Another element of the film that sets it apart from the noir mainstream is its rural environment. The action takes place entirely in the country, on the open road or in small towns. A leitmotif throughout the film is a high angle moving shot of the runaways’ car on the open highway. Visually, the shot is more panoramic than almost anything else in noir, yet its insistent repetition suggests enclosure, as if the speeding car is hurtling the characters to their doom.
Ray also uses a rural setting for the unusual On Dangerous Ground. Here, a country landscape—snow-covered, isolated, coldly beautiful—provides a startling contrast to the festering city in which the film opens. The film’s protagonist is a policeman on the verge of a crack-up; the pressures of his job, and of the tough city environment in which he must function, have pushed him beyond the point of endurance, releasing his latent capacity for violence. Ordered to go for a rest in the country, he becomes involved in a different kind of criminal case, at the end of which he is a man transformed. The country people he gets to know, a blind woman and her troubled younger brother, soften him, and in the course of his country exile he gradually sheds the city-based manner of a psychotic tough. Reversing noir’s usual interest in dramatizing defeat, this story of emotional renewal is even more sentimental than They Live By Night. Ray dares to make corny films noirs that celebrate the healing powers of romantic love.
Cutting across several different genres, Ray’s subsequent work maintains a remarkable thematic consistency. Most of his pictures—Rebel Without a Cause, Wind Across the Everglades, Johnny Guitar—are about outsiders and rebels; the Ray hero does not fit into the pattern of an established community. Noir encouraged the director’s preoccupation with loners, and with hostile, conformity-ridden groups. The genre, though, was not simply a launching point for Ray, a prelude to later achievement, because his earliest work is among his strongest: his essential style was full-grown at the very beginning of his career, with They Live By Night.
Noir proved for Jules Dassin, as it had for Ray, the inspiration for his strongest work: The Naked City, Brute Force, Thieves’ Highway, and Night and the City. Although Ray’s work does not show steady growth (his last film was the lacklustre and uncharacteristic 55 Days at Peking), it still has a marked continuity, with remnants of noir visible in nearly all his films, whereas Dassin’s career has dramatic changes, in quality as well as style. After he left America, Dassin seemed to be a director without a country. Even in his films noirs, though, Dassin was a chameleon as he moved from the predominant Neo-Realism of The Naked City to the intense Expressionism of Night and the City. At both ends of the noir spectrum, however, he works with a tautness and intensity not evident in most of his later films. New York in The Naked City, London in Night and the City, and the prison in Brute Force are powerfully rendered backgrounds which reflect the entrapment of the films’ heroes. In its hyperactive transmutations of London into a web of alleys and underground dens, its fevered chiaroscuro, its angular, fragmented images, and in Richard Widmark’s bravura performance of a born loser—“an artist without an art,” another character calls him, in a memorable phrase—Night and the City may well be the definitive film noir. (Borde and Chaumeton chose a picture of Widmark, glassy-eyed, frightened, a cigarette dangling from his lips, for the cover of their pioneer study of noir.)
Dassin’s crime films have terrific energy not evident in his later work after he begins to use Melina Mercouri and when, starting with He Who Must Die, he is drawn to allegories. When Dassin casts himself as a collaborator on Christian and classical myths, as in Phaedra, He Who Must Die, and A Dream of Passion, his work turns arty and bloated. Early on in his peripatetic career, when he made Rififi in France in the mid-fifties, he drew on his experience in noir; and his expertly constructed drama of a bank heist is cited by Borde and Chaumeton as the only pure example of film noir in France. But a later return to America, and to noir terrain, with an updated version of The Informer (Up Tight, 1968) set in a Chicago slum, lacked the bite for which Dassin had been noted twenty years before. Dassin’s four vivid films noirs remain high points from which the rest of his career represents a curious falling away.
Joseph Losey’s history has geographic and political parallels with Dassin’s. But unlike Dassin, Losey’s films noirs do not represent his best work. For Losey, in a way that was not true for either Ray or Dassin, film noir served primarily as an apprenticeship, and his achievement in the genre was only an anticipation of mature works like The Servant, Accident, Mr. Klein, and the supreme The Go-Between. Losey came to his first film assignments from a background in political theatre; in the thirties, he worked for the Federal Theatre on several Living Newspaper dramas, and in 1947 he directed the world premiere of Brecht’s Galileo with Charles Laughton. He approached his first films with an earnest social consciousness derived from his left-wing associations. The Boy with Green Hair, The Dividing Line, M and The Prowler are films noirs with a distinct social thrust; they are thrillers that assault the status quo and that, in the kinds of emblematic American communities they portray, contain references to the contemporary witchhunt for communists. The protagonists of The Boy with Green Hair, The Dividing Line and M are social outcasts tracked mercilessly by a community of bigots which cannot tolerate any departure from a bland norm. The Boy with Green Hair is an antiwar fable whose real focus is an indictment of small-town narrow-mindedness, the profound inability of the rigidly conformist town to accept difference. The boy’s green hair outrages the town fathers in the same way that the presence among them of a communist or a homosexual or a Jew would; in order to preserve its purity, the WASP community must expel the boy.
