"OUT OF THE PAST", the title of the classic film noir directed by Jacques Tourneur, might already revealed the theme of this blog. Yeah, you got it right, "film noir".
But, how to open this blog?
1)Write an essay on the definition and history of film noir?
2)Post a long list of classic noir film?
... ...
It seems not right in either way. Oh, how about Paul Schrader? "Notes on film noir" said, if not all, but most, about film noir.
In 1946 French critics, seeing the American films they had missed during the war, noticed the new mood of cynicism, pessimism and darkness which had crept into the American cinema. The darkening stain was most evident in routine crime thrillers, but was also apparent in prestigious melodramas.
The French cineastes soon realized they had seen only the tip of the iceberg: As the years went by, Hollywood lighting grew darker, characters more corrupt, themes more fatalistic and the tone more hopeless. By 1949 American movies were in the throes of their deepest and most creative funk. Never before had films dared to take such a harsh uncomplimentary look at American life, and they would not dare to do so again for twenty years.
Hollywood’s film noir has recently become the subject of renewed interest among moviegoers and critics. The fascination film noir holds for today’s young filmgoers and film students reflects recent trends in American cinema: American movies are again taking a look at the underside of the American character, but compared to such relentlessly cynical film noir as Kiss Me Deadly or Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye, the new self-hate cinema of Easy Rider and Medium Cool seems naive and romantic. As the current political mood hardens, filmgoers and filmmakers will find the film noir of the late Forties increasingly attractive. The Forties may be to the Seventies what the Thirties were to the Sixties.
Film noir is equally interesting to critics. It offers writers a cache of excellent, little-known films (film noir is oddly both one of Hollywood’s best periods and least known), and gives auteur-weary critics an opportunity to apply themselves to the newer questions of classification and transdirectorial style. After all, what is film noir?
Film noir is not a genre (as Raymond Durgnat has helpfully pointed out over the objections of Higham and Greenberg’s Hollywood in the Forties). It is not defined, as are the western and gangster genres, by conventions of setting and conflict, but rather by the more subtle qualities of tone and mood. It is a film “noir”, as opposed to the possible variants of film grey or film off-white.
Film noir is also a specific period of film history, like German Expressionism or the French New Wave. In general, film noir refers to those Hollywood films of the Forties and early Fifties which portrayed the world of dark, slick city streets, crime and corruption.
Film noir is an extremely unwieldy period. It harks back to many previous periods: Warner’s Thirties gangster films, the French “poetic realism” of Carne and Duvivier, Von Sternbergian melodrama, and, farthest back, German Expressionist crime films (Lang’s Mabuse cycle). Film noir can stretch at its outer limits from The Maltese Falcon (1941) to Touch of Evil (1958), and most every dramatic Hollywood film from 1941 to 1953 contains some noir elements. There are also foreign offshoots of film noir, such as The Third man, Breathless and Le Doulos.
Almost every critic has his own definition of film noir, and a personal list of film titles and dates to back it up. Personal and descriptive definitions, however, can get a bit sticky. A film of urban night life is not necessarily a film noir, and a film noir need not necessarily concern crime and corruption. Since film noir is defined by tone rather than genre, it is almost impossible to argue one critic’s descriptive definition against another’s. How many noir elements does it take to make a film noir noir?
Rather than haggle definitions, I would rather attempt to reduce film noir to its primary colors (all shades of black), those cultural and stylistic elements to which any definition must return.
At the risk of sounding like Arthur Knight, I would suggest that there were four conditions in Hollywood in the Forties which brought about the film noir. (The danger of Knight’s Livliest Art method is that it makes film history less a matter of structural analysis, and more a case of artistic and social forces magically interacting and coalescing.) Each of the following four catalytic elements, however, can define the film noir; the distinctly noir tonality draws from each of these elements.
