“What we all dread most,” said G. K. Chesterton’s detective priest Father Brown, “is a maze with no centre.”

The mood of existential dread that gripped the American psyche in the wake
of WWII was largely unconscious, and so it expressed itself in
irrational ways — in the hysteria of the Communist witch hunts, for
example, and in the mythology of the film noir,
which characteristically sent an impotent man into the heart of a
nightmarish moral labyrinth from which there was no escape.

There was a variant on the classic noir paradigm which sent a cop or a government agent into that same dark underworld, but he was armed with the positive values of the official
culture and backed by its official institutions — he not only escaped from the labyrinth, he straightened it out, brought it into the light and broke its evil spell.

The first film of this kind, and a model for all the rest, was The House On 92nd Street
from 1945, an F. B. I. procedural about the uncovering of a Nazi spy
ring operating inside the U. S. during WWII.  It had a
quasi-documentry approach and was obviously designed to reassure
Americans that their government had the issue of existential dread well
in hand.  It’s a taut, entertaining thriller, with fascinating
location photography,  but its celebration of the F. B. I.’s
omnipotence and infallibility couldn’t, even at the time, have been a
profound assurance to people who felt that something had gone terribly
awry with the world — something that the Allied victory in the war
hadn’t really set right.

This feeling was addressed but not answered in genuine film noir,
which is what gave the form its power — turned its image of the urban
labyrinth into an enduring variation on an ancient myth.
Interestingly, the terrifying image of the maze with no center, and no
exit once entered, can also be found I believe in the best films of
Frank Tashlin — all comedies.

In The Girl Can’t Help It and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?,
Tashlin offers a satire of post-war American culture which also has no
center and no exit point.  These movies mock modern media from within the
modern medium of film, which is itself mocked, deconstructed, leaving us
with no reliable perspective from which to judge any of their judgments.
They savage the modern rat race but also savage anyone who tries to
escape it.  In Tashlin’s vision, as in film noir, American culture is a maze which can’t be navigated, in which every passage circles back on itself.

In Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?,
for example, Tashlin attacks modern advertising and product placement
on television, then proceeds to plug his own earlier film The Girl Can’t Help It
within the new one.  Tashlin’s films are funny but deeply
disturbing.  Their vision of America is profound and just as noir as the dark streets of the great films noirs.  The fact that Tashlin’s darkness is rendered in garish, overheated
Color by Deluxe is just one more of the radically disorienting ironies
of his method.

[For more on The Girl Can’t Help  It, go here.  The image of the labyrinth in film noir is discussed helpfully in Nicholas Christopher’s book Somewhere In the Night.]

Someone once remarked that there's no such thing as a bad film noir.  It's a strange propostion and the strangest thing about it is that it's pretty much true.



I've just watched over 30 films noirs
and none of them was anything less than a wondrously entertaining
B-picture.  There are some clunkers that are labelled films noirs but really aren't — like Otto Preminger's Whirlpool,
for example, which is in fact a Hitchcockian suspense thriller made by
a man who had no clue as to how Hitchcock created suspense . . . but even among the faux noirs, films that are noirish only in visual style, for example, most have dialogue and images that are thrilling.



I'm not sure how to explain this consistency of quality except by suggesting that noir
represented such a release from the thematic and stylistic conventions
of the traditional studio product that filmmakers responded with an
outburst of pent-up creativity and daring.  They must have known
that they were inventing a new kind of film, even if it didn't have a
name yet, and the fact that there were no set rules for this kind of
film made it hard for the studios to wrestle it into a set
formula.  Films noirs
were relatively cheap to make, and people couldn't seem to get enough
of them, so the studios stepped back and let the experimentation
continue — for almost 20 years.

None of the movies made about the war itself ever expressed as
eloquently its psychic cost to a generation of Americans as did the
movies we now call film noirs. 
They crackle with the excitement of artists suddenly allowed to deal
with truths that couldn't be addressed in the official view of
things.  Corporate entertainment tends to gravitate towards the
official view of things but there are times when the official view of
things diverges so radically from the actual mood of the audience that
accommmodations have to be made.  Film noir was one of the most radical of those accommodations.

[Note — this post contains plot spoilers and shouldn’t be read if you haven’t already seen Leave Her To Heaven.]

Leave Her To Heaven is one of the strangest films ever made in studio-era Hollywood.  The tension between its text and its subtext is so violent that it can induce mild dizziness.  It’s sometimes called, unhelpfully I think, a film noir.  It’s certainly a dark film, despite its gorgeous Technicolor photography, and it deals with some of the same cultural neuroses that inform the noir tradition, but it comes at them from a different perspective — a female perspective.

