The Dark Side of the Screen: Film Noir

by Foster Hirsch

  The careers of Joseph H. Lewis and Phil Karlson do not exhibit the same consistency or the same stubborn individuality as Fuller’s. Neither managed entirely to overcome the burdens of shoddy formula scripts, or to forge a strong personal style, until noir assignments offered them visual and thematic challenges. Lewis’s breakthrough came in 1946, with the distinctly lower-case but visually arresting So Dark the Night; Karlson’s, in the fifties, with Kansas City Confidential and The Phenix City Story.

  So Dark the Night is an ideal example of the opportunities for visual expressiveness which noir offers. The film is about a high-powered detective forced by his boss to take a vacation. Trouble follows the detective. A young woman he meets during his country holiday is murdered, and the detective launches a characteristically intense investigation. Early on, we realize that he is looking for himself. Lewis presents this absorbing but hardly unusual study of schizophrenia with a calculated visual design, the character’s psychological schism telegraphed through a series of mirror shots and reflections as well as a consistent frames-within-the-frame motif. Space is broken up by doors, windows, beams, railings, bars, low ceilings. Visually trapped within the image, the detective never occupies space that is open and clear; he is pushed into the frame, photographed behind windows and doors, as space seems to close in on him. This sense of encumbrance is magnified as he comes closer to confronting his doubleness. The way Lewis presents a tormented, self-divided character is certainly not original, but it reveals a genuine flair for telling a story through visual means.

  Mise en scene in the films of Joseph H. Lewis emphasizes the physical entrapment of his characters: Nina Foch framed behind a barred window, in My Name is Julia Ross; Peggy Cummins and John Dall, at the rear of a claustrophobic diner with slanted walls that seem to be closing in on them, in Gun Crazy (opposite).

  More adaptable than Fuller, Lewis shifts his own style to accommodate the style of his characters and their setting. The detective in So Dark the Night, on the surface, is sedate and implacable, a man of absolutely sober deportment; and the film’s own measured manner echoes the character’s. The fugitive couple in Gun Crazy have a very different rhythm. The woman, who goads the man into a life of crime, is wildly impulsive, forever on the run; to capture her essential spirit, Lewis adopts a more expansive style than the one he used for the earlier film. He gives Gun Crazy a nervous, jagged movement.

  After Gun Crazy, the flexible director returned to routine B work, where he remained for the rest of his career. Lewis clearly lacks Fuller’s scrappy individuality, but he certainly knew how to enhance underdone scripts. And when, for once in his career, with Gun Crazy, he was given a script that demanded little directorial embroidery, he made a true genre classic in an unforced, masterly style.

  Phil Karlson had somewhat better luck than Lewis. He began in the same bottom-rung position, forced to churn out a string of commodity entertainments. He served an undistinguished apprenticeship until, with Kansas City Confidential in 1952, he stepped out of the factory line-up to show the kind of directorial presence of which cults are made. Karlson’s noir style, unlike Fuller’s or Lewis’s, has documentary overtones; he works best on exposes of criminal corruption (Phenix City Story, Walking Tall) which pretend to a kind of cinematic journalism in their hard-headed, crusading manner. Phenix City Story begins, unforgettably, with a series of interviews by Los Angeles newscaster Clete Roberts with real people who experienced the crime wave that inundated their town. The interviews give the film the stamp of journalistic immediacy. In his strongest dramas, Karlson’s style is crisp, alert, seemingly objective. As he has risen in the studio ranks, though, Karlson has eliminated a knottiness that gave his pieces of the fifties an added jolt. Made on an A budget, Walking Tall is a smoother and much less force-full portrait of mob rule than Phenix City Story. Both films reflect Karlson’s right-wing belief in countering violence with greater violence. Like Fuller, he is a true political reactionary who responds to crime as a stain on the American landscape. Karlson has a vigilante mentality. In Phenix City Story, he creates an environment of true horror in which decent family people are victimized by a ruthless, anonymous mob force. Karlson constructs such a powerful case against the syndicate that the unleashing of vigilante ferocity seems an inevitable and even defensible reaction.

