The Dark Side of the Screen: Film Noir

by Foster Hirsch

  Noir operates only within the confines of a small black-and-white screen, and therefore directors such as George Stevens, David Lean, D. W. Griffith and Cecil B. DeMille, who have an essentially epic vision and who favor large-scale stories set in vast natural landscapes, would never have attempted any hard-core films noirs even if their careers had intersected noir’s heyday. Directors for whom length and magnitude release their greatest strengths could obviously not be comfortable within noir’s constricted frame. Noir may well be the most unromantic and unsentimental of American film genres, and so directors with a basically open, generous, romantic temperament, with a benign view of the world—humanists like Ford and Renoir—could hardly thrive on the genre’s bitter diet of cynicism and defeat. During Renoir’s Hollywood period, working at RKO, a studio that specialized in dark films, he did try a piece in the noir vein, with predictably strained results. The Woman on the Beach is a flat and visually threadbare melodrama. It is possible that a director like Lang could have transformed its familiar elements—an unfaithful wife, a psychotically jealous husband, a studio-built seaside setting—into an atmospheric psychological thriller. There is no chance in the film for the constantly tracking camera, the elegant and complex deep focus, and the long takes of Renoir’s masterpiece, The Rules of the Game. Forced to contract rather than to expand space, Renoir works in a minimalist style, with neutral medium shots and conventional angle-reverse angle cutting that are clearly uncongenial to him. The result is patchy, thin, curiously remote: a great director in alien territory.

  Howard Hawks, Raoul Walsh, and Max Ophuls—other directors unsuited to noir—produced films which are more successful than The Woman on the Beach but which nevertheless show signs of strain. Hawks and Walsh, Hollywood’s ultimate he-man directors, are more comfortable on the range than within the parameters of the noir city. For these two gregarious personalities, noir is too internalized and neurotic. Yet working against the grain, Hawks made The Big Sleep and Walsh White Heat, two of the most popular crime films of the decade.

  Hawks is surely among the most proficient of studio directors; on assignment, he has worked in most of the major genres, acquitting himself professionally in westerns (Red River), screwball comedy (His Girl Friday, Ball of Fire), gangster stories (Scarface), even musicals (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes) and epics (the visually exciting Land of the Pharaohs). His one entry in the noir canon is a dead-pan classic, a cool, safe rendition of Raymond Chandler’s intricate mystery story. Perhaps Hawks worked well in so many different areas because his “style”—a succession of neutral camera set-ups, flat lighting, conventional continuity cutting—is so unobtrusive. In its determined flatfootedness, The Big Sleep is almost an anti-noir, a display of impersonal Hollywood craftsmanship. Hawks is sure of his effects, he is skillful in handling his actors (he wisely places Bogart and Bacall at the center of the film), but The Big Sleep has no genuine feeling for the genre’s possibilities.

  Walsh’s natural expansiveness is also uncomfortable with noir, though White Heat is a stronger piece than the overrated Big Sleep. Walsh’s style is more open and direct than is usual for the genre; his pace is faster, his framing sidesteps customary noir claustrophobia, and he responds more warmly to his characters than a true noir director like Lang would. Certainly Cagney’s crackpot gangster has more verve and expresses more feeling than the typical noir somnambulist.

  Probably Ophuls’ The Reckless Moment is the most successful noir made by a director at temperamental odds with the genre. In films like Madame de ... and Lola Montes—stories about the rules of the game in high society—Ophuls was noted for the swirling, encircling movement, the wonderful darting rhythms of his camera. But Ophuls’ craning, tracking, gliding, pirouetting movement, which would seem to suggest freedom and expansiveness, had an effect quite the opposite: the ceaselessly moving camera suggests time in its flight and underlines the impermanence of feelings and relationships as well as the inability of the characters to escape their pre-ordained fate. In his own way, that is, Ophuls was always as concerned with themes of entrapment as the directors of noir. For The Reckless Moment, a story about an average American matron’s attempts against terrific obstacles to preserve her averageness, Ophuls changes his characteristic camera movement: there are no visual arabesques in this American film noir, no graceful, flowing rhythms. The film is choreographed in straight lines. Going downtown to challenge her daughter’s no-good boyfriend, or meeting clandestinely with the blackmailer she almost falls in love with, the brisk heroine (Joan Bennett) moves in a direct, straight-ahead way, from her house to her car, from country to town, walking up and down stairs, charging “manfully” through doors and corridors. Ophuls’ camera imitates the woman’s movement, and the film is designed as a virtually uninterrupted series of lateral tracking shots, with not a single echo of the curlicues and twirls that defined Ophuls’ celebrated mise en scéne for his stories of European sensuality. To portray this competent, no-nonsense American bourgeoise, Ophuls strips his work of its characteristic lushness.

