Like all noir directors, Hitchcock is attracted to stories of confinement. After an accident, the photo-journalist in Rear Window is a wheelchair recluse whose only recreation is spying on as much of his neighbors’ lives as he can see through the windows on the other side of the courtyard. Rope takes place entirely within an elegant New York penthouse. For this stage-bound drama, Hitchcock devised one of his most ingenious technical solutions, filming the action in a series of long takes, with the few cuts masked by the camera moving in on dark objects that fill the entire frame. Dial M for Murder, another adaptation of a claustrophobic play, is set for the most part in an apartment and in the outside hallway. Many of the films take place in an environment that is physically limited. But even in the films that venture beyond confined interiors, the ones set against colorful backgrounds (San Francisco in Vertigo, Morocco in The Man Who Knew Too Much, New York in The Wrong Man, Montreal in I Confess, Washington, D.C. in Strangers on a Train, Havana in Notorious), Hitchcock’s canvas is not expansive. The pressure of events forces the characters into hiding; assailed by the unexpected at every turn, they become paranoid, withdrawn. Even wide-open spaces in Hitchcock are dangerous—in a flat open field in North by Northwest, a plane materializes to attack the dazed hero. And even in the superficial To Catch a Thief, the French Riviera in which the story is set is not a glorious holiday backdrop but a place of lurking threats and potential pitfalls.
Hitchcock’s camera choreography is more complex than the tight, static set-ups typical of noir. There are virtuoso displays of camera movement throughout the canon: the camera encircling the lovers in Vertigo; the camera retreating down the stairs and away from the scene of a murder in Frenzy; the gliding, roving camera in Rope, its movement breaking up the static space in which the action unfolds. But the utter calculation of the movement prevents it from having an open, liquid quality, a fluency that would be foreign to noir. Even when he indulges in movement that is seemingly sweeping and expansive, Hitchcock’s work is taut, intentionally mechanical.
Deadlier than the male: Joan Crawford in Sudden Fear.
6
The Noir Actor
Actors are often prized for their naturalncss. Some actors become stars because they are exotic, because they are strikingly different from the everyday, but most of what we see in American films is meant to pass for realistic behavior that audiences can easily identify with. Yet all acting, no matter how real it attempts to be, involves some degree of stylization. Supremely realistic performers like Gary Cooper and James Stewart, who may pretend to be nothing more than the guy next door, nevertheless have a carefully groomed manner.
Acting, like directing, demands choices which contain elements of simplification and abstraction ; and acting in genre films increases the amount of stylizing the performer needs to bring to his part. Genre storytelling is streaked with codes that have been worked out over the course of time. Characterization in genre pieces also depends on a kind of shorthand, so that roles are defined quickly by such matters as dress (the western convention in which good guys wear white and villains arc garbed in funereal black) or environment (the dance-hall hostess in her saloon, the gangster in his newly acquired white-on-white apartment). Genres depend on audience familiarity, and actors performing genre roles often have to do less filling-in with the kind of realistic detail that might be more naturally introduced into a non-formula picture.
The most consistently stylized acting in American genres is in film noir, which is itself, along with the special case of the musical, the most stylized Hollywood genre. If noir stories often seem like a bad dream, the acting in noir, fittingly enough, is somnambulistic. The performers most closely identified with the genre have masklike faces, their features frozen not in mid- but in pre-expression. Performing in a constricted area both physically as well as emotionally, the noir actor has a glacial presence. He does not open up the frame, claiming screen space for himself, but plays close to the chest, remaining a figure in the noir landscape, one element in the film’s overall composition. Actors with expansive personalities are unlikely to appear in noir. When on occasion they do, like an overly emotive Bette Davis in Beyond the Forest, they all but dismantle the tight noir frame. Actors who either overact, or who project a basically sunny disposition, appearing to be at ease with themselves and the world, are not noir material; and if by chance this masterful kind of personality shows up-like Charlton Heston in Touch of Evil, for instance—he plays a masterful character (one of the few in the canon).
