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Tuesday, July 17
THE LOOK OF NOIR
by
Lloydville
on Tue 17 Jul 2007 10:07 AM PDT
It's a commonplace of writing about film noir
to see its dark, moody lighting as derived more or less directly from
the German expressionist cinema of the 1920s and 1930s, best
exemplified in work done at the UFA studio in Berlin. The
proposition is logical enough -- the "UFA style" had become a kind of
shorthand in Hollywood for highly exaggerated, expressionistic
lighting, and many of the cinematographers and directors associated
with film noir had European backgrounds, with experience working at UFA itself or in traditions influenced by it.
The proposition gets a little shaky, however, when you examine the visual style of film noir
with a careful attention to detail. Its resemblance to the look
of UFA-style expressionism is mostly superficial. The UFA style
had a Romantic quality, evoking candlelight and
gaslight rather more than popping flashbulbs, stabbing headlights and
glaring neon -- which characterized the noir
style. The UFA influence is very clear in the Hollywood horror film cycle
of the 30s, with its atmospheric, Gothic sets and lighting -- but it's
less clear in the jagged edges of light, the jarring collisions of black
and white in film noir.
As I've written elsewhere: "Lotte
Eisner sees Murnau's visual strategy [in Faust] as one which opposes
darkness against light, but this is not quite right, for Faust is not
a film of stark contrasts, but of chiaroscuro, of subtle gradations and
complications. Light itself is in some ways the protagonist of the
film, its mysterious workings and shadings offering a mystical
perspective, making the characters and settings emblematic but also
providing consolation and inspiration -- the sense of a world animated
by Spirit." This was true of many films in the German expressionist tradition -- and was decidedly not the visual strategy of film noir.
There's another, home-grown visual tradition that I think had a much clearer influence on the look of noir -- the American tabloid crime photography of the 1930s and 1940s. A book called New York Noir makes a very convincing case for this influence. It collects images from the pages of the New York Daily News and most of these images echo the look of film noir far more closely than the great films made at UFA.
The visual style in question begins with the adoption of the Speed Graphic camera by the Daily News
photographers in the 30s. Its faster film stocks, along with
developments in synchronized flash technology, allowed these
photographers to penetrate the night for the first time. The
flash itself created bold contrasts of light and dark and helped
construct the public image of the night-time city, especially its seamy
underside -- an image that is faithfully explored in classic films noirs.
Weegee was the most famous of the Daily News photographers -- his book Naked City
brought the public a conscious awareness of the tabloid style as a distinct phenomenon,
recognized directly by filmmakers Hellinger and Dassin when they bought the book's title
for their New York police procedural movie of the same name. But Weegee
was just one of many great tabloid photographers who pioneered this
style, who lodged it in the public imagination.
The great filmmakers who worked at UFA before WWII, including many who
eventually made their way to Hollywood, certainly developed and
codified expressionistic lighting in movies -- but I think the many,
mostly anonymous photographers who snapped pictures of crime scenes for
the American tabloids had a much greater and more direct influence of the look
of the film noir.
The frame below, from Stanley Kubrick's The Killing, seems to be trying to invoke precisely the look of a tabloid crime scene photograph:
Friday, July 13
ODDS AGAINST TOMORROW
by
Lloydville
on Fri 13 Jul 2007 06:42 AM PDT
Touch Of Evil is sometimes cited as the last classic film noir but I'd nominate in its place Robert Wise's Odds Against Tomorrow, which came out a year later. Odds Against Tomorrow is certainly a true noir, as well as one of the greatest films in the tradition, and its themes recapitulate the core themes of noir with elegant clarity, while at the same time looking forward to the post-noir future.
Odds Against Tomorrow is steeped in the mood of existential dread that characterizes the classic film noir
-- and more specifically the sense of male impotence in the face of a
world gone horribly wrong. It makes sense to see the root of this
dread in the global catastrophe that was WWII and in the spectre of
global annihilation summoned up by the atomic bomb -- and Odds Against Tomorrow deals directly with both these themes.
Robert Ryan's character is an aging WWII vet whose capacity for
violence is no longer needed -- is a bewildering liability in the
post-war world. He has a sense that his best days are past, that
he has no place in society, and this fear un-mans him, all but destroys
his relationship with a woman who truly loves him but whose ability to
earn more money than he can fills him with shame and self-loathing.
Harry Belafonte's character is also a war vet, but as a black man his
sense of impotence in a white world is even more intense. The
Ryan character suffers from deep psychological wounds -- the Belafonte
character has a handicap in a racist society that nothing could possibly cure . . . the color of
his skin. He's a jazz singer but addicted to gambling, to finding
the one big score that will enable him to tell the white
nightclub owners he works for to kiss his ass. His gambling, however, has wrecked
his relationship with his wife and made him incapable of being a true
father to his daughter. Assaulted from without and within, his
sense of himself as a man has imploded.
These two characters are brought together for a crime caper by a crooked ex-cop, who incarnates the assumption in films noirs that corruption is universal.