WAR AND POST-WAR DISILLUSIONMENTS. The acute downer which hit the U. S. after the Second World War was, in fact, a delayed reaction to the Thirties. All through the Depression movies were needed to keep people’s spirits up, and, for the most part, they did. The crime films of this period were Horatio Algerish and socially conscious. Toward the end of the Thirties a darker crime film began to appear(You Only Live Once, The Roaring Twenties) and were it not for the War film noir would have been at full steam by the early Forties.
The need to produce Allied propaganda abroad and promote patriotism at home blunted the fledgling moves toward a dark cinema, and the film noir thrashed about in the studio system, not quite able to come into full prominence. During the War the first uniquely film noir appeared: The Maltese Falcon, The Glass Key, This Gun for Hire, Laura, but these films lacked the distinctly noir bite the end of the War would bring.
As soon as the War was over, however, American films became markedly more sardonic—and there was a boom in the crime film. For fifteen years the pressures against America’s amelioristic cinema had been building up, and, given the freedom, audiences and artists were now eager to take a less optimistic view of things. The disillusionment many soldiers, small businessmen and housewife/factory employees felt in returning to a peacetime economy was directly mirrored in the sordidness of the urban crime film.
This immediate post-war disillusionments was directly demonstrated in films like Cornered, The Blue Dahlia, Dead Reckoning, and Ride a Pink Horse, in which a serviceman returns from the war to find his sweetheart unfaithful or dead, or his business partner cheating him, or the whole society something less than worth fighting for. The war continues, but now the antagonism turns with a new viciousness toward the American society itself.
POST-WAR REALISM. Shortly after the war every film-producing country had a resurgence of realism. In America it first took the form of films by such producers as Louis de Rochemont (House on 92nd Street, Call Northside 777) and Mark Hellinger (The Killers, Brute Force), and directors like Henry Hathaway and Jules Dassin. “Every scene was filmed on the actual location depicted,” the 1947 de Rochemont-Hathaway Kiss of Death proudly proclaimed. Even after de Rochemont’s particular “March of Time” authenticity fell from vogue, realistic exteriors remained a permanent fixture of film noir.
The realistic movement also suited America’s post-war mood; the public’s desire for a more honest and harsh view of America would not be satisfied by the same studio streets they had been watching for a dozen years. The post-war realistic trend succeeded in breaking film noir away from the domain of the high-class melodrama, placing it where it more properly belonged, in the streets with everyday people. In retrospect, the pre-de Rochemont film noir looks definitely tamer than the post-war realistic films. The studio look of films like The Big Sleep and The Mask of Dimitrios blunts their sting, making them seem more polite and conventional in contrast to their later, more realistic counterparts.
THE GERMAN INFLUENCE. Hollywood played host to an influx of German expatriates in the Twenties and Thirties, and these filmmakers and technicians had, for the most part, integrated themselves into the American film establishment. Hollywood never experienced the “Germanization” some civic-minded natives feared, and there is a danger of over-emphasizing the German influence in Hollywood.
But when, in the late Forties, Hollywood decided to paint it black, there were no greater masters of chiaroscuro than the Germans. The influence of expressionist lighting has always been just beneath the surface of Hollywood films, and it is not surprising, in film noir, to find it bursting out full bloom. Neither is it surprising to find a large number of Germans and East Europeans working in film noir: Fritz Lang, Robert Siodmak, Billy Wilder, Franz Waxman, Otto Preminger, John Braham, Anatole Litvak, Karl Freund, Max Ophuls, John Alton, Douglas Sirk, Fred Zinnemann, William Dieterle, Max Steiner, Edgar G. Ulmer, Curtis Bernhardt, Rudolph Mate.
On the surface the German expressionist influence, with its reliance on artificial studio lighting, seems incompatible with post-war realism, with its harsh unadorned exteriors; but it is the unique quality of film noir that it was able to weld seemingly contradictory elements into a uniform style. The best noir technicians simply made all the world a sound stage, directing unnatural and expressionistic lighting onto realistic settings. In films like Union Station, They Live By Night, The Killers there is an uneasy, exhilarating combination of realism and expressionism.
