Thu 5 Mar 2009
I’ll continue to be occupied with a host of other matters this week and next, so images will be added later, as I can get to them. For now it’s the text that matters, and from this point on, David has the floor. — Steve
I’m going to go out on a limb here and say why I don’t think some films embraced as noir really belong there, then saw it off behind me by trying to define what noir is. But first the films that I don’t think really are noir despite having noir elements.
I’ve already explained why I don’t think The Maltese Falcon is noir — Spade is hardly alienated, doomed, obsessed or the victim of mysterious forces. He’s in control of himself and the situation, and the closest he comes to a touch of noir is a pang of regret at sending Brigid up the river for killing Archer. The only bad nights Spade is going to have is getting Miles Archer’s widow off his neck.
Laura is a bit more problematic, because the sleuth is briefly obsessed, but in the end he isn’t a noir protagonist either. Clifton Webb’s villain is alienated and obsessed, but in noir it’s the hero and not the villain that counts.
I Wake Up Screaming would be noir if Laird Cregar’s cop was the hero, but the hero and heroine are PR man Victor Mature and showgirl Betty Grable, and if you remove the murder plot, the two would be perfectly served in a musical (in fact, they were).
Johnny Eager is a slick MGM take on a Warner’s gangster movie, but again the hero, Robert Taylor isn’t a noir hero (his buddy Van Heflin is though, but that doesn’t count). There is nothing in Johnny Eager’s character different than the general run of gangsters in a hundred similar films.
All of these films use the shadows and high contrast lighting of noir, but then so does the swashbuckler The Sea Hawk. They all have noir elements, but they lack the core elements that define noir. For that matter I would put Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt as only borderline noir (Teresa Wright is neither alienated, obsessed, nor beset by mysterious forces — she’s Nancy Drew caught in an adult mystery).
Shanghai Gesture is an old fashioned German Expressionist melodrama, and not a noir though a contributor to the genre. An argument can be made however for You Only Live Once, Street of Chance, Mask of Dimitrios, The Stranger on the Third Floor, and Journey Into Fear.
I’ll give them their points, and only point out that two of them are spy films and by that nature share elements with noir, and the two spy films are directed by Noir director Jean Negulesco and Orson Welles (though credited to Norman Foster). The elements of distrust, paranoia, and betrayal common to most spy films are noirish to begin with.
But then what is noir? We’ve beat around the noir bush and come up with some general ideas — as Walker Martin points out it is a style — but it isn’t just a style, or every moody horror film would be noir, so I’m going to try to break down some key elements that I think define noir.
First of all noir is defined by the protagonist, and the noir protagonist has some distinct characteristics. As often as not he’s a veteran who is having a tough time adjusting to the peace time world, but veteran or not he is always alienated in some way.
In noir this means he is lost in a darkness he carries inside of him, but which is expressed by the world outside of him. He is inevitably an urban figure, usually in an urban setting (but even in a rural setting — On Dangerous Ground, Un roi sans divertissement — the hero is an urban figure).
Above all he is opposed by a “mysterious force,” a situation or antagonist beyond his control which leaves him with a sense of fear, powerlessness, and isolation. He is faced with forces of chaos he can’t control and sometimes is even attracted to. The noir hero is at the mercy of forces he can’t control and can only hope to survive.
The second factor key to most — but not all — noir is obsession. The noir protagonist is invariably obsessed — with the truth, revenge, a woman, power, money, or an impossible dream. He carries that obsession to the point it nearly (or does) destroy him (these definitions all define the female protagonists of noir as well).
He is set apart by the obsession, and though he recognises the power it has over him he can’t escape. That inability to escape from one’s fate is another key element of noir. You can run from everything but yourself.
Noir style is also important. High contrast lighting gives objects a certain sinister feel. Traffic lights, street lights, rain-soaked streets, narrow alleys, dark stairwells in cheap apartments, abandoned buildings, fire escapes, the sewers beneath the city, darkened warehouses — all these places and things take on a character of their own.
The freighter where the final scene of Anthony Mann’s T-Men takes place, the bridge girders Arturo De Cordova flees onto in The Naked City, the tunnels beneath Union Station, the sewers of LA in He Walked by Night, the refineries in White Heat and Follow Me Quietly, the merry-go-round in Strangers on a Train, the office stairwell in Mirage‘s blackout, the bleak snowbound countryside in On Dangerous Ground and Murder Is My Beat, the baseball stadium in Experiment in Terror, the inner works of the Big Clock, the elaborate garden in Night Has 1000 Eyes, the claustrophobic corridors of the train in Narrow Margin, and the carnival fireworks of The Bribe are all as much characters in the film as any human. They are familiar and alien at the same time.
In their book Film Noir (Overlook Press, 1979), Alain Silver and Elizabeth Ward write that Noir “consistently evokes the dark side of the American persona … a stylised vision of itself, a true cultural reflection of the mental dysfunction of a nation uncertain of transition.” They put the classical noir period between the end of WWII and the end of the Korean Conflict when the country is in transition from the war and the influx of returning veterans adjusting to civilian life — and setting off the baby boom.
Among the other staples of noir is the femme fatale. She is hardly new to literature (lest we forget Delilah or Madame De Winter), but the noir protagonist is uniquely unable to resist or recognise her (Sam Spade on the other hand, not only recognises her, but plays her and ultimately disposes of her).
To this sexual confusion is added an atmosphere of violence, paranoia, and threat. The hero is vulnerable and beset by grotesque characters that seem to come out of a horror film at times (in The Big Clock Charles Laughton is shot in closeup with a wide angle lens that further distorts his already magnificently ugly features). Many of the characters in noir would be at home in Paris Grand Guignol or Dicken’s novels.
Certain visual cues are important, high contrast lighting, shadows, disorienting angles, and the sudden threat of ordinary and even benign objects (in The Big Combo policeman Cornell Wilde is tortured by gangster Richard Conte with Brian Donlevy’s hearing aid). There is often a dream scene or a brief use of nightmare imagery, and frequently flashbacks that disrupt the narrative flow.
Along with the grotesque there are frequently suggestions of perversion — twisted sexuality just beneath the surface (in The Glass Key William Bendix’s Jeff virtually seduces Alan Ladd as he beats him, calling him “Baby”), Clifton Webb’s aesthete villain in The Dark Corner is either asexual or homosexual (homosexuality is inevitably presented as perversion in noir, but then so are most forms of heterosexuality).
The femme fatale in noir often seems to feed on and desire humiliation, and take a perverse pleasure in destruction like some strange incarnation of Kali or a Dionysian bacchanalia. It’s the old fear of female sexuality sharpened to a knife point.
The films are also marked by a sort of hyper acuity of the senses. Blacks are deeper, light areas brighter, edges more defined. In Phantom Lady when Elisha Cook Jr.s’ hophead drummer plays a solo it rises in crescendo into a near sexual climax. The interior of the big clock in The Big Clock looks like an alien spaceship. When Philip Marlowe falls into a black pool it swallows him and the viewer. The sharpness of edges in noir is one of the most important visual cues, one that becomes startlingly clear if seen on the big screen or on today’s HDTV’s with superior digital DVD or Blu Ray.
One last key element of many noir’s is narration. This can vary from the poetic hardboiled voice of Dick Powell’s Marlowe, Tom Brown’s doomed drifter, Chill Wills’ embodiment of Chicago in The City That Never Sleeps, or the dry baritone of Reed Hadley emotionlessly keeping us informed in the docu-noirs.
The narration is at its most effective in Sunset Boulevard when William Holden’s Joe narrates from his own murder scene. The narration allows us inside the head of characters in ways that dialogue can’t always. At the same time it reminds us we are all to some extent trapped in our own mind.
Not all of these elements are in every noir film, but enough of them predominate that they can be used to define the genre. There are always going to be films that are on the edge one way or another, and because of its nature I’m not sure noir can be defined precisely, but I’ll name seven key factors I think are vital.
1. Alienation.
2. Obsession
3. Visual Style
4. Destructive Sexuality
5. Grotesque characters
6. Narration
7. Stylized violence
Any four of those elements in one film and I think you have to grant it is noir, but three or less is problematic, and unless the psychological elements apply to the protagonist it probably isn’t noir.
And one last rule that will certainly be controversial — I don’t think you can really claim it is the Hollywood noir school if it is made before at least 1944, though it may be an immediate precursor of the genre (This Gun For Hire, Street of Chance, Journey Into Fear, Citizen Kane …).
