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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 The Lady In the Lake are included in the Warner noir DVD series . . .
I Wake Up Screaming and Vicki are included in the Fox noir DVD series . . . The Big Sleep and Laura are included on almost all lists of films noirs . . . Behind Closed Doors is included in Kino's film noir DVD box set . . . and The Mask Of the Dragon is included in the VCI Forgotten Noir DVD series.]
Wednesday, August 22
SCHIZO-NOIR
by
Lloydville
on Wed 22 Aug 2007 03:33 AM PDT
The dramatic methods and strategies of a police procedural film, and
what might be called the moral climate, are quite different from those found in a classic film noir
-- a proposition that can be demonstrated by taking a look at films
which try to combine the two forms.
As a case in point, consider Trapped,
starring Lloyd Bridges and doomed starlet Barbara Payton. Bridges
and Payton play a counterfeiter and his moll. The counterfeiter
gets a chance to redeem himself by co-operating with Treasury agents
but is sucked back into his old ways and hurtled toward ruin. We
identify with Bridges in the role because he has an appealing screen
persona and because he's the star, which should be enough to place the
film squarely in the noir tradition.
The filmmakers, however, have chosen to place the Bridges character and his story inside a docu-noir
celebrating the Treasury department, its agents and procedures. John Hoyt,
who usually plays villains, is the chief Treasury operative, acting
undercover. The narrative encourages us to root for him -- the
casting makes this all but impossible.
This might at first seem like an interesting formula, producing a
complex tension between the two narrative traditions, but it all falls
apart in the final reel, because the filmmakers eventually have to
choose which tradition to favor when constructing the climax.
What they do is simply eliminate the Bridges character from the final
action sequence and ask us to identify totally with the agency and its chief
representative. The denouement therefore has no punch, since it
doesn't involve or impact the character we've been previously encouraged to identify most closely with.
Crime Wave is another conflicted noir
with a slightly different dynamic. It starts as a straight-ahead
procedural, with
Sterling Hayden as a police officer trying to hunt down some escaped
cons who've killed a cop in the course of a bungled robbery. The
film veers into noir
territory when it switches focus and concentrates on a character played
by Gene Nelson, an innocent ex-con who gets caught up in the
case. (We know that the Nelson character is a co-equal
protagonist with the Hayden character because he's hooked up with the
very vexing female lead, Phyllis Kirk.)
This is when things start to get interesting, because after we switch our attention to Nelson the Hayden
character, delightfully brutal and pig-headed but undeniably
charismatic, starts making mistakes, mistakes that plunge the Nelson
character deeper into his vortex of doom. It takes some narrative
sleight-of-hand at the end of the film to redeem Hayden's cop,
and the police, who become the agents of the Nelson character's
salvation, thus restoring the pro-police bias of a procedural. (The sleight-of-hand involves a classic film noir
heist-gone-wrong which turns out to have been not exactly what it
seemed to be -- in other words, a bit of a cheat, though still
entertaining.)
This film does manage to have it both ways, after a fashion, but the core of it is noir,
because we spend so much of the time out of sympathy with the
police. The cop and the innocent-man-wrongly-accused both seem
trapped in a hopeless and bewildering moral maze.
I think you can call Crime Wave a true noir. Trapped is so schizophrenic that it's simply unclassifiable.
Monday, August 20
A BOX OF NIGHT
by
Lloydville
on Mon 20 Aug 2007 12:44 AM PDT
It's always a cause for celebration when Warner Home Video comes out with a new box set of films noirs.
These are first-rate collections of wonderfully entertaining films in
superb transfers, with generally very good (and sometimes genuinely
illuminating) commentaries.
The fourth set in the series was released last month -- it has ten
films, as opposed to the five in each previous set, and I'm working my
way through them with tremendous excitement. I've already
discovered that Act Of Violence, directed by Fred Zinneman, is one of the best of all noirs, and one which exposes very clearly the peculiar strain of post-WWII anxiety that fueled the tradition.
