Login
User name:
Password:
Remember me 
This Month
April 2008
Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
1 2 3 4 5
6 7 8 9 10 11 12
13 14 15 16 17 18 19
20 21 22 23 24 25 26
27 28 29 30
Year Archive
View Article  DAISY KENYON


Fox home video has been releasing a lot of terrific DVDs in their
Fox Film Noir series -- great transfers of entertaining films with generally excellent commentaries and brief featurettes about the movies and their creators.  They're running out of films from their vaults which can plausibly be called noir -- except that these days, apparently, just about anything can plausibly be called noir.

Daisy Kenyon, the 23rd title in the series, is an extremely interesting film by Otto Preminger from 1947 which could plausibly be called domestic noir, though it doesn't involve crime or violence in any significant way.  It's basically a soap opera centering on a very complicated love triangle, but it's disturbingly dark, in ways that wouldn't have been conceivable in Hollywood before WWII.

Joan Crawford plays a career girl in New York who's having an affair with a married man, played by Dana Andrews, a charming self-centered lout.  Neither character seems to feel any moral qualms about the affair, and Preminger presents it with an almost cynical nonchalance that's strikingly adult and modern.



Crawford meets an equally charming but somewhat unstable returning war vet, played by Henry Fonda.  Fonda's character feels that the world and everyone in it has become dead, and isn't sure if this feeling has to do with the loss of his wife in a car accident or with his experiences in combat.  The war, and its collateral moral damage, are also referenced in an off-screen subplot in which the Andrews character defends a Nisei war vet whose farm was stolen from him while he was off fighting for his country, heroically, in Italy.  He loses the case.

According to Preminger's biographer Foster Hirsch, these elements were not prominent in the novel on which the film was based.  It was Preminger and his screenwriter who chose to associate the moral confusions and neuroses of the characters with the broader anxieties of post-war American society, issues of guilt over the price of victory, over the psychological wounds suffered by the soldiers who won that victory.  It's a theme one finds in many noir and noir-inflected films of the time, sometimes explored explicitly, as it is here, sometimes only by implication.

Perhaps Preminger was too explicit.  Daisy Kenyon was a box-office disappointment.  Without the cover of the crime-thriller genre, elements of which figure to one degree or another in most other domestic noirs, the film's investigation of post-war American angst may have cut too close to the bone for contemporary audiences.

The mood of the film is almost unbearably tense and unsettling, eventually involving child abuse and a scandalous divorce trial played out in the tabloid press.  There had always been soap operas like this in American movies, of course, but there was always a clear sense of when moral boundaries were being crossed and what the consequences would be.  Daisy Kenyon plays out in a world in which moral boundaries seem to have been erased.



The Spanish title of the film translates as "between love and sin" but the tale offers few clues as to where one stops and the other begins.  The romantic triangle is resolved at the end, more or less, with everyone doing the "right" thing -- but there's hardly a sense of moral triumph.  We feel that all the characters are going to remain adrift in a morally ambiguous universe, trying to walk a line that none of them can see clearly.  This is noir territory, all right, but strictly domestic, and explored primarily from the point of view of the female protagonist, which distinguishes it from the classic noir cycle.
View Article  AWESOME DEAL GOING DOWN


Volume 4 of Warner's Film Noir Classic Collection is currently on sale for $29.99 all-in from Amazon -- no sales tax, of course, and no shipping charges (if you choose Super Saver Shipping).  Ten films, all interesting, including several noir classics and one masterpiece, They Live By Night -- for less than $3 a film.  Entertainment doesn't get much cheaper than this.
View Article  CLASH BY NIGHT


There's a terrific short review of Fritz Lang's Clash By Night, maybe the greatest of all domestic noirs, recently posted on the web site films noir.  It has this sublime evocation of the film's themes -- "
Sexual abandon and existential entitlement are put on trial and found empty."

Double Indemnity and Sunset Boulevard are certainly the most entertaining domestic noirs, but Clash By Night offers far more complex insights into the ways post-WWII anxiety corroded relations between the sexes.

Check out the review here.
View Article  SCARLET STREET


This film by Fritz Lang, from 1945, is essentially domestic noir -- the story of an unhappy, ordinary middle-aged married man led into a life of deception and, ultimately, crime by a fetching femme fatale.  It was Lang's favorite among the films he made in America and has a considerable reputation but I find it curiously dead emotionally and lacking in real suspense.

The problem is that the fatal femme is so obviously on the make, so obviously not attracted to the ordinary man, so cynical and so dumb, that we feel only pity for the guy, a pity laced with scorn.  We can see what attracts Walter to Phyllis in Double Indemnity -- the two are hot together -- and even if we suspect that Phyllis might be using Walter, part of us thinks it might be worth getting used by a woman like this.  This implicates us morally and emotionally in Walter's transgressions, makes us care about his fate.



It's impossible to care about Chris in Scarlet Street on that level -- watching his life come apart at the seams is like watching a train wreck from a distance.  It's fascinating and horrifying but we're not involved.  In Double Indemnity, like it or not, we're passengers on that trolley hurtling towards the end of the line.

The ending of Scarlet Street achieves a kind of tragic power, because things go so horribly wrong, and Chris's moral collapse is so complete and so bleak.  It's not a genuine tragedy, though, because in a genuine tragedy we could imagine ourselves in Chris's place.  In Scarlet Street we're denied that identification, that implication in his fate.
View Article  MORE ON FILM NOIR AND THE DEATH OF GOD


Although, as I wrote earlier, I don't see film noir as expressly concerned with theological issues, there is a sense in which the idea of "the death of God", as a kind of metaphorical expression for existential bewilderment, gets close to the heart of the tradition.

