by Mark Cousins
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Off-horizontal shots, such as this one in Sam Fuller’s Pick-Up on South Street, express the mental instability of many characters in films noirs. USA, 1953.
The majority of these émigrés who made films noirs lived through the period of German expressionism in the 1920s, or were subject to its influence. Before he died, Wilder denied any direct visual influence from Wiene or early Lang on Double Indemnity, but film-noir lighting is usually a lattice of expressionist directional beams and dark shadows and the actors in image 140 cast heavy ones. Earlier in Double Indemnity they are even more prominent. There was also an economic imperative behind such shadows as they meant sets could be more cheaply constructed.
However, it was not only expressionism’s surface that was important, but also the characters. In the key Lang and Wiene films they were often deranged, with asylums being the setting or threat. Film noir’s human tenor is similar, with frequent scenes of near hysteria in which life breaks open to reveal the passions and nightmares under the surface. The world view is so infected that even the imagery in which the story is told becomes unbalanced, in a similar way to The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. The Great Unsaid in expressionist films was the idea of a happy, normal, balanced world. Film noir was the dissident response to the idea of such utopianism in Hollywood, which was so far from unsaid as to be suffocating.
The influence of German aesthetics on these films is well known, but other fictions play their part. Double Indemnity was co-written by Raymond Chandler, the Chicago-born novelist whose fiction, along with that of Dashiel Hammett, created many of the character-types and situations to which noir filmmakers applied their shadows and sensibilities. Chandler’s most famous character was Philip Marlowe, whose notoriously “hard-boiled” dialogue played so well on screen. Chandler had Marlowe narrate his novels, a clear prototype for film noir’s frequent voice-overs. His first significant book, The Big Sleep, was published in 1939 and Howard Hawks filmed it in 1946, with Humphrey Bogart playing Marlowe (142), a role that many other actors would embody. It would become the most influential of films noirs since Double Indemnity for two reasons. Firstly, its plot was so complicated that it emboldened subsequent directors to take their work further in the direction of Caligari’s narrative insanity. Secondly, its script was co-written by Leigh Brackett, a fellow-novelist who wrote mystery books. Brackett is an intriguing figure in film history because she co-wrote three of the most entertaining films in American cinema, The Big Sleep, Rio Bravo (Howard Hawks, USA, 1946, 1959) and The Empire Strikes Back (Irvin Kershner, USA, 1980). Her co-writing of The Big Sleep raises the question of how films noirs represent their female characters. Stanwyck in Double Indemnity, Lauren Bacall in The Big Sleep, Ava Gardner in The Killers (Robert Siodmak, USA, 1946) and Jane Greer in Out of the Past (Jacques Tourneur, USA, 1947) all haunt these films; they are constantly talked about by the men in the stories, toying with them and causing their downfall. These characters understand that their eroticism empowers them to manipulate men’s minds and judgments, and what is original is that they achieve this with ease. The wartime emancipation of women is undoubtedly reflected in these films, but they are sexually fascinating because in tandem with assertive females there are men’s weak, damaged or repressed erotic imaginations. Weakened men are blinded by strong women; in some cases, this can be literally so, where the woman is strongly back-lit and her face is in shadow (143).
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Humphrey Bogart as Philip Marlowe in Howard Hawks’ labyrinthically plotted film noir, The Big Sleep. USA, 1946.
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The use of facial shadows to suggest the mystery and moral darkness of women in film noir; Jane Greer in Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past. USA, 1947.
Only one film noir from the hundreds produced was directed by a woman, Ida Lupino (144). Born in London in 1918, she went to the US to follow an acting career. She was a rebel of sorts and in the spirit of Olivia de Havilland refused the lure of massive studio salaries if projects were not of a suitable standard. She started directing B-movies with tiny budgets in 1949, when a male director had a heart attack three days into a shoot. Her crews were impressed by the fact that a glamorous movie star knew enough about the craft of filmmaking to call the shots. Her most significant film, The Hitch-Hiker (USA, 1953), is a noir story about a brutal murderer who hitches a ride with two gentler characters, both fishermen. Even when the killer sleeps, he keeps one eye open like a reptile. Based on actual events and shot with economy, the film’s portrayal of competing strains of masculinity was ahead of its time.