The shadow of the atomic bomb is omnipresent in the film -- to a greater degree than it is even in Kiss Me Deadly, another classic noir which makes a clear connection between its bleak mood and atomic-age anxiety. In Odds Against Tomorrow characters
refer to the bomb on several occasions, and the explosive climax of the
film references it visually and metaphorically.
When the subtext of a tradition like film noir
gets as close to the surface as it is in this film you can be pretty
sure that the tradition is just about played out. Film noir didn't disappear after Odds Against Tomorrow, but it became something else -- neo-noir, which is always, at least in part, a commentary on the old form in its less self-conscious incarnation. But by centering
the psychological dread of a character like Belafonte's in a particular social
problem like racism, the ground is prepared for the politically
conscious films of the Sixties and onward. True noir, while
always attuned to social ills, and always political in that sense,
trafficked in a more existential brand of hopelessness. Odds Against Tomorrow, which was financed by Belafonte himself, looks forward to a time of action.
Belafonte gives a terrific performance in the film -- he's appealing
and incredibly cool but hard-edged. His rage and resentment don't
seem ideological or didactic but deeply personal. Ryan's
performance as the washed-up thug, whose racism is just another mask
for his impotence, is one of the best of his career, with a creepiness
that's also touching, and all the more creepy for that.
The film is beautifully shot, mostly on location in Manhattan and in
Upstate New York -- and yet a few annoying, pretentious zooms remind us
that the end of the classic noir
style is at hand. Apart from that it's a brilliant film on every
level -- maybe Wise's best -- and it certainly belongs in the classic film noir canon. In fact, I think you could say that, like Ryan's aging boxer in Wise's The Set-Up, the film noir tradition goes out here with one last improbable, bittersweet triumph.
Sunday, July 8
NOIRISH: THE LATE-CYCLE CRIME MELODRAMA
by
Lloydville
on Sun 08 Jul 2007 03:36 AM PDT
The following films are sometimes called films noirs, but I don't think they really belong in the category:
They Drive By Night
High Sierra
The Asphalt Jungle
Key Largo
Railroaded
Shoot To Kill
The Big Heat
Tough Assignment
Illegal
Force Of Evil
These
films are better appreciated as late-cycle variants of the 30s-era
crime melodrama. They're very specifically about the underworld
of crime -- they assume an overworld of decency and order. They
allow us to participate vicariously in the transgressive behavior of
often romanticized criminals, or to penetrate their world in the
company of a righteous guide, a righter of wrongs. They don't,
like the true film noir, posit a world where everything seems to have gone horribly wrong.
Glenn Ford's character in
The Big Heat certainly has his dark night of the soul, when it looks as though his whole world has gone noir
and that there's no way out of it. But just at that moment his
pals on the police force reassert their decency, a bunch of old army
buddies rallies to protect his child, and all is set right in the
end. Gloria Grahame's character, the only person in the film
besides Ford who seems to have any balls at all, dies heroically,
defusing her challenge to the general collapse of manhood around her.
The idea of a city government in the grips of a corrupt political regime was a staple of the 30s-era crime drama. In The Big Heat
this corruption has become virulent and all-pervasive, but in the end
it's just as thoroughly vanquished and dismantled as it routinely was
in the 30s-era films. The Big Heat, like a lot of crime dramas that are identified as noir, flirts with the dark vision of the true noir but stops short of embracing it.
Compare They Drive By Night with Thieves' Highway.
Both are dramas about corruption in the trucking industry, both feature
working-class protagonists who fight against this corruption.
But on a psychic level the two films play out in entirely different universes. In
the earlier film,
They Drive By Night, corruption is a social problem which courageous
proletarians can overcome. In the later film, protagonist Richard
Conte is snared in a web he doesn't understand and can't get out of
except with the help of a fallen woman. The center of the earlier
film is struggle, the center of the later film is a mood of existential
dread. It's precisely in its sensitivity to this mood, in its
atmosphere of moral ambiguity and bewilderment, that the true film noir separates itself from the Depression-era crime melodrama.
[The noir credentials of the films listed above are as follows: Railroaded is packaged in Kino's film noir box set The Dark Side Of Hollywood . . . Shoot To Kill and Tough Assignment are packaged in VCI's Forgotten Noir series . . . The Big Heat, The Asphalt Jungle and Key Largo are listed in Nicholas Christopher's filmography of noir in his book Somewhere In the Night . . . High Sierra is listed as a notable film noir in the Wikipedia entry on the subject . . . They Drive By Night, though usually discussed as a proto-film noir, is occasionally identified as a full-fledged noir
on web sites and in DVD catalogue listings. I would argue that
none of these films diverges significantly, fundamentally, from the
30s-era crime drama tradition out of which they emerge -- certainly not
enough to require placing them in a new category all their own, like film noir, even when they're inflected here and there with a noirish style and tone.]
