Sheri Chinen Biesen
BLACKOUT
World War Two and the origins of film noir
241pp. Johns Hopkins University Press. £33.50.
0 8018 8217 6
Edward Dimendberg
FILM NOIR AND THE SPACES OF MODERNITY
327pp. Harvard University Press. £38.95.
0 674 01346 8
The term “film noir” was coined in 1946 by the French critic Nino Frank, as a variation on “roman noir”, which is what the French have been calling the British Gothic novel since the eighteenth century. He used it in an essay for L’Ecran français while trying to come to terms with the flood of dark, pessimistic Hollywood movies made between 1940 and 1945 that arrived in liberated Paris. He and others were surprised to discover that films produced under the German Occupation were not that different from those being made in Hollywood. Indeed, immediately after the Second World War, RKO remade Marcel Carné’s bleak, poetic-realist Le Jour Se lève as The Long Night, with Henry Fonda replacing Jean Gabin, and the original withdrawn from distribution for a decade. Later, the most controversial French picture of the war years – Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Le Corbeau (1943), a tale of the corrosive effects of poison-pen letters in a provincial town – was remade as The 13th Letter (1951) by Otto Preminger, a key exponent of film noir. It is forgotten now that Nino Frank preferred Citizen Kane, How Green Was My Valley and The Little Foxes to Double Indemnity, Laura, The Maltese Falcon and Murder My Sweet (aka Farewell My Lovely), which are now regarded as noir masterworks.
A decade after Frank’s seminal essay, Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton published their highly influential Panorama du film noir américain 1941–1953, though forty-four years passed before it was translated into English. In fact, the term “film noir” didn’t become current in the English-speaking world until the late 1960s, a decade that saw a proliferation of film schools across America and a radical revision of Hollywood history, resulting largely from the writings of the French critics-turned-moviemakers who created the nouvelle vague. In 1972, when I was at the University of Texas, a member of the film department dropped into my office to discuss his plans for a course on film noir. He wanted to find out if I knew of any articles on the subject that hadn’t come to his attention. There were not many in English at that time (one of them was a surprisingly hostile attack on the genre by Julian Maclaren-Ross, writing anonymously in a 1947 edition of Penguin New Writing), and as yet no book in English. Now there’s a shelf of them, to which can be added two studies of specialist areas by Sheri Chinen Biesen and Edward Dimendberg.
Biesen and Dimendberg agree that whatever film noir is – a movement, a style, a phase, a genre, a subgenre? – its classical period was roughly from 1941 to the late 50s, which is to say from Orson Welles’s first Hollywood movie, Citizen Kane, to the last one he directed there, A Touch of Evil. It is an indication of how a certain consensus has grown up that while Biesen and Dimendberg confirm Borde and Chaumeton’s view that the movement really got under way in 1941, with The Maltese Falcon, directed by John Huston, both nominate as the first authentic Hollywood film noir Stranger on the Third Floor, which the French writers had evidently not seen. Directed by the Russian émigré Boris Ingster, this story of a reporter getting an innocent man convicted of murder, before himself becoming a murder suspect, has most of the essential ingredients. These include a foreign director, high-contrast black-and-white photography, menacing streets, dark, drab interiors with an emphasis on shadows and staircases, a disturbed protagonist who experiences an Expressionist nightmare (one of the cinema’s most remarkable dream sequences), a general sense of urban malaise, and two actors from an emerging noir repertory company, Elisha Cook Jr, the genre’s favourite fall guy, and Peter Lorre, more or less reprising his role as a psychopathic killer from Fritz Lang’s M. But Stranger on the Third Floor was a box-office failure in 1940 and a little ahead of its time.
Biesen’s Blackout sees a number of factors coming together to create the noir style, some of them familiar, others less so. First, the rise of Hitler had driven the most gifted German cinema filmmakers into exile, and they brought to Hollywood the legacy of German Expressionism, the roots of which were mostly to be found in German Romanticism. Second, the hard-boiled school of writing created in the 1920s by Ernest Hemingway came to Hollywood by way of Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler and lesser pulp writers. Third, psychology and psychoanalysis in their popular and perverse forms entered American cinema in the late 1930s (Welles called the Rosebud motif in Citizen Kane “dollar-book Freud”). Fourth, the politicized atmosphere of the late Depression merged with the storm clouds of the Second World War in 1941. Fifth, after Pearl Harbor, the major studios were pinched financially with the loss of the Continental European market, and were affected by the rationing of material for sets, limited power resources, enforced blackouts, and restrictions placed on daytime location shooting for security reasons. In the early 1940s, Californians and their leaders truly believed some sort of Japanese invasion was imminent, and xenophobia directed at aliens of any stripe was widespread.
This combustible brew was accompanied by some relaxation of censorship, around which a generation of suave filmmakers had learnt to manoeuvre. The word “gunsel”, for instance, means catamite, but, when used in The Maltese Falcon, the Production Code administrators thought it meant a gunman or bodyguard and let it through. Further, when the Roosevelt Government’s Office of War Information (OWI) set up a Hollywood office to see that movies carried positive, patriotic messages, filmmakers sought to create a genre that appeared detached from the war, yet provided a provocative form of violent, erotic entertainment that could be a conduit for current anxieties about, for example, the empowerment of women and the absence of men serving in the military. Also, old actors came into their own when younger ones went to war, and some careers were crucially changed. The light comedian Fred MacMurray, movie representative of the decent average Joe, was cast as a weak, easily corrupted insurance man led into murder by femme fatale Barbara Stanwyck in Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity. The screen persona of sweet-natured song-and-dance man Dick Powell was changed overnight when he was cast as Chandler’s hardboiled private eye Philip Marlowe in Farewell My Lovely.
