Dick Richards’ Farewell, My Lovely provides a more congenial frame for Mitchum’s Marlowe. Richards sets the film in the forties though the milieu is palpably a studied recreation rather than the real thing. To suggest the texture of old photographs the images are coated with a yellow gauze—the blurred quality is intended to distance characters and events. The film is beautiful to look at, but the photo album color and the exaggerated period details only point up the film-makers’ lack of confidence in the material: everything seems to be enclosed in quotation marks. Farewell, My Lovely is a film about a bygone Hollywood style and, as such, shares many of the attitudes toward old movies in the films of Mel Brooks and Peter Bogdanovich. Bogdanovich resurrects superannuated modes in an affectionate, celebratory spirit; Brooks’ satiric thrusts at outmoded movie conventions are harsher yet contain an implicit fondness for their corniness and sentimentality. A product of the cinematic self-consciousness of seventies film-makers, Farewell, My Lovely is more a nostalgic evocation of an old movie style than a full-fledged film noir.
Robert Altman is certainly not one merely to recreate or mimic a defunct genre, and his version of The Long Coodbye offers aggressive changes on the Chandler original. Subjecting the original story to cynical revisions, Altman has made a movie very much of and for the seventies. Chandler’s The Long Goodbye is a story of a male friendship; Marlowe, obeying that gentlemanly code of honor that is so strong an aspect of his appeal, maintains his loyalty to a friend in trouble, even at considerable risk to his own well-being. His trust turns out to be justified, as his friend—despite incriminating appearances—is in fact innocent. As often in Chandler, a woman is responsible, and in The Long Goodbye she turns out to be a positive murdering fiend. Altman’s film utterly violates Chandler’s as well as Marlowe’s code: the friend in this version is guilty; the woman merely an adulteress; and an enraged Marlowe, feeling a keen sense of betrayal, tracks down his friend in Mexico and shoots him, in an act of cold-blooded murder that Chandler’s Marlowe would never commit. What is Altman saying? That Marlowe’s code is no longer applicable to the cynical seventies? That trust and loyalty are irrelevant and misplaced feelings, and certainly have no part in the life of a private eye? Elliot Gould’s sloppy, boyish Marlowe is deliberately a far cry from the sartorial neatness of Bogart and Dick Powell. Behaving altogether with a cuteness that would have given Bogart the shudders, Gould plays Marlowe as a mumbler who lives in a pig sty and holds absent-minded conversations with his cat. He is on the wrong track most of the time, as the old Marlowes also were, but he also seems to be a natural fall guy in a way that the forties hard-boiled anti-heroes were not. He is ill-treated by the police, like all the Marlowes, but he does not hold his own with them as his predecessors did. This Marlowe gets his revenge at the end, in a radical and quite unexpected gesture, when he kills his betraying friend and then walks away, seemingly purged, to the ironic strains of “Hooray for Hollywood.” The film ends with intentional dissonance: the music sends up the whole story, dismissing it as a Hollywood fabrication with a we-know-better-than-to-believe-this smugness, while the sudden killing is meant to jolt us, since Gould’s character has seemed incapable of such a brutal and decisive action.
Dick Richards’ 1975 version of Farewell, My Lovely (with Robert Mitchum) is a self-conscious homage to film noir.
This revisionist noir is outfitted with Altman’s usual tricks: muffled, overlapping dialogue ; elaborate deep focus compositions (lots of reflections in glass in a chic Malibu beach house where much of the story takes place). Altman’s leisurely pacing has an openness and an improvisational quality that sets up a deliberate contrast with the forties films; his is a very different kind of “cool” than the hard-boiled variety. The Long Goodbye is a stylish piece of work which shows little faith in the ability of Chandler to hold a contemporary audience. As opposed to the self-conscious recreation of Farewell, My Lovely, the film attempts to break the noir formula; but rather than suggesting provocative possibilities for the genre, Altman’s work looks like a self-enclosed exercise.