In the story, two basically decent war vets have their lives ravaged by
the memory of wartime experiences that they can't either deal with or
run away from. Only the women in the film are strong enough to
try and confront the buried demons directly, but even the women can't
head off the trainwreck that fate has ordained.
I've added the film to my own personal canon of genuine films noirs, and added another film in the set, Mystery Street, to the noirish but not really noir category of police procedurals.
Thursday, August 16
NOIRISH: THE POLICE OR AGENCY PROCEDURAL
by
Lloydville
on Thu 16 Aug 2007 04:52 AM PDT
The films below are sometimes called films noirs but they make up such a distinct category that they're almost always qualified with the the sub-label docu-noirs:
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
In fact they're
all police or government-agency procedurals (or, in one case, a newspaper procedural.) They usually feature some
highly positive documentary-type footage about the law enforcement
group involved and are sometimes shot within the
facilities of the institutions they depict. (The newspaper procedural, Call Northside 777,
about a crusading journalist who saves an innocent man from prison, was
based on a real case and shot on some of the locations where the original incidents occurred.)
These films are designed to show the effective functioning of
government agencies or other establishment organizations, and while this sort of reassurance may have
addressed the same strain of post-war anxiety that film noir explored, it obviously did so from a completely different perspective than you find in the classic film noir, where suspicion of all social institutions is part of the general atmosphere of dread.
In the films above, the city may well be a dark and threatening maze,
but we enter it in the company of an upright guide, backed by the full
force of the official society, and we overcome the danger we face there
-- we clean up the mess.
These films make up a vigorous genre in themselves and have become
fascinating social documents -- but I don't think it makes any sense to
call them films noirs.
[The noir credentials of the films above are as follows . . .
House On 92nd Street, Call Northside 777 and Panic In the Streets are part of the Fox film noir DVD series . . . The Racket,
Border Incident, Mystery Street and The Narrow Margin are part of the Warner film noir DVD series . . . A Bullet For Joey is part of the MGM film noir DVD series . . . Naked City is found on almost all lists of films noirs . . . the rest are included in the VCI Forgotten Noir DVD series.]
Sunday, August 12
NOIRISH: FILMS OF INTERNATIONAL INTRIGUE
by
Lloydville
on Sun 12 Aug 2007 02:06 PM PDT
It's hard for me to imagine why anyone would find it useful to call any of the films listed below films noirs, but people have:
Contraband
Casablanca
To Have and Have Not
Notorious
Macao
I'll Get You
The Man From Cairo
They Were So Young
Mr. Arkadin (Confidential Report)
These are all
thrillers involving romance and international intrigue, where the occasional
disorientation and jeopardy of the protagonists results from being
embroiled in a foreign locale, fighting a foreign system. The
whole crux of the film noir
tradition is that the disorientation and jeopardy take place on
familiar soil, within familiar systems that have somehow grown alien, bewildering
and malevolent. Night and the City is by contrast a true film noir, even though it happens to be set in London.
It unfolds in a world its American protagonist knows well (though perhaps not
well enough) -- his jeopardy and his doom have nothing to do with the
fact that his surroundings are foreign.
Rick in Casablanca masquerades
as a cynical, even nihilistic anti-hero who believes in nothing --
which gives him at least a superficial link with some film noir
protagonists -- but he proves himself to be a knight in shining armor,
willing to sacrifice the most important thing in his life for transcendent
ideals. If this is film noir, what the hell do you call Gun Crazy or Detour -- or Night and the City, for that matter? Film noir noir?
I guess Macao gets labeled a film noir because it stars film noir icon Robert Mitchum and was made right after His Kind Of Woman, which also paired him with Jane Russell and which is an actual film noir,
or at the very least a comic parody of one. The rest are mostly
standard spy thrillers involving an innocent American caught in a web
of foreign intrigue.
