Sunrise itself is oneiric, strange, erotic, ambivalent, and cruel, and it has all those scenes in the swamp where the hero and a femme fatale, the city woman, are lovers planning to kill an inconvenient spouse. There’s more to Murnau’s film—including light, an attractive city, love, redemption, and happiness—but there’s no mistaking its resemblance to A Place in the Sun (1951), a story of gathering gloom in which the wretched Montgomery Clift is shut out of the sunlight of American opportunity, and thinks to drown his pregnant girlfriend in a lake, in imagery of encroaching darkness.
The conventional history of noir says that American hardboiled literature (Hammett, Chandler, and so on) had a lot to do with its development: casual violence, dames and hoodlums, and disenchanted dialogue. But they are both more robust than the neurotic personality of noir. Hammett is tough, practical, and cold; Chandler is romantic and funny—that’s one reason Howard Hawks’s The Big Sleep (1946) behaves like a noir thriller but deeply belongs as a screwball romance. Hammett and Chandler were upright men and battered gentlemen. There’s no real doubt in their books about the place of good and evil. But an enigmatic possibility in noir is our growing uncertainty over which is which. So you can find its uneasiness in the light in paintings by René Magritte, and in the voice of Louis-Ferdinand Céline and Patrick Hamilton, too.
Hamilton is a fascinating figure, not just because of how regularly his books and plays were adapted to the screen—Gaslight (1944), Rope (1948), Hangover Square (1945), Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky (2005)—or because he was himself depressed and alcoholic in disturbing ways. But listen to this, the opening to his novel Hangover Square, published in 1941:
Click!…Here it was again! He was walking along the cliff at Hunstanton and it had come again…Click!…
Or would the word “snap” or “crack” describe it better?
It was a noise inside his head, and yet it was not a noise. It was the sound which a noise makes when it abruptly ceases: it had a temporarily deafening effect. It was as though one had blown one’s nose too hard and the outer world had suddenly become dim and dead. And yet he was not physically deaf: it was merely that in this physical way alone could he think of what had happened in his head.
It was as though a shutter had fallen. It had fallen noiselessly, but the thing had been so quick that he could only think of it as a crack or a snap. It had come over his brain as a sudden film, induced by a foreign body, might come over the eye. He felt that if only he could “blink” his brain it would at once be dispelled. A film. Yes, it was like the other sort of film, too—a “talkie.” It was as though he had been watching a talking film, and all at once the sound-track had failed. The figures on the screen continued to move, to behave more or less logically; but they were figures in a new, silent, indescribably eerie world. Life, in fact, which had been for him a moment ago a “talkie” had all at once become a silent film. And there was no music.
That is an insidious but overwhelming start to a book in which the mind of George Harvey Bone is slipped inside ours, or run as a movie on our screen. He is a pathetic man, living in the London of the phony war, waiting for the bombs to fall, and thinking of murdering the stupid, spiteful woman he loves—when the right “click” sounds. As in some of the best noir films, there is no escaping this insinuation of self-pity and criminal response. Thus the feeling of futility and calm in the narrative voice of Fred MacMurray throughout Double Indemnity. (You could add William Holden in Sunset Blvd.; Billy Wilder excelled at people luxuriating in their own fatal story.)
So perhaps Hammett and Chandler enriched the chat and the iconography of noir. But Hangover Square is an intuition of the physical or neurological experience of watching film as signs of human and social pathology. No one was bothered or able to spell this out at the time, but maybe the deepest significance in noir is a disquiet over film itself and the ways in which it has enacted and armored our detachment from the world.
In those same years of noir, there were obvious circumstantial events to contribute to uneasiness, or the age of anxiety. I mean the revelation of the banality of evil, of cruelty and torture, that spilled out in the imagery of liberated concentration camps. I mean the realization that weapons now existed with a destructive power that might be sudden and universal. In that mood, some people involved in picture-making and its factory for happiness felt ashamed of the foolish lies that had been perpetrated. Another betrayal came as the state turned on Hollywood for harboring subversive elements, and the craven picture business succumbed to that specious pressure and blacklisted some members of its own family.
