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Wednesday, April 9
DAISY KENYON
by
Lloydville
on Wed 09 Apr 2008 03:53 AM PDT
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.
Tuesday, March 25
AWESOME DEAL GOING DOWN
by
Lloydville
on Tue 25 Mar 2008 10:13 AM PDT
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.
Monday, February 4
CLASH BY NIGHT
by
Lloydville
on Mon 04 Feb 2008 12:39 AM PST
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.
Monday, January 21
SCARLET STREET
by
Lloydville
on Mon 21 Jan 2008 06:23 AM PST
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.
Saturday, October 20
MORE ON FILM NOIR AND THE DEATH OF GOD
by
Lloydville
on Sat 20 Oct 2007 05:55 AM PDT
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.]
Thursday, October 18
FILM NOIR AND THE DEATH OF GOD
by
Lloydville
on Thu 18 Oct 2007 03:27 AM PDT
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.
Tuesday, October 16
THE WOMEN IN FILM NOIR
by
Lloydville
on Tue 16 Oct 2007 01:18 AM PDT
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.
Monday, October 15
THE MESSAGE OF FILM NOIR
by
Lloydville
on Mon 15 Oct 2007 12:19 AM PDT
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.
Sunday, October 14
WHAT IS DOMESTIC NOIR?
by
Lloydville
on Sun 14 Oct 2007 02:50 AM PDT
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.
Friday, October 12
ANTI-NOIR: PITFALL
by
Lloydville
on Fri 12 Oct 2007 01:37 AM PDT
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 noir. Pitfall
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.]
Thursday, October 11
A NORMAN ROCKWELL FOR TODAY
by
Lloydville
on Thu 11 Oct 2007 01:31 AM PDT
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.
Wednesday, October 10
TRUE NOIR: THE BIG COMBO
by
Lloydville
on Wed 10 Oct 2007 12:51 AM PDT
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.
Wednesday, September 26
FILM NOIR: THE HISTORY (AND FUTURE) OF A TERM
by
Lloydville
on Wed 26 Sep 2007 08:46 AM PDT
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.
Tuesday, September 11
POST-TRAUMATIC STRESS DISORDER AND FILM NOIR
by
Lloydville
on Tue 11 Sep 2007 02:26 AM PDT
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.
Monday, September 3
THE NARROW MARGIN
by
Lloydville
on Mon 03 Sep 2007 08:07 AM PDT
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."
Saturday, September 1
NOIRISH: DOMESTIC NOIR
by
Lloydville
on Sat 01 Sep 2007 04:46 AM PDT
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.]
Tuesday, August 28
MORE ON MEXICO AND FILM NOIR
by
Lloydville
on Tue 28 Aug 2007 12:29 AM PDT
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.
Sunday, August 26
THEY LIVE BY NIGHT
by
Lloydville
on Sun 26 Aug 2007 12:14 AM PDT
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.
Friday, August 24
NOIRISH: THE HARD-BOILED DETECTIVE THRILLER
by
Lloydville
on Fri 24 Aug 2007 12:34 AM PDT
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 |