Arthur Penn, like Altman a conscientious revisionist, tries in Night Moves to do to the private eye mold what he did to the western in Little Big Man and The Left-Handed Gun and to the gangster story in Bonnie and Clyde—that is, to give it a distinctly modern flavor. Like Chandler’s plots, Night Moves blends two parallel stories: the private eye spies on his wife, who is having an affair, at the same time that he is pursuing a professional assignment, trying to locate the missing daughter of a wealthy client. The inner story (the hunt for the missing girl) is a reprise of forties conventions, and practically indecipherable in its twisted plotting; but the outer story gives the private eye more of a private life than was ever extended to the Spades and Marlowes of old. Interestingly, the film uses his profession as a metaphor for his own incompleteness ; surveillance, which is a way of life for the character, is a sign of his remoteness. Harry Moseby (Gene Hackman) sees the world as a network of clues, and can live only by tracing and spying. He conducts a search for his father, and when he finally locates him, sitting on a park bench, he “spies” on him and then leaves. Moody, vulnerable, unknowable and yet intrigued by the unknowability of others, passionately involved in discovering the truth, in finding the puzzle’s missing piece, Harry (as brilliantly played by Hackman, who performed much the same kind of part in The Conversation) is a significant extension of the tight-lipped private eye impersonated by Bogart.
Private eye detective dramas appeared at sporadic intervals in the sixties and seventies, to varying but never spectacular effect: Paul Newman in Harper, Jack Nicholson in Chinatown; the vastly overrated The Late Show with Art Carney as an aging, bloated private eye and dead-faced Lily Tomlin as a seventies kook who wants to locate a missing cat; parodies like Gumshoe, The Black Bird, and The Cheap Detective. Other thrillers with noir echoes—Don Siegel’s remake of The Killers, the byzantine Point Blank, Siegel’s Clint Eastwood movies, Bunny Lake is Missing, Dead Ringer—have been on the whole more successful than the Chandler-based series, though none has had the impact of the original forties pictures.
Many noir conventions have nonetheless had a continuing influence on American film-making: the use of the city; Expressionistic heightening and distortion to create suspense and to convey personality transformation; the notions of the criminal as a complex, divided character and of the criminal possibilities—the potential for violence—within the most seemingly ordinary people. Almost all thrillers since the fifties have some elements of noir, in mood or atmosphere, in acting style, settings, lighting. And the noir look infiltrated other genres as well: Pursued is obvious film noir even though a west-ern, and a costume melodrama like Reign of Terror has distinct noir overtones. Although full-blown films noirs are indeed rare, thrillers with noir echoes, and dramas of various kinds that demonstrate the strength and endurance of the genre’s conventions, continue to appear.
Elliott Gould, as a bedraggled, uncool Philip Marlowe, in Robert Altman’s revisionist version of The Long Goodbye.
The city as a sexual inferno, in two latter-day films noirs: Taxi Driver (with Robert De Niro); Hard Core (with George C. Scott).
Noir conventions were adopted by French film-makers in the fifties and sixties. Godard’s Breathless is certainly a salute to the American crime cycle of the forties, with Jean-Paul Belmondo playing a distinctly Gallic version of the noir loner. And the thrillers of Jean-Pierre Melville are heavily indebted to noir in both visual design and narrative pattern. Melville’s cold, oddly still crime movies have a self-consciously abstract quality that no major studio American thriller would dare risk.