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The only woman to direct a film noir: Ida Lupino (left) on location.
Wilder and his team on Double Indemnity were drawing in still other cultural threads. The presence of Edward G. Robinson was a reminder of how films noirs reawakened the early 1930s fascination with gangster films, in which Robinson had been a key player. The pessimism of noir directors, atypical in American cinema, was also an inheritance from the poetic realist films of France in the 1930s, such as those by Marcel Carné and Jacques Prévert. These were not seen widely by American audiences, as foreign-language pictures were not distributed conventionally, but film societies programmed them. If any proof of the influence were needed, Fritz Lang remade Renoir’s La Chienne (1931) as the film noir Scarlet Street (USA, 1945) starring Edward G. Robinson.
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Citizen Kane’s faked newsreel sequence, complete with faked hidden camera shots (above), anticipated semi-documentary films such as The House on 92nd Street (below).
If Citizen Kane’s deep staging was one of the influences on films noirs, it was also a stepping-stone to other stylistic variations in American cinema. Welles’ film started with an accurately faked newsreel, charting the life of its eponymous protagonist, the mogul Charles Foster Kane (145 top). One of these newsreels’ producers, Louis de Rochemont, in turn oversaw The House on 92nd Street (Henry Hathaway, USA, 1945), a semi-documentary spy drama, which was filmed on real locations (145 bottom). There were antecedents for such filming as King Vidor and Dziga Vertov had used hidden cameras in the streets in the 1920s.12 One year after Double Indemnity, Wilder had done the same with his film about an alcoholic, The Lost Weekend (USA, 1945), as had the Italian neo-realists, changing storytelling techniques by doing so. Jules Dassin’s The Naked City (USA, 1948) became the most famous location-shot “semi-documentary” of its day. Its success led, twelve years later, to a television series of the same name.
Some of the most utopian American films of these years continued the debate about reality and fantasy which first surfaced in Ninotchka and The Wizard of Oz, but even these found room for passages of pessimism and visual darkness. It’s a Wonderful Life (Frank Capra, USA, 1946) is one of Western cinema’s most emotive films and, like the Archers’ A Matter of Life and Death (UK, 1946), it concerns a man hovering between the world of the living and that of the dead. Capra, a former gag writer turned director, had become one of the most powerful filmmakers in Hollywood during the 1930s. He made extremely effective works of rhetorical cinema about the nature of American populism, the flow of hope and despair running through the nation’s soul. It’s a Wonderful Life was not a great commercial success, but it is Capra’s most significant work, not least because it was an independent production – of Liberty Films, the company Capra co-founded with William Wyler and George Stevens. In it, James Stewart plays George Bailey, an ordinary man in a small town, Bedford Falls, who is driven to the brink of suicide by financial hardships. As he is about to jump off a bridge, his guardian angel appears and shows him how much worse Bedford Falls would be if he had not been a part of the community. The film is one of the most affecting narrative films not based on a novel or stage play. The despair on Stewart’s face when he realizes that money has gone missing from a co-operative savings company he runs is palpable. Earlier, Stewart’s character has told his father that he wants to “design buildings and modern cities … I just feel like if I didn’t get away, I’d b
urst.” At this stage of the film, he is a cosmopolitan, dreaming of going to Europe, but these touches of modernity in his personality are challenged on the angel’s arrival. The latter shows him that without his influence, his homely town would be full of bars, a pawnshop (implied as Jewish), eroticized women, black people playing boogie-woogie piano and general agression. In other words, it would be a film noir. Capra’s moving tale is profoundly suspicious about such city life and teaches George a lesson about wanderlust and hating home. Its conclusion is very similar to that of The Wizard of Oz: “There’s no place like home”, an expression of relief that America is not a film noir.
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Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life is fondly remembered as a feel-good movie but there are elements of film noir in it and times when James Stewart’s character borders on psychosis. In one such moment (above) Capra and his cinematographer Joseph Biroc use a wide-angle lens to bring their actor unusually close to the camera. USA, 1946.
