In Niagara, Joseph Cotten plays a man who “went wrong” in the war. In the haunting first scene, he is “called” by the falls in the early morning, to commune with their titanic natural force. He is linked to them throughout the film, as if they symbolize the forces churning within him. After he kills his adulterous wife (Marilyn Monroe), he chooses his own destruction by going over the edge of the falls. A character to whom something awful—something irreversible—has happened, he is sick beyond cure and perhaps beyond explanation, like the psychopath in The Spiral Staircase.
Gun Crazy is the case history of a man whose gun fixation dates from his childhood. He is not a bad kid, flashbacks inform us, since he does not use guns to kill living things. As a grown-up, he is played appropriately by a weak actor (John Dall)—the character’s fascination with guns, obviously, is a compensation for his own lack of manliness. His obsession begins to turn violent when, at a circus, he encounters a woman who makes her living as a sharpshooter. They meet in a contest, as they shoot matches placed on each other’s heads—sexual imagery as blatant as the film’s other psychological symbols. The woman (Peggy Cummins), a bewitching psychopath, is an enigma; the film keeps its distance from her, in a way that it does not with the more reasonable male protagonist, whom it attempts at least partially to explain. We have no clue as to how the woman got to be as maniacal as she is. Fearless, taunting, utterly without moral scruples, she goads the passive hero into a cycle of robberies and shootings, her expertise with guns a sign of her essential and unstoppable violence. At the end, as they are on the run, the man shoots her as she is about to kill his childhood friends who have come to reclaim him.
Great pop psychology, Gun Crazy makes passing stabs at a variety of meaty subjects: the place of violence in American life; the link between violence and sex; the emasculating obsession with masculinity. It examines the dependence on violence of a passive, fatally wounded man and an amorally seductive woman. Guns replace sex for both characters, and it is shrewd casting that the two actors do not project a strong sensuality.
“The power to kill can be just as satisfying as the power to create. You know I’d never do anything unless I did it perfectly,” says John Dall, in a dramatic change of pace, as an aggressive psychopath in Hitchcock’s Rope. His character manipulates a weak-willed friend (Farley Granger) into committing with him “an immaculate murder. We’ve killed for the sake of danger and the sake of killing.” “How did you feel, during it?” he asks his friend. The question has a sexual undertone: in the killer’s mind the act of murder becomes a metaphor for the sexual act. “I felt tremendous, exhilarated,” Dall proclaims. After the murder he hosts a dinner party, taking a wicked delight in using as a table the chest where the murder victim lies. “This party is like the signature of the artist,” he boasts to his friend.
This deceptively plain-looking couple (Peggy Cummins and John Dall) is Gun Crazy.
Although Rope does not label the two young men as homosexuals, it is clear that they are perfectly paired partners in a gay sado-masochistic relationship. In an entirely unliberated way, the film implies a connection between the characters’ sexuality and their crime, as if being homosexual has placed them beyond the laws of society. Brandon (the Dall character) is a stereotype of a sneering, fastidious homosexual—a spiritual heir of Oscar Wilde, seduced by elegance and the notion of decadence. He affects a disdainful posture: “Good and evil were invented for the ordinary man.” His contempt for humanity is never explained; aside from the fact that he was a bully at school and that his friend has always been afraid of him, and aside from whatever damage his sexual preference has worked on him, he remains a blank, grinning mask. James Stewart, as a professor who finds him out, says, “This thing must all along have been deep inside you. You’ve made me ashamed of my concept of superior and inferior. By what right did you decide that that boy in there was inferior and therefore could be killed? Did you think you were God?”
Presented with Hitchcock’s characteristic detachment, his bland irony in the face of psychological horror, Rope is especially chilling because its blasphemous anti-hero resists categorization. At the end of Psycho, Norman Bates is diagnosed as a schizophrenic who has “internalized his mother.” He has worked out in a literal way the clash between a strong-willed, guilt-inducing mother and a pliant, secretly rebellious child. The explanation of his psychosis is certainly pat, and may be a particularly droll instance of Hitchcockian irony. With the “mother part” of his personality having taken over, Norman is locked up, to be of no further harm to anyone. Rope is more disturbing because the criminal cannot be contained by a tight Freudian profile; his evil seems more a matter of intellectual will than a result of psychic damage. Noir’s aberrational, deeply anti-social characters—the homosexuals in Rope, the gun-crazed couple on the run, the weakling son in The Spiral Staircase, the anti-Semite in Crossfire—resist whatever fragments of personal history the films supply as reasons for their madness. Noir constructs a world in which enflamed anti-Semites, crazed gunmen, power-mad lawmen, gangsters, and con artists can materialize without apparent cause, to menace and terrify those who abide by the rules of the normal world. In noir, the bland and the insane live cheek-by-jowl: sometimes, they exist within the same person, waging a battle for supremacy; more often, madness erupts with terrifying suddenness into an environment that is seemingly ordered and safe. In either case, the genre is preoccupied with the vulnerability of seemingly well-adjusted characters to the forces of darkness both within and without.
