir is long, scattered across concerns of story, character and style. With that criteria in mind, I return to "L.A. Noire," Rockstar and Team Bondi's postwar L.A. detective thriller. The best way I can think to cover most of my critical thoughts on the game is to address the question of just how noir it is.

The answer: It's fairly noir.

The stories of the cases in "L.A. Noire" indeed are the sort you'd encounter in classic noir. The plot of "A Marriage Made in Heaven" strongly resembles that of "Double Indemnity," the 1944 classic I would consider the epitome of noir conventions: a sequence of femme fatale charm, infidelity, greed and murder all stationed along a fated ride to doom for the guilty parties.

The story arc tying together the cases of the arson desk trade in the corruptive portrait of nascent Los Angeles found in "Chinatown," the 1974 movie widely credited as starting the neo-noir period of films that revived the ambitions of the movement's 1940s and '50s works. This part of the game marks the height of its storytelling, when the sorted characters and conspiracies - the arsons, the drug-pushing Dr. Fontaine, Detective Phelps' war "buddies" - come together in an "a ha" moment that reveals the sinister plot motivating much of the crime Phelps has investigated.

The path to that moment is pocked with a silly and contrived "this is our evil plan" sequence with the key players. It's one of several peculiarities in the game's point of view, which often grants us a seat at the tables of the game's criminals but denies us a peek at the domestic life of the game's supposed protagonist (more on that later). But that's the only major fault in an engaging story told by Bondi and Rockstar with focus and scale uncommon among big-budget games.

As concerns the game's "noir" status, there's one problem: These aren't really Phelps' stories. In the first three-quarters of the cases, he's peripheral. And "Double Indemnity" wouldn't be terribly noir if it was filmed from Edward G. Robinson's perspective.

For the first three-quarters of "L.A. Noire," Phelps has little story of his own. Flashbacks slowly chronicle his service in the Pacific Theater, but for a while, all these sequences tell us is that he's kind of a jerk. And we already knew that from his barking responses to sketchy suspects.

Then, 15 hours into the game, we find out Phelps is cheating on his wife with a German night club singer. We're given a few scant hints beforehand, but it's still abrupt. And because we're not given a reason why, it's also alienating.

This turn in the story hits players like a punch in the gut because the game foregoes the common noir convention of voice-over narration. Characters like Walter Neff in "Double Indemnity" and Frank Chambers in "The Postman Always Rings Twice" also succumb to lust for off-limits women, but we see the transgression coming when they describe the passion those femme fatales stir in them. Their narration also forms a basis for understanding, maybe even empathizing with the characters.

Instead, "Noire" keeps players at a distance from Phelps. But this has its own noir precedent.

Instead of Neff or Chambers, Phelps is cut from the rule-abiding, ladder-climbing cloth of Sgt. Exley from 1997 neo-noir "L.A. Confidential."

The sudden revelation of Phelps' infidelity is comparable to Exley's surprising tryst with prostitute Lynn Bracken. When Phelps is forced to join forces with Jack Kelso, a rival Marine we meet in the wartime flashbacks, it parallels Exley's reluctant alliance with the think-with-his-fists Bud White to bring down the real bad guys. Phelps and Exley even share a corrupt Irish-American superior officer in the LAPD. Like Exley, Phelps fascinates by being so simultaneously likable and unlikable.

Bondi and Rockstar draw the other characters of "L.A. Noire" with less heavy a hand than "Grand Theft Auto IV" cartoons like Brucie and Gay Tony. But there's one archetype the developers foolishly undercut: the femme fatale, a noir essential. A few pop up in Phelps' investigations, but none fulfill the femme fatale's function of manipulating him into harm's way with their sexuality. Even Elsa is apparently good for him, as she all-too-briefly explains in the game's final hour. The only woman who consistently pushes him in any direction is the switchboard operator at the police station.

The visual language of film noir is maybe it's least mistakable identifier. Noir movies like "The Killers" and "Touch of Evil" carry on the aesthetics of German expressionist movies like Fritz Lang's "M": Harsh shadows and dense, angular compositions reflect the dramatic turbulence of the characters' lives.

There's little of this during the in-game portions of "L.A. Noire" because you have control of the camera, which prohibits the thoughtful cinematography work necessary to present those visual hallmarks. But even during the game's cinematics, the visuals bear little of noir's chiaroscuro influence. The menu screen just might be the most noir shot in the whole game.

The game's realization of the postwar L.A. period, however, is spot-on. The attentively recreated fashions and hairstyles turn the vivid faces into living, breathing artifacts from another time and place. And if you want to see it all the way you can in noir and other films of the time, there's a black-and-white filter you can activate from the game's menu.
PSN, Xbox Live: Davewiththeid

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Film noir is a tricky genre to nail down. The criteria by which a movie is or isn't noir is long, scattered across concerns of story, character and style. With that criteria in mind, I return to "L.A. Noire," Rockstar and Team Bondi's postwar L.A. detective thriller.