  Noir attracted directors noted, then, not for their warmth and rich painterly style but for their irony and distance, their unromantic tough-mindedness. And it is no surprise therefore that the best noir directors were German or Austrian expatriates who shared a world view that was shaped by their bitter personal experience of living in and then escaping from a nation that had lost its mind.

  The group of expatriate directors who were to become the masters of the noir style began their careers during the heyday of the German Expressionist film, and they naturally brought to their American assignments a predilection for chiaroscuro and for stories in which brooding and solitary characters struggle against hopeless odds. (German art of the twentieth century, long before Hitler, was steeped in morbid subject matter, in themes of madness and death.) Their doom-ridden sensibility, partly a matter of artistic training and experience, partly perhaps an engrained national characteristic, found an appropriate outlet in the crime films that developed into a Hollywood cycle in the immediate postwar period. The directors share a cynical view of human nature; good characters in their films are often presented as weak, unknowing, and defenseless against a pervasive corruption. In exile from a world gone mad, they are drawn to stories about man’s uncertain fate, and about psychological obsession and derangement. The morbid, defeatist tendency of their work is checked, however, by an ironic humor: these Germanic directors have a mordant wit, a rich sense of life’s potential for black comedy.

  Their interest in emotional and social collapse is presented in a style notable for its glacial detachment. Noir at its most typical is not a wild-and-woolly attempt to dramatize the pitfalls and detours of its hapless characters; the people in the films may go mad, but the style in which their disintegration is recorded remains neutral. Noir attracts directors whose rigorously controlled and methodical work eliminates any chance for randomnesss, improvisation, spontaneous give-and-take. A vivid moment from Robert Siodmak’s Phantom Lady indicates the kind of directorial calculation that is standard for the genre. The heroine follows a man onto an elevated train platform; she is tailing him to try to elicit evidence that will exonerate her boss from the charge of murdering his wife. As she stands on the platform, trying to conceal herself in shadow, a heavy black woman crosses in front of her, the resounding click-clack of the woman’s heels causing the heroine to shudder. Coming from the outside world, from a reality that transpires beyond the frame of the story, the black woman does not, however, validate that external world; she is not introduced into the film for verisimilitude but to heighten tension, and her sudden appearance is as pre-planned, as precisely timed, as every other aspect of the film’s action. This is a small gesture, to be sure, but a memorable one—a quintessential moment of noir contrivance, in which a passing stranger is conscripted into the film’s fabric of calculated effects.

  The stories of noir are like bad dreams, but the directors treat the events like someone else’s nightmare, presentin
g personal apocalypse with deadly impassivity. Noir directors oversee their stories with Olympian detachment, for the most part watching pitilessly as lives unravel. The directors mean to unsettle the audience, to make it aware of its own vulnerability, but they are not interested in arousing conventional audience sympathy. There are no tears infilm noir.

  Of the four major Germanic directors of noir—Fritz Lang, Robert Siodmak, Billy Wilder, and Otto Preminger—Lang is the most consistently incisive. In temperament, he is the quintessential noir stylist, and from Manhunt in 1941 to Beyond a Reasonable Doubt in 1956, he contributed more well-crafted titles to the canon than any other director. Lang’s earlier German films, ranging in style from the extreme ornamentation of Die Niebelungen and Metropolis to the muted texture of M, were constructed in the studio; and in all his work of this period, decor was molded to express the mood of the characters and the theme. Evoking the child murderer’s paranoia and isolation, the studio-built city in M is a created environment of buildings, uncannily deserted streets, menacing storefront window displays, and a deathly silence pierced by occasional off-screen car horns and the heavily muffled sound of unseen traffic. The film’s city is thus merely a faint echo of a real city.