Perhaps the greatest master of noir was Hungarian-born John Alton, an expressionist cinematographer who could relight Times Square at noon if necessary. No cinematographer better adapted the old expressionist techniques to the new desire for realism, and his black-and-white photography in such gritty film noir as T-Men, Raw Deal, I’ the Jury, The Big Combo equals that of such German expressionist masters as Fritz Wagner and Karl Freund.
THE HARD-BOILED TRADITION. Another stylistic influence waiting in the wings was the “hard-boiled” school of writers. In the Thirties authors such as Ernest Hemingway, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, Horace McCoy and John O’Hara created the “tough”, cynical way of acting and thinking which separated one from the world of everyday emotions—romanticism with a protective shell. The hard-boiled writers had their roots in pulp fiction or journalism, and their protagonists lived out a narcissistic, defeatist code. The hard-boiled hero was, in reality, a soft egg compared to his existential counterpart (Camus is said to have based The Stranger on McCoy), but he was a good deal tougher than anything American fiction had seen.
When the movies of the Forties turned to the American “tough” moral understrata, the hard-boiled school was waiting with preset conventions of heroes, minor characters, plots, dialogue and themes. Like the German expatriates, the hard-boiled writers had a style made to order for film noir; and, in turn, they influenced noir screenwriting as much as the German influenced noir cinematography.
The most hard-boiled of Hollywood’s writers was Raymond Chandler himself, whose script of Double Indemnity (from a James M. Cain story) was the best written and most characteristically noir of the period. Double Indemnity was the first film which played film noir for what it essentially was: small-time, unredeemed, unheroic; it made a break from the romantic noir cinema of (the later) Mildred Pierce and The Big Sleep.
(In its final stages, however, film noir adapted then bypassed the hard-boiled school. Manic, neurotic post-1948 films such as Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye, D. O. A., Where the Sidewalk Ends, White Heat, and The Big Heat are all post-hard-boiled: the air in these regions was even too thin for old-time cynics like Chandler.)
STYLISTICS. There is not yet a study of the stylistics of film noir, and the task is certainly too large to be attempted here. Like all film movements film noir drew upon a reservoir of film techniques, and given the time one could correlate its techniques, themes and causal elements into a stylistic schema. For the present, however, I’d like to point out some of film noir’s recurring techniques.
------The majority of scenes are lit for night. Gangsters sit in the offices at midday with the shades pulled and the lights off. Ceiling lights are hung low and floor lamps are seldom more than five feet high. One always has the suspicion that if the lights were all suddenly flipped on the characters would shriek and shrink from the scene like Count Dracula at noontime.
------As in German expressionism, oblique and vertical lines are preferred to horizontal. Obliquity adheres to the choreography of the city, and is in direct opposition to the horizontal American tradition of Griffith and Ford. Oblique lines tend to splinter a screen, making it restless and unstable. Light enters the dingy rooms of film noir in such odd shapes-jagged trapezoids, obtuse triangles, vertical slits—that one suspects the windows were cut out with a pen knife. No character can speak authoritatively from a space which is being continually cut into ribbons of light. The Anthony Mann/John Alton T-Men is the most dramatic but far from the only example of oblique noir choreography.
------The actors and setting are often given equal lighting emphasis. An actor is often hidden in the realistic tableau of the city at night, and, more obviously, his face is often blacked out by shadow as he speaks. These shadow effects are unlike the famous Warner Brothers lighting of the Thirties in which the central character was accentuated by a heavy shadow; in film noir, the central character is likely to be standing in the shadow. When the environment is given an equal or greater weight than the actor, it, of course, creates a fatalistic, hopeless mood. There is nothing the protagonist can do; the city will outlast and negate even his best efforts.
------Compositional tension is preferred to physical action. A typical film noir would rather move the scene cinematographically around the actor than have the actor control the scene by physical action. The beating of Robert Ryan in The Set-Up, the gunning down of Farley Granger in They Live By Night, the execution of the taxi driver in The Enforcer and of Brian Donlevy in The Big Combo are all marked by measured pacing, restrained anger and oppressive compositions, and seem much closer to the film noir spirit than the rat-tat-tat and screeching tires of Scarface twenty years before or the violent, expression actions of Underworld U. S. A. ten years later.