“We’ve killed for the sake of danger and the sake of killing”: Farley Granger and John Dall, as psychotic homosexuals, in Rope (with James Stewart, who has found them out).
Visual entrapment, in Windows, Gordon Willis’ 1980 city thriller.
8
Noir’s Legacy
Noir’s true heyday was brief: from Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity in 1944 to Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard in 1950. By the end of the decade, noir’s distinctive signature—its visual style, character types and narrative patterns—seemed repetitive. In the early fifties noir began, in various ways, to be eroded from within as it slipped into an unmistakably B category. The genre had always been low budget, but in the forties it had attracted the interest of major stars and directors. In the fifties it began to look threadbare. But the development and decline of a genre is a complicated process, of course, and good films noirs continued to be produced throughout the decade, and later.
Touch of Evil (1958) is now commonly regarded as the genre’s epitaph, but Odds Against Tomorrow (1959), Robert Wise’s strikingly designed thriller about a bank robbery, and Psycho (1960), which recounts an average woman’s plunge into crime, contain many traditional noir motifs. Psycho’s memorable opening, in which the camera moves from the bleaching daylight of Phoenix at mid-afternoon to the dark interior of a hotel room, announces a descent from day to night, from order to disorder, from rationality to error and chaos, that recalls many of the best and most typical noir dramas. From the dark self that lies in wait beneath the sunny facade of its normal heroine, to its psycho villain split between his own personality and that of his mother, to the birds he has stuffed in a gruesome parody of resurrection, to the appearance of the heroine’s sister, halfway through the film, who in looks and manner so closely resembles her as to constitute another kind of “resurrection,” to the name of the city (Phoenix) in which the story begins (which recalls the mythical bird that rises from its own ashes), the film is preoccupied, both visually and thematically, with the quintessential noir theme of doubleness.
Despite its gothic embellishments, Psycho is a vindication of the continuing strength of noir motifs, since at the time the film was made, noir was no longer a dominant influence. The genre in many ways was a product of its time, a response of film-makers, perhaps even on an unconscious level, to the stresses of the immediate postwar period, as well as a retrospective acknowledgment of wartime traumas. Noir unleashed a series of dark allegories of the natio
nal state of mind during the forties.
The genres that thrived during the fifties were westerns, science fiction thrillers, and musicals. Westerns and science fiction movies provided metaphors for a different set of national traumas than the ones that were filtered into noir. The strongest genre pieces of the fifties offer symbolic readings of two disasters, the HUAC (House Un-American Activities Committee) witch-hunt for communists, and the fear generated by atomic energy. (Although both catastrophes had their roots in the forties, their impact was not registered in popular culture until the fifties.) Such archetypal films of the period as High Noon and The Invasion of the Body Snatchers reflected current fears about what happens to non-conformists. The number of mutants that terrorized American cities in the fantasy movies of the time—The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms and all his fellows—translated anxiety of nuclear holocaust into popular storytelling molds; and the recurrent theme of personality takeover surely at some level spoke to the political hysteria fostered by Senator Joe McCarthy.
Noir thrives on confusion and a breakdown of values, and, in prospect, the utter political absurdity of the search for communists in the late forties and early fifties contained ripe possibilities for noir stories of paranoia, and of nightmarish disruptions of everyday routine. But the fact remains that no significant films noirs were concerned, either directly or metaphorically, with the contemporary political scene. The genre worked most effectively in recording private rather than large-scale social traumas; its most congenial framework was domestic: murderously angry husbands and wives, embattled parents, siblings and lovers. One of the eroding factors in the fifties thrillers surfaced in such films as The Big Combo and The Phenix City Story where crime no longer springs from the aberrant individual but is instead a corporate enterprise, run like a business. This view of crime as a widespread, almost communal undertaking, counters the traditional noir interest in the isolated criminal whose actions are controlled not by an impersonal conglomerate but by a complex interweaving of character and fate.