Edgar G. Ulmer's Detour, a low-budget thriller from 1945, was arguably the first true film noir.  It offered a vision of the world as a moral maze from which there was no exit -- an image that accorded well with the unconscious dread which gripped America in the wake of WWII and in the shadow of nuclear apocalypse.

In this light, it's interesting to look at Ulmer's The Black Cat, a strange Universal "horror film" from the early 30s.  There, the source of the horror that ensnares its innocent protagonists is a modernistic version of the old dark house -- which sits on the site of a ghastly battle from WWI, somehow infected by the mass slaughter that took place there.



This may not be enough to prove that Ulmer saw a connection between the moral chaos of Detour and the horrors of WWII but it certainly suggests that there may have been an unconscious association of the two ideas in Ulmer's mind.

Certain modern commentators want to see film noir as a phenomenon with essentially political implications -- something that's not hard to argue given the leftist leanings of many of the great masters of the noir tradition, a number of whom were eventually blacklisted.  But seeing film noir as essentially political expression I think sells the phenomenon short.  Film noir reflected an existential dread far deeper than politics could encompass.  "The death of God" gets closer to expressing this than "the corruption of Capitalism".

Curiously enough, the French critic Luc Mollet said that Ulmer's whole body of work expressed "the loneliness of man without God".  A recent essay on Jules Dassin's Brute Force, included in Criterion's DVD edition of the film, quotes Mollet dismissively and ironically, suggesting that he was just offering a kind of smokescreen for the political underpinnings of the noir vision.  But I think it makes more sense to see the nutty, irrational Stalinism of many noir filmmakers as a smokescreen for the more comprehensive psychic dislocations of post-WWII America, in which Communism and Stalinism were just faddish, ill-conceived replacements for a God who seemed to have abandoned the world in the desert outside Los Alamos, New Mexico, after clearly announcing, at places like Auschwitz, his plans to retire permanently from the world's affairs.



If film noir were simply a reflection of the politics of its leftward-leaning makers, it ought to be terribly dated today, after the demystification of Communism and Stalin, those ephemeral
shibboleths for which the Hollywood radicals martyred themselves.  But film noir still speaks to us as strongly as it ever did -- perhaps because "the loneliness of man without God" still troubles the spirit, while the passing of Stalin and Communism go conspicuously unlamented.

[Thanks again to Tony D'Ambra of films noir whose posts on film noir and the death of God prompted the thoughts above -- and to Michael Mills' classic film blog for the Detour advertising art.]
View Article  FILM NOIR AND THE DEATH OF GOD


In a comment here (and currently on his own web site films noir) Tony D'Ambra posts an intriguing quote from Mark Conrad about the connection between film noir and existentialism:

"My proposal, then, is that noir can also be seen as a sensibility or worldview which results from the death of God, and thus that film noir is a type of American artistic response to, or recognition of, this seismic shift in our understanding of the world. This is why Porfirio is right in pointing out the similarities between the noir sensibility and the existentialist view of life and human existence. Though they are not exactly the same thing, they are both reactions, however explicit and conscious, to the same realization of the loss of value and meaning in our lives."

[This is from Conrad's book The Philosophy of Film Noir: Nietzsche and the Meaning of Noir: Movies and the ‘Death of God’.]

I agree with the gist of the quote, and with Tony's assertion that film noir and existentialism have a lot in common -- though I'm not sure that there was a direct influence on the former by the latter.  I think Conrad is on the right track when he locates the essence of film noir in a particular moral orientation to the universe and not in a style or in subject matter.

I'm also not sure that the death of God is quite the right way to explain film noir, though -- except as a metaphor for "the loss of value and meaning in our lives".  Film noir, to me, is more about moral bewilderment as a social phenomenon, with social causes, than about loss of faith in God.  It's about male insecurity and fear of women, about a creeping dread that the world isn't what it seems to be, doesn't work anymore -- if it ever did.

These sorts of feelings have theological implications of course, but they don't lead automatically to atheism or to existentialism -- not in America, with its strong Protestant tradition, which has always preached what the theologian Paul Zahl calls a "low anthropology", holding that the world is intrinsically corrupt, redeemable only by supernatural Grace.



Hitchcock's The Wrong Man is an apt illustration of what I mean.  The film is pure noir -- except in its denouement, when the protagonist is saved not by a good woman or luck or some kind of desperate action but by the direct intervention of Jesus.  This is not a whole lot more improbable than the ways some other protagonists get saved in the film noir tradition.

We needn't go this deep, however, to find the core, and the enduring appeal, of film noir.  The feelings it deals with, though brought to the surface by the peculiarly horrific experiences of the generation that suffered through WWII and afterwards lived in the shadow of nuclear annihilation, are common to all men and women at some moments of their lives.



Such feelings may lead to atheism, to philosophies like existentialism -- or to religious epiphanies like the one Saul had on the road to Damascus.  Because film noir is art, not theology or philosophy, it is not concerned with such outcomes.  It is only concerned with the feelings, with certain particular conditions of the heart -- with bringing them to the surface and allowing us to engage them.
View Article  THE WOMEN IN FILM NOIR


In my last post I quoted James Ellroy's brilliant summation of the message of film noir -- "You're fucked."  One of the ways "you're fucked" in film noir is that most of the women you're going to meet in the shadowy backstreets of noir's dark city are going to be smarter and stronger than you are.  They may use their power to save you, they may use it to destroy you, but the situation is going to be beyond your control.



