Film Noir

In all likelihood the primary reason for my love of the movies of the 1940s and 1950s is a type of film called film noir.  The bumper crop of them was dispatched in some abundance in those two decades.  Another tack is to perhaps say the period from John Huston's The Maltese Falcon (1941) to Orson Welles' Touch of Evil (1958).  Some might not consider either of those films as film noir, but I do.  What we can be certain of, oddly enough, is that even the high-minded film scholars don't always agree on what film noir is. 

I call it a genre, but not everyone refers to it as that either.  A number of the earlier noir films were not even called that.  More or less they were simply regarded as melodramas.  The term film noir seems to have evolved over a bit of time.  And what attracted one's attention was in noticing a style of filmmaking that had been gathering steam (and steaminess).  That style was seen in new lighting techniques, including mood, a certain look and also in a similar type of storylines, such as those involving psychological conflict, paranoia, fate and moral ambiguity. 

The roots of film noir come from German expressionist cinematography.  It was a new visual style with respect to camerawork (angles, framing, etc.) and unbalanced composition (unusual placement of things) and lighting.  The lighting was low-key, shades of blacks and whites (the term film noir is French for black film), often taking place at night, on wet streets, usually in New York, Chicago, L.A., San Francisco.  Inside shots were stark, economical, drab.



Jean Wallace & Cornel Wilde at the finale of The Big Combo

There was often great use of fog and shadows to create mystery and ambivalence.  New camera angles were used to show faces partially obscured in darkness; perhaps venetian blind shadows were shown across faces.  The duration of camera shots were different from the past, the movements could be more sudden.

I think an example of this sort of camerawork and lighting is Citizen Kane (1941), its black and white images are considered as dazzling today as when the film was first released.  It is not considered a true noir because, although it has the visual part, it does not have the thematic one.

And that theme is crime.  Whether about cops or private eyes (both a staple) or femme fatales or others, everyone is hard.  Many are tough, cynical, greedy, cruel.  Jealousy runs rampant.  So does murder and sex (in the 1940/50s way of doing things, mind you) and everyone but everyone smokes cigarettes.  There is a foreboding nature to the entire proceedings.  Someone has an inescapable past and seemingly nowhere to go.  Trust someone and then deal with regret.  Pessimism and a good bottle of scotch are around every corner.

Oddly, a feature of film noir is often convoluted stories.  Among the very finest is The Big Sleep (1946), the Bogie-Bacall-starrer where half the time one wasn't sure what is going on and it isn't much different at the end when you decide you don't really care whether it all makes sense... you just know it's been a wonderful sleep.

Another feature that identifies noir is the narration generally in the first person.  That voiceover could be helpful to us in filling in the gaps not shown but it could also be ambivalent.  

It was only natural that as film noir blossomed crime writers such as Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett and James M. Cain came aboard either as screenwriters and/or having their own novels made into films.  Coming from one or the other of these three superb writers were such outstanding film noirs as The Maltese Falcon (1941), The Glass Key (1942), Double Indemnity and Murder My Sweet (1944), Mildred Pierce (1945), The Blue Dahlia and The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946) and Strangers on a Train (1951).  

Also worth mentioning (so hard to mention some and leave out others but my aching fingertips and your patience win out here) are Fallen Angel (1945), The Killers and The Dark Corner (1946), Nightmare Alley, Crossfire and Kiss of Death (1947), In a Lonely Place (1950), Angel Face and a little B-movie gem called Narrow Margin (1952) and Pickup on South Street (1953).

A number of these films will be discussed in future posts but let's unveil four of my favorites alphabetically.  Get a pencil and paper.  If you haven't seen any of them, correct that.  If you live near me, come over.  I own them.  I'll cook.
 


Gloria Grahame knows the meaning of The Big Heat

                                              
Fritz Lang's superb 1953 pearl, The Big Heat starring noir veterans Glenn Ford and Gloria Grahame, is a honey.  You may have to run out and catch your breath after it concludes.  If you've seen it you have never forgotten Lee Marvin throwing a pot of boiling coffee in Grahame's face.  Nearly all of these characters are as hard-boiled as they come.  Ford plays a cop investigating mobsters at his personal peril.  A film noir staple, the bad girl, is here in spades.

 


Rita Hayworth and her frequent costar Glenn Ford in Gilda

And then there's Gilda (1946), a legendary film for its leading lady, Rita Hayworth and (again) Glenn Ford.  She has a screen entrance that is as memorable as they come.  One thing that sells this noir is sex.  Few female characters have ever been so alluring.  Hayworth really works it for the Put the Blame on Mame minor striptease number.  Grrrrr.  Ford has never been better.  What a team these 5-time costars made.  They play former and bitter ex-lovers in South America.  She is married to a powerful man she doesn't love and Ford goes to work in her jealous husband's gambling palace.  It gets tense and you know it's aided by camerawork rife with shadows and mystery and dread.





Dana Andrews falling for the haunting Laura

I'm very sentimental about Otto Preminger's 1944 classic Laura.  (Hmm, another film titled with a woman's first name.  What does it mean?)  Old autocratic Otto is perhaps the noir director supremo.  Laura comes from a popular novel, features a haunting score, is photographed in black and white brilliance. 

It features one of the best ensemble casts from that era in the form of Gene Tierney, Dana Andrews, Clifton Webb, Vincent Price and Judith Anderson.  The story is of a hardbitten cop who falls in love with the beautiful woman whose death he is investigating.  We watch him moon for her as he stares at her portrait.  I've always believed that the film is as popular as it was because as the cop falls in love with Laura, so have we.  




Out of the Past with noir icons Mitchum and Greer

Out of the Past, director Jacques Tourneur's 1947 story of a cynical private dick and the baddest of the bad girls he's hired to find, is for a lot of people, the very essence of film noir.  It has narration, flashbacks, fabulous shadowy photography, a fatalistic mood, sex, cruelty, morally-corrupt characters, greed, jealousy, confusion and all the rest. And everyone smokes!  It also has noir icon Robert Mitchum at his best and Jane Greer in one of the great femme fatale roles you could ever hope to see. 

Along with Mitchum, Greer, Hayworth, Ford, Grahame, Andrews, Webb and Tierney, there are other actors closely identified with film noir... Robert Ryan, Lizabeth Scott, Richard Widmark, Barbara Stanwyck, Humphrey Bogart, Dick Powell, Burt Lancaster, Alan Ladd, Veronica Lake, Audrey Totter, Claire Trevor, Raymond Burr to name a few.  Their work in this genre is worth a gander.

In addition to Lang, Preminger and Tourneur, there are other directors whose contributions to the genre that should not go unmentioned.  Hitchcock, Orson Welles, John Huston, Henry Hathaway, John Cromwell and Nicholas Ray turned in some exciting work.  It would be wrong to not recognize Robert Siodmak whom I would consider a godfather of noir for his consistent work in the genre and who brought along his Expressionist techniques from his native Germany.

Film noir has continued outside the classic period (and outside America as well).  A few of the ones that have caught my eye are Chinatown (1974), Body Heat (1981), Black Widow (1982) and L.A. Confidential (1997).  Later films had one thing about them that the earlier ones did not and that is color.  Leave Her to Heaven (1945) is a notable exception.  These are sometimes referred to as neo-noir.

Again, not everyone, in or out of the industry, has always agreed on what film noir is.  Sometimes this or that element is missing but what seems most apparent is that film noirs are stylish crime stories.  Film historian Mark Bould says it remains an elusive phenomenon... always just out of reach.