As a storytelling mold, the gangster saga proved much less versatile than film noir. As it traced the hero’s rise and inevitable fall, each gangster story was essentially the same story. The narrative format became so quickly a matter of formula that the genre lasted only a few years. By the mid-thirties, Cagney and Robinson switched to the other side of the law, and by the late thirties, the gangster and his world were subjected to parody in such films as Brother Orchid and A Slight Case of Murder. The remarkably brief life of the gangster picture may have been partly a matter of social realities, since the repeal of Prohibition removed the gangster’s dependence on bootleg liquor and, as a result, the kind of underworld society depicted in Little Caesar was a matter of historical record by the end of the decade. In 1939, Raoul Walsh’s Roaring Twenties provided a retrospective and nostalgic look at the gangster milieu; the film’s elegiac tone, epitomized by Cagney’s bravura death on the snow-covered steps of a church, was in sharp contrast to the unsentimental “high” gangster dramas of the early thirties.
Gangsters figure marginally in film noir, appearing as the central characters in only a few films, such as White Heat and Key Largo, which are themselves only marginally noir. In White Heat the gangster is played by Cagney; in Key Largo by Robinson. The casting certainly suggests a retrospective quality, yet the two stars are not simply offering a reprise, in the late forties, of the kind of performance that made them famous almost two decades earlier. In these two powerful films, Cagney and Robinson are playing diseased characters who have none of the enormous personal vitality of Little Caesar or Tom Powers. Like many of the protagonists of films more centrally connected to the noir tradition, their characters project mental and physical unhealthiness. Cagney’s mobster has epileptic fits; Robinson’s is the victim of uncontrollable shakes, and in each case physical disability indicates emotional paralysis: Cagney is tied to his mother, in what is probably the most perverse Oedipal relationship in the American cinema, while Robinson is a master sadist who takes special pleasure in humiliating his alcoholic mistress. Significantly, the underworld background in both films differs from that of the thirties crime dramas. Key Largo is set in Florida, on a remote island; the nervous, jagged movements of the gang in While Heat indicate that they are no longer a settled part of the American big city but are peripheral figures always on the run, hiding out in highway motels and mountain cabins. The settings are different because the gangsters are anachronisms, no longer supported by the rigid, hierarchical community that was shaped by the Depression-Prohibition era.
Played to the hilt by Cagney and Robinson as madmen floundering for survival, the gangster protagonists of these late films clearly lack the heroic thrust of their thirties counterparts. Cagney’s intense performance as the bedeviled, mother-wrapped gang boss in White Heat may well be his greatest; the role offers him richer opportunities than the formularized gangsters of the thirties. The scene in which Cagney cracks up, when in prison he hears of his mother’s death, is one of the bravura moments in American movies—no one who has seen it can ever forget it. At the end of White Heat, in a spectacular apotheosis, Cagney is blown up on the top of a gas tank.
Key Largo also has overtones that the original gangster stories downplayed. In Maxwell Anderson’s heavy-handed script, the gangsters are treated symbolically. Though they may also have been interpreted as American icons, as upside-down incarnations of the American Dream, the thirties gangsters were primarily individuals, whereas Anderson’s thugs are symbols of evil who must be destroyed in order to preserve democracy. After Humphrey Bogart, playing the film’s reluctant hero-savior, mows them all down, his girlfriend (Lauren Bacall) opens the windows of the dim hotel in which most of the action has been set, to let in a flood of holy, cleansing light.
The nightclub hold-up, in Little Caesar. Like saloons in westerns, and like empty streets in film noir, nightclubs were among the visual fixtures of the gangster drama.
