The Dark Side of the Screen: Film Noir

by Foster Hirsch

  The film’s splintered chronology, the flashbacks presented from multiple points of view, and the flashbacks within flashbacks, all have a crucial impact on both the mood and the meaning of the story. As the insurance man uncovers bits and pieces of Swede’s background, he constructs different explanations for the character’s self-sacrificial death, though only at the end of his search does he light upon the full truth. Till that point, his view of the character is fragmentary and clouded. Swede is one of the most elusive of noir’s anti-heroes, Kitty is one of the genre’s most masked spider women; and the film’s own devious structure, its conflicting points of view, its choppy handling of time, reinforce the enigmatic aura that enshrouds the two main characters.

  In Out of the Past (Build My Gallows High), Robert Mitchum plays a former private eye who has given up the city for a quiet new life in the country. But like Swede (and many other noir protagonists as well), he cannot escape the claims of the past. Out of the past comes one last assignment, a job that he knows is dangerous but also unavoidable. On the way to his fatal meeting with a gangland boss (Kirk Douglas), he calls on his sweet new fiancée and uncovers his past, revealing the secret other self that bedevils many noir victims. Like that of Swede, his fall from grace in his “other” life resulted from his infatuation with a woman. Following the long flashback, the present action contains ironic echoes of the past, as the doomed ex-detective is seduced once again by the charming, wicked woman he had loved and lost, and becomes hopelessly embroiled in a maze of double- and triple-crosses.

  The femme fatale (Jane Greer) returns, from Out of the Past, to plague the former detective (Robert Mitchum) who, like many noir heroes, cannot escape from his past.

  Reconstructing the past in fragments containing contradictory information, dramatizing the impact of the past on present action, the format of archetypal noir thrillers like The Killers and Out of the Past recalls Citizen Kane, the locus classicus for many noir patterns. Kane’s framework—a series of colliding, incomplete recollections unified by an outside investigator’s search for a single truth—served noir’s complex time schemes. As in many crime dramas, the reporter’s thrusts into the past in Citizen Kane only reinforce its elusiveness, its deep mysteriousness. We perceive Kane, as we do Swede, in subjective, illusory fragments.

  Noir’s recurrent use of a jumbled time sequence, its sometimes delirious flashbacks within flashbacks (as in Sorry, Wrong Number and The Enforcer as well as The Killers), support the characterizations, which are also, and often spectacularly, crooked rather than straight, devious rather than forthright. Like the handling of time, motivation and identity in noir are frequently oblique, confusing. A film noir can confound the audience even when it does not juggle past and present action. During production of The Big Sleep, Howard Hawks and William Faulkner, so the famous story goes, were said to have wired Raymond Chandler to ask him who killed the Sternwoods’ chauffeur, to which Chandler responded by saying he didn’t know. Whether or not this charming report is apocryphal is really beside the point, for it is true in spirit if not fact: the story of The Big Sleep is very hard to follow. Propelled by a series of criss-crosses, double-crosses, betrayals, deceptions, noir stories like The Big Sleep deliberately try to be knotted and sinuous.

  In the fatally unstable noir world, voice-over narration often serves as an anchor. (Though even here, noir has tricks up its sleeve, as the narrator of Sunset Boulevard is dead: we see him floating face down in Norma Desmond’s swimming pool, as we hear his voice on the sound track, telling us how he died. Both Laura and Criss Cross begin with narrations by characters who are killed.) Usually reflective and commonsensical, the voice-over narrator is our guide through the noir labyrinth. Dick Powell in Murder, My Sweet, John Garfield in The Postman Always Rings Twice, Orson Welles in The Lady from Shanghai, Fred MacMurray in Double Indemnity, all speak in a brisk, straightforward way. Sometimes confessional, sometimes simply supplying information, their no-nonsense narration introduces a pointed contrast to the devious characters and tortuous plotting. The cool narrator talks about events which have already happened, while the image on the screen takes place in an ongoing present. The conflict between what we see and what the narrator tells us creates distance—his voice provides a frame in which the characters enact a drama that he knows the outcome of. Having survived a nightmare, the noir narrator, for the most part, recollects the past in a matter-of-fact tone. Sometimes, his story is therapeutic, as he confesses to crimes; sometimes he speaks with relief, since he has escaped from a dragnet. But whether he is merely supplying background details or “coming clean,” his cool tone has a hint of irony. Calmly, but with a trace of amazement, as if he can’t quite believe what has happened to him, the narrator of Double Indemnity recalls the story of his fateful involvement with a femme fatale. From Death Row, the low-key narrator of The Postman Always Rings Twice tells his story of passion leading to crime. With a mixture of disillusionment and relief, the narrator of The Lady from Shanghai recalls his involvement with and escape from the mysterious heroine. Speaking in a voice of certain knowledge (he knows, after all, how things turned out), the tough noir narrator regards the characters like pawns on a chessboard as he moves them toward their grim, awaiting destinies. Voice-over narration, then, seals off the action from the world outside the film frame.

