The Dark Side of the Screen: Film Noir

by Foster Hirsch

  The Lost Weekend and Ace in the Hole blend film noir with social drama. The former is perhaps the most renowned of films about alcoholism; the latter is a fierce indictment of the sleazy practices of yellow journalism. Double Indemnity tells an archetypal noir story of passion and murder that contains a sly attack on American greed, as money rather than romance is the lure for the film’s two conspirators. Wilder’s stern disapproval of them makes them seem even nastier than the general run of noir villains. He treats their moral failings as representative of a generalized social condition—the film is a parable of American materialism gone sour.

  Sunset Boulevard transfers noir psychology to a novel setting, the decaying mansion of a once-grand film star. Wilder’s portrait of the megalomaniacal Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson) is etched in acid; she is the embodiment of Hollywood’s rotting foundations, its terminal narcissism, its isolation from reality. When Wilder returned, nearly thirty years later, in Fedora, to another study of a legendary screen star (the real-life model for Fedora was clearly Greta Garbo), his tone had softened; to Fedora, whose fate is equally as monstrous as that of Norma Desmond, he extended a measure of compassion. Set in lush Mediterranean villas, and filled with glowing sunlight, Fedora is a film noir en couleur. Like its famous forebear, it concerns the extortionate cost of fame, the crumbling of illusion, the depleting dependence of egocentric stars on their fawning public. In both films Wilder attacks the fabrications and deceits of the Hollywood system—biting the hand that feeds him, so to speak. But Fedora is a gentler film, the lingering backward look of an older man, himself a Hollywood monument, on the industry of illusion in which he has worked for more than half a century. Fedora has a generosity toward its protagonist that Wilder withholds from all his high noir characters, and certainly from Norma Desmond, the ultimate spider woman, a grotesque hibernating behind closed shutters in a swoon of alcohol and self-deception.

  Hollywood, alcoholism, yellow journalism, the greed of the upwardly mobile American middle class—Wilder’s noir pieces are themati-cally ambitious, employing noir atmosphere to make cynical social statements. Since the fifties Wilder’s work has retained the moralistic thrust of his earliest American work. He has remained a fierce satirist, excoriating people he disapproves of for the satirist’s traditional purposes of correction and reform. Certainly Wilder has not been known for his amiability; his best work is hard, snappish, edged with stabbing humor. Although his later comedies echo the harsh tones of his films noirs, and although they are made with unfaltering control, for the most part they lack the visual elegance that distinguished his thrillers. Comedies like The Apartment or One, Two, Three are not much to look at. Their style is contained in the wit and the staccato pace of the dialogue (Wilder collaborates on most of his scripts with I.A.L. Diamond) and of the performers (James Cagney, Arlene Francis, Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine).

  A typically cool shot from Otto Preminger’s elegant Laura (Gene Tierney and Dana Andrews).

  Preminger’s later work diverges even more markedly than Wilder’s from his noir origins. Of the four major emigre directors who earned their reputations in America in noir, Preminger’s track record with the genre is by far the weakest. No Preminger noir has the authority of Double Indemnity, the concentrated power of The Woman in the Window, or the ominous atmosphere of Phantom Lady. Preminger’s most successful noir, Laura, is nonetheless an elegant thriller, ripe with perverse sexual overtones, whereas his other genre entries—the lacklustre Fallen Angel, Angel Face, and Where the Sidewalk Ends—are disappointing. Preminger works best in an altogether different register. On such big films as Exodus, Hurry Sundown, and Advise and Consent (which have massive subjects like war, politics, religion, the founding of a modern nation), Preminger has a smooth, sweeping, and sometimes even majestic style. Compared to the flowing epic rhythm of Exodus, with its roving camera, its striking wide screen compositions and its handling of crowd scenes, a small-scale film noir by Preminger looks stiff. Preminger is most comfortable when his camera can explore wide open spaces as opposed to poking around a cramped noir environment; he thrives on the expansiveness and the essential objectivity of the epic frame. Preminger does, however, have a dryness and irony that serve noir well, and he has contributed two films that rate a high place in the genre’s pantheon: Laura, one of the most popular thrillers of the forties; and an effective suspense drama, made long after noir’s heyday, the 1965 Bunny Lake Is Missing.

