Film Noir

Chapter 1: The Background to Film Noir The Evolution of the Term ‘Film Noir’ Of late there has been a trend in Hollywood toward the wholesale production of lusty, gut-and-gore crime stories, all fashioned on a theme with a combination of plausibly motivated murder and studded with high-powered Freudian implication. Of the quantity of such films now in vogue, Double Indemnity, Murder, My Sweet, Conflict and Laura are a quartet of the most popular which quickly come to mind ... This quartet constitutes a mere vanguard of the cinematic homicide to come. Every studio in town has at least two or three similar blood-freezers before the camera right now, which means that within the next year or so movie murder - particularly with a psychological twist - will become almost as common as the weekly newsreel or musical. (Shearer, 1945, in Silver and Ursini,1999a, p.9) The reviewer who made these comments in the summer of 1945 was clearly fascinated by what he took to be a new phenomenon in Hollywood film production: ‘murder with a psychological twist’. The subject matter, sex and violence, has clear continuities with the tradition of American crime fiction, but the injection of ‘high-powered Freudian implication’ is new. A few months earlier, another reviewer had labelled these films ‘“red meat” stories of illicit romance and crime’ (Stanley, 1944, in Biesen, 1998, p.137). A third, writing two years later, used the term ‘morbid drama’ for this cycle of thrillers whose chief characteristics were ‘deep shadows, clutching hands, exploding revolvers, sadistic villains and heroines tormented with deeply rooted diseases of the mind’ (D. Marsham, Life August 25, 1947, in Schatz, 1981, p.111). Clearly groping for the most appropriate label for these films, American reviewers most frequently called them ‘psychological thrillers’, a term that the film industry itself employed (Neale, 2000, p.169). The origins of the label ‘film noir’ have been traced to the French film critic Nino Frank who used the term in his response to the release of four crime thrillers - The Maltese Falcon (1941), Murder, My Sweet (UK title: Farewell My Lovely, 1944), Double Indemnity (1944) and Laura (1944) - in Paris in August 1946. Film noir was employed through its analogy with ‘série noire’, the label given to French translations of American ‘hard-boiled’ fiction from which several of these films had been adapted. After the five-year absence of Hollywood films during the Occupation, Frank, even more than his American counterparts, was stimulated by what he perceived as a new type of crime film that would render obsolete the traditional detective film with its emphasis on plot convolutions and the unmasking of the killer, through a radical visual style, a complex mode of narration, and a pronounced interest in the characters’ ‘uncertain psychology’. Frank averred: ‘The essential quality is no longer “who-done-it?” but how does this protagonist act?’ (Frank, 1946, in Silver and Ursini, 1999a, p.16). In France, especially through the work of left-wing critics writing for the film journal Positif, film noir became an important component of a self-questioning intellectual climate dominated by Existentialism. This philosophy emphasises contingency and chance, a world where there are no values or moral absolutes, and which is devoid of meaning except those that are self-created by the alienated and confused ‘non-heroic hero’. French intellectuals saw in film noir a reflection of their own pessimism and angst. As cinéastes they were looking for American films that were ‘art’ rather than merely commercial entertainment, but which were also popular (Naremore, 1995-6, pp.12-28). The nature of American film noir continued to be debated over the next decade, culminating in the first book-length study in 1955, Panorama du film noir américain, by Raymonde Borde and Etienne Chaumeton, who characterised film noir as ‘nightmarish, weird, erotic, ambivalent, and cruel’ (Borde and chaumeton, 1955, in Silver and Ursini, 1996, p.16). They concluded that ‘the moral ambivalence, the criminality, the complex contradictions in motives and events, all conspire to make the viewer co-experience the anguish and insecurity which are the true emotions of contemporary film noir’, whose aim was ‘to create a specific alienation’ (ibid., p.25, original emphasis). Film noir therefore was deemed to unsettle spectators, forming a disruptive component of an American cinema that had habitually sought to reassure and comfort its audience. With its modernist sensibility, film noir embodied a critical strand in popular cinema. Borde and Chaumeton’s high valuation of film noir was supported by the work of a new generation of French critics-turned-directors, Claude Chabrol, Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut, whose appropriation of film noir became an important component in their construction of a radical French cinema, the nouvelle vague, as discussed in Chapter 7. As there was no equivalent intellectual film culture in America at this point, it was not until the late 1960s that the term film noir, and with it the intense interest in this body of films and the positive valuation placed on them that the French commentators had established, became widespread. The opening chapter of Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg’s Hollywood in the Forties (1968) was entitled ‘Black Cinema’, but they used the term film noir within the text itself and placed a high value on a body of films seen as cynical, subversive, erotic and visually sophisticated (Higham and Greenberg, 1968, pp.19-50). Raymond Durgnat wrote a typically wide-ranging and provocative essay in 1970, ‘Paint It Black: The Family Tree of the Film Noir’ which helped to locate film noir within more general cultural formations (Durgnat, 1970, pp.48-56). However, it was Paul Schrader’s 1972 essay ‘Notes on Film Noir’, originally issued to accompany a Los Angeles Museum retrospective, that was particularly influential, not only in defining noir ‘stylistics’, but also in its subdivision of what he regarded as a ‘specific period of film history’. Schrader saw film noir as an inevitable development of the gangster film delayed by the war, which divided into three broad and overlapping phases: 1941-46 was the phase of the private eye and the lone wolf; 1945-49 showed a preoccupation with the problems of crime, political corruption and police routine; while 1949-53 was the ‘period of psychotic action and suicidal impulse’ that he regards as the ‘cream’. Like Borde and Chaumeton, Schrader considered film noir’s masterpiece to be a ‘straggler’, Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly (1955), while Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil (1958) provided its ‘epitaph’ (Schrader, 1972, pp.8-13). Schrader’s enthusiasm echoed that of the earlier French writers, offering film noir to a rapidly developing American film culture as an exciting and iconoclastic element of Hollywood cinema that was ripe for revaluation and reappropriation following the widespread disillusionment consequent upon the war in Vietnam. Schrader observed, ‘as the current political mood hardens, filmgoers and filmmakers will find the film noir of the late forties increasingly attractive’, and its influence will be felt at a time when ‘American movies are again taking a look at the underside of the American character’ (ibid., p.8). Schrader himself wrote the screenplay for Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976), which, with its angst-ridden, alienated Vietnam veteran, updated film noir for a new generation and formed part of noir’s revival as discussed in Chapter 7. Since this formative period there has been a steady stream of academic articles, book length studies and anthologies of essays. Alain Silver and Elizabeth Ward’s encyclopedic Film Noir, first published in 1980, was highly influential in defining the noir ‘canon’, providing commentaries on over 250 films and tabulations of creative personnel and studio output (Silver and Ward, 1993). Slightly earlier, in 1978, Women in Film Noir edited by E. Ann Kaplan, part of a wider feminist movement within cultural studies, raised the complex issue of the noir’s representation of women, the ways in which its female types, centrally the femme fatale, were expressive of ideological tensions within patriarchy over female sexuality The reissue of an extended edition of Women in Film Noir twenty years later was testimony to the importance of these essays and to the continued interest in noir’s construction of gender. Richard Dyer’s essay on Gilda observed that ‘film noir is characterised by a certain anxiety over the existence and definition of masculinity and normality’, (Kaplan, 1998, p.115). Frank Krutnik’s In a Lonely Street, was the first book length study to discuss the complexities of masculinity within film noir (Krutnik, 1991). Chapter 5 discusses this issue in detail, and pays attention to the neglected area of actors’ performances, which are central to the representation of gender. Of more recent studies of film noir, the outstanding contribution has been