The Dark Side of the Screen: Film Noir Read online

  John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon (1941), often cited as the first film noir, takes place in neat studio interiors, with the action photographed primarily from neutral medium shots, as in this representative still. In contrast, Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil (1958), frequently called film noir’s epitaph, has exotic settings (like the gaudy strip joint in these two shots), packed frames, and disorienting camera angles.

  The three major noir character types—the sleuth, the criminal, the middle-class victim and scapegoat—all inhabit a treacherous urban terrain filled with deceiving women and the promise of money easily and ill-gotten. The city, minatory and bewitching, is a powerful and inescapable presence in noir; but, like the characters who walk through its mean streets, it too comes in various styles. Again, neat dating is impossible as noir’s phases overlap, but there are some general patterns: the earliest period (for which Lang’s Scarlet Street and The Woman in the Window are pre-eminent examples) presented cities that were primarily studio-created, deliberately lacking the fullness and density of a real city. Shown, most typically, at night, the studio city of darkened rainy streets was eerily deserted, its pools of shadows pregnant with menace. The simplified and semi-abstract cityscapes of the studio-made thrillers provided the appropriate backdrop for stories of entrapment. Films set in this environment were claustrophobic psychological studies, stories of obsession and confinement in which the world begins small and then progressively closes in on the fated protagonists. In these dramas of wriggling, harried, increasingly desperate characters, the outside world is filtered through only in limited doses, as, in a sense, an “accessory to the crime.”

  The textures of a studio city and of a real city are contrasted in these scenes from Lang’s Woman in the Window and Dassin’s Naked City. Typically, the shot from the studio-made film looks posed, neatly balanced; the eerily deserted, rain-slicked street emphasizes the isolation of the character (Edward G. Robinson, as a meek professor turned murderer). The busy shot from The Naked City, with Don Taylor as a plain-clothesman moving against the flow of traffic, has qualities of spontaneity and immediacy that Lang deliberately avoided.

  After the war, the thriller took to the streets of real cities (while studio dramas continued to be made as well), and the new location look encouraged the development of different kinds of crime stories. The location films opened up the crime picture, giving it a semblance of documentary authenticity that the studio-based films, with their heavily controlled lighting and creation of atmosphere, deliberately avoided. The location thrillers had a wider and more open frame, a greater number of settings, and a visual style that was not as stiff and manipulated as in the studio-created “cities of the imagination.” The greater amount of camera movement in the location films, as well as the dominant use of the camera as an objective recording instrument, gave the action the look of an on-the-spot journalistic report. Passing by, at the rear and the edges of the frame, were glimpses of a random reality, a flow of life, that could not be absorbed by crime dramas confined to the studio. Such films as Call Northside 777, Boomerang and The House on 92nd Street dramatized true-life stories as a salute to policemen or the FBI or crusading journalists who cracked tough cases. The semi-documentary thriller thus had a different tone than the more stylized and claustrophobic films noirs. The realistic stories of detection were essentially conservative in their outlook, whereas the studio films tended to be subversive, slyly undermining the middle-class status quo with their depiction of middle America gone haywire. The location stories of police procedures had clear-cut separations between the good guys (the men who represented and staunchly upheld the law) and the bad (the criminals who hid from the light of day in the bowels of the urban underworld), whereas in the stylized noirs innocence and guilt, virtue and vice, were presented in much more complex ways.

  Films noir shot on location often chose unusual backgroundsor, through compositional means, transformed reality to match the mood of the story. Here, Robert Siodmaksets up a shot for Criss Cross, while Burt Lancaster waits on the porch of a house in the old Bunker Hill section of Los Angeles, a popular location for forties thrillers because of its bizarre Los Angeles-Victorian architecture.

  Yet the straightforward semi-documentary thrillers were not the only kind of crime film to take advantage of the real city. Again dates overlap, and the hard-hitting expose dramas with a Neo-Realist technique appeared at much the same time or anticipated by only a year or two the location film with a more neurotic component, such as The Naked City (1947), Kiss of Death (1948), Criss Cross (1948), Side Street (1949), and Night and the City (1950), in which the real city became more than a merely neutral and uninflected backdrop. In these manneristic pieces, reality is transformed. In the brilliant Night and the City, for instance, a real London, oozing with slime and enshrouded with fog, becomes a maze of crooked alleyways, narrow cobbled streets and waterfront dens: a place of pestilential enclosure. In The Window (1949), New York in midsummer is rendered as a wasteland of abandoned buildings, empty lots ringed by fences, and sweltering tenements—an infested environment that seems to be a breeding ground for crime.

  The difference between the airless studio city and the real city of later films suggests the range of themes within which noir operates. The fabricated city, or the fragments of it that represent the whole, forms the appropriate setting for stories of psychological focus, while the real city backgrounds indicate a shift to a broader social canvas. The fake and the real cities point up the distinction between noir’s “private” and “public” modes, between closed-form stories of festering neurosis on the one hand and the more open-form stories that connect in some way to contemporary social realities on the other.

