Wesley Fenlon | Not with a bang but a whimper.

When I watch film noir, I’m peering through a window to an earlier time, a window to a place I never lived in.  It’s a place where men dress in pinstripe suits and trenchcoats for breakfast, rarely go anywhere without a fedora and a cigarette, and drink their liquor straight.  And they drink it constantly.

Granted, it’s a world that never really existed — not the way Hollywood of the 1940s and 50s made it out to be, where every guy’s a tough guy with a square jaw and an oblique wisecrack waiting behind a grim smile.  But it’s always felt like an authentic world, real within the confines of its own imagining, reflecting a now-departed society where people really did talk tough and mysteries really did exist, if you bothered to follow the trail of breadcrumbs from shady alley to shady alley.

Maybe that’s why Rian Johnson’s 2005 neo-noir Brick is so wildly surreal.  Set in modern-day suburban California, Brick transposes the language of classic noir into rapidfire, jargon-saturated dialogue, as heavily stylized as Juno but with none of the whimsy.  There are no men in suits and coats, no cigarette holders, no fedoras.  In their place are boys, teenagers treating high school social circles with the same gravity as mobsters and racketeers.  And they deserve that world-weary treatment; Brick presents an unrelentingly dark disturbia, in which crime and danger hardly bother to lurk beneath the surface.

Noir has jarringly and unabashedly been stuffed into a high school, bringing with it the eerily empty streets and late-night meetings of the urban underworld.  Joseph Gordon-Levitt, easily one of the strongest young actors of his generation, plays the classic loner — street-smart and tough enough to take a beating — searching for the identity of his ex-girlfriend’s murderer.  Brendan knows she’s in trouble, tracks her down, finds her dead; from there he’ll do whatever it takes to flush her killer into the open, even if it means dealing with heroin dealers and the cliques of rich kids manipulating everyone beneath them.

Brendan and his acquaintances clash with words loaded with venom, delivered at a youthful speed that matches or outpaces anything in classic noir.  It borders on campy, much like the film adaptation of Frank Miller’s Sin City, but Brick never crosses the line from heavy-handed to excessive.  Simply put, it just works.

The danger feels real, and Brick is emotionally tense throughout Brendan’s journey.  I was transfixed, trying to piece together the clues and figure out exactly how much danger he was in.  With everyone playing their cards close to their chests and Brendan stirring up the underworld with the grace of a sledgehammer, it’s easy to forget how young all these kids are…until Johnson points it out with a tongue-in-cheek scene featuring someone’s mom, or an ironic moment when a violent drug-dealer casually asks, “You read Tolkien?  You know, the Hobbit books?”

Coupled with Nathan Johnson’s score, with shifts from mournful horns and retro piano to jarring percussion to heighten the intensity of Brendan’s most dramatic moments, Brick does the unthinkable: it out-noirs classic noir, without a trenchcoat in sight.  Rian Johnson knew his material, and he knew it well — low angle shots create imposing characters, and wide shots highlight the solemnity of Brendan’s world, a series of empty rooms, empty halls, empty fields.  And in a modern touch, when there’s violence, the camerawork suddenly explodes into motion.

Brick is a film so lovingly crafted, smartly written and seriously acted that it deserves to be seen more than once…and maybe read again, on top of that.

While the Hollywood of the 1930s is hardly known for its raunch or bawdry, literature of the early 20th century is an altogether different animal. The rise of pulp fiction and the hardboiled genre in the 1920s meant popular literature was poking against the boundaries of polite society. And while the 1934 film adaptation of Dashiell Hammet’s classic murder mystery The Thin Man tones down on some of the novel’s more indecent and suggestive dialogue, it perfectly captures the playful chemistry between the story’s leading couple.

Nick and Nora Charles, played by William Powell (in a Best Actor-nominated performance) and Myrna Loy, became one of the screen’s most successful couples after The Thin Man’s release. A few minutes into the film, and it’s easy to see why. Nick, a former private investigator, becomes embroiled in a murder mystery thanks to past associations, but he doesn’t tackle the caper with the tough guy mentality Humphrey Bogart would later popularize in the 1940s. Powell energetically bounces between flippancy, nonchalance and sharp wit, playing Nick as a devilish gentleman who has far more interest in drinking liquor and teasing his young wife than solving a murder. Loy does just as much to hold up her end of the couple, going toe-to-toe against her on-screen husband with comical facial expressions and banter aplenty.

In fact, the entire production of The Thin Man plays up Hammett’s underappreciated talent for comedy, resulting in an amusing twist on the typically serious detective genre. The film skews more on the side of entertainment than complex mystery, making a few minor adjustments to Hammett’s novel to for the benefit of the Hollywood presentation. Clyde Wynant (the titular thin man) actually makes an appearance at the beginning of the film, while he is only spoken of but never actually encountered in the novel. The first scene establishes Wynant’s character and his relationship with his daughter Dorothy, which ultimately leads to the girl meeting Nick and pleading with him to find her missing father.

In the novel, things aren’t packaged quite so neatly — Dorothy hasn’t seen her father since childhood, nor is she the pure-hearted innocent she appears in the film. Her brother receives similar treatment, having his role marginalized in favor of a one-dimensional, goofy persona purely in place for the laughs. Even so, once the film establishes its story to simplify things for viewers the plot moves along at Hammett’s brisk pace. Several portions of the backstory are excised for the sake of time, but everything comes together in the final moments in classic form, as Nick lays out the tangled, murderous details at a delightful dinner party packed with nearly the entire cast.

Hammett’s complex plot hardly seems to matter next to the electric relationship between Powell and Loy, who went on to star in five more Thin Man capers as the flirtatious husband-and-wife team. If the series had been established after John Huston’s genre-defining film noir treatment of The Maltese Falcon, Hammett’s penchant for devious mysteries may have taken on a more serious role in the film.

Thankfully, the Hollywood of the 30s took the laughs and ran with them, resulting in a rare balance between crime and comedy. In fact, any film made since 1934 combining the two genres may owe The Thin Man for writing the recipe of a perfect murder-comedy cocktail.