In both these noir stories of gangsters, the relationship between the hoodlums and the straight characters is different from what it was in the thirties. The one-to-one connection between the kingpin mobster and the cop who’s intent on capturing him no longer applies. In White Heat, computers, recording devices, and an array of technical gadgetry assist the police in tracking down the gang—police detection is now something of a corporate undertaking. In Little Caesar, the policeman is a fierce antagonist, obsessed with nabbing Rico. In White Heat, the cop is in disguise, masquerading as Cagney’s friend as he infiltrates the gang. His devious and dishonorable methods (Edmund O’Brien in a thankless role) contribute to the cynicism that pervades the film; the relationships in the old gangster dramas, both within the gang and between the hoods and the law, had a directness that is nowhere in evidence here. Psychotic and introverted, the gangster then survives into the noir period as a marginal relic, supplanted by the private eye and the bourgeois who slips into crime—characters distinctly less grand than the gangster in his prime.
As Expressionist motifs supplied noir’s dark undercurrents, the Neo-Realist influence that appeared after the war introduced a documentary flavor into American thrillers. Quite unlike Expressionist artists, Neo-Realist directors intended not to distort or to refract reality but simply (though this is never a simple matter) to present it. The Italian directors associated with the Neo-Realist movement—Rossellini, De Sica, Visconti—turned to contemporary events for their material, using the camera as a neutral recording device. Their goal was to capture a sense of the flow of reality, and such landmark films as Open City, Paisan, Shoeshine, La terra trema, Bicycle Thief, and Umberto D were notable for their absence of stylistic flourish. The grainy quality of their images, the natural lighting and location photography, the frames packed with the background movement of the city, the uninflected camerawork and editing, the performers who seemed like (and often were) real people rather than actors, the scrupulous avoidance of aesthetic effects—these elements gave the stories of contemporary social realities a special force and freshness. In American films, the Neo-Realist influence was registered in an increase in location shooting, in documentary-like narration, and in a straightforward, utilitarian technique noticeably different from the Expressionistic noir thriller. The first crime films in the new semi-documentary style, The House on 92nd Street (1945) and Call Northside 777 (1948), were produced by Louis de Rochemont, who transferred to fiction films the pace and texture that had marked his popular March of Time newsreels. In de Rochemont’s films, sunlit, real city streets replaced the murky, artificial nightworld of the archetypal Fritz Lang films noirs. And instead of probing neurotic characters, the realistic policiers emphasized the process of detection. In The House on 92nd Street, a Nazi conspiracy is uncovered; in Call Northside 777, a journalist’s tireless investigation saves the life of a man condemned to die for a crime he did not commit. Their style external and objective, the films move at an unbroken rhythm, containing few of the tonal or psychological shifts of the original noir dramas.
Anna Magnani, in Open City, one of the pioneer Neo-Realist dramas. The loose, seemingly spontaneous quality of this shot, along with the grainy photography, the natural lighting and the use of location settings, epitomizes the documentary look of the Neo-Realist films. Below: The visual textures of the Italian movies filtered into noir in semi-documentary thrillers such as Call Northside 777 which, as the shot here (with James Stewart) indicates, avoided the studied, theatrical style of the Expressionist-inspired films noirs.
Moving crime into the real world and away from the tormented victims who dominated its early phase, the Neo-Realist influence modified the direction of noir. The central characters of the semi-documentary thrillers are staunch law enforcement officers, defenders and protectors of the status quo, who are less interesting than the damned figures in classic noir pieces like Double Indemnity and The Woman in the Window. Films on the order of Call Northside 777 reduce the twisted characters, who are starred in Expressionist noir thrillers, to colorful but
decidedly supporting roles.
Neo-Realism was really no help to noir. In its most provocative and absorbing form noir inhabits a twilight zone shakily suspended between reality and nightmare; it thrives on and indeed requires spatial as well as psychological dislocations, whereas the tendency of Neo-Realism is toward simplicity, directness, reportorial accuracy. Noir’s richest offerings are oblique, deliriously slanted—anything, in short, but clear and direct. In opening the labyrinthine underground of urban crime and of the criminal mentality to the fully waking, daily world, in moving crime into real city streets at high noon, the semi-documentary thriller lacked the impact and originality, the special charged atmosphere, of noir’s shadowy closed world. But fortunately, the Neo-Realist influence did not at any point entirely overtake the genre’s Expressionist tendencies ; and in many films in the late forties and early fifties (Panic in the Streets, Side Street, The Naked City, D.O.A., The Window, Night and the City), Expressionist motifs invaded location shooting, transforming the real city into moody echoes of the claustrophobic studio-created urban landscapes.