  Don Siegel’s career parallels Karlson’s, but his promotion from B to A status, with a string of hits starring Clint Eastwood, has proven more decisive and enduring. Like Karlson, Siegel has untied the knots from his style as he has moved up in the studio hierarchy. In early films like Riot in Cell Block 11 and The Lineup, Siegel was a nervy and self-conscious stylist; in later films like Escape from Alcatraz he is an immaculate craftsman turning out smooth popular thrillers. The Lineup is a fast-paced action drama, with one of the great noir psychopaths as its central character, the amoral idiotic killer named Dancer (played by Eli Wallach with a wicked gleam in his eye). Siegel has retained his interest in psychotic characters (as in the brilliant and underrated The Beguiled, in which Clint Eastwood is a wounded Confederate soldier held prisoner in a house of hysterical women). But the gothic traces in his work, and the attraction to bizarre personalities, have been steadily reduced as Siegel has become a more bankable director. It is no accident that poker-faced, tight-lipped Clint Eastwood, the hard-boiled hero of the seventies, is Siegel’s favorite actor. In his archetypal role as Dirty Harry, Eastwood is a cop who flaunts the law in order to conquer evil; the character thus fulfills the vigilante urge announced in Karlson’s work with more efficiency than any Karlson hero would be likely to manage. In concentrating on Dirty Harry and his successors, Siegel shifted his focus from the psychotic noir villain to the figure of the loner cop who also lives on the edges of society but who is working nonetheless to uphold rather than to subvert its structure.

  Eastwood is a good film actor who communicates through a minimum of means and who invariably plays private characters. “What was your childhood like?” asks a fellow inmate of the Eastwood loner in Escape from Alcatraz. “Short,” he snaps back with characteristic terseness. Eastwood is a man of few words and much action. Over the years he has refined his style in a way that matches Siegel’s-both work now with absolute assurance and economy. Their collaboration is probably the closest equivalent in current Hollywood film-making to the hard-boiled style of the forties. Both Siegel and Eastwood have the kind of control, the leanness, the self-consciously masculine pose that Hemingway and other writers and performers of the tough guy school were aiming for. Siegel’s A budget crime dramas in color (Madigan, Dirty Harry, The Killers, Coogan’s Bluff) represent an updating of noir, though they have a visual smoothness that was never a part of the forties cycle. Siegel’s eye for the eccentric detail which transforms reality (as in The Lineup) all but disappears in the blandly rendered location settings of his recent work. As he has gained in status and technical assurance, Siegel has become a less flavorful director than he was in the beginning of his career, when he made tough, energetic, lopsided stories of dangerous loners.

  Among directors who “rose” from noir to prestige projects, Stanley Kubrick made the most astounding leap. His early thrillers—Killer’s Kiss (1955) and The Killing (1956)—are so self-consciously steeped in noir conventions that they look like an anthology of genre stylistics.

  The Killing, a brilliantly paced story about a racetrack robbery, is the work of a professional filmmaker; Killer’s Kiss, that of a talented amateur. In story and visual style, the latter is almost a parody of noir motifs. Its down-and-out hero is a boxer (that recurrent occupation of the noir loner) who becomes involved with a woman who lives across the courtyard. She is trying to break away from her psychopathically jealous lover, who tries to kill the hero—but the lover’s henchmen corner the wrong man. The film concludes with the obligatory chase through off-beat urban settings. Clearly derived from other movies rather than from life, Killer’s Kiss has a ready-made, hand-me-down quality.

  Visually if not
thematically, the film is rewarding. With the eye of a born film-maker, Kubrick effectively captures an atmosphere of urban seediness. The film’s settings are carefully chosen: a shabby Bronx apartment house where the hero and heroine peer at each other through their facing windows, a smoky gym where the boxer trains, a dance hall where the heroine works, a bizarre mannikin factory where a climactic fight is staged, the old Pennsylvania station where the film begins and ends. True to noir tradition, the story begins at the end, and is told in a flashback, with the beleaguered hero serving as the narrator of his own downfall. Kubrick’s settings and mise en scéne reinforce the aura of defeat that trails the down-at-heels hero as the director frames his character through windows or places him against the intricate, prison-like architectural details of the old Penn Station.

  Don Siegel graduated from low-budget thrillers like The Lineup (Eli Wallach, with gun, on an unfinished highway in San Francisco) to A budget projects like Dirty Harry (Clint Eastwood and Andy Robinson) which retain remnants of the director’s original noir style.