That makes a heavy package of grief and regret, and after 1947 so many people in filmmaking lost their jobs and their confidence. Then came the chance to hesitate as American happiness was mocked by the shrill assertions of advertising (given unprecedented currency and life as the motor of television) that of course we all wanted to be happy, and would be nervous wrecks if we didn’t make it. But what if our failure to make a community out of the huddled masses may have been assisted by the separating device of film itself? We thought we were looking at the world in fellowship with it, but the screen doesn’t care if we are there, or who we are, so long as we have paid for the seat. The humanism that we hoped was the purpose of art doesn’t quite travel in the dark or past the privilege of voyeurism.
In time, a number of films will see this alienation as a subject. In a teasing way, Fritz Lang’s The Woman in the Window (1944) suggests, “Don’t fall asleep—and then don’t fall for sleep’s screen,” because it is a trap waiting for you. Joseph Losey’s The Prowler (1951) hints that the cop who answers the call reporting a prowler may himself have been that prowler. Dixon Steele (Humphrey Bogart) isn’t the murderer in In a Lonely Place (1950), but the investigation will reveal that he could have been, because he occupies that poisoned emotional solitude, alone in the movie city. Sunset Blvd. (1950) is a melodrama filled with gallows humor, an insider story that jabs us in the ribs; but it knows that even the successes in Hollywood go mad. In Otto Preminger’s Angel Face (1952), we guess early on that the angel (Jean Simmons) is a deliverer of death, but we can’t give her up any more than the Robert Mitchum character who falls for her. Rear Window (1954) is a step toward confession from Alfred Hitchcock about the uneasiness of the habitual watcher. That will come to a head in Vertigo (1958) and Psycho (1960), and nothing less than horror over film runs through Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960).
That picture is notorious for raising a stream of critical abuse in the London press sufficient to interrupt Powell’s postwar career as a director. But Powell was not a defeatist, and he did not lack ingenuity in the face of opposition. So credit something in his withdrawal to at least a passing dismay over what film was doing. The very means of desire were being invaded by dread.
That emerging anxiety is more deep-seated than all the immediate worries in noir: that the lovers in They Live by Night (1949) may be killed; that people on the run could end up mad; that the great criminal enterprise may come undone; that Joe Gillis in Sunset Blvd. will end up facedown in a swimming pool, still telling a story—the one thing he longed to do on-screen; or even that the end of life may be approaching. Sometimes noir faded into science fiction, and it’s in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) that death by uniformity overtakes people when they fall asleep and start to dream. You can say that is a metaphor for a society that could not handle radical outsiders (such as Communists? Or blacks? Or women?) or people determined to think for themselves, to be part of the huddled masses but known, individual, different. Isn’t that a crux of America’s dilemma now? Isn’t it critical thinking that risks being snatched? So in noir, outsiders (even the mad and the dangerous) begin to become attractive.
This shift can be seen as part of a filmmaker’s feeling that the old code of happy endings and unmistakable virtue had to be abandoned if film was going to grow up and earn respect. That’s the first hint, on “home” ground, that villainy (such a hokey word) mig
ht be a new facet of our behavioral mix, that evil might be understandable. The bad guys were becoming the glowing roles. In Kiss of Death (1947), a standard film noir, it’s hard to recall the hero, Victor Mature, not just because that actor was so subdued, but because the film had lost interest in his character. Instead, we watch Tommy Udo (Richard Widmark), in a black shirt, a white tie, and a filthy raincoat, who pushes an old woman in a wheelchair down a staircase. And then he laughs in his giggly, whining way. He seems like a concentration camp guard who got away. It was Widmark’s first film, and it launched his career while presenting him with the problem that had dogged Peter Lorre: no one might take him seriously except as a killer. (The film was cowritten by Ben Hecht, who had just been through analysis.)
The medium seemed to grasp its own split—the lifelike without life’s detachment—so we could be allowed to appreciate a sadist, just as in the future we would be encouraged to study a rapist, an act of torture, a murderer…hell has no limit. In Vertigo, the fuss of the central story masks a vital first: the killer, Gavin, a master of refined cruelty, goes free. In a few years’ time, Norman Bates was not free, but he was on show, holding Psycho’s screen and the identity of the film. You can chart the following decades with dark characters not disowned by their films: Michael Corleone, Travis Bickle, Hannibal Lecter, Tony Soprano.