------There seems to be an almost Freudian attachment to water. The empty noir streets are almost always glistening with fresh evening rain (even in Los Angeles), and the rainfall tends to increase in direct proportion to the drama. Docks and piers are second only to alleyways as the most popular rendezvous points.
------There is a love of romantic narration. In such films as The Postman Always Rings Twice, Laura, Double Indemnity, The Lady from Shanghai, Out of the Past and Sunset Boulevard the narration creates a mood of temps perdu: an irretrievable past, a predetermined fate and an all-enveloping hopelessness. In Out of the Past Robert Mitchum relates his history with such pathetic relish that it is obvious there is no hope for any future: one can only take pleasure in reliving a doomed past.
------A complex chronological order is frequently used to reinforce the feelings of hopelessness and lost time. Such films as The Enforcer, The Killers, Mildred Pierce, The Dark Past, Chicago Deadline, Out of the Past and The Killing use a convoluted time sequence to immerse the viewer in a time-disoriented but highly stylized world. The manipulation of time, whether slight or complex, is often used to reinforce a noir principle: the how is always more important than the what.
THEMES. Raymond Durgnat has delineated the themes of film noir in an excellent article in British Cinema magazine (“The Family Tree of Film Noir,” August, 1970), and it would be foolish for me to attempt to redo his thorough work in this short space. Durgnat divides film noir into eleven thematic categories, and although one might criticize some of his specific groupings, he does cover the whole gamut of noir production (thematically categorizing over 300 films).
In each of Durgnat’s noir themes (whether Black Widow, killers-on-the-run, dopplegangers) one finds that the upwardly mobile forces of the Thirties have halted; frontierism has turned to paranoia and claustrophobia. The small-time gangster has now made it big and sits in the mayor’s chair, the private eye has quit the police force in disgust, and the young heroine, sick of going along for the ride, is taking others for a ride.
Durgnat, however, does not touch upon what is perhaps the most over-riding noir theme: a passion for the past and present, but a fear of the future. The noir hero dreads to look ahead, but instead tries to survive by the day, and if unsuccessful at that, he retreats to the past. Thus film noir’s techniques emphasize loss, nostalgia, lack of clear priorities, insecurity; then submerge these self-doubts in mannerism and style. In such a world style becomes paramount; it is all that separates one from meaninglessness. Chandler described this fundamental noir theme when he described his own fictional world: “It is not a very fragrant world, but it is the world you live in, and certain writers with tough minds and a cool spirit of detachment can make very interesting patterns out of it.”
Film noir can be subdivided into three broad phases. The first, the wartime period, 1941-46 approximately, was the phase of the private eye and the lone wolf, of Chandler, Hammett and Greene, of Bogart and Bacall, Ladd and Lake, classy directors like Curtiz and Garnett, studio sets, and, in general, more talk than action. The studio look of this period was reflected in such pictures as The Maltese Falcon, Casablanca, Gaslight, This Gun for Hire, The Lodger, The Woman in the Window, Mildred Pierce, Spellbound, The Big Sleep, Laura, The Lost Weekend, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, To Have and Have Not, Fallen Angel, Gilda, Murder My Sweet, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Dark Waters, Scarlet Street, So Dark the Night, The Glass Key, The Mask of Dimitrios, and The Dark Mirror.
The Wilder/Chandler Double Indemnity provided a bridge to the post-war phase of film noir. The unflinching noir vision of Double Indemnity came as a shock in 1944, and the film was almost blocked by the combined efforts of Paramount, the Hays Office and star Fred McMurray. Three years later, however, Double Indemnitys were dropping off the studio assembly line.