  Laura is a cool piece of work, silken, remote, perhaps the most posh of all films noirs. From the opening shot, as the camera tracks discreetly through the swanky Manhattan penthouse of man-about-town Waldo Lydecker, the film has a powerful atmosphere of repressed sexuality. (Laura is set in the haut monde to which Preminger returns in his underrated Bonjour Tristesse—boredom and sexual dalliance among the rich attract him.) Except for Laura, the characters are unsavory. The twisted, possessive Waldo, who kills Laura (or thinks he kills her; that the victim is the wrong woman is the story’s famous plot twist) because he fears he is losing her, is one of noir’s great psychopaths. The crazed Pygmalion to Laura’s Galatea, Waldo is played by Clifton Webb as an effete aristocrat. Whether consciously or not, Webb gives the character homosexual overtones, so that his obsession with Laura seems not entirely convincing, as if it’s a cover-up.

  Vincent Price plays a kept man, and like Webb, the actor has a prissy quality. The two of them seem like old-fashioned gay types, confirming in their bitchiness and superciliousness stereotyped popular notions of homosexual behavior. Their sexual uncertainty is here protected to some extent by the fashionable setting, as if the film-makers were counting on audiences’ assumptions about how rich men are supposed to act. Price and Webb have some sharp exchanges; their tones are well-matched, which makes them a more likely pairing than Webb with Laura, or than Price with Laura’s high society friend, played by Judith Anderson. Anderson’s masculine presence completes the tone of sexual ambiguity that runs through the film. Playing a grande dame who keeps attractive young men, Anderson brings to the part her own natural assertiveness. Her deep authoritative voice emphasizes the character’s dominating qualities, and her attempted control of Price echoes Waldo’s “creation” of Laura. But her interest in Laura, while remaining implicit, is more convincing than her nominal attraction to the Price character.

  The only “straight” characters are Laura and the detective (Dana Andrews) who investigates her “death.” Even here there is an unhealthy undertone, as the detective is bewitched by Laura’s portrait. He falls in love with a dead woman, or a woman he presumes is dead. Dead, she becomes an image of his ideal woman; alive, she is a person with a will of her own, and his enchantment diminishes.

  The film’s themes of sexual transference and obsession are presented obliquely, giving the drama a stealthy undercurrent. Preminger treats the loaded material quietly, in a matter-of-fact way. His fanciest touch is the visual linkage he makes between the detective and Laura’s portrait, which hangs over the fireplace in her living room. Preminger works in a detached style, his camera for the most part maintaining a neutral distance from the actors. The film’s uninflected visual manner parallels the dry, reined-in performances: Gene Tierney and Dana Andrews look and sound like sleepwalkers; Clifton Webb, Vincent Price, and Judith Anderson introduce homosexual tints on the sly.

  Except for the Chicago milieu in The Man with the Golden Arm, Preminger does not return to a noir mood until Bunny Lake Is Missing, which has all the razzle-dazzle, the visual high jinks, that he avoided in Laura. In this later thriller, Preminger uses the sweeping camera work he had developed for his epic subjects. The film is filled with visual bric-a-brac: an active camera, peering into corners and trundling through doors and up and down stairs; bizarre angles, and lighting from below which throws disfiguring shadows onto faces. A thriller about a missing little girl, who may or may not exist, the film is crammed with eccentrics: Martita Hunt as a daffy schoolmistress, Noel Coward as a surpassingly seedy landlord, and C
arol Lynley and Keir Dullea—the Veronica Lake and Alan Ladd of the sixties—as the mysterious, icy-looking brother and sister who seem to have misplaced Bunny Lake. The only sane character in sight is the droll inspector, played by Laurence Olivier. The film has a dotty sense of humor that at times seems to betray the noir genre. It is both cranky and grandiose, and in its visual openness and fluency it indicates Preminger’s essential discomfort with the claustrophobic style that dominated the forties cycle.

  Glacial Carol Lynley and Keir Dullea, in Preminger’s striking post-noir film noir, Bunny Lake is Missing.

  Orson Welles and his cinematographer Gregg Toland, on the set of Citizen Kane.

  Noir intersected the careers of several major American directors. Some of these, starting out in the forties, did their strongest work in the noir mold; others went on to other kinds of films, retaining elements of style developed during their noir apprenticeship. In visual style and thematic concerns, noir had a strong impact on a wide range of American directors, from Orson Welles, Stanley Kubrick, Joseph Losey, Elia Kazan, Jules Dassin and Don Siegel to cult figures such as Nicholas Ray, Sam Fuller, Joseph H. Lewis and Phil Karlson. Although their work varies in quality, all of these directors have interesting and unusual temperaments; they are powerful visual stylists whose essentially dark sensibilities are well suited to noir’s brooding themes.