  Whether it is a gossamer fabrication, as in Rope (below), or the real thing, as in Side Street, Boomerang, and The Phenix City Story (following pages), and whether it is during the day or at night, the city in noir is a place of uneasiness and sudden violence—a cauldron of crime.

  Two scenes from Side Street.

  Above: Boomerang

  Below: The Phenix City Story

  Like the measured, confining, voice-over commentary, other recurrent apsects of noir narrative style—the fractured time scheme, the shifting points of view, the maze-like storyline—are distancing devices which enclose the characters within the frame, and thereby underscore the genre’s interest in alienation and entrapment. Cut off in some way from the normal world, noir characters inhabit a terrain of bleak and often terminal isolation, their remoteness from reality enhanced by the genre’s stylized narrative techniques.

  Noir’s visual style is as highly inflected and as self-conscious as its storytelling methods. The central background for noir, as it had been for the gangster story, is the American big city. Presented in a variety of moods and designs, ranging from patently studio recreations in such films as Scarlet Street and The Woman in the Window, to the Expressionist overtones given to real city backgrounds in thrillers like Night and the City, M, On Dangerous Ground, and The Asphalt Jungle, to the more straightforward renderings in The Naked City, Side Street, The Street with No Name, the city in noir is an inescapable image, its throbbing presence an integral part of the drama.

  Powerful early films noirs were set in airless, fabricated environments; the city in these films, as in the German Expressionist dramas, consists of little more than a few deserted streets, their rain-swept emptiness illuminated by stray flashing neon signs. In Scarlet Street, there is no sense of life outside the frame; all exterior scenes are stripped of any sense of city density and rhythm. The film’s unpeopled streets, the elongated shadows, the angular buildings that guard empty space like grim sentinels, recall the eerie night-time cityscapes in the paintings of Edward Hopper. Scarlet Street opens with a strange and rigorously choreographed street scene, with each of the pedestrians, from an organ grinder to a prosperous bourgeois and his wife stepping out for an evening’s stroll, carefully planted in the frame. With its orchestration and its severely restricted movement, the scene is totally different in rhythm from the location shots in Neo-Realist films, where the movement of a real city is presented in all its randomness.

  In other early noirs such as The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep, the city is mostly a matter of interiors. Both these archetypal private-eye stories admit the outside world in small doses, like the static shots of San Francisco glimp
sed from the windows of Sam Spade’s office. Eerily motionless and poised, “the city” here looks like a painting; it is inert, lifeless, far away.

  Perhaps the most remote from physical reality of all the imaginary cities in early noir is the one in The Blue Dahlia. An apartment hotel, the Blue Dahlia nightclub, fragments of streets lined with blank-looking buildings, all seem cut off from the real world, suspended in a limbo of the Hollywood set designer’s imagination. The film’s world is posed and suffocating without a trace of natural daylight or nature, and therefore an appropriate frame for Raymond Chandler’s contrived little thriller.

  Many noir dramas combine studio simulations with the real thing, with sometimes noticeable lapses between the two. John Farrow’s The Big Clock opens with a panoramic view of New York at night, its giant towers twinkling splendidly under the titles. After the credits, the camera pans to the right, zooming in on a particular building in the city. As the camera moves in through the window, the film shifts from the real world to one of studio fabrication. That descent from the outside world into a separate environment is used, unforgettably, in Hitchcock’s opening for Psycho, where the camera moves slowly from a long shot of Phoenix at midday to a close-up of a darkened hotel window.

