The Dark Side of the Screen: Film Noir

by Foster Hirsch

  The noir-inspired cover for a recently published collection of stories by Cornell Woolrich, the most noir of all mystery writers.

  A man confined to a wheelchair has little to do but peer across a courtyard into the windows of the facing buildings. What begins as a casual inspection of the comings and goings of his unsuspecting neighbors escalates to obsessive interest when the observer discovers a murder—a man across the way has done in his invalid wife, though how can this be proven? No one believes him, including his detective friend. He begins to deal directly with the murderer, who then tracks him down, an invalid alone in his apartment: the perfect victim.

  A spoiled young man, despite his sister’s pleas, is determined to run off with a floozy. When he calls at his fiancée’s apartment, she is dead. Caught red-handed, the boy is sentenced to the chair. His sister, who is convinced of his innocence, sets out on a search for the murderer that takes her into a tough urban nightworld. When she discovers a link between the murdered girl and a nightclub, she applies for a job as a dancer. The gross entrepreneur goes wild over her, but when he finds out that she is a double-dealer, he orders his henchmen to finish her off.

  These four archetypal Woolrich tales—“Phantom Lady,” “The Boy Cried Wolf,” “Rear Window,” and “Angel Face” are expert variations on a formula. Innocent characters are accused of or in some way involved in a murder, and saved at the last minute after a series of escalating catastrophes. The Woolrich world is a maze of wrong impressions as the author sets traps for his luckless protagonists and then watches as they fall into them. Filled with pitfalls and sudden violence, the landscape in Woolrich is the kind of place where a single wrong turn, a mere chance encounter, triggers a chain reaction in which one calamity follows another. Standing in the wings manipulating the movements of his players as though they were figures on a chessboard, Woolrich is a master contriver. His characters, more thinly conceived than those of his more illustrious hard-boiled predecessors, have no inner life, no history at all in fact apart from their immediate use to the author as pawns in his clever games.

  Often Woolrich presents a story from the point of view of a criminal or an amateur avenging sleuth. The first person mode, with its necessarily limited perspective, increases the aura of claustrophobia and entrapment which hovers over all of Woolrich’s work—Woolrich’s characters seldom see the light, and are rarely prepared for what happens to them. As he operates above his near-sighted characters, watching them pinned and wriggling against their ghastly fates, Woolrich’s humor is pitch black. An alcoholic and a recluse, Woolrich had a grim comic sense, a piercing irony, and a firm belief that the world was at best indifferent to its inhabitants, at worst an active conspirator against our well-being.

  Two Woolrich avenging angels—(left) a ravaged, maddened Jeanne Moreau, in Frangois Truffaut’s The Bride Wore Black, and (right) a triumphant, sane one portrayed by Susan Hayward, in Deadline at Dawn.

  “Black,” “night,” and “death” appear with obsessive recurrence in Woolrich’s titles: The Bride Wore Black, The Black Curtain, Black Alibi, Rendezvous in Black, The Black Angel, Night Has a Thousand Eyes, Dead Man Blues, I Married a Dead Man. Two recent collections of Woolrich stories are called Nightwebs and Angels of Darkness. Night, darkness, the menacing streets of the city at night, the city as a landscape of doom: these supply the inevitable mise en scene for Woolrich’s taut stories of black deeds, sudden eruptions of foulness, grisly twists of fate. One of Woolrich’s unfortunate protagonists suffers from amnesia; many of his characters are plagued by self-division, by conflicts between their rational daytime selves and their night-time alter egos, just as the typical Woolrich fable customarily begins in the ordered, daytime world before it plummets into darkness. The Woolrich canon is rife with visual and psychological dou-bleness, as day is contrasted with night and sanity teeters on the edge of darkness.

  Woolrich’s writing lacks Chandler’s metaphoric frills and his characters are not as complex as Cain’s, but he is a superb craftsman. The Woolrich style is colloquial and easy; it imitates the tone of his primarily working class characters. The opening of “Angel Face”conveys the author’s rough-hewn, idiomatic quality:

  I had on my best hat and my warpaint when I dug into her bell. You’ve heard make-up called that a thousand times, but this is one time it rated it; it was just that-warpaint.

