3 - Historical Coincidence or Generic Cross-Pollination? The Angry Hills and the Birth of Film Noir in Greece

Summary

This chapter aims to contribute to the increasing scholarly interest in noir studies within a Greek film context, through an examination of The Angry Hills (dir. Aldrich, 1959), a British-American production that was shot for the most part in Greece in 1958. Produced by the British Raymond Stross Productions and released by Hollywood major MGM, The Angry Hills was the second Hollywood-sponsored ‘runaway’ film production in the country, after 20th Century-Fox's Boy on a Dolphin (dir. Negulesco, 1957). That film’s success had opened the path for a wave of such productions by the rest of the Hollywood studios that lasted until the late 1960s, before a military coup in 1967 dramatically changed conditions in the country and discouraged the Hollywood majors from selecting Greece as a location for their international productions. The film told the convoluted story of a US Second World War correspondent who finds himself in Greece on the eve of the German Occupation of 1941, and becomes involved in a scheme to deliver a list of names of Greek Resistance spies to British intelligence. Branded by trade and popular press of the time as a ‘war picture’ (Rich. 1959), a ‘cloak and dagger thriller’ (A-MY-Y 1959), a ‘melodrama’ (Scott 1959) and ‘a spy drama’ (Harford 1959), and featuring as its main character an American in a foreign land who becomes gradually and reluctantly implicated in the war and the country’s local politics, The Angry Hills has similarities with Casablanca (dir. Curtiz, 1942), although the latter was shot in the Warner Bros. studio backlot rather than on location.

Alongside this breadth of epithets chosen by contemporaneous critics to describe the film's generic identity, one cannot help but notice that both the story itself and the style in which it is told are characterised by strong noir elements, as these have been identified by a number of scholars and critics in numerous American films that cut across studios, genres and production trends (Walker 1994; Crowther 1990; Borde and Chaumeton 2002; Dickos 2002). Such elements, however, acquire an even greater significance when one considers that the film was directed by Robert Aldrich and scripted by Albert Isaac Bezzerides. Three years prior to the production of The Angry Hills, this duo had been lauded by critics for their collaboration on Kiss Me Deadly (1955).