Yet in the same years of film noir—as Detour (1945) crossed with Meet Me in St. Louis (1944)—Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer created a string of musicals that are still felt as an epitome of pure cinema and transcendent pleasure. Their dream was not simply that lovers found each other and lived in bliss in a flawless world. It was not even the songs sung in these films. It was that we might all of us sing and dance at the same time with the effortlessness that was the goal of Fred Astaire’s relentless work. Of course, that unison was a white lie: in fact, the performers danced to a playback of the songs. But Astaire gave the musical a fluent cinematic style: he wanted to see full figures shot in unbroken coverage. He longed to believe the dream was real.
In hindsight, the color musical seems inevitable. Yet its example has never been attempted again, and it needed many circumstantial advantages, such as the acceptance of Technicolor. So explaining the musical historically is not simple. The genre goes against the grain of the postwar mood, and hangs upon a slight fellow with big ears, a high speaking voice, and no apparent desire to be an actor. Astaire remains one of the more implausible but most adored stars. The genre might not have taken flight without his elusive, cool manner, before “cool” had been noticed.
There had been earlier musicals. Al Jolson (far from cool) was the bearer of sound, talk, and song in The Jazz Singer (1927). Metro’s The Broadway Melody (1929) won the second Best Picture Oscar. Warner Brothers developed what we call the Busby Berkeley pictures, black and white and often aware of the harsh issues of the Depression, but a choreographic lather of girls and orgasmic forms, where the camera was itching to plunge into the center of the big O. So Berkeley choreographed (and ordered the shooting of) the big numbers in Footlight Parade, Gold Diggers of 1933, and 42nd Street (all three released in 1933), with players such as Cagney, Dick Powell, and Ruby Keeler. These films had aerial shots of waves, and whirlpools of chorus girls opening and closing their legs in time with our desire. It was as if the Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov had been assigned to a pornographic ecstasy: Willing Comrades of 1933?
At RKO, in the Astaire-Rogers pictures, still in black and white, the exhilaration of the set-piece numbers (as conceived and visualized by Fred) ignored the weightless framework of the stories and their inane romantic complications. In no other area had Hollywood so freed itself of obligatory naturalism, or ventured so close to surreal abandon.
Though everyone knew they wanted fun at the movies, the musical was flagrantly attuned to pleasure. Factory films often clung to common sense: Would the audience be able to follow it? Would it make money? But the musical ridiculed such solemnity. You could think of the picture as a transporting dream, or even an orgy—as in ballet, there was an eroticism in the musical that slipped through the sieve of censorship. Just recall Cyd Charisse putting on lingerie in Silk Stockings (1957), a scene that might not have passed the Code in a dramatic film.
At M-G-M, a stronghold of practicality and business efficiency, under the leadership of the producer Arthur Freed, Metro made a series of musicals that look like a campaign to keep people cheerful as war ended and darker threats loomed.
There was a history: Metro had made The Broadway Melody as sound dawned. It had produced the Jeanette McDonald–Nelson Eddy films in the 1930s, and it had won a Best Picture Oscar again with The Great Ziegfeld (1936), in which William Powell played the showman and the film was an anthology of his numbers. The studio had done Babes in Arms (1939) and Strike Up the Band (1940), in which Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland were kids putting on a show (and both films were in black and white). In Broadway Melody of 1940, Astaire (now under contract at M-G-M) and Eleanor Powell, all in white on a glossy black floor, had done the fabulous “Begin the Beguine” number so that the rest of the clunky picture was forgotten. In 1939 the confusion and hopes behind The Wizard of Oz turned into a pioneer fantasy with songs. When Dorothy sang “Over the Rainbow” she was behaving or acting like a character in a drama. “Over the Rainbow” introduced a new possibility of belief in which the studio embraced Technicolor and a bold, theatrical scheme of production design. The musical might be less a studio space—at RKO it was apparent that Fred and Ginger danced on sound stages—than a fictional place that only film could fashion. What is the Hollywood Walk of Fame (begun in 1958) but the Yellow Brick Road with product placement?
