The Dark Side of the Screen: Film Noir

by Foster Hirsch

  The city as a cradle of crime and a cauldron of negative energy is the inevitable setting for film noir. Country settings appear infrequently, and usually as a counterpoint to the festering city. In The Asphalt Jungle, the hero’s idea of the pure clean life is a farm with horses grazing serenely in the open rolling fields. Nicholas Ray’s On Dangerous Ground offers what is probably the most schematic opposition between town and country in all of noir. As it presents the daily activities of its beleaguered policeman, the first part of the movie is set in a virulent, blistering city. The protagonist’s breakdown is played out against kaleidoscopic views of big city corruption. In the second part of the film, a stark, snow-covered rural landscape stands in eloquent contrast to the infested world from which the cop has had to escape to save himself. As he becomes involved in the lives of a blind woman, her emotionally disturbed brother, and an avenging father, he discovers that the country too has its dangers and pitfalls; but the film suggests that the overwrought cop is humanized by the country environment in a way that he could not be in the city.

  Leaving the contaminating city for salvation in the country is a recurrent noir pattern. Burt Lancaster in The Killers and Robert Mitchum in Out of the Past retire from lives of crime to sylvan settings. A few noir movies—They Live By Night, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Ace in the Hole, and Gun Crazy—take place in rural locations. Some of these, though, like The Postman Always Rings Twice, merely transport a city mentality to an out-of-the-way setting. The film’s two murderers are really city types at heart, with all the animal cunning and sexuality of characters who inhabit the city jungle. An expose of yellow journalism, Ace in the Hole simply brings the mean streets to the country as a cynical reporter exploits a personal disaster (a man is trapped in a cave) in order to advance his own career.

  They Live By Night and Gun Crazy, in contrast, are true countrified noir thrillers. Both films, dramatizing the adventures of couples who live on the margins of society, outside the law, are precursors of Bonnie and Clyde. Perhaps because of their rural settings, the films have a different narrative development than most noir pieces. Episodic, taking place in a greater number of locations than the usually claustrophobic noir thriller, the films have a picaresque flavor, though of a particularly dark tonality. They have a more open feeling in their outdoor sequences than in any of the more traditional city-based dramas and They Live By Night even has a semi-romantic aura—its sweet, gentle outlaw couple are in love.

  In Joseph Losey’s The Prowler, the Mojave Desert is a novel and expressive noir setting. The parched landscape reinforces the barrenness of the characters, a corrupt policeman and his forlorn, pregnant wife, and proves to be as suffocating as the city environment. In Leave Her to Heaven, however, open country settings undermine noir tension. Photographed in color, the glamorous mountain retreats (that may accurately reflect the characters’ social status) give the story a ladies’ magazine gloss. The pristine scenery and the House Beautiful interiors soften the film’s protrait of a psychopathically possessive woman and point up the fact that noir-functions best when its settings are as idiosyncratic and neurotic as its characters.

  The tenement, with peeling walls, rickety stairs, pools of shadows, blank brick walls and prison-barred fire escapes, is a recurrent noir setting. (Farley Granger and Adele Jergens, in Edge of Doom; Ruth Roman and Paul Stewart, in The Window.)

  Like the western and the gangster film, noir uses the same kinds of settings over and over. Night clubs, hotels, tenements, police stations, offices, docks, corner luncheonettes and drug stores, factories, warehouses, crumbling mansions, boxing arenas, train stations, restaurants both shabby and luxurious are as integral a part of noir as private eyes and two-timing dames. Like the great city itself, individual locations are charged with menace.

  Trains, train yards, and train stations are familiar noir backgrounds. (Charles MacGraw, in The Narrow Margin; Glenn Ford, Broderick Crawford, Gloria Grahame, in Human Desire.) Trains, like cars, are means of escape that can easily become traps.

