The Dark Side of the Screen: Film Noir

by Foster Hirsch

  Noir stories with a social point to make have less tension than the non-preachy thrillers, just as the noir victim who represents only himself is more engaging than such sufferers as prisoners and prize fighters, who represent the entrapment of Modern Man. Victims who live in a real world that turns against them are more persuasive fictional characters than the boxer or the member of a minority group who suffers in a closed-off and obviously symbolic setting. In more open-ended victim stories, crime pops up just around the corner. A single misstep can precipitate disaster. Any movement or action in which the character departs from routine is potentially dangerous, fraught with peril. In these dramas, middle-class routine is pierced by an overheard conversation, a chance encounter, a wrong turn on the way to work. And in that fateful moment the course of a life is unalterably changed.

  In Scarlet Street, Edward G. Robinson, deciding to go home by a different route, runs straight into trouble: Joan Bennett and Dan Duryea. In My Name is Julia Ross, Nina Foch plays an American alone and unemployed in London, who goes for a job interview as companion to a rich lady. Before she has time to catch her breath, she has been cast by her wealthy new employer in the role of Julia Ross, the woman’s mad, dead daughter-in-law, killed by the matron’s son in a moment of rage. Presented as suicidal and crazy to the villagers in the remote hamlet where the dowager and her weak-willed son live, the new “Julia Ross” will provide a corpse with an alibi. The film is a clever variation on the noir theme of unstable identity: who you are can be altered, or eradicated, by the simplest act—by something so mundane as a job interview. A despondent, aspiring screenwriter (William Holden) turns by chance into a driveway off Sunset Boulevard—and into the fatal net of faded film star Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson). In The Ministry of Fear, a man just released from prison for having killed his terminally ill wife goes to a fair, simply because he happens to be passing by. On a whim, he has his fortune told, and in record time is embroiled in the activities of a network of spies.

  Noir posits an unstable world in which terror lurks in wait just beneath a deceptively placid reality. In The Window, a little boy, going out on the fire escape for some air on a sweltering New York night, sees a murder through a window. In Rear Window, a photo-journalist (James Stewart) confined to a wheelchair looks at his neighbors through a telescope. He too discovers—or thinks he discovers—a murder. Violent crime can crop up in noir anywhere and at any moment. Murder is often sudden—and, for the voyeurs in The Window and Rear Window, exhilarating because they are not directly involved. But for Joan Crawford in Sudden Fear, or Barbara Stanwyck in Sorry, Wrong Number, who discover that their husbands want to do them in, or for Joan Bennett in The Reckless Moment, who has to conceal her daughter’s accidental murder of her unsavory boyfriend, the sudden intrusion plunges them into a nightmare.

  In noir, no one is safe from himself or from others—and those “others” include spouses, siblings, neighbors, best friends. Crime occurs even in the most sedate and unexpected settings. Who could have thought Joan Bennett’s lovely Balboa house would be the scene of murder? Or Crawford’s swank San Francisco apartment could become a place of “sudden fear?” Or Stanwyck’s Sutton Place townhouse turn into a death trap? In these stories, crime escapes from its usual setting—the underworld of the gangster films—to infest a sunny, seemingly innocent and pacific, daytime reality. And the gap between setting and action in these accounts of sudden violence is meant to surprise the audience as much as it does the hapless characters.

  The middle-class protagonists in such films as The Reckless Moment, The Woman in the Window, Scarlet Street, Sudden Fear, and Sorry, Wrong Number are more or less innocent bystanders invaded by crime. They may be unconsciously provocative, but they are not willing, calculating criminals, like a number of the genre’s middle-class citizens who are tempted and then victimized by fantasies of quick money and illicit sex.