James Naremore’s More Than Night, which attempted to place the ‘noir phenomenon’ within its various intellectual, cultural and social contexts (Naremore, 1998). However, film noir remains a contested term, a point that will be explored in the concluding section of this chapter. The Characteristics of Film Noir The label ‘film noir’ designates a cycle of films that share a similar iconography, visual style, narrative strategies, subject matter and characterisation. Their iconography (repeated visual patterning) consists of images of the dark, night-time city, its streets damp with rain which reflects the flashing neon signs, its sleazy milieu of claustrophobic alleyways and deserted docklands alternates with gaudy nightclubs and swank apartments. The visual style habitually employs high contrast (chiaroscuro) lighting, where deep, enveloping shadows are fractured by shafts of light from a single source, and dark, claustrophobic interiors have shadowy shapes on the walls. The decentred, unstable compositions are further distorted by the use of odd angles and wide-angle lenses; fog or mist obscures the action and characters faces are often lit with strange highlights or partially shadowed to create hidden and threatening spaces. Noir’s highly complex narrative patterning is created by the use of first person voice-overs, multiple narrators, flashbacks and ellipses which often create ambiguous or inconclusive endings. Noir narratives are frequently oneiric (dream-like), where every object and encounter seems unnaturally charged. Thematically, film noir is dominated by a mixture of existential and Freudian motifs discussed in a separate section. The noir universe is dark, malign and unstable where individuals are trapped through fear and paranoia, or overwhelmed by the power of sexual desire. Noir’s principal protagonists consist of the alienated, often psychologically disturbed, male anti-hero and the hard, deceitful femme fatale he encounters. But the range of noir characters is more complex than is usually thought. All these elements of film noir will be discussed in detail in the chapters that follow. The rest of this chapter will examine the cultural influences that gave rise to the noir cycle. Cultural Influences James Naremore has identified film noir as the interface between an avant-garde European modernism and an older, more conservative tradition of ‘blood melodrama’, stories of violence and erotic love that included crime films but also Gothic romance (Naremore, 1998, p.220). In examining the influence of these traditions on film noir it is useful to bear in mind Richard Maltby’s observation that: ‘Cultural history is too diffuse to allow for clear causal relationships; the most it can attempt is to establish a chain of plausibility’ (Maltby, 1998, p.38). ‘Hard-Boiled’ Crime Fiction I first heard Personville called Poisonville by a red-haired mucker named Hickey Dewey in the Big Ship at Butte. He also called a shirt a shoit. I didn’t think anything of what he had done to the city’s name. Later I heard men who couldn’t manage their r’s give it the same pronunciation. I still didn’t see anything in it but the meaningless sort of humour that used to make richardsnary the thieves’ word for dictionary. A few years later I went to Personville and learned better. (Dashiell Hammett, Red Harvest, 1929) The work of the American ‘hard-boiled’ writers such as Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain, was frequently used as the basis for films noirs: almost twenty per cent of noir thrillers produced between 1941 and 1948 were direct adaptations of ‘hard-boiled’ novels and short stories (Krutnik, 1991, pp.33-4, 182-7). In addition, numerous films noirs imitated or reworked hard-boiled sources and many hard-boiled writers, including Raymond Chandler who wrote an original screenplay for The Blue Dahlia (1946) and co-adapted Cain’s Double Indemnity, were hired by Hollywood studios during this period. As Borde and Chaumeton argued, hard-boiled fiction formed the central and ‘immediate’ influence on film noir’s subject matter and characterisation. Hard-boiled writing was a development of the nineteenth century ‘dime novel’ where writers developed a vernacular style and promoted working-class attitudes and values that were expressive of American republican democracy (Denning, 1987). Hard-boiled writing formed part of what became known generically as ‘pulp fiction’, i.e. stories produced on cheap wood-pulp paper. The first cheap magazine devoted to crime fiction was the Detective Story Magazine established by 1915, but the most significant of well over twenty such titles was Black Mask, which was almost entirely devoted to hard-boiled fiction by the end of the 1920s. Towards the end of the 1930s this fiction began to appear in the new form of the paperback whose lurid covers promised a crime thriller laced with graphic sex and violence (O’Brien, 1997). Pulp fiction’s readership was largely the male urban working-class who enjoyed the fast-paced violence and eroticism. Dashiell Hammett is often regarded as the ‘father’ of this tradition, with Red Harvest, quoted from above, a watershed between the older dime novelists and a more modern conception of an American society that is corrupt and alienated. Hammett developed a tough, terse, understated vernacular idiom that kept close to the rhythms of ordinary speech and is often directly narrated by the main male protagonist. In many ways this first person narration was an ‘essentially radio aesthetic’ and indeed many of these stories were adapted for that new cultural form (Jameson, 1993, p.36). The short, declarative sentences of hard-boiled writing created a sense of speed and urgency that resembled reportage. Joseph T. Shaw, editor of the Black Mask, encouraged his other writers to emulate Hammett’s style with its “objectivity, economy and restraint”, and it was Shaw who persuaded Hammett himself to move into full-length fiction. Hammett and other exponents of the art were masters of the laconic wisecrack, which combined wit, verbal aggression and a sense of self-esteem. These characteristics made hard-boiled writing the opposite of the more polite, refined and middle-class ‘English school’ of detective fiction, which included Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers. American writers replaced ratiocination by action, and the drawing rooms of country houses with the ‘mean streets’ of the fast-growing American city (Porter, 1981). This concentration on urban life was distinctive and modern, reflecting the major cultural and social transformation that America was undergoing (Marling, 1995). Although Hammett’s ‘Poisonville’ is any modern American town, his disciple Chandler became the great chronicler of Los Angeles, the modern metropolis. In hard-boiled writing, the city is corrupt, disorientating and threatening, often depicted as a dark, confusing labyrinth, a nightmare city that is the seamy but enticing underside to respectable American life (Christopher, 1997). This city is an emphatically masculine world, concentrating on male ambitions and lusts; and, it must be emphasised, their fears and paranoias. The male protagonists of hard-boiled fiction are obsessed with women, but only with their looks and bodies, the way they move or wear make-up and clothes. Most frequently, women are characterised as femmes fatales, overwhelmingly desirable but duplicitous. The most famous male protagonist was the private eye. In Hammett’s fiction the figure is either the anonymous ‘The Continental Op’, an employee of a detective agency, or the self-employed gumshoe Sam Spade whose overriding obsession is never to be a ‘sap’. Chandler’s serial detective, Philip Marlowe, was a more refined and honourable character. American reviewers thought his name sounded resonantly English, connoting elegance and erudition. Marlowe is independent, incorruptible, intelligent, cultured and sensitive, but also tough, hard-drinking and good with his fists. Like Sam Spade, he is a lone outsider, who lives in a cheap, comfortless flat free from family ties. Marlowe’s investigations as the modern knight of the city streets do not form part of any wider crusade. Unlike Sherlock Holmes, Marlowe realises that although he may solve an individual case, it is part of a wider corruption that is too deep to be eradicated. The private eye was the new urban folk hero who mediated between respectable society and the criminal underworld (Donald, 1999, p. 70). His real significance lay in his ability to interpret modern urban life, ‘to reveal whatever the city conceals: secret passions, liaisons, crimes and corruptions’ (Willett, 1996, p.6). After Hammett and Chandler, James M. Cain was the most influential pulp writer. Edmund Wilson dubbed Cain the leader of the ‘poets of tabloid murder’, observing that ‘Cain himself is particularly ingenious in tracing from their first beginnings the tangles that gradually tighten around the necks of the people involved in those bizarre and brutal crimes that figure in the American papers.’ (Wilson, 1962, p.21). Cain never uses a private eye protagonist, instead his narrators are themselves criminals, therefore his novels took the form of the extended ‘confession’ so beloved of tabloid readers, though his fiction also had an educated readership. His protagonists are victims of the Depression, ordinary people forced by circumstances into crime, becoming drifters who turn to violence, in a world where individual effort no is longer rewarded with financial security. Cain’s fiction focused on the rootless lower class who poured, from the prairies and deserts, into Los Angeles, a city which functions, as in Chandler’s novels, as a seductive Eldorado. Cain concentrates on the alliance between money and sexual desire, particularly male fears of female sexuality: the femme fatale with whom the narrators become enmeshed. His narrators have no capacity for self-analysis or reflection and do not develop as characters, but are gripped by the obsessive ‘fatal passion’ that dominates their lives. Cornel Woolrich’s influence on film noir is not so widely recognised, and yet no less significant: eleven of his stories were adapted in the classic period. Woolrich wrote for a whole range of magazines in the thirties and forties and his output was prodigious (Nevins, 1988). Although his prose has the typically pared-down, urgent idiom of the ‘hard-boiled’ school, it contains tortuously elaborate passages of masochistic delirium through which his characters, who are almost always victims, acknowledge that “defeat, dispossession, fear and pursuit [are] the shaping energies of life” (Lee, 1990, p.185). His stories take to new extremes the metaphor of the city as a nightmare labyrinth in which his paranoid protagonists are trapped and from which they try frantically to escape. His fictional world is therefore more overtly expressionist, any sense of objective reality is engulfed in subjective fantasies, which Woolrich often describes in detail. For instance the scene in Phantom Lady (1942) in which the female protagonist visits a nightclub where black jazz musicians are playing: ‘The next two hours were spent in a sort of Dante-esque inferno … It wasn’t the music, the music was good. It was the phantasmagoria of their shadows, looming black, wavering ceiling-high on the walls. It was the actuality of their faces, possessed, demonic, peering out here and there on sudden notes, then seeming to recede again.’ (Quoted in Tuska, 1984, p.88). Passages like these were readily translatable into noir’s visual idiom, and Robert Siodmak’s 1944 adaptation is discussed in detail in Chapter 6. James Naremore argues that the work of these hard-boiled writers developed ‘blood melodrama’ into a modernist art form, but one that was populist rather than avant-garde (Naremore, 1998, pp.40-95). Their influence on film was delayed until the forties because, as will be discussed in the next chapter, Hollywood films were aimed at a ‘family audience’, and were subject to close censorship, which prose fiction escaped. The major studios, sensing the potential problems in such suggestive subject matter, translated hard-boiled fiction into a more restrained and less combative idiom. Two early adaptations of The Maltese Falcon - Roy del Ruth’s 1931 version and William Dieterle’s Satan Met a Lady (1936) - significantly modified Hammett’s style, softening the characterisation of the detective so that he became the much more respectable figure of the gentleman amateur. Even in 1942, RKO’s The Falcon Takes Over, an adaptation of Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely, George Sanders plays the detective as the debonair socialite, breezing through a well-lit, upper-crust world in what was then the dominant form of the comedy thriller. It was John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon (1941) - the first adaptation that was true to the spirit of the original - that began to close the gulf between the hard-boiled tradition and its screen equivalent. The Gangster Film Although it was not as central as hard-boiled fiction, the gangster film did exert an important cultural influence on film noir, because it represented another development of ‘blood melodrama’ that was centrally concerned with crime, violence and the modern American city. The gangster, like the private eye, contributed to the ‘cultural mapping of new social territory’, the city (Ruth, 1996, p.8). As Robert Warshow memorably articulated: ‘The gangster is a man of the city, with the city’s language and knowledge, with its queer and dishonest skills and its terrible daring ... not the real city, but that dangerous and sad city of the imagination’ (Warshow, 1962, p.131). The gangster was another authentic American folk hero, ‘the archetypal American dreamer’ whose actions live out the contradictions of capitalism, the price of being a successful competitive individualist. Although the gangster was a staple of pulp fiction, the figure was also a screen presence as far back as D.W. Griffith’s The Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912), or Alias Jimmy Valentine (1915) which was remade in 1920 and 1928. Joseph von Sternberg’s Underworld (1927) scripted by Ben Hecht, was the story of Bull Weed (George Bancroft), a top Chicago mobster arrested for killing his arch rival. In prison he becomes convinced that he has been betrayed by his moll, Feathers McCoy (Evelyn Brent), in league with an alcoholic intellectual Rolls Royce (Clive Brook), whom Bull befriended when he discovered him begging on a street corner. After breaking out, Bull realises they are both loyal to him and in love. He lets the pair escape, facing certain death at the hands of the police cordon alone. Underworld was the first film to depict a criminal milieu sympathetically and von Sternberg’s shadowy, atmospheric direction lends the cityscape a spectral, suggestiveness that complements Hecht’s taut, idiomatic script. Underworld’s themes of alienation, paranoia, betrayal, revenge and the desire for death, all prefigure film noir.2 The major cycle of gangster films occurred shortly after Hollywood’s transition to sound enabled it to capture the dramatic sound of machine-gun fire and the fast patter of the gangster’s speech. The three seminal films of the early 1930s - Mervyn LeRoy’s Little Caesar (1930), William Wellman’s The Public Enemy (1931) and Howard Hawks’ Scarface (1932) - all contributed to the development of a subversive image of the gangster as the modern entrepreneur. Author and screenwriter W.R. Burnett emphasised that Little Caesar’s dialogue attempted to treat criminals as human beings, showing the world through their eyes, and also developed ‘a style of writing based on the way American people spoke - not literary English. Of course, that the Chicago slang was all around me made it easy to pick up.’ (McGilligan, 1986, p.58). James Cagney’s role as Tom Powers in The Public Enemy incarnated the modern ‘city boy’, the man from a deprived background whose toughness, dynamic energy and quick wits allow him to succeed through his own efforts in a competitive world (Sklar, 1992). As Jonathan Munby has argued, gangster fiction constituted a dissident tradition which represented lower-class and ethnically marginalized American interests in the 1920s and 1930s, their ‘frustrated desire for cultural and economic inclusion’ in an era of Prohibition and the Depression (Munby, 1999a, p.40). It is for this reason that Munby argues that film noir is a cycle or particular development within the broad generic history of the crime/gangster film. Munby argues that to place film noir outside that context is to run the risk of ‘an ahistorical vision of crime film forms’ that negates the strong links and continuities between the thirties and the forties. However, while the influence of thirties’ gangster films on film noir is profound, many commentators have pointed out that the heroic self-assertion of the gangster - intensely public figures who represent the pleasures of conspicuous consumption and whose story is one of rapid rise and inevitable fall - is very different from the doom-laden withdrawal of the typical small-time, unheroic noir protagonist. Noir’s antiheroes do not dominate their environments and often do not deserve what happens to them. The archetypal gangster becomes a marginal presence in film noir. With the exception of Underworld, the visual texture of the gangster film is typically flatter and less self-conscious than film noir, a straightforward realism, direct and economical.2 The Gothic Romance Accounts of film noir have over-privileged its debt to the hard-boiled tradition, and therefore its male-centredness, at the expense of the Gothic legacy, the other great tradition of ‘blood melodrama’. In his recent authoritative study of forties’ Hollywood, Thomas Schatz rightly argues that the Gothic romance was equally important in generating the noir style and that Gothic noirs such as Gaslight (1944) share a close ‘family resemblance’ to hard-boiled noirs in both style and themes (Schatz, 1997, pp.232-9). As film noir continued into the fifties, it became dominated by the male-orientated crime thriller, but the importance of the Gothic romance to early film noir is immense. The