The Dark Side of the Screen: Film Noir Read online

  Before Hammett, the major names in the mystery field are Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Agatha Christie, whose work represents three phases of the literature of crime and detection. Histories of the genre, from Howard Haycraft’s pioneering survey, Murder for Pleasure (1941 ), to Julian Symon’s Mortal Consequences (1972), invariably cite Poe as the father of the detective story. Poe’s pre-eminent place rests on only three short stories, “Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Mystery of Marie Roget,” and “The Purloined Letter.” But in them Poe introduced elements that have been staples of the literature of crime ever since. In “Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841), Poe introduces the prototype for the character of the eccentric detective. Independently wealthy, Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin lives in seclusion in a baroque ancestral mansion, accompanied only by a friend who is the Boswell to his great skills, the modest court reporter who narrates the story. (Poe’s characters anticipate Conan Doyle’s Watson and Sherlock Holmes by forty-five years.) Dupin and his companion love the dark. During the day, Dracula-like, they remain secluded behind shuttered windows, while at night they wander at random through Paris, seeking not so much adventure as suitable subjects for contemplation. As his admiring friend tells us, Dupin is a wizard of ratiocination, able to pierce any mystery with his uncanny powers of deduction. The murders that occur in the Rue Morgue, which completely baffle the police, offer a signal challenge to Dupin’s reasoning skills. The deaths of an obscure laundress and her daughter—the first instance of what was to become a classic mystery motif, that of the locked room puzzle—seem to defy any rational explanation; the conflicting reports of several witnesses who overheard a babble of strange accents before the murders cause further confusion. But Dupin cracks the case with a virtuoso display of his reasoning faculties—concluding, after an argument of serpentine complexity, that the murders were perpetrated not by any human agency but by a gorilla escaped from a traveling circus that entered the top-floor apartment through a window after climbing up a drainpipe!

  “Murders in the Rue Morgue” introduces many motifs that were to become conventions of the detective story and of film noir: the peculiar and incisive investigator, a lordly, detached figure; the locked-room puzzle; the city as a dark and dangerous setting; the clash between the detective, in business for himself, and the dimwitted police; the last-minute explanation of the crime after a series of hypotheses has been tested and proven false; the withholding of the truth until just before the “final curtain”; the hero’s pleasure in the intricate processes of deduction and ratiocination; the labyrinthine route to the solution of the crime. This story and its two successors were enormously popular, which makes the long interval between their publication in the early 1840’s and the emergence of Sherlock Holmes in 1886 something of a mystery in itself. Since the first appearance of Conan Doyle’s sleuth, however; the genre has sustained its popularity through a number of changes in structure and style.

  Like Poe, Conan Doyle created his detective as a respite from other kinds of writing which he took more seriously and for which he wanted to be remembered. The enduring appeal of the Holmes stories, like that of Poe’s mysteries, is in the oddities and compulsions of their protagonist, and in the evocation of mood and setting, rather than in plotting. Conan Doyle’s narrative construction is often haphazard, and sometimes delirious—habitués are more likely to return to the stories again and again for the sake of Holmes himself, and the London atmosphere, and not for their elements of mystery.

  But it is the element of detection that dominated crime literature until the emergence of the hard-boiled school in the twenties. In these pre-hard-boiled stories, whodunit is paramount, and ingenuity of plotting takes precedence over style or character drawing. This kind of puzzle story, of which Agatha Christie’s are among the most popular, sets up a mock-battle with the reader, teasing him into a series of wrong guesses. But the writer had to play fair; he could be tricky, but he couldn’t cheat; above all, the guilty party had to be on the premises from the beginning. Stories in the Christie mold were set in confined locations: a train, a ship, most often a country house. A murder is committed; the cast of characters, distinctly limited in number, contains many suspects. The detective questions the house guests or passengers, as the case may be, his suspicions pointing now one way, now another, while the reader engages in his own simultaneous process of inquiry and deduction, toying with hunches that may or may not tally with those of the detective. The revelation of the murderer, at any rate, is meant to be a jolt: by convention, the least likely character is usually the guilty one.

