The Dark Side of the Screen: Film Noir

by Foster Hirsch

  The private eye genre returned, ignominiously, to its pulp origins in the work of Mickey Spillane, whose character of Mike Hammer has none of the finesse or integrity that distinguishes Marlowe or Spade. “A good name for a duke,” Mrs. Llewellyn Lockridge Grayle tells Marlowe at the end of Farewell, My Lovely. Nobody could say that to Mike Hammer, the antithesis of royalty in both name and manner. If Marlowe represents for Chandler, as many of his critics claim, an ideal fantasy version of himself, then Hammer is a fantasy self-image for Spillane. The distance between the two characters charts the difference between Chandler’s refinement on the one hand and Spillane’s hopeless crudeness on the other. Spillane makes no pretense of being an artist—he is merely in the business of marketing garish right-wing fantasies of the threat to the national fibre of communists and homosexuals. To preserve the macho patriotic ideal, Hammer resorts to vigilante justice, his violence excused as a necessary way of maintaining law and order against contaminating foreign elements. The Hammer books represent a lunatic right-wing fringe, enlisting sex and violence in the cause of Americanism. Raw to an absurd degree, naked testaments to Spillane’s utterly meretricious sensibility, the books would not deserve notice except for the disturbing fact of their unprecedented popularity. A culture does not buy fantasies that have no connection to it, and the record sales of Spillane books indicate the degree to which he has plumbed the lowest common denominator.

  Spillane’s work is the nadir of the hard-boiled school. His fiction confirms the worst elements that critics of the crime novel have customarily charged against it: its exploitation of sex and violence and sensational crime, its sleazy atmosphere, its misogyny, its lack of aesthetic standards.

  The detective is the most famous, but certainly not the only, incarnation of the hard-boiled style. Although crime is usually present, either centrally or peripherally, in the hard-boiled novel, the element of detection is not. James M. Cain and Horace McCoy, along with Hammett and Chandler the leading writers of the hard-boiled school and major influences on noir style, do not write stories about private eyes or about searches for missing persons. Their focus is on the criminal rather than the investigator, and the shift in vantage point involves adjustments of tone and characterization as well. In Cain’s most famous stories, the criminals serve as narrators, so the novels are not mysteries in the usual sense: in Cain, we know whodunit, and why, right from the start. The suspense comes not from locating the guilty person but from examining him, from penetrating his consciousness as he tells us his story.

  Cain felt that he belonged to no particular school or tradition; he especially disliked the hard-boiled label attached to his work. But hard-boiled it definitely is. His writing is more feverish than the work of Hammett or Chandler, but like them Cain writes about crime in a stylistically self-conscious way, creating through a vigorous vernacular mode a hard-edged picture of hard-edged characters. His major pieces—The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934), Double Indemnity (1936), Serenade (1939), and Mildred Pierce (1940)—anticipate aspects of noir sensibility as much as the work of Hammett and Chandler.

  Recently reissued in paperback, James M. Cain’s novels, like those of Hammett and Chandler, are attracting a growing number of admirers.

  Chandler, the chief critic of the hard-boiled literary tradition, disliked Cain’s writing. It is not difficult to see why. Cain’s sexually explosive novels violate Chandler’s sense of decorum; in Cain’s work, twisted characters are not, as in Hammett or Chandler, observed from the disapproving gaze of a moralistic and sexually restrained investigator, but seen up close, in sustained intimate focus, through their own words. The absence of an intervening consciousness between the sexually voracious criminals and the reader gives Cain’s stories a sensational aura. “Nothing Cain has ever written has been entirely out of the trash category,” writes W. M. Frohock, in The Novel of Violence in America. “He has schooled himself grimly to produce the kind of effect he wants, with every sentence supercharged and a new jolt for the reader on every page ... Cain works on the assumption ... that he can do with the reader just about what he likes. The reader is a sort of victim, whose weaknesses are there to be exploited.”