  Of this roster of notable names, Orson Welles made the greatest contribution to noir stylistics. Welles’ connection to noir, like his connection to virtually everything else in the history of American film, is that of bold innovator rather than intelligent follower. He is the only American director whose contribution to noir equals that of the German expatriates. Among its many other claims to landmark status, Citizen Kane also exerted an enormous influence on both the visual and narrative patterns which were to coalesce into the recognizable noir style.

  Released in 1941, Citizen Kane appears at the head of the noir cycle, in the same year as The Maltese Falcon. Perhaps it, rather than Huston’s thriller, should be considered the primal Americanfilm noir. Kane, of course, is not a crime film and thus stands apart from noir in this important respect; but in the way it tells its story, as well as in its visual idiom, the film contains many of the crucial elements that were to define noir technique. With its journalist assuming the role of the investigating detective, and its quest for the meaning of Rosebud substituting for the whodunit motif of the traditional murder thriller, Kane is constructed like a mystery. The film’s splintered structure—the divergent points of view of the people whom the journalist interviews, the interweaving of past and present, the series of flashbacks—anticipates the narrative labyrinths of many of the richest films noirs. And the film’s celebrated compositions, in which the frame is divided into fragments of light and shadow, also clearly point toward noir. Kane was the first major American film steeped in the shadowy universe of the German Expressionists; like the Germans’, Welles’ infatuation with theatrical lighting is used to indicate the mysteries of personality: the film’s shadows corroborate Kane’s inner darkness. Welles’ delight in exaggerated angles—the famous low angle shots which distort the characters’ appearance—also became a standard part of noir syntax.

  Although Kane is a titanic figure, a man of destiny, he is often placed within the frame in such a way as to suggest confinement and limitation. Low angle shots, which magnify Kane’s physical stature (even in his twenties, Welles was of Falstaffian proportions), also contain ceilings which seem to weigh down on the character and to diminish him. Cutting him down to size, the low ceilings provide an ironic counterpoint to Kane’s dominant personality. In the cavernous rooms of his mansion, the character is overwhelmed by his environment, framed by a door in the rear of the image, for instance, as if he is a wax figure on display. Welles’ careful placement of all his actors within the frame restricts their freedom; they seem to move only at the director’s bidding, and the orchestration, together with the pervasive images of visual entrapment, gives the film the claustrophobic quality of the noir thrillers that follow.

  Meticulous Wellesian composition: deep focus, balance, Germanic lighting. (Ruth Warrick, Ray Collins, Dorothy Comingore, and Orson Welles, in Citizen Kane.)

  Many elements of Welles’ mise en scène in Citizen Kane—such as low angles with ceilings and high contrastlighting—became regular features of the noir style.

  Welles is clearly indebted to German Expressionism, but he avoids its extreme stylization, eliminating abstract settings, exaggerated acting, and nightmarish distensions of time and space. More stylized than the average American film—than any major studio American film up to this time—Kane is not a dream film, altogether remote from a recognizable world. Welles is careful to balance Expressionist elements with techniques such as depth of field, the long take, and overlapping dialogue which enforce a sense of reality.

  When Welles later made films that were clearly in the noir vein, he was returning to a style his own seminal work had helped to forge. Thus, The Lady from Shanghai in 1947 and Touch of Evil eleven years later are unmistakably by the same man who had directed Citizen Kane. These two full-fledged noir dramas fall short of Kane, but Welles treats them in the same bravura style. Welles used a noir style for nearly everything he worked on, refracting both Kafka and Shakespeare, for instance, through a noir prism. His versions of The Trial, and of Macbeth and Othello, have the feel of film noir in their calculated imagery of nightmare and entrapment, their delirious angles, their bizarre settings and circumambient shadows.

  Welles is the most exuberant of all directors drawn to noir. Temperamentally, he sits at the opposite end of the noir spectrum from Fritz Lang. But his work shares many similarities with Lang’s. Welles has a nostalgic streak, a longing for an idyllic past (a prominent motif in both Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons) that the dour Lang does not reveal; but beneath the sentimental echoes and the stylistic pyrotechnics, Welles’ vision is as dark as Lang’s. Welles is drawn to powerful and power-seeking figures like Kane, Macbeth, Mr. Arkadin, the sheriff in Touch of Evil. But his men of destiny are ultimately defeated by destiny, cut down by the very excesses of personality that elevated them to positions of power. Kane ends up a hollow, defeated man, alone in his fortress, yearning for a long-vanished innocence, and puzzled about the meaning of his accomplishment. The character’s dissolution is vividly shown in the scene where he walks through his castle in a daze, after his second wife has left him, his stooped frame reflected in a huge mirror in an infinitely regressive series of images. None of Welles’ larger-than-life heroes survives. Like most noir protagonists, they are overwhelmed by a combination of forces, their own deficiencies of character magnified by the impact of a battering and merciless fate.

