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Notes on Film Noir

by Paul Schrader

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In 1946 French critics noticed the new mood that had crept into the Amercan cinema:
- Cynicism
- Pessimism
- Darkness
Most evident in routine crime thrillers, but also apparent in prestigious melodramas
As the years went by:
- Hollywood lighting grew darker
- characters more corrupt
- themes more fatalistic
- tone more hopeless
1949 American movies were in the throes of their deepes and most creative funk
Never before have movies dared to take such a harsh uncomplimentary look at American years, and wouldn't dare to do so again for twenty years
Recent fascination with film noir reflects recent trends in American cinema:
- Again taking a look at the underside of the American character
- The newer self-hate cinema of Dennis Hopper's Easy Rider (1969) and Haskell's Medium Cool (1969) seem naive and romantic compared to such cynical examples of noir as Robert Aldrich's Kiss Me, Deadly (1955), Gordon Douglas's Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye (1959)
- As current political mood hardens, filmgoers and filmmakers will be more attracted towards the late 1940's film noir
- The forties may be to the seventies what the thirties were to the sixties
Film noir interests critics:
- offers writers a cache of excellent, little-known films
- film noir: Hollywoods best periods and their least known
- gives writters an oppurtunity to apply themselves to the new questions of classification and transdirectorial style - What is film noir?

What is Film Noir?

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Not a genre - Raymond Durgnat "Paint it Black: The Family tree of Film Noir"
Not defined as western and gangster movies are - by conventions of setting and conflict but rather by the more subtle qualities of tone and mood
It is a film "noir," as opposed to the possible variant of film "gray" or film "off-white"
Specific period of film history - like German expressionism or the French New Wave
In general - film noir refers to hollywood films of the forties and early fifties that portrayed the world of dark, slick city streets, crime and corruption
Extremely unweildy period
Harks back to many previous periods:
- Warner's thirties gangster films
- French "poetic realism" of Carne and Duvivier
- Starnbergian melodramas
- Ultimately - German Expressionist crime films (Lang's Mabase cycle)
Film noir stretches the limits:
- The Maltese Falcon - John Huston 1941
- Touch of Evil - Orson Wells 1958
- Almost every dramatic Hollywood from 1941-1953 contains some film noir element
Foreign off-shoots of film noirs:
- The Third Man - Carol Reed 1949
- Breathless - Jean-Luc Godard 1959
- Le Doulos - Jean-Pierre Melville 1963

Most Every Critic has...

Their own definition of film noir
Personal list of film titles to back up their definition
These can get a bit sticky, film noir is defined by tone rathher than genre
- Almost impossible to argue with critics about their descriptive definitions
- How many elements does it take to make a film noir?
Film noir, reduced to its primary colors (all shades of black), these cultural and stylistic elements all definitions must return to:
- Influences
- Stylistics
- Themes
- Phases

Influences

Four main influences in Hollywood in the forties that brought about film noir are the war and postwar disillusionment, postwar realism, German Expatriates, and the hard-boiled tradition. Each catalytic elements, however, can define film noir; the distinct noir tonality draws from each of these elements.

War and Postwar Disillusionment

After WWII - acute downer hit, delayed reaction to the thirties
The Depression movies were needed to keep peoples spirits up
- Early crime films - Horatio Algerish and socially concious
- End of the thirties - darker crime film
  - You Only Live Once - Fritz Lang 1937
  - The Roaring Twenties - Raoul Walsh 1939
- If not for the war, film noir would have hit full steam in the early forties
The produced Allied propaganda abroad and promoted patriotism at home, blunted the blossoming dark crime films
Film noir thrashed in the studio system, not quite able to come towards full prominence
During the war the first four film noir came out - but they lacked the noir bite of later film noirs
- The Maltese Falcon 1941
- The Glass Key - Heisler 1942
- This Gun for Hire - Frank Tuttle 1942
- Laura - Otto Preminger 1944
War was over - American films turned markedly more sordid
For 15 years the pressures against American amelioristic (to make better or more tolerable) had been building up, and given freedom, audiences and artists were now eager to take a less optimistic view of things
Disillusionment that many soldier, small businessmen, and housewife/factory employees felt in returning to peacetime economy was directly mirrored in the sordidness of the urban crime film
Immediate postwar disilussionment was directly demonstrated in the following movies as a serviceman retruning from the war to find his sweetheart unfaithful or dead, or his business partner cheating him, or the whole society something less than worth fighting for:
- Cornered - Edward Dmytryk 1945
- The Blue Dahlia - George Marshall 1946
- Dead Reckoning - John Cromwell 1947
- Ride the Pink Horse - Robert Montgomery 1947
The war continues, but now antagonism turns with a new viciousness toward American society itself

