Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre, and Francis L. Sullivan do not possess Robinson’s double-edged quality, his suggestion of violence held in reserve, of a private rage underlining a benign public mask. In appearance and manner, they are clearly heavies, and so their work, good as it is, does not have the shading and subtlety of Robinson at his best. Within a narrower range, though, they are unbeatable. So odd and singular in appearance, the three actors have a menacing sexual presence, a factor which is exploited in The Maltese Falcon where Greenstreet and Lorre are playing homosexuals as conceived by Dashiel Hammett, who had an old-fashioned notion of them as decadent exotics living in an unreal, perfumed world. Lorre is swarthy, small-boned, jittery, always on the verge of hysterics; Greenstreet is elegant, cosmopolitan, seemingly in control—and unmistakably malevolent. He radiates world-weariness and cynicism; he is out for the kill even when he is supposedly sympathetic, as in Conflict, where he is a psychiatrist who ensnares wife-killer Humphrey Bogart. Francis L. Sullivan has Greenstreet’s oiliness. As the maniacally jealous nightclub proprietor in Night and the City, he is photographed from a low angle that emphasizes his enormous bulk, with lighting from below casting ominous shadows across his face. Looking like some kind of caged beast, he is observed frequently through the bar-like windows of his office.
A memorable contribution to noir’s gallery of sexual grotesques: Clifton Webb as the effete killer, in The Dark Corner.
As the effete killer in both Laura and The Dark Corner, Clifton Webb is a memorable addition to noir’s gallery of sexual grotesques. In both parts, Webb plays a cosmopolitan dandy whose passion for unattainable women leads him to commit murder. Webb has a civilized, indeed an over-refined veneer, which, in Hollywood iconography, is suspicious; in the anti-intellectuality that has always plagued American movies, well-bred aesthetes are usually morally and sexually questionable. Webb’s manner targets him as at best a dubious character. In both films, as a man-about-town and a patron of the arts, he turns out to be among the sickest of all noir villains. The films could acknowledge the decadence of Webb’s aestheticism, but could not, in the forties, link it to homosexuality. Webb embodied an old-fashioned idea of what homosexuals were supposed to be: dandified, affected, superficial, addicted to fine living, concerned excessively with fashion and with appearance. The lingering suspicion about Webb’s sexual persona is filtered into the films by casting him as a character who cannot control heterosexual impulses. Obsessed by Laura, whom he feels he has created and whom he wants to control utterly, he is impelled to kill her. In The Dark Corner, he is likewise driven to crime to preserve the waning interest of his young and beautiful wife. Both films place him—by the force of his monomania, his psychotic jealousy and possessiveness—beyond acceptable heterosexual patterns. In these two virtually identical roles, Webb is made quite a despicable character; covertly, the films reveal a fear of as well as a strong hostility toward the sexual outsider.
Like Webb, Farley Granger projects sexual ambiguity. In Rope, Edge of Doom, They Live By Night, Strangers on a Train, and Side Street, he plays moral weaklings who slip into crime; his characters are too forlorn or too soft to withstand temptation. With his quiet voice and weak face he makes a perfect noir victim, the eternally dazed man in a net, retaining an essential sweet-ness and innocence despite what happens to him. In both Rope and Strangers on a Train, he is the passive partner in a masked homosexual relationship, dominated by John Dall in the former and Robert Walker in the latter, who flirt with him and are obviously drawn to him sexually, though Granger seems unaware of their interest. Noir’s pre-eminent pretty boy (and a more capable actor than he is usually given credit for being), Granger in film after film is victimized by his beauty. In his sexual helplessness, he is exactly the opposite of the ravenous women who populate the genre.
Farley Granger, noir’s pre-eminent pretty boy victim, with Cathy O’Donnell, in They Live By Night.
Granger is the most visible of the weak men noir used recurrently. Affable Fred MacMurray in Double Indemnity, fuzzy Wendell Corey in Thelma Jordan and dazed Dana Andrews in Fallen Angel and Where the Sidewalk Ends seem to invite sexual manipulation. Gullible, evidently not in control, perplexed, the screen image of actors like Andrews and Granger pales beside that of their vivid leading ladies, or the dominant males, who lure them into crime.
