Hazily illuminated city streets. Anonymity in every shadowy corner. Hotel rooms, dive bars, train carriages – the backdrop of murder, seduction, and misdeeds. Swirling smoke emanating from the lips of a dangerously beautiful woman. And a man caught up in a trap of his own design.
The elusive subject of film noir has baffled film scholars for decades. Is it a genre? A sub-genre of crime films? A movement responding to a particular historical moment? Or simply a visual style? It is much easier to recognize a film noir than define the term (James Naremore) and as such the evocative imagery of film noir is inherently bound up with the city. But what happens if noir is taken out of the dark city, taken instead to play out in the desolate country?
Video Librarian has collected the ultimate list of rural noir films, from the classic noir of the 40s and 50s to the more contemporary neo-noir forays into the menacing landscape. Labyrinthine city streets are traded for barren expanses and small towns, where the shady characters are equally as abundant. Take a look at our other recommendations for your film noir collection.
The Hitch-Hiker (1953)
As the first notable American film noir directed by a woman, Ida Lupino’s Hitch-Hiker follows two friends, Roy (Edmond O’Brien) and Gilbert (Frank Lovejoy), who embark on a road trip to Mexico. Their journey is interrupted when they are taken hostage by a hitchhiker and terrorized. Incorporating tropes of the road movie, this rural noir shows that alienation, violence, and lawlessness are certainly not qualities reserved for the urban.
For another road-noir see The Hitcher (1986)
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Detour (1945)
Displaying a similar road movie slant as The Hitch-Hiker, Detour sees a musician, Al (Tom Neal), traveling between New York and Hollywood, indulging in a series of questionable decisions along the way. A man on the run, Al gets caught up in his own web of lies, the strings of which are pulled by the truly incorrigible femme fatale, Vera (Ann Savage).
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On Dangerous Ground (1951)
Bitter and hardened by low-life perpetrators, cynical city detective Jim (Robert Ryan), who relies on violence to do his duty, is cast to a remote location up-state to “cool off” and aid a murder investigation. During the investigation, Jim meets Mary (Ida Lupino), a blind woman who has the potential to change his life forever. Urban noir often romanticizes the rural as some utopic paradise untouched by the sins of the city. Yet, here Jim represents the city’s infiltration of the rural, discovering the countryside is far from the promised utopian paradise. Jim is still cursed with the noir protagonists ‘inability to dwell comfortably anywhere’ (Edward Dimendberg).
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Wind River (2017)
Wind River follows Cory (Jeremy Renner), a wildlife officer, who discovers the body of a young indigenous girl on an Indian Reservation in mountainous Wyoming. FBI agent Jane (Elizabeth Olsen) is sent to investigate the murder, with Cory as her aid. Drawing on Western tropes (such as the insider/outsider dichotomy, the lone cowboy, redemption/revenge motivation) and the evocation of Western iconography, the harsh and incredibly remote landscape serves as a stark reminder of the distinction between city crime and rural crime: “this isn’t the land of backup”. It is also a film that raises pertinent questions about the abhorrent treatment of indigenous women, still today.
For another Taylor Sheridan western/rural noir see Hell or High Water (2016).
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A Single Shot (2013)
Sam Rockwell stars as John Moon, a poverty-stricken hunter from West Virginia. Upon illegally hunting deer to survive, John fires a single shot and accidentally kills a young woman. Finding a stack of cash near her body, in an act of desperation, he hides the body and keeps the money. John is oppressed by his impoverished existence and stifled under the weight of the claustrophobic woodlands – the alienation he feels is palpable. In true noir fashion, self-preservation becomes the ultimate goal, but the escalation of immoral actions leads to a gloomily poetic end.
For a similar example see Winter’s Bone (2010).
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A History of Violence (2005)
Heading into the realm of small-town noir, this film follows diner owner and unassuming family man Tom Stall (Viggo Mortensen) as he swiftly (and single-handedly) kill two criminals attempting to rob his diner. Tom is hailed as a hero and garners some media attention, leading to a threatening stranger named Carl Fogarty (Ed Harris) finding Tom and identifying him as the missing Philadelphia mobster Joey Cusack. All is not as it seems and Tom must confront his violent past. No noir protagonist can escape their past, not even those small-town dwellers.
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Cold in July (2014)
When family man Richard (Michael C Hall) kills a home intruder identified as Freddy Russel, he puts a target on his back for the father of the intruder, Ben (Sam Shepherd), who is out for revenge. The plot thickens when private investigator Jim Bob (Don Johnson) appears. It becomes increasingly obvious that all is not as it seems and even the authorities are not to be trusted. This film very much plays with the notion of the burden of kinship present in many small town noirs. Indeed, the devil may live closer to home than you realize.
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No Country for Old Men (2007)
In 1980s West Texas, Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) stumbles onto the grisly aftermath of a drug deal gone wrong and cannot resist stealing the abandoned cash. Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), a ruthless hitman, is tasked with recovering the money. Adhering to the classic noir trope of protagonists finding unexplained bags of cash, just as in A Single Shot, the isolated dusty plains seemingly encourage a false sense of security in which (already shaky) morals are completely abandoned. The motel, the dusty backroads, the lonesome gas station, the trailer park, and the sheriff’s office are cemented in this film as an iconic part of the rural noir milieu.
For another Coen Brother’s rural noir, see Blood Simple (1984). For an entirely motel-set noir, see Bad Times at the El Royale (2018).
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