Films starring the professional investigator come the closest in spirit to the classical detective story. Private eye stories are constructed like puzzles in which the investigator questions a series of suspects in order to find out whodunit. “My name is Philip Marlowe, private detective,” announces Robert Montgomery at the beginning of Lady in the Lake, going on to provide a fair summary of the genre’s ground rules: “You know, someone says follow that guy. Find that female. And what do I get out of it? ... You’ll see it just as I saw it. Maybe you’ll get it, maybe you won’t. You have to be alert, things may creep up on you.”
Traditionally, the investigator is hired to find a missing person, and before he knows it, “things creep up” on him. His client has lied to him; his eternal adversaries, the police, think he did it; women throw themselves at him. He is hurled headlong into a world where almost no one speaks the truth. But through it all—through the assorted bribes and seductions which assault him—the investigator (Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe) retains his integrity. He cannot be bought or fooled. At the end he dispenses justice, sending Brigid O’Shaughnessy off to jail; he has earned his money, even if the case has not turned out the way his client intended it to.
The original request for finding the missing person leads the private eye into a maze. The stories are complicated, with as many twists and turns as the tales which that brilliant tale teller Brigid O’Shaughnessy fabricates for Sam Spade. “I’m a liar, I’ve always been a liar,” Brigid confesses, in one of her moments of disarming candor—and she is speaking, in effect, for virtually the entire cast of characters of private eye dramas. The people the detective talks to arc ready and often quite competent liars and it is his job to gauge their reliability. The private eye has to be a shrewd judge of character.
Narrative construction is remarkably similar in the best of all private eye films noirs: The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep, Lady in the Lake, Murder, My Sweet, Kiss Me Deadly, The Glass Key. All the pictures are arranged as a sequence of interviews between the private eye and witnesses and potential suspects which lead, after a string of false clues and the investigator’s mistaken judgements, to a final, surprising revelation. The stories are deliberately hard to follow; we are supposed to be as baffled as the inquirer. The Big Sleep’s reputation as having an all-but-impossible-to-follow storyline is justified, as the film is a maze, as circuitous and convoluted as the most devious noir liar.
A close look at another Chandler-based mystery, Murder, My Sweet, indicates the weblike narrative pattern typical of the investigation drama. Arrested by the police, who have accused him of multiple murders, Philip Marlowe explains how he wound up where he is when the film opens, battered and blindfolded and subjected to a tough police grilling. It all started when he was working late one night at the office ... He glances up from his desk to catch the reflection of a looming figure in one of his windows. It is Moose Malloy, who is just out of prison and who wants Marlowe to find his girl Velma. After some prodding, Marlowe agrees to go with Moose to a joint called Florian’s, where years ago Velma was a dancer. No Velma there anymore, of course, and no Florian either. But Marlowe seeks out Mrs. Florian, a boozy, rumpled dame—“with a face like a bucket of mud”—who doesn’t want to talk much, though her vague memories of Velma arouse Marlowe’s interest. Finding Velma, he figures, is going to be the kind of challenge he enjoys.
The search for the woman is set aside at this point when another client claims Marlowe’s attention. Lindsay Marriott is an obvious dandy, who, apparently by chance, has selected Marlowe to be his companion when he delivers money to some crooks in return for jewelry that they stole from a Mrs. Grayle. The whole set-up smells fishy to Marlowe—Marriott is no more credible as a client than Moose. The rendezvous with the thieves is to take place at night, off an open highway out of town. Marlowe disregards the signs of danger, and goes off into the night with Marriott. At the meeting place he is knocked unconscious. Some time later he is awakened by the voice of a woman peering anxiously down at him, asking “Are you all right?” and then fleeing into the night. Marlowe then discovers that Marriott has been killed.
