Film Noir

Andrew Spicer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781317875024
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Film Noir is an overview of an often celebrated, but also contested, body of films. It discusses film noir as a cultural phenomenon whose history is more extensive and diverse than American black and white crime thrillers of the forties.

An extended Background Chapter situates film noir within its cultural context, describing its origin in German Expressionism, French Poetic Realism and in developments within American genres, the gangster/crime thriller, horror and the Gothic romance and its possible relationship to changes in American society.

Five chapters are devoted to 'classic' film noir (1940-59):

• chapters explore its contexts of production and reception, its visual style, and its narrative patterns and themes
• chapters on character types and star performances elucidate noir's complex construction of gender with its weak, ambivalent males and predatory femmes fatales and also provide a detailed analysis of three noir auteurs, - Anthony Mann, Robert Siodmak and Fritz Lang

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Three chapters investigate 'neo-noir' and British film noir:

• chapters trace the complex evolution of 'neo-noir' in American cinema, from the modernist critiques of Night Moves and Taxi Driver, to the postmodern hybridity of contemporary noir including Seven, Pulp Fiction and Memento
• the final chapter surveys the development of British film noir, a significant and virtually unknown cinema, stretching from the thirties to Mike Hodges' Croupier

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Films discussed include both little known examples and seminal works such as Double Indemnity, Scarlet Street, Kiss Me Deadly and Touch of Evil. A final section provides a guide to further reading, an extensive bibliography and a list of over 500 films referred to in the text. Lucidly written, Film Noir is an accessible, informative and stimulating introduction that will have a broad appeal to undergraduates, cinéastes, film teachers and researchers.

Chapter One

The Background to Film Noir

The Evolution of the Term ‘Film Noir’

Of late there has been a trend in Hollywood toward the wholesale production of lusty, gut-and-gore crime stories, all fashioned on a theme with a combination of plausibly motivated murder and studded with high-powered Freudian implication. Of the quantity of such films now in vogue, Double Indemnity, Murder, My Sweet, Conflict and Laura are a quartet of the most popular which quickly come to mind … This quartet constitutes a mere vanguard of the cinematic homicide to come. Every studio in town has at least two or three similar blood-freezers before the camera right now, which means that within the next year or so movie murder – particularly with a psychological twist – will become almost as common as the weekly newsreel or musical.

(Shearer, 1945, in Silver and Ursini, 1999a, p.9)

The reviewer who made these comments in the summer of 1945 was clearly fascinated by what he took to be a new phenomenon in Hollywood film production: ‘murder with a psychological twist’. The subject matter, sex and violence, has clear continuities with the tradition of American crime fiction, but the injection of ‘high-powered Freudian implication’ is new. A few months earlier, another reviewer had labelled these films ‘“red meat” stories of illicit romance and crime’ (Stanley, 1944, in Biesen, 1998, p.137). A third, writing two years later, used the term ‘morbid drama’ for this cycle of thrillers whose chief characteristics were ‘deep shadows, clutching hands, exploding revolvers, sadistic villains and heroines tormented with deeply rooted diseases of the mind’ (D. Marsham, Life August 25, 1947, in Schatz, 1981, p.111). Clearly groping for the most appropriate label for these films, American reviewers most frequently called them ‘psychological thrillers’, a term that the film industry itself employed (Neale, 2000, p. 169).

The origins of the label ‘film noir’ have been traced to the French film critic Nino Frank who used the term in his response to the release of four crime thrillers – The Maltese Falcon (1941), Murder, My Sweet (UK title: Farewell My Lovely, 1944), Double Indemnity (1944) and Laura (1944) – in Paris in August 1946. Film noir was employed through its analogy with ‘série noiré, the label given to French translations of American ‘hard-boiled’ fiction from which several of these films had been adapted. After the five-year absence of Hollywood films during the Occupation, Frank, even more than his American counterparts, was stimulated by what he perceived as a new type of crime film that would render obsolete the traditional detective film with its emphasis on plot convolutions and the unmasking of the killer, through a radical visual style, a complex mode of narration, and a pronounced interest in the characters’ ‘uncertain psychology’. Frank averred: ‘The essential quality is no longer “who-done-it?” but how does this protagonist act?’ (Frank, 1946, in Silver and Ursini, 1999a, p. 16).