  Places in noir reveal character. The cramped tenements, the joyless middle-class apartments, the dingy furnished rooms that populate the genre carry the history of their inhabitants. Settings are chosen for thematic reinforcement. Cars and trains and boxing arenas figure prominently in noir stories because they provide visual metaphors of enclosure and entrapment. The packed, smoke-filled arena in such films as Killer’s Kiss, Champion, The Big Combo, Body and Soul and The Set-Up is an image of the fighter’s destiny: the beating he gets within the tight, fixed “frame” of the ring reflects the kind of battering that is doled out to him in the outside world. Cars and trains are means of escape that can quickly become traps; they are tight, confined spaces from which there is no escape.

  In addition to its symbolic use of ordinary environments, noir also relies on surreal and exotic settings: the unfinished highway, with roads dangling crazily in mid-air, at the end of The Lineup; the huge ferris wheel in which the climactic meeting takes place between Orson Welles and Joseph Cotten in the The Third Man; the mannikin factory in Killer’s Kiss; the aquarium, the Chinese theatre, and the fun house in The Lady from Shanghai; the deserted warehouse at the end of This Gun for Hire; the ominous fairground, with its laughing fat lady and its fiendishly whirling merry-go-round, in Strangers on a Train; the sweltering greenhouse in The Big Sleep. Noir exploits the oddness of odd settings, as it transforms the mundane quality of familiar ones, in order to create an environment that pulses with intimations of nightmare. Whether in seemingly familiar or unusual surroundings, noir depends on settings that radiate menace and instability.

  Bizarre backgrounds encourage the splashy visual set-pieces that decorate the genre. Usually involving a chase, a murder, a showdown, a release of tension or violence, a moment of madness, the noir set-piece is a showcase for the kind of baroque sensibility that most American genres have little use for. Defined by its bravura scale, these visual high points have a delirious humor, as if the film-makers are slyly ribbing themselves as well as the audience. The villian pinned against one of the Gothic spires of the Brooklyn Bridge at the end of The Naked City; Hope Emerson’s grand entrance in Cry of the City, as she makes her way through a tunnel of doorways, turning on lights as she goes, to answer Richard Conte’s insistent knocks (the scene is a virtuoso display of noir’s delight in chiaroscuro) ; the long take of the bank robbery in Gun Crazy, with the camera recording the action from the back seat of the killers’ car; the equally long take of the heist in The Killers, where the camera records the complicated maneuvers from a distance, in an unbroken chain of vertiginous angles and panoramic long shots; the villain’s impalement on the spokes of a giant cuckoo clock in The Stranger; the high angle shot of a heist in Criss Cross (the extreme angle, which seems to turn the world upside down, evokes amazed laughter from audiences); Richard Widmark’s bravura mad scene in Kiss of Death, where he pushes an old woman in a wheelchair down a flight of steps; Janet Leigh in Touch of Evil being terrorized in a creepy roadside motel by a brutal lesbian and her equally grotesque gang of thugs; Cagney on “top of the world,” blown to bits by a gas tank explosion, at the end of White Heat; the similarly apocalyptic imagery at the end of Kiss Me Deadly, where Pandora’s Box contains an atomic blast; Lee Marvin throwing scalding coffee in Gloria Grahame’s face in The Big Heat; Constance Towers viciously beating up a john, and then taking off her wig (a scene that elicits howls of sadistic delight) at the opening of Sam Fuller’s dotty Naked Kiss; the chase through the canyons of lower Manhattan, the camera perched at steep angles, in Side Street, the shootout between husband and wife, in the crazy mirror fun house, at the end of The Lady from Shanghai—a sequence that epitomizes the visual as well as psychological extravagance of the noir set-piece.

  These privileged moments are isolated from the rest of the films in which they occur by their special intensity but not by their content: the best noir thrillers “earn” and can absorb these moments of visual and theatrical virtuosity
; the violence and mania that are highlighted in these passages of kinky vaudevillian cinema flow directly from the noir milieu. But few films noirs can or even try to sustain the pitch of these italicized moments. Often, in fact, noir functions in a neutral, even deadpan range; instead of the energy that characterizes the set-piece, the films work for a flattened effect, an almost zombie-like verbal and visual mode.

  The exotic noir setting, thick with danger and menace. A New Orleans house of pleasure, and (following page) a coffee warehouse, in Panic in the Streets.

  The church as noir setting. Houses of worship offer no refuge for the noir outlaw: Farley Granger, in Edge of Doom; Humphrey Bogart, in Dead Reckoning.

