‘Greek Film Noir’
Edited by Anna Poupou, Nikitas Fessas, and Maria Chalkou
Edinburgh University Press

Looking over the list of available titles from “Traditions of World Cinema,” a run of books published by the University of Edinburgh Press, an inveterate reader might begin to wonder what the relationship might be between globalist initiatives and niche pursuits. 

Series editors Linda Badley and R. Barton Palmer are doing the Lord’s work in encouraging scholars the world over to put in their two cents about this-or-that aspect of cinema. Yet sometimes narrow-casting can be indistinguishable from a Monty Python sketch. What are we to make of tomes like “Nordic Film Cultures and Cinemas of Elsewhere” or “Liminal Noir in Classic World Cinema?” Specialists do have a tendency to miss the forest for the trees. 

The trio of scholars who have put together “Greek Film Noir,” Anna Poupou, Nikitas Fessas, and Maria Chalkou, are keenly aware of what the critic and historian Robert Hughes referred to as “cultural cringe” — the perception that one’s own culture is somehow behind the curve of other countries or peoples. “The study of Greek film noir,” the trio write, “is directly linked to how Greeks see themselves as part of an increasingly dystopian landscape.” In so many words: The world’s going to hell and we want in.

Although film noir has its roots in European cinema, the genre found its fullest realization in America around the midpoint of the last century. Acknowledging as much, a professor at the University of the West of England, Andrew Spicer, writes that it is now time to forego localism and “accept noir as a mode of attention, a sensibility, a particular approach to understanding the world.” The “weird wave” of contemporary Greek filmmakers, foremost among them icky fabulist Yorgos Lanthimos, is posited as reason enough to poke around the darker corners of older Greek cinema.

The irony here is that it may well have been a British-American film, “The Angry Hills” (1959), that helped clear the decks for Greek film noir. A historian and author, Yannis Tzioumakis, makes a cogent argument for the picture as both a spur for local talent and a solid entertainment on its own terms. Based on a book by Leon Uris, “The Angry Hills” has long suffered from bad word-of-mouth, not least because its director, Robert Aldrich, maligned it upon completion. Mr. Tziousmakis demurs: “its noir qualities go beyond the aesthetic, and reach all the way into the nation’s psyche. What more can one ask of a film?”

A good question, particularly given that Aldrich had established himself as an adept noirist with the apocalyptic thriller “Kiss Me Deadly” (1955). The scriptwriter on that film, A.I. Bezzerides, was brought in to work on “The Angry Hills,” less for his Greek heritage than the knack he had for tough guys, sultry dames, and shadow-ridden streets. As for the casting of Robert Mitchum in the role of an American journalist with secrets to keep, let the man himself tell it: “Some idiot said, ‘Ask Mitchum to play it. That bum will do anything if he has five minutes free.’ Well I had five minutes free so I did it.”

“The Angry Hills” veers between vistas of blistering sunlight and shadowed backways rife with Nazis, but fumbles along with only sporadic dramatic interest. The same can’t be said about “The Ogre of Athens” (1956), the best-known example of Greek noir and a film that got a literary boost from being mentioned in Jonathan Franzen’s novel “Freedom.” What can it mean, this gritty film about a milquetoast who is mistaken for a criminal mastermind: Is it a satire on political oppression or a parable about masculine initiative? 

Directed by Nikos Koundouros and scripted by novelist Iakovos Kambenanellis, “The Ogre of Athens” is less of a noir than a tragicomedy. Granted, it does take place in seedy nightclubs and darkened alleyways and is freighted with a bevy of ugly toughs and alluring women. Yet the story is centered more on the everyday failings and unexpected vanities of Thomas (Dinos Iliopoulos), a bank employee whose life is irrevocably upended during the course of a single night. The vicissitudes of fate prove alternately liberating and inescapable for our mousey hero.

“The Ogre of Athens” isn’t quite as good as its devotees would have it — the film’s grotty, on-the-cheap cinematography is a decided backdraw — but it does pack a hallucinatory punch and, in the end, earns a place alongside honorable noir also-rans like “Phantom Lady” (1944), “Criss Cross” (1949), and “Crime Wave” (1953). That it should be the starting point of “Greek Noir” is as it should be.