The Dark Side of the Screen: Film Noir

by Foster Hirsch

  The gloomy, fatalistic vision, the intoxication with breakdown, of the Expressionist artists, was translated into German films during their so-called Golden Age, which began in the late teens and extended to the end of the silent period. Countering the mimetic tradition that dominated American silents, the German Expressionist dramas were set in claustrophobic studio-created environments where physical reality was distorted. Stories about the loss or the impossibility of individual freedom dominated the “haunted screen” (as Lotte Eisner calls it in her brilliant study of the Expressionist film). Images of death, of a relentless fate, and of the divided soul appeared with insistent repetition. To convey their dark themes, the films developed a distinct visual vocabulary consisting primarily of chiaroscuro and distortions of time and space. Mood (stimmung) was all-important, as the films’ shadow-filled, artificial settings and theatrical high-contrast lighting, which dramatically divided the image into criss-crossing shafts of light and dark, gave intense visual expression to the negative stories. Space in the high German Expressionist film is fractured into an assortment of unstable, zigzagging, splintery lines, of spinning circles and twisted angles. The conflicting shapes and patterns of movement convey restlessness, chaos, as if the physical world has assumed the dementia of the bewitched characters.

  The most famous film in the full Expressionist style is The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919), which is set in a hallucinatory landscape, a crazy quilt of anti-naturalistic shapes and angles. Vertical lines form visual prisons, slanting in ways that entrap the characters; horizontal lines swerve in haphazard directions in a mad mockery of the laws of gravity. This lopsided world is revealed at the end to be an imaginary one—the ravings of a madman—but the film-makers slipped (intentionally perhaps) because the sets remain Expressionist even after the narrator has been discredited as a lunatic. The film thus offers no normal world to oppose to that of the insane asylum in which the inmate relates his story to a friend, as both the inner story and its frame share the same disfigured and nightmarish setting.

  The inner story, about how Dr. Caligari trains a somnambulist to commit a series of murders, is one of personality takeover. In his provocative reading of German films, From Caligari to Hitler, Siegfried Kracauer suggests that the Caligari figure is symptomatic of a thrust in German society toward the need for a tyrant. Kracauer makes a remarkably convincing case for Caligari and his somnambulist as premonitions of Hitler’s relation to the German people: in Kracauer’s interpretation, Caligari is a madman-tyrant whose ability to control the minds and actions of others leads to massive moral as well as social perversion. For Kracauer, the authority-crazed Caligari, and the weak-willed, puppet-like somnambulist, committing crimes in his sleep, prefigure aspects of the Nazi mentality that was to infect Germany.

  Dr. Caligari feeds Cesare, his somnambulist; Cesare in a trance, in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, the grimly prophetic Expressionist thriller, a madman’s nightmare enacted in distorted, symbolic settings.

  The child-murderer (Peter Lorre) trapped in a warehouse, in Lang’s M. As indicated in this shot, Lang’s decor has overtones of Expressionist distortion and paranoia.

  Later Expressionist films, for the most part, do not distort the real world to the degree that The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari does. Many of the dramas are set in an approximation of reality that is then invaded by Expressionist elements. In such representative films as Murnau’s The Last Laugh (1924) and Fritz Lang’s M (1931), Expressionist subjectivity is reserved for climactic passages where the protagonists recoil in humiliation and defeat. In both films, the central characters are marginal, collapsing figures. The “hero” of The Last Laugh is a hotel porter, proud of his rank, who is demoted, because of his advanced age, from doorman to lowly lavatory attendant. As he descends to his new position, the film takes on darker tones; as the character sinks in self-esteem, the city seems to tower above him, its thrusting spires mocking his fall. The court where he lives, and where he had enjoyed a privileged place, becomes a sea of cruel laughing faces, cackling like a set of macabre masks in an Ensor carnival. Shapes, objects, perspective, begin to shift and dissolve in a taunting dance. In the man’s visions, the revolving door of the hotel that had been the center of his life now appears as a gigantic totem, whirling in mockery of his downfall.