  “I left the same house at the same time for eleven years,” announces the banker (Joseph Cotten) at the beginning of The Steel Trap. And then, one morning, this ultra-respectable bourgeois, this pillar of his community, decides to steal money from the bank where he has been a trusted employee for so long. “Of course, I wasn’t serious about this wild scheme,” he tells us, in the voice-over narration, “but I had an uncontrollable urge to probe its possibilities... there were moments when I was shocked by the enormity of my own thoughts.” Once the idea occurs to him, he is unable to extricate himself from its grip: “Did you ever have one of those nightmares in which you try to run from danger and can’t move?” As he plans and then executes the larceny, he begins to invent excuses: “The difference between the honest and the dishonest is a debatable line... We’re suckers if we don’t try to cram as much happiness as possible in our brief time, no matter how; everybody breaks the law.” And yet, finally, his stubborn middle-class conscience stops him in his tracks: “I walked and walked and realized with each step what it meant to be a thief, a man without honor or self-respect, a man without a wife, a daughter, a home.” He returns the money on a Monday morning, before the bank opens, his guilt safely concealed beneath his public facade; only he and his wife know what he has tried to do.

  The boxer is one of film noir’s pious victims: Robert Ryan, in the ring, in Robert Wise’s self-consciously symbolic drama, The Set-Up; Jamie Smith, in Killer’s Kiss.

  The ad for Act of Violence stresses the recurrent noir theme of sudden, annihilating misfortune.

  Uncovering the criminal potential of an ultra-bourgeois, The Steel Trap is designed to strike a sympathetic chord in the average spectator. The audience actively wants the man to get away with it. The film exploits universal fantasies of being bad, of defying the law, of getting rich quick no matter how; and its subversive undercurrent is not entirely eradicated by the return-to-normal ending.

  “I feel like a wheel within a wheel within a wheel,” says Dick Powell, an insurance man, to his wife (Jane Wyatt), at the beginning of Pitfall. “You and fifty million others,” she answers, rather tartly. “You’re John Forbes, average American, backbone of the country.” “I don’t want to be,” he says. “What would happen if, just once, I didn’t walk through the door at Olympic Insurance?” Pitfall is the story of what does happen when idle daydream turns to grim reality, on the day he does not follow the straight and narrow. On a routine case of embezzlement, Powell yields to the lure of money and a woman (Lizabeth Scott). He ends up a prisoner in his own home, as the embezzler comes to gun him down. In self-protection, he kills his assailant. He is exonerated but stained by his experience. “You kill a man and that’s not a pleasant thing to live with for the rest of your life,” the district attorney tells him. A psychiatrist suggests that the risk he took has all the signs of temporary insanity. And his wife asks: “If a man has always been a good husband except for twenty-four hours, how long should he be expected to pay for it? ... I don’t suppose it will ever be the same, but we’ll try.”

  Like the banker in The Steel Trap, Forbes resents his averageness: “I was voted the boy most likely to succeed; you were the prettiest girl in class. Something should happen to people like us.” Something does, yet the departure from middle-class convention is presented in films like Pitfall as perilous. A regular middle-class life may be dull, but the options are treacherous; to leave middle-class containment is to risk danger to life and limb. Such films as Pitfall and The Steel Trap support the status quo out of fear rather than from strong or healthy moral convictions, and their mealy-mouthed morality may be a symptomatic response to the political witch-hunt that was invading the motion picture industry at the time. The search for communists may have enforced the idea that it is safer to stay home, minding your own business, than to stray into unknown territory. These noir thrillers that end up espousing a numbing bourgeois conformity are in part a response to the sense of threat and intimidation instigated by the Congressional investigations, which asked the appalling and intransigent question: “Are you now or have you ever been... ?”<
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  In Side Street, a baby-faced postman (Farley Granger), another of noir’s nice-guy victims, lower in the economic scale than the Cotten and Powell characters, also is tempted by the prospect of easy money. By chance, money is sitting in an empty office where he makes a mail delivery. What could be the risk in taking it? He steals what he thinks is $200—an impulsive act which propels him into the middle of a crime syndicate. The $200 turns out to be $30,000, and the postman becomes a man on the run, cowering in rundown hotels as he tracks down the criminals to whom the money belongs and who don’t want to step forward to claim it.

  “You know how it is early in the morning on the water, and then you come ashore, and in no time at all you’re up to your ears in trouble, and you don’t know how it began,” says John Garfield, delivering the noir victim’s theme song, at the opening of The Breaking Point (based loosely on Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not). Because he needs money, he agrees to a shady deal, smuggling some Chinese refugees on his boat. The leader pulls a gun on him and the hero shoots and kills him. Later he gets involved with criminals, and ends up killing them all. Not being able to support his family has led him to “the breaking point,” getting involved with crooked characters and using violence to defend himself.