The second phase was the post-war realistic period from 1945-49 (the dates overlap and so do the films; these are all approximate phases for which there are many exceptions). These films tended more toward the problems of crime in the streets, political corruption and police routine. Less romantic heroes like Richard Conte, Burt Lancaster and Charles McGraw were more suited to this period, as were proletarian directors like Hathaway, Dassin and Kazan. The realistic urban look of this phase is seen in such films as The House on 92nd Street, The Killers, Raw Deal, Act of Violence, Union Station, Kiss of Death, Johnny O’Clock, Force of Evil, Dead Reckoning, Ride the Pink Horse, Dark Passage, Cry of the City, The Set-Up, T-Men, Call Northside 777, Brute Force, The Big Clock, Thieves’ Highway, Ruthless, Pitfall, Boomerang!, and The Naked City.
The third and final phase of film noir, from 1949-53, was the period of psychotic action and suicidal impulse. The noir hero, seemingly under the weight of ten years of despair, started to get bananas. The psychotic killer, who had in the first period been a subject worthy of study (Olivia de Havilland in The Dark Mirror), in the second a fringe threat (Richard Widmark in Kiss of Death), now became the active protagonist (James Cagney in Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye). There were no excuses given for the psychopathy in Gun Crazy—it was just “crazy”. James Cagney made a neurotic comeback and his instability was matched by that of younger actors like Robert Ryan and Lee Marvin. This was the phase of the “B” noir film, and of psychoanalytically-inclined directors like Ray and Walsh. The forces of personal disintegration are reflected in such films as White Heat, Gun Crazy, D. O. A., Caught, They Live By Night, Where the Sidewalk Ends, Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye, Detective Story, In a Lonely Place, I’ the Jury, Ace in the Hole, Panic in the Streets, The Big Heat, On Dangerous Ground, Sunset Boulevard.
The third phase is the cream of the film noir period. Some critics may prefer the early “gray” melodramas, others the post-war “street” films, but film noir’s final phase was the most aesthetically and sociologically piercing, the later noir films finally got down to the root causes of the period: the loss of public honor, heroic conventions, personal integrity, and, finally, psychic stability. The third-phase films were painfully self-aware; they seemed to know they stood at the end of a long tradition based on despair and disintegration and did not shy away from that fact. The best and most characteristically noir films—Gun Crazy, White Heat, Out of the Past, Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye, D. O. A., They Live By Night, and The Big Heat—stand at the end of the period and are the results of self-awareness. The third phase is in rife with end-of-the-line noir heroes: The Big Heat and Where the Sidewalk Ends are the last stops for the urban cop, Ace in the Hole for the newspaper man, the Victor Saville-produced Spillane series (I’ the Jury, The Long Wait, Kiss Me Deadly) for the private eye, Sunset Boulevard for the Black Widow, White Heat and Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye for the gangster, D. O. A. for the John Doe American.
By the middle Fifties film noir had ground to a halt. There were a few notable stragglers, Kiss Me Deadly, the Lewis/Alton The Big Combo, and film noir’s epitaph, Touch of Evil, but for the most part a new style of crime film had become popular.
As the rise of McCarthy and Eisenhower demonstrated, Americans were eager to see a more bourgeois view of themselves. Crime had to move to the suburbs. The criminal put on a gray flannel suit and the footsore cop was replaced by the “mobile unit” careening down the expressway. Any attempt at social criticism had to be cloaked in ludicrous affirmations of the American way of life. Technically, television, with its demand for full lighting and close-ups, gradually undercut the German influence, and color cinematography was, of course, the final blow to the “noir” look. New directors like Seigel, Fleischer, Karlson and Fuller, and TV shows like Dragnet, M-Squad, Lineup and Highway Patrol stepped in to create the new crime drama.
Film noir was an immensely creative period—probably the most creative in Hollywood’s history—at least, if this creativity is measured not by its peaks but by its median level of artistry. Picked at random, a film noir is likely to be a better made film than a randomly selected silent comedy, musical, western and so on. (A Joseph H. Lewis “B” film noir is better than a Lewis “B” western, for example.) Taken as a whole period, film noir achieved an unusually high level of artistry.