I don’t think true noir exists without the catalyst of WWII and the returning veteran. Like the atomic genie, the war let loose a new twist in the American psyche as defined as Hemingway’s Lost Generation, and it is out of that and many tropes of popular literature and film that film noir arises, as clearly as the detective story comes into focus with Conan Doyle and Sherlock Holmes in ways it had not in the period from 1841 in Poe’s Rue Morgue until Holmes.
Many of the elements are there, but until the right moment they don’t become a distinct form.
March 5th, 2009 at 4:00 pm
Lately I’ve been reading and rereading film noir definitions and just about everybody has a different interpretation of what film noir means.
Some are very inclusive and consider many of the crime/mystery films in the 40’s and 50’s to be noir. Others are very strict and exclude all sorts of movies with noir elements because of something missing in the film or some rule that was ignored, etc.
In the beginning when Nino Frank and others in France in 1946 first started to talk about film noir they included The Maltese Falcon and Laura. David Vineyard and others exclude these two films for many of the reasons he’s outlined above.
I don’t believe we can ever come to a consensus about what constitutes film noir. All I do know is that all the major film noir reference books do include such films like Laura. I’m talking about the major books like Film Noir, an Encyclopedic Reference by Silver and Ward and The Film Noir Guide by Kearney, among others.
In fact if you apply the 7 key factors listed above, I even see most of them definitely being in Laura. David and others will disagree. I therefore think the meaning of film noir is a personal and subjective topic that everybody must figure out for themselves. When I view Laura and The Maltese Falcon (I’ve seen each movie over a half dozen times), I see film noir, no doubt about it. Others see nothing more than an excellent crime/mystery drama.
Having said this, is it possible for anyone to really objectively and honestly prove that I am wrong about the film noir elements in these movies or that David Vineyard is wrong? I really don’t believe so.
March 5th, 2009 at 8:31 pm
For what it’s worth, I’m on record elsewhere as saying Laura is a definitive noir film, but I’m on the fence about The Maltese Falcon.
Looking through David’s seven key factors, I still think that “Visual Style” is the primary one, as far as films are concerned. As far as I’ve thought it through so far, it’s the one factor that HAS to be present.
But if that’s the only one of the seven factors that a movie has, assuming that’s what we’re using as a basis of a definition, is it Noir?
Or speaking as a mathematician, while “Visual Style” is necessary, is it sufficient? That’s what I’m working on.
— Steve
March 6th, 2009 at 1:11 am
Actually I agree with Walker and Steve, but in attempting to define noir you have to establish some parameters, and by the ones I used I felt Maltese Falcon and Laura weren’t quite film noir. But in both cases my primary reason for excluding them is the nature of the protagonist, which I feel is as key to noir as visual style. If you notice two of my seven points deal with the motivation of the protagonist of the film.
I do agree defining noir is subjective, and some of the films I don’t include for one reason or another are close calls. I should probably say that my definition is as much there for the purpose of argument as definition. Once you set a definition then you know what the argument is about.
I’m not as strict or as certain as this sounds, but having set some parameters I think we can make a broad consensus. However, one point I will stick with is that I don’t think anything before about 1943 is true noir because I think the defining social and psychological factor of the genre is the war.
And I will say I don’t think noir would exist without The Maltese Falcon, Laura, and I Wake Up Screaming, but the fact that they inspired the genre doesn’t make them of the genre. Still, I’ll grant that’s a narrow argument to make, and I’m really not bothered by the fact most reference books include them. I don’t think you can discuss the genre without those films, but I do think you are in a gray area. To make the point clear (or start a new argument) Owen Wister’s The Virginian is not a western (it’s a novel set in the west), but the books inspired by it are westerns and you can’t dicuss them without the Wister book. But Poe’s “Murder’s in the Rue Morgue” and it’s sequels are detective stories, because Poe was consiously creating a new kind of story. I don’t think Huston, Preminger, or Humberstone were conciously making a new kind of film, but I think Dmytryk and others were (though they didn’t use or think in the terms of film noir). But as I said, once you set parameters there’s room for argument and for consensus. Without some parameters you end up doing what Walker mentioned doing in an earlier blog, sitting down with a reference work and penciling in “this is not noir” next to titles that shouldn’t belong.
March 6th, 2009 at 9:20 am
Steve asks, if “Visual Style” is the only one of the seven key factors that a movie has, is it noir? At first, after looking at the seven factors listed above, the viewer might say no, it has to have more key points in order to be noir.
But I agree with Steve about visual style being the key and further, I think it is possible to have a noir simply because of style. My main example is REIGN OF TERROR aka THE BLACK BOOK (A restored version with commentary will be available March 31, 2009). Ordinarily you would think a film about the French Revolution would be classified as historical drama and no way would it be considered film noir. However because of one of the greatest cinematographers and stylists, John Alton, this film can be considered in the film noir canon. Alton may be the most influential person in film noir history simply because of his dark photography and use of lighting and shadows. He stated, “It’s not what you light. It’s what you don’t light.” Some of his film noirs are classics such as, T-MEN, RAW DEAL, HOLLOW TRIUMPH, HE WALKED BY NIGHT, THE CROOKED WAY, BORDER INCIDENT, I THE JURY, THE BIG COMBO, etc.
But also add Anthony Mann as the director of REIGN OF TERROR and you get a film that normally you would not consider noir, but is film noir because of the stylistic art of John Alton and Anthony Mann.
I agree with David Vineyard that you have to have rules or parameters in order to define film noir. However as we have mentioned, even with such rules we still get different opinions. LAURA is an example. By applying the seven key points David finds the movie to not be film noir, but when I apply the same rules I find that Laura is definitely film noir.
Another example of how subjective our noir rules can be was proven once again to me last night when I settled down to watch my nightly film noir at midnight. Two major film noir reference books, BRITISH FILM NOIR GUIDE by Keaney and ENCYCLOPEDIA OF FILM NOIR by Mayer and McDonnell, both list and discuss the British movie, HATTER’S CASTLE (1941), starring Robert Newton with James Mason and Deborah Kerr as supporting actors. Both books consider the movie to be film noir.
However to me it became obvious that this was not noir but more of a Victorian horror melodrama with Robert Newton chewing the scenery and acting like a younger Tod Slaughter. In fact, as I spilled a bowl full of grapes I was eating because I was laughing so hard, I realized HATTER’S CASTLE was indeed “mad as a hatter” and as enjoyable and fun as the Tod Slaughter films in the late 1930’s, such as SWEENEY TODD, CRIMES AT THE DARK HOUSE, MURDER IN THE RED BARN, etc.
The film is full of unhappy events and scenes involving rape, adultery, having a child out of wedlock, financial ruin, suicide, daughter disowned and banished, wife dying when rejected for a mistress, insanity, etc. And a great ending right out of FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER.
But is this movie film noir? I would have to definitely say no. But the authors of the books mentioned above indicate they consider it noir. I guess this is what makes these discussion so interesting; that several viewers can watch the same movie and come up with different opinions as to it quality, genre, and place in film history. Another great benefit is after talking and thinking about certain movies, there is a revival of interest in watching the film again, even if you have already viewed it many times.
March 6th, 2009 at 10:28 am
Hatter’s Castle is what the British used to call a ‘barn burner’, and as Walker Martin says no more noir than The Wolfman or many other horror and terror films that resemble the genre. Great fun in the Tod Slaughter mode, but hardly noir. A bit closer, and one I might concede as noir is the Robert Newton thriller The Hidden Room, about a jealous husband who imprisons his wife’s lover in the room of the title and tries to starve him. Still Newton does a fair amount of scenery chewing there too.
I agree with Walker Martin about Reign of Terror (The Black Book) being noir even though it is a period film. I can think of several period films made in the noir era that I think fit neatly into the genre, including The Lodger, Hangover Square, So Evil My Love, Ivy, The Suspect, The Spiral Staircase, Moss Rose, The Sea Wolf, The Tall Target, and of course Night of the Hunter. When you consider those are done by directors like John Brahm, Robert Siodmak, and Mann, it becomes even more evident. And in the case of Reign of Terror I’d also point to the presence of noir actors Robert Cummings, Richard Basehart, and Arnold Moss in the cast. I could probably even be argued into including Gaslight and Douglas Sirk’s Summer Storm and Scandal in Paris too, even though many noir critics insist noir can only exist in a modern setting. I’ll even add a few westerns to the list Pursued, Blood on the Moon, Ramrod, Rawhide, Yellow Sky, Station West, Track of the Cat, and to some extent The Searchers. And while not film noir the comedies Murder He Says and My Favorite Brunette parody many noir elements (particularly Brunette, which even has a cameo by Alan Ladd in his only film appearance as a private eye). Where I draw the line are films from before the noir era.