  The protagonist of M is a murderer of children in flight from groups of criminals and police who are determined to capture him. As his pursuers track him down, the city streets become increasingly shadowed and solitary. As in Murnau’s film, the Expressionist tendencies of Lang’s mise en scène are emblematic of an internal reality; the dark streets, the abandoned storage area where the haunted man takes refuge, the frames within the frame that seem to box the character into corners, all reflect the child murderer’s mounting agitation.

  These early Expressionist films, with their tormented protagonists in flight from an alien society, and their stylized urban settings, exerted a deep influence on the subject matter as well as the visual temper of the American film noir. Expressionist motifs filtered into film noir, in diluted but nonetheless significant ways, because the German style offered an appropriate iconography for the dark vision of the forties thriller and also because a number of German directors fled to Hollywood from a nightmare society, bringing with them the special sensibility that permeated their early work. Adjusted to the taste of American producers and their audiences, Expressionist elements in noir are more muted than those in the German films. The world of noir is not distorted to the degree that it is in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. A recognizable physical reality dominates the noir thriller, as it does throughout the American cinema, but the films contain an undercurrent of Expressionist motifs that functions as a kind of visual italics, supplying mood and texture and removing the stories from a merely bland, everyday context.

  In moments of tension, noir dramas crawl with shadows. The image darkens to indicate sudden fear, to suggest that the characters are about to be attacked or to crack up. A consistent vestige of Expressionism throughout noir is the nightmare sequence, where for a few moments, under the protection of a dream interlude, the film becomes overtly subjective, entering into the hero’s consciousness to portray its disordered fragments. One of the earliest and best of these Expressionist nightmares occurs in Murder, My Sweet (1944), where a short sequence dramatizes Marlowe’s drug-induced delirium.

  “Starring You and Robert Montgomery”: Hollywood’s half-hearted Expressionism. The ad for Lady in the Lake calls attention to the film’s visual gimmick of using the camera as Philip Marlowe’s eye, a diminished version of Expressionist subjectivity.

  The sequence is composed of objects, characters, and places that have appeared as part of the realistic “furniture” of the story, and which in the hero’s nightmare spin crazily and haphazardly in space. The fragmented, free-floating images of the dream symbolize Marlowe’s drug-induced mania, and their disorder, their violation of reality, can therefore be explained as his temporary hallucination. An American thriller can accommodate Expressionist distortion at this pitch in short spurts only.

  The Expressionist emphasis on subjective experience is likewise of only limited use in an American film. The noir thrillers often carry a first-person narration, a device retained from the crime novels of the tough guy school. But the point of view of the images is seldom first-person, and certainly not in the same way as in the deeply Expressionist paintings and films, where the “I” that views the scene is manifestly neurotic, unstable, approaching if not actively embracing a kind of demented ecstasy. The hard-boiled narrator strives to be objective, to divest himself of exactly the kind of private and visionary slant sought by the Expressionists. In films, at any rate, a first-person point of view is bound to look like a gimmick, a self-conscious departure from the camera’s observing, recording function, its predisposition to witness the scene rather than to create it. Films, and certainly major studio American films, gravitate toward a neutral rendering of a recognizable physical r
eality rather than toward the delirious inner landscapes, the overwrought transmutations, of full-fledged Expressionism. Subjective experience in noir is for the most part limited to the interpolated dream sequence or to the visual trick of using the camera as the eye of a central character, as in Robert Montgomery’s awkward Lady in the Lake, the opening section of Dark Passage, and in isolated climactic moments in many thrillers, where the image blurs or dissolves into wavy patterns to suggest a character’s loss of consciousness or his derangement or sudden terror. In Lady in the Lake, the camera “stands in” for Philip Marlowe, while the other characters look directly into the lens, on the pretext that they are talking to him. The device is strained, and not at all a rendering of the kind of subjective experience the Expressionists had in mind.