Jules Dassin on the set of his two best pictures, both exemplary films noirs, Night and the City and The Naked City (opposite).
The hero of The Dividing Line is a victim of racial prejudice—the “line” of the title separates the white part of town from the Mexican ghetto. Through a chain of unhappy circumstances, the protagonist is accused of both rape and murder, and forced to run for his life from a mob of wrathful whites. In its social analysis and political sympathies, the film is far too pat; but it is nonetheless an interesting experiment in adapting the noir manhunt theme to an explicit social purpose.
M and The Prowler are less schematic than either of Losey’s earlier pamphleteering statements, although here too noir conventions are brushed with social overtones. M adapts the story of Lang’s classic German film to a dilapidated downtown Los Angeles, where it does not entirely work: the underground criminal network that seemed so natural a part of the shadowy, studio-built German city is an alien presence in Los Angeles, even in the rotting, colorful Bunker Hill section (since torn down) that Losey uses. To avoid obvious echoes of Peter Lorre, Losey chose the quintessentially middle American and sympathetic David Wayne to play the child-murderer. Losey wanted to stress the fact that the character needs to be helped rather than prosecuted, and he harnesses the material’s thriller elements—the efforts of the police and the gang to track down the child-murderer-to a final plea for greater understanding of the mentally disabled.
A story of greed and passion leading to murder, The Prowler is closer to noir conventions than any of Losey’s other early work. Recalling Cain’s Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice, it concerns an extramarital affair—in this case, between a rapacious cop and a bored housewife—which leads to crime. Yet there are variations on this standard noir theme: the wife is far from the lethal spider woman of the Cain mold, the man is the aggressor here, and he plans to murder the woman’s husband without her knowledge or approval. Sympathetic and sexual, the woman is a rare noir character. Because she wants a child her impotent husband cannot give her, she allows herself to be seduced by the fast-talking policeman, the prowler of the title. At the end, after she has discovered her lover’s treachery, she bears his child in a remote desert cabin where the couple hide out to escape social censure. The desert setting, the child motif, the woman’s aching loneliness, the imp
licit criticism of the crooked cop’s lust for status and money, for the trappings of the American Dream, that runs throughout the film—these elements attest to the freshness and originality of Losey’s vision.
Typically claustrophobic noir framing, in this studied shot from Joseph Losey’s first-rate The Prowler. Peering in through the window, the policeman (Van Heflin) is visually identified as both an outsider and a voyeur.
From the early fifties, when he was forced to leave Hollywood, to the early sixties, when he collaborated with Harold Pinter on The Servant, Losey was demoted from a promising director of American thrillers to a modest status in the British film industry. During these lean years, when he was offered a series of routine melodramas (all with noir overtones), Losey continued to create closed worlds on film and to explore settings for symbolic reinforcement of character and theme. As he developed and mastered a taut style, he never forgot his noir training. Almost all his films are variations of noir themes of enclosure and paranoia: his settings (the houses in The Servant, Secret Ceremony, Boom) continue to evoke noir isolation in their separateness from an outside world. The recent Mr. Klein is directed with a steely control that proclaims Losey’s indebtedness to the closed, clammy noir vision.
For Kazan, as for Losey, noir was a prelude to greater achievement. Kazan directed two notable noir thrillers, both in the semi-documentary style popular in the late forties. Boomerang and Panic in the Streets, both filmed on location, concern manhunts, and are filled with moody lighting and studied compositions that invest the real city settings (a small town in Connecticut in Boomerang, New Orleans in Panic in the Streets) with Expressionist intensity. Kazan presents New Orleans as steamy and exotic, a hothouse of sex and violence that looks like the perfect setting for A Streetcar Named Desire, the film Kazan directed in 1951, a year after Panic in the Streets. Like Streetcar, later Kazan films such as On the Waterfront, East of Eden, and Baby Doll have vestiges of noir visual style in their high contrast lighting, their smoky environments, their scrutinizing close-ups, their occasional odd camera placement (the tilts in East of Eden, for instance, that punctuate the father-son confrontations). But Kazan is finally too impassioned for the somnambulist noir style; he is too exuberant to be contained for long within the noir frame and world view. Pushing his performers into emotional explosions, Kazan is more comfortable with the heady mix of sex and poetry in the plays of Tennessee Williams than he is with the taut, measured rhythms of the typical noir screenplay.
Elia Kazan introduced elements of lighting and compositionused on his early films noirs into non-noir dramas like A Streetcar Named Desire (with Vivien Leigh and Karl Maiden) and On the Waterfront (with Marlon Brando and Eva Marie Saint).
Kazan is a romantic, and his best films, which have heroes who overcome obstacles and which usually end in some kind of emotional resolution, are essentially optimistic and therefore anti-noir. The bravura acting—triumphs of Actors Studio naturalism—in Kazan’s richest and most characteristic work violates the containment of the hard-boiled manner. Kazan ranks among the greatest directors of actors in American films, but within the noir canon he is a marginal figure.