Not to beat a dead horse (well, not too badly), if you include The Maltese Falcon as film noir, then you have to include films like M and the Blue Angel, and they aren’t noir either. I understand why everyone wants to include Falcon, and it is the progenitor of noir, but Bogart’s Sam Spade is neither haunted, hunted, harried, obsessed, alienated, doomed, or controled by forces outside of his command. You can’t have noir without a noir hero, and Sam isn’t one. I’m not sure there has ever been a most self assured, self controled, self possessed hero in any film. Bogart being Bogart can’t help but provide Spade with a touch of humanity, but if you read the book without having him in mind Spade is perfect. You might make an argument his inhuman detachment qualifies him as a noir hero, but since it is presented in the book and the film as a virtue and not a flaw it doesn’t have a noir sensibility. Spade isn’t even obsessed with catching Archer’s killer, he just does it because it’s what detectives do. Many people seeing the film tend to read things into the film, especially into what Spade says, but if you listen closely or read closely you’ll notice Spade says exactly what he says and means throughout the book. He never lies, and never misleads save by telling the truth when others expect him to lie. There is no interior life, and we are never given any insight to what he thinks or feels save through his actual words. My argument is that aside from visual style noir must have a noir protagonist. When Spade tells Ward Bond that the bird is “the stuff that dreams are made of” he isn’t commenting on his shattered dreams, but those of everyone else who has touched the black bird. Spade is the only survivor because he is the only one who hasn’t dreamed. Hell, he’s nearly a Nietizchean ubermensch. A long way from the flawed heroes of noir.
Any noir history should do a chapter on Falcon, but then set it aside as a special case. That said, I don’t expect, or intend, to convert anyone (or to quote Joyce, “pervert myself”). I’m only making my position clear. I know fully well the next noir reference I pick up will list Falcon, and I still won’t agree, but I’ll always be pleased to read more about one of the most important films that ever came out of Hollywood.
March 6th, 2009 at 12:20 pm
I’m glad to see that you list SO EVIL MY LOVE as a period noir. Another Victorian setting starring Ray Milland and Ann Todd. Definitely a British noir with Ann Todd at the beginning being the perfect “good girl”. A young widow of a missionary who wants to do the right thing but by the end of the movie she has descended into the depths of sin and now is the perfect example of a good girl gone bad. I highly recommend this movie as an excellent British film noir. But if you want nice characters and a happy end you better stay away.
March 6th, 2009 at 4:14 pm
Ann Todd is also excellent in then husband David Lean’s film Madeleine (aka The Strange Case of Madeleine 1950) based on the real life sensational trial for murder of Madeleine Smith (and with that infamous Scottish verdict “not proven” to forever leave us hanging). This is clearly period noir. Some Lean critics condsider it beneath him, but forget that back when he was still a film editor he cut his teeth working on films like Ronald Neame’s film of Winston Graham’s thriller Take My Life.
But So Evil My Love is the superior of the two with Todd’s transition from good girl to murderess and Ray Milland’s charming ruthless rogue very much noir creations. So Evil My Love is based on a novel by Joseph Shearing, whose Moss Rose was also a period noir film (though I’m not sure of Blanche Fury, it’s pretty much a standard romantic drama — though a good one). Shearing was Margret Long who was best known as Marjorie Bowen, whose historical novels include Black Magic that made the list of the 100 Best Horror Novels.
I didn’t include Experiment Perilous on my list though it wouldn’t take much to convince me. It’s the right period (1944), has the right elements, and is directed by Jacques Tourneur, but I’d like to see some other opinions on whether it is noir or not. Based on style alone it qualifies.
March 7th, 2009 at 9:34 am
Back on Part One of this ongoing discussion, Jim Doherty has left the following comment:
I’ve suggested a definition for noir at other venues on the ‘Net. As it happens, I write a column on hard-boiled and noir crime fiction for MYSTERICAL-E. In one of my earliest columns, I gave my suggested definitions for “hard-boiled” and “noir.” In a subsequent column, I talked about film noir.
With Steve’s permission, rather than go into a long dissertation here, I’ll simply post the links to those articles.
The early definitional column can be found here:
http://www.mystericale.com/index.php?issue=064&body=file&file=like_em_tough.htm
The column on film noir can be found here:
http://www.mystericale.com/index.php?issue=071&body=file&file=like_em_tough.htm
My views on the subject are pretty much summed up in those two pieces.
JIM DOHERTY
>>>
Steve again. Jim’s right. His essays are far too long to repeat here. But very briefly — and I hope not too briefly — here are some of his definitions:
“But whatever the profession of the protagonist, what all the stories [I’ve just mentioned] had in common was a tough attitude and a colloquial style. So, essentially, a hard-boiled crime story is a story with that’s tough and colloquial.”
As for noir: “But, as near as I’ve been able to determine, based on those books I am familiar with, what they all seem to have in common is a tone, a sense of foreboding, what Chandler called “the smell of fear.” If “hard-boiled” is about attitude and style, then “noir” seems to be about atmosphere. A dark, sinister atmosphere.
“So, despite what you might read elsewhere, “noir,” according to the people who first coined the term, and according to the way it’s most commonly used now, isn’t about things like doomed characters or nihilistic plots. Not per se. Obviously, certain kinds of characters, and certain kinds of plot situations, will lend themselves to a particular kind of dark, sinister treatment. Clearly, such characters, and situations, and plots will contribute to the atmosphere of the story.
“But “noir,” to the degree that it describes anything that we can put our finger on, doesn’t describe those characters or those plots so much as the dark, sinister kind of atmosphere that such characters and plots support.
“In other words, noir’s about atmosphere, and that’s really all it’s about.
“So, to recap, if it’s tough and colloquial, it’s hard-boiled.
“If it’s dark and sinister, it’s noir.
“If it’s tough and colloquial, and dark and sinister, it’s both hard-boiled and noir.”
As for film noir: “So if, using the Serie Noire default definition we developed last time (a noir novel is a crime novel with a dark, sinister atmosphere), it follows that a film noir is a crime movie with a dark, sinister atmosphere.”
And: “Film noirs tend to have similar visual styles, characterized by dramatic, chiaroscuro lighting, lots of highlighted lights sharply contrasting with heavily darkened shadows. The plots often, but not always, have gritty, urban backgrounds (although some, like On Dangerous Ground , have rural settings).
“The funny thing is, precisely because the term didn’t come into common usage until the ‘70’s, the makers of the classic film noirs didn’t know that that was what they were making.”
There’s much more to both articles, so by all means go read both of them, and in full context.
— Steve
March 7th, 2009 at 9:57 am
I didn’t comment on Jim’s definitions in that previous post, but I will now, concentrating on what he said about film noir, as that’s what has been our primary topic here.
Jim says “…a film noir is a crime movie with a dark, sinister atmosphere.”
Right now, as a definition, that summarizes my thoughts also, in the smallest nutshell possible.
Allowing, of course, for the widest possible definition of “crime movie” that you can make — allowing for most of the movies that David and Walker have been discussing to squeeze in as noirs. The period pieces, the westerns, but not, I don’t think, comedies.
Walker and I have recently been discussing screwball comedies between ourselves and offline. We agreed that a noir film can have strong screwball components, a la THE BIG CLOCK, but we failed to come up with a screwball comedy that that was noir.
Since then, though, David has pointed out that: “…while not film noir the comedies Murder He Says and My Favorite Brunette parody many noir elements.”
That might be the best a comedy can be in terms of being a noir film: a parody.
Or can a black comedy also qualify as being noir?
DR. STRANGELOVE?
March 7th, 2009 at 11:29 am
I see Jim Doherty has emphasized that the main ingredient for a movie to be considered film noir is style, such as a sinister atmosphere with dark shadows. This is the same basic conclusion that Steve Lewis and I have arrived at, as discussed above. Certainly John Alton as the main photographer on many classic film noirs would agree that style and use of shadows and lighting are very necessary.
Jim also points out the interesting theory about why the film noir period is often considered to have ended by 1959. During the 1940’s and 1950’s most films were still being made in black and white, but by the 1960’s color was in wide use. This sort of ended the black and white film noir period.
March 7th, 2009 at 11:44 am
Jim also said: “… until the 70’s, the makers of the classic film noirs didn’t know that that was what they were making.”
In an email that Juri Nummelin sent me last week, which now complements what Jim has just posted, he said the following:
“The only real film noirs are those were made from the eighties on, with the stamp “film noir” in the screenwriters’ and directors’ foreheads and eyes: Body Heat, Blade Runner, The Hot Spot…”
There’s some truth to that, isn’t there?