Postwar Realism

After the war every film-producing country had a resurgence of realism
First took form as crime documentaries:
- House on 92nd Street - Henry Hathaway 1947
- Call Northside 777 - Henry Hathaway 1948
- The Killers - Robert Siodmak 1946
- Brute Force - Jules Dassin 1947
"Every scene was filmed on the actual location depicted" the publicity for the 1947 de Rochemont-Hathaway Kiss of Death proclaimed
Even as authenticity fell, realistic exteriors remained a permanent fixture of film noir
Postwar mood: public's desire for a more honest and harsh view of America would not be satisfied by the same studio streets they'd been watching for dozens of years
Postwat realistic trend: broke film noir away from the high-class melodrama, placing it in the street with everyday people
Retrospect: pre-de Rochemont film noir look is definitly tamer than postwar realistic films
The studio look of these films blunted their sting, making them seem polite and conventional in contrast to later films.
- The Big Sleep - Howard Hawks 1946
- The Mask of Dimitrios - Jean Negulesco 1944

The German Expatriates

Hollywood received many German expatriates in the twenties and thirties - these filmmakers and technicians had intergrated themselves into the American film establishment
late forties - hollywood decided to paint it black, the germans where the best
Germans where the greatest masters of chiaroscuro (pictorial representation in terms of light and shade without regard to color; 2. the arrangement or treatment of light and dark parts in a pictorial work of art; 3. the interplay of light and shadow on or as if on a surface)
Influence of expressionist lighting has always been just beneath the surface of Hollywood films, it bursts out in full bloom in film noir
Some well known Germans working in film noir:
- Fritz Lang
- Robert Siodmak
- Billy Wolder
- Franz Waxman
- Otto Preminger
- John Alton
On the surface: seemed incompatible with postwar realism with its harsh unadorned exteriors
But it is the unique quality of film noir that it was able to weld seemingly contradictory elements into a uniform cycle with its reliance on artificial studio lighting
Best technitians simply made all the world a sound stage, directing unnatural and expressionistic lighting onto realistic settings
They show exhilarating combination of realism and expressionism
Greatest master of noir: John Alton
He was an expressionist cenematographer who could relight Times Square at noon if necessary
His work equals that of German expressionist master as Fritz Wagner and Karl Freund

The Hard-Boiled Tradition

The "heard-boiled" school of writers
1930s writers created the "tough," the cynical way of acting and thinking that separated one from the world of everyday emotions - romanticism with a protective shell:
- Ernest Hemingway
- Raymond Chandler
- Dashiell Hammett
- James M. Cain
- Horace McCory
- John O'Hara
Roots in pulp fiction or journalism
Their protagonists lived out a narcisistic defeatist code
hard-boiled hero was a soft egg compared to his existential counterpart, but a good deal tougher than anything American fiction had seen
When the forties turned to the American "tough" moral understrata (the layer underneath the surface), these hard-boiled writers were ready with a preset conventions of heroes, minor characters, plots dialogue, and themes.
This style was made to order for film noir, and influenced noir screenwriting as much as the Germans influenced noir cinematography
Raymond Chandler was the most hard-boiled writers of Hollywood
Wrote the script for Double Indemnity - best written and most characteristically noir of the period
Showed noir for what it really was: small-time, unredeemed, unheroic; a break from romantic noir cinima
Film noir, in its final stages, adapted and then bypased the hard-boiled school
Manic, neurotic post-1948 filmsare all post-hard boiled: the air in these regions was even too thin for old time cynics like Chandler:
- Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye - Mate 1950
- Where the Sidewalk Ends - Preminger 1950
- White Heat - Raoul Walsh 1949
- The Big Heat - Fritz Lang 1953

Stylistic

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Film noir drew upon a reservoir of film techniques, some of the recurring techniques are:

The majority of scenes are lit for night.
Oblique and vertical lines are preferred to horizontal.They tend to splinter a screen, making it restless and unstable. Light enters in odd shapes - jagged trapezoids, obtuse triangles, verticle slits - one suspects the windows were cut out with a penknife.
Actors and setting are often given equal lighting emphases. the actor is hidden in the realistic tableau of the city at night, his face is often blacked out by shadow as he speaks. when the environment is given equal or greater lighting than the actor, it creates a fatalistic or hopeless mood.There is nothing the protagonists can do; the city will outlast and negate even their best efforts.
Compositional tension is preferred to physical action.
Freudian attachment to water. Docks and piers are second only to alleyways as the most popular rendezvous points
Love of romantic narration. Laura, Double Indemnity, The LAdy from Shanghai, Sunset Boulevard movies have narration that creates a mood of temps perdu, an irretrivable past, a predetermined fate, and an all-enveloping hopelessness. Pne can only take pleasure in reliving a doomed past.
A complex chronological order is frequently used to reinforce the feelings of hopelesness and lost time. Films such as The Enforcer, The Killers, Mildred Pierce, The Dark PAst, Chicago Deadline, Out of the Past and The Killing use convoluted time sequences to immerse the viewer in a time-disorientating but highly stylized world. Manipulating time is used to reinforce a noir principle: the how is always more important than the what.

Themes

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Raymond Durgnat has created a wonderful list of film noir themes in the British Cinema magazine Ibid. He has catogorized over 300 films into 11 themes, which some critics criticize. In each theme it is found that the upwardly mobile forces of the thirties have halted; frontierism has turned to paranoia and claustrophobia.

The villain - gangsters have sit in the mayors chair
The hero - private eye has quit the police force in disgust
The heroine - sick of going along for the ride, is taking others for a rid

Durgnat does not touch on the overriding noir theme: a passion for the past and present, but also a fear of the future. Film noir's tecniques emphasize loss, nostalgia, lack of clear priorities, and insecurity, then submerge these self-doubts in mannerism and style. Style becomes paramount; it is all that separates one from meaninglessness. Chandler described this fundamental noir theme - "It is not a very fragrant world, but it is the world you live in, and certain writers with tough minds and a cool spirit of detachment can make very interesting patterns out of it." ("The Simple Art of Murder")

Heros - dread to look ahead, but instead try to survive by the day, and if unsuccessful at that, they retreat to the past

Phases

Film noir can be put into three phases:

Movie	Director	Year
The Maltese Falcon	John Huston	1941
Casalanca	Michael Cartiz	1942
Gaslight	George Cukor	1944
This Gun For Hire	Brahm	1944
The Lodger	Brahm	1944

War-time Period 1941-1946
- Private eyes and lone wolf
- Chandler, Hamett, and Greene
- Bogart and BAcall, Ladd and Lake
- Classy directorss, studio sets,
- More talk than action
- Double Indemnity provided a bridge to the postwar phase.
  - Came as a shock in 1944
  - Almost blocked by combined efforts of Paramount, the Hays Office, and star Fred McMurray
  - Three years later - Double Indemnitys were dropping off the studio assembly line
Postwar Realistic 1945-1949
- Dates and films overlap
- Tended towards the problems of crime in the streets
- Pollitical corruption
- Police routine
- Less romantic heroes
- Realistic urban look
Psychotic Action and Suicidal Impulse 1949-1953
- Noir hero - seemingly under the weight of ten years of despair, started to go bananas
- Pshycotic killer, in the first phase was a subject worthy of study, the 2nd phase a fringe threat, now turned into the active protagonist
- No excuses give for the psychopanthy in Gun Crazy - it was just "crazy"
- Phase of the "B" film noirs
- Psychoanalytically inclined directors like Ray and Walsh
- Neurotic and instability of the actors like James Cagney, Robert Ryan and Lee Marvin
- Forces of disintegration

The Third phase was the cream of the film noir period, it is the most aesthetically and sociologically piercing. Root cause of film noir: the loss of public honor, heroic conventions, personal integrity, and finally, psychic stability. These films were painfully self-aware; seemed to know they stood at the end of a long tradition based on despair and disintegration and did not shy away from that fact.

Best and most characteristically noir films because they stand at the end of the periodand are the results of self-awareness are:
End-of-the-line noir heros:
- The Urban Cop: The Big Heat and Where the Sidewalk Ends
- The Newspaper Man: Ace in the Hole
- The Private Eye: I, the Jury, The Long Wait, and Kiss Me, Deadly
- The Black Widow: Sunset Boulevard
- The Gangster: White Heatand Kidd Tomorrow Goodbye
- The John Doe American: D.O.A
The masterpiece: Kiss Me, Deadly 1955
- time delay gives it a sense of detachment and thoroughgoing seediness
- stands at the end of a long sleazy tradition
- the private eye goies through the last phase of degredation
- direction carries noir to its sleaziest and most perversely erotic
Mid-fifties noir ground to a halt, a new style of crime film had become popular
Straggler films: Kiss Me, Deadly, The Big Combo, and noirs epitaph - Touch of Evil