Gothic romance was a literary tradition that originated in the late eighteenth century as part of a European revival of Gothicism in the arts, a shift in taste that embraced the wild, the morbid and the supernatural, a new preoccupation with death, solitude and the horrific or terrifying (Punter, 1996). The key Gothic setting is the ruin or the labyrinthine mansion with its secret, shadowy passageways and locked rooms containing dark secrets. The most influential Gothic romance was Anne Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) with its persecuted heroine imprisoned in the decaying castle of Udolpho by her aunt’s sinister husband. The Gothic tradition migrated to America as early as the end of the eighteenth century, in the work of Charles Brockenden Brown and was developed by Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe. Old World Gothic was refracted into a preoccupation with evil Europeans and with the pathology of guilt (ibid., pp.165-85). The Gothic romance modulated through the nineteenth century ‘sensation novel’ to become one of the staples of popular fiction targeted at a female audience (Modleski, 1982), pp.59-84). The modern Gothic romance continues to have at its centre the imperilled victim-heroine, often recently married to an enigmatic older man to whom she feels intensely attracted and repelled, and who feels helpless, confused, frightened and despised; her paranoias include the strong sensation that the past is repeating itself. She has a desperate desire to know her husband’s secret, but is terrified about what that knowledge may bring. Hollywood drew extensively on this Gothic tradition in the 1940s as a branch of the ‘woman’s film’, aimed at the numerically dominant female audience and displaying an ambivalent attitude towards theVictorian period. The first Gothic noir was Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940) discussed in Chapter 2, adapted from Daphne du Maurier’s 1939 novel.3 European Influences 1: German Expressionism German Expressionism is always cited as the major influence on film noir’s arresting visual style and also its pessimistic mood. However, it was the influence of Weimar cinema (1919-1933) as a whole, rather than just ‘Expressionism’, that was profound, and also more complex, multi-faceted and indirect than is often supposed. The origins of German Expressionism lay deep in the Gothic-Romantic movement in European culture. Expressionism was a cross-cultural movement encompassing music, dance, painting, sculpture, architecture, design, literature, theatre and film, which lasted roughly between 1906 and 1924. In essence it was a philosophical and artistic critique of bourgeois rationalism; an attempt to express the distortions, alienation, fragmentation and dislocation, the ‘irrationality’, of modern life. Expressionism was concerned to represent subjective experience: states of mind, feelings, ideas, perceptions, dreams and visions, often paranoid states. The protagonists of many Expressionist films - including the most famous and influential, Robert Wiene’s Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, 1919) - are frequently tormented or unbalanced. Der Student von Prag (The Student of Prague), first released in 1913, but remade in Expressionist style in 1926, was the archetypal Doppelgänger story in which a student sells his mirror image to a sorcerer who turns that image into the young man’s evil, murderous second self. The Student of Prague was eloquent testimony to Expressionism’s concern with the instability and fluidity of identity, which found resonant echoes in film noir. Expressionism created an embracing stimmung (mood) and texture, dependent on a distinct visual style that used high contrast, chiaroscuro lighting where shafts of intense light contrast starkly with deep, black shadows, and where space is fractured into an assortment of unstable lines and surfaces, often fragmented or twisted into odd angles. Overall, Expressionist cinema used a highly designed and carefully composed mise-en-scène that was anti-naturalistic. In a recent study, Thomas Elsaesser emphasises the complexity of narration as another key characteristic. Expressionist cinema cultivated displaced, decentred narratives, nested in frame tales, split or doubled stories, voice-overs and flash-back narration (Elsaesser, 2000). Both Expressionism’s style and its narrative patterns influenced film noir. The Weimar ‘Street Film’ and the Urban Thriller Without denying the importance of Expressionism, Janice Morgan has emphasised the significance of the Strassenfilm, the ‘street film’, as an influence on film noir (Morgan, 1996, pp.31-53). The street film was part of what is usually known as Neue Sachlichkeit or ‘New Objectivity’ which departed from the Gothic scenarios of Expressionism to concentrate on the social realities of contemporary German life. The subject matter of this cycle of films, beginning with Karl Grune’s Die Strasse (The Street, 1923), was the descent of a respectable middle-class protagonist into the ‘overcharged landscape’ - fascinating, thrilling, but dangerous - of city streets at night. In these films one can perceive a proto-noir urban milieu consisting of deep shadows, rushing traffic, flashing lights and cast of underworld characters: black marketeers, gamblers and con men and, above all, the femme fatale who embodies the temptation and threat of illicit desire. The cycle was most associated with G.W. Pabst, notably Die freudlose Gasse (The Joyless Street, 1923) set in Vienna in the period of hyperinflation, but also Joe May’s Asphalt (1928) where an up and coming policeman from a good family falls in love with a prostitute. The ‘street film’, and the later development of the Milieuonfilm (‘milieu talkie’), were realistic and ordinary, delineating the characteristic psychic and social ills of modern day urban life. Von Sternberg’s Der blaue Engel (The Blue Angel, 1930), made simultaneously in German and English, depicted the descent of a school teacher (Emil Jannings) who becomes enthralled by a femme fatale, a nightclub singer played by Marlene Dietrich. Fritz Lang’s urban crime thrillers about the master criminal Dr Mabuse - Dr Mabuse der Spieler (Dr Mabuse the Gambler) parts one and two (1922) and Das Testament von Dr Mabuse (The Last Will of Dr Mabuse, 1932) - and his study of a paedophile in his best known film, M (1931), showed a preoccupation with the fluidity of identity, depicting the city as a dark labyrinth (Kaes, 1999; Gunning, 2000, pp.87-202). [ILLUSTRATION 1] In M Franz Becker (Peter Lorre) is a tortured outsider caught between the rival forces of police and organised crime. Becker is painfully aware of his condition, that the desires that dictate his actions are beyond his rational control. Lang combined dispassionate observation combined with an intense subjectivity in the frequent scenes where the action is shown from the viewpoint of the protagonist. Lang commented: ‘I use my camera in such a way as to show things, wherever possible, from the viewpoint of the protagonist; in that way my audience identifies itself with the character on the screen and thinks with him.’ (Bogdanovitch, 1967, p.85). To ‘think with’ such characters is deeply disturbing, suggesting as it does that criminality and deviance are not ‘out there’ safely distanced, but a potential within the modern subject, a possible identity to inhabit. Émigrés Lang was one of many German film-makers who pursued a second career in America. The reputation of Weimar cinema and the technical expertise of its creative personnel made them a highly desirable commodity for Hollywood. The rise of Nazism and Hitler’s assumption of power in 1933 served to intensify an already established exodus. These émigrés included directors: William Dieterle, Lang, Otto Preminger, Siodmak and the writer-director Billy Wilder; cinematographers: John Alton, Karl Freund and Rudolph Maté; and also actors, set designers, scriptwriters and composers. Their influence was pervasive but by no means simple. Many worked on other types of pictures than film noir and many films noirs bear no trace of Austro-German involvement. As Marc Vernet has pointed out, Expressionist lighting techniques were already part of Hollywood’s stylistic repertoire and predated any direct influence (Vernet, 1993, pp.1-32 ). As this study will show, Hollywood’s ‘classical narrative’ style with its continuity editing was only capable of partial deformation by the more severe Expressionist techniques. American films, made within a more nakedly commercial system, did not strive for the ‘landscape of delirium’ that Expressionism used. The direct influence of Expressionist techniques, as Foster Hirsch has observed, comes out most strongly in nightmare sequences, ‘where for a few moments, under the protection of a dream interlude, the film becomes overtly subjective, entering into the hero’s consciousness to portray its disordered fragments’ (Hirsch, 1983, p.57). However, rather than direct transplantation, one is looking at a process of diffusion and reappropriation where a modified Expressionism could be superimposed over