I’m in favor of adopting flexible criteria for admission to the citadel. Although not every movie with a masterful use of chiaroscuro and images of entrapment qualifies as noir, I’d say that a film with a crime scene, a neurotic protagonist, and a menacing atmosphere is on its way to grabbing the prize. Nonetheless, as the canon expands—recognizing a good thing, studios in the classic era made a vast quantity of films that can claim noir rank—it’s wise to maintain common sense. “If it’s noir, it must be good,” is by no means a certainty, and the field is littered with many flaccid rip-offs of classics like DOUBLE INDEMNITY and THE MALTESE FALCON. Still, the number of satisfying noir movies made in the 1940s and 1950s is noteworthy.
Noir’s powerful lure derives, at least in part, from its B status. With a few exceptions, the suspense films we now call noir were intended to be shown without fanfare on the bottom half of double bills. I remember seeing HIGHWAY DRAGNET (Nathan Juran, 1954) as the second feature to SEVEN BRIDES FOR SEVEN BROTHERS; HUMAN DESIRE (Fritz Lang, 1954) in support of THE SILVER CHALICE; NIGHTFALL (Jacques Tourneur, 1957) at the bottom of the bill with BABY DOLL; and THE 3rd VOICE (Hubert Cornfield, 1960), amazingly enough, as the “appetizer” for PORGY AND BESS. In each case, I enjoyed the main attractions, but it was the second features, the films that presumably no one in the audience had come to see and that were being presented as afterthoughts, that caught my attention. Even as a kid I felt the outlaw appeal of the crime pictures. They were a little tawdry, even somehow disreputable, and they could be subversive in ways that the more sanitized A pictures couldn’t get away with.
Noir was better suited for viewing in rundown side-street theatres rather than lavish downtown movie palaces. It was meant to be seen in exactly the kind of grind house once found on the Long Beach, California, boardwalk that had a policy of screening double and sometimes triple bills of B movies—where with a childhood friend I saw a double bill of SHIELD FOR MURDER (Edmond O’Brien and Howard Koch, 1954) and NAKED ALIBI (Jerry Hopper, 1954). It was a rainy Saturday afternoon, gray and misty, and few people were on the boardwalk or in the theatre. The place was run by a disappointed-looking blonde who, as business warranted, moved back and forth between the box office and the candy counter. I remember thinking at the time that a ragged, single-screen side-street theatre like this one, and movies with titles like SHIELD FOR MURDER and NAKED ALIBI, were not long for the world.
In the original edition of THE DARK SIDE OF THE SCREEN, I discussed many of noir’s most famous titles. My intention here in this afterword to the third edition has been to focus on less familiar, often underrated films that, by and large, I had not seen thirty years ago, or had not seen since the 1950s—movies that deserved to be screened alongside the established classics of noir in that long-vanished Long Beach theatre. My hope is that my brief mentions of these solid, mostly uncelebrated movies will provide the reader suggestions for further viewing.
Because of videotapes and DVDs, I didn’t have to go to the Library of Congress this time. However, a number of the films I discuss here are rarities I had to obtain from generous private collectors. The sometimes flawed, “wounded” condition of some of the DVDs enhanced the renegade aura of the films themselves. And consuming them in the dead of night, as I often did, underscored their guilty-pleasure aroma.
Frequently guided by recommendations of colleagues-in-noir, I had no set agenda, though at first I thought I might include films from the post-classic period, the 1960s and beyond, to ratify noir’s durability and to challenge the familiar claim that noir “expired” with TOUCH OF EVIL in 1958. But isn’t it obvious by now that by whatever name they are known, whether neo-noir or post-classic noir or just plain noir, and despite the incorporation of color, wide screen, staccato MTV-style editing, profanity, and hyperactive action sequences, psychological crime dramas have continued to be made up to the present? Besides, in DETOURS AND LOST HIGHWAYS: A MAP OF NEO-NOIR (1999), I had devoted a book-length study to the genre’s lengthy and ongoing evolution. I soon settled on the early 1960s as my unofficial cut-off date.
While watching many pictures from the classic era I was struck by the still-potent attraction of noir’s visual repertoire. An arrangement of light and shadow on a deserted, rain-swept nighttime street; a femme fatale languidly smoking a cigarette in a half-opened doorway; oblique low-angle ceiling shots in which space seems to be closing in on the characters; disorienting high-angle shots that underline the vulnerability of victims racing toward doom; mirrors, banisters, bedposts, windowpanes, and cars that create imprisoning frames within the frame; flashing neon lights that reflect the agitation of characters and circumstances; slanted shadows of venetian blinds on practically every wall and surface—these never failed to elicit my admiration and enjoyment.
