5

In Between the Dark and the Light

HOW ABOUT A THEORY? This one’s not mine, but I like it a lot even if it’s not strictly accurate: there are two genuinely American film genres, the Western and film noir. The Western we’re mostly dealing with elsewhere, although it comes into play here as well. Here, however, is exactly the place to consider the latter, especially the second word. Noir, for those of you who, like me, wasted your time studying Spanish in high school, is French for “black” or “dark.” One might be tempted to think that black film would be hard to see, and indeed it is, but it’s also not uniformly devoid of light. During the 1930s and ’40s, a style of filmmaking sprang up that shot movies with dark themes on dark film stock with minimal light sources. Many scenes took place at night and in dark alleys, and about half the movies starred Humphrey Bogart. The rest had George Raft. These films were generally about crime and detection, focusing on the murkier depths of society. “Heroes,” to the extent that they existed at all, were ambiguous figures at best, and audiences often couldn’t be sure that the good guys were all that good.

These films were rarely taken very seriously by the Hollywood establishment. They were seen as strictly commercial enterprises, vehicles for stars, nothing very special. Nor did American audiences see these dark movies as anything like high art. Entertaining, yes. Popular, certainly. Artistic? Not so much. As so often happens, we needed the French to help us see ourselves. The New Wave directors and critics embraced the genre, especially critic Nino Frank, who named the form in 1946, François Truffaut, Jean-Pierre Melville, and Louis Malle. And, as so often happens subsequently, we follow their lead and figure out that we really have something after all. Happened with Poe. Faulkner. Jerry Lewis? Well, no system’s perfect. But film noir for sure.

And what’s the most important element of a noir movie? Light. Yeah, yeah, the light that’s not there. But absence implies a presence, as darkness implies light. Above all others, this genre is about the absence of light. No one, viewers included, can see clearly.

Let’s consider an example. THE example. The Maltese Falcon (1941) is the noirest of the noir, the übernoir, if I can mix language families here. It’s darker, murkier, more morally ambiguous than almost any movie you’ll meet in a day’s walk. When Sam Spade’s partner, Miles Archer, is murdered, it’s at night. He has taken the assignment because of the undeniable beauty of “Miss Wonderly,” whom we will later know as Brigid O’Shaughnessy, hoping for a chance to bed her and never guessing that the attraction he feels will be his undoing. Spade is called out to the scene of the crime in the middle of the night, where he meets up with the police and an encompassing darkness, with Miles at the bottom of a hill, which only deepens the gloom around the body. Later, when Spade finds the ship La Paloma torched and, shortly thereafter, the dying ship’s captain smuggles the eponymous statuette to Spade’s office, both events are shrouded in black. Indeed, when Captain Jacoby staggers into the office, he seems to carry the darkness in with him. And, of course, during the very long session involving Spade and all the suspects, they are waiting through the night for a time when daylight returns and his secretary can retrieve the black bird from the bus terminal locker where Spade has stashed it and bring it to them. Once Spade has it in his hands, the most noticeable thing about the scene is the shadow of man and bird behind him on the wall. Indeed, shadows are nearly everywhere in the film, precluded only by periods of darkness too complete to throw them. And most of the principals, excepting Mary Astor’s Brigid, display a penchant for garments of black or navy, which come to the same thing in a black-and-white film. What’s interesting about the movie is that, for the black/white dichotomy of tones, the ethical tone is more black/gray. Sure, sure, there are plenty of out-and-out villains here: the femme most fatale Brigid, Sydney Greenstreet’s Kasper Gutman and his henchman, Wilmer, and Peter Lorre’s effeminate Joel Cairo (showing that this was a less enlightened time). But even the good people aren’t all that good. Miles gets killed for following his libido rather than his common sense. His widow, Iva (Gladys George), has had an affair with Spade that is over in his mind but not in hers and now believes, quite mistakenly, that he may have killed Archer to have a clearer path to her. Spade himself plays fast and loose with the truth, including his reputation for being morally challenged, and he is willing to bully, cajole, and possibly commit violence to meet his ends. Only his secretary, Effie, comes off as an upstanding citizen. What a crowd.