This view of women was obviously a projection of male anxiety and insecurity in the post-WWII era.  There are some extraordinary female characters in the film noir tradition, but usually they're not quite real -- they are demons, or angels, summoned up out of troubled male psyches.  A film doesn't need a femme fatale to be noir -- they're absent in many classic films in the tradition -- but it does need a sense of male helplessness.  It's a comprehensive helplessness, in the face of society and the universe itself -- tough, powerful women are just one manifestation of a general existential dread.



When the situation is looked at from the woman's point of view, we leave the territory of noir -- move into another tradition, typically that of the psychological suspense thriller, of the Hitchcockian variety, which is often presented from the viewpoint of the female, with whom we identify.  This tradition predated noir and is in fact connected to works of Victorian Gothic fiction, such as Jane Eyre.  It deals with more traditional female anxieties arising out of the contradictions of an insecure patriarchy.  To me it makes no sense to call this sort of movie film noir, even though it may tap into the same mood of existential dread that pervades the classic noir.

As I've observed before, it took the neo-noir Chinatown to look back on the noir tradition and try to imagine the effect of its male insecurities on women -- but this was never really a conscious concern of classic film noir.
View Article  THE MESSAGE OF FILM NOIR


In my last post I wrote:

I would argue that pulp fiction, hardboiled fiction, from the 20s and 30s is something different from the wartime and post-war films that are, to me at least, the heart of the film noir tradition.  Film noir drew on that fiction, just as it drew on the 30s-era crime melodrama and conventional detective fiction, but it became something new.

So what was new about it?

James Ellroy summed it up best when he observed that the basic message of
film noir is "You're fucked."  It's an existential message, philosophical (or perhaps theological) in nature.  Another way of putting it might be "The world is fucked, at its core, and there's nothing you can do about it."  You might temporarily survive the predicament this puts you in, or it might destroy you, but the predicament isn't going to change.

This represents a profound divergence from the traditional "hero's journey", in which an everyman faces tests and ordeals in the pursuit of wisdom, of meaning.  It also represents a divergence from the "outlaw ballad" tradition of the 30s-era crime melodrama, in which we explore the underworld and revel in the transgressive behavior of society's rebels -- all the while confidently expecting the rebel's death and a reassertion of humane values.  In true noir, those traditional values have evaporated.



You have to ask yourself why such a radical divergence from earlier traditions happened in the post-WWII era, and the answer to me is obvious.  The basic message of war, and particularly of combat, is "You're fucked."  The soul-shaking experience of hearing this message delivered in the most brutal terms doesn't go away after the war ends, even if it ends in victory.  It is not subsumed in feelings of patriotism or in the satisfaction of having done one's duty.

It endures forever.  In the case of WWII it had a macabre objective correlative -- the atomic bomb, the image of the mushroom cloud, which summed up the enduring sense of existential dread that had infected American society, and in particular its returning war vets.



Film noir was an arena in which that existential dread could be engaged safely -- and there was something exhilarating about the exercise, the exhilaration of dealing with an urgent but buried anxiety.  The existential dread I'm speaking of here didn't define post-war America but it was there, and it couldn't be talked about directly in a world that was desperately trying to get back to normal.  But it could be faced in art -- most especially in film noir.
View Article  WHAT IS DOMESTIC NOIR?


Tony D'Ambra of the ever useful films noir web site posted an interesting comment about my Film Noir Master List which I'm eager to respond to:

Tony wrote:

I doubt you will welcome this comment, but here goes.

I'm delighted by all thoughtful comments!

He continued:

I don't see the point of your classification system: it has meaning for you only and no film can ever be categorised to such a degree.

I realize that my list violates convention, but others have found it useful, if only as a provocation to further thinking about the subject.  It's primarily intended to provoke a new conversation about film noir, which in my opinion has gotten to be such a vague term that it's losing its usefulness.

And Tony wrote:

For example, there is wide agreement that Wilder's Double Indemnity is an elemental film noir, yet you describe it as a "domestic noir"? Neff is an unmarried loner and Phyllis an amoral gold-digger whose marriage was a sham from day one, so how does domesticity gone bad come into it? There is "no moral confusion" or "existential dread": both protagonists are motivated by greed and each has no scruples when it comes to making sure that only one of them makes it to the end of the line. Marriage has nothing to do with the dramatic imperative of the plot. Remember Phyllis murdered Dietrichsen's first wife, so she could marry him for his money. Neff was ready to be seduced and she knew it: this is the essence of the noir paradigm of the femme fatale, which has little to do, if it ever to did, with the role of woman in WW2 and its aftermath. Remember, the great noir novels by Hammett and Cain, were written before WW2.

Domestic noir, to me, from Double Indemnity to Sunset Boulevard, is characterized primarily by a rancid view of domestic life, and especially married life.  It's not about good marriages gone bad -- instead it reflects a jaundiced view of the domestic realm, sees it as corrupt, no longer viable, infected by the moral chaos, the existential bewilderment, of the wartime and post-war world.

Double Indemnity takes place primarily in middle-class homes and offices -- not in the typical urban jungle of the classic noir, the labyrinth of the dark city.  In the domestic noir, the existential dread symbolized by noir's dark city has penetrated the "normal" world,
transformed it.  Both traditions are dealing with the same existential dread, but viewing it from different angles -- different enough to constitute two distinct traditions.