  It was exactly this type of story—the tale of classical detection—that the hard-boiled school intentionally superseded. The mysteries built on the house-party plan took place in a remote environment—in a sylvan country setting, most typically—and were enacted by caricatures of English nobility and the servant class. In locale, as well as in social notation, the classical detective stories existed in a never-never land utterly alien to the urban American crime milieu. American crime stories and films put crime back where it belonged—in the mean streets of the real world. Stories featuring Nick Carter, the earliest hard-boiled hero, appeared in pulp magazines in the latter part of the last century, but the pulps did not achieve widespread recognition, nor did they become a literate and significant aspect of American popular culture, until the twenties. And the pulp that loomed over the field was Black Mask, founded in 1920 by H.L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan. The two men were more interested in their Smart Set magazine and, within a year, sold Black Mask. In 1926, the editorship was assumed by Captain Joseph T. Shaw, who took the magazine serious-ly, never referring to it as a “pulp” but as “the book” or the “rough paper” magazine. Shaw set high standards for his writers, holding out for a taut style and for characterization. He published the first efforts of both Hammett and Chandler, and used their stories as models for his other writers. The Captain was known in the trade for his ready blue pencil—he tolerated no padding or fat, and he personally edited every story that appeared during his long tenure. Though quality varied, “the book” achieved a level of performance that is now legendary.

  Humphrey Bogart, as Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon. Hollywood’s first hard-boiled hero, a brooding, tight-lipped loner who keeps his feelings to himself.

  Colloquial, racy, vivid, Black Mask style (like that later to dominate film noir) imitated the lingo of the real criminal world. Style and form are so well matched that it is surprising that crime stories had not always been written in this way, in the accent of street-wise hoodlums and burly cops and gumshoes; but the fact is that Black Mask’s gritty realism was something new in the field-a conscious rebellion against the sissified English murder mysteries.

  The use of language in these crime stories was part of a larger revolution in written language, with its roots in the nineteenth century, in the work particularly of Mark Twain, Henry James, and Walt Whitman, who in their different ways sought to introduce the sounds and rhythms of vernacular American speech into literature. Prose in nineteenth century America was formal and ornate. Poe begins “Murders in the Rue Morgue” with a discourse on the deductive faculty: “The mental features discoursed of as the analytical, are, in themselves, but little susceptible of analysis. We appreciate them only in their efforts. We know of them, among other things, that they are always to their possessor, when inordinately possessed, a source of the liveliest enjoyment.” The dry, abstract language is likely to alienate the contemporary mystery reader. Here, for striking contrast, representing the Black Mask tone at its strongest and purest, is the opening of The Maltese Falcon (1929):

  Samuel Spade’s jaw was long and bony, his chin a jutting v under the more flexible v of his mouth. His nostrils curved back to make another, smaller, v. His yellow-grey eyes were horizontal. The v motif was picked up again by thickish brows rising outward from twin creases above a hooked nose, and his pale brown hair grew down-from high flat temples-in a point on his forehead. H
e looked rather pleasantly like a blond Satan. He said to Effie Perrine: “Yes, sweetheart?”

  Poe is oratorical; Hammett is swift, concrete, simple. Between the two writers lay generations of experiments in tone and style intended to bring prose closer to spoken language. The process, overall, was one of a general chastening and simplification. In this assimilation of the American tone into literature, the crucial book is Huckleberry Finn(1884), in which Twain’s use of his hero as narrator enabled him to write in a distinctly colloquial manner. Huck speaks directly to the reader in the voice of rural America, with Twain hovering above the page as a sly master of ceremonies. Twain uses the first person technique to introduce greater realism and immediacy into the texture of his writing, and the “I” through whom we receive impressions in many of the hard-boiled stories and films noirs performs the same function.

