Noir #2:
Linking
styles:
Mildred
Pierce

Noir #3:
Existentially
yours:
Double
Indemnity

Noir #4:
Innocence
unprotected:
The Killers

Noir #5:
Apocalypse
of modern
life:
Kiss Me
Deadly

Noir #6:
The Rara Avis
of Noir:
Maltese
Falcon

 by Kathryn D’Alessandro

 quick term search in any computer database that accesses entertainment publication reveals the naked truth: American critics, filmmakers, artists, and writers are still obsessed by film noir, nearly 60 years since the form supposedly finished its initial 20-or-so-year run of misogyny, corruption, and moral darkness. Its allure isn’t hard to account for; original noir and its newer offspring explore the tantalizing dark side of the human psyche, maintaining that decay and decline are the natural state of human beings. Happiness is fleeting in noir films; worse yet, it is a cruel illusion, a twist of fate which promises power, sex, and money but which delivers only suffering.
     Besides its psychotic outlook on society and metaphysical concerns, noir is also seductive in its use of visual style to evoke atmosphere and emotion. Noir can be chic and trendy, exploiting an overt, even lush cinematography filled with rain-drenched streets, smoky clubs, sharply-defined silhouettes, and the ubiquitous prison bars created by light cast through Venetian blinds. Noir can be sparse or baroque, harsh, and brutal in its visual evocation of the triumph of evil over good. Distinct contrasts between areas of shadow and brightness, hard edges and textures also shade the universe of noir; the uncompromising simplicity of décor in films like Edgar Ulmer’s Detour (1945) suggests a universe that cloaks its multitudinous complicity in basic black and white.
     One aspect of the artists’ continued fascination with noir is its resistance to definition. Is it a genre? If so, what does one do with Ridley Scott’s science-fiction classic Blade Runner (1982) or Kathryn Bigelow’s horror film, Near Dark (1987)? Is it merely a function of style? That makes it more problematic. Noir has roots in German Expressionism and the Gothic, and definition becomes a question of how much watered-down shadow-and-light one can add to any film before it becomes—or ceases to be—a product of noir. Limiting film noir to a distinct time period also plays mischief with boundaries. Although the 1940s and 1950s are universally identified as the primary residence of classic noir, its influence and characteristics can clearly be identified in newer productions both foreign and domestic: Godard’s Breathless (1960), Polanski’s Chinatown (1974), Hanson’s L.A. Confidential (1997), Nolan’s Memento (2001), and Insomnia (2002) are just a few of the myriad films which proudly link their cinematic DNA to that of classic noir.
     In any case, traditional noir has a decidedly perverse streak when compared to the more cheerful productions usually associated with classical Hollywood’s studio system. Film noir of the 1940s and 1950s was always a razor-thin edge away from the wrath of Hollywood’s censorship force, the Production Code Administration. Good barely triumphed over evil, and usually in the most ironic of fashions. The original ending of Detour intended for the murderer to roam aimlessly, in a personal prison of misery and suffering more tangible than any jail cell. Not permissible, snarled the PCA watchdogs. Thus, writer Martin Goldsmith tacked on an image of a patrol car stopping the disheveled hitchhiker, with the character’s voice-over acknowledging the inevitable hand of fate in his doomed life. In John Huston’s Maltese Falcon (1941), Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart) sleeps with his partner’s wife, gleefully roughs up pathetic schemer Joel Cairo (Peter Lorre), and manages to exude corruption even as he clears himself of wrongdoing at the film’s end. Film noir is the birthplace of the cinema’s male anti-hero, as far from the valorous, self-sacrificing heroic ideal of good as one could possibly be. These men are emotionally cold, ethically ambiguous, cynical, pessimistic, bitter, violent, and angry. Traditionally, film viewers were expected to identify and support characters who were exactly opposite in personality; in noir, however, the Existential suffering of the hero and his lot in life mirror many of the beliefs of the audience. Hollywood censorship could only sugarcoat so much.
     One of the reasons that noir films posed so many problems for PCA censors was their literary and psychological pedigree. Films noir drew from the “trashy” works of American authors like Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler, Cornell Woolrich, and Mickey Spillane. Today, scholars of English and cultural studies examine them for the insights they provide on 20th-century issues such as gender, class, and society. In the ’30s and ’40s, these works had a minimal pedigree; the genteel purveyors of middle class morality found them offensive at best, shocking in the most extreme. Still, those authors’ books were purchased by studios as potential scripts; only after the success of Double Indemnity in 1944—a James M. Cain story published in 1935—did script departments revisit their archives to see what hard-boiled detectives might have become the property of Warner Brothers or Paramount.

oir is an American style, but was first identified as a coherent part of American film production by French critics in the late 1940s. They chose the name in part because of the moral and visual darkness represented in the films, and in part because certain French crime novels, with black covers, were known as serie noire. This interconnection of European and American characteristics goes beyond the name; noir films were heavily influenced by Freudian psychology, European Existentialist philosophies, German Expressionist art, and the Central European artists, filmmakers, and technicians who had fled the Nazis and were now working in Hollywood. Moral chaos and sordid passions, in the guise of films noir, gave voice to international fears brought on by war, cultural change, personal malaise, and a host of modern concerns.
     One of these concerns revolved around the changing dynamic in relationship between women and men. Entering the workforce during WWII, replacing the men who had gone off to fight, women gained confidence in their abilities and a greater desire for personal and economic autonomy. When the male workforce returned, they found subtle—and obvious—differences in the attitudes of girlfriends, wives, and mothers. To many observers, mostly male, the traditional “good” woman, willing to stay at home, raise children, and entrust all decisions to a dominant man, had been subsumed by confident, assertive, even truculent women who no longer felt that their role in life was to be barefoot and pregnant.
     Very few good women find their way into films noir. In these male-centered, psychological thrillers, the most attractive woman is the deadly dangerous spider woman—the infamous femme fatale. Her capacity for seduction foregrounds her aggressive tendencies, and her hunger for money and power, not home and hearth, establishes her as a rival to men, and to traditional masculine roles in society. The moral darkness evinced by the male protagonist is echoed by this corruption of the concept of family. In Double Indemnity, second wife Phyllis (Barbara Stanwyck) marries a much older man (Tom Powers) for his money, after acting as nurse to his ailing first wife, who dies under her care. Phyllis shows no love for stepdaughter Lola (Jean Heather), and sheer contempt for the man she married. Their union is barren. When Phyllis encounters Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray), she uses her seductive wiles upon him; their love is passionate and highly sexual—hence profane in noir terms. This also barren union meets to plan their murder in an arena usually considered domestic, the grocery store—and they make their duplicitous trysts, ironically enough, in the baby-food aisle.
     Sex, misogyny, fate, destiny, corruption, brutality, violence, cynicism, decay: the descriptors for film noir form a litany of humanity’s darkest fears and most perverse pleasures. Modern confusion, the nuclear age, and now, the blight of terrorism in post-9/11 America all promise a continued fascination with the men, women, and chiaroscuro lighting that operate at the Existential heart of film noir’s darkness.

Selected Bibliography

Left, Leonard J. and Jerold L. Simmons. The Dame In the Kimono: Hollywood, Censorship, and the Production Code from the 1920s to the 1960s. New York: Grove Weidenfeld 1990.

Naremore, James. More than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts. Berkeley: University of California Press 1998.

Silver, Alain and James Ursini, editors. Film noir Reader 2. New York: Limelight Editions 1999.