Film noir seemed to bring out the best in everyone: directors, cameramen, screenwriters, actors. Again and again, a film noir will make the high point on an artist’s career graph. Some directors, for example, did their best work in film noir (Stuart Heisler, Robert Siodmak, Gordon Douglas, Edward Dmytryk, John Brahm, John Cromwell, Raoul Walsh, Henry Hathaway); other directors began in film noir, and it seems to me, never regained their original heights (Otto Preminger, Rudolph Mate, Nicholas Ray, Robert Wise, Jules Dassin, Richard Fleischer, John Huston, Andre de Toth, and Robert Aldrich); and other directors who made great films in other molds also made great film noir (Orson Welles, Max Ophuls, Fritz Lang, Elia Kazan, Howard Hawks, Robert Rossen, Anthony Mann, Joseph Losey, Alfred Hitchcock, and Stanley Kubrick). Whether or not one agrees with this particular schema, its message is irrefutable: film noir was good for practically every director’s career. (Two interesting exceptions to prove the case are King Vidor and Jean Renoir.)
Film noir seems to have been a creative release for everyone involved. It gave artists a chance to work with previously forbidden themes, yet had conventions strong enough to protect the mediocre. Cinematographers were allowed to become highly mannered, and actors were sheltered by the cinematographers to distinguish between great directors and great noir directors.
Film noir’s remarkable creativity makes its longtime neglect the more baffling. The French, of course, have been students of the period for some time (Borde and Chaumeton’s Panorama du Film Noir was published in 1955), but American critics until recently have preferred the western, the musical or the gangster film to the film noir.
Some of the reasons for this neglect are superficial; others strike to the heart of the noir style. For a long time film noir, with its emphasis on corruption and despair, was considered an aberration of the American character. The western, with its moral primitivism, and the gangster film, with its Horatio Alger values, were considered more American than the film noir.
This prejudice was reinforced by the fact that film noir was ideally suited to the low budget “B” film, and many of the best noir films were “B” films. This odd sort of economic snobbery still lingers on in some critical circles: high- budget trash is considered more worthy of attention than low-budget trash, and to praise a “B” film is somehow to slight(often intentionally) an “A” film.
There has been a critical revival in the U. S. over the last ten years, but film noir lost out on that too. The revival as auteur (director) oriented, and film noir wasn’t. Auteur criticism is interested in how directors are different; film noir criticism is concerned with what they have in common.
The fundamental reason for film noir’s neglect, however, is the fact that it depends more on choreography than sociology, and American critics have always been slow on the uptake when it comes to visual style. Like its protagonists, film noir is more interested in style than theme; whereas American critics have been traditionally more interested in theme than style.
American film critics have always been sociologists first and scientists second: film is important as it relates to large masses, and if a film goes awry it is often because the theme has been somehow “violated” by the style. Film noir operates on opposite principles: the theme is hidden in the style, and bogus themes are often haunted (“middle class values are best”) which contradict the style. Although, I believe, style determines the theme in every film, it was easier for sociological critics to discuss the themes of the western and gangster film apart from stylistic analysis than it was to do for film noir.
Not surprisingly it was the gangster film, not the film noir, which was canonized in The Partisan Review in 1948 by Robert Warshow’s famous essay, “The Gangster as Tragic Hero.” Although Warshow could be an aesthetic as well as a sociological critic, he was interested in the western and gangster film as “popular” art rather than as style. This sociological orientation blinded Warshow, as it has many subsequent critics, to an aesthetically more important development in the gangster film—film noir.
The irony of this neglect is that in retrospect the gangster films Warshow wrote about are inferior to film noir. The Thirties gangster was primarily a reflection of what was happening in the country, and Warshow analyzed this. The film noir, although it was also a sociological reflection, went further than the gangster film. Toward the end film noir was engaged in a life-and-death struggle with the materials it reflected; it tried to make America accept a moral vision of life based on style. That very contradiction—promoting style in a culture which valued themes—forced film noir into artistically invigorating twists and turns. Film noir attacked and interpreted its sociological conditions, and, by the close of the noir period, created a new artistic world which went beyond a simple sociological reflection, a nightmarish world of American mannerism which was by far more a creation than a reflection.