I think you could make a case that John Le Carré's existentially bleak spy thrillers enter the realm of noir, or neo-noir, but the romantic adventures and thrillers above don't come close.
[The noir credentials of the films listed above are as follows . . . Contraband is included in a film noir DVD box set from Kino . . . Casablanca, Notorious and To Have and Have Not are listed on the Wikipedia "expanded list" of classic films noirs . . . Macao is among the films noirs listed in Nicholas Christopher's Somewhere In the Night . . . I'll Get You, The Man From Cairo and They Were So Young are included in the VCI series Forgotten Noir.]
Wednesday, August 8
NOIRISH: THE PSYCHOLOGICAL SUSPENSE THRILLER
by
Lloydville
on Wed 08 Aug 2007 12:30 AM PDT
Below is another list of films that are sometimes identified as films noirs but that, in my opinion, really aren't:
Whirlpool
The Big Clock
House On Telegraph Hill
The Blue Gardenia
Shock
Sudden Fear
Shadow Man
The Stranger
These are all in fact what have come to be known as Hitchcockian
suspense thrillers, because Hitchcock remains the undisputed master of
the form. In these films, ideally at least, the viewer is seduced
into a strong identification with the protagonist, a damsel in
distress or a man wrongfully accused of a crime, and shares the
psychological suspense of his or her ordeal, which includes feelings of
guilt that may not be rational and are in any case disproportionate to
the jeopardy involved.
I think they're distinguishable from the true film noir because
they concentrate on the often aberrant psychology of an
individual and don't reflect a sense of society as a whole, or
existence itself, as deranged. They chart passages through a
moral/psychological disorientation that is more or less resolved by the
end of the film. The jeopardized innocents of this
tradition are often women, which also distinguishes it from the
tradition of the
classic film noir, which tends to center on male anxieties. These films involve an exploration of moral guilt, while classic films noirs involve an exploration of existential bewilderment and incompetence, almost always from a male point of view.
All of the films listed above fall far short of Hitchcock's best work
in the form, primarily because they fail to make us full psychological
participants in the jeopardy of their protagonists. Their
narratives may be purely Hitchcockian, beat for beat, but their
technique doesn't compel us into a deep and often unconscious identification with
their central characters.
In Whirlpool, for example, we
first see the Gene Tierney character in a department store where she's
just done some shoplifting -- but we don't find this out until a store
detective follows her to her car and seizes the lifted item.
We're looking at the character from the outside, from the point of view of the
authorities. In a Hitchcock film, we'd see the theft when it
happened, share Tierney's fear as she tries to exit the store without
getting caught -- even find ourselves rooting for her to get away with
it. With that identification established, we'd feel her guilt when she's caught, and feel it as our own guilt, because we secretly hoped she'd pull the theft off.
Ben Hecht, who wrote the script for Hitchcock's Notorious, also wrote Whirlpool
for Otto Preminger. The latter has all the ingredients of a
classic Hitchcockian thriller -- so it's highly instructive to study
why it isn't one. It all comes down to Hitchcock's genius in
constructing identification with the protagonist, an identification
that can contradict our conscious disapproval of the protagonist's
behavior. Preminger made one of the best of all noirs, Angel Face, but on the evidence of Whirlpool he had no gift for, and apparently no great interest in, the Hitchcockian suspense thriller.
[The noir credentials of the films listed above are as follows -- Sudden Fear is included in Kino's film noir box set The Dark Side Of Hollywood . . . Whirlpool, The House On Telegraph Hill and Shock are part of Fox's film noir series . . . Shadow Man is included in VCI's Forgotten Noir series . . . The Stranger is part of MGM's DVD noir series . . .The Big Clock is part of Universal's noir series . . . and the packaging of the Image DVD release of The Blue Gardenia identifies it as "classic noir with a feminine twist." I don't see any point in calling any of these films noirs unless you're willing to call almost all of Hitchcock's American films noirs -- which I think stretches the definition of noir beyond the point of usefulness.]
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