Film Noir

Towards a Definition of Film Noir

by Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton (1955)

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Excerpt from the book Panorama du Film Noir Americain

First Five Film Noirs

Parisian screens showed the following films during the summer of 1946, in which they all shared a strange and violent tone, tinged with a unique kind of eroticism.

1. John Huston's The Maltese Falcon
2. Otto Premingers Laura
3. Edward Dmytryk's Murder, My Sweet
4. Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity
5. Fritz Lang's The Woman in the Window

It was hard for the French to truly understand these films because they had been cut off from American films during the war. Nino Frank, one of the first to speek of "dark films," discerned from the first the basic traits of the noir "The Maltese Falcon and Double Indemnity belong to what we used to call the police genre but that we should more appropriately describe from now on by the term 're criminal adventure' or, better still, 're criminal psychology." These ideas were shared by other genre critics who failed to grasp the full impact of these releases.

A few months later Frank Tuttles This Gun for Hire, Robert Siodmak's The Killers, Robert Montgomery's Private detectives the Lake, Charlse Vidor's Gilda, and Howard Hawk's The Big Sleep imposed the concept of film noir on moviegoers. A new "series" had emerged in the history of film.

A series:

• Is a group of motion pictures from one country sharing certain traits (style, atmosphere, subject matter, etc) strongly enough to mark them unequivocally and to give them, over time, an unmistakable character.
• Usually consists for two to maybe ten years.
• They reach a peak, a moment of purest expresses, then slowly fade and disappear leaving traces and informal sequels in other genres.

The existence over the last few years of a "serie noir" in Hollywood is obvious. Defining its essential traits is another matter.

If the problem is simplified we could assign traits such as nightmarish, weird, erotic, ambivalent, and cruel. All these exist in the series; but one moment, reverie may dominate and the result is Shanghai Gesture, at another, eroticism comes to the fore in Gilda. Often the noir aspect of a film is linked to a character, a scene, a setting. The Set-up is a good documentary on boxing, it becomes a film noir in the sequence when scores are settled by a savage beating in a blind alley. Rope is a psychological melodrama which attaches itself to film noir through its intriguing sadism. The Big Sleep, This Gun for Hire, and The Lady in the Lake seem to be "thrillers." We begin to see the problem of definition by discussing the pictures which critics have most often dubbed "film noirs."

Films created by their directors, their themes

• John Huston - the theme of failure
• Raoul Walsh - the theme of violence
• Dassin - the theme of urban realism
• Sternburg - never strayed far from exotic sensuality

The noir film is black for us, that is, specifically for the Westen and American moviegoers of the 1950s. it exists in response to a certain mood at large in this particular time and place. Accordingly ones who seeks the root of the "style" must think in terms of an affected and possibly ephemeral reaction to a movement in history. This is what links productions as diverse as The Shanghai Gesture and The Asphalt Jungle.

From this vantage, the method is obvious, while remaining as scientifically and objectively grounded as possible, one must examine the most prominent characteristics of the films which critics has classified as noir. From these characteristics one may then derive the common denominator and define that unique expressive attitude which all these works put into play.

Film noir's most constant element is its presence of crime. "The dynamism of violent death," is how Nino Frank evoked it, and the point is well taken. Blackmail, accusation, theft, or drug trafficking set the stage for a narrative where life and death are at stake. This cycle has the greatest mix of fould play and murder in film history. Sordidly or bizarrely, death always comes at the end of a tortured journey. In every sense of the word, a film noir is a film of death.

Crime Documentary

• Also has a claim on death
• Title card or a narrator often alerts the viewer at the beginning of film that this is a true story which took place at such and such a time and place
• The shots faithfully reconstruct the start of the process:
  • A call to homicide bureau
  • Discovery of body
  • Inconsequential incident or some report from a neighborhood police station sets event in motion
• Tedious "leg" work of cops:
  • Careful but fruitless searches
  • Ineffective surveillance
  • Futile decoys
• The glimmer - some object found, or a witness, which leads to a climactic chase and uncovering a den of cutthroats.

This series, containing interesting pictures such as Heny Hathaway's Call Northside 777 and The House on 92nd Street, and Elia Kazaan's Boomerang and Panic in the Streets, shares several characteristics with film noir:

• Realistic settings
• Well developed supporting roles
• Scenes of violence
• Exciting pursuits

The documentary-styles use noir elements for the repellent aspect of the head of Murder Inc. in The Enforcer and the laconic gangster in Panic in the Streets. It sometimes happens that directors jump between genres. An example is Joseph H. Lewis produced a classic noir work in 1950 with Gun Crazy, while a year later he had detailed the work of treasury agents in The Undercover Man.

