The Best Film Noir Soundtracks

The Best Film Noir Soundtracks

There’s a lot of great music in these films. The classic era and the modern era, are much different, but sometimes play homage to one another. Here are some of the best films where the music is concerned.

The Big Sleep: This film has a moody orchestral score that is characteristic of the era in terms of the instrumentation, but very dark. This soundtrack fits the film very well.

Chinatown: If you’re looking for the jazzier end of things, this soundtrack will not disappoint. The saxophone that most people probably hear in their heads whenever someone mentions film noir is well represented in some of the pieces.

Reservoir Dogs: This has some of the most jarring juxtapositions of music and action of any film. The song most associated with this film is “Stuck in the Middle with You” by Stealers Wheel. “Coconut” by Harry Nilsson is another song much associated with this film.

Bad Lieutenant: This film has some wonderfully eerie organ pieces during the scenes where the main character is in church. They’re well worth hearing for their ambient, haunting qualities.

A Touch of Evil: Henry Mancini lent his considerable talent to this soundtrack, and the results are stunning. Very moody, dark and suspenseful, oftentimes with a wonderfully spacious feel.

Taxi Driver: Menacing, dark and brooding, this soundtrack sometimes approaches horror film levels of suspense. Bernard Herrmann also has some great jazzy work in this soundtrack and it fits the film perfectly.

The Crow: This film has a soundtrack packed with underground and very popular bands with an emphasis on the Gothic. Bands include The Cure, Violent Femmes, The Jesus and Mary Chain and My Life with the Thrill Kill Cult. More mainstream acts included Stone Temple Pilots and Rage Against the Machine. A classic.

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Film Noir: Rain and Gloom

Film Noir: Rain and Gloom

Rain and gloom are common in these films, as well. It adds to the sleazy element, makes the world seem generally more unpleasant and, if it’s a black and white film, rain is a great excuse to sit inside with a pack of smokes and a bottle of whiskey.

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In neo-noir, the rain is sometimes more oppressive, as it provides a motivation to make darker, colorless scenes. Blade Runner is a great example of this, with the bright lights of modernity feebly trying to illuminate the rotting, wet corpse of a city underneath. In Se7en, it rains almost the entire movie, and the one sunny scene is really just a setup for one of the film’s most disturbing moments.

There’s an appropriately sad irony to rain in these movies. In real life, rain nourishes, makes the world green and bright and, sometimes, cools off the most brutal summer heat. In film noir, it just lubricates the city’s filth, and keeps the sun from brightening the shadows.

Film Noir: Rough and Rugged vs. Classy and Stylish

Rough and Rugged vs. Classy and Stylish

It’s also rewarding to keep an eye out for the style that the gangsters—whether they’re protagonists or antagonists—have in films.

In The Usual Suspects, one finds a great example of this. Dean Keaton looks the part of the wealthy, intelligent gangster, Fred Fenster, the classic New York mobster, Todd Hockney, the working-class gangster, Michael McManus a bad boy gangster, and Verbal Kint is completely unremarkable, save for his visible, physical handicaps. The film manages to assemble a broad range of stereotypical movie gangsters and have them work as a team, setting up some interesting conflicts among them.

Some films feature one type of gangster more than others, however. In Sexy Beast, the criminals all at least have the appearance of belonging to a professional organization, and Gal’s lounging by the pool with his shirt off demonstrates how far he has come from his glory days as a safe cracker and a stylish lady’s man. In The Crow, the villains all have unique looks, but all of them imply being simple thugs, rather than gangsters with specialized skills.

Gangsters can also be portrayed as being elite by making them look very professional. The gangsters in Reservoir Dogs, for instance, wear a uniform consisting of black suits, ties and white shirts, topped off with sunglasses. They look like solid professionals, like they have purpose and the skill to carry it out.

Some of these films also feature gangsters that are so elite, they are, for all intents and purposes, above the law. L.A. Confidential, with its corruption theme; The Usual Suspects, with its near mythical villain and Dark City, with its sinister overlords, are all examples of film noir offerings with these types of villains driving the sinister elements in the plot.

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Film Noir: Gangsters

Film Noir: Gangsters

Throughout the films discussed in the upcoming sections, an observant viewer will notice a lot of changes in the way that gangsters are portrayed. The gangster characters, not too surprisingly, often serve as the motivation for the violence in the film. However, the way it’s portrayed has changed dramatically over the years.

Hollywood is less restrictive about what is allowed in films in today’s world than it was in the 1940s and 1950s. Audiences are also more open about there being very graphic violence in films. Given the dark, crime-ridden world in which many film noir pieces take place, it’s no surprise that the amount of violence and the graphic nature of that violence have both increased over time.

In older film noirs, the violent climax oftentimes came down to a couple of shots out of a revolver. When machine guns and other heavy hardware were brought into the story, most of what the viewer really saw was a lot of people shooting, a lot of holes getting punched in buildings and people grabbing their chest and falling down, more dramatically than realistically. In today’s films, the violence is sometimes exceptionally graphic. Anything by Tarantino is usually a good example of this, with Reservoir Dogs being a particularly demonstrative film of extreme and graphic violence in film noir.

Gangsters in today’s film noirs are commonly seen murdering multiple people on-screen. They may even do it with style, such as by using two handguns at once and getting headshots on two different enemies at the same time. In addition to the depictions of violence becoming more graphic, the gangsters have become almost cartoonishly good at it.

In the older films, the violence may not have been as graphic, but the threat was certainly there. In some ways, the absence of graphic violence might have made the threat more realistic. Ultimately, such realism may have proved more frightening. When a woman who has been victimized her entire life is gunned down at long range, in the dark, by a cop with particularly good aim, it serves as one of the saddest and most gruesome depictions of violence in the film. It not only kills the woman, it probably kills whatever faith in humanity the protagonist had left as well.

In today’s films, the victims of violence are oftentimes just victims. They’re not real people, they’re just there to establish how deadly someone is, or to make a crime seem more extreme. In Reservoir Dogs the characters in the film, and the film itself, treat cops as if they weren’t real people. They’re there to be shot, and to establish the seriousness of the criminals.

Watch for how the depictions of violence change between noir and neo-noir films. What’s often interesting is that both use violence in very different ways and to different extents, but good film noirs use it effectively.