New Direction - Death of noir

Rise of McCarthy and Eisenhower
Americans wanted to see a more bourgeois (of, relating to, or characteristic of the social middle class; 2: marked by a concern for material interests and respectability and a tendency toward mediocrity; 3: dominated by commercial and industrial interests: capitalistic) view of themselves
Crime moved to the suburbs
Criminals put on flanel suits
Foot-sore cop turned into the "mobile unit" careening down expressways
Social criticism was cloaked in ludicrous affirmations of the American way of life
TV - demands for full lighting and close-ups undercut the German influence
Color cinematography - the final blow to the noir look

Film noir - a Creative Period

Most creative in Hollywoods history - if measured not by peak but by average
Picked at random, a film noir is likely to be a better made fillm than a randomly selected silent comedy, musical, wester etc.
Film noir achieved unusually high artisty
brought out the best in everyone:
- Directors ex. - Stuart Heisler, Robert Siodmak, Gordon Douglas, Edward Dmytryk, John Brahm, John Cromwell, Raoul Walsh, Henry Hathaway
- Cameramen
- Screenwriters
- Actors
Directors who began in film noir and never regained their original heighs, Ex: Otto Preminger, Rudolph Mate, Nicholas Ray, Robert Wise, Jules Dassin, Richard Fleisher, John Huston, Andre de Toth and Robert Aldrich (etc.)
Director who made great film noirs and other great films are: Orson Wells, MAx Ophuls, Elia Kzan, Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock and Stanley Kubrick (etc.)
message of film noir schema is irrefutable: film noir was good for practically every director's career
Two interesting exceptions: King Vidor and Jean Renoir
Film noir was a creative release for everyone involved
gave artists a chance to work with previously forbidden themes, yet had conventions strong enough to protect the mediocre
Cinematographers were allowed to ecome highly mannered
Actors were sheltered by cinematographers
It wasn't until years later that critics were able to distinguish between great directors and great noir directors

Neglect of Film noir

Film noir's remarkable creativity makes it's neglect that much more baffling
The French, of course, have been students of the period for sometime (Borde and Chaumeton 1955)
American critics have prefered westerns, musicals, or the gangster films to the film noir
Some reasons for the neglect are superficial
Others strike to the heart of film noir
For some time film noir was considered an aberration of the American character: its emphasis on corruption and despair
The western and the gangster films were considered more American than film noir
Prefudice was reinforced by film noir being ideally suited to being a low-budget B film
Economic snobbery - high-budget trash is better than low-budget trash, and to praise a B film is somehow to slight (often intentially) an A film
Fundamental reason for neglect: the fact that it depended on choreography than sociology, and American critics have always been slow on the uptake when it comes to visual style
Film noir is more interested in style than theme
American critics have been sociologists first, scientists second: film importance related to large masses, and if it goes awry, its cause the theme has been "violated" by style
Film noir operates on opposite principles: theme is hidden in style, and bogus themess are often flaunted that contradict the style.
Style determines theme in every film
Easier for sociological critics to discuss the themes of the western and the gangster film apart from stylistic analysis than it was to do for film noir
Not surprisingly the gangster film was canonized in the The Partisan Review in 1989 in "The Gangster as Tragic Hero" by Robert Warshow
Warshow was interested in the western and gangster films as "popular" art rather than as style
Sociological orientation blinded Warchow, and many subsequent critics, to an aesthetically more important development in the gangster film - film noir

The Irony of Neglect

In retrospect the gangster films Warshow wrote about are inferior to film noir
Thirties gangster - reflecion of what was happening in the country, Warshow analyzed thid=s
Film noir, also a sociological reflect, - went further than the gangster film
Film noir was engaged in a life-and-death struggle with the materials it reflected
Tried to make America accept a moral vision of life based on style
This contradiction - promoting style in a culture that valued themes - forced film noir into artistically invigorating twists and turns
Film noir attacked and interpreted sociological conditions and created a new artistic world
Went beyond a simple sociological reflection, a nightmarish world of American mannerism that was by far more a creation than reflection
Film noir, first of all style, worked out its conflicts visually rather than thematically
Aware of its own identity
Was able to create artistic solutions to sociological problems
Kiss Me, Deadly, Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye and Gun Crazy can be works of art in ways that gangster movies like Scarface, The Public Enemy, and Little Ceasar can never be

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