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Get an overview of the Rockstar crime thriller LA Noire and see exactly what the gameplay looks like in this new trailer for the game. IGN's YouTube is just a taste of our content. Get more: http://www.ign.com Want this week's top videos? Sign up: http://go.ign.com/VideoRound-up

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L.A. Noire is a neo-noir detective action-adventure video game developed by Team Bondi and published by Rockstar Games.  The game draws heavily from both the plot and aesthetic elements of film noir—stylistic films made popular in the 1940s and 1950s that share similar visual styles and themes, including crime and moral ambiguity—along with drawing inspiration from real-life crimes for its in-game cases, based upon what was reported by the Los Angeles media in 1947. The game uses a distinctive colour palette, but in homage to film noir it includes the option to play the game in black and white.

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As this sub genre of neo noir develops, it is branching out from film into other forms of media, including video games.

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In the 1960s come 1970s, a new style emerged, and it is known as neo-noir. It is a style often seen having the same elements and characteristics as film noir, however the themes and ideas that are used in the stories are very much more adventurous than those film noirs of the 1940s and 1950s. Ever since the 1970s onwards, we have had Neo-Noir films which had brought back the essence of Film Noir. And this style is now still being ventured into other genres due to many films these days being products of overlapping genres, therefore the style is still developing as it moves through the ages thought the essence of the classic version of the style remains.

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Furthermore LA Noire brings the sense of the noir soundtrack at the time in the 40's and 50's.

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The main theme from the game L.A. Noire. I DON'T OWN ANYTHING IN THIS. Hope you enjoy! The rest of the soundtrack will continue to be be put up over the next few days.

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A BFI article

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Peering back down the decades 70 years later, you have to wonder at what it must have been like to be a Manhattanite cinemagoer in the August of 1946. Eight days after Alfred Hitchcock's Notorious first went on release in New York on 15 August, Howard Hawks' immortal adaptation of Raymond Chandler's detective novel The Big Sleep landed too. What a month to be alive!

But while both are enshrined now as all-time classics of American cinema, these two films had very different receptions from Bosley Crowther, then reigning critic at The New York Times. Crowther deemed Hitchcock's latest "one of the most absorbing pictures of the year", but confessed to complete befuddlement over the Hawks:

"If somebody had only told us - the script-writers, preferably - just what it is that happens in the Warners' and Howard Hawks' The Big Sleep, we might be able to give you a more explicit and favorable report on this over-age melodrama which came yesterday to the Strand. But with only the foggiest notion of who does what to whom - and we watched it with closest attention - we must be frankly disappointing about it."

Fair enough. Indeed, there's a famous story that gets told every time anybody writes about The Big Sleep that Hawks himself phoned Chandler during filming to confirm who actually killed the chauffeur dredged out of the harbour about a third of the way through. That Hawks didn't know is proof of his strategy as a filmmaker. He believed that if you simply make one scene after another crackle with energy and fun, the audience will follow and fall (head over heels) for the film regardless of whether they fully comprehend what's going on.

What's more, the very haziness of who is blackmailing who, and who is in league with them, makes this film unfinishable in the best sense. No matter how many times you've seen it, you can watch it almost anew a few years later and wonder again how the various lowlifes and sleazes that Marlowe encounters fit together.

In this, it's very different from John Huston's earlier private dick movie The Maltese Falcon (1941), which cast Bogie as Dashiell Hammett's gumshoe Sam Spade. While that film's supporting cast presents a colourful and indelible gallery of larger-than-life rogues, none of the gamblers, pornographers and thugs in The Big Sleep stick in the mind. How they all relate to the nefarious business of who's blackmailing the ageing General Sternwood using indiscreet pictures of his wayward daughter Carmen is a mystery that's fresh for unpacking every time you watch it.

Each time you do, like a good detective you make a newly concerted effort to keep a hold on the facts of the case. And each time, Hawks throws seductive distractions at you that make you lose your way. Each scene follows logically from another, but each one is so alive with hilarious, terse, sexy, absurd dialogue by William Faulkner (William Faulkner!) and Hawks regulars Leigh Brackett and Jules Furthman that you don't notice the shagginess of the rug that's shifting beneath you.

The Big Sleep is such a great novel, but Hawks treats his adaptation of it like a game - an excuse to reteam Bogart and Lauren Bacall, who he'd introduced on 1945's equally essential To Have and Have Not and who had subsequently married. The result purports to be a mystery thriller (it would later be called a film noir), but it's also a feature-length excuse to have Bogart and Bacall bat innuendo back and forth at each other with such relish that you're amazed such talk got past the censors.

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The Big Sleep at 70: film noir at its most seductive

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Peering back down the decades 70 years later, you have to wonder at what it must have been like to be a Manhattanite cinemagoer in the August of 1946. Eight days after Alfred Hitchcock's Notorious first went on release in New York on 15 August, Howard Hawks' immortal adaptation of Raymond Chandler's detective novel The Big Sleep landed too.

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Example of Film Noir

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The Big Sleep Official Trailer #1 - Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall Movie (1946) HD

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A BFI article detailing what goes into creating the perfect noir.

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An infographic dedicated to the shadowy world of one of classic Hollywood's most beloved subgenres.

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A style or genre of cinematographic film marked by a mood of pessimism, fatalism, and menace. The term was originally applied (by a group of French critics) to American thriller or detective films made in the period 1944–54 and to the work of directors such as Orson Welles, Fritz Lang, and Billy Wilder.