AN INTRODUCTION TO FILM NOIR
By Alain Silver
If there was a road map through the heart of film noir, it might reveal a course full of twists and turns with steep hills, alternate routes and side roads into odd places. Despite its surface complexity, despite occasional squabbling over specific titles, even over the identity of the first—or the last—noir film, the big picture is clear. More than a half century after its zenith, there is a basic agreement on the key films. After some early prototypes, the “classic period” of film noir transpired over less than two decades roughly beginning with The Maltese Falcon in 1941 and ending with Touch of Evil in 1958. Beyond this, there is little consensus. That the noir phenomenon exists is indisputable. How it happened, the people who made it happen and the noir style they helped create is the focus here.
Most commentators have come over to the side of noir as a movement or cycle. Because so many different people came together and created the same sort of movies without creating a traditional genre, the 1979 edition of Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference to the American Style cites the years of production immediately after World War II as the most homogeneous of the classic period. Included is a list of eight motion pictures released over a period of just a year and a half: Framed, BruteForce, The Unsuspected, Out of the Past, Pitfall, The Big Clock, Cry of the City, and Force of Evil.
What is remarkable about this list is that eight different scripts were written by fourteen different people, six of them adapted from novels or original stories by others. Eight different men oversaw the production of these screenplays into movies, employing eight different directors and eight different cinematographers. The eight finished pictures starred twenty different actors and were scored by eight different composers before being released by one of the eight major studios of the era. The point here is that the process of collaboration during the noir movement generally reflects the somewhat haphazard and incestuous nature of how filmmaking teams were formed and dissolved during the entire studio era. At their core, the people who made film noir were the same people who made movies of every sort from 1941 to 1958. During that classic period, all 72 of the filmmakers with creative credits on the eight archetypal titles worked on at least one other noir film. What is most remarkable, of course, is that these 72 people created eight otherwise unrelated motion pictures with one cohesive style.
Many aficionados of film noir are aware that the term originated with two French critics in 1946, Nino Frank and Jean-Pierre Chartier, who saw a relationship between the noir films made during the Second WorldWar and American hard-boiled fiction. They decided that Americans not only wrote the books that appeared as Serie Noire but that as Chartier said, “Americans also make noir films.” Less than a decade later, Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton observed in their Panorama du Film Noir Americain that “the existence of a serie noire in Hollywood is obvious. Defining its essential traits is another matter.”
Despite being quintessentially American for these early observers, it was not until the 1970s that critic and filmmaker Paul Schrader wrote his Notes on Film Noir. From that point, many of the English-language analyses both scholarly and popular which have followed in the wake of Borde and Chaumeton’s challenge to discover “essential traits” have actually muddied the waters.
Certainly the most specious assertion about film noir, still popular in academic circles, is the concept that “film noir” was created after the fact and that it wasn’t filmmakers who made film noir but distant observers looking back and discovering similarities. As David Bordwell writes in The Classical Hollywood Cinema, “Nobody set out to make or see a film noir in the sense that people deliberately chose to make a Western, a comedy, or a musical.”
In his 1949 book Painting with Light, John Alton described lighting for mood in this way: “The room is dark. A strong streak of light sneaks in from the hall under the door. The sound of steps is heard. The shadows of two feet divide the light streak. A brief silence follows. Schrader called Alton “the greatest master of noir” because “no cinematographer better adapted the old expressionist techniques to the new desire for realism.”
One of the shortest yet apt definitions of noir came from actor Nick Nolte: “Film noir is putting a style over the story.”
Now “noir” as a term has become part of the American language. Contemporary writers have used it to describe dark variants of just about anything from animé to zydeco. One thing is clear: whatever its antecedents in film and literature from German Expressionist cinema to hard-boiled detective fiction, wherever the people who made film noir came from, the rough beast that is film noir slouched towards Hollywood to be born. It was and remains a vibrant example of an American style.
STYLE
Given that it was Hollywood, it’s unlikely that style was more important than story to them. Rather, style was how they shaped and shaded a narrative. Thematically, the psychological and philosophical developments of the first half of the 20th century, not to mention the sociological impact of the largest armed conflict in the history of the world and the cold war that developed in its wake, were influential on all movies from all cultures. But only in Hollywood did that peculiar marriage of style and content now known as film noir emerge.
From a Freudian perspective, the imagery of film noir – its dark corridors, wet streets, and figures lurking in the shadows – reflect the underlying apprehension, even paranoia, of many of its protagonists.
Many observers have perceived in the deterministic narratives of noir a reflection on the concepts of existential anguish and despair. The defining comment of Bradford Galt in The Dark Corner (“There goes my last lead. I feel all dead inside. I’m backed up in a dark corner, and I don’t know who’s hitting me”) often is cited as a prime example. But as a film cycle or movement which was trans-generic in its signs and meaning, film noir is not simply about Freudian or existential motifs with characters forced to make impossible choices. The problem of Bradford Galt and of many noir protagonists is that of perspective. From his dark corner, Galt can only see straight lines. He cannot envision the narrative arc that has entrapped him.