  The bourgeois hero slips into crime: Joseph Cotten, in The Steel Trap.

  Besides money, the other temptation for the good man gone wrong, the potential noir victim, is, of course, sex. Often the two are linked, as in Double Indemnity. One look at Joan Bennett, in The Woman in the Window and Scarlet Street, and Edward G. Robinson is a goner. Barbara Stanwyck throws D.A. Wendell Corey off the track in The File on Thelma Jordan. He loses his job and his family, and the ending implies that he will find a new way of salvation, like a penitent hero in a religious drama by T.S. Eliot. Women of a certain kind spell certain disaster for the vulnerable middle-class men, the Mr. Nice Guys, in noir. Affable Wendell Corey, smiling Fred MacMurray, debonair Ray Milland, meek Edward G. Robinson, an untried Burt Lancaster or William Holden don’t stand a chance against the man-eating, victim-hungry dames of the noir underworld.

  In noir, sex invariably leads to crime, as the posters for Dead Reckoning and Born to Kill, and the scene from Phantom Lady, reveal.

  Sex in noir is usually poisoned, presented characteristically not in a romantic context but a psychotic one. Characters are enslaved, victimized, by it. But unlike noir’s “wrong men,” who are essentially innocent bystanders, the sexually enflamed characters are often potentially dangerous, capable of acts of violence against themselves as well as others. Sexual interest fans psychosis, leading to extreme jealousy, possessiveness, and often crime. “Love” in noir is typically a disease, an affliction. In Conflict, Sydney Greenstreet as a psychologist delivers a speech to Humphrey Bogart that could well stand as the noir psychotic’s theme song: “Love rather than money is the root of all evil,” he says. “Sometimes a thought can be like a malignant disease and start to eat away at the will power.” Consider what “love” does to a group of noir misfits, how it deforms and distorts the personality of characters originally healthy, or at least seemingly so, and how it oozes in bizarre forms out of characters already beyond the pale. It becomes the focus of psychotic behavior, the catalyst for crime. Smitten, Lana Turner and John Garfield become murderers in The Postman Always Rings Twice; their powerful sexual response to each other leads them into a maze of criminal action, as they first plot how to kill the woman’s husband, and then turn against each other. Humphrey Bogart’s infatuation with his wife’s sister (in Conflict) makes him want to kill his wife. When the insurance man first sees Phyllis Dietrichson, in Double Indemnity, he feels “hooked.” “I could smell that honeysuckle again, only it was even stronger, now that it was night ... The machinery had started to move,” he states flatly, as he speaks into a tape recorder, leaving a record of his crime, “and nothing could stop it.”

  In The Killers and Criss Cross, Burt Lancaster’s obsession with unfaithful women leads to his own death. His two lovesick characters use their infatuation as a luxurious form of self-punishment in which romantic longing and a death wish are closely connected.

  Sexual obsession in such films as Laura, Human Desire, and Leave Her to Heaven provokes criminal acts. The psychotic lovers, husbands, and wives in these films seek absolute control over the objects of their passion. Like Porphyria’s Lover, they would rather see their loved ones dead than alive with someone else. “You are the best part of myself,” Waldo Lydecker (Clifton Webb) says to Laura (Gene Tierney), whom he feels he has created, and whom he cannot bear to see grow away from him. “Do you think I could leave you to a second-rate detective who thinks you are a dame?” He thought he had killed Laura, but he had shot another woman, who simply had the misfortune to be staying in Laura’s apartment at the time. His sick fantasy is that he will be able to hold onto her in death: “Love is stronger than life—it reaches beyond the shadow of death.”

