The Dark Side of the Screen: Film Noir Read online

  Table of Contents

  Also by Foster Hirsch

  Title Page

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter 1 - The City at Night

  Chapter 2 - The Literary Background:

  Chapter 3 - The Cinematic Background:

  Chapter 4 - The Crazy Mirror:

  Chapter 5 - The Noir Director

  Chapter 6 - The Noir Actor

  Chapter 7 - Down These Mean Streets...

  Chapter 8 - Noir’s Legacy

  Afterword

  Selected Bibliography

  Selected Filmography

  Index

  Copyright Page

  Also by Foster Hirsch

  Love, Sex, Death, and the Meaning of Life: The Films of Woody Allen

  Laurence Olivier on Screen

  A Portrait of the Artist: The Plays of Tennessee Williams

  Joseph Losey

  Who’s Afraid of Edward Albee?

  Elizabeth Taylor

  The Hollywood Epic

  Edward G. Robinson

  George Kelly

  A Method to Their Madness: The History of the Actors Studio

  Harold Prince and the American Music Theatre

  Acting Hollywood Style

  The Boys from Syracuse: The Schuberts’ Theatrical Empire

  Detours and Lost Highways: A Map of Neo-Noir

  Kurt Weill on Stage: From Berlin to Broadway

  Acknowledgments

  The Motion Picture Section of the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; the Library of Performing Arts, New York Public Library at Lincoln Center; the Library of the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills; the Beverly Hills Public Library; the Brooklyn College Library; Scribner’s, for permission to use quoted material from The Killers; Vintage, for permission to use quoted material from The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep, and The Rebel; the Thalia Theater, New York City, for their two seasons of films noirs; the Los Angeles Public Library, Downtown Branch, for their rare copies of the original editions of the novels and stories of Cornell Woolrich; the Whitney Museum of American Art; Ted Sennett ; Peter Cowie; Allen Eyles; Murder Ink., New York.

  Visual material edited and designed by

  Bill O’Connell

  The policeman and the city: Barry Fitzgerald, in The Naked City, looks out over his turf.

  1

  The City at Night

  A car weaves crazily through the Acar weaves crazily through the dark deserted streets of downtown Los Angeles. As it lurches to a halt, a man crawls out, stumbles into an office building, falls at his desk as he begins to talk into a tape recorder, narrating in a clipped tone a story of a doomed love affair. The speaker, Walter Neff, is an insurance salesman who, on a routine house call, became enamored of a bored and sexy housewife. The two of them, in record time, began an affair and concocted an elaborate plan to do away with the woman’s husband—after he had been insured for double indemnity. But their ingenious scheme to defraud Walter’s insurance company backfired, and the conspirators were undermined by their own mounting distrust of each other, as well as by a shrewd and suspicious claims investigator. The estranged lovers’ final meeting takes place in the woman’s house, at night, in dark shadows, in pointed contrast to their first encounter in the house on a sunny mid-afternoon. They shoot each other. The woman dies; the man is able to stagger back to his office where he unburdens himself on tape to the zealous claims man who is also his friend. Having revealed the truth, Walter dies in the friend’s arms.

  After a dinner in his honor, marking twenty-five years of faithful service, a mild-mannered bank clerk named Christopher Cross decides to celebrate by walking home instead of taking the bus, as he usually does. He gets lost in the winding streets of Greenwich Village. Turning a corner, he stumbles upon a scene of violence—a man attacking a woman—and he runs to call the police as the woman (Kitty Marsh) and her boyfriend (Johnny), who were having a typical argument, confer quickly before Johnny steals away. Kitty and her “rescuer” strike up a conversation. She is clearly a dame on the make, though the shy clerk is so delighted to be talking to a pretty woman that he doesn’t see her for what she is. The poor guy is hooked, a goner; and before he has a chance to get his bearings, he is stealing money from his bank in order to support Kitty in a smart Village apartment. She and Johnny see the older man as easy prey, as someone who can be easily swindled, but they are both too dumb to realize that Chris has no money—they are as blind to who he really is as he is to the truth about them. They manage, though, to take him for all he is worth and then some, living high on the money he has stolen; and they contrive as well to steal his identity. The clerk is a Sunday painter, and through a chain of coincidences, the two-timing woman begins to sell his canvases as her own work. When Chris discovers the full extent of her duplicity, when she reveals her true face to him and taunts him for his ugliness, his blindness and gullibility, he kills her. But it is Johnny, always slinking around corners and hiding behind doors, who gets caught (and executed) for the murder while Chris goes free, becoming a Bowery bum unable to come forward as the painter of his own now highly-priced work.