John Ford’s My Darling Clementine (USA, 1946) released in the same year as It’s a Wonderful Life, is, in many ways, its cinematic sibling. In the film a legendary cowboy, Wyatt Earp (147), finds that the frontier town of Tombstone is in moral decline and full of bars and prostitutes. He restores order to it and establishes law and decency as its twin foundation stones. Capra allows us to imagine a town gone awry, whereas Ford looks back nostalgically to the time when a similar one stopped being so.
It is perhaps no surprise that American filmmakers were going through a period of narrative soul searching. Not only had war darkened their sunny view of life, but closer to home, their industry was changing. Ernst Lubitsch died in 1947. D.W. Griffith and Greg Toland, American cinema’s civilizer and its deep-space experimenter, both died in 1948, as did Louis Lumière in France and Eisenstein in the Soviet Union. Victor Fleming, director of much of The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind, died the following year. Structurally, the challenge to the studio system, initiated by Olivia de Havilland, contin-ued. Ticket sales started to decline, people began to move to suburbs and spent their money on new consumer goods rather than movies. In 1947, fifty studio bosses and producers agreed to sack any of their employees who would not co-operate with the government’s new anti-communist House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). The five main studios were denounced by the US Supreme Court for their “conspiracy to monopoly” in 1948 and the first of them, Paramount, was forced by law to sell its 1,450 theatres in the following year. In 1949, the HUAC chairman, J. Parnell Thomas, was sentenced to prison for embezzlement.
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Whereas Capra depicted what would happen if lawlessness was not challenged by decent men, in John Ford’s My Darling Clementine order is restored by just such a man. USA, 1946.
Meanwhile in France, major actors led demonstrations against the influx of American films. The US industry, after a complex tussle, began to pay the UK to reduce its taxation on imported American movies and Mexico and Brazil set up anti-import policies. The wartime need for collective emotional experiences seemed to have peaked and new tiny, bug-eyed screens started to appear in people’s living rooms. Gradually at first, but then with increasing strength, television, legislation and international opposition broke down American film’s oligarchy.
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Director Zheng Junli’s strong depiction of a landlord–tenant fight in Crows and Sparrows shows the influence of realism on Chinese cinema. China, 1948.
The New York bankers who owned the American studios, had they been aware of the Far Eastern situation, would have taken cold comfort from what was concurrently beginning to happen in China. In 1949, when Mao finally ousted the Nationalists, forty-seven million Chinese people went to the cinema. A decade later, after the introduction of government-built touring cinemas, based on the early Soviet Union’s agitprop trains, annual attendances were up to four billion. China’s massive expansion in movie-going was fostered by a communist government, an irony that would not have been lost on the US bankers and the studio executives who sided with the HUAC. Like his fellow dictators, Hitler and Stalin, Mao was interested in cinema as a tool of control and ideological indoctrination, rather than as an art. He appointed the Chinese actor and director, Yuan Muzhi, who had made Street Angel (China, 1937, see page 420), as head of the new Cinema Board. One of the first films to reflect the communist success was Crows and Sparrows (Zheng Junli, China 1949), often voted one of the best Chinese films of all time. It tells of the struggle in a Shanghai tenement building between its residents and their brutal nationalist landlord. It ends at Chinese New Year in 1949, with the celebration of Mao’s victory and its triumphalism now appears ironic in the light of China’s future. However, the still forceful realism of its scenes (261) are a reminder that China, as much as Italy, France or America, contributed to post-war cinematic naturalism.