  Crime dramas set in real cities have a denser texture than the austere studio pieces, though in location films, too, reality is heightened to create atmosphere. The city in film noir is never merely neutral, never simply a shapeless background. In both studio and location thrillers, it participates in the action, “comments” on the characters, supplies mood and tension. In the striking opening to Possessed, for instance, Joan Crawford wanders dazed through a real downtown Los Angeles. The deserted streets, the tall, silent buildings, the slanting, early morning light which casts elongated shadows are all an eerie projection of the tormented character. Through camera angles and lighting, the real city has thus been subtly transformed into a place of incipient nightmare. The Asphalt Jungle begins with shots of empty New York streets, with scattered newspapers blown about by the wind the only signs of movement in the early morning gloom. The film’s kaleidoscope of the city at dawn is beautiful, but threatening, as if New York is ready to explode; the city’s awesome canyons seem indifferent to human concerns.

  In Night and the City, London is transformed into a menacing terrain of narrow alleys, winding, darkened streets, abandoned lots—a seething environment in which the haunted hero seeks refuge, with no success. The city’s hostility is reflected in the sharp vertical lines that slice the frame, the harsh angles of buildings. Elegant London becomes a place crawling with waterfront dives and smoke-filled, cave-like rooms populated by oversized hoodlums. It is an inferno that mocks the hero’s fate.

  Panic in the Streets opens as the camera (mounted on a moving vehicle) hurtles through Bourbon Street, in the honky-tonk section of the French Quarter in New Orleans. The flashing neon signs, the clusters of people arranged in ominous formations, the gaudy strip joints, all suggest an atmosphere of potential violence. The city looks dangerous, infected, as indeed it will prove to be when in the course of the film it is threatened with an outbreak of bubonic plague.

  The noir city—the great foul place—rumbles with danger and enticement. Bustling downtown areas appear as sinful and polluting. In Phenix City Story, recurrent shots of the dens of gambling and vice clustered on the city’s notorious 14th Street, though pretending to be merely documentary, arc in fact stylized portraits of evil. Phil Karlson has staged these panoramic views of his Sin City with all the exhilaration of a puritan fascinated by debauchery. The tangle of bodies, the blare of honky-tonk music, the swell of car horns, the nervously flashing signs create a dazzling visual and aural cacophony: the city as moral and sexual cesspool.

  Orson Welles depicts a Mexican border town (actually Venice, California) in Touch of Evil as a hothouse of filth and corruption, its buildings and people rotting away in the steamy Mexican climate. In the famous bravura opening, Welles’ camera cranes and tracks athletically through the thronged main street as the hero and his wife (Charlton Heston and Janet Leigh) move against the flow of traffic, creating visual tension that is echoed everywhere in the packed frame. This ugly Mexican community is the most pestilential of the noir cities.

  In Max Ophuls’ brilliant The Reckless Momeant, Joan Bennett (as a proper upper middle class housewife drawn into a criminal milieu to protect her daughter’s reputation) drives into downtown Los Angeles from her luxurious Balboa house. As she enters the inner city, the frame darkens and seems to contract; the streets, filled with grotesques milling about in threatening postures, are rife with danger for the prim, sheltered suburban matron. Going to the heart of the city to do business with a blackmailer, the character seems to be entering an inferno.

  In Edge of Doom, the troubled hero (Farley Granger) walks through a seamy downtown on his way to see a priest. Overrun with Bowery bums and prostitutes, its succession of beer halls and penny arcades and strip joints erupting in frenzy, the slum street seems to spring from within the character, his obsessions transformed, as it were, into a scene of mass disorder. The character’s grim-faced processional through this urban phantasmagoria turns out to be the prelude to crime: he will kill the provoking and insensitive priest he is going to visit. After the murder, he walks back home through the blazing street. The loud, gaudy city in Edge of Doom, reflecting the hero’s own chaos and bottled-up violence, thus frames his act of crime.