March 7th, 2009 at 5:07 pm
Steve asks if there can be a film noir comedy, and I can nominate three “black comedies” that I think qualify. The best known is Hitchcock’s The Trouble With Harry based on the novel by Sexton Blake veteran writer Jack Trevor Story. Even though the protagonists aren’t the usual noir hero, I think the film fits enough of the parameters of the genre to fit as noir and not merely a parody of it. Not many would agree with me, and I can certainly see their point, but I do think Harry qualifies.
The second film is noir, and may also be a parody of noir, but it also qualifies, and is included in Slver and Ward’s Film Noir. This is Robert Siodmak’s Uncle Harry (1945) with George Sanders as a rather mild type henpecked by his spinster sisters, and driven to murder when he meets a young woman and falls in love and his sisters object. Granted, it is hardly a kneeslapper, but it is a comedy, at least a black one.
Film number three is clearly noir, directed by Fritz Lang, The Woman in the Window (1945). Again, this isn’t a broad comedy by any means, and it is fairly dark, but ultimately it’s all the set up for a sort of grim joke, and like those above as close to comedy as noir gets. It’s not belly laugh comedy, more a sort of grim ironic humor.
Most black comedies such as Dr. Strangelove, The Busy Bodies, The Loved Ones, The Green Man, Hue and Cry, and so on aren’t noir although they have noir touches because they lack that atmosphere of fear and repression — of unease, that is key to noir. And at least two noirs that aren’t comedies, The Big Clock and His Kind of Woman, have strong comic elements.
Re Jim’s definitions I think that is as succinct as you can make it, but there are problems. I’ll give one example, 1940’s The Stranger on the Third Floor. Many call this the first true film noir, but I think it is really the last true German Expressionist film. I think the problem is because the two genres cross over so much. If you give Stranger as the first noir then you have to say Lang’s M is also noir, and it isn’t. Stranger is a transition film, which is what I argue Falcon, I Wake of Screaming, Laura, and This Gun For Hire are — transitions from the hardboiled and German Expressionist school to what we came to call noir. You can not divorce noir from the psyche of the late and post war world anymore than you can divorce German Expressionism from the post war Germany that also gave birth to Hitler.
And no, the directors doing noir no more thought in terms of noir than most of the German directors thought in terms of German expressionsim, but most of them were aware of making a new type of film whether it had a name or not. And they made them because they were relatively inexpensive, popular, and also echoed the mood of the people watching them. They were aware of utilizing a style of film making even if it was just a new twist on old genres. I think you have to take into account the social changes that occured in the period to define noir just as the depression was the spur for screwball comedy or the Great War the catalyst for the Expressionist movement. If you try to define noir as only style, atmosphere, and hard boiled sensibility then you come perilously close to having to include films like The Falcon Takes Over, the Michael Shayne film Time to Kill (based on Chandler’s Farewell My Lovely and The High Window respectivly), all of Val Lewton’s films (only Leopard Man is really noir — and based on Woolrich’s Black Alibi), B programers like Quiet Please, Murder!, and quite a few black comedies and horror films. By this broad definition Lang’s first American film, Fury, is noir. LeRoy’s They Won’t Foget, The Amazing Dr. Clitterhouse, Scarface, Night Must Fall, and early Mann film’s like Dr. Broadway and Two O’Clock Courage, as well as Zinnemann’s Kid Glove Killer, and Edgar Selwyn’s Mystery of the Dead Police all become noir films.
Without narrower parameters then the definition noir means nothing, and you have to let anything in that even vaguely fits the broad criteria. I’m not defending my seven categories — but I do think some sort of set of rules need to apply or else the genre is soon going to include Abbot and Costello Meet The Killer and Cat and the Canary. I’m really not a purist, but I think we are fooling ourselves with these broad definitions that end up with the old Justice Potter “I know it when I see it” caveat. “Walks like a duck, looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck,” is fine — if you know what a duck walks, looks, and quacks like, but if you can’t agree on that it might as well be a goose, or film noir.
March 7th, 2009 at 6:59 pm
Does anybody think BLUES IN THE NIGHT
(1941) would qualify as the first and perhaps
only film noir MUSICAL?
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0033409/
http://www.tcm.com/thismonth/article/?cid=21734
March 7th, 2009 at 7:06 pm
Several of the films mentioned in this
discussion are being shown on TCM
next week:
http://stkarnick.com/blog2/2009/03/tcm_thrillers_for_march_9_15.html#more
March 7th, 2009 at 7:19 pm
I’m glad you mentioned Quiet Please Murder. This film is only available on bootleg dvds but if you are a big reader or book collector, it’s worth seeking out. George Sanders is the star and most of the murderous action takes place in a library. In addition it has Nazi spies, rare books, and beautiful girls.
I stumbled across this film during my nightly viewing of film noir movies. Of course it is not really noir but most of the movies that I watch on bootleg dvds turn out to be crime/mystery dramas instead of film noir. They are still fun to watch and many are of quite high quality. But if you want to watch film noir, the real thing, then I recommend Silver and Ward’s FILM NOIR AN ENCYCLOPEDIC REFERENCE. The films they recommend and discuss have more of the film noir elements that we have been talking about. Most of the other reference books let in too many crime/mystery melodramas. For instance FILM NOIR GUIDE AND BRITISH FILM NOIR GUIDE by Keaney are both excellent books but they are too inclusive and discuss too many movies that are crime, gangster, mystery films, not really film noir at all.
The Silver and Ward book, FILM NOIR AN ENCYCLOPEDIC REFERENCE, is in it’s third edition and first was published in the late 1970’s, which made it one of the first film noir encyclopedias and reference books. Every since 1979 I’ve been checking off the over 300 film noirs discussed in this book as I see them over the years. I give each movie a grade, the date I view it, and sometimes a comment. Now, after 30 years I’m closing in on having seen all of the movies, some several times.
Another book I like but that takes getting used to is THE FILM NOIR BIBLE. Unfortunately many readers take exception to the breezy and slangy style that the author uses. But if you can look beyond the wisecracks and jokes you have an enormous 700 page large sized book listing 250 of the authors favorite noirs, all graded and discussed in detail with long summaries, critical analysis and listing of characters. There are dozens of other lists. The book is available on amazon.com and I recomend it if you have been following the above discussions.
March 7th, 2009 at 10:47 pm
Quiet Please, Murder! is an old favorite, and as Walker says not easy to find, but rewarding when you do. It’s written and directed by John Larkin who wrote quite a few movies and later wrote and produced television, and a good example of a film that has a lot of noir touches without being noir. George Sanders and Gail Patrick are very good in the film and Richard Denning gives good hardboiled private eye. It’s a superior B film, and why it has never been available is one of those mysteries no one can really explain adequately.
Blues in the Night isn’t noir, but uses some elements of the genre un-consciously. I’m not really sure there are any noir movie musicals (unless you want to count later films like New York New York and Cotton Club — I don’t), if Young Man With a Horn and Love Me or Leave Me aren’t noir (and they aren’t) then you probably can’t claim any musicals for the genre — not even oddball films like Fritz Lang’s You And Me which stars George Raft, has Kurt Weill music, and Leslie Charteris contributed to the screenplay. You could probably do a pretty thick book on Not Quite Noir films from films like Quiet Please, Murder! to Blues in the Night.
Walker, I agree wholeheartedly about Silver and Ward’s Film Noir, but they leave out several pictures for no real reason. If I’ll Cry Tomorrow and Lightning Strikes Twice aren’t noir then what are they? I don’t think you even have to push the boundaries of the genre to include those two. And do Five Steps to Danger (based on a Donald Hamilton novel) and Foreign Intrigue (which has close to the same plot as Mr. Arkadian) count or not? What about Affair in Trinidad or The Green Glove? What about To The Ends of the Earth or Sam Fuller’s The World For Ransom? Edge of Eternity, Trapped, and Desert Fury don’t make most lists either nor does Inferno. All these films fit many of the agreed upon general parameters of noir. Silver and Ward don’t let Walk East on Beacon Street, Walk a Crooked Mile, or The People Against O’Hara in either, but they have no problem with Lady Without Passport being on the list. Good book, but if they let the silent Underworld in just what are the criteria, because all the films I’ve mentioned are included in many noir references? Or is the critera we’ve agreed on as broad as one man’s noir isn’t anothers. If that’s the only criteria then Blues in the Night is noir if you want it to be.