In France, especially through the work of left-wing critics writing for the film journal Positif, film noir became an important component of a self-questioning intellectual climate dominated by Existentialism. This philosophy emphasizes contingency and chance, a world where there are no values or moral absolutes, and which is devoid of meaning except those that are self-created by the alienated and confused ‘non-heroic hero’. French intellectuals saw in film noir a reflection of their own pessimism and angst. As cinéastes they were looking for American films that were ‘art’ rather than merely commercial entertainment, but which were also popular (Naremore, 1995–6, pp. 12–28). The nature of American film noir continued to be debated over the next decade, culminating in the first book-length study in 1955, Panorama du film noir américain, by Raymonde Borde and Etienne Chaumeton, who characterized film noir as ‘nightmarish, weird, erotic, ambivalent, and cruel’ (Borde and Chaumeton, 1955, in Silver and Ursini, 1996, p.16). They concluded that ‘the moral ambivalence, the criminality, the complex contradictions in motives and events, all conspire to make the viewer co-experience the anguish and insecurity which are the true emotions of contemporary film noir’, whose aim was ‘to create a specific alienation’ (ibid., p.25, original emphasis). Film noir therefore was deemed to unsettle spectators, forming a disruptive component of an American cinema that had habitually sought to reassure and comfort its audience. With its modernist sensibility, film noir embodied a critical strand in popular cinema. Borde and Chaumeton’s high valuation of film noir was supported by the work of a new generation of French critics-turned-directors, Claude Chabrol, Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut, whose appropriation of film noir became an important component in their construction of a radical French cinema, the nouvelle vague, as discussed in Chapter 7.

As there was no equivalent intellectual film culture in America at this point, it was not until the late 1960s that the term film noir, and with it the intense interest in this body of films and the positive valuation placed on them that the French commentators had established, became widespread. The opening chapter of Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg’s Hollywood in the Forties (1968) was entitled ‘Black Cinema’, but they used the term film noir within the text itself and placed a high value on a body of films seen as cynical, subversive, erotic and visually sophisticated (Higham and Greenberg, 1968, pp. 19–50). Raymond Durgnat wrote a typically wide-ranging and provocative essay in 1970, ‘Paint It Black: The Family Tree of the Film Noir’ which helped to locate film noir within more general cultural formations (Durgnat, 1970, pp.48–56). However, it was Paul Schraders 1972 essay ‘Notes on Film Noir’, originally issued to accompany a Los Angeles Museum retrospective, that was particularly influential, not only in defining noir ‘stylistics’, but also in its subdivision of what he regarded as a ‘specific period of film history’. Schrader saw film noir as an inevitable development of the gangster film delayed by the war, which divided into three broad and overlapping phases: 1941–6 was the phase of the private eye and the lone wolf; 1945–9 showed a preoccupation with the problems of crime, political corruption and police routine; while 1949–53 was the ‘period of psychotic action and suicidal impulse’ that he regards as the ‘cream’. Like Borde and Chaumeton, Schrader considered film noir’s masterpiece to be a ‘straggler’, Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly (1955), while Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil (1958) provided its ‘epitaph’ (Schrader, 1972, pp.8–13).

Schrader’s enthusiasm echoed that of the earlier French writers, offering film noir to a rapidly developing American film culture as an exciting and iconoclastic element of Hollywood cinema that was ripe for revaluation and reappropriation following the widespread disillusionment consequent upon the war in Vietnam. Schrader observed, ‘as the current political mood hardens, filmgoers and filmmakers will find the film noir of the late forties increasingly attractive’, and its influence will be felt at a time when ‘American movies are again taking a look at the underside of the American character (ibid., p.8). Schrader himself wrote the screenplay for Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976), which, with its angst-ridden, alienated Vietnam veteran, updated film noir for a new generation and formed part of noir’s revival as discussed in Chapter 7.

