Between the Great Depression and the start of
the Cold War, Hollywood went noir, reflecting the worldly, weary, wised-up
undercurrent of midcentury America. The author explores the genre’s origins,
its look, its politics, and its geography, and shows how noir’s poignant
cynicism took hold—and why it remains embedded in the national psyche today.
I belong
to the last movie-centric generation; my family didn’t own a television until I
was eight. It was not on the small screen but in the art houses and rerun
theaters springing up everywhere during my college years that I discovered the
noir movies of the 1940s and 50s. Launched just before this country’s entry
into the war and peaking in the Cold War years, whether one calls it a genre or
a style—critics disagree—noir was a hybrid of glamour and grittiness, exposing
the enticingly seamy underside of midcentury America, a world untouched by the
national sport of self-justification then reaching Olympic proportions.
Directed
by such outstanding artists as Fritz Lang, Samuel Fuller, Robert Siodmak, and
Nicholas Ray, and shot by the best cameramen in the business, noir was peopled
not with the gratingly ill-timed figures blotting much of Hollywood’s
mainstream fare but with wised-up men and worldly women who had none of the
right answers but all the smart moves, whose motives were always mixed and
quite possibly malign, and who spoke some of the sharpest lines in American
film history. “You’re a cookie full of arsenic,” Burt Lancaster tells a
hustling publicity agent played by Tony Curtis in Sweet Smell of Success
(1957). “Is there any way to win?,” Jane Greer asks Robert Mitchum in Out of
the Past (1947). “There’s a way to lose more slowly,” he replies.
But
cynicism is not all noir’s protagonists offer. Many of them are in the grip of
an intoxicating metaphysics of utterness that creates signature moments of
total theatrics. A suicidal Burt Lancaster, dressed in pants and an undershirt,
abandoned by Ava Gardner in Siodmak’s The Killers (1946), smashes a chair
through the window of his Atlantic City hotel room and starts to jump, all in
one seamless rush of magnificent, amour fou movement. (Lancaster’s body,
trained by his early years as a high-wire circus performer, was almost always a
great actor, whatever the face was doing.) A cleaning lady stops him, saying,
“You’ll never see the face of God!,” an intervention, though it only postpones
his destruction, he will never forget—he makes her, years later, the sole
beneficiary of his life-insurance policy.
In Fritz
Lang’s Clash by Night (1952), Robert Ryan, wary to the point of paranoia and
transparently defenseless, his face beautiful, frightening, and worn with the
wrong kind of waiting, begs Barbara Stanwyck, “Help me—I’m dying of
loneliness!” Ryan, one of the finest actors of his day, was noir’s theologian,
mixing purity and guilt into lethal new combinations, poisons he administered,
despite the corpses often mounting around him, solely to himself. The
protagonists of this vein of noir were among those Amiri Baraka would describe
a few years later as “the last romantics of our age.” They may not believe in
the American pieties, but they believe in something.
The term
noir was coined in 1946 by French critics reviewing a group of American
thrillers, including Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity and Otto Preminger’s
Laura, both from 1944, to mark a phenomenon they thought new to American
cinema, a “harsh,” “true to life” quality, a mood of “pessimism and despair.”
Noir was the last product of the studio system, itself now fighting for
survival, and unlike the genres that preceded it, it worked best as a showcase
for situations and problems that were palpably unsolvable and systemic, endemic
to the social, economic, and even cosmic order.
“So
you’re unhappy,” the tough-minded moll played by Mary Astor tells a distraught
Van Heflin in Fred Zinnemann’s Act of Violence (1949). “Relax. No law says you
got to be happy.” In noir, and only in noir, it’s possible to be both
archetypically American and irremediably unhappy—a good thing for Heflin, a
bogus war hero, who has a vengeful Robert Ryan on his trail. After fleeing to
downtown L.A., Heflin deliberately gets himself shot, then jumps onto an auto
that crashes and explodes for good measure, leaving a young widow and infant
son to fend as best they can in an upscale suburban housing development for
which he served as contractor. The inner city was Heflin’s all but inevitable
destination. Noir, in Tony Curtis’s phrase, was a “feel-bad” genre, and
America’s metropoles, shadowy, glittering, perilous netherworlds, “too vast to
know,” in Allen Ginsberg’s words, “too myriad windowed to govern,” hemorrhaging
their middle classes even as they spawned a teeming new multi-ethnic underclass,
provided its natural habitat.
