The Dark Side of the Screen: Film Noir Read online

  Opposite, top: The offices of Spade and Archer, with San Francisco glimpsed through the windows, before trouble starts. Opposite, below: Spade looking down at the body of his slain partner; no matter how much trouble he was in, Hammett’s tough guy private eye always behaved like a Hemingway hero, a model of grace under pressure.

  Fully aware that this is a world in which falling beams can cause an absurd end for an innocent bypasser, Flitcraft proceeds imperturbably. The knowledge of the absurd doesn’t destroy his life; he carries on much as before, business as usual: but the event gives him rare clear-sightedness. Beneath the seemingly unruffled surface of his life, Flitcraft sees into the abyss. Hammett summarizes:

  Flitcraft had been a good citizen and a good husband and father, not by any outer compulsion, but simply because he was a man who was most comfortable in step with his surroundings ... Now a falling beam had shown him that life was fundamentally none of these things. He, the good citizen-husband-father, could be wiped out between office and restaurant by the accident of a falling beam. He knew then that men died at haphazard like that, and lived only while blind chance spared them. It was not, primarily, the injustice of it that disturbed him: he accepted that after the first shock. What disturbed him was the discovery that in sensibly ordering his affairs he had got out of step, and not into step, with life.

  Flitcraft’s strange story epitomizes the hard-boiled world view. Like Flitcraft, Spade is clear-sighted-pitilessly so, in fact—proceeding as if the world makes sense and adds up to something when he knows it really doesn’t. Like Flitcraft, Spade leads an ordered life, maintaining a sense of purpose in the face of disorder and irrationality.

  The Flitcraft episode is extraordinary for a number of reasons. This richly suggestive allegory, which seems oddly placed in a crime story, is indicative of Hammett’s unconventional methods. Supplying mood and philosophical context, and conveying a sense of Spade’s measured, wary character, the story does not advance the narrative in any direct way-Hammett’s inclusion of it moves The Maltese Falcon toward literature and away from pulp fiction.

  Spade’s speech to Brigid at the end is equally trenchant in its revelation of character. Spade tells Brigid that he has been wise to her from the beginning. The jig is up, he announces, as she attempts to work her female magic on him. Though Sam is attracted to her, charmed by the skill of her performance, he is not going to protect her. He is not going to violate his code for her. “When a man’s partner is killed,” he says, in a speech that typifies the clipped, terse tone he always adopts, “he’s supposed to do something about it. It doesn’t make any difference what you thought of him. He was your partner and you’re supposed to do something about it ... ”

  These two beautifully written passages, the Flitcraft story and the explanation to Brigid, summarize the moral foundation of the hard-boiled code. In the face of uncertainty and duplicity, Sam Spade retains his honor. He is not lily-white by any means—he had an affair with his partner’s wife, he is not above using deception and violence to gain his ends. He is cynical and hard to reach emotionally. But, like Flitcraft, he endures, held together by an inner toughness. He commands respect. He is, in short, an ideal character for Humphrey Bogart, the quintessential noir actor.

  Like the typical Hemingway hero, Spade attends to the task at hand, concentrating on the physical details of the moment. Hammett’s description of how Spade makes a cigarette is similar to Hemingway’s accounts of how his characters fish, or steer a boat, or fight a bull, with superb control and a mastery that comes from absolute concentration:

  Published in 1939, The Big Sleep was Chandler’s first novel, the first of ten that starred Philip Marlowe.

  Spade’s thick fingers made a cigarette with deliberate care, sifting a measured quantity of tan flakes down into curved paper, spreading the flakes so that they lay equal at the ends with a slight depression in the middle, thumbs rolling the paper’s inner edge down and up under the outer edge as forefingers pressed it over, thumbs and fingers sliding to the paper cylinder’s ends to hold it even while tongue licked the flap, left forefinger and thumb pinching their end while right forefinger and thumb smoothed the damp seam, right forefinger and thumb twisting their end and lifting the other to Spade’s mouth.

  Hammett wrote about a world he knew (among his various jobs, he had been a Pinkerton man) in a tight, lean, vernacular style that seemed to him the appropriate medium for his characters and settings. As he was drawn more and more in the thirties and forties to radical political causes, his crime fiction began to appear irrelevant to him, though his short career was also attributable to his spectacular ill-health, his fight against both tuberculosis and alcoholism. Hammett’s body of work is slim. When he could no longer write the way he wanted to, he simply stopped. Hammett’s reputation as the progenitor of a new kind of crime novel, as a symptomatic political figure, as the inspiration to his long-time companion Lillian Hellman, and as an innovator of the clenched tough guy style, has continued to rise; if anything, he is in danger of being overrated. Of its kind, The Maltese Falcon is supreme—it maintains a perfect pitch throughout—but nothing else in the canon comes anywhere near the same level of performance. Hammett knew his own limits, as well as those of the genre in which he worked, and he surely would have scoffed at high-toned re-appraisals that make him a writer of the first rank, co-equal with Hemingway, or that attempt deep readings of material never intended to be more than intelligent, finely crafted entertainment.