  Cain’s two best-known protagonists, Frank in The Postman Always Rings Twice, and Walter Neff in Double Indemnity, are led to crime through animalistic passion. By chance, both characters meet sexually enticing and available women. Frank is something of a hobo, a knock-about wanderer, who drifts by a country luncheonette-gas station. When he sets eyes on the proprietor’s wife, he decides to stay on as handyman and station attendant. Walter Neff meets Phyllis on a routine call in the course of selling insurance. The sight of these two women unbalances both men. The women are embodiments of male sexual fantasies, and the heroes’ luck in encountering them, and then in beginning affairs with them, constitutes what Cain has called “the wish come true.” But in Cain, hot sex is a trap, the beginning of the end. Sex leads quickly to crime as the new lovers plan to murder the woman’s unloved husband. Once the lovers commit murder, their passion becomes stained and corrupted beyond repair. The conspirators begin to distrust each other, in little ways at first, and end up locked in a fierce battle of wills, their passion turned to hatred.

  Double Indemnity served as the basis for one of the most trenchant films noirs. The Postman Always Rings Twice was emasculated in its screen adaptation, made by the wrong studio (tinselly MGM), and miscast in two of its roles (Lana Turner too poised and glamorous for Cora, Cecil Kellaway far too refined for Cora’s dimwitted and gross husband). Elements of Cain’s work filtered into most of the crime films of the forties: the link between sex, greed, and crime; the deadly irony (Frank escapes punishment, through legal technicalities, for a crime he did commit, and is then condemned to death for a crime of which he is innocent); the tough, dispassionate, slangy first-person narration. Frank’s story, we learn at the end, is told from his cell on Death Row. Walter’s story is told just before he and Phyllis decide to commit suicide by jumping off the ship that is carrying them to a life of exile. Although we don’t know, until the end, where the stories are told, or at precisely what point in time, an aura of doom vers over both narrations.

  Cecil Kellaway, John Garfield, and Lana Turner in the 1946 MGM film of The Postman Always Rings Twice, which undercut the novel’s hothouse atmosphere. The film’s well-scrubbed surface (indicated in this shot) missed the sour, mordant quality of Cain’s writing.

  The fact that the narrators are recalling events that have already taken place gives these stories of sex and murder a reflective overlay; the cool, matter-of-fact quality of the narration, as in many of the voice-over commentaries in noir, creates a striking contrast to the powerful feelings that put the hapless protagonists where they are now. The narrators look back on their hot-bloodedness with a mixture of rue and irony, recollecting their wrong-headed lust with distance if not exactly tranquility. Here is the voice of Walter Neff, as he begins his story of passion gone wrong:

  James M. Cain’s Serenade is a delirious sexual escapade, all but unrecognizable in the laundered Hollywood adaptation, starring Mario Lanza, a most unlikely noir hero.

  I drove out to Glendale to put three new truck drivers on a brewery company bond, and then I remembered this renewal over in Hollywood-land. I decided to run over there. That was how I came to this House of Death, that you’ve been reading about in the papers. It didn’t look like a House of Death when I saw it. It was just a Spanish house, like all the rest of them in California, with white walls, red tile roof, and a patio out to one side. It was built cock-eyed.

  The clash between the narrator’s dry, mordant tone and the sensational substance of his story is one of the hallmarks of the hard-boiled tradition, providing the kind of ironic distancing that lifts Double Indemnity, like other novels of its type, above tabloid intrigue to the level of consciously crafted literature.

  In addition to Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice, Cain has written two other deeply noir novels,
Serenade (an extraordinary story utterly disembowelled in a foolish, laundered film version starring Mario Lanza, a most unlikely noir hero) and Mildred Pierce (splendidly adapted into Joan Crawford’s most successful star vehicle). Both stories again concern obsession leading to murder, though the actual crime in each case is much less central than in the earlier books.