At his office, a woman reporter arrives to ask questions about the murder. Marlowe suspects that she is not a journalist and calls her bluff. She turns out to be the stepdaughter of Mrs. Grayle, the woman whose jewels were stolen. Marlowe calls on Mr. and Mrs. Grayle at their mansion, and sizes up the situation quickly, almost as quickly as Mrs. Grayle makes a play for him, which is as soon as her rich, feeble old husband leaves the room. Their tête-à-tête is interupted by the arrival of Jules Amthor, a spiritualist with a local reputation as a smooth-talking swindler. Marlowe has been eager to meet Amthor because the cops have told him to lay off the guy. (Amthor appears the moment after Mrs. Grayle has pronounced him a man of great mystery and inaccessibility.) Shortly after this first meeting with Amthor, Marlowe finds himself shot up with dope and lying in a bizarre hospital presided over by Amthor, a self-confessed quack doctor.
At this point, all the pieces of the puzzle have been introduced. All the important characters are on stage, and what remains is for Marlowe to sort out identities and relationships. What is the connection between plot number 1 (the search for Velma) and plot number 2 (the stolen jewels, the murder of Marriott, the Grayle menage, and its mysterious links with Amthor and his thugs, among whom is Moose Malloy)? After further roughing up, and more hassles with the police, Marlowe pieces it all together. Mrs. Grayle is Moose’s Velma, risen mightily in the world and determined to wipe out her past. Thus, a mean, determined woman, it turns out, as it often does in Chandler, is responsible for everything: Velma, or, as she is now known, Mrs. Llewellyn Lockridge Grayle, staged the robbery (working with Amthor) and killed Marriott, thinking he was Marlowe. In the climactic showdown, Velma, Moose, Amthor, and old Grayle are all killed, leaving only Marlowe and the stepdaughter to await the arrival of the police.
Stories in the private eye dramas tease the audience by presenting characters and events in a deliberately garbled, roundabout way. Marlowe takes on a second case just as the first one gets started, and we are left dangling, wondering about Velma, having become interested in what happened to her after Marlowe’s interview with the slovenly Mrs. Florian. Except for the hard-core mystery addict, the puzzle-solving seems more trouble than it is worth. The tricky, criss-cross plotting exists for its own sake, as a witty exercise in stage-managing, rather than as a means of deepening characterization. With almost no will of their own, the characters are at the mercy of the writer’s juggling skills, tossed into the stew and stirred about to little purpose except to create confusion. In Murder, My Sweet and The Big Sleep, the fun is not in the delirious plotting but in the dialogue and atmosphere. The wittiest and most appealing moments in these two films are the male-female games played by Bogart and Bacall, and by Bogart and Dorothy Malone (as a prim bookseller who turns out not so prim after all), and by Dick Powell and Claire Trevor (as the duplicitous Mrs. Grayle). In these scenes, the films crackle with Chandler’s droll, sexy, grown-up humor.
Call Northside 777 conforms to the classical pattern of the story of investigation: the crime (a masked man shoots a policeman); the manhunt (a reporter, James Stewart, questions the star witness); and the solution (the date of the newspaper in the photo determines a man’s innocence or guilt).
The investigation framework has a greater potential impact when the quester is personally involved in the case. The private eye, after all, is a hired professional, an outsider. Like the archetypal western hero, he does what he has to do; and solving the case is his badge of honor. He may use devious methods, he may well resort to violence, but he is not a criminal. He keeps his distance from the underworld, and from his own underworld as well. He is a detached, essentially disinterested figure, and his fundamentally objective view of crime is engrained in the more or less detached style that is the mark of the private eye story.
The private detective film is the best-known of the noir story types. F
or most moviegoers, film noir may well summon up the image of Bogart in a trench coat and fedora asking tough dames and hoods with punched-in faces a lot of questions. But of the various narrative strains that qualify as noir, the private eye prototype is the least rewarding thematically, because in it the hunter and the hunted occupy clearly separate places. One of the provocative ideas in noir is that a potential criminal is concealed in each of us: the private eye story does not acknowledge that complex, dark, and secret other self that surfaces in other kinds of noir dramas. The private eyes may be vulnerable, but Spade and Marlowe and their sort tend toward emotional invulnerability, which makes them less interesting characters than the hunter who is personally involved in the puzzle-solving and who has an ambivalent, unresolved relationship to the crime he is investigating. Because Marlowe is not genuinely concerned about finding Velma except to satisfy his manly code of professional competence, the search remains something outside of him. He is shaken up, doped, beaten, lied to, but at the end he is the same person he always was and always will be. And so the story, twisting and eventful as it is, lacks a dynamic connection to him. He remains a person to whom things happen.