Since this formative period there has been a steady stream of academic articles, book-length studies and anthologies of essays. Alain Silver and Elizabeth Ward’s encyclopedic Film Noir, first published in 1980, was highly influential in defining the noir ‘canon’, providing commentaries on over 250 films and tabulations of creative personnel and studio output (Silver and Ward, 1993). Slightly earlier, in 1978, Women in Film Noir edited by E. Ann Kaplan, part of a wider feminist movement within cultural studies, raised the complex issue of noir’s representation of women, the ways in which its female types, centrally the femme fatale, were expressive of ideological tensions within patriarchy over female sexuality. The reissue of an extended edition of Women in Film Noir twenty years later was testimony to the importance of these essays and to the continued interest in noir’s construction of gender. Richard Dyer’s essay on Gilda observed that ‘film noir is characterised by a certain anxiety over the existence and definition of masculinity and normality’ (Kaplan, 1998, p.115). Frank Krutnik’s In a Lonely Street, was the first book-length study to discuss the complexities of masculinity within film noir (Krutnik, 1991). Chapter 5 discusses this issue in detail, and pays attention to the neglected area of actors’ performances, which are central to the representation of gender. Of more recent studies of film noir, the outstanding contribution has been James Naremore’s More Than Night, which attempted to place the ‘noir phenomenon’ within its various intellectual, cultural and social contexts (Naremore, 1998). However, film noir remains a contested term, a point that will be explored in the concluding section of this chapter.

The Characteristics of Film Noir

The label ‘film noir’ designates a cycle of films that share a similar iconography, visual style, narrative strategies, subject matter and characterisation. Their iconography (repeated visual patterning) consists of images of the dark, night-time city, its streets damp with rain which reflects the flashing neon signs. Its sleazy milieu of claustrophobic alleyways and deserted docklands alternates with gaudy nightclubs and swank apartments. The visual style habitually employs high contrast (chiaroscuro) lighting, where deep, enveloping shadows are fractured by shafts of light from a single source, and dark, claustrophobic interiors have shadowy shapes on the walls. The decentred, unstable compositions are further distorted by the use of odd angles and wide-angle lenses; fog or mist obscures the action and characters’ faces are often lit with strange highlights or partially shadowed to create hidden and threatening spaces. Noir’s highly complex narrative patterning is created by the use of first-person voice-overs, multiple narrators, flashbacks and ellipses which often create ambiguous or inconclusive endings. Noir narratives are frequently oneiric (dream-like), where every object and encounter seems unnaturally charged.

Thematically, film noir is dominated by a mixture of existential and Freudian motifs, discussed in a separate section. The noir universe is dark, malign and unstable where individuals are trapped through fear and paranoia, or overwhelmed by the power of sexual desire. Noir’s principal protagonists consist of the alienated, often psychologically disturbed, male anti-hero and the hard, deceitful femme fatale he encounters. But the range of noir characters is more complex than is usually thought. All these elements of film noir will be discussed in detail in the chapters that follow. The rest of this chapter will examine the cultural influences that gave rise to the noir cycle.

Cultural Influences

James Naremore has identified film noir as the interface between an avant-garde European modernism and an older, more conservative tradition of ‘blood melodrama’, stories of violence and erotic love that included crime films but also Gothic romance (Naremore, 1998, p.220). In examining the influence of these traditions on film noir it is useful to bear in mind Richard Maltby’s observation that: ‘Cultural history is too diffuse to allow for clear causal relationships; the most it can attempt is to establish a chain of plausibility’ (Maltby, 1998, p.38).

‘Hard-Boiled’ Crime Fiction

I first heard Personville called Poisonville by a red-haired mucker named Hickey Dewey in the Big Ship at Butte. He also called a shirt a shoit. I didn’t think anything of what he had done to the city’s name. Later I heard men who couldn’t manage their r’s give it the same pronunciation. I still didn’t see anything in it but the meaningless sort of humour that used to make richardsnary the thieves’ word for dictionary. A few years later I went to Personville and learned better.