  Objects, things, fragments of decor loom as large as places in the noir iconography. Clocks, mirrors, staircases, windows and bedposts create images of entrapment and anticipate moments of doom. Characters in many films are caught behind window frames, imprisoned by bannisters. Stairs, windows, mirrors, as familiar a part of noir terrain as the saloon or the sheriffs office in westerns, are used to enclose frantic noir characters in frames within the frame. Reflections in mirrors and windows suggest doubleness, self-division, and thereby underline recurrent themes of loss or confusion of identity; multiple images of a character within the same shot give visual emphasis to the dual and unstable personalities that are rampant in the genre.

  The closed world of the typical noir neurotic is reflected in the tight framing that is customary for the genre. Directors working with noir stories avoid openness and horizontality; the sense of space, the feeling for landscape that distinguish a Ford western or a Griffith epic have no place within the noir frame. Asymmetry, angularity, verticality are important compositional elements for noir thrillers; space is sliced up, it seems to close in on the characters as shapes converge over their heads, pressing them down to the bottom of the screen. The fractured image mirrors the characters’ disintegration.

  In noir, narrative continuity is typically achieved through tight cutting rather than a roving camera. Even tracking shots are used to create tension rather than the smooth, loose, flowing quality that such a movement often imparts. Close-ups abound, creating a sense of claustrophobia. The leisurely establishing shot, the generous long shot and the sensuous moving camera are of little use to noir design, and only undermine the tautness and concentration that the genre depends on.

  Exaggerated angles are a regular, expected element of noir visual style. Extreme close-ups, low angles which distort the human face and figure, high angles and oblique, off-center angles appear with almost obsessive repetition. The high angle overhead shot, the most unheroic of perspectives, a visual signal of impending doom, may be the most frequently used camera placement in noir. Reducing the characters in size and underlining their vulnerability, the high angle shot places us in a superior positions : we’re looking down at the characters, aware of their fate before they are.

  Noir stories are about departures and lapses from the normal world, and the films’ deliberate visual styling enhances the kind of transformation from reality to nightmare that the narratives dramatize. The most well-known of noir’s visual inflections, its virtuoso lighting, is borrowed directly from the German Expressionists. Compulsively addicted to shadows, and to high contrasts between light and dark, the noir screen offers a cornucopia of patterns of chiaroscuro, as pools of shadow surround and sometimes over-takes small centers of light. As the characters are menaced by a hostile world, so sources of light within the frame are attacked by an invading, pervasive darkness.

  No white wall in any noir drama is free of shadows. Cast onto walls by sunlight filtering through venetian blinds or by artificial sources of illumination, shadows form spectral reflection of bannisters and human figures. Horizontales barred, criss-crossed lines on walls create a prison-like aura, underlining the psychological and physical enclosure that is at the core of most noir stories. Isolated pools of light surrounded by velvety darkness; a face picked out from the encircling gloom by a harsh spotlight; lighting from below which throws an unearthly shine onto faces; severe vertical shafts of light bisected by menacing cross-bars of shadow; figures outlined in dramatic silhouette against a halo of light: these recurrent visual patterns are the signs of noir’s fascination with Germanic lighting. The films reserve their most bravura manipulation of light and shadow for climactic moments, for scenes of crime and passion, where chiaroscuro intensification is a signal of imminent and present catastrophe.

  Noir’s love of shadows—and the Hollywood know-how which can depict patterns of light and dark with the utmost technical skill and sensuality—supplied a few visual jolts to even the most uninspired and derivative storyline. The kind of visual coding and stylization that noir encouraged—indeed demanded—made it, for a time, a virtually foolproof genre. Among American film genres, noir has the most consistently high standards of visual design.

  Reflections in mirrors and windows are a recurrent aspect of noir iconography. The double images suggest schizophrenia and masquerade. (Ida Lupino, below, and Robert Ryan, facing page, in Beware, My Lovely; Edward G. Robinson and Joan Bennett, in The Woman in the Window, above right. Following pages: Dick Powell, in Murder, My Sweet— p. 92; Dick Powell and Raymond Burr, in Pitfall— p. 93.).