The work of two current film-makers-Paul Schrader and Walter Hill—is especially evocative of the noir strain. Schrader’s familiarity with noir as critic and moviegoer has certainly influenced his own work, particularly in Taxi Driver (for which he wrote the script) and Hard Core (which he wrote as well as directed). In both films the city is a potent dramatic presence. New York in Tax
i Driver is as infested a cityscape as any in the darkest noir of the forties. It seems not only to reflect the loner hero’s terrifying disconnectedness and ferocity, but almost to function as a catalyst for it as well. A place of all-night movies and of sex for sale, the crumbling, dank city is an inferno in which steam drifts up from holes in the street and blinking neon lights perform their own demented dance of death; the city is a symbol of the anti-hero’s tortured state of mind. The night scenes, with Travis’ taxi snaking through the mean streets, have a preternaturally eerie quality. Schrader and the director, Martin Scorsese, make no pretense of presenting New York realistically; only those viewers with the most paranoid sense of what city life is really like could accept the film’s version of the city as true-to-life. The film’s dark city is a city of the imagination—of the Expressionist imagination, with an artistic lineage that can be traced back through the forties to German cinema and painting of the twenties.
Its story is not as compelling as that of Taxi Driver, but Hard Core also renders the city—this time, Los Angeles—as a wicked, corrupting environment, a collection of porn shops and brothels. Schrader, who comes from a strict Midwestern Calvinist family, has a puritan’s riveted fascination with sin. Clearly, in the director’s mind, “the city” is virtually a synonym for sexual wickedness.
Walter Hill (The Driver, The Warriors) is, like Schrader, a neo-Expressionist for whom the city is a rich symbolic backdrop. In The Driver, Hill uses noir conventions in an abstract way that strongly recalls Melville’s cool style. His characters have no names, no inner lives; they are masks. The Driver, who is tops in his field (he drives getaway cars in hold-ups), is a noir loner, hiding out in dumpy downtown hotels. His eyes hidden behind dark glasses, he is a cold, dangerous character, capable of swift violence. His most human contact is in his battle of wits with a compulsive cop who is determined to nail him. In the forties, the Driver would have been killed; but in this modern allegory, he wanders off into the night as his arch-enemy, the Cop, has a fit because once again the Driver has eluded him.
The city is a cold presence in the film, as remote, as abstract, as menacing as the nameless characters. Hill begins and ends his story with spectacular chase sequences through the empty streets of downtown Los Angeles at night, with its mixture of sleek high-rise apartment buildings, its modernistic hotels, and its peeling bars and low-life rooming houses. A movie-smart director, Hill adds to the echoes of classic films noirs by setting much of the action in Union Station, one of the most-used backgrounds in films of the forties. The Driver is a true homage to the genre, a highly stylized and unappreciated contemporary film noir.
Film noir, then, has made a steady contribution to the look of American movies. Visual elements first formulated and developed in noir continue to appear in a variety of crime stories and melodramas. In its heyday, film noir had the best track record of any Hollywood genre. It was hard to go entirely wrong with noir stories, which provided ready-made visual opportunities. Even the thinnest and most purely formulaic examples of the genre had some style and atmosphere. Noir had popular appeal—the stories were usually tense and engrossing—and it allowed for, indeed virtually demanded, some psychological complexity. Dramas of people in crisis, noir illuminated the night world of the other self that bedevils us all. Visually and thematically it was a genre of genuine richness, one that flourished at a particular moment in American history, but one that has had a lasting impact on film style. Noir is being rediscovered on college campuses and in revival theaters, as American cinéastes are finally catching up with the discovery of French critics over twenty-five years ago, that film noir constitutes a body of striking work that represents the American film industry in its most neurotic, subversive, and visually provocative phase. Noir exposes the underside of the American Dream in a mode that mixes German Expressionism with a native hard-boiled realism. In the verve and colloquial tanginess of its dialogue, in its range of provocative themes, in its gallery of taut performances, its studied compositions in light and shadow, its creation of sustained suspense, and its dramatic use of the city, the noir canon is an exemplar of Hollywood craftsmanship at its finest. In the flickering images of a movie screen, film noir seizes and penetrates a universal heart of darkness.
Cars as a place of isolation (Robert De Niro and Martin Scorsese, in Taxi Driver) and as a weapon (in The Driver) in two contemporary thrillers.