The noir actor is an icon. More often than not, he is embodying a type, and he creates his effects with means that are both vivid and sketchy as he provides something of a visual shorthand for a full-dress character. Because he is part of the decor, conforming to the all-important noir mood and ambience, he is kept on a short leash, his actorly enthusiasm constantly checked. True bravura performances in noir are therefore rare. Cagney in White Heat and Robinson in Key Largo perform with an all-out intensity that the genre normally discourages, and it’s significant that both actors date from an earlier movie tradition, one that encouraged a dynamic style. The typical noir performer is tighter, emotionally stingier than Cagney or Robinson at full blast.
The quintessential noir couple is the utterly deadpan Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake, noir’s answer to William Powell and Myrna Loy. In This Gun for Hire, The Glass Key, and The Blue Dahlia, the two players perform the same kinds of roles, with no variation in pitch or temperature. Their faces barely move. Their dry, tight voices, monotonous in rhythm and intonation, lack any music or coloring. And the similarity of their chiseled features and Nordic complexions adds to the general eeriness. Their unblemished beauty has a manufactured quality; they look like a mogul’s idea of what American movie stars should look like. And, with all this, they are both very, very good—perfect icons, in fact, for the world of forties noir. Their dazed, mannikin-like quality is exactly right for noir. Lacking the strength and force of character of stars like Gable or Garbo, they make convincing victims, suggesting, beneath their masks, a weakness and vulnerability that the noir stories require of them as they get pushed about by bizarre turns of fortune. Neither star could withstand the stresses of Hollywood fame; both were alcoholics, both died relatively young. Lake’s film career was finished by the end of the decade. Ladd managed to hold onto a career of sorts through the fifties, despite the fact that his own private torment began to appear in his sagging, wasted appearance. Had he lived, he might have developed into an interesting character actor, whereas Lake passed to a point where her Hollywood celebrity was unrecoverable. In middle age, Lake looked nothing like her forties image, the immaculate frozen beauty as much a memory as her trademark peek-a-boo hair style.
In noir, Ladd and Lake acted in a rigorously minimalist vein; their presence alone commanded our interest and attention. Neither occupied much screen space. Part of their appeal was in their essential stillness, their sculptured quality. Lake speaks in a tough voice that is a hair‘s-breadth away from sounding merely common. Ladd has one of the flattest voices on record, quieter and softer than Lake’s, more “feminine,” and in this way suggestive of the kind of sexual reversal which cuts across noir. Their scenes together are at the opposite end of the acting spectrum from the wit and sparkle, the generous give-and-take, of the running screen battles between Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn-Lake and Ladd perform as if from the end of a tunnel, phoning in their lines from remote control. Their somnolent delivery, together with the invariably dim or flickering light in which they perform, begins to take on a sinister quality. And yet some human responses are observable beneath the apparently thick-skinned veneer. Something close to good nature even manages to surface, particularly at the ends of their films, when tensions between them are resolved and they go off together. Lake proves to be good for her co-star: she is his helpmate, urging him to serve his country (in This Gun for Hire), and aiding him in solving the murder mystery (in The Blue Dahlia and The Glass Key).
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bsp; In This Gun for Hire, the film that made him a star, Ladd plays a cold-eyed, dead-voiced killer who seems to have no moral restraints. Hiding out in shabby rented rooms between assignments, he is a dangerous loner, his capacity for menace engrained in Ladd’s mask-like face, stiff movements, and parched voice. But by the end of the film, the character softens under Lake’s influence; his violent impulses are used to thwart a Nazi conspiracy. At best, though, he is a reluctant, inverted anti-hero, far removed from the dynamic villains of the gangster films. In This Gun for Hire, he is extremely well cast as a pained, convoluted character who remains as much a mystery to himself as he does to us.