Richard Widmark, Jack Palance, Robert Ryan, and Richard Conte, who clearly do not project the sexual indecisiveness of Webb or Granger, are deeply hard-boiled. Anything but dandies or preening ladies’ men, they suggest a powerful heterosexual impulse gone amiss. In one of the best-remembered scenes in noir, Richard Widmark, in Kiss of Death, pushes a woman in a wheelchair down a steep flight of tenement steps while he cackles in insane delight. The actor plays the part of an ex-con who tracks an informer (Victor Mature) with wild intensity, covering the screen with the nervous, pent-up energy of a caged panther. With his stabbing voice, his clipped delivery, his madman’s mirthless laugh, his strange regional accent, the hard angularity of his face and his steely eyes, Widmark is truly terrifying. He plays the character as a mass of twitches, with a restlessness and a wired tension that counterpoint Mature’s inevitable sleepwalker’s stolidity. The two actors perform beautifully opposite each other: Mature, with his taut, deadened face, his stiff movements; and Widmark, with his gyrating thrusts and lunges. Widmark claims the space around him like a boxer moving in on a punching bag, while Mature seems closed in, as if he is separated from the world by a glass partition. Mature is ideally cast as the saintly masochist to Widmark’s macabre sadist. The role of the informer who yearns to go straight taps a soulful quality that Mature has, a propensity for noble suffering, while the part of Udo calls on Widmark’s hyper-edginess. Kiss of Death contains Mature’s finest performance; Widmark went on to fill other extraordinary noir roles, as a fierce racist in No Way Out, as a pickpocket in Pickup on South Street, and, most memorably, as the embattled con artist in Night and the City. In that film, he gives what is perhaps the archetypal rendition of the neurotic noir victim, a self-destructive overreacher forever on the run. His eyes pleading and terrified, a cigarette dangling at his lips, Widmark endows the two-bit hustler with a heroic vitality. Performing with a sustained energy unsurpassed in noir, Widmark palpably conveys his character’s mounting desperation, his struggle against impossible odds. Jumpy, erratic, damned, Widmark adds a demonic rage to the role, his nervy, hyped-up acting perfectly matching Jules Dassin’s power-ful direction, which transforms elegant London into a city of fear.
Fated to play villains: saturnine Jack Palance, terrorizing Joan Crawford, in Sudden Fear.
Widmark’s portraits of doomed characters—his eyes ablaze, his face set in a sadist’s leer, his body hunched, as if in readiness for attack—leave such a strong impression that it is difficult to accept him in normal roles. He is mediocre as a health inspector in Panic in the Streets—playing an average family man who is determined to track down villains who may be carriers of bubonic plague, he is so adamant and astringent that he seems to be quoting from his gallery of noir psychopaths. Widmark’s cruel handsomeness, with its promise of decadence, makes him seem out of place in everyday roles. The actor has not been seen to good advantage since the noir cycle ended.
Careers of other noir-bred actors—character tough guys Jack Palance and Richard Conte—suffered similar eclipse in the mid to late fifties. Both actors slipped into low-budget crime dramas that were clearly not of noir calibre. But in their heyday, which corresponded to noir’s prime, both made exemplary villains. Palance, by appearance, was fated to play heavies. His saturnine face conveying menace and ill-will, he positively radiates the imminence of dark deeds. He is a man who inspires discomfort. As the two-timing husband who plans to murder Joan Crawford in Sudden Fear, and as the murderer unknowingly carrying bubonic plague in Panic in the Streets, he is oily, sinister, reptilian. Those deep-set dark eyes, that smarmy, sibilant voice, that scowling visage accented by the prominent cheekbones, all
carry the threat of catastrophe.
Richard Conte had more flexibility than Palance—his swarthy Italian handsomeness could be both menacing and appealing. In Call Northside 777, he is convincing as a victim of circumstance who is given a life sentence for a crime he did not commit. Playing this beleaguered character with a fetching gentleness, he offers a striking contrast to his definitive noir criminals, the desperate man on the run in Cry of the City and the racketeer, crazed by jealousy and ambition, in The Big Combo. Conte has a rugged charm, no matter what kind of part he plays; he is believable as a romantic hero in a way that neither Widmark nor Palance could ever be. In Cry of the City, he uses his appeal on a number of willing female victims. Whereas Widmark and Palance seem to want to destroy women, their capacity for sadism immediately apparent in their evil grinning masks, Conte is more winning but no less dangerous. He is a cunning manipulator of women, turning into a tyrant when he fails to get what he wants.