Italian Neo-Realism and the American hard-boiled school, however, do share a stance of presenting things as they are; both modes strive for a cool, unshockable tone. Similar elements between the two styles are revealed in Ossessione, Visconti’s adaptation in 1943 of Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice. Visconti presents Cain’s sordid story of illicit sex and murder in a stark manner; the film’s objective Neo-Realist technique complements Cain’s stripped-down, hard-boiled prose. Visconti’s camera watches with unblinking detachment as the characters meet their ironic fates. The film’s relentless pacing, its grim location settings to which the passionate peasant characters seem inextricably bound, its rigorously unadorned style, match Cain’s tough guy posture. As it filtered into the American crime film, though, Neo-Realist objectivity and toughness are less stylized than the hard-boiled manner of the Spade-Marlowe variety, and contained a social consciousness that the boys in the back room never aimed for. Visconti’s film indicates that a Neo-Realist approach can complement a story of noir criminality; but by and large Neo-Realist tendencies did not provide a fertile background against which to “play” noir tensions.
Parallel shots from two versions of The Postman Always Rings Twice. Visconti’s Neo-Realist Ossessione (with MassimoGirotti and Clara Calamai) has a true hard-boiled flavor, whereas the Lana Turner-John Garfield Hollywood adaptation is too polite.
Steamy Cain sexuality: Jack Nicholson and Jessica Lange, in Bob Rafelson’s simmering 1981 version of The Postman Always Rings Twice.
Lost in the maze: Rita Hayworth and Everett Sloane, in The Lady from Shanghai.
4
The Crazy Mirror:
Noir Stylistics
Noir has been called a “sensibility,” a sub-category of the crime film, a species of psychological thriller, a mystery with a private eye as its hero; but it has not often been called a genre. Its diverse story possibilities and its assimilation of several literary, artistic, and cinematic traditions have prompted critics to see it as an amorphous form, too loose and wide-ranging to be discussed in terms of genre. “Film noir is not a genre,” writes Paul Schrader in “Notes on Film Noir.” “It is not defined, as are the western and gangster genres, by conventions of setting and conflict, but rather by the more subtle qualities of tone and mood.” “Film noir is not a genre, as the western or gangster film is,” agrees Raymond Durgnat in “The Family Tree of Film Noir,” “and takes us into the realms of classification by motif and tone.” Durgnat parcels noir out among eleven thematic subheadings: 1) crime as social criticism; 2) gangsters; 3) on the run; 4) private eyes and adventurers; 5) middle class murder; 6) portraits and doubles; 7) sexual pathology; 8) psychopaths; 9) hostages to fortune; 10) blacks and reds; 11) guignol, horror, fantasy. For all its idiosyncrasy, Durgnat’s tree metaphor is apt, as noir indeed has many branches—but its array of character types and themes does not surely disqualify it from being a full-fledged genre.
A genre, after all, is determined by conventions of narrative structure, characterization, theme, and visual design, of just the sort that noir offers in abundance. Noir deals with criminal activity, from a variety of perspectives, in a general mood of dislocation and bleakness which earned the style its name. Unified by a dominant tone and sensibility, the noir canon constitutes a distinct style of film-making; but it also conforms to genre requirements since it operates within a set of narrative and visual conventions. Reviewers in the forties responded to the thrillers as something new in American movie-making, and spotted recurrent storytelling elements and visual motifs. Noir tells its stories in a particular way, and in a particular visual style. The repeated use of narrative and visual structures which soon became conventional, depending on a shared acknowledgment between the film-makers and the audience, certainly qualifies noir as a genre, one that is in fact as heavily coded as the western.