  The schizophrenic Hitchcock criminal: Robert Walker, at home, and (below), about to commit murder, in Strangers on a Train.

  Regardless of genre, all the director’s later films have the kind of control, the manipulation of reality, that is typical of the noir thriller—his work remains as calculated as his two early crime dramas. 2001: A Space Odyssey, his greatest achievement, is a long way from the small-scale canvas of noir, but it shares with noir a bleak vision of human destiny, a sense of man as the victim of forces he is unable to control, and a style of complete detachment. Both the theme and the style of 2001 stress preordainment : Kubrick’s commanding control is as absolute as the monolith’s power over human destiny.

  Noir proved an appropriate training ground for Kubrick. And in the classically immature and embryonic Killer’s Kiss, Kubrick’s essential qualities are on full display: his interest in enclosure and entrapment, as a visual style and as a theme; his tight control over all elements of the mise en scéne; his emotional detachment.

  Since he is neither a German expatriate with a penchant for Expressionism nor an idiosyncratic American, Alfred Hitchcock, the most renowned director of thrillers, does not belong to any group prominently associated with noir. Hitchcock, in fact, is seldom labeled as a noir director—certainly he is not linked with the genre to the same degree as Fritz Lang or Robert Siodmak or early Jules Dassin. And yet, as he continued working in that narrow vein of the thriller that he has made distinctly his own, Hitchcock is pre-eminently a noir stylist: Shadow of a Doubt, Rope, Spellbound, The Paradine Case, Strangers on a Train, I Confess, Rear Window, The Wrong Man, Vertigo, and Psycho, are richly, demonstrably noir.

  Like the traditional noir director, Hitchcock maintains a decided distance from his characters, looking down on them as they become entangled in the nets he carefully spreads. His typical posture is one of amusement—what fools these mortals be—as he masterminds the often catastrophic fates that confound his protagonists. Awful things happen to them—the Hitchcockian world is a series of traps for unsuspecting victims. Like Lang and his compatriots, Hitchcock watches dispassionately, though with more deadpan humor than the Germans could summon, as a terrible pre-ordained destiny overtakes his characters. That same dry humor and unflappable detachment, that same deadly matter-of-factness (part of Hitchcock’s familiar persona of a droll, imperturbable Englishman) are present everywhere in the films.

  Two neurotically fixated Hitchcock heroes: (above) Gregory Peck with Ingrid Bergman in Spellbound; James Stewart with Kim Novak (page 141), in Vertigo.

  The director is attracted to stories in which average people are undone. In his films, the normal waking world is covered with quicksand; sometimes a character’s fall is occasioned merely by grisly coincidence—the “wrong man” theme that appeals to Hitchcock’s nasty and mordant sense of humor. Sometimes a character conspires in his own undoing rather than being the passive recipient of a malevolent fate. Many of his characters are victims of circumstance, like the unlucky musician in The Wrong Man who is accused of a series of crimes because, as it turns out, he has the ill-fortune to resemble the real criminal. Through this chance fact, his routine life is brutally disrupted: he is thrown in jail; his wife has a nervous breakdown. The priest in I Confess is implicated in a murder. Circumstantial evidence points overwhelmingly to his guilt, yet he cannot reveal the real murderer who confessed his crime to him in church because to do so would betray his priestly vows.

  It is always dangerous for Hitchcock’s characters to step beyond normal boundaries. When the tempted secretary in Psycho, a model of cheerfulness and efficiency, decides to steal money from her boss, she becomes a doomed character. In Hitchcock, to borrow Robin Wood’s useful formulation, the night world often invades and gradually overtakes the day world; dark forces penetrate the most seemingly ordinary characters and settings. In Rope, a dead body is buried in a casket the two murderers use as a table on which to serve their dinner guests. The elegant apartment setting, with a view of the Manhattan skyline, seems an incongruous context for a pathological crime. The bland small town, the acme of Saturday Evening Post Americana, that harbors the Merry Widow murderer in Shadow of a Doubt, the courtyard in Rear Window, the peaceful Northern California community in The Birds, are all atypical backgrounds for dark deeds. The eruption of crime in a seemingly innocuous setting—the gunshot that interrupts the concert in The Man Who Knew Too Much—is one of the manifestations of Hitchcock’s sardonic humor.