  To create suspense and to enhance characterization, objects (like phones) and elements of decor (like paintings)are often given special emphasis in noir composition.The phone here is Sam Spade’s, in The Maltese Falcon; the painting, which lends a spiritual quality to the suffering hero (Victor Mature), is from Kiss of Death.

  Stairs in noir often lead to catastrophe: in Sudden Fear, Joan Crawford mounts to stairs to meet her husband (Jack Palance), who’s planning to kill her; there’s violence at the top of the stairs, in The Naked City.

  Spiral staircases are a sure sign of chaos, as Burt Lancaster discovers in Brute Force.

  Frames-within-the-frame, a recurrent visual motif in noir, underscore themes of enclosure and imprisonment; characters in these shots occupy a fixed, tight space. (Dennis O’Keefe, Marsha Hunt, in Raw Deal; Lucille Ball, in The Dark Corner; Judith Evelyn, in Rear Window.)

  Characters in noir are often caught in visual traps. Counterclockwise from upper left: Victor Mature is pinned against brick walls, in Kiss of Death; Francis L. Sullivan looks like a caged animal as he sits in his office, in Night and the City; overhead beams press down ominously on Jack Palance, in Panic in the Streets. Jean Wallace and Cornel Wilde (opposite top), “framed” in The Big Combo; the ceiling seems dangerously close to Robert Ryan (opposite bottom), in On Dangerous Ground.

  High angle shots underline the noir victim’s terror and helplessness: Robert Ryan on the run, in Crossfire (Pages 100-101); David Wayne in flight from his pursuers, in Joseph Losey’s M (right).

  Disorientation in noir is often suggested through extreme close-ups like that of Susan Hayward, in Deadline at Dawn (opposite); through Wellesian low angle shots in which ceilings box in the characters: Don Taylor, in The Naked City (below); Humphrey Bogart and Alexis Smith, in Conflict (page 104 top); and through tilted angles, Humphrey Bogart, in Conflict (page 104, bottom); Joan Crawford, in Queen Bee (page 105).

  Strongly influenced by German Expressionism, noir operates in a world of virtuoso contrasts between light and shadow: Orson Welles (above), in The Third Man; an elegantly choreographed shot, in Panic in the Streets (opposite, right).

  Striking noir chiaroscuro (above): Mark Stevens and female shadow, in The Dark Corner.

  Below, a recurrent noir design: venetian blinds which cast barred shadows onto characters. (Victor Mature, in Kiss of Death; Janet Leigh and John Gavin, in Psycho.)

  Lighting from below makes actors look like waxworks figures (Alan Ladd and Howard da Silva, in The Blue Dahlia; Sydney Greenstreet and Humphrey Bogart, in Conflict. )

  Caught in the spotlight: Joan Bennett, in The Reckless Moment; Richard Widmark, near the end of his ordeal, in Night and the City.

  Orson Welles on the set of The
Lady From Shanghai, with members of the San Francisco Mandarin Chinese Theater.

  5

  The Noir Director

  Like the gangster film, the noir thriller established its conventions quickly. The low angles and theatrical lighting that embellish The Maltese Falcon soon became the common currency of the new genre. Because many films noirs have a similar look and sound—those same rainy abandoned city streets, those ominous flickering neon signs, that moody, lonely jazz score, that tight-lipped, he-man narration—critics have suggested that the genre offered a ready-made style to which any competent director could easily adapt himself. A common critical assumption has indeed been that noir’s hard-and-fast visual conventions tend to erase the eccentricities of individual style, and that noir dramas all look and “feel” pretty much the same.

  Although there is some standardization—certain expected elements of narrative and visual style—the range of textures available to the noir director is in fact considerable. Noir has accommodated directors of a wide temperamental spectrum, from the absolute even-handedness and sobriety of Henry Hathaway to the baroque theatricality of Orson Welles, from the flatfootedness of George Marshall to the Germanic flourishes of Robert Siodmak, from the sanity of Howard Hawks to the advanced neuroses of Sam Fuller. But the directors who achieved the greatest success in noir do share some technical as well as emotional predispositions.