Films noirs were low-budget and therefore often considered, by both studios and exhibitors, to be B entries. Although they were often the best work that the studios were producing, the front offices did not think of the crime dramas as warranting major promotion efforts, and most of them were given a modest release. Some directors, like Kazan and Losey, who began their careers on noir dramas, went on to projects that were clearly A in both budget and prestige, while other directors, who had no interest in or pretensions to “class,” flourished at the B level, in the Hollywood equivalent of the pulp jungle. B directors like Sam Fuller, Joseph H. Lewis, and Phil Karlson worked in a variety of genres, turning out programmers to fill in the slots at the bottom of double bills, though it was primarily their films noirs that have earned them their cult reputations. Noir tapped their own dark sensibilities, releasing images that are among the quirkiest in the American cinema. Their films noirs arc stories of misfits, and of criminal corruption, presented in idiosyncratic styles. The work of directors like Fuller and Lewis was relegated even lower in the studio pecking order than a Siodmak (which might boast Stanwyck or Laughton as its star) or a Lang. They were clearly second-feature directors handed scripts from the bottom of the barrel. As a matter of routine, they were given B unit crews and actors. And yet it is precisely in the tension set up between the half-baked scripts and the pulp directors’ genuine feeling for the medium that their work achieves its vitality, its eccentric signature. The formulaic scripts permitted a maximum of directorial intervention; and it was with the delighted discovery of the kind of personal stamp that low-class, high-strung directors were able to give their work that French critics began their celebration of the American B film and their formulation of the auteur theory. Films noirs by Fuller and Lewis were thus primary examples, cited by adulatory French critics, in substantiating the validity of the politique des auteurs.
Sam Fuller is probably the kinkiest of all B auteurs. Chronologically, he entered the noir field at a late date, well after the cycle had reached its post-war maturity. His most powerful noir is Pickup on South Street, released in 1953. Making his movies when and how he wanted to, Fuller produced three notable post-noir films noirs: Underworld USA (1960); Shock Corridor (1963); and the notorious Naked Kiss (1965). In their freewheeling approach to genre conventions, the films are all characteristic of Fuller’s work.
Pickup on South Street is an especially ripe example of Fuller’s methods. The basic story line, involving a search for a valuable object, is standard, recalling the archetypal pattern of The Maltese Falcon. In this case, the prized possession is a document containing atomic symbols which spies are attempting to smuggle to the Russians—this allows Fuller an excuse to embroider the thriller frame with some typically wacky right-wing Americanism. Fuller also bends noir formulae in his treatment of characters. Its political simple-mindedness aside, the film shows real affection for its leading players: a petty thief conscripted into patriotic action (Richard Widmark); a near-prostitute who is an innocent messenger (Jean Peters); and, most of all, a street-wise woman who earns her living as an informer (Thelma Ritter). Fuller endows these people, who live on the margins of the city, with greater human dimension than is usual in noir. Compared to such noir landmarks as Double Indemnity and The Woman in the Window, Pickup on South Street is a warm-hearted film. Perhaps the peak moment is Thelma Ritter’s death scene. Fuller holds the camera on her as she reminisces about her life on the streets, defining her code of honor in a way that recalls Sam Spade summing up his ethic to Brigid O’Shaughnessy. Fuller is unusually generous as he keeps his camera in place for the long and frankly sentimental scene, an odd touch in a film noted for its speed and energy.
The tilted angle in this shot from Pickup on South Street (with Jean Peters and Richard Widmark) captures the tension and energy that are hallmarks of Samuel Fuller’s direction.
Fuller’s athletic camerawork also counters noir convention. The film is almost constantly in motion, as the camera nervously tries to keep abreast of the action with a series of jiggling tracking and crane shots. The pattern of the movement differs from the utterly controlled methods of Lang or Wilder. Fuller seems to work from a spontaneous impulse, and the location shooting has a sense of improvisation, an immediacy, that separates it from the directorial calculation typical of noir. Scenes on the subway, and a climactic shootout on a subway platform, place the action in a palpably real environment : New York in the summer, an inferno of waterfront dives and steamy, crowded streets. The emphatic local color is carried over into the dialogue, which is packed with underworld lingo. Pickup on South Street is a brilliant example of the way an idiosyncratic director can redeem ordinary material. Out of a sub-noir story, Fuller has fashioned a punchy valentine to the big city underworld, with petty hoods and bag-lady informers stirred to their finest hour as they vanq
uish the communist threat.
Everything that Fuller touched, whether it was a war story or a western or a deep-sea adventure, he stamped with his own unmistakable signature, with a raw energy that animates his crude reactionary themes. It is not possible to talk of Fuller’s career in terms of progression or decline because his cranky, kinetic style is as apparent in his first film, I Shot Jesse James (1949), as in one of his most recent, the vividly-titled Dead Pigeon on Beethoven Street (1975). Fuller is a law unto himself, Hollywood’s great primitive, whose films noirs, true to form, are not quite the same as anyone else’s.
The Dark Side of the Screen: Film Noir Page 14