Differences between film noir and Documentary

• Difference of focus:
  • Documentary - examines a murder from without, POV of the police official
  • Ex The Naked City, action begins after the criminal act, and the murderers, their minions, and other accomplices move across the scene only to be followed, marked, interrogated, chased, and killed. If some flashbacks occur, it depicts a scene between gansgters it is to illustrate a disclosure or some testimoy, a transcript of which is already in the police file.
  • Police are always present to act or to overhear
  • Film noir - examines a murder from within, POV of the criminals
  • Situated within the very criminal milieu (person's social environment) and describes it, sometimes in broad strokes (The Big Sleep or Dark Passage) or in depth with correlative subtlety (The Asphalt Jungle)
  • Posits a criminal psychology which recalls, from another discipline, delve into forbidden milieus.
• Difference between moral determinism
  • Investigators are traditionally portrayed as righteous men, brave and incorruptible.
  • Ex. The medical officer is depicted as a hero in Panic in th Streets
  • Ex. The diminutive Irish Detective of The Naked City who believes in God and works on his own time to se justice done
  • As a message film - it is more accurately a glorification of the police
  • If the police are featured, they are rotten - the detective in The Asphault Jungle, corrupt - Lloyd Nolan in The Lady in the Lake, or sometimes even murderers themselves - Otto Preminger's Fallen Angel or Where the Sidewalk Ends
  • Minmum they allow themselves to get sucked into the criminal mechanism, like the attorney in The File on Thelma Jordon.
  • Screenwriters usually use the private detective, too controversial always to impugn American police officials
  • Private detectives are midway between lawful society and the underworld, walking on the brink, sometimes unscruputous but putting only himself at risk, fulfilling the requirements of his own code and of the genre as well.
  • Acutual lawbreakers are more or less sympathetic figures, MGM's pre-War motto "Crime does not pay" is still the order of the day, so there must be moral retribution.
  • Narrative is manipulated so that at time the movigoer sympathizes, identifies with the criminals
  • Unstable alliances between individuals in the heart of the underworld, best described in The Big Sleep and Rico's testimony in The Enforcer, we perceive in this rogue's gallery of suspects and convicts, a complex and shifting pecking order based on bribery, blackmail, organized crime and the code of silence. Who kills and who is killed? the criminal milieu is an ambiguous one, where a position of strength can be quickly eroded.

Ambivalence in film noir

• The Characters - integral protagonist, the elemental figure of the Scarface type, has disappeared from film noir and given way to a crowd of:
  • Sanctified killers
  • Neurotic gangsters
  • Megalomaniac crime bosses and their perplexing or tainted cronies
  • Ex. solitary and scientific serial killer in He Walked by Night
  • Ex. the self-destructive loser in Night and the City
  • Ex. the hyperactive gang boss so attached to his mother in White Heat
  • Ex. the twisted, vicious, drunken, grublike henchmen in The Enforcer
• The Victims, usually under some suspicious as well
  • Have ties to unsavory milieu, which attract the attention of their executioners
  • They are victims because they cannot be executioners
  • Ex. decadent partner in The Lady from Shanghai a man who finds death when he tries to simulate his own murder and who will long remain a prototype of the sham victim
  • The terrorized woman, who seems destined to be killed before the end of Jaques Turner's Out of the Past but who had already set up her would-be assassin for a fall, this tough guy had no more chance than a steer consigned to the slaughterhouse
• The Protagonist
  • He is often more mature, almost old, and not too handsome - Humphrey Bogart typifies him
  • Inglorious victim who may suffer, before the happy ending, appalling abuse
  • Often enough masochistic, even self-immolating, one who makes his own trouble, who may throw himself into peril neither for the sake of justing nor from avarice but simply out of morbid curiosity
  • At times is a passive hero who allows himself to be dragged across the line into the gray area between legal and criminal behavior, such as Orson Well's The Lady from Shanghai
  • He is far from the "superman" of adventure films
• The Women: femme fatale
  • Is fatal for herself
  • Frustrated and deviant, half predator, half prey detached yet ensnared, she falls victim to her own traps
  • Ex. while the inconstancy of Lauren Bacall may not cost her life in The Big Sleep, Barbara Stanwyck cannot escape the consequences of her murderous intrigues in The File on Thelma Jordan.
  • Manipulative and evasive, as hard bitten as her environment, ready to shake down or trade shots with anyone - and probably frigid - has put her mark on "noir" eroticism, which may be at time nothing more that violence eroticized.
  • Long way from the chaste heroines of the traditional Western or historical drama

Film Noir Renovated Theme of Violence

• Abandoned the adventure film convention of the fair fight
• Sporting chance has given way to settling scores, beatings, and cold-blooded murderS
• Ex. Bodyguards kick a powerless victim back and forth like a football, then toss his bloody body on a common thoroughfare (The Set-Up) or the garbage (I Walk Alone)
• Crime itself is performed by the numbers, professionally, by a contract killer who does his job "without anger or hate."
• Twitching and stigmatized, an unknown breed of men rose up before us, their lot includes mild-mannered hit men (Alan Ladd in This Gun for Hire), indiscriminate brutes (William Bendix), and the clear-eyed menacing organizers (Everette Sloane in The Enforcer)