  Though sometimes it did go “public,” noir worked best when it bypassed specific contemporary problems to concentrate instead on private obsession and trauma. The genre’s full flavor was curtailed when a film was designed to make a social point, when a story had an anti-communist bias, or exploited nuclear anxiety, or crusaded against criminal syndicates, or networks of German spies. Noir, adapted to the demands of expose or patriotism or moral statement, proved less vigorous and original than when it dealt with small-scale, intimate portraits of criminals by design (Double Indemnity) or default (Scarlet Street), its focus specifically psychological rather than social.

  The crime films of the thirties reflected their times in a direct way, whereas noir’s connection to the forties is less precise, less a matter of portraying specific social issues than of reflecting, generally and metaphorically, the mood of the country during and after the war. French cinéastes felt, after all, that the very qualities which gave the style its name reflected the impact of the war on American society. In Panorama du film noir américain, Borde and Chaumeton make the point that few films noirs were made from 1941, when The Maltese Falcon appeared, to 1945, when the war ended. They write that noir’s full flowering had to wait until 1945-46, as if the studios had agreed to withhold the negative imagery of noir in order to concentrate on patriotic war stories (the industry doing its part in the nation’s war effort) or purely escapist entertainment, like musicals and light comedies, which supplied a diversion during a period of anxiety. The two French critics cite the number of full-fledged noir dramas in the immediate postwar period as a sign of contemporary disillusionment and malaise, while Raymond Durgnat suggests, plausibly though not persuasively, that “late forties Hollywood is blacker than thirties precisely because its audience, being more secure, no longer needed cheering up.”

  To read noir, however, as a series of social notations either in sympathetic response to or in reaction against a national frame of mind is tricky because it is not primarily a social form, in the way that the stories of gangsters in the thirties were. The gangster’s rise and fall took place in a public arena, and the films (partly to placate the censors) assumed a propagandistic cast, claiming to be social documents aimed at eliminating public enemies. The reformist strain of the gangster saga may have been s
purious or half-hearted, but the films captured the social flavor of their period. The public focus of the gangster’s career—his activities made headlines—does not continue into film noir, where the emphasis is distinctly private, underground. The typical noir anti-hero is in hiding, from himself as well as from society; and his criminal activity, unlike the gangster‘s, is not the stuff of folk legends.

  In these two scenes from The Naked City, New York becomes a place of entrapment, a blank, menacing background for climactic noir chases.

  Yet in a number of ways, noir offers a symbolic social and psychological profile of its era. The genre’s heyday covers a particularly disruptive time in American history; the forties began with the specter of war and concluded with the Congressional witch-hunt for communists, as well as with the prospect of a war in Korea. Even though the theater of action was on foreign soil, American lives were profoundly changed by the war. American cities may not have been directly under fire, but still the daily rhythm of life shifted; if there were no bread lines, there were at least war rations. The war stimulated the domestic economy, but the work force was significantly different from what it had been in the years of pre-war isolationism. Because men were needed in the armed services, women for the first time entered the job market in large numbers, and the place of women, both at home and on the job, changed radically. It is, in fact, in the way that it reflects the new status of women in American society that film noir is most closely connected to its period. Like everything else that noir touched, it transformed the new role of women into a negative image. Passed through the noir filter, the “new woman,” forced by social circumstance and economic necessity to assert herself in ways that her culture had not previously encouraged, emerged on screen as a wicked, scheming creature, sexually potent and deadly to the male. The dark thrillers record an abiding fear of strong women, women who steer men off their course, beckoning them to a life of crime, or else so disrupting their emotional poise that they are unable to function.

  In Night and the City, Dassin presents London as an imprisoning environment of barred windows and foul narrowalleyways, as in this shot (with Googie Withers, in flight from her husband).

  Noir’s treatment of women is thus symptomatic of the way in which the genre transforms reality: women who in real life were strengthened by their wartime experience, while their husbands were away, appear in films as malevolent temptresses, their power confined almost entirely to a sexual realm, their strength achieved only at the expense of men. Noir’s parade of weak, uncertain, woefully neurotic men and fire-breathing dragon ladies is thus a nightmarish distortion of contemporary realities. It is one of the ongoing complaints of feminists that American films, made mostly by men (and by men who are economically and socially dominant), have seldom been able to portray women as intelligent, independent, and strong-willed without either turning them into monsters, as in noir, or else marrying them off in the last reel (the inevitable fate of the career gals played by Rosalind Russell, for instance), thereby “proving” that a woman is calmed down, and removed from the world of masculine striving, once she gets a man. Female ambition is seen then as merely a channeling of sexual frustration.

  The anti-woman bias that runs through American films reaches an apotheosis in noir, where beautiful spider women proliferate. There are other kinds of women in the films—meek wives infected with a fuddy-duddy morality, strong women like Lauren Bacall who achieve something of a parity with the men they fall for. But the dominant image is the one incarnated by Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity: woman as man-hating fatal temptress. The force and persistence of this image of women as amoral destroyers of male strength can be traced, in part, to the wartime reassignment of roles, both at home and at work.