  Raymond Chandler was more defensive about his writing than Hammett, and he worked as both practitioner and critic to lift crime fiction to full-fledged literary status. In contrast to Hammett’s proletarian roots, Chandler’s background was blue-blood. He was raised in England, where he attended Dulwich College and received a fine classical education. Returning to his native America as an adult, Chandler saw it with the eyes of a foreigner, and with a clarity perhaps possible only to an outsider. Chandler did not begin writing until he was middle-aged, and he developed his mature style quickly. His first story, Blackmailers Don’t Shoot, was published in Black Mask in 1933. His first novel, The Big Sleep, appeared, to popular and critical success, in 1939. There followed nine other novels between 1940 and 1959. As with Hammett, the list is slight, as crime fiction goes (compare Hammett’s and Chandler’s lean output to the vast numbers of books by Agatha Christie or Ellery Queen or John Dickson Carr).

  A studied craftsman who insisted that good writing was good writing regardless of genre, Chandler worked, like Hammett, for tone and characterization rather than narrative drive. He was, in fact, a poor storyteller, and his novels are often confusing conflations of motifs derived from several different short stories. (Chandler referred to the process of turning short pieces into novels as “cannibalization. ”) His work is distinguished not by its tension, though the reader has a lingering curiosity as to how the story ends, but by its evocation of setting (Chandler is the poet laureate of Southern California) and by its wry tone—in short, by its fine writing. And in Philip Marlowe, Chandler created a private eye, a proper noir hero, worthy of following Sam Spade. Chandler had a more romantic temperament than Hammett, and his private eye was a more exalted figure than any of Hammett’s characters. In The Simple Art of Murder, Chandler defined his concept of the ideal detective:

  ... down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero, he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world. I do not care much about his private life; he is neither a eunuch nor a satyr; I think he might seduce a duchess and I am quite sure he would not spoil a virgin; if he is a man of honor in one thing, he is that in all things. He is a relatively poor man, or he would no
t be a detective at all. He is a common man, or he could not go among common people. He has a sense of character, or he would not know his job. He will take no man’s money dishonestly and no man’s insolence without a due and dispassionate revenge. He is a lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him. He talks as the man of his age talks, that is, with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness. The story is his adventure in search of a hidden truth, and it would be no adventure if it did not happen to a man fit for adventure. He has a range of awareness that startles you, but it belongs to him by right, because it belongs to the world he lives in. If there were enough like him, I think the world would be a very safe place to live in, and yet not too dull to be worth living in.

  Chandler’s work doesn’t quite match this beautifully written description, but it does reveal his sense of the story of detection as a kind of modern urban romance, a quest for truth, with the private eye hero the self-appointed preserver of decency and order in a tarnished world.

  Guided by his own code, morally flexible but not corruptible, maintaining his integrity while resorting, if necessary, to violence and double-dealing, Chandler’s hero has much the same tough guy posture as The Op and Sam Spade. And like Spade and the others, he too is sexually ambiguous; beautiful women find him appealing, but he remains sexually aloof, almost monkish. Essentially wary of women, he is more at ease in the world of male friendships. The most impassioned relationship in any of the Marlowe books is the one between the detective and his male friend Terry Lennox, in The Long Goodbye. The decided misogyny that runs through Chandler’s stories is to become a dominant motif in noir.

  Concealing a festering evil beneath seductive masks, women are typically the villains in Chandler’s work, their beckoning sexuality a trap for the tempted male. Like most hard-boiled heroes, Marlowe responds to women as objects to appraise; he inspects and judges them. “I sat down on the edge of a deep soft chair and looked at Mrs. Regan,” Marlowe says in The Big Sleep.

  Chandler’s men and women communicate in a language of inuendo and wisecrack which is a cover-up for their true feelings. In the film of The Big Sleep, Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall capture exactly the kind of low-keyed mutual baiting that is a metaphor for sexual attraction in Chandler’s writing.

  She was worth a stare. She was trouble. She was stretched out on a modernistic chaise-lounge with her slippers off, so I stared at her legs in the sheerest silk stockings. They seemed to be arranged to stare at. They were visible to the knee and one of them well beyond. The knees were dimpled, not bony and sharp. The calves were beautiful, the ankles long and slim and with enough melodic line for a tone poem. She was tall and rangy and strong-looking. Her head was against an ivory satin cushion. Her hair was black and wiry and parted in the middle and she had the hot black eyes of a portrait in the hall. She had a good mouth and a good chin. There was a sulky droop to her lips and the lower lip was full.

  Marlowe keeps his distance from Mrs. Regan, not venturing beyond verbal flirtation; but toward her sister Carmen, he reacts with revulsion. “She stood there for a moment and hissed at me, her face still like scraped bone, her eyes still empty and yet full of some jungle emotion.” After he throws her out of his apartment, he goes to his bed, where she had been lying in wait for him. “The imprint of her head was still in the pillow, of her small corrupt body still on the sheets. I put my empty glass down and tore the bed to pieces savagely.” Carmen’s blatant sexuality offends Marlowe’s asceticism. To him, she is a foul creature, a warped jungle animal, and he regards her with open distaste.