  Drawing innocents into its dark byways, the city casts its net. Often in noir, a character who enters the city, usually from a small town, is caught off guard. In D.O.A., a hayseed insurance man (Edmond O’Brien) goes up from Modesto to San Francisco for a convention. After a night on the town, a whirlwind tour of the city’s hot spots, he discovers that he has been fatally poisoned, and begins his death-watch through the city’s underground to track down his murderer. In Champion, Kirk Douglas plays a poor boy from the sticks who becomes progressively corrupted as he penetrates the inner city’s boxing syndicate.

  In Stanley Kubrick’s Killer’s Kiss, set in a jittery midtown Manhattan, the heroine works at a dance hall at 49th and Broadway. As the camera pans the forlorn room, the dancers look like waxworks figures; they’re more dead than alive, bowed down under the burdens of city life.

  The city settings in the paintings of Reginald Marsh have the isolation and the brooding tension that hover over the city in film noir. Death Avenue; Lunch; and The Subway. (Courtesy Whitney Museum of American Art)

  Marsh’s Ten Cents a Dance has the casual, beckoning eroticism of noir’s femmes fatales. (Courtesy Whitney Museum of American Art)

  The noir city is often a place of extreme weather. It is sweltering, ripped apart by blistering heat in one film, an arctic outpost in another. Summer in the city is vividly etched in Laura. In the opening scene, the camera tracks through an elegantly appointed Manhattan penthouse as the hot summer sun streams through the large windows, throwing a shimmering light over the furniture and objets d’art. The few side streets and dingy tenements that represent the city in Deadline at Dawn seem to be drained by the heavy summer weather. Characters sweat profusely, peeling walls seem to be perspiring (as the men continue, in obedience to some curious outdated notion of propriety, to wear jackets and ties, their only acknowledgment of the stifling climate a loosening of their ties).

  Laura and Deadline at Dawn suggest summer heat in studio settings; the real summer city, in such films as The Window and The Naked City, is equally brutal, with steam rising from potholes in the streets and fans circulating in pathetic battle against nature’s unfriendliness. The merciless New York climate seems in these films a veritable catalyst to crime.

  The image of the city as a place of terror and seduction, as a modern wasteland, an environment indifferent to people, a carnival edging toward disorder, has striking parallels in the work of artists of the twenties, thirties and forties. Anticipations and echoes of the noir city appear in the work of John Sloan, George Bello
ws, Franz Kline, Reginald Marsh, Edward Hopper, Martin Lewis. American artists who chose city scenes as their subject devised a style that blended American realism with Expressionism. Reminiscent of the work of caricaturists like Hogarth, Daumier, and Ensor, their city canvases often have a sharp, satiric thrust. In mood their work ranges from the austere images of isolation in paintings by Hopper to the bustling crowds by Reginald Marsh to the tense city scenes in the black and white lithographs of Martin Lewis.

  Marsh, who worked from the late twenties to the late fifties, was centrally concerned throughout his career with New York, a city he loved and studied all his life. Marsh’s characteristic treatment of the city, in his numerous Coney Island and Bowery scenes, is as a place of terrific energy. In his packed street scenes, muscular, sensual characters jostle each other in a spirit of Mardi Gras. But beneath the holiday pleasure, there is always the suggestion that the bursting scene is about to erupt into violence—the swelling crowds of pleasure-seekers are a potentially destructive force.

  Ablaze with a nervous energy, a quicksilver intensity, Marsh’s city, like the noir city, is a place of sexual promise and release. It glitters with temptation. In Marsh, as in noir, the visually striking city is a potent, galvanizing force, as beautiful as it is corrupt, as majestic as it is also putrid. Marsh’s vision, again like that of noir, contains a raw poetry.

  Noir’s fascination with physically and morally battered characters has an equivalent in the photographic records of city life found in Weegee and Diane Arbus. The portraits by these two noted photographers are astringent documents of human wreckage, of life as it is lived on the edge, on downtown Skid Rows. Noir inevitably softened the extreme harshness of the two artists, but vestiges of their attraction to freaks appear throughout the canon, in grotesque supporting characters, in surreal cityscapes, in images of debasement, in an icy, insistent detachment from suffering.