  Lang’s work in America during the thirties continued to anticipate film noir. Directing for major studios, at a time when the studio’s mass marketing methods were supremely powerful, Lang necessarily had to subdue his Expressionist tendencies. No American outfit would permit him to turn out a film as remote from the daily life of the audience as Die Niebelungen or even M. In dramas like Fury and You Only Live Once, Lang’s style was noticeably chastened—the films certainly had a more earthbound look than his symbolic pieces for UFA—though they retained a distinct aura of Germanic gloom. Regardless of where he was working, Lang’s output over a period of almost forty years reveals a remarkable visual and thematic continuity.

  The director’s noir titles—The Ministry of Fear, The Woman in the Window, Scarlet Street, Human Desire, The Big Heat, Beyond a Reasonable Doubt are a representative sampling—share strong thematic parallels. All concern victims of fate. From the hero of The Ministry of Fear, released from a mental institution and stumbling innocently into a network of spies, to the policeman in The Big Heat, who infiltrates the gang that killed his wife, the Langian hero is a marked man, hurled into a maze from which he struggles to escape.

  A Lang film opens typically with a chance encounter—the hapless characters played by Edward G. Robinson meeting deceptive women in Scarlet Street and The Woman in the Window, Ray Milland in The Ministry of Fear walking into a fair and deciding to have his fortune told. Thrown into a dilemma of nightmarish proportions, he discovers a secret self, one containing unexpected possibilities. (The theme of the hidden or unexplored self, a favorite subject of German Expressionist films, continued to fascinate Lang throughout his career.) Lang’s typical American heroes are seemingly average men who become deranged under the pressure of extraordinary circumstances. As he sets out to avenge his wife’s brutal murder, the policeman in The Big Heat is unhinged. Taunted by a beautiful woman who pretends to be his mistress, the meek Christopher Cross in Scarlet Street proves capable of murder. Sedate Professor Wanley in The Woman in the Window begins to act like a shrewd criminal as he protects himself from the consequences of a murder he committed in self-defense.

  Lang’s response to his victims is one of detachment laced with a grim sardonic humor. He treats his characters like figurines, to be moved about according to the demands of his calculated master plan. His characters are specimens to be scrutinized and laughed at, rather than people with whom to sympathize.

  Lang’s deliberate pacing, his deep irony, and his interest in characters thwarted by fate, remain continuing facets of his work while his visual design undergoes progressive simplification, from the heavily decorative Expressionism of the twenties to the spare selective Hollywood realism of the fifties. Lang’s Hollywood work is gradually subdued to the point where Exprcssionist inflection and abstraction sound but a faint echo. The real world is seldom admitted into the director’s canvas, and where it is, in the few location sequences in his films (such as the train yard in Human Desire), it is subtly transformed into an environment bristling with terror. No matter what the dominant visual style of his work may be, then, Lang never loosens his grip.

  Most of Fritz Lang’s films are set in the studio, where the director has maximum control over all elements of the mise en scène; but even when Lang, on rare occasion, ventures into the real world, as in this shot from Human Desire (with Glenn Ford and Gloria Grahame), he presents reality with distinctly Expressionist overtones.

  In temperament, thematic interest and design, Lang is the pre-eminent noir director; but he never enjoyed the full Hollywood success of his compatriots Billy Wilder and Otto Preminger, who earned high reputations within the studio system, turning out films in a variety of styles that were commercially and often artistically successful. Lang seemed to be working more and more within the B category (Human Desire was released at the bottom of double bills), but in the long run his reputation has proved to be higher and more enduring than either Wilder’s or Preminger’s. All three directors, however, have received the kind of acknowledgment that Robert Siodmak, whose career parallels theirs, has not. At the end of the forties, after the initial phase of the noir cycle had ebbed, Siodmak had trouble finding work, and he returned to his native Germany, only rarely to be heard from again, and then with uncharacteristic film projects like Custer of the West. Was Siodmak so closely identified with film noir that he was unemployable once the genre had more or less run its course? From 1944 to 1949, in a remarkably brief span of time, he made nine memorable films noirs: Phantom Lady, Christmas Holiday, The Suspect, The Dark Mirror, The Spiral Staircase, Criss Cross, The Killers, Cry of the City and The File on Thelma Jordan.