Phyllis
Dietrichsen is indeed a femme fatale, one of the most fatale in all of movies, but the presence of a femme fatale doesn't automatically make a film noir, anymore than the lack of one excludes it from the category.  The femme fatale in the person of the vamp was a staple of silent cinema, featured in films we would never think of calling noir, and many classic films noirs have heroines who save the protagonist.

Finally, I would argue that pulp fiction, hardboiled fiction, from the 20s and 30s is something different from the wartime and post-war films that are, to me at least, the heart of the film noir tradition.  Film noir drew on that fiction, just as it drew on the 30s-era crime melodrama and conventional detective fiction, but it became something new.  My underlying argument in all this is that we lose sight of what made film noir new and distinct when we confuse it with its antecedents and with other films that were dealing with the same cultural anxieties in different ways and in different contexts.
View Article  ANTI-NOIR: PITFALL


Through the good offices of Joe D'Augustine, of the excellent Film Forno web log, I was recently able to view André de Toth's remarkable film
Pitfall, from 1948.

Joe thought I might find it an interesting example of domestic noir -- and on many levels that's just what it is . . . a taut, harrowing thriller about a man whose good marriage is threatened in violent ways by a moment's indiscretion.  The film's tough, snappy, cynical dialogue bears favorable comparison with the dialogue in Double Indemnity -- and the moral confusion of the protagonist, played by Dick Powell, is pure noir.  (We also get to see Raymond Burr in one of his earliest noir villain roles.)

But there's something unusual about this film -- something that distinguishes it from true noir and from the films I think of as domestic noir.  It's the way that the institution of marriage, and the women in the film, are portrayed.



Lisbeth Scott, in what ought to be the femme fatale role, isn't fatale at all, in the end.  She's the victim of male obsession and mendacity, who's destroyed when she tries to strike back.  What's important, though, is that we see the predicament she's in from her point of view -- not from the point of view of the men who don't understand her or fear her, as we would in a classic noir.  (The oddness of this is only reinforced by the copy on the lobby card above, which tries to sell the Scott character as a typical femme fatale -- assuming that that's what audiences of the time were looking for.)

More remarkably, Powell's wife in the film, wonderfully played by Jane Wyatt, is a true partner -- neither delivering angel nor destructive goddess, the two poles of womanhood in the classic noirPitfall offers one of the best and most convincing portraits of a good marriage in all of cinema -- which takes it far from the rancid view of married life found in almost all domestic noirs.



This film, in fact, presents marriage as a viable refuge from the moral maze, the existential dread, of post-war American life -- and it does so without a trace of piety or sentiment.  Like young Charley in Shadow Of A Doubt, Powell's character in Pitfall feels trapped by family life at the beginning of the film -- only to discover in the end that it's the only thing in his life that makes any sense at all.  It's a way out that's almost always denied to the protagonist of a classic noir, lost in the labyrinth of noir's dark city -- and a view of marriage that's unknown in the moral chaos of a classic domestic noir.

I guess this film belongs in a category all its own -- anti-noir.

[In honor of Pitfall I've added a new category to my Film Noir Master List -- Sui Generis, for noirish films that aren't like any other films noirs.  So far it has two entrants, the anti-noir Pitfall and the schizo-noir Trapped.]
View Article  A NORMAN ROCKWELL FOR TODAY


During the WWII years Norman Rockwell created a character named Willie Gillis -- an ordinary guy from a small town who joined the army.  Rockwell chronicled his experiences in the war in a series of Saturday Evening Post covers.  After the war, he showed us Gillis returned to civilian life -- above you see him in college, on the G. I. Bill, having survived and put on a little weight.

It's a poignant image, for all it doesn't say.  Gillis is preparing himself for a "normal" life in post-war America, with his pipe and his golf clubs -- but the war souvenirs hanging over his head suggest that he will always be haunted by memories out of place in a "normal" world.

One of the virtues of Ken Burns' newest documentary The War is that it addresses the sort of post-traumatic stress disorder that returning vets, and the whole civilized world on some level, suffered in the wake of WWII.  For the vets it was peculiarly disorienting, with feelings of triumph, guilt and shame all mixed up together.  It was not something that could be talked about in the world Willie Gillis was trying to become a part of.

All of this I think reinforces my notion that it was in art, in film noir particularly, that such disorientation could be engaged in a safe way, a socially acceptable way.  You can read more thoughts on the subject here.
View Article  TRUE NOIR: THE BIG COMBO


The subject matter of The Big Combo, a terrific B-picture from 1955, might have easily been treated within the confines of a late-era crime melodrama or a police procedural -- instead it lurches instantly into the territory of the classic film noir and never leaves it, at least not for long.  It's something you might expect from its director Joseph H. Lewis, who also directed Gun Crazy, one of the darkest and bleakest of all noirs.

The Big Combo is about a policeman's attempt to bring down a modern crime lord, Mr. Brown -- a man so rich and powerful that he never has to soil his own hands with the dirty work.  The police don't have the financial resources to investigate his multifarious organization, the big combo of the film's title, and Brown has enough friends in high places to put pressure on any cop who does try to go after him.



Cornell Wilde plays the one cop who won't give up, won't buckle under the pressure, and his boss thinks he's lost his mind.  Fighting Brown is fighting the corruption of the whole world -- a fool's errand.  It's Wilde's essential loneliness that makes him a classic noir protagonist.  He doesn't represent the decent forces in society opposed to "respectable" thugs like Brown -- those forces simply don't exist.  This is what distinguishes The Big Combo from a traditional crime melodrama or police procedural.