  In The Night of the Hunter, Charles Laughton used Expressionist design in a more forthright way than was usual for most American films. In selected passages, Laughton employs non-realistic space and a heightened chiaroscuro that are overtly Germanic. This story of a preacher crazed by greed who terrorizes a widow and her children is shot through with daring stylistic changes. At key moments, as the preacher pursues the children through rural landscapes, the film becomes as stylized as a German Expressionist drama of fate. Retreating from the real world in which most of the action is set, these scenes seem to be taking place on a vast sound stage, where real time and space have been suspended. Laughton favors dramatic silhouettes, with the preacher outlined in black against a blank horizon. The disorienting close-ups in these passages, the prominence of objects, the extreme chiaroscuro, the angularity, the clean, sharp compositions, enclose the action in a timeless and dream like ambience. A scene in which the children float on a raft is surely the most lyrical use of Expressionism in the American cinema. The modulations from realism to theatricality lend the film a strange and ethereal quality, one that seemed at the time (1955)—and would seem so now—to cut across the grain of American film-making. Laughton’s great work may well be the most visually experimental, and certainly the most intensely Expressionist, of all American films noirs; but The Night of the Hunter was so decisive a financial failure that Laughton never got another chance to direct. Though this particular film contains a greater amount of Germanic stylization than most American thrillers, the level of visual inflection that prevailed in noir was in fact unusually high: the films have a special mood and aura, a tenebrous, minatory atmosphere, that perhaps lend them a touch of “something foreign” and that certainly sets them apart from standard major studio realism.

  As influential as German Expressionism in forging the noir style was the homegrown gangster story that had flourished, in various permutations, throughout the previous decade. Like the later noir thriller, the gangster saga took place in an urban setting, involved criminal activity, and ended in the defeat of the anti-social protagonist. But the gangster story, reflecting different social conditions, had a different tone than the forties’ film noir. During the Depression, the gangster emerged as both a living presence—his activities chronicled in the news—and as a folk hero. As a fictional character, the gangster was strikingly different from the typical film noir anti-hero. The gangster may ultimately have been defeated by the system (the censors saw to it that his story was, in the final reel at least, a reminder that crime does not pay, no matter how attractive its temporary rewards) ; but the gangster, especially as embodied by such charismatic actors as James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson, was a figure of vitality and enterprise, a man who carved for himself a life of glamor and power that offered vicarious satisfaction to thwarted Depression audiences. The noir protagonist is etched in a different mold—resolutely small-scale, unheroic, defeatist. He is, typically, a knotted, introspective character, cowering in the corner in flight from his crime, or else hopelessly entangled in the aftermath of his ill-considered actions. The fates may also be against the gangster, but he reacts heroically rather than with the fear and trembling that is characteristic of the noir criminal.

  Full-blown Hollywood Expressionism: Robert Mitchum, as the preacher in Charles Laughton’s Night of the Hunter, which is closer in spirit and visual design to the German Expressionist films than any other noir thriller.

  The gangster’s essential energy was engrained in the staccato rhythm in which his story was told. The thirties gangster film moved at a clipped pace, its colloquial dialogue snapped out in a rat-tat-tat beat. Little Caesar and Scarface had brute force as they hacked their way up the ranks of the underworld. They were dumb but nervy and stubborn, and their drive was rewarded with all the trappings of bourgeois success. In their hunger for money and power, they are less alienated from the American mainstream than the introverted characters of noir, who usually want to escape from themselves and from a past which continues to haunt them. The gangster, on the other hand, is a public figure who craves fame and recognition.

  The prevailing tone of the gangster story, then, is more upbeat than that of noir. In its unique way, the typical gangster saga is something of a celebration of self-assertiveness, whereas noir focuses on stories of doom and withdrawal. Cagney and Robinson challenge the world; the noir hero wants mostly to be left alone. The neon sign that blinks on and off outside the window of Scarface’s apartment, proclaiming that “The World Is Yours,” is an ironic counterpoint to the action, especially at the end as the bullet-ridden thug lies sprawled in the gutter. But the sign is also something that Scarface truly believed in, the creed that sustained him. As a motto for a character in noir, “The World Is Yours” would only be seen as a mockery; no character in noir who knows the score would believe it for a minute.

