The Dark Side of the Screen: Film Noir

by Foster Hirsch

  Characterization through costume and setting (in Scarlet Street): Christopher Cross, dressed in an apron, is doing housewifely chores in the kitchen, and a portrait of his wife’s first husband, which dominates the livingroom, seems to displace him in his own home. Yet the shot is filled with Langian ironies, because meek, emasculated Chris will outwit his wife and her former husband, and will murder the woman (Kitty Collins) who makes a fool of him. In noir, visual information is often misleading, double-edged.

  Wilder’s seamless direction maintains its taut surface throughout, never becoming overtly theatrical, like the ending to Scarlet Street, where Lang emphasizes the character’s de-rangement to show beyond any doubt, and therefore to satisfy the censors, that Chris is indeed punished for his crime. Like Wilder’s, Barbara Stanwyck’s performance is quintessentially noir. Stanwyck, who plays Phyllis Dietrichson with the steeliness for which she is famous, is the undisputed queen bee of noir—hard, mannish, her face a taut mask, her eyes beady and suspicious, her voice honed to a cutting edge. Her acting is unrelieved by a moment’s softness or shading. Yet this is not an operatic version of a fatal temptress: Stanwyck’s method is one of subtraction rather than theatrical embellishment as she reduces expression and gesture to a minimum. She plays in a narrow, tight emotional range, creating a recognizable American housewife of a certain type and class—except that something is missing, some crucial human element omitted. Her face frozen, her voice and body forbiddingly rigid, she seems like a somnambulist, a walking zombie in a waking nightmare. Stanwyck’s skillful work is like a painting of a recognizably real scene in which nature, on closer inspection, looks too neat and still and poised. Her character, as a result, is more a mask, a symbolic idea, of a monstrous woman than a fully flesh-and-blood representation of her; and in this sense she is playing the character as James M. Cain originally conceived her in his novel: predatory and not fully human, the essence of aggressive, unlovely female sexuality. Cain’s almost cartoon-like villain is a caricature of the wicked stepmother of folk lore and fairy tales, and the film has the integrity not to blunt the characterization by adding humanizing touches.

  Stanwyck’s acting is thus an imitation of reality in only the narrowest possible sense. Her deliberately monochromatic delivery is the signature of the hard-boiled manner prevalent in thrillers of the period. It is one of the conventions of noir that, like Stanwyck, tough dames and guys hardly move their facial muscles or their lips, their darting, narrowed eyes the only movement in their masks. Stanwyck’s performance created a sensation; never before in American films had a female character been presented as so devoid of softening, feminine touches, and never before had death and sex been linked so explicitly and powerfully. Stanwyck plays the character with startling suggestions of perversity.

  Double Indemnity is also seminal because it represents a one-time-only collaboration between James M. Cain and Raymond Chandler, two of the leading writers of the hard-boiled school. Chandler didn’t care for Cain. He thought Cain’s work had too many sensational elements, and he was offended by the feverish, erotic quality of Cain’s writing, its hothouse sultriness. With his English school training and his upbringing by a genteel mother, Chandler was put off by what he considered Cain’s lack of polish. Reluctantly, he accepted the assignment of adapting Cain’s novel into a screenplay, and he was desperately unhappy working with Billy Wilder because he felt Wilder did not allow him sufficient creative freedom. But working together, uneasy as the collaboration may have been, Wilder and Chandler preserved the texture of Cain’s novel—a trim novel in the hard-boiled manner becomes a trim, hard-boiled movie—and made a few changes that actually strengthened the material, as Cain later admitted. They decided to give the story a flashback framework, beginning at the end as Walter is dying. Avoiding a straightforward treatment of time immediately introduces the requisite hopeless tone: the story, in a sense, is over before it begins, with the hero’s grim fate then hovering over the entire film. The adapters retain Cain’s first-person narration, keeping it to a minimum, while choosing passages that express the narrator’s cynical, world-weary, yet peculiarly matter-of-fact manner. The narration has added dramatic impact because in the film it is a confession to Walter’s friend and colleague, whereas in the novel it was a mere literary convention, a report addressed to no one in particular.