  These are the stories of two of the most famous films noirs, Double Indemnity (1944) and Scarlet Street (1945). In theme, characterization, world view, settings, direction, performance, and writing, the two dramas are focal points for noir style, as representative of the genre as Stagecoach is of westerns or Singing in the Rain of musicals. Double Indemnity and Scarlet Street are about doomed characters who become obsessed with bewitching women. The insurance man and the bank clerk live regular, self-contained lives, yet a chance encounter releases wellsprings of suppressed passion and forces a radical transformation of character. Both men end up killing the women who have tempted them away from their humdrum lives. Victims of fate, both Walter and Chris fall into traps from which there is no escape; Walter is hopelessly caught when he first meets his client’s sultry wife, the clerk is doomed when he rounds a corner and finds what he thinks is a damsel in distress. Both films suggest that the obsessiveness, the irrationality, the violence, the wrenching psychological shifts triggered by their infatuation with luscious, deceitful women were lying in wait beneath the characters’ bland masks. Sexual release plunges both men into irreversible calamity.

  Freed from their former, middle-class selves, both Walter and Chris prove resourceful. Realizing at last a long-held fantasy of duping his company, Walter plots an ingenious swindle. He and his paramour can claim double indemnity if her husband dies—or seems to die—on a train. (Deaths by accidents on trains yield high premiums because of their rarity.) Walter applies himself with evident relish to formulating a perfect crime, exulting in the cleverness of his plan to stage the husband’s fatal fall from the rear platform of a train; Walter himself “plays” the husband, whom he has already killed. Chris Cross, though an utter fool in his relations with Kitty, turns out to be a smart embezzler and, when he has the chance to get rid of his nagging wife, rises triumphantly to the occasion. Her former husband, a sea captain she has presumed dead, returns, promising Chris that, for a price, he will disappear once again. But Chris tricks him, and the Captain to his utter surprise is reunited with his wife while Chris walks away a free man. That Chris is not all meekness and pliancy is announced also in a droll scene when, dressed in an apron, he chops meat as his wife scolds him. The emasculating apron notwithstanding, Chris wields the chopping knife heartily, a sly look in his eye: this soft-spoken clerk is obviously seething with murderous rage.

  Both Walter and Chris are at first sexually stalled. Walter is unmarried, and his closest attachment is to his colleague, the claims investigator, a father figure
whom he tries, perhaps unconsciously, to outwit and to outrage in his clandestine affair with a married woman. The investigator is a figure of authority but also and more crucially of propriety as well; he is a strait-laced bachelor whose life is his job and who is as obsessive in his pursuit of false claims as Walter is in his scheme to defraud the company. The claims man believes Walter’s nice-guy image, responding to him as the perfectly behaved son, and never for a moment suspecting him as Phyllis Dietrichson’s partner in crime. He dislikes Phyllis the moment he sees her, perceiving her as in some way a threat to his own relationship with Walter. He is offended by Phyllis’ obvious sexuality. Clearly there is a strong connection between the two men; Walter, half dead, races back to the office to confess to his friend and then dies, purged, in the older man’s arms. The comradely devotion and loyalty that bind them are an antidote to the poisonous sexuality that links Walter to Phyllis. Is Double Indemnity covertly anti-woman and pro-homosexual? The film’s tangled, ambiguous, loaded sexual currents, at any rate, are typical of noir thrillers.

  The triangular relationship in Scarlet Street, involving Chris, Kitty, and Johnny, is also kinky. The woman likes the man who regularly beats her up; Johnny is a sadist, and the more brutal his behavior, the more devoted and clinging Kitty becomes, whereas she scoffs at the man who treats her like a princess. Are there in this story, as in Double Indemnity, some disguised parent-child hostilities? Chris is old enough to be Kitty’s father, and his posture toward her is paternal and kindly. He sometimes drops by unannounced when Kitty is entertaining Johnny on the sly. Before admitting Chris, she kicks Johnny’s hat and shoes under the bed and hides him in the bathroom: is daughter sneaking in an affair behind Daddy’s back? Does the child have guilty secrets from her parent?

