Six Film Noir Scores That Made Me Hear Chicago's Night Again

Last night, walking beneath the elevated tracks in the Loop, the song playing through my earphones cut out. It wasn't a dead battery, just the silence between tracks, but in that brief gap, the creaking of the L train rails and the rush of wind flooded in. And I realized something: for years, I had been listening to this city's night sounds through the frame of film noir music.

Working as a translator has made me sensitive to rhythm. Not just the rhythm of sentences, but the rhythm of a city. Whenever I imagine the sounds of a street a character walks down in a novel, I always think of a specific place in Chicago and set it to music. Here are six film noir scores I've collected that way, along with the Chicago locations where each sounds best.

David Raksin, "Laura" (1944)

Among the classic scores of film noir, this one is unique. The melody is so beautiful it becomes unsettling. Whenever I hear it, I think of the area near the Water Tower on Michigan Avenue. Around ten at night, after the tourists have cleared out. The shadows cast by streetlight striking the stone buildings are as soft and strange as the string melody of "Laura." Once, with a Russian novel translation deadline looming, I stepped out for a walk after working until dawn and put this track on. Suddenly, Michigan Avenue looked like a 1940s film set. The rhythm of the sentence I'd been translating, the rhythm of the music, and the rhythm of my footsteps overlapped in an uncanny way.

Miklós Rózsa, "Double Indemnity" (1944)

The tension in this score comes from the short, repeating string phrases. The staccato, clipped notes feel like a heartbeat. The place for this music is the Chicago Riverwalk, especially beneath the Wells Street Bridge. Watching the city lights shimmer on the river's surface while listening to this piece, it seems as though the rhythm of the waves and the rhythm of the strings are imitating each other. In translation work, I often use the word subtext, and this score is subtext itself: the experience of translating, with your ears, the anxiety hidden beneath the surface melody.

Leigh Harline, "The Big Clock" (1948)

This is a lesser-known score, but the combination of clock-tick-evoking percussion and woodwinds is captivating. I listen to it in front of the Chicago Board of Trade Building. At the end of LaSalle Street, where that massive Art Deco structure cuts into the night sky. On weekday evenings, after the finance crowd has emptied out, my footsteps are the only sound echoing through the deserted street. When the percussion of "The Big Clock" settles over that emptiness, time itself becomes a character in a noir.

Henry Mancini, "Touch of Evil" (1958)

Mancini's opening theme is a blend of Latin jazz and noir's shadows. The place for this piece is 18th Street in the Pilsen neighborhood. Walking through the mural-filled alleys while listening to it, the border-town tension Mancini intended resonates strangely with Chicago's multicultural energy. I once worked on a novel that had been translated from Spanish into English, retranslating it into Korean, and I played this track on repeat throughout. The border between one language and another, between one genre and another, between one neighborhood and another. Mancini shows, through music, how to stand on that borderline.

Herschel Burke Gilbert, "Nightmare" (1956)

Fitting for a film whose protagonist is a jazz club musician, the entire score carries the texture of live jazz. This piece should be heard on the South Side, especially along the streets where the old Bronzeville jazz clubs once stood. Much has changed, but walking there at night, there's still something in the air that makes you feel a saxophone could leak out from somewhere. Listening to this score with a translator's ear, you sense that the unpredictable flow of improvisation resembles the rhythm of a good dialogue scene: seemingly scripted, yet veering off in new directions moment by moment.

Alex North, "A Streetcar Named Desire" (1951)

I know it's hard to classify this strictly as noir. But Alex North's score is steeped enough in a noir atmosphere, and whenever I listen to it, I ride the Chicago L train. The Blue Line late at night, heading toward O'Hare. The residential lights flickering past the window, the fluorescent glow inside an empty car, the occasional screech of metal on rails. When North's jazz-blues melody settles over all of this, it feels like sitting inside a kind of moving noir set. Those moments when you spread a translation manuscript across your lap, pause mid-correction of a single word with your pen, and look out the window.

I don't listen to these tracks on rotation every night. But on nights when the translation stalls, I leave the studio and walk into some street in Chicago. I put in my earphones and choose one of the six. Then, for a moment, this city becomes a different text, one written in the language of night, which I have yet to translate.