Ceremony of Execution

• Widest array of examples
• Offhanded gesture of a wealthy publisher who sends a bothersome witness who was washing windows down an elevator shaft; all that was needed was to tip over the stool with the handle of his cane while idly chatting (The High Wall)
• The atrocious death by razor in The Enforcer
• Kick to a car jack (Red Light)
• Paralyzed women is tied to her wheelchair and hurled down a stairway (Kiss of Death)
• An informer is locked inside a Turkish bath and the steam valve is opened [(T-Men)]
• A convict is impelled under a pile driver by the threat of red-hot irons (Brute Force)
• One man is crushed by a tractor, another drowned in slime (Border Incident)
• An unparalleled range of cruelties and torments are paraded before the viewer in film noir

Anxiety in Film Noir

• Derives more from its strange plot twists than from its violence
• Ex. A PI takes on a dubious assignment: find a woman, eliminate a blackmail threat, throw someone off track, and suddenly corpses are scattered across his path. e is followed, beaten, arrested. He asks for some information and finds himself trussed up and bloodied on the floor of a cellar. Men glimpsed in the night shoot at him an run off.
• There is something of the dream in this incoherent and brutal atmosphere, he atmosphere common to most film noirs
• Georges Sadoul remarked in this regard that "The plot is murky, like a nightmare or the ramblings of a drunkard."
• One of the rare parodies of the genre, Elliott Nugent's My Favorite Brunette, begins exactly this way - Bob Hope wants to play detective and Dorothy Lamour gives him a retainer to tackle on of these vague assignments that only Americans understand, such as "Find my sister." Immediately a hail of daggers menaces him, bodies pile up by the roadside and inexorable gears of mischance drag him towards the electric chair by way of a hospital that doubles as a gangland hide-out
• Mystery is usually a bit more realistic: an amnesiac tries to discover his past and flushes a crime out of its den. This is explored by Robert Florey in The Crooked Wayand by Joseph Mankiewicz in Somewhere in the Night
• The context in this narrative dilemma is such that the viewer expects confusion
• In true noir, the bizarre is inseparable from what might be called the uncertainty of motivations
• Ex. What are Bannister and his partner hoping to accomplish with their shadowy intrigues in Private detectives Shanghai? The weirdness of the movie is focused ont his:
  • Mysterious and metamorphosing creatures tip their hands only in death
  • Does a fleeting figure in a nightclub indicate a possible ally? an enemy?
  • The enigmatic killer, will he be an executioner? a victim?
  • Honor among thieves
  • An extortion network
  • Unexplained motives
  • All this verges on madness

Resounding Confusion at the core of film noir's oneirism

• Oneirism - dream-like experiences or qualities; dreaminess.
  (psychiatry) A state of abnormal consciousness in which dream-like experiences and hallucinations happen while awake
• Movies deliberately associated with dreams such as Fritz Lang's The Woman in the Window
• Also films where the artifice focuses on the symbolic and imaginary - Sternberg's Shanghai
• General rule - the perspective of film noir is realistic and each scene in isolation could pass for an excerpt from a documentary
• It is the sum total of these realistic snapshots of a weird theme which creates the atmosphere of the nightmare

Disorientating the Spectator

• All the components of film noir yield the same result: disorientating the spectator
• Spectator can no longer find the familiar reference pointS
• The moviegoer is accustomed to certain conventions:
  • A logical development of the action
  • A clear distinction between good and evil
  • Well-defined characters
  • Sharp motives
  • Scenes more showy then authentically violent
  • A beautiful heroine
  • An honest hero
• These were the conventions of American adventure films before the war
• Now the moviegoer is presented a less severe version of the underworld, with likeable killers and corrupt cops
• Good and evil go hand in hand to the point of being indistinguishable
• Robbers become ordinary guys:
  • They have kids
  • Love women
  • Just want to go home again (The Asphalt Jungle)
• Victim is as guilty as the hit man, who is just doing his job
• The primary reference point of earlier days, the moral center, is completely skewed
• The heroine is depraved, murderous, doped up or drunk
• The hero is under the gun or, as the say in boxing, he absorbs a lot of punishment when accounts are settled up
• Secondary reference point, the legend of Superman and his chaste fiance, also fades
• Action is confused
• Motives are unclear
• Nothing resembling classic drama or the moral tales from a realistic era:
  • Criminals vie against each other (The Big Sleep)
  • A policeman arrives on the scene, reveals his criminal intent, and does nothing but enhance the viewer's apprehension (Private detectives the Lake)
  • The sober process by which a man's fate is determined concludes in a fun house (The Lady From Shanghai)
• A film takes on the characteristics of a dream and the viewer searches in vain for some old-fashioned logic
• In the end, the chaos goes "beyond all limits"
• Gratuitous violence
• The overweening rewards for murder
• All this adds to the feeling of alienation
• A sense of dread persists until the final images
• The conclusion is simple:
  • The moral ambivalence
  • The criminality
  • The complex contradictions in motives and events
• All conspire to make the viewer co-experience the anguish and insecurity which are the true emotions of contemporary film noir
• All the films of this cycle create a similar emotional effect: that state of tension instilled in the spectator when the psychological reference points are removed
• The aim of film noir was to create a specific alienation

Original article translated from the French by Alain Silver