The rise of communism was too much for many free-thinking filmmakers in Shanghai and many fled, as others had done before the Russian revolution or the Nazis’ rise to power. Their destination was Hong Kong, where Chinese filmmakers had first gone in the late 1930s, when Japan invaded. The wave that crossed over at the end of the 1940s and the early 1950s was more significant and some of the best Mandarin-language films of all time were made by them. Wang Weiyi directed Tears of the Pearl River in Hong Kong at the end of the 1940s and Zhu Shilin, one of the best filmmakers of his era, made The Secret History of the Imperial Palace (Hong Kong, 1949) and The Dividing Wall (Hong Kong, 1952), which became classics. Zhu was a pioneer and continued to advance the 1930s tradition of realism in Chinese cinema (he had written screenplays for the great 1930s star Ruan Lingu). His work was the forerunner of 1950s Cantonese melodrama which, although less critical of society than his own work, was still splendidly emotional. The films of Zhu and Wang paved the way for the 1950s and 1970s filmmaking explosions in Hong Kong.
In other countries, decolonization established the possibility of local directors making more authentic work than had been allowed before. Within a year or two of the US withdrawal, the Filipino director Manuel Conde had made Ghengis Khan (Philippines, 1950) which was a hit at the 1952 Venice Film Festival and whose story was retold — badly — by Hollywood, with John Wayne in the lead. Filipino cinema would not come into its own until the 1950s and 1960s. Mexico may have had no colonizer to overthrow but its 1930s films had been popular retreads of the 1911–18 revolutionary period’s history. In 1931–32, Eisenstein had tried to make a film, Que Viva Mexico! in this country. It remained unfinished, but its symbolism influenced Mexican film style and ideas in this period. The Mexican government had set up film institutions in the early 1940s and by the end of that decade, two main types of indigenous films had emerged: Eisenstein-influenced mythic works about life on the land, treated in an almost sacred way; and, by contrast, brothel and cabaret urban films. One of the earliest of the former was Maria Candelaria (Emilio Fernandez, Mexico, 1943) and one of the best of the latter, was The Mother of the Port (Emilio Gomez Muriel, Mexico, 1949). Native Mexican filmmakers such as Emilio Fernandez used these two genres to debate the nature of their country’s modernization, just as European directors had obsessed about the gulf between city and country life in the late 1920s. Mexican cinema’s realist roots gave way to a tussle between piety and melodrama which continued for many decades. Together, these genres represented a quarter of the films shown in Mexico in the late 1940s, over 100 films in total. The majority of the rest were either American or Spanish.
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Orson Welles as Harry Lime in Carol Reed’s potent mix of film noir, expressionism and post-war themes. The Third Man. UK, 1949
British cinema was more in tune with Western cinematic trends and while stylistically it showed signs of expressionism and shadow play, it also did more than this. In 1949 it produced one of the most complex devastation-films of the whole period. The Third Man (UK, 1949) is almost as pivotal to film history as the film noir cycle. It was one of the first British studio films to be shot entirely on locatio
n and was produced by a rare pairing, the ubiquitous Alexander Korda and Gone with the Wind’s David O. Selznick. It was written and directed by another extraordinary pair, the Catholic novelist Graham Greene and Carol Reed, the illegiti-mate son of an actor who had worked his way up through the British studio system.
The Third Man has an engaging scenario: an American in bombed-out Vienna, Holly Martins, attempts to find out whether his mysterious friend, Harry Lime, has died. In so doing, he becomes involved with Harry’s girlfriend, Anna, and discovers that not only is Harry alive, but that he is an amoral penicillin trafficker. Greene invented a demonic character in Lime, played by Orson Welles (149), who benefits from this black market trafficking at the expense of those children for whom the medicines are intended. Reed, who had just made the remarkable Odd Man Out (UK, 1947), liked the gravity of this idea. Its moody pessimism reminded him of the 1930s French films he admired. He had made a wartime documentary and, like the Italians and some of the Americans, felt that cinema had to engage more with reality. Post-war Vienna, with insistent zither music in the background, was a million miles away from the city of Strauss’s light waltzes, besides being divided into French, British, Russian and US sectors. Using Hitchcock’s string of-set-pieces approach, Reed and his great cinematographer, Robert Krasker, shot the majority of the film with the camera angled off the horizontal axis. German filmmakers in the 1920s had used this technique to indicate mental imbalance. Their Vienna held as much madness as the asylums of Wiene and Kinugasa, Reed’s expressionist precursors. Welles wrote his own scenes and some claim he was yet another influence on the visual style of the picture.