Giallo: Playing with Genres

That’s hardly the only case where we see this happening. Take film noir, for instance—that’s a quintessentially American genre, yet you constantly see a mountain of European films being shoved into the same category here. It's just like how they handle M or Bob the Flamethrower...

Jessica Morris6 said:That’s hardly the only case where we see this happening. Take film noir, for instance—that’s a quintessentially American genre, yet you constantly see a mountain of European films being shoved into the same category here. It's just like how they handle M or Bob the Flamethrower...

I’ve never really seen it that way, even if most of those movies are strictly American. You still have heavy hitters from France and Japan, plus some British noirs shot during that era.

As for M, you can't call it noir—it came out a good decade before the Malta Falcon, which was the real starting point.

Morgan Brown4 said:I’ve never really seen it that way, even if most of those movies are strictly American. You still have heavy hitters from France and Japan, plus some British noirs shot during that era.

As for M, you can't call it noir—it came out a good decade before the Malta Falcon, which was the real starting point.

Look, film noir pulls its roots from German Expressionism and Lang’s stuff—specifically 'Dr. Mabuse.' That's easily twenty years before Knights of Columbus even happened.