  Welles’ vision is as doom-ridden as Lang’s. Almost the only “happy” ending in Welles’ work is the one in The Lady from Shanghai, where the narrator, who has been victimized by a beautiful woman, escapes with his life. Surely it is no accident that this one character of Welles’ who survives is the most modest and gentle protagonist in the Welles canon, the one character who does not challenge the order of the universe.

  In visual style, Welles is certainly more athletic and extroverted than Lang, but both directors control reality, shaping it to their own pre-ordained aims. Sharply curtailing the randomness of the real world, both men adopt a stance of God-like omnipotence over the worlds they mold on film. The pre-eminent American director of noir, Welles is the most flamboyant of noir stylists. But beneath the self-intoxication of his celebrated bravura manner, he is transfixed by themes of despair and defeat.

  Welles continued to use low angle compositions throughout his career, as evidenced in this shot. (Tony Perkins and Madeleine Robinson, in The Trial.)

  A Welles deep focus shot. (Charlton Heston and Welles, in Touch of Evil.)

  Dassin, Losey, Ray, and Kazan began their careers in the late forties after the revolutionary visual and narrative style of Citizen Kane had been fully absorbe
d by noir. Losey and Dassin reversed the history of the German directors by becoming expatriates. To escape the blacklist, Losey settled in England; Dassin moved from France to Greece. Except for brief visits, neither has returned to America. Losey achieved his greatest success in his collaborations with Harold Pinter, Dassin his greatest notoriety (though not his highest achievement) in his films with his wife, Melina Mercouri. Unaffected by the blacklist (Kazan was a cooperative witness), Kazan and Ray remained in Hollywood. Noir was an ideal testing ground for all four directors, and the variety of their offerings, both texturally and thematically, is decisive proof against the argument that films noirs are all alike.

  Ray and Losey served their apprenticeship at RKO, a studio particularly receptive to noir films. Both made a number of movies, in the late forties and early fifties, which were either fully or marginally noir—odd, personal pieces that announced their stubborn and non-conformist temperaments. The two strong-willed men adjusted the noir idiom to their own ends, offering variations on what had become, by 1947—the year of their debut as film directors—generic conventions.

  Ray’s two most notable dark films, They Live By Night and On Dangerous Ground, defy traditional noir motifs. Both films are shot through with a sentimentality and romanticism that represent a daring reversal of the characteristic noir tone. The close-up of the two lovers which opens They Live By Night, and the lush musical theme are radical departures from the urban vistas with their thrusting skyscrapers blazing in the night sky and the cacophonous jazz that customarily announce the film noir. Ray’s fugitive lovers are fragile and less neurotic than the usual couple-on-the-run: compare Ray’s outlaws to the psychopathic couple in Gun Crazy. Ray’s characters really care for each other, and an undercurrent throughout the film is the suggestion that Bowie (Farley Granger) and Keechie (Cathy O‘Donnell) would be an ideal average pair if only Bowie had not been born to a life of crime. Scenes of the two dancing at a nightclub, walking in the park, celebrating Keechie’s pregnancy, and the last, lingering close-up on Keechie, recording her stunned reaction to Bowie’s death, have a strongly sentimental flavor. The film’s bittersweet, rueful tone, which sets it apart from any other noir drama, is supported by shrewd casting. Farley Granger and Cathy O’Donnell do not fit the noir stereotypes of hardened criminal and tough moll; they are young innocents caught, as the opening states, in a world they did not create. They are adrift in alien territory. Bowie is obviously ill-suited to a life of crime, even though that is the only kind of life he has known; and Keechie is drawn into his world because of her feelings for him. They are too weak to break out of the mold that has been set for them by their elders. Granger’s fresh-faced, juvenile lead ingenuousness, ironically at odds with the cut-throat gang leader the newspapers and radio bulletins report him to be, and O’Donnell’s sweetness and stillness, make them unique outlaws in the crime film canon.