existing generic conventions through a more self-conscious deployment of mise-en-scène, chiaroscuro lighting, minimalist sets, mobile camerawork and the use of fractured narratives. What the detailed studies of Siodmak and Lang in Chapter 6 seek to demonstrate, is that successful émigrés were those who could assimilate to some degree their host culture. Both Wilder - whose Double Indemnity (1944) was the single most influential film noir - and Lang, were fascinated by, but also critical of, American life; they were what Elsaesser has called ‘doubly estranged’ from both their homeland and their hosts, producing a schizophrenic artistic vision that was neither wholly European nor fully American (Elsaesser, 2000, p.374). Jonathan Munby has shown how the sensibility of the Austrian-Jewish directors - Wilder, Preminger and Edgar Ulmer - was shaped by their early experience of ‘internal exile’, as Jews in Catholic Vienna, before they emigrated to America (Munby, 1999b, pp.138-62). Munby also emphasises their extensive Americanisation in the 1930s. Each developed a close and detailed knowledge of their country of adoption, an affection and concern for American democracy and the American way of life, whilst remaining outsiders, a process of partial assimilation and continued critical detachment that was especially wary of any attempt to suppress freedom of thought and expression, notoriously McCarthyism, analysed later. The émigrés were able to mould ‘blood melodrama’ so that it also bore the trace of European modernism, which was in turn influenced by American Expressionism, discussed below. European Influences 2: French Poetic Realism The effect of French Poetic Realism on film noir is less appreciated, but Ginette Vincendeau has provided a cogent and persuasive case for its stylistic and thematic influence, which, she argues, ‘“filled the gap” between German Expressionism and classical Hollywood cinema’ (Vincendeau, 1992, p.54). The term Poetic Realism was first used in 1933 to describe ‘a genre of urban drama, often set among the Paris proletariat or lower middle classes, with romantic/criminal narratives emphasising doom and despair. In these films, “poetry” and mystery are found in everyday objects and settings - hence the proletarian milieu’(ibid., p.52). The alternative label was le fantastique social - one that radiated eeriness in an ordinary, not Gothic milieu. Prewar French critics and reviewers did use the term film noir to describe these films (O’Brien, 1996, pp.7-20). This cycle of films, whose central period was 1936-39, was dominated by the collaboration of scriptwriter Jacques Prévert and director Marcel Carné. The pair made seven films together, including the two that are considered to be definitive: Le Quai des brumes (Port of Shadows, 1938) and Le Jour se lève (Daybreak, 1939). Poetic Realism drew on an indigenous tradition of crime fiction that concentrated on the everyday, the ordinary and the banal. The chief exponent was Georges Simenon who rose to prominence in the early thirties and was popular with both the intelligentsia and a broad public. However, Simenon competed with a strong Gallic taste for hard-boiled American crime writers: Carné was enthralled by the hard boiled American policier. Revealingly, the first adaptation of Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice was made in France in 1939 as Le Dernier Tournant (The Final Twist), directed by Pierre Chenal. Poetic Realism’s visual style was indebted to Weimar cinema and German cameramen and set designers were frequently employed. Several German directors, including Lang and Siodmak, worked in French cinema before going to America, and French creative personnel had almost invariably worked in Germany. However, Poetic Realism was a distinctive modification of Expressionism, exhibiting a softer and less extreme use of chiaroscuro. Poetic Realism is concerned to create a distinctive milieu with shiny cobblestones and neon-lit nightclubs that are sites of danger and desire and much atmospheric use is made of shadow or fog. But the city was rendered less abstractly than in the Weimar ‘street film’. The sets were designed to have solidity, and to render a specific milieu, not a generalised one, hence the terms Films de milieu or Films d’atmosphère. The pace of Poetic Realism is closer to Weimar than to Hollywood, using tightly controlled camera movements and long takes, reframing rather than cutting within their deep focus settings. As Dudley Andrew observes, the pace and insistent mise-en-scène makes Poetic realism a cinema of character rather than events, and its typical protagonists anticipate film noir (Andrew, 1995). The dangers of desire, as in the ‘street film’, were represented by the femme fatale, or ‘lost girl’, in her beret and shiny raincoat that transferred the reflections of the night-time city onto her body as if she were all surface, without substance. The male protagonists tend to be confused, passive, divided and deeply introspective. The dominant actor was Jean Gabin, always marked as an outsider, romantic, but possessed by self-destructive forces. Such was Gabin’s stature that he created a new type of male hero, a modern Everyman who is complex and ambivalent, both sexually and socially. His tough masculine power is often outweighed by a ‘feminine’ sensitivity and vulnerability, a clear difference from his American counterparts, and his social status is ambiguous or confused. He often plays a decent workman or soldier who, through circumstances beyond his control, is criminalised. Like many noir heroes, his past is constantly alluded to, but never fully revealed. Unlike his American successors, Gabin always dies, making these French films, for instance Pépé le Moko (1937) where he kills himself, generally bleaker and more heavily fatalistic than film noir. The lighting, milieu, iconography and characterisation, especially Gabin’s angst-ridden hero, all prefigure noir. These films were not only popular in France - Quai des brumes was the most successful film released in 1938 - but they were also intensely admired within English and American intellectual circles as adult in content and visually sophisticated (ibid., pp.13-14, 89, 255). As Vincendeau points out, there were also direct American remakes. Renoir’s La Chienne (The Bitch, 1931), a dark drama about a respectable clerk’s victimization by a prostitute and her pimp, based on a best-selling crime thriller by George de la Fouchardière, was remade by Lang as Scarlet Street (1946), its Parisian locale transferred to New York’s Greenwich Village. Le Jour se lève was remade as The Long Night (1947), directed by Anatole Litvak and starring Henry Fonda in the Gabin role. American Expressionism: Universal Horrors, Val Lewton and Orson Welles The most direct influence of German Expressionism was felt on a cycle of horror films produced by Universal Studios in the early thirties. Universal, led by the German born Carl Laemmle, had a tradition of hiring Weimar talent including Edgar Ulmer who directed the extraordinary The Black Cat (UK title: House of Doom, 1934). The horror cycle was initiated by the American Tod Browning’s Dracula and the Englishman James Whale’s Frankenstein, both released in 1931. Whale, a sophisticated intellectual with a great feeling for Gothic forms, was the key director, also making The Old Dark House (1932), and The Bride of Frankenstein (1935), the most celebrated of these films. Robert Florey’s Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932) was the most directly Expressionist, with strong echoes of Caligari in the twisted streets, oddly contorted houses that lean over the glistening cobblestones, and gloomy shadows (Dettmann and Bedford, 1976, p.24). The German émigré Karl Freund photographed Murders (and Dracula) and also directed The Mummy (1932). In the opening scene the assistant of the English archaeologist who has been investigating the Pharaoh’s tomb opens the sacred chest thereby releasing the protective curse that brings the Mummy (Boris Karloff) gradually to life. The pacing of this silent scene, its acting, and its lighting - the glowing white light and deep, velvety shadows - are all pure Weimar. The best of the Universal horror films take great care over composition (both design and decor), camera angles and lighting, and their slow pace allows the subtle suggestiveness of the mise-en-scène to create the meaning. Universal’s second horror cycle, beginning with Son of Frankenstein (1939), was less distinguished, but both cycles were a major influence on the studio’s early experimentation with film noir, beginning with Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt (1943) and Siodmak’s Phantom Lady which influenced the development of the whole noir cycle. As discussed in Chapter 3, the other studio most associated with film noir was RKO, whose evolution of the form was indebted to both Val Lewton and Orson Welles. The Russian born Lewton started at RKO in 1942, running his own ‘B’ feature unit to produce horror films that would compete with Universal’s (Siegel, 1972). Their frugal budgets and low status meant that Lewton