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shareNot really a western, but an examination of American culture in a western. A great film.
shareI'd neer looked at it that way, but you're right.
"So what else is on your mind besides 100 proof women, 90 proof whiskey, and 14 karat gold?"
How so? It does shoot characters in darkness as they begin to tell their story before going to flashback. However, the characters filmed this way are not doomed (as is typically the case in film noir) and there's no real femme fatale luring men intentionally to do her evil deeds and making them the fall guy.
shareNO! True film Noir is in Black and White. When you film in black and white you highlight you target in the light and everything is in the shadows. You can NOT do with color film. If you see guy stepping out of the shawdow that color vase on the shelf draws the viewer attention aways. In color film you have what is called Neo-Noir.but it is not the same. Only true black and white film can reproduce film and is stark contrasting shadows. It is impossible to that in color.
Sincerley
I really hope you are not saying this movie would have been a better movie if it was in black and white. That would be sad, and untrue.This was a fine movie just the way it was.
share
No way, no how.
But I can almost see how you imagine so.
Sergeant Rutledge is yet another great John Ford film. It may be a a western with a crime drama component but it is in the subset of 1950s and 1960s civil rights movies. That's a genre of which Hollywodd can be forever proud.
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Absolutely wrong, directorgene.
shareWell...the authors of the story, that Sergeant Rutledge was allegedly derived from, did a lot of pulp paperback crime novels...so in it's original form the story probably was substantially closer to noir than a western drama.
However this is, obviously, not film noir:
a. Everybody is way too nice. Film noir delves into seedy underworlds where the characters have questionable morals. Even the good guys in old film noirs are not 100% straight-arrows and are the first archetype for the now-common anti-hero characters of today's movies. Everybody in Sergeant Rutledge (almost) is of pretty good character. No criminal backgrounds, no loose-women, no paid-thugs and definitely no Femme-Fatales.
b. Too much color. I mean an early poster spelled out the details far better than I can, but black & white IS the millieu of film noir. There have been a few examples of noir in color, but I think there is a reason why this genre died out when color stock film became inexepensive. It just gives a different feel. Noir is an otherworldly feel. Watching a film in a black and white "world" instantly/automaticaly sets-up that "feel" for you.
On November 6, 2012...God blessed America
In 1957, Hollywood developed a treatment of the source novel in to a project involving a black soldier in post-WWII Germany who is accused of raping a German girl and killing her father. It was to be filmed in black & white, from a film noir angle, told in flashback with a gritty look at how post-war Germany really operated (black markets, German mothers prostituting their daughters for extra rations, occupation soldiers knocking up German women and abandoning them, etc...)
When the production stalled, John Ford picked it up specifically as a Western. He had no experience in film noir. Plus, none of his characters had need for that gritty, subhuman personality of the genre. The seedy underworld of film noir didn't really exist in 1870's Arizona (in Fort Worth/Hell's Half-Acre, yes, but not in Arizona).
Anyway, Ford redeveloped the movie into a Western and removed the film noir elements with color. The story would still be told in flashback because most films dealing with trials work best that way. And, in 1960, Westerns still stuck to a formula that hid the true, gritty side of the Old West, a trend that would not really be broken until Sergio Leone came along with his Spaghetti films.