It could easily be said that film noir anticipates fatality. Ultimately, the fateful narrative patterns that precipitate the remarks of Bradford Galt bring forth even simpler generalizations: Nick Blake mouthing the words of the title in Nobody Lives Forever, or even more directly, the Swede in The Killers saying, “Everybody dies.” However predestined their alienation, and whether or not their awareness of their condition is truly existential, the reaction of its protagonists to these structural elements is the fundamental conflict in film noir. The style of noir reinforces these emotions.
Certain stylistic effects are subtle, such as the sidelight that strikes the apprehensive faces of the couple in Moonrise or the low light which models the bruised face of Marie (Ida Lupino) as Roy Earle (Humphrey Bogart) examines it in High Sierra. In Human Desire, the vectors of the doomed relationship between Vicky Buckley (Gloria Grahame) and Jeff Warren (Glenn Ford) are encapsulated in a single pose as explicitly as 1954 would permit by her tight sweater, her sexually charged pout, and by the shadow she casts literally and figuratively over the enraptured Warren.
Often the mise-en-scene is more explicitly manipulated: the cracked window behind which John Garfield and Shelley Winters are posed in He Ran All theWay; the dark figure that fills the foreground and menaces the couple in Pitfall or the ironic low angle of Bogart leaning over the woman he may kill in Conflict; the harsh glare of interrogation lights in Crossfire or even more harshly in Laura. Some effects are naturalistic like the maze of objects and shadows behind the wounded Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) in the office of Barton Keyes (Edward G. Robinson) in Double Indemnity or the diner in which the title characters in The Killers seek their victim.
THE PRIVATE DETECTIVE
If Maltese Falcon is the consensus starting point for the classic period, then the private eye is an icon of film noir from the first moment. Whatever he was called – gumshoe, peeper, private dick, op, snooper, or shamus – the prototype for the noir character came out of the hard-boiled school of crime stories, the penny-a-word pulp fiction that filled the pages of Dime Detective and Black Mask magazines from the early 1920s.
Dashiell Hammett, himself an alcoholic ex-private eye, is best remembered for creating Sam Spade. The version released in 1941 directed by John Huston was actually the third adaptation of Hammett’s book. As the kick off for the noir cycle, Huston’s adaptation quickly became and has remained the definitive version, and Humphrey Bogart’s nuanced performance as Spade set the standard for all the noir PIs to follow.
Raymond Chandler, another graduate of the pulps, wrote a series of books about iconic private eye Philip Marlow. Chandler’s first four novels and his untarnished and unafraid hero became a staple of 1940s noir. With the signature set design and low-key lighting, Murder My Sweet (1944) is a stylistic tour-de-force set almost entirely at night or inside the uniformly under-lit interiors of musty offices, cheap bars, tract houses, and Bel-Air mansions. The best known sequence in the picture is a hallucinatory episode of exaggerated sights and sounds that is meant to express a drugged Marlowe’s mental state.
Bogart easily segued from Spade to Marlowe in The Big Sleep (1946), which recast Chandler’s violent and convoluted plot that left bodies piled up from Malibu to San Bernardino into a backdrop for a sharp-tongued film noir courtship between a down-to-earth Marlowe and spoiled heiress Vivian Sternwood (portrayed by Lauren Bacall). In 1947 Robert Montgomery directed and portrayed Marlowe in Lady in the Lake. In this most idiosyncratic of film noir, the audience only gets a good look at him when he stands in front of a mirror because Montgomery adapted Chandler’s first-person prose in the most literal way: the entire film was shot in subjective camera.
The noir cycle may give the impression that many of its heroes were private detectives. In fact, aside from the pictures adapted from the novels of Chandler and Hammett there are very few (Jeff Bailey in Out of the Past and Bradford Galt in The Dark Corner among them).
There are other amateur sleuths, of course, such as the journalists in The Big Clock or Call Northside 777 and the insurance investigators in The Killers or Pitfall. There are also amnesiacs seeking their own pasts as in Street of Chance or Somewhere in the Night, resourceful secretaries as in Stranger on the Third Floor and Phantom Lady, and even young boys as in TheWindow and Talk About a Stranger. However, most of the detectives in film noir are public servants whether with a local police force or a federal agency.
About the author
Alain Silver wrote The Samurai Film and a score of other books (including Film Noir, The Noir Style and L.A. Noir) as well as for Film Comment, Movie, Literature/ Film Quarterly, Wide Angle, the DGA Magazine, Photon, the anthologies The Philosophy of Film Noir, Akira Kurasawa, and The Hummer and the on-line magazines Images and Senses of Cinema. He co-scripted the features Kiss Daddy Goodbye and Time at the Top and adapted Dostoevsky’s White Nights (which he also directed). He has produced a dozen independent features, documentaries, music videos and soundtrack albums, provided audio commentary on numerous classic period DVDs such as Thieves Highwayand Murder My Sweet and appeared in television and DVD documentaries on film noir, Raymond Chandler, Double Indemnity, Dirty Dozen, and the Gangster Film.