  Ole Andresen (Burt Lancaster) awaits his executioners, in the film adaptation of Hemingway’s authentically hard-boiled short story, “The Killers.”

  The major link between the kind of experiments with language that Twain was making and the vernacular tang of the hard-boiled style is Ernest Hemingway, who is generally acknowledged as the true father of the tough crime writers of the twenties and thirties, their stylistic and philosophical headmaster. Hemingway did more than any other single writer to legitimize the colloquial mode in American prose; he perfected a clean, idiomatic style. He and the hacks cranking out a penny a word for the flouishing pulp jungle had much in common: a concern for the true sounds and rhythms of American speech and a posture of American toughness and durability. The typical Hemingway hero held on to his stance of self-reliant masculinity in a way that paralleled the hard-boiled stars—the Sam Spades and Philip Marlowes—of the Black Mask brigade. Hemingway’s men keep a tight rein on their emotions, guardedly resisting feelings, their fiercely willed stoicism a shield against chaos. The struggle for control and the denial of feelings are reflected in Hemingway’s spare, taut, compulsively worked-over language, where everything is concrete and immediate, where descriptions (whether of climate or landscape or food or people) are confined to a tight neutral tone, like a journalist reporting the externals of a scene as they seemed to him to be at the time.

  Chaste and withheld, with a simplicity arrived at through rigorous self-discipline, the Hemingway style quickly became the dominant mode of American realism. Yet beneath the compact tough guy stance is a creeping sense of hysteria, an ongoing hint that the hard-boiled pose can crack at any moment. It is in exactly this tension between surface and subtext, between the seeming poise of the characters and the language and the underlying unrest, that Hemingway transcends the Black Mask school. For the most part, the image that the hard-boiled heroes present to the world is accurate, whereas Hemingway’s stoics—the wounded Jake Barnes in The Sun Also Rises, or Frederick Henry, fleeing from war in A Farewell to Arms—often construct a facade which is almost the opposite of what they really are “deep down.” The split in Hemingway’s characters between their public and private selves is often decisive, while in much crime writing the characters have no private selves at all.

  Hemingway honed the hard-boiled style, but only one of his novels (To Have and Have Not) and only a few of his short stories (“The Killers” pre-eminently) qualify as specifically hard-boiled. Harry Morgan, the hero of To Have and Have Not, is a full-fledged tough guy who tries to make ends meet running a fishing boat from Havana harbor. Betrayed by a rich client, who steals off without paying the money he owes, Harry slips into criminal activity, illegally transporting a group of Chinese and Cuban revolutionaries. A determined man, capable of violence, he dislikes trafficking with criminals, but he compromises because he sees no other way to support himself. A heavy drinker who spends his time in bars, he is also a terrific lover. Killed in a shootout aboard his boat, Harry Morgan, like the old fisherman in The Old Man and the Sea, makes a superhuman effort to survive against enormous odds. His defeat is rendered in heroic terms, as the action of a special man. Harry is a more exalted figure than the tight-lipped private eye, but the world he moves in, the challenges he faces, and the posture he assumes, are all much the same as those of the lesser Spades and Marlowes of the pulps and of noir.

  “The Killers” is Hemingway’s one perfectly realized piece in the hard-boiled vein. Two hired gunmen enter a diner to wait for the nightly appearance of “the Swede,” whom they have been paid to kill. When the Swede doesn’t show, the zombie-like killers go to his rented room, to find him lying on his bed in the dark, waiting to give himself up to their dark mission. The killers shoot him and then leave town, as quickly and as quietly as they arrived.

  Hemingway tells us nothing about the Swede’s background, or about his feelings. We see him only from the outside, as a startlingly passive victim. And yet the story reverberates with a sense of powerful, unexpressed feelings. Hemingway’s clenched, metallic dialogue—which is to become the standard “voice” of noir—and his terse scene-setting contain a palpitating subtext. The Swede’s existential resignation, the character’s despair and world-weariness, are ingrained in the willed, deadly flatness of the language.