At the same time, Wilde's detective is hardly pure himself.  It's suggested that he secretly admires Brown, is secretly in love with Brown's moll -- that his crusade is motivated more by jealousy and resentment than by morality or a love of justice.  This is what distinguishes the protagonist of this film from the traditional "tarnished knight" hero of traditional hardboiled detective fiction.  The code of honor of the Wilde character is suspect.



At one point the moll, explaining why she can't leave Brown, says, "I live in a maze . . . a strange, blind and backward maze, and all the little twisting paths lead back to Mr. Brown."  That's the predicament of Wilde's character as well.  By the end of the film, the view of the world we've been given makes it quite irrelevant whether or not Brown is ever brought to justice.  There's no sense that the world will be a better place if he is, because it will still operate by the same rules -- Brown's rules.

The Wilde character's fight to extricate himself from the maze is heroic.  He will save a few lives and avenge a few others along the way, but his existential dilemma will never be resolved, because the big combo is the world and it won't change.  It will stay noir.



The ending of The Big Combo echoes the ending of Casablanca visually.  But what different moral universes the two films inhabit.  In 1942, Casablanca could make idealistic sacrifice look glamorous and sexy.  By 1955, ten years after the end of WWII, the cost of such sacrifice had been measured.  We had defeated the Axis evil, but to do so we had had to summon up reserves of evil within ourselves, and the ghost of it hovered, in the shape of a mushroom cloud, over everything.

The Big Combo has been added to my film noir canon.  Sadly, there isn't a satisfactory DVD edition of the film, although the Geneon release is watchable and cheap.  The Big Combo deserves better, if only for the wonderfully inventive cinematography of the great noir master John Alton.
View Article  FILM NOIR: A MASTER LIST


Below is a provisional master list of what to me are the canonic films noirs, followed by lists of films that are often identified as films noirs but which I think fall into different categories.  You can click on most of the category names for more thoughts on them, and on the underlined film titles for reviews.

THE FILM NOIR CANON

Out Of the Past
The Killers
His Kind Of Woman
The Dark Corner
The Set-Up
Gun Crazy
Fallen Angel
Angel Face
Touch Of Evil
Detour
The Wrong Man
Criss Cross
The Killing
In A Lonely Place
On Dangerous Ground
Crossfire
Where the Sidewalk Ends
Brute Force
The Sweet Smell Of Success
Night and the City
Thieves Highway
The Lady From Shanghai
14 Hours
The Long Night
Nightmare Alley
Odds Against Tomorrow
Act Of Violence
Crime Wave
They Live By Night
Decoy
The Big Steal
Side Street
Where Danger Lives
Tension
Kansas City Confidential
The Big Combo
Gilda



HARD-BOILED DETECTIVE THRILLERS

Murder, My Sweet
The Lady In the Lake
I Wake Up Screaming
Laura
The Big Sleep
Behind Closed Doors
The Mask Of the Dragon
Vicki



DOMESTIC NOIR

Shadow Of A Doubt
Double Indemnity
Clash By Night
Leave Her To Heaven
Sunset Boulevard
The Night Of the Hunter
Scarlet Street
Blonde Ice
Daisy Kenyon



POLICE/AGENCY PROCEDURALS (DOCU-NOIR)

House On 92nd Street
The Racket
Call Northside 777
Panic In the Streets
Border Incident
The Narrow Margin
Mystery Street
Naked City
Arson, Inc.
Loan Shark
Fingerprints Don't Lie
F. B. I. Girl
Portland Expose
A Bullet For Joey



PSYCHOLOGICAL SUSPENSE THRILLERS

Whirlpool
The Big Clock
House On Telegraph Hill
The Blue Gardenia
Shock
Sudden Fear
Shadow Man
The Stranger



LATE-CYCLE CRIME MELODRAMAS

They Drive By Night
High Sierra
The Asphalt Jungle
Key Largo
Railroaded
Shoot To Kill
The Big Heat
Tough Assignment



FILMS OF INTERNATIONAL INTRIGUE

Contraband
Casablanca
To Have and Have Not
Notorious

Macao
I'll Get You
The Man From Cairo
They Were So Young



SUI GENERIS (NOIRISH BUT NOT LIKE ANY OTHER NOIRS)

Trapped
(Schizo-Noir)
Pitfall
(Anti-Noir)

View Article  FILM NOIR: THE HISTORY (AND FUTURE) OF A TERM


The term film noir was coined in 1946 by French film critic Nino Frank.  The occasion was a particular week in which five films made earlier in Hollywood but unavailable to French audiences during the war opened in Paris.  All of them had dark themes and reminded Frank of American pulp fiction from the 30s.



Much of this fiction had been published in France under the Série Noire ("Black Series") imprint and so Frank, logically enough, labeled the five films films noirs.  Three of the films, Murder, My Sweet (above, at the top of the post), Double Indemnity and The Phantom Lady were in fact based on the work of pulp fiction writers -- Cornell Woolrich, Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain.  The Woman In the Window, below, was more in the line of a Hitchcockian psychological thriller, a form Hitchcock had mastered before the war.  Laura was a fairly standard murder mystery, a form that also predated WWII, though very elegantly executed.