Lake’s work is not as layered as Ladd’s; but she is very sly, very sexy. She is one of a series of forties leading ladies with a deep voice and an ambiguous sexuality. Although the scripts often treat her as so much embroidery, as a mere handmaiden both to the put-upon hero and to the tortuous plot, she has a direct, dominating quality. She cracks wise, in the style of thirties sharpshooters like Rosalind Russell, but unlike the thirties dames she lacks a touch of dizziness. She is all business as she trades quips with her male sparring partners. Her voice and her bearing have a sharpness, an angularity, not easy to warm to; she is tough, and no mistake about it. Snapping out her lines in a gravelly, hard-edged voice that already had the whisper of the alcohol that was to destroy her life, she is the perfect partner for Ladd. This polar couple defined noir style early in the decade. Not every noir performance was pitched in the same severe key, or was so strictly confined to the same narrow register, but the stylized work of Paramount’s deep-frozen twosome anticipated the somnambulistic mode of the forties thriller.
At the time, Ladd and Lake were enormously popular, perhaps unimaginably so now that their stylized non-emoting seems rather specialized, an acquired taste. Noir certainly needed the kind of screen presence that they had, but it also needed actors who were more than authoritative icons. It needed stars who could also act, as demonstrated by the careers of the undisputed king and queen of film noir: Humphrey Bogart and Barbara Stanwyck. Their work spans the period, setting standards and creating models for other performers to emulate. Both began their careers in the thirties, though they didn’t fully come into their own until their startling work in early films noirs— Bogart in The Maltese Falcon, Stanwyck in Double Indemnity.
As Sam Spade and then later as Philip Marlowe in The Big Sleep, Bogart caught the particular flavor of Hammett’s and Chandler’s hard-boiled style. Like Ladd and Lake, Bogart works in a restricted area, with few inflections and minimal movement. His tough guy style is tense and tight-lipped, yet surprisingly agile, arrived at without any visible effort. His features fixed in a perpetual frown that modulates into scorn and cynical disbelief on the one hand and into a kind of bemused irony on the other, Bogart hardly moves facial muscles. As Spade and Marlowe, dealing with an assortment of criminals, oddballs and misfits, he remains detached and wary, especially of pretty women who tell a lot of stories. He keeps his feelings to himself. The detectives may be tempted by women and by money, but they really can’t be bought. As Bogart plays them, the private eyes are men of principle, men with their own code of honor whose cynicism masks their essential integrity. It is the moral certainty which emanates from Bogart, and the sense of shrewdness in his judgment of others, that more than anything have been responsible for the actor’s mystique. Bogart became a cult hero at Harvard, where students at the Brattle Street Cinema responded to his honesty and knowingness.
Veronica Lake, the archetypal forties dame, wisecracking, deadpan and sexually ambiguous.
Searching for the gang that killed his wife, Dick Powell in Cornered sheds some of the poise of his impersonation of Philip Marlowe in Murder, My Sweet.
Humphrey Bogart, the perfect noir icon, the compleat forties tough guy.
With his stiff face and taut voice, his rhythmed recitation (accented by the famous lisp) of the roguish Hammett-Chandler dialogue, Bogart works in a monochromatic style. His delivery is as lean as his physique. For him, less is certainly more. And yet the actor’s pared down, straight-ahead, no-fuss manner communicates a subtle range of feeling, from waggish humor to romantic interest. Throughout both key films, there are chinks in the tough guy armor, moments when the actor drops the rigor mortis mask. The private person beneath the investigator’s facade is revealed in a delightful scene in The Maltese Falcon, where, after Spade laces into Kaspar Gutman (Sydney Greenstreet), laying it on thick, he kicks up his heels in glee on his way to the elevator, pleased with his own performance.
Bogart had the perfect face for noir, a face filled with character. Though he tried, Bogart could not conceal worry or regret or the sadness that always seemed to gnaw at him. His mask is thus different from the idealized ones of Lake and Ladd, from which all human concern seems to be erased. In contrast to their unblemished facade, Bogart has a frankly homely face—a mug—and he doesn’t look at all like anyone’s stereotyped concept of a movie star. Ravaged and sad-eyed, he looks positively unhealthy. With a few minor adjustments, Bogart can easily appear sinister, a quality which was exploited for most of his early career at Warners, when he played heavies. Curling his lip in a perpetual sneer, furrowing his brow in scorn or menace, the early Bogart looked surly and dyspeptic. The startling originality of his presence, though, was not realized until 1941, in both The Maltese Falcon and High Sierra, a swan song to the thirties gangster in which he played a sentimental con infatuated with a crippled girl and loved in turn by a mature and self-effacing woman (Ida Lupino). In both these roles, his innate decency collided interestingly with echoes of the snarling, embittered characters he had played as second banana to Edward G. Robinson’s emphatic tough guys in crime dramas of the thirties. The result is wonderfully shaded, with the integrity and humanity of his Spade and Roy Earle qualified by an underlying harshness. Bogart balanced astringency with a fleeting sentimentality and romanticism in a way that no other actor ever has.