enjoyed almost complete creative control, free of front office interference save for the lurid titles that were established by production chief Charles Koerner through market pre-testing. Despite his budgetary limitations, Lewton’s erudition and painstaking meticulousness over every aspect of production created a series of eleven films that were coherent, visually distinctive and of high aesthetic quality. He shaped and encouraged the work of his directors, including Jacques Tourneur who directed the first three features, Robert Wise and Mark Robson, all of whom went on to make distinguished films noirs. Unlike Universal’s monsters, Lewton’s horrors featured ordinary men and women in what were usually contemporary, often urban, settings. The principal cinematographer was Nicholas Musuraca, already known as a specialist in ‘mood lighting’, who honed his craft on these films where impoverished sets could be disguised by the use of atmospheric lighting effects. Musuraca became one of the most significant noir cameramen. Lewton’s first film Cat People (1942) was a supernatural ‘chiller’, the third, The Leopard Man (1943), was adapted from Woolrich’s Black Alibi in which a deranged serial killer distracts attention by casting suspicion on the activities of an escaped leopard. Perhaps the most atmospheric, subtly suggestive and chilling film was the fourth, The Seventh Victim (1943). Its epitaph is from one of John Donne’s Holy Sonnets - ‘I run to Death, and Death meets me as fast, and all my Pleasures are like Yesterdays’ - which inaugurates a tale of isolation and morbid despair in which a young woman, Jacqueline, takes her own life, seeing death as a release from the intolerable existentialist pressures of living. The Seventh Victim is a complex modernist film that can pass as a genre product through its use of a satanic cult - the Palladists - which pursue Jacqueline, and its quest story in which Jacqueline’s sister and her lover try to unravel the mystery of her disappearance. It contained a famous visual set-piece where Jacqueline, released by the Palladists to walk the deserted midnight streets, is assailed by the threatening shadows that alternate with the bright shafts of light from street lamps and menacing but obscure sounds. At the height of tension a city bus arrives, the sound of its brakes and the opening of the pneumatic doors are as startling as an appearance of the monster in a conventional horror film. Lewton worked on audiences’ imaginations, knowing that given the right suggestions, the viewer ‘will populate the darkness with more horrors than all the horror writers in Hollywood could think of’ (Quoted in ibid., p.32). As J.P. Telotte argues, Lewton’s films question the nature of perception and expose the fictiveness of rationality and the processes of reason, emphasising the dreamlike qualities of experience, the power of myths and psychic fantasies and the constant threat of meaninglessness (Telotte, 1985). In both subject manner and style they helped generate film noir. Orson Welles’ interest in cinematic modernism and avant-garde practice was well known (Arthur, 1996, pp.367-82). He made several important contributions to film noir, but his astonishingly innovative Citizen Kane (1940) has often been identified as the key example of ‘American Expressionism’ and therefore another bridge between European modernism and film noir. Citizen Kane’s investigation of its enigmatic subject, Charles Foster Kane the newspaper magnate, uses a number of Expressionist techniques in set design, lighting, the use of mirrors, superimpositions and distorted perspectives as well as a multiple flash-back narration. The film’s complex design, involving an unprecedented number of separate sets, facilitated the dramatic choreography of Welles’ camerawork, which was indebted to the Weimar Kammerspielfilm (literally ‘chamber film’). The most sophisticated Kammerspielfilm was The Last Laugh (1924), where director F.W. Murnau and his cinematographer Karl Freund developed the entfesselte kamera, the ‘unfastened’ or ‘unchained’ camera, using cranes, dollies and holsters strapped to the cameraman to free the camera from its tripod. The camera’s mobility was the means through which subjective experience, an intimate individual psychology, could be realised, often through complex point-of-view shots. Welles’ innovations were developed through his intense collaboration with the highly experienced cinematographer Greg Toland (Carringer, 1985, pp.67-86). Kane is famous for its use of deep focus photography, which allows objects in the foreground and background to be seen with equal clarity. Toland had not invented this technique and had used it on several of his earlier films, including Samuel Goldwyn’s Dead End (1938), that have been identified as a forerunner of film noir; but Kane was an audaciously bold application of what was, at this point, an unconventional method (Cormack, 1994, pp.123-37). Toland also makes consistent and creative use of wide-angle lenses and low-angle compositions that distort the foreground with figures elongated or slightly ballooned out. Welles’ use of sound effects, deriving from his radio work, was also innovative and Bernard Herrmann’s unconventional score, which used unorthodox combinations of instruments, was the first of many he would contribute to film noir. Kane was the product of Welles’ exceptional artistic ability and the unheard of creative freedom he was offered, as the ‘boy wonder’, by George J. Schaefer, head of production at RKO, in a bid to add more cultured films to the studio’s rather ‘assembly-line’ product (Jewell, 1996, pp.122-31). Although Kane was not popular with a broad public, it was a critical success, voted best picture of 1941 by the New York film critics and the National Board of Review, and receiving Academy Nominations in nine categories. The development of deep-focus photography was brought to a halt by the war, but Expressionist lighting came into vogue shortly after Kane’s release, in part at least, attributable to the influence of Welles’ extraordinary achievement. Elaborate tracking shots, long takes, compositions in depth and set designs reminiscent of Kane, are all evident in forties’ films noirs. Kane was also influential in its use of subjective narration, through its complex use of flashbacks, which opened up a whole range of possibilities that Hollywood’s conventional omniscient narration foregoes. The characteristics of film noir that were outlined at the end of the first section can now be understood as the complex synthesis of American and European cultural traditions. But this synthesis occurred at a particular historical moment, which also needs to be analysed in detail. Film Noir as a ‘Dark Mirror’ to American Society In attempting to explain the eruption of film noir’s dark, cynical and often pessimistic stories into the sunlit pastures of Hollywood’s characteristically optimistic and affirmative cinema, film historians have often resorted to the metaphor of the ‘dark mirror’: ‘However briefly, then, film noir held up a dark mirror to post-war America and reflected its moral anarchy.’ (Cook, 1990, p.471). At its broadest this ‘moral anarchy’ or, as it is often termed, ‘social malaise’, is related to a several overarching factors: America’s entry into the Second World War and the end of isolationism; paranoias about the ‘red menace’ that developed into McCarthyism as the Cold War penetrated deeply into popular consciousness; and the reverberations of dropping the hydrogen bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Silver and Ward argue that ‘McCarthyism and the specter of the Bomb became the unspoken inspirations for a leitmotif of fear or, more specifically, paranoia that resounded through the noir cycle after the war.’ (Silver and Ward, 1980, p.2). Historians have tended to see the late forties in America as a period of uncertainty, an ‘age of anxiety’, in which there seemed to be a significant tension between an outward stability and prosperity, and strong inner doubts and a sense of alienation.4 One historian has recently described this condition of fear and paranoia as ‘triumphalist despair’ (Engelhart, 1995, p.9). Dana Polan argues that film noir was one of the outgrowths of the change from a unified, collective war culture to a much more fragmented postwar society uncertain of its direction (Polan, 1986). It is possible to support these contentions through contemporary views. The reviewer I quoted at the beginning commented, ‘psychologists explain that [the moviegoer] likes [this type of film because] it serves as a violent escape in tune with the violence of the times, a cathartic for pent-up emotions ... the war has made us psychologically and emotionally ripe for pictures of this sort’ (Shearer, 1999a, p.10). Postwar Readjustment Films noirs are littered with maladjusted veterans, the product of the difficult and traumatic readjustment to peace and civilian life after a period of severe disruption and the dangers, and excitements, of active service. Like other extended conflicts, the Second World War had profound psychological effects upon its combatants, often making their reintegration into civilian society difficult or impossible. The problem of the ‘psychoneurotic vet’ who had been traumatised by his wartime experiences and whose unpredictable violence, instability and aimlessness made him unsuited for civilian life, was well documented. He often became disillusioned by returning to his mundane prewar occupation after becoming used to both action and command. Kaya Silverman, quoting Siegfried Kracauer’s observation that the returning veteran was an ‘average individual stunned by the shock of readjustment’, argues that he became the representative postwar male whose problems indicted the breakdown of established notions of social functioning, inducing an ‘historical trauma’ where males felt impotent and dysfunctional, compulsive and passive (Silverman, 1992, pp.52-124). The preoccupation with these ‘difficult’, ‘damaged’ men - who had disturbing similarities to the ‘shell-shocked’ victims of the Great War - extended to magazine journalism, lodging the problem in popular consciousness. William Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives, which dramatised these issues, was the most popular film released in 1946. Films noirs’ veterans in such examples as Cornered (1945) or Ride the Pink Horse (1947) thus formed part of a wider concern, but, as will be argued in Chapters 4 and 5, the narrative patterns and visual style of film noir enabled it to explore this problem most extensively. Maladjustment was an important preoccupation in the immediate aftermath of the war, rarely surfacing after 1950. Clearly interwoven with this concern for the returning serviceman was the wartime changes in the role of women. The temporary but widespread use of women in the labour force brought with it a new sense of social and economic independence and this fostered fears of male displacement and unease which was condensed in the figure of the femme fatale (Harvey, 1998, pp.35-46). But the preponderance of these strong-willed, manipulative and sexually active females in film noir was also a challenge to the dominant Hollywood conventions of representing women. The relations between the sexes are often played out in the nightclub rather than the home, which, like family life, is a notable absence in films noirs (Sobchak, 1998, pp.129-70). These issues of male paranoia and the independent woman will be explored in detail in Chapter 5. McCarthyism After the initial upheavals created by the return to peace subsided, the most abiding preoccupation of American society became the Communist ‘threat’. The intense anti-Communist campaign that grew up after the war has come to be referred to as ‘McCarthyism’ after the Republican Senator Joseph McCarthy who tirelessly rooted out the ‘enemy within’ that was supposedly undermining the fabric of American society and values.5 The Republican resurgence after the war gave the party the confidence for a renewed assault on what it regarded as subversive elements that included an attack on those who still adhered to the social welfare doctrines of Roosevelt’s New Deal forged in the early thirties in response to the Depression. McCarthy, constantly trying to grab attention through the media, was the mouthpiece for these ideas. The actual instrument was the House Committee on UnAmerican Activities (HUAC) formed in 1938, but now given a vigorous new lease of life. A sub-committee descended on Hollywood for preliminary hearings into alleged ‘communist infiltration of the motion picture industry’ in May 1947. In October the Committee conducted public hearings in Washington in which ‘friendly’ and ‘unfriendly’ witnesses from the film industry were summoned. The ‘friendly’ ones dutifully complained of Communist infiltration in the film industry while the eleven ‘unfriendly’ witnesses refused to co-operate. One, Bertolt Brecht, fled back to Europe, but the remainder, the ‘Hollywood Ten’, were imprisoned for contempt of Congress. Among the Ten were director Edward Dmytryk, writer-producer Adrian Scott and influential scriptwriters Dalton Trumbo and Albert Matz. A meeting of studio executives and members of the industry’s regulating body, the Motion Pictures Producers Association, agreed to suspend the Ten without pay and deny employment to anyone refusing to co-operate with HUAC’s investigations, thereby effectively instituting a blacklist of unemployable artists. After a second more protracted and virulent round of investigations, which happened intermittently during 1951-54, over 200 suspected Communists had been blacklisted. The list went unchallenged until 1960 when Dalton Trumbo was re-employed, but Dmytryk re-appeared before the Committee in 1951 and, because he had named twenty-four former Communists, was reinstated (Belton, 1994, pp.328-44). The anti-Communist witch hunt helped to create a climate of fear and paranoia in American society and curtailed the efforts of an important group of left-liberal writers and directors that included Dmytryk, Trumbo and also Abraham Polonsky, Robert Rossen, Joseph Losey, and the actor John Garfield whose work is analysed in detail in Chapter 4, and their films noirs make a clear critique of the social and emotional costs of American society’s unfettered competitive capitalism. In the longer term McCarthyism and the Cold War against Communism formed part of a pronounced shift to the right in American culture, which is often reflected in films noirs, particularly those in the 1950s. As will be discussed in Chapter 4, many fifties noirs are preoccupied with the threat of organised crime syndicates or with psychopathic criminals who are threats to the suburban home. The threat of nuclear destruction haunts several noirs, notably Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly (1955), analysed in detail. Existentialism and Freudianism Although film noir does explore social issues, commentators have linked its dominant concerns with individual paranoia and psychological disturbance to the popularisation of Existentialism and Freudianism. Robert Porfirio has argued persuasively for the pervasive presence of ‘existential motifs’ in film noir, noting that as, a general attitude rather than a specific school of thought that developed in wartime France, existentialism was a late outgrowth of Romanticism, present in the ‘hard-boiled’ novel and resurfacing powerfully during and after the war. Noir’s non-heroic protagonists are entrapped, often by mischance, in an alienating, lonely world, usually the night-time city, where they face the threat of death. The chaotic, random violence of this world gives rise to feelings of persecution and paranoia; a sense that life is absurd, meaningless, without order or purpose (Porfirio, 1996, pp.77-93). This existentialism was another response by liberal intellectuals disillusioned by the failure of American society to embrace socialism and therefore becoming disenchanted with the values and objectives of prewar radicalism (Pell, 1985, pp.41-9, 181). A despondent old intelligentsia was joined by a younger generation which was similarly despairing and pessimistic (Tallack, 1991, p.198). David Riesman’s influential The Lonely Crowd (1950) argued that the individual was increasingly alienated from the amorphous indeterminacy of modern urban life. As has been shown, both American and French reviewers were struck by the abundance of Freudian motifs in the crime thrillers that were emerging towards the end of the war. Film noir’s depiction of a wide variety of disturbed mental states is one of its most arresting features and linked to the growth of psychoanalysis in America during the interwar period so that its terminology and concepts had penetrated into popular consciousness (Thomas, 1992, pp.71-87). As Frank Krutnik has argued, the importance of psychoanalysis to film noir goes well beyond ‘particular references to psychoanalytic concepts or the presence of psychiatrists/analysts as characters’, as it provided a way of understanding and dramatising characters’ motivations, sexuality, disturbed states of mind, noir’s whole emotional landscape (Krutnik, 1991, p.46). Dana Polan notes that the effect of deploying Freudian psychoanalysis was double-edged. On the one hand it was a rational, positive science that provided the solution, a ‘cure’, to an array of social and psychic ills. On the other it was a discourse that could be appropriated for the dramatic depiction, often through dreams, of these ills wrenched free from an explanatory or recuperative framework (Polan, 1986, pp.14-15). As will be discussed in later chapters, film noir is extremely adept at suggesting, often through the mise-en-scène, repressed or hidden sexual longings and murderous impulses, where violence and desire are often disturbingly melded. As with its use of existentialism, film noir’s use of psychoanalysis does not represent a detached and in-depth understanding of psychoanalysis per se, but rather an acute sense of its potential to add depth to the conventions of ‘blood melodrama’ (Gabbard and Gabbard, 1987, pp.16-37, 73-4). However, an important caveat to the theory that film noir reflects the ‘postwar mood’, is the fact that film noir emerged during the war, and the early noirs, including those mentioned at the head of the chapter such as Double Indemnity, cannot therefore exemplify postwar angst. As discussed in Chapters 2 and 3, film noir’s emergence was partly as a result of wartime conditions: restrictions on costs, technological developments in lighting and photography, less prohibitive censorship practices, and on the film industry’s gradually increasing willingness to tackle difficult issues. Robert Sklar identifies a wartime Zeitgeist (spirit of the times) in which the early noirs represent a more extreme example of a general mood of ‘claustrophobia and entrapment’ felt by film-makers and audiences alike, an introversion and gloom very different from the usually ‘extrovert’ American cinema (Sklar, 1978, pp.252-5). Certainly the protagonists of some early noirs, the wartime spy thrillers made by Hitchcock, Lang, and Welles whose Journey into Fear (1943) was the first example, were paranoid men-on-the-run, besieged by Nazi agents or fifth columnists. Although the most prolific period of film noir production was 1946-51, it is very important to understand film noir as a wartime as well as a postwar phenomenon. However, Richard Maltby has warned against understanding film noir as simply a reflection of the Zeitgeist. He argues that the Zeitgeist theory of culture is notoriously selective and circular: the angst-ridden narratives of film noir become ‘evidence’ of social problems which in turn are considered to have generated the films themselves. In the postwar period, those commentators who did see film noir (by whatever label) as symptomatic of a widespread malaise were usually anxious liberal intellectuals, worried about the apparent direction of American society, a group that was by no means fully representative (Maltby, 1992, pp.39-48). What often alarmed critics was that film noir thrillers, unlike their predecessors, foregrounded criminal psychology or that of the victim and seemed to suggest that psychoneuroses were common in American society. One of the most influential was Siegfried Kracaeur, another German émigré, who argued that these disturbed crime thrillers reflected a world of irrational confusion and ‘ideological fatigue’ that used ‘psychological motifs in place of social solutions’(quoted in ibid., p.40). At this time Kracauer was in the process of composing his study of German Expressionism, From Caligari to Hitler (1947), that tied the darkness of those films to the disillusioned and demoralised state of Germany after the First World War. Kracauer was one of many writers who detected disturbing parallels between the two postwar moments. Intellectual commentators and reviewers adopted a very similar position in Britain, as discussed in Chapter 9. There were very many wartime films that had stirring messages of hope, courage and ultimate victory, and the most popular postwar films were often strikingly upbeat, for instance The Bells of St Mary’s (1945), or Blue Skies (1946) one of a number of buoyant musicals that were perhaps as characteristic of the postwar period as film noir (Ray, 1985, p.165). Problems of Definition: What Is Film Noir? I have already shown how film noir is a discursive critical construction that has evolved over time. What must now be acknowledged is that it is a contested construction. Film noir has been defined as a genre, a movement, a visual style, a prevailing mood or tone, a period, or as a transgeneric phenomenon. This uncertainty partly stems from its retrospective status; as Steve Neale has pointed out, film noir cannot be verified by ‘reference to contemporary studio documents, discussions or reviews, or to any other contemporary intertextual source’ (Neale, 2000, p.153). Neale argues that this is not an insuperable problem, ‘provided that the nature and status of the term are acknowledged, and provided that the canon is established by applying a clear and consistent set of criteria to as broad an initial corpus of films as is possible’ (ibid.). The fundamental problem, as he suggests, is that this is not the case; there remains, even now, significant disagreement about which films to include and what to exclude. One key issue, raised by Neale and discussed already, is that the habitual concentration on film noir’s derivation from hard-boiled crime fiction obscures the importance of noirs derived from Gothic melodrama. I have included discussion of these films and the semi-documentaries and ‘police procedurals’ such as Jules Dassin’s The Naked City (1948) which evolved after the war in response to calls for greater ‘realism’ in American films, again profoundly influenced by European developments, in this instance Italian neo-realism as discussed in detail in Chapter 3. My inclusion of these films is a response to Neale’s demand for discussion of film noir to be based on as broad a corpus of films as possible. As Neale also points out, in addition to problems about which films constitute the noir ‘canon, many of the elements that are used to define film noir - its particular treatment of gender and sexuality, its devices of flashback and voice-over narration, its concentration on abnormal psychological states and its visual style - can all be found in contemporaneous films that are not classified as noir (ibid., pp.162-73). Hence the frequent reliance on terms other than genre to define film noir, including R. Barton Palmer’s ‘transgeneric phenomenon.’ However, as James Damico observes, as with other genres, the fact that salient features can be found elsewhere does not invalidate the significance of their particular combination within film noir (Damico, 1996, pp.95-105). But, a different problem occurs with Damico’s classificatory rigour through a paradigmatic master narrative that involves a triangular relationship between the main male protagonist, the ‘not-innocent woman’ he encounters and a second man to whom she is unwillingly attached; this relationship becomes a tale of deceit, murder and betrayal. This formulation obscures as much as it clarifies as there are many other, quite dissimilar, noir plots.6 Any attempt at defining film noir solely through its ‘essential’ formal components proves to be reductive and unsatisfactory because film noir, as the French critics asserted from the beginning, also involves a sensibility, a particular way of looking at the world. A fundamental shift has occurred in the understanding of film noir with the widespread use of the term ‘neo-noir’, used to designate films noirs made after the ‘classic’ 1940-1959 period and which derive their inspiration from those earlier films. Neo-noir, which now forms an important component within postmodern American film culture, as discussed fully in Chapter 8, indicates a high degree of self-consciousness about film noir amongst current film-makers. The label ‘neo-noir’ mobilises the high cultural capital - the connotations of sexy, chic ‘artiness’, visual sophistication and ‘adult’ subject matter - that the term film noir has accumulated. Rick Altman observes that ‘noir has over the last twenty years become as much a part of film journalism as biopic, sci-fi and docudrama’ (Altman, 1999, p.61). As James Naremore argues, film noir has become an imprecise but necessary ‘intellectual category’, comparable to romantic or classic, whose use helps to make sense of diverse but important phenomena (Naremore, 1998, pp.2-6, 276-7). What the present study hopes to demonstrate is that film noir - in its classical and modern forms - is an evolving cultural phenomenon whose fullest development occurs within American cinema but which has also influenced European cinema notably French, and also British, the subject of Chapter 9. Notes to Chapter 1 1 Other Von Sternberg films - The Docks of New York (1928), Thunderbolt (1929), and especially The Shanghai Gesture (1941) - are considered to have influenced the development of film noir, along with the suggestive eroticism of his six films with Marlene Dietrich, especially The Blue Angel (1930). Von Sternberg’s single noir, Macao (1952) has the trademark exoticism, but was a troubled film, largely reshot by Nicholas Ray. 2 Silver and Ward’s identify elements of ‘existential anguish’ and noir visual style in some thirties gangster films, but they insist on keeping the two cycles separate (1980, pp.323-25). 3 For further discussion see Waldman (1983), Walsh (1985), Doane (1987), Basinger (1993). For an informative overview see Barefoot (2001). 4 A highly informative recent study is Henriksen Dr Strangelove’s America (1997), which includes consideration of film noir. See also Lary May The Big Tomorrow (2000) described in ‘Further Reading’. 5 The literature on McCarthyism is extensive. For studies of its impact on Hollywood see Ceplair and Englund (1983), Andersen (1986, pp.141-96) and May (1989, pp.125-53). The most detailed study of the ‘Hollywood Ten’ is Dick Radical Innocence (1989). 6 Krutnik has a fairly elaborate taxonomy of ‘crime film cycles’ (Appendix 2, pp.188-226). These are helpful in grouping films, but not fundamental to a definition of noir. 40