In short, there was nothing terribly new about the five films in question, though all were perhaps a little darker and edgier in tone than similar Hollywood films from before the war had been.  Because the French had not been able to see the gradual development of this tone during the war years, it came as something of a revelation.



But after 1946 a new film tradition emerged which diverged from the hardboiled detective fiction of the 30s -- and from the rancid domestic dramas of Cain and from the Hitchcockian suspense thriller and from the classic murder mystery.  It was a body of work which specifically addressed post-war, atomic age anxieties.  In this body of work, the underworld of pulp fiction seemed to have become the only world.  Its protagonists were not wisecracking knights errant who ventured onto the wild side of things to solve a crime, nor were they everymen forced to brave an ordeal to become stronger and wiser, nor were they committed criminals, following transgressive urges to an inevitable and cautionary doom, a doom which restored society's moral norms.  They were men in a state of existential despair, unsure of how the world worked anymore, at the mercy of strong women, morally bewildered.  The doom they often met with solved nothing, restored nothing.  It was, in a sense, an expression of the post-traumatic stress disorder of the generation which had fought WWII and could never again see "normal" life in the same way again -- especially not in the enduring shadow of nuclear annihilation.



This new tradition naturally enough assumed the label film noir, even though it was quite distinct from the kinds of films that inspired the label, the kinds of films out of which the new tradition emerged.

The imprecision of the term film noir was built into its history, so to speak.  Most of the films we now think of as classic films noirs were made after the term was invented.  They eventually came to constitute a distinct cycle, which flourished for more than a decade before it played itself out toward the end of the 50s.



I think the time has come to consider this cycle apart from the kinds of films that were first called films noirs -- and I think the only sensible way to do this is to violate the history of the term film noir and to apply it only to the distinct cycle that emerged, for the most part, after the term's invention.  In fact, I would argue that none of the five films that inspired Frank's phrase really belong to the tradition of the classic film noir.

In the interest of clarity and a sharper kind of analysis, we need to distinguish film noir from the various traditions out of which it developed.  Pulp fiction, or hardboiled detective fiction, are terms that serve perfectly well to label the sort of films made from the works of writers like Chandler, Woolrich and Cain.  Hitchcockian is a term that serves perfectly well to label the sorts of thrillers he specialized in.  Murder mystery is a term that serves perfectly well to describe a film like Laura.  The cycle of films that emerged after WWII, what might be called the atomic-age crime thriller, was something else again and it needs its own label . . . film noir.
View Article  POST-TRAUMATIC STRESS DISORDER AND FILM NOIR


World War Two was a "good war".  America and its allies pulled together and destroyed the Axis powers.  On balance, and in retrospect, it has to be considered one of the great achievements of humane civilization.  But human beings don't live on balance or in retrospect, particularly where war is concerned.  They live inside the horror of it and it takes a toll on individuals and on societies which can never be fully measured.



The upbeat spirit of American propaganda during the war, and the genuine satisfactions of victory, veiled the true experience of the war for millions -- not just for those who fought it on the battlefields of the world, but for those at home who lived in terror that their loved ones at the front might never return . . . and of course, most especially, for those at home whose loved ones didn't return.  On a broader level, anyone who simply witnessed the spectacle of total war on a global scale, from whatever distance, had to have experienced a soul-shaking anxiety about the fragility of all social structures and cultural norms.



After WWII, the whole planet experienced post-traumatic stress disorder -- localized in this case by the fact of the atomic bomb, which ended the war but left the world with a paradox that wouldn't go away.  It took an act of colossal horror to finally "win" this good war.  And the prospect of this horror being again visited on the world was far from unimaginable.



We now know a lot more than we used to about post-traumatic stress disorder and the ways it can be treated.  In the immediate post-war era, the phenomenon was more elusive, and often unrecognized.  We made meaningful social restitutions to the veterans of the war, with measures like the G. I. Bill -- we reconstructed the devastated nations we conquered.  But that just scratched the surface.



It was in art that the true psychic cost of the war was exposed and explored -- nowhere more pointedly than in film noir.  The sort of trauma that engenders PTSD is identifiable by several characteristics -- a sense of being out of control and confused, a sense of terror, a sense of being outside the normal realm of human experience.  Is there a better description of the usual predicament of the protagonist in a classic film noir?



PTSD on a broad cultural and societal level is what best explains the phenomenon of film noir, which on its surface is so mysterious.  Why should a triumphant nation, after a great collective victory in a good war, have been gripped by that mood of existential dread which informs so many Hollywood films of the post-war era?  Why should the most spectacular achievement of American arms have led to a crisis of manhood, a sense of impotence, a fear of powerful women incarnated in the morbid fantasy of the femme fatale?



Film noir was a dream landscape where the buried costs of WWII could be recognized, reckoned and mourned, as a prelude to psychic recovery, or at least psychic survival.  Veterans of combat often report the difficulty of dealing with people who have not shared their experience of it -- people who can never really know what it's like.  Film noir, far more than the WWII combat film, was one of the few arenas of American life where the true legacies of war, its lingering moral and psychological dislocations, could be engaged without apology or shame.
View Article  THE NARROW MARGIN


An excellent brief review (with plot spoilers) of The Narrow Margin on the ever-useful films noir web site.  I personally classify this film as a police procedural, not a genuine film noir -- which I think helps explain why the treatment of the apparent femme fatale, played by Marie Windsor, is so unsatisfying.  Femmes fatales serve no real dramatic purpose in a police procedural -- they're just, if anything, red herrings . . . and who wants to see Marie Windsor treated as a red herring?