At the heart of the film is Ellen, played by Gene Tierney — a
beautiful, narcissistic psychopath.  We’re told early on that
Ellen wrecked her parents’ marriage by her obsessively close
relationship with her father.  The minute we hear this
extraordinary bit of information our perceptions should be alerted that things
aren’t always going to be what they seem in this film — though I
imagine that it’s mostly women who pick up on it, and perhaps only
subconsciously.

Think about it.  A grown man allows his marriage to be ruined by his obsessively close
relationship with his daughter — and the child is blamed.  This
strikes me as a kind of emotional code, alluding to the phenomenon of blaming
women for the psychic and moral failings of men.

Ellen will go on in the course of the film to do horrible things — she
will murder a crippled boy, her husband’s brother, she will induce
the miscarriage of her own unborn child and she will try to frame her
innocent cousin for murder.  She becomes a monster and no rational
consideration can induce us to sympathize with her — but we do.
We do because of the coded text embedded in the overt one.

In the film, Ellen falls in love with and marries Dick, apparently
because he reminds her of her father.  Cornell Wilde is
brilliantly cast in the role.  He looks like a hunk but is a kind
of black hole on screen, with a blank face and eyes that express little
more than hurt and bewilderment.  He’s further un-manned in the
narrative, which makes him a fumbler, insecure around Ellen, easily led by
her and only too happy to retreat to the female company of her mother
and cousin, “good” women but good in a bland, smug way.

Dick has a crippled younger brother who comes to live with the
newlyweds — sleeping in the room next to theirs behind a wall so thin
that he can talk to them through it without raising his voice.
Dick doesn’t seem to comprehend why this situation makes Ellen
uncomfortable.  When the brother is finally moved out to a guest
house Dick secretly invites Ellen’s mother and cousin to come visit,
another intrusion on their intimacy, and once again can’t understand why this disturbs Ellen.  He whines out his reasoning — “I thought you’d be pleased!” — without the slightest apparent awareness of Ellen’s point of view, much less her right to be consulted on such things.

Ellen over-reacts, of course — drastically.  She lets the brother
die in a swimming accident.  But part of us understands why she
does it.  All the people around her are so drippy, so dull and, in
the case of the men, so weak, that part of us wants her to kill them
all.

This is how the deep tension of the film is created — by giving Ellen
real grievances, maddening and suffocating, while at the same time
giving her responses that we can judge as thoroughly
reprehensible.  Men are allowed to righteously condemn a woman who
sees through male weakness, women are allowed a vicarious revenge
against those same weak men.

The film starts on a train and climaxes in a courtroom, but in between
it plays out in a series of glamorous vacation homes, shot in wild,
almost lurid color.  The whole film is like a paean to the
well-decorated second home — a glossy magazine-spread celebration of
bourgeois comfort and excess.  But Ellen makes us feel the
oppression of those homes — they are for her what the urban labyrinth
is to the lost souls of film noir, and they’re lit with the same expressionistic exaggeration.

Gene Tierney was an actress of limited range but she turns up in some
of the great films of Hollywood’s golden age, radiant and unforgettable —
this film, Laura, Heaven Can Wait and The Ghost and Mrs. Muir.
She had a unique quality on screen, part aristocratic, part down to
earth, always suggesting a secret that will never be revealed.
That quality, and especially it’s sense of impenetrable mystery, is
what allows us here to project onto her our unconscious approval of her
wickedness.

While not a true film noir the movie fits nicely into a category that might be called domestic noir — along with Shadow Of A Doubt and Double Indemnity,
both made around the same time.  In these films, the nightmare of
moral chaos doesn’t play out on dark city streets but in middle-class
homes . . . yet the existential dread invoked is almost exactly the
same.

“I feel all dead inside.  I'm backed up in a dark corner and I don't know who's hitting me.”



With this little speech, the hardboiled private-eye protagonist of Henry Hathaway's The Dark Corner, from 1946, leaves the world of 30s pulp fiction where he was born and enters the realm of the film noir. 
He's lost the romantic nobility of the traditional private eye, summed
up by Raymond Chandler when describing his idea of the hero in a work
of detective fiction — “Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean,
who is neither tarnished nor afraid.”



The hero of The Dark Corner, played by Mark Stevens, is
tarnished by a past frame-up for manslaughter, almost unhinged by the
memory of his impotence in the situation, his sense that it will follow
him forever and destroy him in the end.  He's a tough guy, not
afraid of taking his licks but gripped by the dread of a consuming
darkness he doesn't understand and so can't control.  The film
documents what is for him essentially an existential nervous breakdown.