March 8th, 2009 at 12:41 am
Silver and Ward’s FILM NOIR does leave alot of film noir movies out and that’s why they should publish a fourth edition bringing everything up to date. The films you mention should be in the book as well as others and there are some films which should not be in like the silent film UNDERWORLD. I watched this recently and could not see the noir connection at all.
Having said the above, I still pick it as the best checklist for film noir movies simply because it does not let in as many non-noir movies as the other books. For instance I refer to Keaney’s FILM NOIR GUIDE alot but it lists 745 movies, many of which are not film noir.
I think one of the problems with Silver and Ward’s FILM NOIR, is that it was published in 1979 before the video revolution and the authors must have depended alot on watching what they could on TV or renting the actual films. Now we can easily buy dvds or videos of many film noirs or obtain the rare ones on the so called bootleg market at inexpensive prices. Thus we can easily view the films that should have been in the book but in the 1970’s it must have been alot harder to see all the noir type movies. Does anyone know if there will be a fourth edition? I believe I saw that Silver and Ward have a film noir book coming out this summer but I don’t think it’s an update of their classic reference.
March 8th, 2009 at 1:09 am
Whoo-ee. More books to read and even more movies to watch. How am I ever going to get caught up?
It looks like Tuesday’s going to be a perfect gem day for fans of black-and-white crime movies on TCM — even if we’re not likely to get everyone to agree that they’re all noir. Like horseshoes, close is good enough to me. Thanks, Mike, for the link to the entire week’s list.
And as long as I’m still away from the controls here — I am hoping that I can get something new posted here soon — how about another question? I remember seeing this asked on another forum a while back.
Is there a movie that you would call noir that you did not enjoy watching, or that you would call a badly made movie? Not necessarily one that you think could have been better — perfection eludes all of us, after all — but a noir film that was an out-and-out stinker?
— Steve
March 8th, 2009 at 10:15 am
Walker is probably right about the missing films from Silver and Ward’s Film Noir missing many films since they didn’t have access, but I also think they deliberatly avoided many films from the docu. noir genre ( Walk East on Beacon, Walk a Crooked Mile, Pickup Alley …) and one’s they just didn’t like such as Gambling House (a noir remake of Mr. Lucky with Victor Mature). And a correction, they do list Fuller’s World For Ransom (which was the basis for Dan Duryea’s television series China Smith) I guess the pages stuck together.
Which brings us to Steve’s question about bad noir films. Of course this is really subjective (I know people who think Battlefield Earth is a good movie and love Heaven’s Gate), but I have a few nominees. Another Man’s Poison is a really bad film for my money. Bette Davis chews scenery as if she were starving and Gary Merrill just looks as if he ate something that disagreed with him. It’s overly melodramatic, but not enough to be fun. Another Man’s Poison is this man’s poison.
Beyond the Forest is another bad noir (and no, I’m not picking on Bette Davis). I generally like King Vidor films (even Duel in the Sun), but here the soap opera and melodrama take the forefront and the mood and atmosphere are laid on with a trowel. At any given time Davis is inclined to overacting, but in the right film (The Letter, Dark Victory) that’s a virtue. Here it isn’t. And it might be better if it wasn’t so silly. It plays like an overdramatic schoolgirl (or boy)concept of a noir film. On the other hand for those who relish bad movies this is a feast.
Possessed is another women’s noir, a tiresome melodrama about Joan Crawford becoming obsessed with a rich man and doing anything she can to get him. Van Heflin has a thankless role as a good guy and the whole mishmash is just tiresome and overdone, overacted, and under thought. Joan runs Bette a close second in the scenery chewing department, and like Bette it can be a good thing — but not here. About halfway through the film you’ll be looking for the exit, and then realize you are home in bed and can’t escape.
The Woman on Pier 13 doesn’t work by anyone’s standards. It’s a Red-scare film with the worst performance of Robert Ryan’s career as a capitalist whose Commie past comes back to haunt him. William Talman has a nice bit as a hitman, but that doesn’t help all that much. Silly and overwrought, it almost plays like an SNL version of a Red-scare noir.
As Red-Scare noir goes it would be hard to find a bigger train wreck of a film than My Son John, a highly silly overwrought movie with a stellar cast — Helen Hayes, Robert Walker, Van Heflin, and Dean Jagger, about an apple-pie all American couple discovering their little man is a dirty Bolshie — and turning him over to the FBI. Director Leo McCarey should have stuck to singing priests (Going My Way).
Undercurrent by Vincente Minnelli has another all star cast — Katherine Hepburn, Robert Taylor, and Robert Mitchum, but it’s a tiresome bore of a melodrama and the idea that Hepburn might be brow beaten or threatened by Taylor is a bit hard to swallow. Mitchum and Hepburn make for a singularly unlikely romantic couple. Mitchum claimed he and Hepburn got along fine, but rumor holds she loathed him. Maybe she just loathed this script.
I don’t know that anyone but me considers Big Jim McLain as a film noir, but it certainly is a stinker. One of John Wayne’s worst films, he and James Arness are sent to Hawaii by HUAC to find a Commie cell run by Alan Napier (Alfred on tv’s Batman). Flat, badly written, and wasting Wayne’s considerable screen talents it’s not even entertaining as a bad film. Mind numbingly dull film that even Wayne can’t buy into.
Noir is an unusual genre because visual style can sometimes overcome mediocre acting and cliched scripts — sometimes those can even be virtues in something like Edgar Ulmer’s Detour which would fall flat with better actors and a less melodramatc script. But these films have in common the best actors, and that may be the problem, because we expect more of big budget star vehicles.
But yes, Virgina, there is bad noir.
March 8th, 2009 at 11:18 am
Steve’s question about bad film noir is certainly a loaded question that can easily backfire on anyone daring to answer it. David in Comment #19 does a good job of listing some annoying film noir. I recently watched UNDERCURRENT and gave it a mediocre rating despite the all star cast and Minnelli directing. However BEYOND THE FOREST is so bad, it’s good. I laughed all through the movie.
I can nominate some candidates for worst film noir but there might be some arguments that they are not really noir. For instance two movies often listed in film noir reference books I found to be really poor are THE BEAT GENERATION(1959) and BABY FACE NELSON(1957). But many would argue they are not really noir. THE BEAT GENERATION stars Steve Cochran, Ray Danton and Mamie Van Doren in a really dated crime film with many “beat” scenes that made me cringe. BABY FACE NELSON is a gangster film that has Mickey Rooney over acting and not believable. But I guess some would argue that these movies are not as poor as I’m claiming.
So let me nominate a couple more starting off with DOUBLE INDEMNITY. No, I’m not referring to the 1944 classic but to the 1973 TV remake starring Richard Crenna, Lee J. Cobb, and Samantha Eggar. This 75 minute movie used similar dialog and scenes as the 1944 original, but the actors, music, and director, all are hopeless compared to the original movie. If you don’t believe me, this poor remake can be found as an extra on the two disc dvd of DOUBLE INDEMNITY.
But some might argue I’ve taken the easy way out by picking a TV remake because such films are often poor. I therefore recommend as the worst film noir, THE THIEF(1952) starring Ray Milland. This movie is definitely film noir with the portrait of an alienated, lonely man on the run. Also has plenty of dark and shadowy atmosphere. The main problem with the movie is that during the 87 minute running time, there is no dialog at all. That’s right, no talking, just silence, which becomes tedious and boring. Very monotonous with plenty of silent scenes of people walking around, telephones ringing and nervous glances. Considering that Ray Milland had one of the most distinctive voices in Hollywood, you have to wonder why on earth they would keep him silent. This film has to be seen to be believed.
March 8th, 2009 at 2:31 pm
Re Walker’s Post #20, we are in 100% agreement. The only reason I didn’t list The Thief was because it was at least trying to do something different — but it certainly fails at the effort. And I don’t consider Beat Generation or Baby Face Nelson noir either. Nor do I consider them good films. We may be stirring up a nest of Africanized killer bees here, but noir isn’t always good just because it’s noir. Some of these on my list and Walker’s aren’t even subjective really — just bad.
Maybe I’ll watch Beyond the Forest when I’m in a better mood. It’s one of those films so bad you either have to laugh — or cry.
One thing we haven’t touched on are some exploitation films that I wonder if they qualify as noir? I’m thinking of some of Edward L. Cahn’s films in particular.