Biesen uses her research into studio archives, the films’ attendant publicity and the contemporary press to bring alive the wartime period of film noir and its transformation into a post-war genre for dealing with troubled veterans returning home, the coming of the Cold War, nuclear angst and the effects of McCarthyism on Hollywood and the nation at large. She tells us of the public demand for “red meat” entertainment, and the desire of Hollywood to provide it, something amusingly expressed through tag-lines thought up by the advertising departments – “Menace Behind Every Shadow, Suspense in Every Move” (Ministry of Fear), “The kind of Woman most men want – BUT SHOULDN’T HAVE!” (Mildred Pierce). This was escapist entertainment of an unusual kind – a brief escape into nightmares. Yet it came from serious social critics – European émigrés not exactly happy in America, and left-wing talents discontented with the capitalist system, its exploiters and victims. Edward Dmytryk, Canadian son of Ukrainian immigrants, worked his way up in the cinema business from studio messenger boy to make Farewell My Lovely. He followed this with two other crucial noir pictures, Cornered (1945), about war crimes and neo-Nazism, and Crossfire (1947), centring on returning veterans and post-war anti-Semitism. He was one of the Hollywood Ten, left-wing filmmakers jailed for refusing to cooperate with the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). Unlike the others, he emerged from prison to reappear before HUAC, name former Communist associates and go back to work, making large-scale anti-Communist and conformist potboilers. But in 1965 he directed Mirage, an undervalued noir thriller, shot in black-and-white, turning on one of the genre’s favourite themes, amnesia, and indicting the military-industrial establishment which Dwight D. Eisenhower had warned against in one of his final speeches as President. It helped open the way for a new kind of political cinema that was to include such post-Watergate movies as The Parallax View and Three Days of the Condor.
Though somewhat repetitious, Biesen’s book is readable, informative and jargon free. Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity by Edward Dimendberg, who teaches film and architectural theory at the University of Michigan, is dense, bordering on the opaque. Filmgoers interested in learning about architecture, urban life and the cinema would be better advised to read James Sanders’s superb Celluloid Skyline: New York and the movies. Dimendberg’s concern is with the way film noir exploits our sense of anomie and alienation through its representation of the city and its varied spaces, the manner in which we are disturbed by the intrusion of the modern and its practitioners, and our nostalgia for a vanishing past and the sense of community it once represented. He draws on an immense range of professional and speculative thinkers from Le Corbusier to Jean-Paul Sartre, and most clearly states his fascination with the genre when he writes:
“As a prominent example of twentieth-century American popular culture set in the metropolis, a feature it shares with the contemporaneous forms of jazz and hardboiled fiction, film noir remains unique for its engagement with urban subject matter more often encountered in social and architectural histories than Hollywood narrative film.”
Dimendberg is capable of going for seventeen pages talking about architects, designers and theorists such as Lewis Mumford, Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, Siegfried Giedion and Norman Bel Geddes without mentioning a single movie. He even ignores the fact that Bel Geddes’s daughter Barbara appeared in such noir classics as The Long Night, directed by Anatole Litvak, Max Ophuls’s Caught, Elia Kazan’s Panic in the Streets and Hitchcock’s Vertigo. Still, there is much of value in Dimendberg’s book, including nuggets such as the suggestive notion that the recurrence of figures falling to their deaths from high-rise buildings is an instance of “Bernd Jager’s assertion that falling entails a loss of lived space”. He is at his best when analysing individual films, as in the extended comparison between the sensational New York photographs by Weegee in his book The Naked City and the realistic film noir of the same name.
Dimendberg is little interested in films that render New York as one of the world’s most desirable and romantic cities. Vincente Minnelli’s Judy Garland romance The Clock sticks in the mind as persuasively as John Farrow’s menacing film The Big Clock, both equally
authentic depictions of Manhattan. When Woody Allen wanted to make an oppressive picture of urban menace he didn’t attempt to present his beloved New York in a different light. Instead, in Shadows and Fog, he recreated an Expressionistic 1920s Weimar Germany.
Both Sheri Biesen and Edward Dimendberg recognize the amorphous nature of film noir, and note the phenomenon of neo-noir. But, clinging to their personal theses, they avoid looking at the noir western (Robert Mitchum in Raoul Walsh’s Pursued, Dick Powell in Stations West) or the way neo-noir in its Technicolor form began as early as the 1953 Niagara, the film that made Marilyn Monroe a true star, while the futuristic Blade Runner (1982) gets a single mention. These authors also ignore foreign examples, though they occur significantly in the period their books cover. In Britain, for instance, there is Alberto Cavalcanti’s They Made Me a Fugitive (1946) and Carol Reed’s Odd Man Out (1947) and The Third Man (1949).
Most missed perhaps in these books is humour: the wisecrack, the ironic observation, the witty remark in the extended voice-over narration that became a characteristic of the genre. It would have been good to hear something of Bob Hope’s clever spoof of the noir thriller My Favourite Brunette (1947) and Carl Reiner’s Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid (1982), in which Steve Martin plays a 1940s private eye whose investigations ingeniously draw together clips from a dozen or more 1940s noir thrillers from several studios. Apart from their entertainment value, these movies attest to and confirm the way film noir impinged on, and was playfully received by, its audience.