  A neurotic noir triangle (in Double Indemnity): accurately enough, the shot suggests a closer connection between Walter Neff and his colleague (Edward G. Robinson) than between Walter and Phyllis, who is separated from the two men as she hides behind the door to Walter’ s apartment.

  In character types, mood, themes, and visual composition, Double Indemnity and Scarlet Street offer a lexicon of noir stylistics. Set in cities at night, the two films dramatize the fateful consequences of an obsession. The two anti-heroes are driven wild by desire for provocative, unavailable women. The men’s passion destroys the ordered, mundane surface of their former lives, and hurls them into a maze of crime and punishment. Both films depict private worlds turned upside down in a manner that is rigorously controlled. With their use of shadows, their muted patterns of chiaroscuro, and their settings that comment on the characters, the films contain visual echoes of German Expressionism. Made by two masters of the claustrophobic style, Double Indemnity and Scarlet Street are impressive examples of the topography of noir, and as such a helpful starting point for a study of one of the richest and most critically neglected of American film genres.

  At the time, Wilder and Lang did not know that they were making films noirs. They would probably have called their stories thrillers or crime dramas and let it go at that. Film noir as a descriptive term was coined by French critics in the postwar period, as a response to what seemed to them a distinctly darkened tone to the American cinema. During the war, American movies were not shown in France, and when a few were finally released in 1946 French critics (who had long watched the American studio film with particular interest) noticed decided tonal shifts. The thrillers seemed to the French cinéastes more sombre in style and more pessimistic in tone than the usual American movie of the thirties. Marked by a startling cynicism and ending often in defeat, the “new wave” of crime dramas contradicted the customary optimism of popular American pictures. These downbeat stories of murder and passion, of ordinary lives gone hopelessly astray, of evil women casting their net and fatally contaminating the American male, seemed to the French to represent a shift in the national psyche. They saw a loss of energy and confidence, and a growing disillusionment with traditional American ideals. In these dark films, money and love, as well as individual enterprise, lead not to fulfillment and the happy ending, but to crime and death—to defeats of nightmarish proportion. Appropriately enough, the French called these stories of tabloid sex and murder “film noir”—“black film.” The first sustained discussion of the films appeared in 1955, in Panorama du film noir américain, by Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton.

  Film noir, then, was “discovered” by the French during a remarkably fertile period in French film criticism, when the close study of American genre films led to the formulation of the auteur theory. French critics saw the formularized studio films as opportunities for idiosyncratic directors with subversive tendencies to rework standard stories, to undermine generic conventions. The discovery and naming of film noir occurred at a time when French critics, under the influence of Andre Bazin and writing for Cahiers du cinema, were excavating American entertainment movies with an ingenuity that has had a lasting impact. The French “taught” Americans how to read aspects of their own popular culture. Regarding the popular studio offerings as potential works of art some two decades before most Americans were ready to do so, the French were especially attracted to the B movie, as opposed to the A productions with a more obvious cultural pedigree. Low budget films noirs, made quickly and not always with A casts or directors, and frequently appearing at the bottom of the ubiquitous double feature, provided particularly rich grist for th
e auteur critics’ mill. These thrillers with mostly unpretentious packaging contained a wealth of material waiting to be “retrieved” and explicated by clever critics; here, in these modest crime stories with their loaded sexuality and their pathologi-cal characters, was an intriguing image of the American Dream gone bad.

  The role of the femme fatale—noir’s Circe, the wicked woman who destroys every man she meets—is emphasized in this poster for Scarlet Street.