  I caught Ruby Rose reading at breakfast time-hers, not mine. Quarter to three in the afternoon. Breakfast was a pink soda-fountain mess, a tomato-and-lettuce, both untouched, and an empty glass of Bromo Seltzer, which had evidently had first claim on her. There were a pair of swell ski slides under her eyes; she was reading Gladys Glad’s beauty column to try to figure out how to get rid of them before she went out that night and got a couple more. A Negro maid had opened the door, and given me a yellowed optic.

  “Yes ma’am, who do you wish to see?”

  “I see her already,” I said, “so skip the Morse code.” I went in up to Ruby Rose’s ten-yard line. “Wheeler’s the name,” I said. “Does it mean anything to you?” “Should it?” She was dark and Salome-ish. She was mean. She was bad medicine.

  The opening of “Rear Widow ”has the dry, matter-of-fact quality with which Woolrich typically begins his stories of crime and terror: “I didn’t know their last names. I’d never heard their voices. I didn’t even know them by sight, strictly speaking, for their faces were too small to fill in with identifiable features at that distance. Yet I could have constructed a timetable of their comings and goings, their daily habits and activities. They were the rear-window dwellers around me.” Woolrich’s scene-setting is precise and richly evocative of mood and atmosphere, as in this description of a bar in The Black Angel:

  The Oregon Bar ... on Third above Forty-ninth, in the first half-hour after twelve that same night. It was deep and narrow, like an alcove piercing the building it was situated in. It was dark with a sort of colored darkness that was the tint of it. Although there were lights, and they were dusky orange, copper-rose, and other similar feverish tones, it was the darkness you were conscious of more than them; its overall cast was dimness, a confetti-like twilight.

  Opposite: Woolrich voyeurs tracked by the killers whose crimes they have overseen: James Stewart and Raymond Burr, in Rear Window ; Paul Stewart stalks Bobby Driscoll, in The Window.

  Woolrich’s stories often take place in a sickly, yellowish half-light. Inhabiting cramped, foul-smelling rooms in rundown hotels and tenements ; hanging out in bars, all-night cafeterias and movie houses, many of his characters never seem to see the light of day.

  Woolrich’s manipulations of his puppet-like characters, his ironic detachment, his evident enjoyment in subjecting his characters as well as his readers to situations of ulcer-inducing tension, his deliberately narrow emotional range, his clipped vernacular dialogue, his dark city settings, link his methods to those of film noir. Woolrich was enormously popular in the forties, and though he continues to have a loyal following, he has not received his full recognition as a skillful popular artist (the best in his field, in fact), a writer with a distinct moral vision, dark and unsettling, and streaked with flashes of mordant comedy.

  Woolrich is located at the least literary end of the hard-boiled spectrum, where pulp formulae and a genuine if unexalted literary sensibility intersect. The tough guy heritage trickles down from Woolrich to the tabloid sensationalism of dime novels and stories and novelettes of the pure pulp variety. But the hard-boiled tradition can be traced “upward” as well, to serious, non-formulaic literature, to art. Hemingway’s famed style and that of the Black Mask genre writers: both techniques share a concern for realistic description, and an interest in crackling dialogue that depends on echo and repetition. In addition to Hemingway, other serious writers—Graham Greene, Nelson Algren, John O‘Hara, and Albert Camus among them—write in a style and deal with themes and settings that overlap with those of the tough guy tradition. Algren’s novels and short stories, set characteris
tically in the Chicago underworld; Greene’s spy novels; O’Hara’s Appointment in Samarra; and Camus’ The Stranger are all manifestly hard-boiled and noir-like.