  The doomed, unheroic protagonists of both films are triply victimized—by women, by their own psychological imbalances, and by fate.

  Before the fall: Christopher Cross (Edward G. Robinson)). the fated anti-hero of Fritz Lang’s archetypal Scarlet Street, preparing to walk home after the dinner in his honor. Little does he suspect that his casual nighttime stroll through the winding streets of Greenwich Village will plunge him into a noir nightmare.

  Seemingly average men who go haywire, whose lives fall apart because they took an initial wrong turn, Walter Neff and Chris Cross are archetypal noir losers.

  The female characters in Double Indemnity and Scarlet Street are equally representative figures. For both Phyllis and Kitty, sex is only a means to an end. The end is money. Greedy and selfish, knowingly using their bodies as destructive weapons, the women face their doom with less conscience than their male partners. Walter and Chris are allowed a token repentance: the insurance man unburdens himself in a therapeutic confession, the clerk turned murderer wanders the city in a state of terminal alienation. Dazed and radically split from his former self, he squanders his days in a limbo of self-punishment. The women present false faces to the world, but beneath their masks beat hearts of steel.

  Though their effect on men is the same, the two women are not exactly alike. The cunning housewife has no feelings for anyone, while dumb, careless Kitty is genuinely attached to her callow boyfriend. Phyllis is a figure of Machiavellian evil, chilling and reptilian, while Kitty is presented on a distinctly less sophisticated level, as a dimwitted whore with just enough savvy to know how to look out for herself. Phyllis makes a career of murdering people who get in her way. She killed her husband’s first wife; once she meets Walter, she wants to kill her husband; and when Walter becomes a possible threat to her, she tries to kill him too. She has pretended to a sexual interest in him that she does not feel; while courting him, she has been carrying on with her stepdaughter’s boyfriend. The character is a misogynist’s vision of woman as a male-attracting embodiment of evil. Phyllis is a castrating Eve in a nightmare inversion of the Garden of Eden myth. As written by Billy Wilder and Raymond Chandler, working from James M. Cain’s original novel, and as played by Barbara Stanwyck, Phyllis is the ultimate femme fatale of the 1940s thriller, a contemporary Circe luring unsuspecting men with her siren’s song.

  In the harsh world of both Double Indemnity and Scarlet Street, survival means doing unto others before they do unto you. Wives murder husbands, murderers are wolves in sheep’s clothing, stepmothers steal boyfriends from their stepdaughters, loyal employees turn with a vengeance against their employers. The mildestseeming people are capable of fierce crimes of passion: appearances are more than deceiving in this Hobbesian universe, they are positively fatal to the unwary. Life is built on quicksand, as a nighttime stroll that takes the clerk a few blocks out of his way leads directly into a labyrinth without exit, as a routine visit to a client’s house on a sunny afternoon precipitates the hapless salesman into the darkest possibilities of the self, a waking nightmare triggered by lust and concluding in a bloodbath. The characters have no place of refuge in this cruel naturalistic world, this life-as-a-jungle setting. Alone and unprotected, they are truly strangers, to themselves as well as to others. The world is littered with pitfalls against which the individual has, at the most, meager defenses. Like Walter and Chris, most of the protagonists of film noir are the playthings of designing women, of their own dark, subterranean inclinations, and of a malevolent fate.

  Double Indemnity and Scarlet Street are enacted in settings that strongly reinforce the films’ cheerless vision. Double Indemnity takes place in Los Angeles, Scarlet Street in New York, but the two cities are shown in a narrow and subtly stylized way—in Robert Warshow’s resonant phrase, they are “cities of the imagination.” The New York of Scarlet Street is entirely studio-created, airless and claustrophobic, with no sense of a world going on outside the frame. The Greenwich Village in which the story begins, and in which most of the action occurs, is a clear-cut fabrication, bearing only the remotest connection to reality. Village streets, like those in the film, are in fact winding and irregular. But there is no sense in the film of a real community. The film’s streets are eerily deserted, layered with shadows: a symbolic terrain. When Chris Cross starts his walk into the zigzagging, darkened streets, he is clearly doomed.

