26. Film Noir scepticism (part 1), with Sheldon Hall

At the beginning of every podcast, Sergio asks his guests to give their definition of Film Noir, a notoriously difficult assignment. This week, in the first of a two-part episode, Dr Sheldon Hall, long-time friend to Sergio and the podcast, picks holes in the host's own attempts to define the term. 

They consider two genres, screwball comedy and the gangster movie, and look to see how well they overlap with Film Noir, along with the 1931 version version of The Maltese Falcon, starring Ricardo Cortez as Sam Spade.

The films under discussions, in chronological order, include the following:

UNDERWORLD (Von Sternberg, 1927)

THE MALTESE FALCON (Del Ruth, 1931)

TWO SECONDS (Le Roy, 1932)

THE MIRACLE OF MORGAN'S CREEK (Sturges, 1944)

WONDER MAN (Humberstone, 1945) 

Sheldon Hall is an Emeritus Fellow at Sheffield Hallam University, UK. A former film journalist and lecturer, he is the author of Zulu: With Some Guts Behind It (2005/2014) and Armchair Cinema: A History of Feature Films on British Television, 1929-1981 (2024), co-author of Epics, Spectacles, and Blockbusters: A Hollywood History (2010), and co-editor of Widescreen Worldwide (2010) and Film Critics and British Film Culture: New Shots in the Dark (2025). In addition, he has contributed chapters and articles on British and American film history to numerous books and journals and interviews to many Blu-ray special editions of films including, most recently, Sirk in Germany (1934-35), The Lives of a Bengal Lancer (1935), Black Tuesday (1954), H.M.S. Defiant (1962) and Juggernaut (1974).

Next week, in part 2 of our conversation, we look at Western, Horror, Science Fiction, and Hitchcock varieties of Film Noir.