Noir in France: Alain Delon as a masked, hard-boiled hero, in Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samourai (1972).
Afterword
Thirty years ago, when I first began to seek noir films in preparation for THE DARK SIDE OF THE SCREEN, videotapes and DVDs were not available. Films from the past had to be seen on television, at repertory theatres and museums, and the Motion Picture Section of the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. Knowing I would have to make several treks to Washington, I applied to my original publisher for travel funds, and I was promptly turned down on the grounds that my subject had “only a limited appeal” and therefore did not warrant any expenditure beyond the miniscule advance. Posterity, of course, has disproved the publisher’s estimate of film noir. Since my book appeared in 1981, noir thrillers from the early 1940s to the late 1950s—the period now referred to as the classic era—have become some of the most admired achievements of Hollywood’s Golden Age. Aficionados attend annual film festivals in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Palm Springs, Seattle, and Santa Fe. Noir novelist and historian Eddie Muller has established the Film Noir Foundation (on which I serve on the Board of Directors) to promote awareness of noir’s legacy as well as to rescue and restore endangered films. Both scholarly and popular books and articles, in addition to a growing number of college courses, testify to noir’s continuing allure. The brand has such box office heft that it sometimes appears, misleadingly, on DVDs of films with only a shaky claim to it.
Classic noir, in short, has passed the test of time triumphantly. Canonic noir dramas (DOUBLE INDEMNITY, LAURA, OUT OF THE PAST, THE LADY FROM SHANGHAI, SUNSET BLVD., THE KILLING, SUDDEN FEAR, TOUCH OF EVIL, THE MALTESE FALCON, SCARLET STREET, NIGHT AND THE CITY, to take a random sampling) are widely acknowledged as authentic homegrown works of popular art. I have screened the best of noir to senior citizens in their eighties and nineties with vast movie-going experience and to teenagers whose knowledge of films barely extended beyond the latest blockbuster, as well as to students and cinephiles in India, China, Israel, Dubai, and Russia. Everywhere, the audiences were enthralled. “Noir” has entered the language. It defines not only a celebrated film movement but also a literary trend, apparent in the numerous short story collections—Brooklyn Noir, London Noir, Berlin Noir, Los Angeles Noir, etc.—that trumpet the label. In popular discourse “noir” describes a frame of mind as well: a philosophical stance, a way of looking at the world. It is also the name of a perfume.
And yet, over a half-century after astute French critics in the postwar era identified a new downbeat texture in American crime movies, there is still not a firm consensus about what noir is. “I know it when I see it,” is a common statement. A good dodge, which I have myself used frequently, is to call a contested film “noir-stained.” Disagreement about noir’s genre status lingers, and some historians argue that “style” or “movement” would be more accurate designations. Despite some qualms, my own sense is to anoint noir as a genre. It’s easier this way and academically it really isn’t irresponsible or slipshod, despite the fact that elements of style associated with noir migrate into other genres. Noirlike lighting and use of space appear in horror and science fiction films as well as in melodramas and the woman’s film. A number of films I looked at while preparing this afterword are not “pure” noir but rather hybrids in which a noir premise is yoked to other concerns. The crimes in STORM WARNING (Stuart Heisler, 1951), for instance, are committed by groups of men in white sheets: the Ku Klux Klan. Embedded into THE SNIPER (Edward Dmytryk, 1952), a film about a serial killer on the loose in San Francisco, is a plea for human
e treatment of the mentally ill. TALK ABOUT A STRANGER (David Bradley, 1952) is an allegory of McCarthy-era witch hunts in which xenophobic small towners try to expel a foreigner. TRY AND GET ME (Cyril Endfield, 1950), about a war veteran who slips into crime, morphs into a diatribe against yellow journalism and lynching.
Is this film noir? A violent Klan member (Steve Cochran) in the “noir-stained” STORM WARNING.
The Dark Side of the Screen: Film Noir Page 24