  Like many of the dark films, Scarlet Street takes place primarily at night and in a limited number of settings. There are only three important interiors: Chris’s office, his cluttered apartment, and the mirrored, white apartment he rents for Kitty. Hunched over his desk in his cramped, barred office, Chris looks like an imprisoned animal. A large portrait of his wife’s first husband, a lusty sea captain, dominates the living room of his overstuffed apartment, displacing him in his own home. The apartment is dim, the furniture dusty and squat. These rooms without light or air are indications of the people who inhabit them, the pinched, crabby wife and the meek clerk with the busy inner life. The apartment Kitty lives in, with its sleek and empty whiteness, is equally expressive of character. Chris stabs Kitty to death as she lounges in her white bed framed by mirrors, her image split and multiplied in a strong visual echo of her duplicity.

  Double Indemnity is played out against a larger canvas. There are vestiges throughout of the real Los Angeles, of actual streets and houses rather than studio-created replicas. The film is designed as a series of visual contrasts between night and day, shadow and light. The opening scene, Walter’s car racing unsteadily through the nighttime city, is followed by a flashback set on a sunny afternoon in a Spanish-style house in Pasadena. Day is contrasted to night in this back-to-back sequence, as the past intersects the present. Both scenes maintain a mood of impending doom. Walter’s first meeting with Phyllis is played out against a bright, waning Southern California afternoon, as the slanting sun streams through the windows, baking the adobe walls and tiled floors of the comfortable suburban living room. But the venetian blinds break up the flow of the streaming sunlight, casting ominous barred shadows onto the walls. The two conspirators-to-be look trapped in the hot, bright room. The air is thick with sex, and with catastrophe. Intent on killing each other, the former lovers
meet for the last time in the same room, now totally darkened. The pitch-black house encloses their final descent. Between the light and shadow opening and the circumambient darkness of the finale are many scenes set in deceptively normal daytime surroundings. The two murderers meet on neutral ground in Jerry’s Market, conferring in whispered tones in the baby food section, their desperate plotting ironically played off against the flat lighting of an ordinary, featureless surburban grocery.

  The conspirators perpetrating the perfect crime, in Double Indemnity. Night, railroad tracks, high-contrast lighting, a corpse, the glum, masked faces of Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray: this shot contains several key noir ingredients.

  These deeply unromantic films, shot through with visual and verbal ironies, take a sneaking delight in their displays of passion gone wrong and of murderous calculation confounded. The films keep their distance from their twisted characters—a mordant humor seeps through even the darkest moments of the action. Double Indemnity was directed by Billy Wilder, Scarlet Street by Fritz Lang, men of Germanic origin not noted for their warmth or emotional generosity. Like the fate that hovers over their luckless characters, their direction is utterly controlling. They create closed worlds from which a sense of the flow of life has been rigorously excluded. There seems to be no world outside the frame, and there are almost no other people on view besides the principals. These stories of obsession and self-destruction are enacted in a deliberately created vacuum, then—a sealed-off environment of airless rooms, and of threatening, lonely streets. The camera keeps its distance, offering only occasional comment through a recurrent high angle or a disorienting low one. The high angle, which peers down on the characters (catching Chris in his cashier’s cage, for instance), is a visual intimation of doom. It seems to trap the characters and emphasizes their helplessness against both the external and internal forces that bedevil them. The low angle (Phyllis in a bath towel at the top of the stairs, seen from Walter’s point of view) provides occasional disquieting images of one character’s power over another. For the most part, though, both Wilder and Lang use the camera as a neutral observer of the characters’ breakdowns. Relying on dramatic lighting and on settings that reflect the characters’ states of mind, their methods are muted adaptations of Expressionism. At the end of Scarlet Street, to signal Chris Cross’ delirium, Lang uses an all-out Expressionist technique that departs from his prevailing understatement: the neon lights flashing madly outside Chris’ flophouse room, and the voices rooting around in his head, colliding in demented echo and repetition, are subjective renderings of the character’s collapse, and provide a bombastic epilogue to Lang’s remarkably cool film.