There’s also a slick little film written by Sidney Sheldon,No Questions Asked, with Barry Sullivan, Arlene Dahl, and Richard Anderson about a mob lawyer. It’s replete with a sadistic gang boss (Barry Kelly) and a pair of cross dressing hold up men. Minor noir, but noir. A couple of other’s I’m curious if anyone condsider to be noir The Black Orchid, Repeat Performance (which I’m pretty sure is noir), The River’s Edge (again pretty sure), Bottom of the Bottle, Black Magic (period noir surely), Miami Story, Secret Behind the Door, The House by the River, A Stone for Danny Fisher, Portrait in Black, Flaxy Martin (remake more or less of Lawyer Man), and Bad and the Beautiful. I think most of those are noir, though I might be argued out of Miami Story (as a gangster pic).
March 10th, 2009 at 11:51 am
Walker and David, Some of the “bad” noir films you both mention I have to admit I’ve watched but most conveniently forgotten, probably almost immediately. Erased from memory, so to speak, so thanks for reminding me!
I don’t remember watching any of that last group of movies that David, you mention in your last paragraph, except for Flaxy Martin, which I saw so long ago that I’d hesitate in calling it noir one way or the other — but in any case, I wouldn’t hesitate in watching any of them, if the opportunity came along, and that’s what it’s all about isn’t it?
My wife’s mother (96) is still quite ill, so as I’m sure everyone has noticed, all of the recent activity on this blog has been restricted to comments on this post, for which I thank all of the participants most gratefully.
I’m going to ask another question, though, and it will pretty much be a continuation of this one, but I’ll use it as the basis for a separate post.
March 10th, 2009 at 1:58 pm
One screwball comedy I forgot to mention that is at least borderline noir is Remains to Be Seen. Pop singer June Allyson moves into her uncle’s New York apartment where Van Johnson is the hotel manager and a would be drummer. Together they end up in a murder investigation. It’s not a noir plot, but uses some techniques of the genre. Primarily it’s a screwball comedy with noir touches like My Favorite Burnette or George Marshall’s Murder He Says. The foties hip stuff is dated, and Allyson and Johnson are a little old for the parts they play, but it’s an entertaining little film and shows up once in a while on TCM.
Of the films I mentioned (#21) Martin Ritt’s Black Orchid is a soapy romance with Anthony Quinn and Lana Turner — he’s a business man and she’s the widow of a gangster. At best it is borderline noir, but if you define the genre by style it fits. Quinn it the hero in The River’s Edge directed by Allan Dwan (the silent Thief of Baghdad) where he and wife Debra Paget are forced to help her ex, sadistic criminal Ray Milland, get across the border into Mexico. Milland is exceptionally good and nasty in this one. And it’s Lana again in Portrait in Black, a murder and blackmail mystery again with Quinn, Sandra Dee, John Saxon, and Richard Basehart. Again, on style alone it has a noir look, and noir subject.
Bottom of the Bottle, based on the novel Georges Simenon wrote while living in Arizona, features Van Johnson as a fugitive drunk who shows up on the doorstep of estranged brother Joseph Cotton seeking help. Henry Hathaway directed, and though it’s also a soaper I think it also fits in as noir. Ruth Roman and Jack Carson are also in it. Black Magic, directed by Gregory Ratoff is based on Alexandre Dumas novels Memoirs of a Physician and Joseph Balsamo about the mesmerist and fraud Count Cagliostro — here played by Orson Welles. In terms of style it’s clearly period noir. Raymond Burr has a small role as Alexandre Dumas fils.
Secret Beyond the Door and House By the River are murder dramas from Fritz Lang and both pretty clearly noir by almost any definition. In Secret bride Joan Bennett suspects hubby Michael Redgrave is a killer ala Hitch’s Suspicion. It’s based on a novel by Rufus King who wrote the Lt. Valcour and Stan Rice novels. The House by the River features Louis Hayward as a larcenous husband whose schemes lead wife Jane Wyatt and brother Lee Bowman to near ruin.
A Stone for Danny Fisher is Meet Danny Wilson on screen (sorry about that) a musical about a singer (Frank Sinatra) who falls for racketeer Raymond Burr’s girl. It’s based on the first novel by Harold Robbins. Noirish elements at least. Bad and the Beautiful isn’t a crime film at all (but neither is The Big Knife). It’s Vincinte Minnelli’s classic film about Hollywood heel Kirk Douglas, who is on the outs. Walter Pidgeon brings together three people who he worked with who hated him to help revive his career — writer Dick Powell, director Barry Sullivan, and movie star Lana Turner who recall in flashback how they met and were effected by Douglas. Again, if you define noir by style alone this is noir. Gloria Grahame plays Powell’s wife and if she or Lizbeth Scott are in it can it not be noir (just kidding)?
I’ll go out on a limb and say Repeat Performance is clearly noir — and good noir at that. It’s based on a novel by William O’Farrell and directed by Alfred L. Werker. Joan Leslie murders husband Louis Hayward on New Years Eve and finds the next morning it is one year earlier and she has a year to relive and try to avoid it ending the same way. John Ireland narrates, and Richard Basehart makes his debut. In the book Basehart’s character is a gay man known as William and Mary, that wasn’t allowed in the film so he’s a gigilo, but Basehart plays him as gay anyway, and he’s very good. There was a mediocre made for television version called Turn Back the Clock in 1989.
Not from my list, but starring Louis Hayward and Zachary Scott, Edgar Ulmer’s Ruthless is a sort of low budget Citizen Kane, with a stellar cast including Diana Lynn, Sidney Greenstreet, and Raymond Burr. Scott is a souless millionare and Hayward his only friend. It’s a remarkably good little film with Greenstreet giving one of his best performances. This is one that is clearly noir, but so little seen it doesn’t always make the lists.
Miami Story directed by Fred Sears has Barry Sullivan a tough ex con who finds redemption helping to break the mob run by Luther Adler in south Florida. It’s a gangster pic, but also has enough noirish touches to qualify.
One other that I lean toward calling noir is Black Widow directed by Nunnally Johnson and based on the novel by Q. Patrick about his series creations writer/producer Peter Duluth and actress/star wife Iris. Van Heflin is Duluth who takes All About Eve style young actress Peggy Ann Garner under his wing while his wife (Gene Tierney) is away. When Garner is murdered Heflin finds himself the chief suspect and has to turn detective to clear himself with aging diva Ginger Rogers and her hanger on husband Reginald Gardiner and Otto Kruger the chief suspects. George Raft appears as Lt. Trant, a series regular in the Patrick books. It’s not noirish in style as much as the plot. I’m not really sure if I would call it noir, but I’m interested if anyone else would. The Female Fiends (there’s another title) is another Duluth based mystery with noirish touches with Lex Barker as Duluth who has amnesia and finds himself the key in a fraud.
Some of these are clearly noir and some are only noirish, but they point out how subjective the definitons of noir can be. There are quite a few soap operas from the late fifties and sixties that have noir elements like Madame X, Where Love Has Gone, or The Woman on the Beach, that I think point out the problem of defining noir by style and crime element alone. Some of these films aren’t noir, but certainly have noir elements. By the sixties the style was so pervasive that the lines get awfully blurred, and there is a tendency — to which I plead guilty — to call it noir if we like it, and not noir if we don’t. That’s the main reason I’ve taken a stand of sorts about the definitions. Too narrow and you leave out some films that belong, too broad and everything gets in.
March 11th, 2009 at 7:57 am
No one commented on my e-mail Steve quoted (it was a longer one and I was going to post it as a comment, but I forgot all about it and was away for a few days). I still repeat: no one was making film noir in the fourties and fifties in Hollywood. They were doing sinister thrillers or whatever they called them. They started making film noir only when Paul Schrader and others started to talk about it – and then came films like Body Heat and Blade Runner which repeat the patterns all over again. (I don’t even think Arthur Penn was making a film noir when he did The Night Moves. Martin Scorsese whose films were written by Schrader must’ve been thinking of his films as films noirs, but I don’t think anyone else did. The first real film noir may have been DEAD MEN WEAR NO PLAID which made the style and the characters known to the audiences. Before that they were just watching badly-lit crime films.)
Could we agree on that there are many definitions of film noir and go on about our lives? One definition is about camera work and lightning, one is about the dark and sinister mood and fates that threaten our lives, one is about trenchcoats, saxophones, cigarette smoke and femme fatales (the noir of advertisements and music videos, which is, to me, just as right as any other definition), one is about the roots of these films in German expressionism and American hardboiled literature. I’ve even read one theory about film noir being about how cities were built after WWII.