Roughly
75 percent of American noirs are set in cities; of these, two-thirds take place
in New York or Los Angeles, the twin capitals of American movies. Finding its
sources and setting its stories in roughly equal numbers in both locales, noir
constituted an arena of cooperation and competition for the two cities, now
rivals on the national and international stages: one bursting upward from its
claustrophobic island base, densely settled in the European manner, its
infrastructure already riddled with decay, the other the world’s first
suburbopolis, sprawling outward at a rate only cars, not people, could cover,
gripped in the sci-fi grotesqueries of gestation and waste, both surreal in
scope and ambition, both inventories of noir contrasts, with outrageous possibilities
of darkness and light, isolation and contact.
In
Anatole Litvak’s chilly shocker, Sorry, Wrong Number (1948), a repentant Burt
Lancaster warns Barbara Stanwyck by phone that he’s hired a hit man to kill
her—tonight. She’s on Sutton Place, “the heart of New York City,” in his words.
“Walk to the window,” he urges, “scream out on the street!” But we’ve looked
out that window over the course of the film, repeatedly. There’s no
neighborhood there, no sidewalk, just the East River, its highway, and an
elevated train, all distant and impervious. Besides, the killer is already in
the house; the camera follows him into her room, then shows the murder, without
ever revealing his face—only the camera and the city know who he is, and
neither is talking. The credits for Fritz Lang’s The Blue Gardenia (1953), a
crisp, proto-feminist whodunit set in L.A.’s garden-court apartments, newspaper
offices, and nightclubs, unroll over shots of a traffic-laden freeway with an
overpass; then the camera pans to City Hall, moving next to a strip, where it
finally cuts to Richard Conte, the male lead, in a convertible. Los Angeles, as
Lang saw it, had to come first.
When noir
protagonists live in small towns, like the restless notary stuck in Banning,
California, in Rudolph Maté’s bedeviled whirligig of a movie, D.O.A. (1950), or
the Bonnie-and-Clyde couple in Joseph Lewis’s bravura Gun Crazy (1950), they
dream of big-city excitement. Others use obscure towns as hideouts from enemies
made on urban ground—in vain. Both Siodmak’s The Killers and Jacques Tourneur’s
Out of the Past begin with the ominous arrival in innocent villages of hit men
in sinister cars, tracking their quarry down. Even when noir’s protagonists
live in brand-new suburbs, the ever thickening nooses encircling America’s
urban centers, the suburbs are implicitly seen from the viewpoint of the
metropolis.
In noir
movies, people who live in suburbs, like the nice young couple played by
Loretta Young and Barry Sullivan in Tay Garnett’s Cause for Alarm! (1951), set
in L.A. not at nighttime but on the sunniest of days, have entered into a pact
with one another and themselves not to exceed their limits, not to turn into
somebody else—promises they prove unable or unwilling to keep. Sullivan, who
becomes a psychopathic invalid, dies of a heart attack while trying to shoot
his wife. Believing she will be suspected of murdering him, Young undertakes a
cover-up for which she’s frighteningly ill-equipped—the suburbs have disarmed,
not protected, her.
From one
perspective, noir painted a grim picture of what could happen to Americans if
they stayed in the city, but its view of what was replacing urban life was at
least as troubling. How will Americans live, noir asks, without the dense
places of face-to-face human interaction where the truth is revealed by
strangers liberated from permanent proximity? The hero of Edgar Ulmer’s Detour
(1945), a specialist in accidental homicide played by B-movie icon Tom Neal,
plans to go to a “big city” where he can be “swallowed up,” “safe” to become
the nobody he really is. Moving to the suburbs spelled successful upward
mobility amidst America’s unprecedented postwar prosperity, but noir was the
suburbs’ antidote, a pledge that the downward slide was still a career option,
too. In the cities of noir, perhaps the only fully class-conscious genre
Hollywood ever produced, the Depression—if only in the form of the economic
inequities that helped precipitate it and the rackets that then expanded their
control of the nation’s pleasure supplies—stubbornly refuses eviction. As
surely as in Balzac or Marx, wealth here bespeaks crime; there is definitely
not enough to go around.
Whether
native-born veterans of the economic collapse of the 1930s such as Orson Welles
and Nicholas Ray or European refugees from Nazism such as Siodmak and Lang,
noir’s greatest artists were well acquainted with the losses, and promise, of
wreckage. In noir, Fascism, the loser in the war, finds multiple new
incarnations not only abroad but also at home, while the defeat America had
missed on the global stage comes to pass in some untended quarter of the
country’s creative unconscious. Noir is premised on the audience’s need to see
failure risked, courted, and sometimes won; the American Dream becomes a
nightmare, one strangely more seductive and euphoric than the optimism it
repudiates. “He’d had everything,” the novelist and screenwriter Jim Thompson
remarks of a character in The Killer Inside Me (1952), “and somehow nothing was
better.” Noir provided losing with a mystique.