The typical noir story, to begin with, differs markedly from the Depression-era crime dramas. The gangster saga was simply told, in a headlong, straightforward manner, with the gangster himself remaining at the center of the frame. Film noir introduces a narrative method that, by contrast, is sinuous, oblique, often deliberately confusing. The gangster films never intended to puzzle their audiences; narrative or even moral ambiguity was not part of their repertoire, since the film-makers claimed they were fashioning simple, powerful statements to promote the idea that Crime Does Not Pay. The gangster film was really comforting to audiences of the time, in a way that noir certainly was not. On the one hand, audiences in the thirties could revel vicariously in the gangsters’ exploits, enjoying the spectacle of the gangster challenging and for a time beating the system; and, on the other hand, the audience could be assured, with the gangster’s inevitable demise in the final reel, that his illegal and violent methods really did not—and could not—work.
Noir offers no such comfort. It is impossible to derive from its dark stories either a sense of momentary uplift or the moralistic conclusions provided by the gangster picture. The ideal metaphor for the world view that prevails in noir is the maze-like, many-mirrored fun house which Welles uses at the end of The Lady from Shanghai: the noir world is as filled with deception as Welles’ bizarre set, and the multiple mirrored reflections of the film’s duplicitous husband and wife are equally representative of the uncertain, shifting identities, the essential mysteriousness of personality, of an entire cross-section of noir characters. In the gangster drama, motivation and identity were fixed matters; if a character was playing a role (like Edward G. Robinson as a racket-buster posing as a gang member in Bullets or Ballots), we were let in on the deception. Characters in noir often assume several identities, and we are rarely alerted to their masquerades; we have to “read” a character through a thicket of contradictory clues.
The elusiveness and ambiguity that mark noir characterization, the cunning masquerades, the skillful performances that often frustrate the unwary anti-heroes, are all underlined by the genre’s use of plots of labyrinthine complexity. Noir stories are often designed to stump the viewer. And they are presented, typically, in a non-chronological order. In a fractured time sequence, as flashbacks intersect present action, characters try to reconstruct the past, combing it for clues, facts, answers. “The past is a foreign country,” says the narrator of L.P. Hartley’s exquisite novel about time remembered, The Go-Between; “they do things differently there”—a truth which the fevered investigations into the past in noir bear out. In the noir thriller, time past retains its mysteries.
A representative example of the complex treatment of time in film noir, and of the pressure the past exerts on the present, is The Killers, an intelligent expansion of Hemingway’s short story about a man who passively submits to his own death when two hired gunmen, like evil emissaries from his shrouded past, hunt him down in a small-town rooming house. Although Hemingway offers no explanation for the character’s almost indifferent embrace of death, the fil
m attempts to unravel the intriguing mystery of his submission. The search into the dead character’s past is conducted by a dogged insurance investigator whose only clue is an insurance policy that the murder victim left to a clean-up lady in an Atlantic City motel. The investigator learns that Swede left the woman the policy because she prevented him from killing himself after his girlfriend walked out on him. From this single biographical detail, the claims man begins to penetrate the character’s history. From a series of fragmentary interviews, he discovers that Swede was a boxer who fell in with a gang and who then took the rap for a woman. After serving his jail sentence, Swede returned to his old cronies at the time they were planning a big payroll heist. But his old girlfriend Kitty causes trouble for Swede once again, setting him up as the decoy in a double double-cross. Kitty runs off with the money and with the boss, making it appear that it was Swede who swindled them all. Shattered by her duplicity, Swede retreats from his criminal life, hiding out in a small town where he works at a gas station, lives in a dim furnished room, and eats every night at the same diner (where the film opens as Swede’s executioners, hired by the gang boss, await his arrival).
The fun-house mirror shattered, at the climax of The Lady From Shanghai: the characters’ masquerade is over. (Everett Sloane, as the oily Mr. Bannister.)
The Dark Side of the Screen: Film Noir Page 9