March 11th, 2009 at 5:51 pm
Juri is right, of course, that there will never be a single definition of noir — nor agreement on which film is noir and which isn’t. Still, simply because creators weren’t thinking in terms of noir at the time the genre came into being doesn’t mean they weren’t consciously using elements of a new form. A number of factors drew certain directors to the form, including a certain freedom from the production code, and a shared sensibility as well as some freedom within and without the then dying studio system.
Noir films were relatively inexpensive to make and could succeed without major stars. They attracted audiences looking for something they couldn’t find on the emerging small screen, and they allowed for a collaboration between director, writer, and cinematographer that attracted directors like Mann, Hitchcock, Farrow, and others. In addition they fit the post war mood, the let down after the end of the war and the uncertainty about what this new world was going to be like. Audiences and critics responded because the films reflected unspoken attitudes, concerns, and fears they were experienceing.
The fact that these directors didn’t think in terms of noir as we do doesn’t mean they weren’t aware they were making a different kind of movie. While the directors may have been making crime and suspense films rather than “noir” they were clearly operating within a shared vision of urban menace and psychological quirks keyed to the use of a conscious style or look. I’m not sure Tolkien ever thought in terms of heroic fantasy in writing Lord of the Rings and fairly certain Robert E. Howard didn’t use the term sword and sorcery, but their work fits those genres.
Robert Louis Stevenson called his Jeckyl and Hyde a ‘crawler’ and Buchan his tales ‘shockers’, but we recognise them as fitting in the horror and thriller category. Noir has come to represent a kind of film that came into being around the beginning of the war and came to fruition toward the end of the war. It thrived, and with some changes became a genre we now call noir, but which the men who pioneered the form likely only considered a new way to tell a certain kind of story. German Expressionist films, French black cinema, the American hard-boiled school of writing, the rise of the psychological novel, the Hemingway school of romantic realism, social criticism born of the Depression, the shared experience of the War, technical breakthroughs in film stock and its ability to define blacks more sharply, and the hunger of the audience for something new all combined to produce what we call noir. Likely the reason we can’t agree on which films belong to it or not is because the men creating it were not thinking in those terms themselves. Leonardo and Michalangelo didn’t think in terms of the Rennaisance either.
However I have to disagree about Dead Man Wear Plaid. The genre was being consciously parodied as early as My Favorite Brunette, and by the sixties directors and critics were using the term film noir and making films utilizing elements of that genre. By then Blake Edwards and others had even been using it on television, though perhaps not as noir per se. I’d be curious what the first film consciously made as film noir was. Just for discussion I’ll nominate three possibilities: Welles Touch of Evil (1958); John Frankenheimer’s The Manchurian Candidate (1962); and, John Boorman’s Point Blank (1967).
March 12th, 2009 at 8:10 am
Don’t Frankenheimer’s and Boorman’s films use a very different shooting technique and style from the “real” noir films? Wouldn’t know about Welles. After travelling abroad he must’ve known about the French discussion on noir and may have made the film with “noir” stamped on his forehead. (Possible exceptions: Kubrick’s first two or three films and Irving Lerner’s films. But Lerner belonged to a different school of film-making altogether. I don’t know enough about him to really say.)
As for the sixties and seventies films, I beg to differ. In the USA, it was Paul Schrader who first started talking about noir and he did it in the early seventies. And if there was something noirish in the films of those decades, I don’t think it was deliberate and they were still making thrillers or crime films. Someone may have said: “Hey, let’s do it the way they made it in the fifties, you know, shadows and light and weird camera angles”, but still that doesn’t mean it was noir. Because it’s still the genre of the critics and essayists and fans, not the movie-makers’. (It started to be in the late seventies and eighties, with Dennis Hopper saying that film noir is a director’s genre.)
As for MY FAVOURITE BRUNETTE, well, I think the moviegoers had forgotten it by the time DEAD MEN came on. So it seemed like a new style to them and imitation became the new style. (We always forget that people aren’t really interested in the old films the way we are. And do remember when the VHS came. It was only 25 years ago.)
March 12th, 2009 at 1:01 pm
I would like to recommend a set of books that I consider required reading to anyone who has been following the recent discussions on film noir. There are four books in the FILM NOIR READER series: FILM NOIR READER, and FILM NOIR READER 2,3, and 4, all edited by Alain Silver and James Ursini. These books together number over 1200 pages of interesting and valuable articles dealing with film noir. Not only the meaning, but discussions of the films, interviews, and seminal essays. In addition there are hundreds of excellent photographs.
It’s like reading Steve Lewis’ MYSTERY*FILE but instead of online, the comments are in books with more photographs.
March 12th, 2009 at 1:46 pm
I’ll grant Juri’s point if we mean by a noir style film one where the director thought in terms of ‘film noir’ as a genre, but by the sixties there were directors making films like those in the classic noir era, and I don’t think new techniques used by the director means the result isn’t noir or linked to the earlier films. Robert Montgomery’s Lady in the Lake used a ‘new’ (and failed) technique of the subjective camera and it is still noir. Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly is noir yet it is also inspired by the French ‘New Wave’ school of Goddard and others.
Of the three films I mentioned I suspect Welles’ 1958 Touch of Evil is the first consciously noir film, though even he may not have been thinking in terms of the word noir. Some date noir as we know it back to Citizen Kane, and both Lady From Shanghai and Mr. Arkadian are clearly in the genre. If any director of the period was consciously making a noir film it was Welles. Alas it’s almost impossible in Welles case to be sure of anything since at any given time his own words were likely to be contradictory — and always self serving.
And I think we have to keep in mind that despite what some of these directors may say in memoirs and interviews it is clear they were experimenting with a look and style of film. If the question is can a film be noir if the director was unfamiliar with the term film noir or even other films in the genre, the answer is yes. Film and literary genres aren’t only the result of imitation — in some cases different creators working in different circumstances respond to social and other changes and produce work that is related by that. One reason noir is so hard to define is that unlike the western it was never one specific type of film, but a style and sensibility that appeared at the start of the war.
Then too, when we discuss noir we are mostly limiting ourselves to American films, and the fact is that some films made in France and elsewhere were consciously made in the noir tradition and in turn influenced American films. Purple Noon (1960), Repulsion (1965), The Bride Wore Black (1968), Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960) all influenced Hollywood films as they were influenced by Hollywood. The general public may not have been as aware of these films as cineastes were, but the men making the films were aware of them.
In regard to My Favorite Brunette, it was pretty popular at the time and common on television long before video came along. I don’t pretend it was considered as anything other than another Bob Hope movie by most people, but it still parodied the films of the time — notably Double Indemnity, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Murder My Sweet, The Big Sleep, and The Maltese Falcon. Certainly Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid is a conscious parody of noir films, but then to some extent so is Gumshoe (1971). The idea of noir exists well before the term was commonly in use by anyone but a few film fans. As for the general public I don’t think they worry about such things, though I would argue that today film literacy is not uncommon even among those much less obsessed than we are. Poe called his detective stories ‘raciocination’ but they are still detective stories. I have no problem with the idea that the directors of the late sixties and seventies were the first to think conciously of the term ‘film noir’ but even without a name it was a recognized style of film making. Hollywood in that era (and still today) was an incestuous affair and because it is a collaborative form of creativity it’s not always easy to nail down what influenced what. And in any case the old rule is that by the time the general public catches on most trends are already finished and over.
March 13th, 2009 at 3:51 am
I don’t think KISS ME DEADLY was influenced by Godard. How could’ve it been, since it was made in 1955, and Godard and Truffaut made their first (feature-length) films in 1959? I don’t think Aldrich was much inspired by Alain Resnais’s films. There may be some influence from French crime films, like Jacques Becker’s GRISBI or Melville’s early films, but they are not New Wave films.
I think we are talking with slightly different terms here: I see genre as a construction, which always comes afterwards, David sees it as an existing even without being properly explicated. The definitions for the word “genre” don’t match here.
This discussion is fascinating (as one always learns new things: hadn’t heard of PURPLE NOON before), but now I’ll have to get on with my life. 🙂
March 13th, 2009 at 3:54 am
Sorry, I knew it under its French name and the Finnish translation. I’m not sure I’ve seen it, though. (PLEIN SOLEIL, that is, a René Clement film from Highsmith’s first Ripley, with Alain Delon as Ripley, or whatever he’s called in the film.)
One film, though, comes to mind, and this is actually a comment on another discussion here: Skip Homeier’s (and some other guy’s) STARK FEAR from 1962 or so. Is it on DVD, or was it ever on VHS? It was written by pulp and sf author Dwight Swain and the comments on it seem interesting.