Over and again in this group of films that were mostly new to me, I noted the expressive use of settings rippling with apprehension that seemed made to order for noir. Tunnels entrap characters in CRY TERROR! (Andrew L. Stone, 1958), HE WALKED BY NIGHT (Alfred Werker with Anthony Mann [uncredited], 1949), and BLAST OF SILENCE (Allen Baron, 1961). Amusement parks beckon menacingly in THE BURGLAR (Paul Wendkos, 1957), QUICKSAND (Irving Pichel, 1950), THE SNIPER, and WOMAN ON THE RUN (Norman Foster, 1950). The narrow stairways and corridors of rooming houses in WOMAN ON THE RUN and QUICKSAND, the rundown isolated shacks in BLAST OF SILENCE and THE BURGLAR, seem to be crawling with intimidation. Public plunges in HE RAN ALL THE WAY (John Berry, 1951) and SHIELD FOR MURDER; confined diners and cocktail bars in QUICKSAND and APPOINTMENT WITH A SHADOW (Richard Carlson, 1957); gas stations on lonely nighttime highways in HIGHWAY 301 (Andrew L. Stone [credited as Andrew Stone], 1950) and THE DEVIL THUMBS A RIDE (Felix Feist, 1947); mad-houses with prisonlike bars and shadows in WITNESS TO MURDER (Roy Rowland, 1954) and THE SECRET FURY (Mel Ferrer, 1950); burlesque theatres in APPOINTMENT WITH A SHADOW, ARMORED CAR ROBBERY (Richard Fleischer, 1950), and WHERE DANGER LIVES (John Farrow, 1950)—each emits a rich noir fragrance.
A shadowy corridor in a rundown rooming house evokes tension and menace in WOMAN ON THE RUN (with Ann Sheridan and Robert Keith).
An always-atmospheric setting, confirmed by many of the films I saw, is Mexico, noir’s eternal Great Wrong Place toward which criminals on the lam reflexively head. In WHERE DANGER LIVES, ONE WAY STREET (Hugo Fregonese, 1950), and TOO LATE FOR TEARS (Byron Haskin, 1949), among others, Mexico beckons as a site beyond the claims of justice and morality. Border City, just on the edge of Mexico in NAKED ALIBI, with myriad twinkling lights, hole-in-the-wall rooms, and brothel-like bars, is exactly the kind of haven noir’s fugitives seek: it’s neither here nor there. Even for the innocent family vacationers in JEOPARDY (John Sturges, 1952),Mexico, ever an invitation to noir, looms with sudden danger.
Thirty years ago I preferred the manufactured, handmade look of studio thrillers to the open-air location shooting that began to appear in the late 1940s and early 1950s. This time, I noted with surprise that I was often more attracted to films shot on real city streets than to the ones that created imaginary cityscapes. To be sure, the studio-made urban settings of the high 1940s, reflecting the anxieties of a nation during and directly after wartime, exude a nightmarish atmosphere I still enjoyed. The dense, ebony “Havana” in THE CHASE (Arthur Ripley, 1946), for instance, where sudden danger lurks at the top of every staircase and at the end of every cul-de-sac, is a knockout. But I discovered that the use of desert locations in INFERNO (Roy Ward Baker, 1953), HIGHWAY DRAGNET, and THE NIGHT HOLDS TERROR (Andrew L. Stone, 1955); of the Louisiana bayous in CRY OF THE HUNTED (Joseph H. Lewis, 1953) and LURE OF THE SWAMP (Hubert Cornfield, 1957); of Carmel, California, where waves crash against primeval-looking giant rocks in JULIE (Andrew L. Stone, 1956); and of the canyons and valleys of San Francisco, a city made for noir, in THE SNIPER, and of downtown Los Angeles in CRIME WAVE (Andre DeToth, 1954), attains a distinctively menacing aura. When noir erupts in the bland, realistically rendered suburban houses and small towns in 1950s thrillers like TA
LK ABOUT A STRANGER, CRIME OF PASSION (Gerd Oswald, 1957), THE NIGHT HOLDS TERROR, and CAUSE FOR ALARM (Tay Garnett, 1951), a chilling point is made that no one, not even your wife or husband, not even yourself, and no place, not even your own street or your own house, is immune from crime.
Location shooting in the 1950s: a bank holdup in HIGHWAY 301 at high noon on a real city street; a serial killer (Arthur Franz) on the prowl in San Francisco, in THE SNIPER; a desperate hitchhiker in the Mojave Desert and the two women who pick him up (Richard Conte, Wanda Hendrix,and Joan Bennett), in HIGHWAY DRAGNET.