  Serenade was too sensational to be translated intact to films—and it would still be unfilmable today, though for different reasons than in the forties. Set in a variety of locations, from rural Mexico to Hollywood to New York, Serenade is narrated by an opera singer—an unusual noir occupation—whose voice changes radically in quality (and here is the story’s wild, dotty premise) according to his current sexual orientation. He lost his voice when he discovered that he was attracted to men, and then allowed himself to be seduced by a wealthy, decadent patron. In a smoky den he meets a ravishing senorita whom he wins in a card game. His desire for her, which is consummated in a church (in the novel’s most delirious and virtuoso set-piece), revives his voice. His manhood and his art restored, he goes to Hollywood where his star rises and falls in record time. Lured back to New York by his former male lover, he re-enters the world of opera as the effete man and the passionate senorita wage battle over his body and soul. In a climactic scene, the senorita thrusts a sword through the hovering homosexual—a phallic thrust to save her man’s phallus for herself. She and the singer once again become fugitives. She returns to Mexico as he follows in hot pursuit, and the story comes full circle, ending where it began, with the hero in much the same ravaged emotional and sexual condition as at the opening. Serenade is awash in gross sexual stereotyping : nowhere else in the hard-boiled canon is homosexuality presented with the naked disapproval and contempt evident here. Homosexuality in the novel is a threat not only to the character’s self-image but also to his art. Sex with a Mexican spitfire is thus both cleansing and restorative, while sex with his male patron is utterly degrading.

  For all its exotic settings and references, Serenade is quintessentially noir in its depiction of sex, with homosexuality replacing the traditional femme fatale as the hero’s nemesis. Whatever the orientation, sex in Cain (as in noir) is a supremely destructive force; it has the power to transform personality, and to give in to it is a certain invitation to disaster. Although the Mexican prostitute is a vital figure, restoring the hero to his best self, she is ultimately menacing since her passion leads to murder. Cain cannot imagine sex as both dynamic and safe.

  “In the spring of 1931, on a lawn in Glendale, California, a man was bracing trees.” So begins Mildred Pierce, in a voice of rational and objective observation that offers a strong contrast to the intense first-person narrator of Serenade. The cool narration is misleading, since the novel turns out to be as full of sexual obsession as Cain’s other work—it begins as a seemingly conventional domestic melodrama and then descends by degrees into a dark pit of noir pathology. Mildred Pierce, in fact, is more monomaniacal than any of Cain’s other characters, her every action guided by her twisted love for her spoiled-rotten daughter. Mildred is a typical American mother who wants her children to enjoy all the “finer things,” which to her means the things only money can buy. In some respects Mildred is normal and admirable: she is a good hard worker, she is resilient, ambitious, clever, as she set herself up in the restaurant business, graduating in record time from waitress to baker to entrepreneur. But all her good points are disfigured by her intense and single-minded desire to win the approval of her disdainful daughter. She soils herself to maintain Veda’s “love,” marrying a man she does not really care for, a ne’er-do-well with money, just so Veda can have entree to the world of high society.

  There are moments of startling perversity in the novel, as when Mildred admits that she is glad it was her other daughter who died of pneumonia and not Veda, and when she sleeps with Veda, to soothe and protect her. Mildred’s sick attachment to her daughter contaminates and finally overwhelms her, just as the singer’s homosexuality in Serenade and Frank’s lust for Cora in The Postman Always Rings Twice fatally discolor them. For Mildred, men are merely convenient stepping stones toward her fantasy goal of an indissoluble union with her daughter. Going after money and social status for an unusually twisted reason, Mildred Pierce represents a deformed version of the Horatio Alger myth.

  The misogynistic streak in Cain’s work is carried to grotesque proportions in the character of Veda, who is intolerably precocious intellectually and sexually—she is a nymphet version of the castrating femme fatale who was to become a noir fixture. Like Cain’s other vixens, Veda is indeed deadlier than the male, ravenous, libidinous—and only sixteen when she sleeps with and then, when he spurns her, shoots her no-account stepfather.

  Cain is a forceful, knotty, occasionally maddening writer. As he dramatizes the destruction of his sexually overloaded characters, as he attacks American Momism and the American bitch, his voice is harsh and authentic. Fiercely misanthropic, Cain’s writing exudes a low-consciousness tabloid mentality that has kept some readers at a distance. But his work reflects a true aspect of the hard-boiled tradition. Cain is a shrewd American original whose four major novels are striking premonitions of the sensibility that underlies film noir.