  The only character type in noir connected directly to the period, without any symbolic exaggeration, is the veteran, returning home after the war in a disoriented state. He is shell-shocked and violent (William Bendix in The Blue Dahlia, Robert Ryan in Crossfire), reentering a world whose laws he doesn’t understand (Burt Lancaster in Criss Cross, Alan Ladd in The Blue Dahlia). When he surfaces in noir, the returning soldier has the disconnectedness of an ex-con; he seems both amnesiac and somnambulist. The crime dramas absorb the soldiers into the noir world rather than focusing directly on such problems of the immediate postwar situation as demobilization, the severely shaken economy, the loss of Roosevelt and readjustment to a new President. Specific social traumas and upheavals remain outside the frame.

  Noir never insisted on its “extracurricular” meanings or its social relevance. But beneath its repeated stories of double and triple crosses, its private passions erupting into heinous crimes, the sleazy, compromised morality of many of its characters, can be glimpsed the political paranoia and brutality of the period. In its pervasive aura of defeat and despair, its images of entrapment, the escalating derangement of its leading characters, noir registers, in a general way, the country’s sour postwar mood. This darkest, most downbeat of American film genres traces a series of metaphors for a decade of anxiety, a contemporary apocalypse bounded on the one hand by Nazi brutality and on the other by the awful knowledge of nuclear power.

  Film noir is a descriptive term for the American crime film as it flourished, roughly, from the early forties to the late fifties. It embraces a variety of crime dramas ranging from claustrophobic studies of murder and psychological entrapment to more general treatments of criminal organizations. From stylized versions of the city at night to documentary-like reports of the city at midday, from the investigations of the wry, cynical sleuth to the “innocent” man momentarily and fatally tempted by luxury, to the desperate flailings of the confirmed and inveterate criminal, the genre covers a heterogeneous terrain. In range of theme and in visual style, it is both varied and complex, and in level of achievement it is consistently high. Film noir is one of the most challenging cycles in the history of American films.

  Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler began their careers in the rough-cut yellow pages of Black Mask, the best-written and best-edited of all the pulp magazines.

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  The Literary Background:

  The Boys in the Back Room

  Noir did not spring full-blown in the early forties. It has a complex ancestry, drawing on literary, artistic, and cinematic precursors to arrive at its own unique blend of American and European styles. The hard-boiled school of crime writing which flourished in the pages of pulp magazines in the twenties and thirties had a great impact on the noir tone. Noir also shows temperamental and philosophical affinities with the brand of naturalism practiced early in the century by such novelists as Theodore Dreiser and Frank Norris. In visual design, noir recalls the stark night world transformations of German Expressionism. The genre’s most significant directors—Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder and Robert Siodmak—brought to their assignments on American thrillers the kind of visual styling they had developed in Germany in the twenties during the Golden Age at UFA. As a final major influence, noir absorbed some of its iconography from the American gangster film popular in the thirties.

  In 1940, in an unappreciative review of the hard-boiled writers, Edmund Wilson called them “the boys in the back room,” “the poets of the tabloid murder.” Wilson’s skepticism was in fact a minority opinion, since the tough guy writers were generally well received by the literary establishment (though not by movie reviewers of the period); the best of them—Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, and Horace McCoy—had enjoyed a steadily growing reputation. For both the writers and their protagonists, “hard-boiled” was first and foremost a matter of style. It was a stance, a way of observing and behaving that demanded the suppression of any openly expressed feeling. Hard-boiled toughness was indicated by appearance, by occupation, by personal habits, and by manner of speech. Dressed typically in trench coat and fedora, a constant smoker and a heavy drinker, the hard-boiled hero was a man of the city, usually though not always engaged in criminal detection, a cop or a gum
shoe. Moving through the criminal underworld with a shield of ironic and wary detachment, this self-conscious he-man figure used violence to contain violence; he twisted or circumvented the law in order to uphold the law. His morality was flexible and utilitarian. Though he might resort to devious means to get the job done, he was not for sale: he had a fundamental integrity. (The paradoxical morality of the hard-boiled hero is suggested by the title of a recent study of private eye fiction: Saint with a Gun.)

  This urban searcher spoke a particular lingo: terse, laconic, and earthy; the stories in which he starred were written in a style that imitated his own toughness. Often presided over by first-person narrators, the hard-boiled stories had a salty, clipped, no-nonsense tone. The first significant hero in the hard-boiled vein was the Continental Op, conceived by the first important hard-boiled writer, Dashiell Hammett. “Hammett took murder out of the Venetian vase and dropped it into the alley,” wrote Raymond Chandler in his well-known defense of the realistic mystery story, “The Simple Art of Murder.” “[Hammett] wrote at first (and almost to the end) for people with a sharp, aggressive attitude to life. They were not afraid of the seamy side of things; they lived there. Violence did not dismay them; it was right down their street ... He was spare, frugal, hard-boiled, but he did over and over again what only the best writers can ever do at all. He wrote scenes that seemed never to have been written before.” Chandler saluted Hammett for taking crime back to the streets, to a “not very fragrant world” where people “commit [ murder] for reasons, not just to provide a corpse,” and away from the aristocratic country house settings of the so-called classical detective story that had dominated the field until the twenties. Hammett’s mysteries were revolutionary in both style and substance, and must be seen in context as a reaction to the prevailing conventions of the form at the time he began writing.