Although in their visual portfolio the films I saw held up beautifully, I was sometimes disappointed by two storytelling pitfalls. With their pulp fiction roots, noir’s tricky and often serpentine narratives often depend on coincidence, chance, eavesdropping, and gaps in logic and probability. Although I’m usually willing to allow atmosphere to trump coherent plotting, there are limits, and sometimes I felt my readiness to suspend disbelief was challenged to near breaking point. For instance, in two solid films that I watched, TENSION (John Berry, 1950) and HOLLOW TRIUMPH (Steve Sekely, 1948), the protagonists change identities with minimal strokes. In the former, a meek pharmacist (Richard Basehart), intent on killing his wife’s lover, replaces his glasses with contact lenses, changes his name, and moves to a new apartment. In the latter, a criminal on the run (Paul Henreid) transforms himself into a look-alike therapist by giving himself the therapist’s facial scar. And in both films characters who should know better seem to buy the disguise. In JULIE, we’re expected to believe that a stewardess (Doris Day) with no prior experience is able to land an airplane. Sometimes, as in THE CHASE, a story that seems to be edging over the cliff attempts to save itself with the “alibi” that we’ve been watching a dream.
In a number of the films I saw, I noted a retreat from noir in the last act, when happy endings were bestowed on characters marked by the logic of the narrative and the mise-en-scène for collisions with disaster. In THE ACCUSED (William Dieterle, 1949), for instance, a prim college professor (Loretta Young) is acquitted of a crime—causing the death of a student who has tried to seduce her—of which I’m not sure she is entirely innocent. The upbeat finale isn’t presented as a problem for the viewer to meditate on, or as a miscarriage of justice, but rather as a tribute to the star iconography of Loretta Young.
In SHOCKPROOF (Douglas Sirk, 1949) and TOMORROW IS ANOTHER DAY (Felix Feist, 1951), couples on the lam are saved at the last minute by deathbed confessions of criminals. Death and catastrophe as the inevitable fate for every noir antihero would be wearying, of course; but unless firmly justified, reprieves in Act Three violate the genre’s heart of darkness. True noir doesn’t fade out on smiles and kisses.
In this low-angle ceiling shot, space seems to be closing in on a worried father (James Mason) held hostage by kidnappers (Jack Klugman and Angie Dickinson), in CRY TERROR!
I thought that an efficient way to discuss the (far too many) films I saw in preparing this brief update would be to group them according to how the leading characters at the beginning of the story line up on a scale from innocence to guilt. To be sure, “innocence” in noir is a virtual impossibility, usually a mirage or charade. But it was one of noir’s defining elements that crimes are committed not by hard-core gangsters but by seemingly decent, hence “innocent” middle-class citizens lured into antisocial behavior by greed, lust, or mischance.
The most innocent characters in the films I viewed may be the bourgeois Courtier family overtaken by kidnappers in THE NIGHT HOLDS TERROR. In a reckless, irreversible moment driving home through the Mojave Desert, Gene Courtier (Jack Kelly), an average family man without a trace of an inner criminal waiting to spring to life, decides to pick up a hitchhiker (Vince Edwards). With two thuggish accomplices, the hitchhiker pushes his way into the Courtiers’ suburban home. Because the straight-arrow husband and his equally staunch wife (Hildy Parks) never default, the film maintains an immaculate separation between the forces of good and evil—a genre rarity. This ground-zero noir is a thriller with no aim other than constructing a mechanism for generating suspense.
A criminal group overtakes another homogenized suburban family in Andrew L. Stone’s equally taut CRY TERROR!. But this time the sudden disruption is not random. The head of the family (James Mason) is a scientist who worries that he has unwittingly helped the criminals (led by Rod Steiger) develop a small-scale bomb with which they threaten to blow up planes. (In this preterrorist thriller, the kidnappers are motivated not by politics but by simple greed.) Faced with calamity, the husband and his wife prove to be resourceful escape artists who remain committed to their middle-class ideals. Thrillers about unsullied innocents usually aren’t much fun (and at heart are antinoir), but in assembling these two swift, deadpan kidnapping stories, Andrew L. Stone, with the help of his editor-wife Virginia, is supremely skillful. He tops my list of noir auteurs ripe for long-overdue tribute.
For many noir historians (including me), it has been convenient to account for the genre’s preoccupation with stories of masculinity under attack as reflecting the social realignments of wartime America, with men absent from home while away at the front as women became breadwinners and de facto heads of households. A central project of noir, after all, is to undermine the competence and certainty of male protagonists.