  Like many of the tough guy writers, Cain has always been popular abroad, especially in France and Italy, if not consistently on native grounds. He has, however, enjoyed a recent resurgence in America, while Horace McCoy, traditionally listed along with Cain, Hammett, and Chandler as a tough-guy writer who could really write, has yet to be fully appreciated at home. McCoy’s novels are all out of print, and yet his work is flavorful, well-crafted, authentically hard-boiled. His limited fame rests on one novel, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, a slashing social satire much admired by French writers and critics: Camus hailed it as an American masterpiece. A successful film adaptation in 1969, with Jane Fonda and Gig Young, failed to push McCoy out of the literary limbo he has occupied since the thirties.

  The dance marathon as social metaphor. Bonnie Bedelia, Bruce Dern, Jane Fonda, and Red Buttons as contestants, in the film adaptation of Horace McCoy’s hard-boiled novel, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? The success of the 1969 film did not spur a revival of interest in McCoy, who remains the most neglected of the major tough guy writers.

  They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? introduces a number of changes into the tough guy novel. Instead of a wisecracking, tight-lipped hero, its protagonist is a woman (who is among the most embittered of hard-boiled characters) and the story, unlike most in its vein, has an explicit social context. It is a Depression novel, set at a dance marathon in an arena on a crumbling Santa Monica pier. The characters enter the contest to earn money. The two leading characters are aging kids who have traveled to California to be movie stars; the boy retains a naive optimism about his possibilities, the girl is ravaged by her experiences in Hollywood. She has come to the marathon as a last resort. Tart, morbid, poised to expect the worst, Gloria, unlike many of the fated noir protagonists whom she resembles, actively seeks her own death. At the end of her rope, her life nothing but the ashes and rubble of the American Dream, trapped in an absurd contest on a rotting pier at the edge of the American continent, she is “saved” by her partner, who at her insistence becomes her executioner.

  Prefiguring a noir pattern, Gloria’s story begins at the end, with her death, so that a sense of her own utter despair hangs over the novel. We know from the start that Gloria is a marked character. The story is told in retrospective fragments as the boy stands trial for her murder.

  Gloria’s biting manner, her mask of toughness, is not simply a given, as it is in many hard-boiled novels, but a response to a specific social condition, to a Depression America that offers no support to the have-nots. They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? is probably the most socially pointed novel in the tough guy canon; in its splintered narrative construction, and its use of the claustrophobic dance-hall setting as a metaphor for the times, it is more self-consciou
sly literary than most of the mystery stories to which it is related in tone, while McCoy’s staccato dialogue rings with the echo of Hammett and Hemingway at their most caustic.

  Hammett, Chandler, Cain, and McCoy wrote novels and stories that inspired some of the most highly acclaimed films noirs. But the writer whose sensibility is most deeply noir—Cornell Woolrich—does not have the literary prestige of the hard-boiled quartet. The pulp base of Woolrich’s style is less disguised than in the writing of the others, but Woolrich is a better storyteller than Hammett or Chandler and a master in building and sustaining tension.

  Like other writers in the mystery-thriller field, Woolrich works within formulaic patterns. A Woolrich story begins typically in an ordinary and undramatic environment: a cafeteria, an office, a tenement, a city street at noon. Woolrich stresses the ordinariness of his urban settings and of his characters, his blue-collar workers, secretaries, housewives, clerks. He begins in a tone of exaggerated casualness, paying attention to seemingly small matters—to scraps of conversation, details of dress and behavior, to time—that are to figure importantly in the ensuing mystery. A dry, reportorial manner, in Woolrich’s stories, is invariably a prelude to nightmare, as the seemingly everyday setting and the bland characters come quickly under attack.

  A man has an argument with his wife and stalks out of the house for a night on the town. In a bar, he strikes up a conversation with a woman in an exaggerated hat who agrees to go with him to dinner and to the theatre, and then says good-bye without ever telling him her name. The man returns home to find his wife has been murdered. His one alibi—the one person standing between him and the gas chamber—is the phantom lady with the hat.

  A little boy who tells tall stories happens, by chance (it is a stiflingly hot New York summer night and for relief he is on a fire escape), to see his upstairs neighbors commit a murder. When he tells his parents, they threaten to pun-ish him for his lies. When he goes to the police, he is sent home. The neighbors find out about his “story,” and when the boy is locked in his room by his irate father (his mother has been called to visit an ailing sister), the murderers close in on him.