Noir was
never confined to the movies. A many-authored Zeitgeist, it was a modernizing
agent and a fashion statement, adding a proto-hipster sheen of
self-consciousness to everything it touched; different parts of the culture
seemed to be talking to one another in their sleep, learning a new common
language without knowing its source.
The vogue
began in literature, in the hard-boiled murder mysteries of the 1930s—the
French called them romans noirs—by Dashiell Hammett, James Cain, Raymond
Chandler, and the too little known Cornell Woolrich, the greatest and gloomiest
of Poe’s demented heirs. “First you dream, then you die” was Woolrich’s bitter
summation of his worldview. An alcoholic, closeted homosexual who lived with
his mother in paranoid seclusion in New York, Woolrich poured forth a stream of
hallucinatory urban poetry in the shape of some 25 novels and several hundred
short stories. By the mid-1950s, 14 movies, including Siodmak’s Phantom Lady
(1944) and Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954), 71 radio shows, and 47
television programs had dramatized various of his works, making Woolrich,
despite the fact that he worked on none of the adaptations himself, a one-man
noir industry, affecting all the media of his day.
Like
Chandler, Woolrich possessed an insomniac’s knowledge of all that is still
moving after the city is officially abed, the uncanny sights and sounds urban
sites give off when they become posthumous reminders of their daytime function:
the “service station glaring with wasted light” in Chandler’s The Big Sleep
(1939), or the “lighted oblong … mark[ing] an all-night lunchroom” in
Woolrich’s The Black Curtain (1941). Despair gains its cachet by its
uselessness.
The
Hollywood Citizen News headlined a story about Edward Dmytryk’s Murder, My
Sweet (1944) it’s murder, but gowns are sweet, and Dick Powell’s suits were
every bit as sharp as Claire Trevor’s dresses. The noir style for men ranged
from Powell’s meticulously tailored outfits to Robert Mitchum’s casual, rumpled
yet elegant look, with trench coats, hats, and cigarettes indispensable to
both. Smoking streamlined the noir protagonist’s persona, elaborating or
shifting the rhythm, the power balance, of a scene. In H. Bruce Humberstone’s I
Wake Up Screaming (1942), the ominously large and soft Laird Cregar, a
specialist in sotto voce threats and transparently homosexual innuendos, is
being hustled out the door by Victor Mature, his prey; Cregar balks,
nonchalantly striking a match on the back of the door—a cigarette is an affront
and a come-on.
The angle
at which a man wore his hat was almost as important to a noir scene as the
angle from which the cameraman shot it. Troubled, beautiful Alan Ladd, who
survived a nightmare childhood, finally breaking through to stardom as a
mentally disturbed killer in This Gun for Hire (1942), was a virtuoso of
hat-wearing. He knew exactly when to push his hat back, brim up, boyishly high
on his forehead, when to pull it down in a menacing diagonal over one eye. Much
of Ladd’s too often undervalued genius lay in his expert intimacy with his
fashion accessories, including his gun. Told in Lewis Allen’s Appointment with
Danger (1951) that he knows nothing about love, he disagrees, saying, “It’s
what goes on between a man and a .45 pistol that won’t jam.”
Rita
Hayworth’s Hispanic descent and exotic, smoky beauty put her front and center
in wartime America’s “Good Neighbor”–conscious infatuation with Latin-American
style. With her peerless dancer’s carriage, luxuriantly buoyant red hair, and
coolly level gaze that almost veiled the extreme fragility within, in her noirs
as in her musicals, she showed to perfection the full spectrum of 1940s
feminine fashion. For dress-down occasions, she wore casually athletic short
shorts or brief pleated skirts with enchanting, midriff-baring tops and
platform heels; in lulls between catastrophes, engaged in a fiction of everyday
life, she modeled gracefully tailored suits, wide, soft-brimmed hats, and large
yet light handbags. But best of all was Rita in fluff-and-flounce furs and
swooningly profligate evening dress, ready for love-goddess drama. In Charles
Vidor’s Gilda (1946), for “Put the Blame on Mame,” a torchy striptease number,
Hayworth donned a floor-length, slit-knee, black satin strapless gown with
elbow-length black gloves, an instant-legend ensemble audaciously copied by
designer Jean Louis from a John Singer Sargent portrait. When she held her arms
down by her sides, she looked like standoff high-society; raising her arms
above her head, she was top-drawer still, but slumming, even raunchy, a willful
provocation to predators.