The silhouetted figure of a man on crutches that appears under the titles of DOUBLE INDEMNITY casts a long shadow over the genre’s iconography, and in my noir samples I noted the frequent use of images of impotence. At the beginning of DEAD RECKONING (John Cromwell, 1947), the hero has a badly bruised face; at the end his arm is in a cast. The apologetic pharmacist in TENSION wears glasses. The beleaguered protagonist of SUDDEN DANGER (Hubert Cornfield, 1955) is blind. An avenging soldier in ACT OF VIOLENCE (Fred Zinnemann, 1949) limps. The criminal mastermind in HOLLOW TRIUMPH has a deep facial scar. The veteran in THE CHASE is a pill-popping pauper who suffers from bouts of amnesia. Over and over, sexually unstable characters wield guns of varying sizes—the biggest gun as phallic surrogate in the films I saw was the one held in a tight grip by a serial killer of women in THE SNIPER.
The veteran, suffering from wounds both external and internal, his masculinity as well as his “innocence” under far greater threat in the dark cities of postwar noir than it ever was on foreign battlegrounds, is one of noir’s most vulnerable figures. Separated from the regimented environment of men-in-combat to which he had grown accustomed, he is a sitting target. DEAD RECKONING may be the genre’s most cunning look at the challenges faced by the veteran. Rip Murdock (Humphrey Bogart), conducting an investigation into the sudden disappearance and death of his wartime buddy Johnny, behaves as if he’s on a search-and-rescue mission behind enemy lines; in a bizarre scene he tosses hand grenades into a gangster’s headquarters. In the noir city, he must confront the greatest of all challenges to his male ego: Johnny’s former girlfriend Coral Chandler (Lizabeth Scott). Never quite sure about her—he is alternately repelled and attracted—he tries to defuse her allure by making her one of the guys. “Mike,” he calls her as he enlists her help in solving his friend’s death. Yes, he loves her, he admits grudgingly at the end. But in a final stab at reclaiming his masculine authority after she pulls a gun on him, he says he loved Johnny more.
The veterans in THE CHASE, ACT OF VIOLENCE, and TRY AND GET ME seem predestined for a rapid descent into noir whirlpools. As if by magic, in the opening scene of THE CHASE Chuck Scott (Robert Cummings) finds a wallet at his feet that leads him to the lair of sadistic gangster Eddie Roman (Steve Cochran). When Scott enters Roman’s baroque mansion, the walls are streaked with weblike shadows that presage his entrapment. Interestingly, in THE BLACK PATH OF FEAR, the novel by Cornell Woolrich on which the film is based, the character is the victim of an unsparing destiny: wrongly accused of fatally stabbing his mistress, he is murdered by the actual killer. In 1946, when the film was released, the character’s death would have seemed unpatriotic, hence his
dark destiny is phrased merely as a dream and withdrawn.
A few years later, however, the veteran in ACT OF VIOLENCE is not spared. He is also not as “innocent” as the one in THE CHASE. When Joe Parkson (Robert Ryan), a man from his wartime past begins to stalk him, Frank Enley (Van Heflin) runs from the safety of his suburban home and family to take refuge in an inner city, noir-striped underworld of hit men and downtrodden women of the night. Feeling guilty for a fateful choice (he betrayed the men in his unit when he revealed their escape plans to a Nazi commandant in the mistaken belief that he would be saving his men from certain death), he sacrifices his life to save his nemesis. Powerfully directed by Fred Zinnemann in his only noir drama, ACT OF VIOLENCE is among the genre’s most thematically far-reaching efforts.
Masculinity under threat: a hard-boiled wife (Audrey Totter) glares at her husband, a pharmacist who wears glasses (Richard Basehart), in TENSION; the blind protagonist (Tom Drake) in SUDDEN DANGER is about to enter a crime scene; the scarred criminal mastermind (Paul Henreid, with Joan Bennett), in a frame within the frame, in HOLLOW TRIUMPH.
Slanted shadows on the walls and his placement between two threatening men (Peter Lorre, left, and James Westerfield) augur doom for the veteran (Robert Cummings), in THE CHASE.
Like returning soldiers, ex-cons trailing a guilty aura yet trying to recover from a criminal past are also prime candidates for noir reversals. After eighteen years in prison, Bill Clark (Steve Cochran) in TOMORROW IS ANOTHER DAY resembles a veteran in postwar noir: disoriented, ill at ease in the civilian world, and behaving as if he has something to hide. Sprung, he strikes out for noir city, represented by a dance hall with blinking lights and a grimy rooming house. When Bill feels cornered, he responds as he always has: violently. After he mistakenly thinks he has killed a crooked cop, he and his dime-a-dance girlfriend (Ruth Roman) escape from the city. Bill becomes a migrant worker, and the fugitive couple lives in a community that seems to be imported from THE GRAPES OF WRATH. As always in noir, however, the claims of the past are relentless; Bill’s picture is in the papers, and the authorities move in on him. Steve Cochran (my nominee for noir’s finest unsung actor) plays the character with a fetching naïveté, a hard-core innocence, that redeems a contrived happy ending.
The Dark Side of the Screen: Film Noir Page 25