  Although it is not usually regarded as such, Camus’ The Stranger is one of the greatest of all hard-boiled novels. In depth and impact, it eclipses its literary forebears, but it owes a debt to them, one that Camus himself has acknowledged. Like many French writers and critics, Camus admired the American tough guys for their style and control, and in The Rebel, he provides a trenchant analysis of their hard-boiled “realism”: The American tough novel of the thirties and forties, he notes,

  claims to find its unity in reducing man either to elementals or to his external reactions and to his behavior. It does not choose feelings or passions to give a detailed description of, such as we find in classic French novels. It rejects analysis and the search for a fundamental psychological motive that could explain and recapitulate the behavior of a character ... Its technique consists in describing men by their outside appearances, in their most casual actions, of reproducing, without comment, everything they say down to their repetitions, and finally by acting as if men were entirely defined by their daily automatisms. On this mechanical level, men, in fact, seem exactly alike, which explains this peculiar universe in which all the characters appear interchangeable, even down to their physical peculiarities. This technique is called realistic only owing to a misapprehension ... it is perfectly obvious that this fictitious world is not attempting a reproduction, pure and simple, of reality, but the most arbitrary form of stylization.

  In The Stranger, Camus writes in a style based on the work of the American genre specialists he admires. The persona that he creates for Meursault, his doomed narrator, deliberately echoes the tough guy stance of the heroes of American detective fiction. Like them, Meursault is impassive and deeply private. “Mother died today. Or, maybe, yesterday; I can’t be sure,” the novel opens, unforgettably, establishing at once Meursault’s mechanical response to people and events. Meursault lives in a rented room, in physical surroundings that recall those of the American detectives. He has no close personal ties. He has a routine job. He drifts into a casual friendship with a neighbor, and into an affair. Like the American sleuths, he is more observer than participant. Every Sunday, he ritualistically watches the parade of pedestrians that passes in the street below his room. He seems to have no feelings. He reacts only to external stimuli, such as the oppressive heat, the touch of his girlfriend’s hands on his body, the soothing coolness of the ocean.

  Graham Greene’s mysteries are filled with noir motifs in theme, characterization, setting, and mood, as suggested in this climactic scene from Greene’s The Third Man.

  Willfully, he lives on the surface. Meursault is the prototype of the uncommitted existentialist, experiencing life as it happens, yet separated from it as well by his sense of its absurdity.

  The central act, as in crime novels and film noir, is a murder. Meursault kills an Arab because it was hot, because the Arab had earlier terrorized him and his friend Raymond when they were walking along the beach, and because he felt like it. Like many noir heroes, Meursault is caught in a web of circumstance and coincidence, yet unlike the typical noir protagonist, who struggles against the tightening net, Meursault is casual and ironic in the face of catastrophe. For Meursault, casually killing another person is no more important, and no less important, than anything else in his life. It is just something that happened. Even though Meursault is the narrator, he remains an enigmatic figure, a stranger, to himself, to others, to the universe. Camus’ landmark novel is the ultimate film noir story, carrying the recurrent noir motifs of a malevolent, jesting fate and of alienated, puzzled, set-upon characters to their blackest depth.

  Noir also drew at least marginally on another literary tradition, that of naturalism as it was practiced early in the century by writers like Dreiser and Norris. Adapting to American settings and character types the philosophical premises developed in the late nineteenth century by Zola in France, the naturalist writers took a hard view of the consequences of the capitalist system. Their setting is the American city (Chicago in Sister Carrie, San Francisco in McTeague), their aim to chronicle in unsparing and minutely realistic detail the effect of the city’s economic structure on its victims. Although the naturalists professed absolute detachment, their writing became feverish as it recorded their characters’ inevitable corruption and decline. Greed, Erich von Stroheim’s masterful adaptation of McTeague, contains both the sober, uninflected realism and the occasional Expressionistic heightening that mark many of the naturalist novels.

  Quite unlike that of the hard-boiled writers, the naturalists’ vision tended to be epic and grandiose. Their stories typically take place over a long period of time, to underline the portrait of economic and psychological collapse which is their recurrent subject. The naturalists regarded their characters as representative American types whose histories pointed moral lessons with national overtones; thus, Dreiser’s saga of an ambitious young man who kills a poor girl so that he can enter the world of the very rich is called An American Tragedy. In striking contrast to the trim stories and novelettes of the tough guy school, the naturalist novels are big, fat books and are customarily written in a laborious and flat-footed manner.