Bogart, then, has the face of a man of enormous feeling kept in check—he is clearly a man with churning insides beneath the still mask. His gaze is direct yet wary; the scornful twist of the lips does not belie the sense of honor that turns him into a hero no matter what kind of role he is playing. The face hard yet vulnerable, the cold gazing eyes human and wounded, Bogart is the archetypal noir loner. His posture is tensed, hunched; he rarely moves. Our characteristic view of him is seated at a table, the inevitable drink nearby, cigarette in hand, as he stares out at the world dispassionately yet with intimations of a seething tension within. His means of expression are limited, practically to the point of abstraction, yet he radiates complexity.
Appearances are deceiving in this shot from Thelma Jordan, as Barbara Stanwyck, the meanest woman in film noir, clings to Wendell Corey for support.
Bogart’s loner status is modified or challenged only by women who can talk back to him, giving as good as they get. His ideal sparring partner, of course, is Lauren Bacall. In To Have and Have Not, The Big Sleep, Dark Passage, and Key Largo, they are a more human but no less stylized noir couple than Ladd and Lake. The quintessential Bogart-Bacall relationship occurs in The Big Sleep, where their feelings for each other are expressed through mutual baiting and a slicing, edgy wit. They resemble the sparring couples in Restoration comedy whose attraction to each other is measured by their caustic humor, a mark of their shared response to the fools who surround them. Like the Restoration gallants terrified of sentiment and disdainful of sentimentality, Bogart would be unable to tolerate a weepy woman; he would expose her as pitilessly as he does Brigid O’Shaughnessy. He appreciates a sarcastic dame like Bacall who carries herself, in many ways, like one of the boys, rather than standing on ceremonies, expecting deference and courtliness where none are likely to be forthcoming.
The perpetual bachelorhood and final flight from involving alliances of the Hammett-Chandler private eyes match Bogart’s own aura of stubborn independence. His most famous role is that of the wary private inv
estigator who stands coolly outside and above the criminal action. But Bogart tried other kinds of parts within the noir canon, playing characters distinctly not in control. As he moves from the patented Bogart, the distrustful Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe, to the role of a victim in Dark Passage, of a criminal in Conflict, and of a crackpot in In a Lonely Place, Bogart covers the noir spectrum. His gallery of noir neurotics is a notable achievement, though the cynical, honorable characters in The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep will always be his most forceful image. Bogey cracking up or being villainous looks like an impersonation, no matter how skillfully conceived, and audiences are likely always to see the “true” Bogart as Sam Spade or Rick Blaine (in Casablanca), tough guys who keep their distance but who end up doing the right thing.
In Dark Passage, he is accused of two crimes he did not commit. After escaping from prison, his character has plastic surgery, emerging from the operation looking like Humphrey Bogart—only to become entangled in another web of incriminating circumstantial evidence. In both cases, he has been set up as the fall guy by a ferociously jealous woman (Agnes Moorehead). In Conflict, he is another noir archetype, the murdering spouse. The character concocts an elaborate scheme for killing his frigid wife, while all the time his own deception is being watched by a clever analyst (Sydney Greenstreet). In a Lonely Place presents him as a Hollywood screenwriter who has temperamental explosions. Accused of killing a young woman, he is presumed guilty because of his erratic behavior. He even alienates the woman (Gloria Grahame) who provided his alibi and who falls in love with him. His tantrums frighten her to the point where she begins to suspect he is guilty, even though she knows better.
The Dark Side of the Screen: Film Noir Page 16