  In Farewell, My Lovely, Velma Grayle (the name has echoes of the Arthurian motifs present throughout the canon) is another dangerous woman, pretending, like most of Chandler’s female characters, to be something she is not. A former dancer in a downtown strip joint, Velma has transformed herself into the wife of a millionaire. In order to protect her new identity, she kills a few men, a slippery gigolo and the big dumb ex-con Moose Malloy, who has hired Marlowe to track her down. Velma’s sexual come-on is a little subtler than Carmen’s—money and social status are really more important to her than sex—but she is equally poisonous.

  In The Long Goodbye, Eileen Wade pollutes Marlowe’s friendship with Terry Lennox. Eileen killed Lennox’s wife, a crime for which Lennox (who has fled to Mexico) is accused and of which Marlowe believes him innocent. The fidelity to his friend costs him dear; he is jailed, beaten, mistreated by the police to a degree unprecedented in the private eye canon. Yet he is true to a masculine code of honor which the mad female is determined to corrupt. Embarked on a killing spree that includes her lover and her neurotic novelist husband, whose tough pose she chips away at and ultimately destroys, Eileen is the most fiendish of Chandler’s villains. The character is excessive, almost as if in creating and then in destroying her, Chandler is settling a personal score against the female sex.

  Chandler’s conniving women are threats to the poise and attempted self-sufficiency of his male characters, and only when the women are killed is the moral and sexual order of Marlowe’s world restored. Sexual tensions in Chandler—the war between the hard men and the even harder women—are powerful and elemental; the only heterosexual mingling that Chandler seems to accept is the one in which the partners are buddies, sparking each other’s wit and irony, and maintaining their distance with clever give-and-take. The sly sexual baiting in Chandler is captured beautifully in the exchanges between Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall in The Big Sleep, where the two express their feelings in a volley of barbed witticisms. As in Restoration comedy, their mutual verbal slicing is an index of sexual attraction.

  Bacall and Bogart, in The Big Sleep.

  Often in trouble, Chandler’s private eye nevertheless maintained a stoical mask. In these two shots from Murder, My Sweet (the film version of Farewell, My Lovely), Dick Powell as Philip Marlowe undergoes a grueling interrogation by his arch-opponents the police, and is thrown into jail when he is accused of a crime that, of course, he did not commit.

  Chandler’s characters address each other indirectly, in a diction coated with innuendo and duplicity. Often the people Marlowe interviews aren’t being straight with him, and their clever evasions are communicated in a wry tone; the characters are often putting each other on, playing a cagey game of sexual baiting and oneupmanship :

  “Tall, aren’t you?” she said.

  “I didn’t mean to be. ”

  “Handsome, too,”she said. “And I bet you know it.”

  I grunted.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Reilly,” I said. “Doghouse Reilly. ”

  “Are you a prizefighter?” she asked ...

  “Not exactly. I’m a sleuth.”

  “You’re cute,” she giggled. “I’m cute too.”

  Chandler’s dialogue is consistently terse, salty, with an effective rhythm. Listen to the beat as Marlowe talks fresh to Mrs. Regan:

  “I’m not crazy about your manners,” I said. “I didn’t ask to see you. You sentfor me. I don’t mind your ritzing me or drinking your lunch out of a Scotch bottle. I don’t mind your showing me your legs. They’re very swell legs and it’s a pleasure to make their acquaintance. I don’t mind if you don’t like my manners. They’re pretty bad. I grieve over them during the long winter evenings. But don’t waste your time trying to cross-examine me.”

  Almost all of Chandler’s people are smartalecks, and his novels considerably enrich the distinctly American tradition of the wisecrack.

  Chandler is more manneristic than Hammett, allowing his fondness for similes occasionally to run wild: “He looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food cake.” These verbal fillips which spice nearly every page of the Marlowe books are a measure of Chandler’s concern with style. How the story is told is often more important to him than what the story is about; many passages, glittering set-pieces, can be enjoyed qui
te apart from their connection to the narrative, such as this gorgeous paragraph of scene-setting in Farewell, My Lovely :

  We curved through the bright mile or two of the Strip, past the antique shops with famous screen names on them, past the windows full of point lace and ancient pewter, past the gleaming new nightclubs with famous chefs and equally famous gambling rooms, run by polished graduates of the Purple Gang, past the Georgian-Colonial vogue, now old hat, past the handsome modernistic buildings in which the Hollywood flesh-peddlers never stop talking money, past a drive-in lunch which somehow didn’t belong, even though the girls wore white silk blouses and drum majorettes’ shakos and nothing below the hips but glazed kid Hessian boots. Past all this and down a wide smooth curve to the bridle path of Beverly Hills and lights to the south, all colors of the spectrum and crystal clear in an evening without fog, past the shadowed mansions up on the hills to the north, past Beverly Hills altogether and up into the twisting foothill boulevard and the sudden cool dusk and the drift of wind from the sea.

  As a skillful literary stylist working within the conventions of the mystery story, Chandler remains unsurpassed.