The genre is most at home in the postwar forties, at a time when the nation re-entered private life. In the fifties, noir lost its sustained high achievement as it began to tamper with generic elements that had become traditional. Some of these variations extended the life of the genre, while others hastened its virtual eclipse by the end of the decade.
The Prowler (1951) and The Narrow Margin (1952) are both fine thrillers that nonetheless inverted noir molds in ways that signalled the end of a movie cycle. The Prowler is a variation on Double Indemnity. This time it is the man, a thoroughly corrupt cop who invades the house of a well-to-do couple, who is the criminal instigator. The film’s female protagonist noticeably departs from noir convention: instead of the vamp that audiences might expect, given the triangular romance the movie sets up, the character is passive, forlorn, loyal to the husband who is mostly absent pursuing his career, and hesitant about entering into an affair with the persistent policeman. Yet the intruder obviously answers some need in her. She originally called the police to her house to report the presence of a prowler; we are not told the prowler actually existed, but in effect the policeman who answers her distress calls becomes a prowler, slowly taking over her life, which in some ways is really what she wanted. Instead of Barbara Stanwyck, draped in a towel, nostrils flaring, spitting out her seductive words through clenched teeth, the movie offers Evelyn Keyes, tremulous, faded, sad-eyed. In The Prowler, it is the man who is seductive, fatally tempted by the promise of the woman’s sensuality, and by the indications of wealth in her Southern California Spanish-style house, a dead ringer for the shadowed Dietrichson house in Double Indemnity.
Variations on noir formulas: in The Prowler, the woman (Evelyn Keyes) is innocent, the man (Van Heflin) is the criminal: (below) in The Narrow Margin, Marie Windsor’s femme fatale costume is only a masquerade because she is really a policewoman testing detective Charles MacGraw’s trustworthiness.
The Narrow Margin also plays with noir’s traditional iconographic depiction of women. The movie begins with deceptive ordinariness: a detective and his partner come to Chicago to escort a mobster’s widow (Marie Windsor), raven-haired and tough, to a trial in Los Angeles at which she is going to testify. She is carrying a list of names, and as she and her two escorts walk down the rickety stairway of the tenement in which she lives, the detective’s assistant is shot. On the train, the detective befriends a pleasant blonde woman, who is traveling with her child and a nanny. Slyly the film inverts noir stereotypes, as the “widow” turns out to be a police officer (a decoy who has been planted to see if the detective could be bought by the mob), and the Grace Kelly-like blond turns out to be the mobster’s widow. Ideally cast as a tough moll, Marie Windsor performs the role broadly. Her dialogue sounds like a parody of the hard-boiled school; and the exaggeration is a tip-off that noir conventions are being burlesqued. The detective is fooled by appearances, since he never for a moment figures the Windsor dame as a police officer, or the pleasant blonde as a gangster’s widow. Like The Prowler, The Narrow Margin depends for its full impact on audience familiarity with earlier noir stories—both films are echoes of a fading genre.
Part of the process of change and transformation, leading to the eventual disappearance of noir as a popular genre, included two distinct and oddly divergent tendencies, one in the direction of simplification of noir motifs, the other a baroque elaboration of traditional elements. Early in the decade, several thrillers had a severely limited focus in story and setting and thereby differed from the labyrinthine plotting that marked the genre in the forties. In Jeopardy, Barbara Stanwyck spends most of the film trying to find a way to save her husband from drowning when his foot is trapped in the timbers of a rotting pier. In Beware My Lovely, Ida Lupino is held hostage in her house by a madman (Robert Ryan) throughout the film. In Dangerous Crossing, Jeanne Crain’s new husband disappears almost as soon as their honeymoon aboard a luxury liner begins, and the rest of the drama hinges on whether or not the distraught woman really has a husband at all. These three films have bare storylines which rely in a simplified and almost abstract way on noir themes of psychological and physical entrapment. The suspense comes from the concentrated structure: from the start, a heroine is plunged headlong into a catastrophe, and the films focus exclusively on her plight. The three films are exciting thrillers which nonetheless lack the dimension of earlier films noirs.