Come forward to Meet Me in St. Louis (1944). This need not have been a musical: it was based on a series of stories published in The New Yorker by Sally Benson about family life in St. Louis at the turn of the century. But the studio gave it color, an adult Judy Garland, and songs by Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane. One of them, “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” comes near the end of the film. The Smith family is about to move to New York for their father’s promotion at the bank. But not everyone is happy with the move. Esther (about eighteen) and her kid sister Tootie (about seven) are looking out over their moonlit garden and the “snow people” on parade there. That’s when Garland sings what may be the most melancholy of Christmas songs in a very sisterly manner. Tootie (Margaret O’Brien) is so moved she runs down and smashes the snow people. Father comes home, observes the emotional distress, and decides to forsake his biggest opportunity in life.
As delivered on-screen, the father (Leon Ames) pauses over his desktop (it is like Kane noticing the snowball; it is a scene from a drama) before making his decision. The family will stay in St. Louis. This was 1944, when many people longed to believe that an earlier order and home might be enjoyed again—as if nothing had happened. It’s an un-American closure, denying enterprise and mobility, and one of the most touching scenes in a musical.
The film was directed by Vincente Minnelli, who had been raised as a stage art director. He and Garland fell in love on the picture (it shows, and it pushed them into an impulsive marriage). Garland was an actress, to be sure, but she acted best when she sang—the same could be said of Frank Sinatra as a movie star. Minnelli was an M-G-M contract director all his career, and his musicals include The Pirate (1948, again with Garland, though they were divorced by then), An American in Paris (Best Picture Oscar winner for 1951, and a gaudy vision of Paris as seen by some of its great painters), The Band Wagon (1953), Brigadoon (1954), and Gigi (1958).
The other essential director in this history was Stanley Donen, once a dancer and choreographer, and very close to Gene Kelly. Together the two men were recruited to M-G-M, where Donen would make On the Town (1949), Singin’ in the Rain (1952), Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1954), and It’s Always Fair Weather (1955). One should add Funny Face (1957) to that list, though the inspired and tender pairing of Astaire and Audrey Hepburn was actually a Paramount pict
ure.
How could any studio go wrong with Astaire, Kelly, and Garland? The coincidence of those three seems explanation enough for the surge of musicals at M-G-M. But there was also a stimulus coming from the theater. In this same period, Broadway premiered Oklahoma! (1943), Carousel (1945), Annie Get Your Gun (1946), and South Pacific (1949). These shows had a greater faith in story, character, and ideas than the review musical that had been dominant before 1939. They also shone a light on being American and treating an experience that extended beyond New York or Broadway.
M-G-M had ranks of stars. It also boasted Esther Williams, June Allyson, Van Johnson, Debbie Reynolds, and Howard Keel. One could add Lena Horne, who was at the studio and given a few songs (usually removed for the South) but never allowed to become a real star. There were other directors, such as Charles Walters (Easter Parade, 1948; Summer Stock, 1950; and High Society, 1956) and George Sidney (Anchors Aweigh, 1945; The Harvey Girls, 1946; Annie Get Your Gun, 1950; Show Boat, 1951; and Kiss Me Kate, 1953). To support them, Freed gathered a team of craftspeople: Roger Edens, songwriter and arranger (and the producer of Funny Face); Betty Comden and Adolph Green, scriptwriters (they did On the Town, Singin’ in the Rain, and The Band Wagon); André Previn, who joined M-G-M as composer and arranger at the age of fifteen; Kay Thompson, who did so much to look after Judy Garland, and wrote the Eloise books, which had Liza Minnelli as a model; the choreographer Michael Kidd (Seven Brides for Seven Brothers); not to mention the designers, set decorators, costumiers, and photographers who collaborated on the exuberant prettiness of the studio musicals—audiences still gasp with pleasure at the fresh laundry brightness of Meet Me in St. Louis and the devotion to art behind An American in Paris, a film that is inseparable from the postwar surge in tourism and cultural expansion in Americans.
The Big Screen Page 30