If my claim that The Maltese Falcon is one of the darkest pictures ever made is not true, it is only because of Carol Reed’s The Third Man (1949). A great film with outstanding people engaged in some very nasty goings-on, the film features a war-ravaged Vienna along with Orson Welles and Joseph Cotten as childhood buddies who come close to being reunited. That is to say, Cotten’s Holly Martins, a writer of pulp Western novels, keeps looking for Welles’s Harry Lime, who is supposed to be dead, although the stories about his death keep getting in each other’s way. Lime has been involved in the black market, running a ring that steals penicillin (making it perhaps the first film to use the new wonder drug as a key plot element) from military posts and selling it wherever it can fetch the best price. When the two do finally meet up, Harry alternately threatens Holly and tries to buy him off with an offer of a job. He also tells Holly how lightly he views the deaths of the people, chiefly servicemen, who died because of the fake penicillin his agents swapped for the real drug. He is willing to kill anyone who gets in his way, a point driven home when one of Holly’s sources dies violently before he can pass along his information. Before he is killed, Harry will try to shoot his way out of a desperate situation, even seeing shooting his old friend as a welcome possibility.

And the color scheme for this jolly tale of smuggling and murder? Black. Not black and white. Black. I’m pretty sure that Vienna has daytime, but you’d be hard-pressed to prove it by this film. It probably has more nighttime minutes of screen time as a proportion of the whole than any film that doesn’t feature vampires. At one point, Harry has hidden—at night, of course—in a darkened doorway, with only the sheen of his polished black shoes—and his lover’s cat—visible. It is remarkable that one city can have so many darkened corners, doorways, and alcoves. And then there’s the sewer system in which the final chase takes place. Darkness, blind turns, shadows, dim light seeping in occasionally, dark motives, dark clothing, dark outcome. Now that’s noir. It seems that director Carol Reed decided to take the idea of film noir and push it as far as it can possibly be pushed. And then pushed one step more. The movie has powerhouse actors, a terrific story, and a screenplay by English novelist Graham Greene (who a short time later penned the novella based on the film), but its real achievement is the brilliant direction and cinematography making use of such a restricted color palette.

What’s its opposite, a standard-bearer for what we might call film blanc? Maybe Lawrence of Arabia. Oh, sure, we could go with one of Sergio Leone’s sun-drenched, eyeball-blistering spaghetti Westerns, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966), say, or Once Upon a Time in the West, but even there a certain darkness seeps in at the corners. Let’s stick with David Lean’s 1962 epic. I’m tempted to say “masterpiece,” except that he had four or five of them—Brief Encounter (1945), Great Expectations (1946), The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), Doctor Zhivago (1965), A Passage to India (1984, his last), take your pick(s). What a film Lawrence is! The half-dismissive term biopic has no place in this story of a real man-cum-legend. It has the best of everything, from a screenplay by playwright Robert Bolt, author of A Man for All Seasons, to music by Maurice Jarre, to cinematography by Freddie Young, to great performances by Peter O’Toole, Omar Sharif, Anthony Quinn, Alec Guinness (for the first of many times in flowing robes), José Ferrer, Claude Rains, Anthony Quayle—not so much an all-star cast (O’Toole and Sharif would become stars on the basis of the film) as an all-actor cast.

Time and again we are treated to shots of humans as tiny dark spots on vast, brilliant landscapes, emphasizing both their puniness and their difference from the inhospitable environment. When Lawrence risks his life to rescue one of his comrades who has fallen on “the anvil of God,” we are given shots of a perfectly level horizon cutting between the gleaming white sand below and the empty blue sky above. Where they meet, there is very little to distinguish between them.

Later, when Sherif Ali has burned Lawrence’s Western clothing and “awarded” him the robes of a sherif, Lawrence, alone, performs a sort of private dance, trying them out, running in them, holding up the polished dagger to see his reflection, and, in the most compelling moment, bowing to his own shadow, which he has watched to see how he moves in his new duds.

Figure 3. It doesn’t get any brighter. Lawrence of Arabia. Courtesy of Columbia Pictures

Later, after the first train has been dynamited in the desert, Lawrence walks along the top of the captured train to the applause of the Arab fighters below. We see not him but them. And his robed shadow, walking ahead of them. In a film chock-full of stunning camera shots, this could be the most brilliant—Lawrence as a sort of ghost, a figure unseen yet dominating the landscape. Come, it says, and make whatever metaphor you need out of me.