The contrasting late noir tendency is exaggeration tinged with satire. Such films as Kiss Me Deadly, The Big Combo, Screaming Mimi, Touch of Evil, all represent noir’s decadence. With Welles, the overdone treatment grows as much out of his own temperament as from his overwrought attempts to visualize a tired story. The bravura rendering of noir motifs in Touch of Evil, at any rate, is a display to be enjoyed for its own sake, quite apart from usual considerations of story and character development. It is easy to see why the film has been tagged as noir’s epitaph, since it subjects motifs to what is probably their most theatrical elaboration. Robert Warshow wrote that Shame looked like the final western ever made because it pushed generic elements to the breaking point, treating them with calculated virtuosity. Overheated to a turbulent boil, Touch of Evil has something of the same place of dubious honor with respect to noir. The border city in the film is a festering cesspool, populated with a bunch of sweaty Mexicans lurking menacingly in the rotting, colonnaded streets. Crawling with human vermin, this city is the perfect setting for the corrupt sheriff to flourish in as well as an obvious trap for the distinguished Mexican-American lawyer (Charlton Heston) and his Anglo-Saxon wife (Janet Leigh). The film opens with a bomb exploding in the back of a car. It ends with a chase through oil derricks on the outskirts of town. The chase is a bravura set-piece, with wild camera angles and an elaborate soundtrack mixing dialogue, music, and voices on a radio. A cheap little thriller about a power-mad sheriff is transformed, by Welles’ operatic style, into a galvanizing vision of evil.
In the sixties and seventies the genre
was clearly a self-consciously resurrected form. Thrillers made “in the noir style” became a nostalgic exercise, touched with that note of condescension which often results when one generation reconstructs artifacts of an earlier era’s popular culture. For the film-makers of the sixties and seventies, “film noir” seems to mean Bogart and Raymond Chandler. Such films as Marlowe (1969), The Long Goodbye (1974), Farewell, My Lovely (1975), and The Big Sleep (1978) are salutes to a bygone movie and literary tradition which fail, in different ways, to make Chandler’s world either tangible or flavorful.
Based on The Little Sister, Chandler’s novel about Hollywood, Marlowe looks like an ordinary television crime drama, with television actor James Garner providing a stolid interpretation of Chandler’s legendary sleuth. Chandler’s contrived plotting and snappy dialogue are at odds with the film’s neutrally rendered contemporary setting and its bland use of color. The only well-chosen location is Marlowe’s dim office located in the magnificent Bradbury Building in downtown Los Angeles, a recurrent background in high film noir. And the only character who transcends the inappropriately sunny background and the flat sixties lighting is Rita Moreno, playing a psychotically jealous stripper who turns out to be the villain. Moreno lends a soiled quality to the dancer; she has a toughness and seductiveness that have an authentic noir tang.
Michael Winner’s The Big Sleep also has entirely the wrong look. The story has been transferred to England, with most of the outdoor scenes set in a country landscape, all lush green foliage and rolling hills. Where is the fog, so crucial a part of the Howard Hawks version? And where is the decorum, essential to the texturc of Hawks’ work as well as of Chandler’s original? The violence and the sexual perversity that are part of the story are here blatantly handled. As General Sternwood’s bad daughter (the role played by Martha Vickers in the 1946 version), harsh-voiced Candy Clark is crude, coming on like Southern white trash. She is hard and stupid, a freaked-out seventies kook; and she reduces Chandler’s mysterious catalyst to someone who is plainly weird. Understandably enough, Winner did not want to duplicate the tone of the famous Hawks film; but his own counter choices—sunny skies, English countryside, kinky characters-deny the flavor of the material. The film’s only appealing element is Robert Mitchum, himself an authentic noir icon, as Philip Marlowe. His voice-over narration evokes the forties with only the faintest hint of parody or condescension, with at any rate no more of these qualities than can be found in the original noir dramas. Mitchum plays Marlowe in something of a stupor. He seems especially languid and sleepy-eyed, even for him, and he makes no pretense of doing anything more than simply lending his presence to the film. Yet that presence is really good enough—stolid, he-manly, beyond corruption; with a lazy, oozing, pot-bellied sexuality. But the actor looks like an anachronism in Winner’s updating.
The Dark Side of the Screen: Film Noir Page 23