Trendsetter
Joan Crawford, with her short, stocky legs and heavy shoulders, less suited
than Hayworth for either super-casual or daring nighttime wear, epitomized the
female professional look: pencil skirts, blouses or jackets with massively
built-up shoulders (MGM designer Adrian wisely turned nature’s excess into
fashion’s artifice), tops sometimes organized by braid or buttons into military
formations, turbans, and hats at moments so startling that they resembled
extraterrestrial bodies taking over the human face below. More often the victim
than the villainess, Hayworth brought a seductive, masochistic softness to her
best noir roles; her men slap her, or walk out on her as she begs them to stay.
In contrast, despite the preternatural graciousness in which she draped them,
Crawford’s heroines are world-class competitors, relaxing only by design and
for display. Dominatrices disguised as hostesses, they stalk jungles they
themselves have almost stripped of prey—over the years, as Crawford moved down
the food chain, weak gigolo types such as Zachary Scott and Gig Young replaced
Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy as her on-screen partners. But, whether a
cold-blooded recruitment drive à la Crawford or a temptation to inflict pain à
la Hayworth, female glamour was uniting with neurosis in a new kind of style.
No arts
were more closely allied with noir than photography and jazz. Arthur “Weegee”
Fellig was the most flamboyant of the extraordinary crime photographers who
explored the seedy side of noir’s mise en scène and established its visual
vocabulary at New York’s Daily News in the 1930s and 40s. An Eastern European
immigrant hustler of genius, Weegee came of age living, homeless, in the city’s
subways, parks, and railroad stations; his flashgun nailed New Yorkers, without
their permission, at point-blank range, asleep in their underwear on fire
escapes, singing their lungs out in Harlem churches, and as corpses, lying on
sidewalks, as graphic and ugly as unexpectedness.
Versions
of Weegee’s subjects turn up as extras and bit players on the peripheries of noir,
scrubbing floors in the background of Mildred Pierce (1945), cleaning offices
and running elevators in Double Indemnity. (Weegee himself, whose photographs
inspired the noir policier The Naked City [1948], took a bit part as a
timekeeper in The Set-Up [1949], the heartbreakingly stark story of an
over-the-hill boxer played by Robert Ryan.) Hostages from the ordinary world
held unawares, they watch or pass by, as near and far from the action as a criminal’s
unconsulted conscience.
Many
critics agree that the first bop record, on which Charlie Parker played alto
sax with Jay McShann’s Kansas City band, and the first noir, Stranger on the
Third Floor, directed by Russian émigré Boris Ingster and featuring Peter
Lorre, appeared almost simultaneously, toward the end of 1940. Like noir, bop
was an infiltrator, subverting every piety it encountered, and Parker, one of
the towering geniuses of 20th-century music, was its unspeakably charismatic,
handsome, and mischievous lord of misrule. A notorious con man, a heroin addict
“always in a panic,” as he once described himself, no stranger to the police
bust or the mental institution, dying young but exhausted at 34 in 1955, Parker
seemed the incarnation of noir’s most extravagantly romantic impulses. An avid
moviegoer, he improvised his own lush yet nervous virtuoso version of the title
song of Laura, by David Raksin and Johnny Mercer.
Parker’s
unmistakable musical line, its slides and eddies packed with hot, impossibly
fast notes, turning old Tin Pan Alley standards inside out, exteriorizing their
harmony until they emerge electrified by the process of their transformation,
felt like a musical analogue to the restlessly mobile visual style of the great
noir cameramen as they redesign bodies and objects into sensational new
patterns of light and dark, ostentatiously refusing any fallback on
conventional composition. Noir also shared bop’s fondness for small jazz clubs,
perfectly suited to bop’s pared-down ensembles, and the other urban venues
where identities were flaunted, risked, and refashioned. Multiplying in the
1930s and 40s until suburbanization shrank and downgraded its clientele,
achieving iconic status in noir, the cocktail lounge beckoned, in the words of
Lizabeth Scott in André de Toth’s Pitfall (1948), seducing Dick Powell, a
married, harried L.A. commuter, into a bar in broad daylight, those who “want
to feel completely out of step with the rest of the world,” exchanging sunshine
for discreet and décolleté gloom.
Though
bebop, a musician’s music that never found a mass market, was almost never used
on noir soundtracks, various mainstream jazz/pop performers, usually people of
color, appeared in pivotal cameos in dozens of noir films. In Fritz Lang’s The
Blue Gardenia, Nat King Cole is singing the title song (by Bob Russell and
Lester Lee), an incongruous lei around his neck, in a brightly lit,
faux-Polynesian-themed L.A. nightclub where a tipsy Anne Baxter meets Lothario
Raymond Burr—Burr will be dead by morning, possibly by her hand. At the start
of Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly (1955), Cole is heard again, this time
singing Frank De Vol’s “I’d Rather Have the Blues” on the radio of detective
Ralph Meeker’s sleek sports car just after he’s picked up a barefoot female
hitchhiker, naked under her raincoat; she, too, will be dead by morning. Cole,
who met the sometimes ferocious racism he encountered with an implacably
dignified, costly reserve, was about mystery: he feels the consequences without
revealing the cause. As the French were quick to see, “le noir” meant “the
Negro,” too.