  The three archetypal gangsters—Little Caesar, Tom Powers (The Public Enemy), and Scarface—were all in some way sexually wounded or incomplete. Little Caesar (Edward G. Robinson) had no time for women and seemed capable of an emotional commitment only to his hometown friend and partner, Joe. Tom Powers (James Cagney), in his most characteristic gesture, smashes a grapefruit in Mae Clarke’s face. Tom can relate to women only as mother figures or as whores. Scarface (Paul Muni) has an incestuous attachment to his sister. In each case, acting in a kind of blind obedience to powerful inner forces, the characters never confront their problems. The films all suggest, though, that there is something fearfully—fatally—wrong with the gang lords, and that in some way their climb to power is generated by displaced sexual energy.

  But the classic gangster stories are not psychological case studies in the way that many noir films attempt to be. With their craggy looks and their harsh voices, Cagney and Robinson certainly suggested that Little Caesar and Tom Powers were not average or normal; both actors perform with an intensity that at least hints at the characters’ psychopathic maladjustments. But the films are concerned primarily with the gangsters’ public functions, their notoriety as public figures, rather than with their twisted psychology. In most of the films, the gangsters are figures in society, rather than isolated outside it.

  The gangster story is a social drama, set in a specific place and time: the American big city, typically either New York or Chicago, during the Prohibition-Depression era. Representing an aggressive native response to adversity, making capitalistic profit out of national misfortune, the gangster grew out of the social conditions of his time. When Prohibition was repealed, the gangster lost his chief means of livelihood, and both as a movie icon and a folkloric hero, he began to fade.

  Shadows, bannisters, prison-like bars, chiaroscuro: Expressionist motifs in thirties crime dramas. Edward G. Robinson, in Little Caesar; George Raft, in the 1935 version of Dashiell Hammett’s The Glass Key.

  The city in the thirties gangster story is not quite the same city that appears in film noir. With its documentary shots of city streets, and its sense of the pulse and flow of city life, the prologue to The Public Enemy is unusual, for most gangster films are confined to interiors—studio sets built to imitate reality. In Little Caesar and Scarface, the city is glimpsed mostly through windows. The gangster dram
a is enacted against immutable settings: the tenement kitchen and bedroom; the backroom meeting place with its pool table and naked overhanging light, and the inevitable blinking neon sign outside that gives evidence of an ongoing life beyond the circumference of the story; the ritzy apartment, done up in white, that indicates the gangster has arrived ; the classy art deco night club; the neighborhood saloon, with its long lonely stretch of bar. There are usually one or two street scenes, a row of glum brownstones, a downtown avenue seen through the plate glass windows of a restaurant (sure to be shattered in a sudden shootout). These studio settings are conventionalized, and for the most part, interchangeable. The city in the gangster story doesn’t have the heightened presence that it does in many of the noir thrillers; it tends to be a neutral background, often lively, but tending toward an inconspicuous realism rather than an Expressionistic theatricality. Although the lighting is occasionally chiaroscuro, as in the finale to Scarface where the pursued hero has locked himself and his sister behind steel shutters, the visual texture of the gangster movie is flatter and less self-conscious than in noir. For the most part, the three leading directors of the classic gangster dramas—Mervyn LeRoy, Howard Hawks, and William Wellman—were working in a style of straightforward American realism, which was as direct and as economical as the narrative structure of their films.

  The thirties gangsters were in some way sexually and emotionally damaged; (below) Little Caesar has an unhealthy, controlling attitude toward his hometown friend Joe (Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.); (opposite, top) Scarface (Paul Muni) has an incestuous attachment to his sister (Ann Dvorak); (opposite, bottom) Tom Powers (James Cagney), the Public Enemy, smashes a grapefruit into the face of his mistress (Mae Clarke), in a now-legendary gesture that indicates the character’s scorn for women.