Robert Ryan, who played tormented noir misfits, in two of his strongest performances, as the psychotic cop in On Dangerous Ground, and as the intruder in Beware, My Lovely (with Ida Lupino).
Unlike Widmark or Conte or Palance, Robert Ryan went on to enjoy a distinguished post-noir career, although his string of characterizations within the genre remains his strongest work. As the rabid anti-Semite in Crossfire, the violent cop in On Dangerous Ground, the psychotic intruder in Beware My Lovely, the racist bank robber in Odds Against Tomorrow, the hulking lover in Clash by Night and The Woman on the Beach, Ryan was unfailingly powerful, investing his tormented characters with a brooding intensity that suggests coiled depths. Cut off from the world by the strength of their feelings, his characters seem to be in the grip of torrential inner forces. They are true loners. Ryan’s work has none of the masked, stylized aura of much noir acting—he performs with an emotional fullness that creates substantial, complex characters rather than icons.
Noir also launched the careers of three performers who are decidedly leading men rather than character actors and who went on, after their introduction in noir, to long careers as major stars: Burt Lancaster, Robert Mitchum, and Kirk Douglas. Certainly these actors are not identified with noir to the extent that Widmark or Conte or Ryan are, but they began their careers playing quintessential noir types, and although they broadened their range beyond that normally allowed to actors in crime dramas, they retained traces of the noir image. This is especially true of Robert Mitchum, whose recent work as Philip Marlowe in Farewell, My Lovely and The Big Sleep is a resurrection of the forties tough guy. In these roles, which carry more than a hint of self-parody, Mitchum is the noir sleepwalker interpreted, like everything else in these films, with an exaggeration bordering on satire. Mitchum as Marlowe is the ultimate somnambulist, his eyelids so heavy they require a visible effort to be held halfway open. His voice muffled, his bloated face and body drooping in middle-aged fatigue, Mitchum looks and sounds drugged. Frozen-faced and frozen-voiced, he himself seems like a reconstruction, a waxworks image of the real Robert Mitchum. Yet the actor’s famous irony still manages to cut through the weariness, and remnants of his innate nobility surface now and again to give his work fleeting integrity. Mitchum carries the notion of cool to self-effacing extremes, and only an actor of his fame and proven stature could get away with this tired carbon-copy version of a once-vivid original. Mitchum has simply settled for being a film noir icon, evoking a bygone movie genre by his mere presence.
A reprise of the hard-boiled hero: Robert Mitchum as Philip Marlowe, in the 1978 remake of The Big Sleep.
In his noir heyday, in Out of the Past, and later in The Night of the Hunter and Cape Fear, Mitchum made a powerful impact. In Out of the Past, playing one of noir’s fated victims, he is a private eye who cannot escape the claims of his past, when he made the mistake of falling into the web of one of the genre’s most charming and deceitful spider women. In The Night of the Hunter, he plays, unforgettably, a greedy, lecherous preacher. In Cape Fear, he terrorizes a dull bourgeois couple enacted by Gregory Peck and Polly Bergen. In each of these roles, Mitchum is both crafty and menacing. Even at his meanest, he has a glint in his eye, and his threats are laced with a droll humor and a lopsided warmth, revealed especially in his rapport with children. He is superb with the children in The Night of the Hunter, seducing them with his convincing show of paternal affection. Mitchum works nonchalantly, with a seeming minimum of effort and an absence of any visible technique. He is among the least hard-working of star performers.
In film noir, Burt Lancaster played masochistic anti-heroes, as in Criss Cross (with Stephen McNally, above, and Yvonne De Carlo, opposite right). The actor’s early image is very different from his later tyrant figures, like the powerful columnist in Sweet Smell of Success (with Tony Curtis, opposite bottom).
Kirk Douglas, on the other hand, is too impassioned and eager for noir, and he scored only qualified success in the genre. He is too young to fill out the role of the ganglord—Mitchum’s nemesis—in Out of the Past, though he is suitably intense as the misused fighter in the marginally noir Champion, the film that really launched his career. Unlike Mitchum’s, his expression is alert. Entirely lacking Mitchum’s arrogant coolness and devastating sexual assurance, Douglas is a strenuous actor, whose expansiveness, heat and energy place him outside the noir range. He has the dimensions of the larger-than-life hero; he was fine as Ulysses, in an otherwise inferior fifties version of Homer’s epic, and superb as Spartacus. More at home with the panoramic scale of epics and westerns, Douglas chafes at noir confinement.