But Marlowe is certainly an attractive character; he is an enduring popular culture hero for good reason. The most interesting character in Murder, My Sweet, however, the one most capable of surprising us, is Velma turned Mrs. Llewellyn Lockridge Grayle. Painted and perfumed, she is a fabricated, self-created woman; and she performs her part with style. She is the catalyst, but in terms of the narrative development she is merely one of a number of people Marlowe questions and whom we see from his jaundiced view—she is a figure in the tapestry. How much more provocative a story it would be if told from her point of view, as her delicately balanced world is invaded by Moose, a figure from the past, and by the snooping private eye.
Psychologically then, the professionally conducted investigation is the least challenging of the noir narrative patterns. The essential detachment and objectivity of the form made it the obvious story line for noir in its so-called semi-documentary phase. In such films as Boomerang, Call Northside 777, The House on 92nd Street, and Street with No Name, the framework of professional investigation is taken into the real world. The milieu is not the enclosed and fictional one of the byzantine Hammett-Chandler narratives, but true-life settings taken from the files of the FBI and newspaper headlines. In these dramas, investigations are not conducted for their own sake, but as a means to a serious and socially-minded end: to uncover a network of communist spies; to save an innocent man from execution; to alert America to the spread of organized crime. “The story you are about to see is based on fact,” a title announces at the beginning of Boomerang. “In the interests of authenticity, all scenes, both interior and exterior, are in the original locales and as many actual characters as possible have been used.” “This story is adapted from cases in the espionage files of the FBI,” we are told at the beginning of The House on 92nd Street. “Produced with the FBI’s complete cooperation, it could not be made public until the first atomic bomb was dropped on Japan.”
Investigators in these case-history reconstructions remain personally disinterested. They are professionals doing a job. Yet they are fired by goals higher than Marlowe’s—higher, that is, than interest and pleasure in cracking a case. These hunters are patriots, crusading journalists, lawyers determined to defeat a corrupt political machine, FBI men bent on toppling a crime syndicate. In these hard-hitting problem dramas, noir emerges from the fictional labyrinth to become a form of propaganda: the crime thriller as social pamphlet, as journalistic expose, as contemporary crusade.
The narrative structure of these semi-documentary films is much the same as that of the private eye whodunits: an outside investigator confronts a maze. The plotting is as complicated and gnarled, as the crack questioner grills a series of witnesses. In Call Northside 777, James Stewart is a journalist whose boss sees a suspicious ad (“Call Northside 777”) which offers money for information about an eleven-year-old case. Skeptical, the reporter thinks the ad is a fake. He traces the 777 number to a cleaning woman, who has worked for eleven years to accumulate the $5000 reward money she now offers because she believes that her son Frank, who was convicted of murdering a policeman and is serving a life-term in prison, is innocent. The reporter is unpersuaded, but gradually he sees that Frank may well be the victim of circumstantial evidence, and Stewart becomes determined to see that justice triumphs. After his laborious reconstruction of the past he is convinced of the condemned man’s innocence.
Fact is stranger than fiction, as the reporter saves the condemned man in a spectacular variation on the last-minute rescue. The case is decided by the date on a newspaper which appears in the rear of a photograph taken at the time of Frank’s arrest. Both Frank and Wanda, the woman who accused him of murdering the policeman, are in the picture, as they walk up the stairs of the police station. Wanda swore in court that she did not see Frank until December 23, the day she identified him in the line-up. If the newspaper is dated December 22, as the reporter suspects it might be, Wanda’s credibility is suspect, and the district attorney has agreed to a new trial. The man’s fate then rests on whether a new process of photographic enlargement is powerful enough to reveal the date of the newspaper. Typical of the film’s emphasis on technology, the climax involves a documentary detailing of the photo blow-up process. The crime is solved not in the noir nightworld that the private eye inhabits, but by science.