Meanwhile Joe D'Augustine from Film Forno sends this comment on Odds Against Tomorrow:

"This is a great movie! One of Jean Pierre Melville's favorites. Ryan and Belafonte are amazing. Bravo to HB for financing it, that took guts and no wonder it dealt with the frustrations of a black American male so honestly. It was also one of the first films edited by DeDe Allen, her next was The Hustler. The old cop who got screwed out of his pension is excellent as well. Ed Begley, Is he corrupt or was he turned corrupt by a corrupt system? I guess he is on a friendly basis with the bookie/gangster. And he is the mastermind of the big steal. Great locations, it is one of Wise's best! He really made all kinds of films and made them well."
View Article  NOIRISH: DOMESTIC NOIR


The dark view of the world reflected in traditional film noir
found expression in other kinds of Hollywood movies, ones which didn't necessarily reflect a preoccupation with specifically male anxieties or use the night-time urban underworld as an image.  A strong tradition emerged which centered on the home and domestic relationships and the ways these seemed to be threatened by the colossal derangement of war on a global scale and later by the specter of nuclear annihilation.  Here are some of the films I see as representative of this tradition:

Shadow Of A Doubt
Double Indemnity
Clash By Night
Blonde Ice
Leave Her To Heaven
Sunset Boulevard
The Night Of the Hunter
Scarlet Street
Daisy Kenyon

American homes weren't physically threatened by the violence of WWII, at least not
directly, but millions of sons and husbands and fathers from those homes were sent out into harm's way -- and the whole scale of the war seemed to be a threat to the very idea of social order, to the very idea of home and family as the bonding agents of civilization.

Hitchcock's Shadow Of A Doubt was the first great expression of this sense of domestic insecurity.  Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity offered a vision of how comfortable middle-class life might be infected by the violence and cynicism of a world that had seemingly gone mad.  In the post-war era, in the shadow of nuclear annihilation, other films, like Leave Her To Heaven and Clash By Night, reflected a deep suspicion of the old domestic verities -- a sense that they might no longer be viable.



I would place Wilder's Sunset Boulevard in the category of domestic noir.  For one thing its action is mostly centered inside one house -- but the whole film is basically Wilder's deconstruction of his "home", Hollywood, for which he felt both affection and disgust.  (Wilder's cynicism was very personal and eccentric, so its dangerous to connect it too directly with broader social currents -- but it's clear that these broader social currents made his dark visions commercially viable, and he must certainly have had at least an intuitive appreciation of this fact.)



The Night Of the Hunter is, in my opinion, way too poetic, metaphorical and explicitly religious to be called a film noir, but it's certainly a dark film, and it deals with the issues of collapsed manhood that also informed the classic films noirs.  If anything it's domestic noir.  It deals with the destruction of one home by a failed father, a long, perilous journey in search of a new home, and the threat to that new home by a demonic shadow father.  Its expressionistic visual style harks back to the silent era, to the UFA style, and has little in common with the harsh, jagged, tabloid-style photography of classic noir.

It's interesting to note that The Night Of the Hunter was a box-office flop on its initial release, while the general run of classic films noirs were consistently (if modestly) profitable almost to the end of the Fifties.  This suggests that Americans weren't prepared to confront their post-war anxieties about manhood and the home too directly.  The film noir form allowed for a kind of indirect expression of these anxieties within the context of a nominally conventional crime thriller.  When exposed outside this context, as in The Night Of the Hunter, they turned audiences off -- the medicine was just too strong, the scalpel too close to the bone.  (Note that in the poster above, Sunset Boulevard identifies itself as "a Hollywood story" whose pathology of the collapsed male could, presumably, be imagined as confined to Tinsel Town.)

All the films listed above involve murder or the threat of murder, which is why they are often thought of as films noirs, but they differ from the classic film noir in that they offer a strong female perspective and locate the origins of their existential catastrophes inside a home or homes.

The anxieties addressed by these domestic noirs would be addressed more subtly and ultimately more accessibly in other kinds of films in the 50s, most notably in the work of Douglas Sirk and in the cycle of films concentrating on teen angst.  When filmmakers were able to deal with dark visions of American domestic life outside the conventions of a crime thriller, the domestic noir lost much of its usefulness as a form.

[The noir credentials of the films listed above are as follows . . . Clash By Night is included in the Warner DVD noir series . . . noir expert Eddie Muller considers Sunset Boulevard one of the greatest of all noirs . . . Leave Her To Heaven, Shadow Of A Doubt and Double Indemnity are included in Nicholas Christopher's noir filmography in his book Somewhere In the Night and appear on many other lists of films noirs . . . the Wikipedia entry on the subject identifies The Night Of the Hunter as a classic-era
film noir . . . the Internet Movie Database, as well as the VCI DVD, call Blonde Ice a film noir . . . Scarlet Street is included in Kino's second box set of films noirs . . . Daisy Kenyon is part of Fox's DVD noir series.]
View Article  MORE ON MEXICO AND FILM NOIR


Check out the image above, from Where Danger Lives.  A fatal femme, a trusting hunk, an inconvenient husband "accidentally" dispatched.  What's next?  Mexico, of course -- if they can just make it across the line in time.

There are certain settings that appear over and over again in film noir -- nightclubs, dive bars, industrial plants, train yards, cheap hotels, mostly in cities and mostly at night.  But there are also settings that offer sunlit relief from these oppressive locales, most notably rustic mountain or lakeside cabins . . . and Mexico.  Even more often, Mexico is simply an impossible dream -- a place to escape to, to hide out from fate, but always just out of reach.