  Nick opened the door and went into the room. Ole Andreson was lying on the bed with all his clothes on. He had been a heavyweight prizefighter and he was too long for the bed. He lay with his head on two pillows. He did not look at Nick.

  “What was it?” he asked.

  “I was up at Henry’s,” Nick said, “and two fellows came in and tied up me and the cook, and they said they were going to kill you.”

  It sounded silly when he said it. Ole Andreson said nothing.

  “Thanks for coming to tell me about it.”

  “That’s all right.”

  Nick looked at the big man lying on the bed.

  “Don’t you want me to go and see the police?”

  “No,” Ole Andreson said. “That wouldn’t do any good. ”

  “Isn’t there something I could do?”

  “No. There ain’t anything to do.”

  “Maybe it was just a bluff.”

  “No. It ain’t just a bluff.”

  Ole Andreson rolled over toward the wall.

  The short, simple sentences, the repetitions, are thick with menace and implication. Hemingway uses the colloquial style more knowingly and for deeper purposes than the “poets of the tabloid murder,” but the high and low versions of the hard-boiled manner share a world view as well as use of language.

  Though Hemingway’s influence was pervasive, he was never considered merely hard-boiled. The first writer who was legitimately and literately hard-boiled without being anything else was Dashiell Hammett, whose tough-sounding mysteries were intended as a challenge to the genteel, formula-ridden puzzle stories of the British crime school. Hammett wrote for mood and character rather than for story—the solution was often less important than atmosphere, local color, dialogue, tone. It was clear to almost everyone who read him that Hammett was a born writer who just happened to work in a particular genre. Hammett had only ten fruitful years as a writer, from the mid-twenties to the mid-thirties; but in that time, in his stories for Black Mask starring The Continental Op, and in his famous novels, he built a solid reputation as the Hemingway of the pulps.

  Fat and oily, the antithesis of the romantic hero, The Op seems to have no life at all apart from his determined pursuit of criminals. We never catch a glimpse of him in a private moment. He is always on stage, radiating toughness. He never changes, he never removes his mask, he has an emotional range approaching zero. Only his ready use of violence is capable of surprising us. Yet he is a real presence, a character of some stature, a primitive version of the hard-boiled anti-hero central to the private eye tradition in crime literature of the twenties and thirties and to film noir in the forties.

  Hammett’s writing stood above the hack work that inundated the crime field because of his taut, slangy style, filled with precise descriptions of characters and settings, his character drawing, and h
is themes. Like Chandler after him, Hammett chafed at the supposed limits of crime fiction, and he introduced motifs not previously associated with the genre. The feeling that something new and interesting is happening in Hammett’s work is deepened in his novels. Red Harvest, The Maltese Falcon, The Dain Curse, and The Glass Key (but not The Thin Man, which was never intended to be more than an agreeable entertainment, brisk and witty) all deal with serious themes that enlarge the limits of category fiction. The four novels open the enclosed mystery frame to larger issues: Red Harvest and The Glass Key touch on political corruption, exposing shady collaborations between bosses of politics and crime. The Dain Curse flirts with ideas of false religion and of the power of cults—long before cults were a widespread part of American life. The Maltese Falcon is less programmatic than these other socially-oriented crime pieces, but it contains the most pungent of all the hard-boiled characters—Sam Spade—and through him becomes a kind of informal essay on the code of the tough guy. Two famous speeches in the novel reveal the essence of that code. Early in the story, Sam Spade, in what is for him an expansive mood, recites an anecdote to Brigid O’Shaughnessy about a man named Flitcraft. One day, while walking to work, Flitcraft is nearly hit by a falling beam. The near-accident gives him a sense of the randomness and absurdity of life; he decides to walk away from the safe, contained life of work, family, and responsibilities he has created for himself. He disappears, re-settles in some other city, and, after a period of time, rebuilds his life in the same mold as before the incident with the falling beam.