  The recurrent violence that disturbs outwardly calm settings parallels Hitchcock’s belief that we are all potential criminals, that lying in wait, beneath our civilized masks, is a dark, leering, other self. Many of Hitchcock’s characters are therefore seen in a kind of double focus, as variations in a variety of keys on the Dr. Jekyll-Mr. Hyde formula, with Norman Bates the most dramatic example in the canon: a pleasant repressed young man on the surface, a sex maniac within. Psychological as well as visual doubleness echoes throughout the films. The doubleness within is often mirrored in an external way, as one character takes on the qualities or completes the actions of another: Hitchcock’s much-discussed “transference of guilt” motif. But the transference extends from the characters within the drama to the audience so that, in more manipulative ways than in most crime films, we are made to root for the criminal. Who doesn’t want sweet, put-upon Marion Crane to get away with stealing in Psycho? It is easy to identify with Charlie’s protection of her uncle in Shadow of a Doubt, even when she has found out he is a murderer. Or to sympathize with the tennis player’s secret desire to get rid of his nagging girlfriend so that he can marry a senator’s daughter (in Strangers on a Train). Through sly means, Hitchcock often implicates us in the criminal action; and our response to the guilty characters reflects the criminal psychology that the film dramatizes—our identification with the criminal indicates our own dark undercurrents, the possibilities of our own unexplored selves.

  As he manipulates audience involvement, contriving our sympathy for undeserving characters, suggesting our complicity with criminals, Hitchcock himself remains immune, overseeing with Olympian aloofness the dark games he has devised. He resembles the noir director not only in his detachment from the nightmares he depicts but in the absolute control of his work. His autocratic methods are perhaps more well-known than those of any other director. Before filming begins, Hitchcock has planned the film down to the last movement of the camera. There is no “fat” during production, no room for improvisation or spontaneity; everything moves in strict accordance to the director’s tight master plan. Hitchcock’s often-quoted witticism, that actors are (or at least should be treated like) cattle, is true in spirit if not in fact: certainly no actor, with the possible exception of the sly Judith Anderson as the grotesque lesbian housekeeper in Rebecca, has ever been allowed to upstage Hitchcock. Moving and speaking in obedience to his commands, his actors are the puppets to his master puppeteer; Hitchcock is as dictatorial w
ith them as he is with every other element of his mise en scéne. As a result, actors in his films always seem to be a little dazed, their voices monochromatic, their gestures a little muffled, as if they have just been awakened from a trance and are not entirely sure of where they are. It has often been noted that Hitchcock is drawn to bland, icy blondes—non-actresses like Kim Novak or Tippi Hedren, or good actresses like Eva Marie Saint or Grace Kelly who resemble sleepwalkers when Hitchcock uses them. Hitchcock obviously favors women who are reserved and who will not resist his control. Relegating his performers to essential but nonetheless subsidiary roles in the film’s orchestration, Hitchcock is the true star of his own movies.

  Like many noir directors, Hitchcock often conceives of his films in terms of set-pieces. Sometimes, when he has a weak script, as with Foreign Correspondent, the film consists of practically nothing but a series of sequences intended to display the director’s ingenuity. But in all the most successful Hitchcock films there are particular scenes which serve the plot but which also stand on their own, as clever manipulations of film technique that startle the audience. Two of his most fully realized works, Strangers on a Train and Psycho, are ablaze with set-pieces: in Strangers, memorable high points include a murder reflected through the victim’s glasses, Griffith-like cross-cutting between a tennis match and the killer’s frantic efforts to retrieve a lighter from a drainpipe, and a merry-go-round that whirls crazily out of control; in Psycho, the brilliantly edited shower scene, an explosion of Eisensteinian montage, the vertiginous angle as Norman Bates carries his mother down to the cellar, the cross-cutting between the sister’s search through the Gothic house for Mrs. Bates and the tense confrontation in the motel office between Norman and the murdered victim’s fiance. All of these passages involve a rigorous and self-conscious use of editing, camera movement, and camera placement that demonstrates Hitchcock’s virtuosity. Just as he controls his actors and his audience, the Master loves to play with film, molding its properties to suit his own ends.