Tuesday, July 3
THE FILM NOIR CANON
by
Lloydville
on Tue 03 Jul 2007 12:05 PM PDT
People who love film noir also love to argue about what films belong in the category and what films don't. They compile lists of films noirs and break them down into subcategories. The general drift of this activity is to call almost any film noir
as long as it was made in Hollywood in the 1940s or 1950s, in black
and white, and features moody lighting, cynical attitudes and
some content related to crime.
This inclusiveness is abetted by studio home video departments, which will designate any film with the above attributes a film noir because the label is sexy and apparently helps sell DVDs.
In the process, the term gets so vague as to be useless. I would
argue that there is a core set of films that are truly and uniquely noir,
reflecting a particular time in America, with a particular mind-set, a
mood of existential dread that seemed to invade the American psyche
after the end of WWII, at the beginning of the atomic age.
This sense of dread was in the air before then, of course, as the world
hurtled towards war. It can be felt very clearly in some dark
films made during the war -- in Hitchcock's Shadow Of A Doubt, in Wilder's Double Indemnity, in Huston's The Maltese Falcon. The first two of those films, along with Leave Her To Heaven, fall into a distinct category of their own -- the domestic noir.
The Maltese Falcon seems on its surface to belong to another distinct category, the hardboiled detective thriller, which had noirish
elements but whose essentially noble protagonist rescued it from
existential dread. Yet Bogart's Sam Spade seems to be losing
faith in the nobility of his code, to see it as meaningless, and I
think that fact alone allows one to call The Maltese Falcon a true film noir. Just compare Bogart's Spade to his Phillip Marlowe in The Big Sleep, which plays like a hardboiled romantic comedy by comparison with Huston's film.
The point about The Maltese Falcon can be argued, of course, and I place it among the true films noirs with that reservation in mind. Here are some of the other films I think of as truly noir, without such reservations:
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
Note that not all of these films end badly for the protagonist, and not all of them feature femmes fatales -- several actually have femmes
that rescue the protagonist, and in one of them the protagonist is
rescued, just as improbably, by Jesus. But in all of them the
protagonist needs rescuing, in all of them he's lost in a nightmare world that's
existentially different from the world that existed before WWII and he can't, by his own efforts, get out of it.
Even a film like His Kind Of Woman, which goofs comically on this world, is also recognizing it.
In future posts I'll list some of the films commonly called noir
which I don't think really are, because, though they may reflect to one
degree or another the same existential dread as the true noir,
they don't acknowledge it as a profound and inescapable condition.
It's almost a spiritual distinction, and therefore hard to
define precisely, but I think it's one worth making.
Sunday, July 1
CHINATOWN
by
Lloydville
on Sun 01 Jul 2007 12:23 AM PDT
Chinatown is one of the few neo-noirs
that really lives up to the designation. Its view of the world
is truly bleak -- a moral maze from which there is no escape. As
with many films noirs there's
an indictment of the political system but also a sense that corruption
is universal, not limited to any one class. It's an existential
corruption.
The big difference between Chinatown and the classic post-WWII noirs is one of gender perspective. The post-war noirs
were centrally concerned with male anxieties, with the way the world
looked from the point of view of a suddenly inauthentic and insecure
manhood. In them, a man might be ruined by a powerful female, a
traditional femme fatale, or he might be saved by good woman, but in both cases the situation was beyond his control. Chinatown
finally took a look through the other end of the telescope, imagining
what the general collapse of manhood might mean for women.
As screenwriter Robert Towne has said, Evelyn Mulwray is the only
character in the film who operates out of purely decent motives, trying
to rescue herself and her daughter from the clutches of a rancid,
decayed patriarchy. The protagonist of the film, private eye
Jake Gittes, is a decent enough fellow but impotent when it comes to
helping, much less saving, her.
We're not quite dealing with a feminist perspective here -- we're still
looking at the mess from a male viewpoint, assessing the male's failure
of responsibility rather than exploring the female's search for empowerment --
but we're a long way from the phallocentric cry of male bewilderment and pain that
was at the heart of film noir.
Still, the deconstruction of the traditional femme fatale
is very thorough and deliberate, because Evelyn Mulwray is first
presented as a kind of spider woman, with all the generic clues that
used to alert us to the fact that the woman in question was going to be
trouble . . . and that's how Gittes constructs her. The big
switcheroo is that Evelyn is in much more trouble than she has the
capacity to cause anyone else, that it's her father's fault and that
Gittes isn't smart enough or strong enough to deliver her from it.
Towne's conversation with the noir
tradition is very elegant and profound. He goes back, in the
film, to 1937, to the hardboiled detective fiction out of which film noir mutated, and deconstructs the "tarnished knight" of that form, locating in him the existential nullity of the film noir
protagonist. Gittes has Phillip Marlowe's private code of
nobility, his commitment to a kind of rough justice, but it's not
enough anymore. The only real nobility he has left is his ability
to recognize the cost of his own impotence.
When his associate speaks the film's famous last line to him, "Forget
it, Jake -- it's Chinatown," we know he won't, we know he can't.
He lives there now -- and somehow, because of his failure, we all do.
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