Figure 4. Sunlight and shadow in Lawrence of Arabia. Courtesy of Columbia Pictures

In a film with so many brilliant images, this one stands out for the way it takes blazing light and turns it into the darkest of images. We associate darkness with night and fog and rain and gloom; Lean reminds us that we can also arrive at darkness via the desert sun.

In truth, if we want to study the uses of darkness and light in film, we could do far worse than to stick with the works of David Lean. His early Great Expectations captures all the darkness and foreboding of Dickens’s original, the scariness of the fens in the opening sequence supplanted only by the crumbling mansion of the mad Miss Havisham living among the moldering ruins of her long-ago wedding feast. His late Doctor Zhivago, with its endless expanses of snow, and still later A Passage to India, with its miles and miles of sun-bleached plains and barren hills, could each give Lawrence a run for its eye-burning money. Yet what is important with Lean is that his use of dark and light, sun and shadow, day and night, is never programmatic. Rather, he matches lighting to the demands of the films’ actions, which marks both his pragmatism and his greatness.

So then, Lawrence is one of the brightest films going, Falcon one of the darkest. There’s a lot of room in between, and most of the really interesting action happens where the two extremes meet. Surprises are forever emerging from the shadows or stepping into darkened rooms from brilliant sunshine. Even with all the innovations of color and 3-D, moviemaking still comes down to playing off the light against the dark.

A (Well) Matched Pair

It is curious how actors’ lives sometimes intersect. Peter O’Toole and Omar Sharif were almost perfect contemporaries, born four months apart in 1932 and dying a mere nineteen months apart (O’Toole in December 2013 and Sharif in July 2015). It is unlikely that either would have achieved the same level of fame and respect had they not appeared together in their first big Hollywood film. The sparks between them were unmistakable, and according to O’Toole, they had a marvelous, rowdy time making the film. Afterward, of course, they became huge stars, between them largely owning the sixties. Yet neither of them ever won an Oscar, despite Sharif’s two nominations and O’Toole’s eight—a record for someone who never won. That two such prodigious talents never hoisted the statuette (although O’Toole was given an honorary Oscar in 2007 for lifetime achievement) is a reminder of the outsize role luck and timing play in award season.

Consider this little gem from Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002). The whole of the Battle for Helm’s Deep takes place at night. In fact, the sequence took four months to shoot, working exclusively at night, so these actors and crew got the full effect of darkness. As morning approaches and things look utterly desperate, Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen) and the Rohirrim ride out to meet the dreadful army of Uruk-hai and orcs, hoping that this surprising change of plan will allow their women and children to escape farther into the mountains. Just then, Gandalf the White (Ian McKellen) appears over the crest of the hill bringing the rising sun; nay, he is the rising sun, so forceful is his raiment of light. Sorry, one gets carried away writing about things Tolkienish. But you get the idea: this is the ultimate heroic reveal. This is the bugle call of the cavalry charge in Stagecoach; it’s Superman reversing time to save the dead Lois Lane; it’s every miraculous rescue from certain destruction since the movies began. It doesn’t hurt, of course, that Gandalf is accompanied by a huge army of his own, led by Éomer (Karl Urban). The point is, any normal filmmaker would be embarrassed by this brazen use of light to bathe a character who is already all in white as a way of bringing us out of the darkness of that enormous, all-night battle. Happily, Jackson is not easily shamed, and we are rewarded with a breathtaking light show.

This example, as you will have noted, occurs in a film that otherwise stresses the contrast between dark and light, good and evil, purity and sinfulness. The Uruk-hai are creations of a mind of pure evil, Sauron, and another mind corrupted by the allure of power, Saruman. This is pretty standard fare. Batman’s world is far darker than that of his alter ego, Bruce Wayne. In fact, it is often stated in the films that Bruce must embrace the darkness (and he has plenty of psychic darkness in his background) in order to meet the criminal element on its own terms. And he pays a great price for that dark turn.

It is not inevitably the case that all films employing contrasts between dark and light will have such thematic emphases, even if a great many do, but if you are making such a movie and don’t make use of the visual equivalents, just what are you thinking?