Burt Lancaster, by contrast, has never been more interesting than in his early noir roles. In The Killers, Criss Cross, and Sorry, Wrong Number, he enacts weak men who are seduced by clever, castrating women. Lancaster has the build of a gymnast, and with his flashy smile and open-faced handsomeness, he has the look of an all-American—a winner. But his noir characters have a powerful urge toward annihilation as they court romantic disaster. The roles thus exploit dark undertones lurking beneath Lancaster’s healthy grin; his victims are voluptuous masochists, yearning for defeat and death. The tangled combination in Lancaster’s early persona of beauty and perversity makes a striking dramatic impact. Lancaster in The Killers, lying in wait in the shadows of his empty room anticipating the arrival of his executioners with a kind of exaltation, provides one of noir’s great moments.
If his early parts tapped a vulnerability and sickly passivity, his later roles, with a startling iconographic reversal, emphasize an extreme hardness. In his post-noir career, Lancaster made his mark playing commanding figures, heroes cut to wide-screen size, yet his most compelling later work—the malevolent energy of his Elmer Gantry, the monomania of his power-hungry general in Seven Days in May—carries overtones of noir pathology. There is often a frightening quality in the actor’s obsessive, powerful characters—a quality not quite human. He is especially sinister in the late noir drama, Sweet Smell of Success, where he plays a tyrannical gossip columnist determined to shield his sister from reality. Wielding authority with satanic power, his eyes hidden behind dark glasses, his set expression radiating contempt, his voice icy and cutting, Lancaster as this maniacal, incestuously fixated character is truly chilling.
A cavernous New York street: on location for The Naked City.
7
Down These Mean Streets...
Narrative Patterns
The investigator, the victim, and the psychopath are the central figures in noir’s basic story patterns. Investigators of many kinds—private eyes, sleuths, policemen, journalists, private citizens—are the protagonists of the manhunt film. The victim, accused of a crime he did not commit, or slipping into crime because of a momentary lapse, or because he is seduced by an alluring woman, or because he is sick of his wife, or because he is in a financial hole and needs money fast, is the quintessential noir antihero, around whom the genre’s most ironic stories are framed. The psychopath is the dark underside of the noir victim—far gone before the fil
m opens, he remains trapped in an ongoing nightmare. The stories which focus on the pathological criminal, probing and exposing his mania, are the grimmest in the canon.
All noir stories share a number of features, and character types overlap from one kind of narrative to another—victims and psychopaths occupy the same stage with hard-boiled private dicks; but usually one of the three basic character types dominates the action. The films with an investigator as the central character are different from the ones which present crime from the point of view of criminals; the distance from which crime, noir’s central nervous system, is observed influences a film’s style and flavor. Stories told from the vantage point of a private eye, or some other impartial outsider who is paid to solve a murder, to find the missing person, to expose a gang, tend to have an objective tone, their dry quality paralleling the investigator’s own detachment, his essentially disinterested search for the truth. But the investigating hero can be portrayed in a variety of emotional tones, from the utter coolness and poise of Bogart’s Spade and Marlowe to highly-strung questers, such as Edmond O’Brien in D.O.A. (who wants to find out who poisoned him and why) or Glenn Ford in The Big Heat (tracking the gang that killed his wife), who have a strong personal investment in cracking the case. In stories built on the victim pattern, the distance between the central character and the central crime narrows, and the films, often sharing the point of view of their collapsing protagonists, have a more complex, fevered texture than the cool private eye manhunts in The Big Sleep mold. In “victim” movies (Side Street, Double Indemnity, The Woman in the Window, Sunset Boulevard, The Window, The Wrong Man), crime invades bourgeois insularity, penetrating its self-protective boundaries. Caught off-guard, ordinary, lawful citizens are either pushed into crime against their will or discover their criminal potential as the films shift from ironic detachment to more subjective views of encroaching chaos. Stories of inveterate criminals (White Heat, Touch of Evil, Night and the City, Night of the Hunter) adhere more closely than the private eye or victim dramas to the Expressionist’s nightmare world. These films veer, typically, from a detached view of madness to occasional hallucinatory renderings of the psychopath’s disordered mind.
The Dark Side of the Screen: Film Noir Page 18