There’s also James Landis’s THE SADIST on which a friend of mine (film critic from the early sixties on) has commented favourably. He saw it before the film was destroyed in Finland – the copy was shown to the critics, even though the film was banned here. It doesn’t get good reviews from various sources, but I’d trust this guy’s views.
March 13th, 2009 at 4:31 pm
Sorry, I may have put the cart before the horse. What I meant about Kiss Me Deadly was that is was embraced by the New Wave as part of that movement, while we think of it as noir. I think we may have a terminology problem here, because I don’t think noir is a genre (though I probably used the word as shorthand). Noir, like New Wave, Neo Realism, and even screwball comedy is a movement or style within a genre. In the same way the classical detective novel and hardboiled novel are not genre’s in themselves, but movements within the general mystery genre.
Noir is primarily a movement within the genre of crime films much as the ‘adult’ western or singing cowboy were movements within the western genre. If we think of noir as a genre then Juri is correct, because a genre has to be definded before it can exist. A movement (and I hope someone comes up with a better word for this) on the other hand is more about a style or trend of making films within a certain genre. In this same way drawing room comedy and slapstick are both still comedy though little related otherwise. I don’t think noir is a genre to itself, but merely a stylised form for telling a certain kind of crime or suspense story. I do think there are some well defined themes to noir that can help us decide what is central to noir and what is only borderline, but that’s what this argument is all about. I still think style alone is too broad a definition and allows too many borderline films in.
A good example is Blake Edwards Gunn based on his iconic televison series Peter Gunn. Whatever your opinion of the film, Gunn uses many of the stylistic flourishes of the noir film from the jazzy Henry Mancini score to the visual storytelling, but I don’t think Gunn is noir because Peter Gunn isn’t a noir protagonist despite being a private investigator. For me true noir is defined by the mental state of the protagonist (even in docu noir where the protagonist may be a relatvely bland policeman or federal agent), plus visual style, plus the intent of the director. Edward’s Experiment in Terror is clearly noir, but Gunn is just a slick crime film using some of noir’s visual elements. Gunn has no interior life which is one of the keys to most noir films. The noir hero isn’t always obsessed or even alienated, but he is removed by something from the rest of us. Alan Ladd in Appointment With Danger is a cold tough Federal agent with little patience when his chief witness turns out to be a nun, but he grows to respect her as the film develops. In Naked City Don Taylor’s decent police detective has to come to terms with the corruption around him without losing his innate decency. Even in He Walked By Night Scott Brady’s detective only catches Richard Basehart’s killer when he becomes less a cop and more a human being. The noir protagonist is either destroyed by his failings or overcomes them enough to survive, but he is seldom simply the good guy, and in noir the protagonist isn’t always the hero. I would argue that in many ways the protagonist of He Walked By Night is Richard Basehart, the killer; Eli Wallach in Lineup; or Finlay Currie’s scientist in Walk East on Beacon Street. Edmond O’Brien’s federal agent in White Heat is the hero, but the protagonist is Cagney’s Cody Jarret.
And re inspiration I think again we may be in the realm of definition. I doubt Aldrich was inspired by Resnais, but that doesn’t mean he hadn’t seen French films and consciously, or unconsciously, borrowed a camera angle or a style of doing a certain shot. Foreign films were very influential on Hollywood from the fifties on, and not just on the directors who came out of film schools. I can think if at least two American films and one British that tried to borrow from Wages of Fear (1952). Even directors who weren’t auteurs watched and learned from other films. We think in terms today of the directors who showed up in the late sixties and in the seventies and later and widely discussed their influences in early director’s work, but almost from the beginning directors learned from the films they watched. Griffith no sooner invented the close-up for Lilian Gish than it was a standard tool in the directors visual vocabulary. Some directors like Ford, Hawks, Lang, and Hitchcock were so widely imitated and borrowed from they generated whole schools of film making.
Until the seventies most film directors didn’t begin as directors. They came to directing from some other area. Hitchcock was a set designer (for Fritz Lang no less), Wellman a stunt pilot, Walsh an actor, Hawks a writer, Ford an actor and stuntman, and so on. Watching other films is how they learned to direct, so when noir came into being the men creating it naturally didn’t think conceptually of noir as a kind of film, but in terms of using a visual style that would best tell their story. I suspect some of them wouldn’t have thought of their work as noir even if they knew the term. They were just making movies the best they could using the best visual style for the type of story they wanted to tell. No one ever called Michael Curtiz an auteur, but he used noir style for Mildred Pierce and The Unsuspected because that style best told the story. I suspect that Welles Touch of Evil was the first film made by a director consciously trying to recreate a visual style and a storytelling style whether Welles knew the term noir or not.
March 15th, 2009 at 10:12 am
Yes, you’re right, I forgot about Clouzot, whose technique is simply brilliant.
March 15th, 2009 at 10:15 am
By the way, there has been lots of strong evidence that the New Wave ending of Kiss Me Deadly (“the world is so crazy it can’t but explode, and the screen blasts up, too”) is a wrong one and was never intended by Aldrich to be like that. Ever since I saw the film for the first time in the late eighties, I’ve wondered why it would be like that, when Aldrich was always so careful and liked to show off his masterful technique.
March 15th, 2009 at 8:42 pm
I wonder sometimes if there is a variant ending of Kiss Me Deadly I’ve never seen, because the one on the prints I’ve seen seem to me to imply that Hammer survives despite the mushroom cloud, although I always hear that he is destroyed by the explosion.
It may be like the ending of 2001. Kubrick and Clarke were horrified when they discovered that most people seeing the Star Child blowing up the nuclear shield around Earth thought he was destroying the planet when they intended him to be saving it.
Or it could be like the people who insist that there is a version of X The Man With X Ray Eyes that ends with Ray Milland saying “I can still see.” after tearing out his eyes. I’m not sure whether Aldrich lost control or perhaps the audience wrote their own ending.
March 19th, 2009 at 2:54 pm
A Finnish critic on film noir has said he saw a print (presumably in the early sixties) of KISS ME DEADLY with Hammer escaping with Velda. Well, not really escaping – you call it escape when you’re looking at atom explosion from ten meters away?
I think there’s a long article on this over at Noir of the Week blog. It was at least two years ago, though, so I’m not sure. Someone told me that Eddie Muller believes the everything-blasts-ending of KISS ME DEADLY is the real one, but I really don’t think it is.
However, it has been an influential one, since Godard and Ingmar Bergman have copied it in their own films – in BAND OF OUTSIDERS and PERSONA.
March 20th, 2009 at 12:56 am
My copy of Kiss Me Deadly (and every copy I’ve ever seen) clearly shows Hammer and Velda escaping into the surf and then the beach house being consumed in a mushroom cloud, so you can read it either way. The scene doesn’t show anything but the beach house consumed by the explosion, nor a mushroom cloud as big as the Trinity or Hiroshima ones we have seen on film. It seems to show a small contained explosion that only blows up the beach house. If Aldrich intended Mike and Velda to be killed I assume they wouldn’t be shown reaching the surf, unless he intended ambiguity.
Of course, if you want to get realistic they likely both got a lethal dose of radiation when the box was opened while they were in the house, much less when the house went up. But the film seems to show the explosion only consuming the beach house, and Mike and Velda are shown before that in the surf, not the house. I still think the death of Mike and Velda is like the ending of 2001: A Space Odessey where viewers wrote their own ending. The only thing supporting the death of Hammer and Velda is that Aldrich and screenwriter A.I. Bezzerides really disliked Spillane and loathed Hammer.
I have heard there is supposedly a cut where Mike and Velda do not reach the surf (and even that the scene where they do was imposed by the studio), but then again that may be fans reading their own interpretation into the film or even a bad copy edited poorly for showing on television. Again, if the intent of the film is Mike and Velda die why show them reach the supposed safety of the surf?
I’m reminded of taking my cousin’s five year old son to see Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. At the end when Newman and Redford are surrounded by the army and decide to go out in a blaze of glory they run outside firing their weapons wildly and the frame freezes on that image. With perfect five year old logic my cousin’s son turned to me and asked: “Did they kill all those guys?”
The mind is a terrible waste — or whatever Dan Quayle said. Or maybe this is one of those glass half empty, half full things. At least Aldrich doesn’t have Mike and Velda climbing in a lead lined refrigerator like Harrison Ford in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Or like the argument between Sam Jackson and Keven Spacey in The Negociator — is Alan Ladd dead or alive in the last scene of Shane? In the case of Kiss Me Deadly and Shane I think the pessimists are writing their own movie, but you never know, maybe my cousin’s five year old was right and Butch and Sundance wiped out the entire Bolivian army.