  Siodmak’s work is notable for its physical and psychological compression; his characters, typically, are boxed into corners. The films have an edgy atmosphere, with less of Lang’s directorial absoluteness and with a more flamboyant use of Germanic lighting and of Expressionistic transformations of physical reality. Some of the visual set-pieces in Siodmak are more striking than anything Lang would be likely to admit into his noir palette: the famous scene in the jazz club in Phantom Lady, for instance, where the extreme angles, sharp editing, and harsh lighting seem to be visual translations of the agitated music, and the climactic scene in Christmas Holiday, designed in the purest chiaroscuro, where the insane husband tries to kill his loyal masochistic wife. Lang’s work is remarkable for its poise and detachment, its deadly irony; Siodmak’s is at once less detached, and (except for The Suspect) less comic. Siodmak’s visual range is greater than Lang’s, the mood of his dramas generally more high-strung. Lang’s stories are told in a linear fashion that parallels his simplified visual methods, whereas Siodmak films like Christmas Holiday and The Killers have an extremely intricate narrative development, their stories told in a series of fragmentary flashbacks, like boxes within boxes. In Siodmak, the past is often a maze that has to be penetrated, its mysteries uncovered only gradually, by means of a complex web of intersecting viewpoints.

  The relative extremeness of Siodmak’s style is reflected in his obsessive characters. The theme song of Cry of the City is “Never”; that of Christmas Holiday, “Always,” warbled by a torch singer (Deanna Durbin) in love with a man (Gene Kelly) who has done her wrong. “Always” is an appropriate song for other Siodmak characters, too—like Swede in The Killers, for instance, who gives up after the woman he loves double-crosses him. Both these characters embrace their feelings of betrayal and abandonment, luxuriating in their bitterness. They don’t want, or know how, to let go.

  Sometimes, as in Phantom Lady or Cry of the City, the persistence of a Siodmak character leads to a positive outcome. In Phantom Lady, a secretary secretly enamored of her boss is determined to prove that he did not kill his wife, a crime for which he has been arrested. Sh
e sets out into the night-time city to track down the phantom lady, the nameless woman with whom her boss was out on the town the night his wife was killed. Showing the stubbornness that infects most of Siodmak’s characters, she moves ahead, donning a variety of masks, until she establishes her boss’s innocence. In Cry of the City, a police lieutenant (Victor Mature) is determined to convict a wily criminal (Richard Conte) who is skillful in escaping his net. Relentless in his pursuit, the lieutenant, as Colin McArthur notes in Underworld USA, “hunts his quarry with an almost metaphysical hatred.”

  Siodmak’s characters are nurtured by their obsessions. Their single-mindedness, their fierce grip on a hopeless love, give them a purpose and an identity; they desperately need their martyrdom to a usually lost cause.

  Siodmak lets in more of the outside world than Lang does. Both Cry of the City and Criss Cross use real city streets as backgrounds; in both, there is a sense of a real city’s tempo (New York in Cry of the City, Los Angeles in Criss Cross). Siodmak’s cities, like his characters, seethe with unrest, promising imminent explosion.

  Unlike Lang or Siodmak, Billy Wilder and Otto Preminger went on from their work infilm noir to achieve true Hollywood celebrity. Both directors have enjoyed long, successful careers. After their early noir efforts, both turned, in the fifties and sixties, to other genres, Wilder to cynical, bittersweet comedies, Preminger to expensive epics. In his satires of American values and manners (The Apartment; One, Two, Three; Kiss Me Stupid; The Fortune Cookie), there are traces of Wilder’s noir origins; in Preminger’s elegantly constructed epics (Exodus, In Harm’s Way, The Cardinal), there are virtually none.

  Wilder’s noir dramas contain the biting social comment, the stinging disapproval of the American way, that was to become his trademark. Double Indemnity, The Lost Weekend, Sunset Boulevard, and Ace in the Hole are all thrillers with a public focus. Lang and Siodmak concentrated on their characters; Wilder places his characters in a larger and more closely defined social context. His dramas are designed to make a telling social point, in a way that the claustrophobic work of Lang or Siodmak is not. Wilder sets out to attack his characters, setting them up, like the moralist he is, only in order to flay them for their shortcomings.