Because film noir was first of all a style, because it worked out its conflicts visually rather than thematically, because it was aware of its own identity, it was able to create artistic solutions to sociological problems. And for these reasons films like Kiss Me Deadly, Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye and Gun Crazy can be works of art in a way that gangster films like Scarface, Public Enemy and Little Caesar can never be.
The selection of the following seven films by the Los Angeles International Film Exposition reflects a desire to select not only the best noir films, but also some of the less well known.
Kiss Me Deadly. Made in 1955, Kiss Me Deadly comes at the end of the period and is the masterpiece of film noir. Its time delay gives it a sense of detachment and thoroughgoing seediness—it stands at the end of a long sleazy tradition.
The private eye hero, Mike Hammer, undergoes the final stages of degradation. He is a small-time “bedroom dick,” and makes no qualms about it because the world around him isn’t much better. Ralph Meeker, in his best performance, plays Hammer, a midget among dwarfs.
Robert Aldrich’s teasing direction carries noir to its sleaziest, and most perversely erotic. In search of an “eternal what’s-it” Hammer overturns the underworld, causing the death of his friend in the process, and when he finally finds it, it turns out to be—joke of jokes—an exploding atomic bomb. The cruelty to the individual is only a trivial matter in a world in which the Bomb has the final say. Hammer can be seen struggling to safety as the bomb ejaculates, but for all practical purposes the forties private eye tradition is defunct. Written by A. I. Bexerides. Photographed by Eenest Laszlo. Produced by Victor Saville. With Ralph Meeker, Maxine Cooper, Nick Dennis, Gaby Rodgers, Juano Hermandez, Paul Stewart, Albert Dekker, Cloris Leachman, Jack Elam.
Gun Crazy. An early Bonnie and Clyde variant, Joseph H. Lewis’ Gun Crazy incorporates both the black widow and on-the-run themes. John Dall and Peggy Cummins play a winsome couple spinning at a dizzyling rate into the exhilarating world of action, sex, love and mudder. Dall is confused, innocent and passive, Cummins is confused, vindictive and active; together they make an irresistably psychopathic pair. And their deadliness is sanctified by the fact that they know they are special people and will be given the right by the American ethic to act out their symbolic fantasies.
Gun Crazy’s lighting is not as noir as other films of the period, but its portrayal of criminal and sexual psychopathy very much is. There are no excuses for the gun craziness—it is just crazy.
Gun Crazy has three tour de force scenes: the brilliantly executed Armour robbery, the famous one-take Hampton heist, and the meeting at the carnival which is a ballet of sex and innuendo more subtle and teasing than the more famous sparing matches of Bogart and Bacall or Ladd and Lake. 1949. Written by MacKinlay Kantor and Millard Kaufman. Produced by the King Brothers. Photographed by Russell Harlan. With John Dall, Peggy Cummins, Barry Kroeger, Annabel Shaw, Harry Lewis, Nederick Young.
They Live By Night. Made in the same year as Gun Crazy, Nicholas Ray’s They Live By Night is another Bonnie and Clyde/on-the-run film. Ray’s heroes, Farley Granger and Cathy O’Donnell, as the title implies, really do live by night, and the choreography is strictly noir.
Unlike Gun Crazy, Granger and O’Donnell are not psychopathic; rather, the society is, as it makes them into bigger and bigger criminals and finally connives to gun down the unsuspecting Granger. There’s an excellent bit by Ian Wolfe as a crooked Justice of the Peace, and Marie Bryant sings “Your Red Wagon” in the best noir tradition. Written by Charles Schnee. Photographed by George E. Diskant. Produced by John Houseman. With Farley Granger, Cathy O’Donnell, Howard Da Silva, Jay C. Flippen, Helen Craig, Will Wright, Ian Wolfe, Harry Harvey.