Call Northside 777 contains the intriguing “wrong man” theme, but undercuts its potential by presenting the action from the reporter’s rather than the condemned man’s perspective. Visually and thematically, the film’s emphasis is on the processes of investigation and discovery rather than on the wrong man’s paranoia and entrapment. Skillfully constructed and well acted, the film downplays character in favor of documentation, which leads to a dramatic dead end.
The manhunt theme works most interestingly when the investigator, unlike the reporter in Call Northside 777, or the private eye is connected to the crime not through his job but in some personal way. Here is where noir comes into its own, introducing themes of true moral and psychological complexity. Cornered, The Blue Dahlia, Black Angel, Phantom Lady, Deadline at Dawn, D.O.A., The Big Clock, The Big Heat are stories of manhunts conducted by investigators with personal motives. In Cornered, Dick Powell is a soldier who embarks on a mission of vengeance as he tracks political criminals who killed a woman to whom he was married for only twenty days. As a veteran combing the underground of postwar France and Brazil, Powell encounters as much trouble as when he was Philip Marlowe, except this time his search takes on a desperate quality as the character becomes progressively unhinged. Cornered is not as well made as Murder, My Sweet, but its thematic focus has more potential than Chandler’s whodunit. In The Blue Dahlia, Alan Ladd is another soldier facing a postwar trauma. He returns home to an unfaithful wife, who is murdered soon after his arrival. As the obvious suspect Ladd quickly leaves, forced into hiding, “cornered” like Dick Powell as he undertakes his own search into his wife’s murder.
The investigator with a personal motive: Edmond O’Brien (with Beverly Campbell) hunts for his own murderer, in D.O.A.
These two hunters, spurred by personal involvements, are more high-strung and more vulnerable—more complex—than a cynical private dick or a liberal journalist doing a bang-up job as he takes on the American system of justice. The emotional instability of the Powell and Ladd characters adds an edge to the films, as the psychological distance between hunter and hunted, between tracker and quarry, menacingly narrows.
In D.O.A., the investigator is dying of poison, and so his search to find his killer is quite literally a race against time. Here is noir irony at its blackest. The investigator in The Big Clock, as a victim of circumstances, is forced for much of the film to conduct a search for himself. The quest motifs in both these underrated dramas, with Edmond O‘Brien investigating his own death, and Ray
Milland superintending a fake search for himself, raise the kind of provocative psychological questions that the more straightforward pattern of the private eye stories do not. Is O’Brien’s poisoning an oblique comment on the kind of deadly life he has led? Does Milland’s entrapment in the building in which he works as a hotshot magazine editor have a more than literal significance? O’Brien is a small town insurance man who leaves home to go to a convention in San Francisco. There his ordeal begins. He attributes his poisoning to a night on the town; like all small towners in noir, he regards the city as a place of excitement and possibility, but also one of danger and even of possible annihilation. In the course of his frantic search he learns that the roots of the fatal poisoning came from an event that occurred in his home town of Banning: he had notarized a bill of sale that would convict a woman and her lover of having murdered her husband.
Their alibi is that the husband killed himself over a business failure, but the affidavit spoils their case, and so they poison O’Brien, an innocent bystander caught in a ghastly noir fate: if only the murder victim had not, by chance, come to him to sign that note. But has there also been something unhealthy about his utterly routine life in Modesto, and has he come to the city as much as anything to escape the marriage demands of his loyal and conventional secretary? One of the film’s many ironies is that his last desperate search involves him in his life more forcefully than he has ever been before. Tracking down his killer just before he dies—discovering the reason for his death—turns out to be the triumph of his life.
The Dark Side of the Screen: Film Noir Page 19