(Dashiell Hammett, Red Harvest, 1929)

The work of the American ‘hard-boiled’ writers, such as Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain, was frequently used as the basis for films noirs: almost 20 per cent of noir thrillers produced between 1941 and 1948 were direct adaptations of ‘hard-boiled’ novels and short stories (Krutnik, 1991, pp.33–4, 182–7). In addition, numerous films noirs imitated or reworked hard-boiled sources and many hard-boiled writers, including Raymond Chandler who wrote an original screenplay for The Blue Dahlia (1946) and co-adapted Cain’s Double Indemnity, were hired by Hollywood studios during this period. As Borde and Chaumeton argued, hard-boiled fiction formed the central and ‘immediate’ influence on film noir’s subject matter and characterization.

Hard-boiled writing was a development of the nineteenth-century ‘dime novel’ where writers developed a vernacular style and promoted working-class attitudes and values that were expressive of American republican democracy (Denning, 1987). Hard-boiled writing formed part of what became known generically as ‘pulp fiction’, i.e. stories produced on cheap wood-pulp paper. The first cheap magazine devoted to crime fiction was the Detective Story Magazine established by 1915, but the most significant of well over twenty such titles was Black Mask, which was almost entirely devoted to hard-boiled fiction by the end of the 1920s. Towards the end of the 1930s this fiction began to appear in the new form of the paperback whose lurid covers promised a crime thriller laced with graphic sex and violence (O’Brien, 1997). Pulp fiction’s readership was largely the male urban working class who enjoyed the fast-paced violence and eroticism.

Dashiell Hammett is often regarded as the ‘father’ of this tradition, with Red Harvest, quoted from above, a watershed between the older dime novelists and a more modern conception of an American society that is corrupt and alienated. Hammett developed a tough, terse, understated vernacular idiom that kept close to the rhythms of ordinary speech and is often directly narrated by the main male protagonist. In many ways this first-person narration was an ‘essentially radio aesthetic’ and indeed many of these stories were adapted for that new cultural form (Jameson, 1993, p.36). The short, declarative sentences of hard-boiled writing created a sense of speed and urgency that resembled reportage. Joseph T. Shaw, editor of Black Mask, encouraged his other writers to emulate Hammett’s style with its ‘objectivity, economy and restraint’, and it was Shaw who persuaded Hammett himself to move into full-length fiction. Hammett and other exponents of the art were masters of the laconic wisecrack, which combined wit, verbal aggression and a sense of self-esteem. These characteristics made hard-boiled writing the opposite of the more polite, refined and middle-class ‘English school’ of detective fiction, which included Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers. In Raymond Chandler’s famous description, ‘Hammett took murder out of the Venetian vase and dropped it into the alley’ (Chandler, 1964, p. 194). American writers replaced ratiocination by action, and the drawing rooms of country houses with the ‘mean streets’ of the fast-growing American city (Porter, 1981).

This concentration on urban life was distinctive and modern, reflecting the major cultural and social transformation that America was undergoing (Marling, 1995). Although Hammett’s ‘Poisonville’ is any modern American town, his disciple Chandler became the great chronicler of Los Angeles, the modern metropolis. In hard-boiled writing, the city is corrupt, disorientating and threatening, often depicted as a dark, confusing labyrinth, a nightmare city that is the seamy but enticing underside to respectable American life (Christopher, 1997). This city is an emphatically masculine world, concentrating on male ambitions and lusts; and, it must be emphasized, their fears and paranoias. The male protagonists of hard-boiled fiction are obsessed with women, but only with their looks and bodies, the way they move or wear make-up and clothes. Most frequently, women are characterized as femmes fatales, overwhelmingly desirable but duplicitous.

The most famous male protagonist was the private eye. In Hammett’s fiction the figure is either the anonymous ‘The Continental Op’, an employee of a detective agency, or the self-employed gumshoe Sam Spade whose overriding obsession is never to be a ‘sap’. Chandler’s serial detective, Philip Marlowe, was a more refined and honourable character. American reviewers thought his name sounded resonantly English, connoting elegance and erudition. Marlowe is independent, incorruptible, intelligent, cultured...