White Heat. There was no director better suited to portray instability than Raoul Walsh, and no actor more potentially unstable than James Cagney. And when they joined forces in 1949 for White Heat, they produced one of the most exciting psychosexual crime films ever. Cagney plays an aging oedipal gangster who sits on his mother’s lap between bouts of pistol whipping cohorts, planning robberies and gunning down police.
In an exuberantly psychotic ending Cagney stands atop an exploding oil tanker yelling, “I made it Ma! Top of the World!” We’ve come a long way from Scarface where Paul Muni lies in the gutter as a neon sign ironically flashes, “Cook’s Tours. See the World.” Cagney, now the noir hero, is not so much interested in financial gain and power as he is in suicidal showmanship. Cagney tapped the same vein the following year when he produced and starred in Gordon Douglas’s Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye, one of the best of late noir films. What Douglas lacked as a director, Cagney made up in just plain craziness. White Heat. 1949. Written by Ivan Goff and Ben Roberts. Photographed by Sid Hickox. Produced by Louis Edelman. With James Cagney, Virginia Mayo, Edmund O’Brien, Margaret Wycherly, Steve Cochran, John Archer.
Out of the Past. Jacques Tourner’s Out of the Past brilliantly utilizes the noir element of narration as well as the themes of black widow and on-the-run. A gangster (the young Kirk Douglas in one of his best roles) sends his best friend Robert Mitchum to retrieve his girlfriend, Jane Greer, who has run off with his money. Mitchum, of course, teams up with Greer and they hide from Douglas.
Mitchum narrates his story with such a pathetic relish that he obviously draws comfort from being love’s perennial fool. Tourner combines Mitchum’s narration, Jane Greer’s elusive beauty and a complex chronology in such a way that there is no hope for any future; one can only take pleasure from reliving a doomed past. 1947. Written by Geoffrey Homes. Produced by Warren Duff. With Kirk Douglas, Robert Mitchum, Jane Greer, Rhonda Fleming, Steve Brodie.
Pickup on South Street. Sam Fuller’s 1953 film sacks in with an odd noir bedfellow—the red scare. The gangsters undergo a slight accent shift and become communist agents; no idealogical conversion necessary.
Richard Widmark, a characteristic noir actor who has never done as well outside the period as within it, plays a two-time loser who picks the purse of a “commie” messenger and ends up with a piece of microfilm. When the state department finally hunts him and begins the lecture, Widmark replies, “Don’t wave your flag at me.”
The scenes on the waterfront are in the best noir tradition, but a dynamic fight in the subway marks Fuller as a director who would be better suited to the action crime school of the middle fifties. Written by Samuel Fuller. Photographed by Joe MacDonald. Produced by Jules Schermer. With Richard Widmark, Jean Peters, Thelma Ritter, Murvyn Vye, Richard Kiley.
T-Men. Anthony Mann’s 1947 film was photographed by John Alton, the most characteristically noir artist of the period. Alton also photographed Joseph H. Lewis’ The Big Combo eight years later and the cinematography is so nearly identical that one has momentary doubts about the directorial difference between Mann and Lewis. In each film light only enters the scene in odd slants, jagged slices and vertical or horizontal strips.
T-Men is a bastard child of the post-war realistic school and purports to be the documented story of two treasury agents who break a ring of counterfeiters. Complications set in when the good guys don’t act any differently from the bad ones. In the end it doesn’t matter anyway, since they all die in the late night shoot-outs. 1948. Written by John Higgins. Photographed by John Alton. Produced by Edward Small and Aubrey Schneck. With Dennis O’Keefe, Alfred Ryder, Mary Meade, Wallace Ford, June Lockhart, Charles McGraw, Art Smith.
Filmex, 1971 (The Film Noir, at the First Los Angeles International Film Exposition)
(Reprinted in Film Comment, Spring 1972)