  But the naturalists and the hard-boiled crime writers overlap in some respects. Both introduced to American writing what was at the time a new kind of realism; both presented the big city as a ferocious, suffocating place; and both worked for an objective mode in which to present their versions of harsh urban realities, though both ended up embellishing their observations with strokes of literary flourish.

  Fate in the naturalist novel is as dark and as relentless as in the grimmest crime novel or film noir. In the naturalists’ view, as in that of noir, the world is a harsh place in which the lone person hasn’t a chance. The naturalists thought everyone was a victim of heredity and environment, and unable, no matter how hard the struggle, to withstand the combined impact of these two forces; the inevitable downfall of their characters is thus a collusion between personal failings—greed, lust, pride, all the deadly sins writ large—and those of capitalist society. The trapped protagonists in the naturalist novel surface in noir on a smaller, less bombastic scale.

  The hard-boiled anti-hero as existential saint: Marcello Mastroianni as Meursault, in Luchino Visconti’s film of The Stranger.

  Combining the objectivity and harshness of naturalism with the tough, stylized realism of the hard-boiled crime school, film noir draws on a rich literary tradition. The echo of the themes and style of serious writing that permeates noir adds immensely to its palette, making it one of the most accomplished and most intelligent of the Hollywood genres.

  The trompe l’oeil city, in Lang’s Expressionist drama, Metropolis—a visual foreshadowing of the menacing, indifferent noir city.

  3

  The Cinematic Background:

  From Expressionism to Neo-Realism

  The cinematic origins of film noir can be traced to the German Expressionist films of the late 1910s and twenties, to the American crime film of the thirties, and to one contemporary and less central source as, following the war, noir absorbed some of the concerns of Italian Neo-Realism. Expressionism and Neo-Realism are, of course, strikingly dissimilar, the German style edging toward nightmare, the Italian straining for documentary veracity. Sometimes the two modes collide within the same film; more often the divergent styles result in two distinct sub-categories within the noir keyboard.

  As an artistic vision, whether in painting or film, Expressionism reveals a distinctly Germanic rather than American temperament. It may indeed be that its Expressionist aura accounted for the relative unpopularity of noir in America: in visual style and moral sensibility, the films may simply have been too downbeat for general American taste. Expressionist artists pledged themselves to creating works that reveal personal, inner truths rather than to recording a merely objective and exte
rnal reality. Strongly influenced by the work of such Post-Impressionists as Van Gogh, Cezanne, and Gauguin, Expressionism flourished in Germany from approximately 1910 to the mid-twenties. Such artists as Kirchner, Kokoschka, Jawlensky, Pechstein, Kandinsky, Nolde, Schmidt-Rotluff, and Beckmann cultivated an angular, hallucinatory, violently emotional style, one that sought images of chaos and despair, and that seemed to celebrate the artists’ own instability. The Expressionist artist embraced his madness, converting inner demons into images of tumult and breakdown which radiated a terminal bleakness. Painting as he felt, faithful only to his own inner vision, he created phantasmagoric transformations of reality. Night, death, psychic disorder, social upheaval are the recurrent themes of the Expressionists’ apocalyptic sensibility. The typical Expressionist work conveys a powerful sense of chaos, both personal and cosmic. In The Scream, Munch’s influential proto-Expressionist lithograph (1893), the inner turmoil of the screamer is answered by the uneasily undulating lines with which the scene is rendered, as if the world both reflects and participates in the central figure’s evident breakdown. To depict their gloom-ridden images, Expressionists used funereal colors—muddy, heavy purples, blacks and browns—painting in obvious defiance of nature and also of the Impressionists, who had been concerned with the effects of light on natural scenes, and who celebrated the natural world and man’s comfortable place within it. The Expressionist “cry” signaled a release of inner turbulence, though in portraying powerful feelings of doom and disorder, the artists certainly did not banish them. Expressionist transformation heightens chaos, it does not dispel it.