The line will take on a special resonance for anyone managing to sit through Palmetto.

Of all the teeming hordes of misconceived noir spawn in recent years, this, we might hope, is the worst, the one that will shake even the appalling taste and failed imagination of Hollywood by the shoulders and say: No more. All of us who know and love real film noir should start a letter campaign; we could use the classic Lloyd Bentsen line from the 1988 vice-presidential debate – “I knew film noir. It was a friend of mine. And this Tarantinoesque twaddle is not film noir.”

Director Volker Schlondorff has been able successfully to deploy elements of noir in other contexts: The Tin Drum and A Handmaid’s Tale place ordinary protagonists in extraordinary situations and foment a heightened sense of ambient paranoia, corruption, and psychic claustrophobia. With Palmetto, however, Schlondorff seeks to immerse himself in the genre itself. The result – doomed from the outset by an abysmal script and the casting of Harrelson – is a reverential survey of film-noir technique, from rain-splashed windshields in the night, to high-contrast light and shadows (including even the requisite window blinds), violence, and cheap sex. It’s all there. But it never simmers.The characters are utterly uninteresting, and the situations are so heinously derivative of scores of other better movies that, at best, Palmetto feels like a rather boring parody, a sort of “Forbidden Noir” revue.