  Film noir became an accepted critical term in America only in the late sixties, at a time when Americans themselves began to take American films more seriously. Contemporary reviews of film noir were not, on the whole, either favorable or enlightened. Only Manny Farber, ever on the alert for disrespectful stories about the underside of American life, fully appreciated the noir flavor. Lacking Farber’s irreverence, most of the forties reviewers disapproved of the cold tone of the films, of the fact that the dramas offered few characters the audience could care about. Though the writers at the time were alert to the Freudian motifs that filtered into the crime thriller (they cited an epidemic of Oedipal complexes), they were impatient with the quantity of unbalanced characters. Further, the reviewers sniffed at the pulp origins of the films, disdaining Raymond Chandler, for instance, several decades before he was to become a cult figure.

  Night and the City: the archetypal noir title.

  On the whole, the reviewers preferred noir when it was set in the real world rather than when it took place in the studio; thrillers such as The Naked City and Boomerang that had a documentary look got the best notices, just as The Lost Weekend or Body and Soul, stories that seemed to have a social conscience, received the stamp of approval. The particularly high-strung noir thrillers, relying primarily on murky photography and a studio-created atmosphere, were regarded with suspicion. Individual films were critically successful, but for the most part noir in the forties was unappreciated; the crime film trend of the period had to wait some three decades before its full richness began to be savored.

  Film noir erupted in full creative force during a comparatively concentrated period. In an early and influential article, “Notes on Film Noir” (1972), Paul Schrader places its outer limits from The Maltese Falcon in 1941 to Touch of Evil in 1958. In a more strict dating, Amir Karimi, in Toward a Definition of the American Film Noir, limits the period from 1941 to 1949. Later critics suggest that the true heyday of noir lasted only a few years, from Wilder’s Double Indemnity in 1944 to the same director’s Sunset Boulevard in 1950. But the long-range view, with noir extending from the early forties to the late fifties, is the most sensible, for the crime films of this period are noticeably different in theme and style and mood from those made before or after.

  Films noirs share a vision and sensibility, indicated by their echoing titles: No Way Out, Detour, Street with No Name, Scarlet Street, Panic in the Streets, The Naked City, Cry of the City, The Dark Past, The Dark Corner, The Dark Mirror, Night and the City, Phenix City Story, They Live By Night, The Black Angel, The Window, Rear Window, The Woman in the Window, D.O.A., Kiss of Death, Killer’s Kiss, The Killing, The Big Sleep, Murder My Sweet, Caught, The Narrow Margin, Edge of Doom, Ruthless, Possessed, Jeopardy. These wonderfully evocative titles conjure up a dark, urban world of neurotic entrapment leading to delirium. The repetition of key words (street, city, dark, death, murder) and things (windows and mirrors) points up the thematic and tonal similarities among the films.

  Just as noir is a subdivision within the American crime film, so there are several offshoots within what Raymond Durgnat has called “the family tree of film noir.” In a delirious article (written in 1970), Durgnat kneads and twists noir like a sculptor playing with putty. His fancy critical juggling yields eleven sub-categories within noir. Durgnat’s eleven story types can be conflated to three basic patterns: stories about cool private eyes; flailing victims; and hard-core criminals. Certainly all three basic character types can and do appear within a single film, but one of these characters dominates the action and in turn influences the style of the film. The dramas with private eyes as their heroes are cooler than the ones that focus on characters whose lives are coming apart. In its brief history, noir changes its focus, mood, and visual style, as its point of view shifts from objective to subjective and its decor slides from studio stylization to location realism.

  Looking at The Maltese Falcon and Touch of Evil, the two films frequently cited as forming the outer limits of the cycle, suggests some general tendencies about its thematic and stylistic evolution. The Maltese Falcon is directed by John Huston in a sedate manner, with only occasional low angles and theatrical lighting to call attention to the oddness of the characters. The focus of the action is on a private eye, the now-legendary Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart), as he investigates the murder of his partner Miles Archer and searches for the mysterious, priceless, and finally ineffable falcon. Spade is a cool character, and the film for the most part maintains his wary, questioning point of view. Spade regards the crooks (played by Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre, those droll masters of menace) with scornful disbelief, and he keeps his distance from the lady in the case (Mary Astor) as well. He never entirely capitulates to the allure of Brigid O’Shaughnessy, the first of a long line of calculating beauties in movie mysteries, a skillful and dangerous liar. His basic integrity remaining intact, Spade then keeps at arm’s length from crime and from designing women; and Huston’s sly, understated direction provides the appropriate field within which Spade can conduct his inquiries.

  Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil, about a psychotic law enforcement officer in a Mexican border town, is pitched in an altogether different key, the quiet chiaroscuro and occasional oblique angles of The Maltese Falcon inflected to baroque proportions. Welles offers an overheated summary of what were by 1958 the conventions of the noir style. A looming, restless, hyperactive camera, a barrage of tilted, disfiguring angles, complex and self-infatuated patterns of shadows, exotic settings—the film explodes as a series of visual fireworks, the syntax of noir slashed and then reconstructed as if for the last time. Unlike Huston, Welles never leaves well enough alone, is never content merely to serve the needs of his story. If Welles exploded Shakespeare in his wild and woolly film versions of Othello and Macbeth, he was certainly not about to stand quietly to the side in his direction of a pulp crime novel.

  The difference between the two films is emblematic of general shifts in the treatment of crime subjects. Coming at the beginning of a cycle, and presenting character types (the private eye, the crafty heroine, the comic opera villains) which were fresh if not exactly original, The Maltese Falcon did not have to rely on visual pyrotechnics in order to sustain audience interest. If the film represents an early, relatively straightforward depiction of characters and a story pattern that were to become noir conventions, then Touch of Evil can be seen as the last, brilliant flourishes of noir’s decadence. Welles’ baroque and masterly orchestration of effects stands in sharp counterpoint to Huston’s measured rhythm. In a general way, the two films indicate an overall development within the noir canon from objective to subjective accounts of crime, as Sam Spade’s cool outsider’s view of the criminal scene is replaced by the agitated viewpoint of the crackpot sheriff who dominates the later film.

  Richard Widmark, in Night and the City: a beleaguered noir anti-hero, on the cover of Borde and Chaumeton’s pioneer 1955 study of film noir.

  The city at night, with its darkened skyscrapers and a row of blinking neon lights at the bottom of architectural canyons,provided a recurrent backdrop for noir title sequences.(The credits here are for Cry of the City. )

  As noir shifts its focus from the investigator who makes skeptical forays into criminal settings to the feverish criminals hopelessly entangled in webs of crime, its tone grows noticeably darker, more menacing and unsettled. The change of emphasis from the investigator to the criminal cannot be traced in a neat chronological curve, but in general noir heats up, gets crazier, toward the latter part of the 1
940s. The films present the world as an increasingly unsafe place. In the postwar period many thrillers were about neurotic characters lured into a world of crime; victims and good men gone wrong, they are not hardened criminals who willfully set themselves up in opposition to society. Rather, they are often middle-class family men; steady, likable fellows who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, tricked by a twist of fate, seduced by the promise of sex or the chance to make quick illegal money. Standing between the cynical investigator and the committed criminal, the noir victim is the most interesting and most original of the genre’s anti-heroes, the ideal patsy for the world view that is at the core of noir. Like the protagonists of Double Indemnity and Scarlet Street, this luckless recurrent character type walks a tightrope across a landscape strewn with traps ready to spring at the slightest misstep, the smallest detour. ‘The world is a dangerous place’ is one of the axioms of noir—and it is especially so for the man who has lived according to the rules. The solid bourgeois is a prime target, his straight and narrow virtue an invitation to downfall, a thin shield against churning inner dissatisfactions. No one is immune from the tempations of sex and money, noir says—and the seemingly mundane characters, the ones living small, repressed, outwardly conventional lives, like the ripe victims of Double Indemnity and Scarlet Street, are the most susceptible of all.