Anumber
of noir’s best-known artists, including Fritz Lang, John Garfield, Orson
Welles, Nicholas Ray, Clifford Odets, Abraham Polonsky, and Dalton Trumbo,
turned up on the suspect lists of J. Edgar Hoover and the House Un-American
Activities Committee. The noir generation was the blacklist generation. Yet
whatever the convictions animating its makers, noir at its best avoided
proselytizing not just because of the conservative censors and studio bosses who
patrolled movie content but also because noir’s own rhythms spontaneously eject
it. “Is there a law now I gotta listen to lectures?” the small-time crook
played by Richard Widmark in Sam Fuller’s Pickup on South Street (1953) sneers
at a detective reminding him of his civic obligations.
It is
precisely noir’s resistance to obvious political and ethical explication that
constitutes its subversive appeal—in the words of a delightfully corrupt Walter
Slezak in Edward Dmytryk’s Cornered (1945), a spy thriller, “I deplore the
present growth of moral purpose!” At a time when the take-sides, either-or
mentality so marked throughout American history was at its sharpest, noir
offered its viewers the Utopian relief of a world without obligatory responses,
a respite, if only for an hour or two, from cheerleader duty in what was
rapidly becoming the world’s most blatantly triumphalist society. The value of
a getaway spot depends on what is being gotten away from.
Noir was
eclipsed in the late 1950s by the melodramatic Actors Studio case studies of
pampered young males in a new kind of definitively post-Depression crisis, and
by science-fiction fantasies about nuclear fallout and outer space, subjects
noir, largely a city-bound genre and certainly an earthbound one, was not
equipped to address. Yet after its apparent demise in the 1960s, noir made a
brilliant comeback in the 1970s, led by Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola,
and Brian De Palma, a neo-noir vogue still flourishing today in such films as
David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence, Robert De Niro’s The Good Shepherd,
and Scorsese’s The Departed. The cable channels Thriller Max, Turner Classic
Movies, Sleuth TV, and the Mystery Channel provide a steady stream of noir and
neo-noir thrillers, while Walter Mosley, George Pelecanos, Andrew Vachss, and
others have continued to mine the crime novel’s territory.
Noir
serves as a screen memory for its times, a strangely displaced form of memory
that occurs, according to Freud, when someone doesn’t want to recall a painful
event or unpleasant reality, yet cannot forget it because it is, in fact, the
cause of the illness he suffers. He compromises by remembering a part of it but
not the whole, focusing on the corner but not the room, the angle of light but
not the object in it. A screen memory records the unmistakable residue of a
loss, a catastrophe denied. Other countries, including Germany, China, and
Argentina, also have important noir traditions, but in the U.S., noir peaks in
popularity at times like the postwar decade, when the U.S. began its
full-fledged career in domestic surveillance and foreign interventions, like,
indeed, the present, as the Constitution is flouted at home and detainees are
subjected to “gangster-style methods” (in the phrase of a scathing report of
2006 for the Council of Europe) in American “black sites” abroad, all in the
name of an ill-defined, omnivorous “war on terror”—times when the divide
between high-minded, self-serving official rhetoric and the nation’s actual
aims and operations achieves toxic dimensions.
At the
start of Cyril Endfield’s Try and Get Me (1950), working-class noir at its
finest, an earnest, blind evangelist on a street corner, a bit player who will
contribute nothing to the movie’s story, urgently asks passersby, “How much is
each of you guilty for all the evil in the world? Why do you do the things that
you do?” Heedless, the shoppers and pedestrians knock him over, scattering his
pamphlets on the sidewalk and street, there to join noir’s many lost documents
and messages—missing evidence, refusing clarification, yet demanding attention.
A quasi-theological nexus of buried, persistent political hopes and apolitical
style, noir is one of the places where the nation explores the history,
meaning, and limits of its own staggering power.
*Written
by Ann Douglas, March 1, 2007.
Ann Douglas is a professor of American studies at Columbia University. She is working on a book called Noir Nation, to be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Source: vanityfair.com
Ann Douglas is a professor of American studies at Columbia University. She is working on a book called Noir Nation, to be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Source: vanityfair.com