There's a rustic cabin in They Live By Night, a temporary refuge, but the protagonists dream about making it to Mexico, where they can leave their criminal past behind, start over.  It's the same dream entertained by the outlaw couple in Gun Crazy, by Mitchum and femme fatale Faith Domergue in Where Danger Lives -- and just as hopeless.  Only the couple in Where Danger Lives even gets close, but they get very close indeed -- fate tracks them down just inches from Mexican soil.



Greer and Mitchum in Out Of the Past have their romantic idyll in Mexico but can't bring the magic of it back with them to the States.  This fits in with the notion of Mexico as a lost or unattainable paradise.  But sometimes the idea of Mexico went to filmmakers' heads -- they got giddy with the possibilities of it.  Films that started out noir would, once they crossed south of border, turn into larks, lighthearted and feckless.



Re-teamed in The Big Steal, Greer and Mitchum venture into Mexico to try to extricate themselves from typical noir predicaments involving betrayal and unjust accusation, but the dark clouds vanish almost immediately -- they find love and high-spirited adventure instead of noir's dark, impenetrable maze, and all ends well.  Film noir expert Elizabeth Ward amusingly suggests that The Big Steal ought to be labeled fiesta noir -- a designation that would fit His Kind Of Woman equally well.



His Kind Of Woman also stars Mitchum, this time paired with Jane Russell.  The malevolent fate that dogs his character at the beginning of the story more or less evaporates in Mexico, and the film turns into something approaching a screwball comedy.

In general, though, the rustic cabin and Mexico are tantalizing chimera in film noir -- poignant, even tragic images of an unrecoverable innocence and freedom.

Read more about Mexico and film noir here.
View Article  THEY LIVE BY NIGHT


This film has to rank with Erich Von Stroheim's Blind Husbands and Orson Welles' Citizen Kane as one of the most astonishing directorial debuts in the history of American cinema.  It's one of the greatest of all
films noirs yet also a film that looks forward beyond noir to the various traditions that would supplant it.

Like Out Of the Past, They Live By Night is at its core a love story.  Both are hopeless love stories, but for different reasons.  In the former, fate and moral confusion suggest a universe in which men and women can no longer co-operate -- in which love and passion have become recipes for disaster.  In the latter, the love at the film's center is the only good thing left in a world that has become bewildering and malevolent.



You could say that Out Of the Past represents the worldview of the generation of men who fought WWII and came home with a feeling that the world didn't make sense anymore -- that there was a permanent disconnect between the central experience of their lives and the society they now had to become a part of.  They Live By Night, by contrast, represents the worldview of the next generation, which would have to live with the consequences of this post-war moral bewilderment.



Noir historian Eddie Muller, among others, has pointed out that the Granger and O'Donnell characters in They Live By Night are in some sense models for the Dean and Wood characters in Nicholas Ray's later Rebel Without A Cause -- that in his first film Ray was starting to invent the idea of the 50s movie teenager.  The
Granger and O'Donnell characters are not, in fact, teenagers, but they are as innocent and bewildered as teenagers -- and their "rebellion" is just as unconscious, as instinctive, as the rebellion in the great teen dramas of the 50s, best exemplified in Rebel Without A Cause.



In 1947, when Ray made They Live By Night, the noir crime thriller was the only kind of film that allowed a Hollywood director to deal explicitly with the kind of alienation and despair that Ray clearly saw as major elements of post-war American life.  By the time he made Rebel Without A Cause, in 1955, he realized that he could deal with these elements in the context of ordinary American middle-class life.  That in itself was a sign that film noir was coming to the end of its usefulness as a form -- filmmakers could explore the noir sensibility anywhere, and deal with its nature and causes more directly.
View Article  NOIRISH: THE HARD-BOILED DETECTIVE THRILLER


Film noir
owes a lot to the hard-boiled detective fiction of the 30s and to the cycle of films this fiction inspired.  Like the gangster film, this fiction mined a Depression-era fascination with the underside of American life, examining it from a tough-minded point of view that reflected the disillusionment of hard times.  But it was, at bottom, a romantic genre -- the detective, however, cynical, had a code of honor that kept him untainted by the muck he had to slog through.  He may not have trusted the police, or other representatives of official society, but he was a law unto himself, dispensing rough justice in spite of the failures of the established order.  (Clearly there's a connection here, too, with the Western, in which a lone-hand hero often must assert the values of decency and order in the absence of official institutions dedicated to the purpose.)

This is a far cry from the existential estrangement of the classic noir protagonist whose code of honor has broken down somewhere along the line -- whose chief problem is not doing the right thing but having no clear sense of what the right thing is, or why it matters in a world gone haywire.



The key to traditional hard-boiled detective fiction is a mystery to be solved, which becomes emblematic of a moral imbalance that needs to be righted.  Solving the mystery and righting the balance restore hope.  In a true noir there's a sense, or at least a nagging suspicion, that hope is a fool's game.

The following detective thrillers are often identified as films noirs:

Murder, My Sweet
The Lady In the Lake
I Wake Up Screaming
Laura
The Big Sleep
Behind Closed Doors
The Mask Of the Dragon
Vicki

They all have noirish elements, and often look like films noirs, but they belong to an older tradition, one in which atomic-age angst and despair ultimately have no place.

[The noir credentials of the films listed above are as follows . . .
Murder, My Sweet and