  “I love you so I can’t bear to share you with anybody,” says Gene Tierney, as the maniacally possessive wife in Leave Her to Heaven. She is insanely jealous of her husband’s former girlfriend, of his invalid brother to whom he is devoted, of the novel he is writing with a concentration she resents and which she feels excludes her. In her mad efforts to hold onto him, she watches cold-bloodedly as her husband’s crippled brother drowns in a lake; she makes herself fall down stairs so she will have a miscarriage (she imagines that the child will come between her and her husband); she even arranges her own death to implicate her sister, whom she imagines is luring her husband away from her. On her deathbed, she tells her husband, “I’ll never let you go, Richard.”

  “You’re not chained to your husband,” a reasonable Glenn Ford says to Gloria Grahame, noir’s ultimate masochist, in Human Desire. She is married to a brute (played by Broderick Crawford) who asks her, in effect, to prostitute herself for him, in order to get his job back, and who kills his boss in a jealous rage. They make the ideal sado-masochistic couple: the wife craves punishment; the husband needs to be betrayed. She feels that her only escape route from marriage is to ask Ford to kill her husband. But he stands outside her sick world: “It’s all wrong, Vicky,” he says. “From the beginning. I feel dirty.” “You killed before,” she argues, “in the war.” Her twisted conclusion is that “It’s only people like Carl [her husband] who can kill for something they love.” In the end, when her husband strangles her, she gets what she has really wanted all along.

  Significantly, the twisted romantic and sexual relationships in noir which do not lead to crime are unconvincing. In Gilda, Glenn Ford and Rita Hayworth enact one of the most psychotic romances of the decade—and they both live to go off together at the end. Johnny and Gilda, who were once lovers, meet again by chance in Buenos Aires. Johnny works for a powerful businessman who has just married Gilda. “I hate her so I couldn’t get her out of my mind for a minute,” Johnny explains in a voice-over narration that opens the film. (The “lovers” in Gilda talk like a parody of noir neuroticism.) “She was in the air I breathed and the food I ate.” “I hate you so much that I would even destroy myself to take you down with me,” Gilda announces. “I hate you so much I think I’m going to die from it.” “Statistics show that there are more women in the world than anything else—except insects,” Johnny says.

  Strangely, the romance between this fierce misogynist and this castrating femme fatale ends happily. After the Baron, who is something of a father figure for them both, is killed by one of his employees just as he is about to kill Johnny and Gilda, the lovers are chastened, magically reunited—and they decide to return to America. The end is believable only if we ignore the rest of the film. That their ferocious love-hate relationship, their deeply embittered distrust of each other, their games of mutual baiting and mental torture, could be so easily resolved is a denial of everything the film has told us about them.

  In Sweet Smell of Success, Burt Lancaster is a powerful gossip columnist suffering from an incestuou
s attachment to his sister. “Susie’s all I’ve got,” he tells a nervous press agent (Tony Curtis), “and I want my relationship with her to remain on par.” He wants the press agent to do some dirty work for him—to discredit the man Susie is engaged to, before morning, when she is to announce her marriage plans. The gossip columnist wants to own his sister the way he owns the town. When he walks onto the balcony of his penthouse apartment, which overlooks Times Square, he is clearly the monarch of all that he surveys, as, in the preceding shot, he has looked in on his sister, asleep in her room, with a fiercely proprietary air. The character recalls the sexually maladjusted gangsters of an earlier movie cycle—like them, he is a supremely powerful man who is sexually damaged. He makes a living by revealing or uncovering other people’s dirty secrets, and he has tried, in a totally warped way, to keep his sister insulated from the corruption in which he lives. He feels that in protecting his sister he is also keeping a part of himself pure. “I’d rather be dead than living with you,” she says at the end, just before she walks off, on her own at last. “I don’t hate you. I pity you.”

  In The Woman on the Beach, a blind painter (Charles Bickford), his young wife (Joan Bennett), and a coastguardsman (Robert Ryan), enact a neurotic romantic triangle in an isolated, fog-bound oceanside setting. “You’ve got to set Peggy free,” the coastguardsman warns the artist. “You treat her like a slave.” “You murdering little sneak,” the artist lashes out at his wife. “I can smell your hate. It’s no different from your love.” But he discovers a way of releasing himself and his wife from their desperate relationship; he burns down his house and the pictures that have obsessed him, thereby exorcising the past.