CALIFORNIA SCHEMIN’
David Mamet recently discussed how, as a young man, he was inspired by reading crime fiction: “That’s what I did instead of going to school, and one of the genres I read was the California novelists—Dashiell Hammett and Joseph Hansen and Raymond Chandler, who was wonderful, and then Ross Macdonald. There was always something weird about the California story, as opposed to the New York story, which was about some guy trying to find himself. And Chicago noir is about some guy trying to get ahead in the world. But the story of California seems to be the story of people who are lost and have no identity, and they find out what they thought they were wasn’t really who they were, and their father wasn’t their father, and their uncles were schtupping them and impersonating somebody else. And the noir films, all the guys getting out after World War II with nothing to do and no money except an idea and the Pacific Coast Highway—they’re all the story of what happens now? They were all very influential in my upbringing.”
The noir films to which Mamet refers were part of an organic cinematic movement that flourished in the years following World War II, with Hollywood as its epicenter. Simply put, it was born of a combustible mix of hard-boiled American fiction, popularized in 1930s came later, a tag first applied by French cinephiles.
