NOTES

 

 

INTRODUCTION

1. J. P. Telotte, Voices in the Dark: The Narrative Patterns of Film Noir (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 3.

CHAPTER 1

1. Film noir is described as a genre in, among others, Robin Buss, French Film Noir (London: Marion Boyars, 1994); Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg, Hollywood in the Forties (New York: A. S. Barnes, 1968); Foster Hirsch, The Dark Side of the Screen (New York: A. S. Barnes, 1981); and Jon Tuska, Dark cinema: American Film Noir in Cultural Perspective (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1984). It is a “series” in Raymond Borde and Étienne Chaumeton, Panorama du film noir américain, 1941–1953 (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1955); a “movement,” “period,” “tone,” and “mood” in Paul Schrader, “Notes on Film Noir,” in Film Noir Reader, ed. Alain Silver and James Ursini (New York: Limelight Editions, 1996), 53–64; a “motif” and “tone” in Raymond Durgnat, “Paint It Black: The Family Tree of Film Noir,” in Silver and Ursini, Film Noir Reader, 37–52; a “visual style” in Janey Place and Lowell Peterson, “Some Visual Motifs of Film Noir,” in Silver and Ursini, Film Noir Reader, 65–76; a set of “patterns of nonconformity” in David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson, The Classical Hollywood cinema (New York: Columbia, 1985), 74–77; a “canon” in J. P. Telotte, Voices in the Dark: The Narrative Patterns of Film Noir (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1989); a “phenomenon” in Frank Krutnick, In a Lonely Street: Film Noir, Genre, Masculinity (London: Routledge, 1991); and a “transgeneric phenomenon” in R. Barton Palmer, Hollywood’s Dark cinema: The American Film Noir (New York: Twayne, 1994). For an argument similar to Palmer’s, see John Belton, “Film Noir’s Knights of the Road,” Bright Lights Film Journal 12 (spring 1994): 5–15.

2. The dates 1941–1958 seem to have been first proposed by Schrader, who used The Maltese Falcon and Touch of Evil to mark the beginning and end of the noir period. Schrader’s position is accepted by Place and Peterson, “Some Visual Motifs,” and by a few writers in E. Ann Kaplan, ed., Women in Film Noir (London: BFI, 1980). Several other books on film noir implicitly endorse this periodization, even when they do not set fixed dates; see, for example, Telotte, Voices in the Dark, and Krutnick, In a Lonely Street. Most recent discussions treat film noir as a transgeneric form that begins somewhere in the late thirties or early forties and continues to the present day; see Palmer, Hollywood’s Dark cinema, and many of the essayists in Joan Copjec, ed., Shades of Noir (London: Verso, 1993). There are, however, skeptical voices. In the Copjec volume, for example, see Marc Vernet, “Film Noir on the Edge of Doom,” 1–31, an essay that questions the usual historical and stylistic assumptions.

3. Alain Silver and Elizabeth Ward, eds., Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference to the American Style (Woodstock: Overlook Press, 1992), omit a number of titles that might be included—but as Marc Vernet has noted, one of the beauties of the category is that “there is always an unknown film to be added to the list” (“Film Noir on the Edge,” 1). For a larger filmography, see Spencer Selby, Dark City: The Film Noir (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1984). See also Robin Buss, French Film Noir, who lists 101 examples of French film noir between 1942 and 1993, including A Man Escaped and Weekend. Patrick Brion’s handsomely illustrated Le film noir (Paris: Éditions de La Martinière, 1992) discusses several movies that are not usually placed in the category—among them, Hitchcock’s North by Northwest.

4. Michel Foucault, “What Is an Author?” in Textual Strategies, ed. Josué V. Harari (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979), 153. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically in the text.

5. Vian used the pen name “Vernon Sullivan” on several occasions, and many of his readers believed that Vernon Sullivan was an African American. The name was inspired by two black jazz musicians from America—Paul Vernon and Joe Sullivan.

6. I am grateful to Peter Wollen for calling my attention to Boris Vian and his relevance to the postwar cultural climate in France. See Philippe Boggio, Boris Vian (Paris: Flammarion, 1993); also James Campbell, “Sullivan, the Invisible Man,” Times Literary Supplement (28 January 1994): 7. In an earlier published essay that formed the basis of this chapter, I claimed that J’irai cracher was the basis for I Spit on Your Grave (1977), a low-budget American horror film directed by Emir Zarchi. I have subsequently discovered that Zarchi’s film has no connection with Vian’s novel. In 1997, Hawks and Sparrows Films, an independent company, optioned the rights to J’irai cracher. Production was scheduled to begin in 1998.

7. Academic feminism has shown that many of the films called noir are preoccupied with Freud’s famous question, Was will das Weib? Laura Mulvey confirms this point in a recent interview: “It has been established very plausibly through feminist film theory, particularly around work on film noir, that the woman in Hollywood cinema is not necessarily only the object of the gaze, but also the object of inquiry” (my emphasis). See Juan Suarez and Millicent Manglis, “Cinema, Gender, and the Topography of Enigmas: A Conversation with Laura Mulvey, Cinefocus 3 (1994): 3. Mulvey herself has emphasized the sadistic component of voyeurism, and her writings have been elaborated and debated in a large literature on psychoanalytic feminism. Among the best known examples are Kaplan, Women in Film Noir, and Mary Anne Doane, “Gilda: Epistemology as Striptease,” Camera Obscura, no. 11 (1983): 7–27.

8. In France, today, cinéma noir refers to African-American cinema. Higham and Greenberg, Hollywood in the Forties, use “Black cinema” as the title for their chapter on noir, but they employ the French term when they discuss films. For an interesting paper on films noirs directed by African Americans, see Manthia Diawara, “Noir by Noirs: Toward a New Realism in Black cinema,” in Copjec, Shades of Noir, 261–78.

9. Jacques Bourgeois, “La Tragédie policier,” Revue du cinéma 2 (1946): 70–72.

10. Palmer is almost the only writer on film noir who recognizes that movies have different meanings for different audiences. My survey of French criticism differs from his, but I recommend his discussion of writings on noir in Hollywood’s Dark cinéma, 1–31. See also his anthology, Perspectives on Film Noir (New York: G. K. Hall, 1996), which contains useful translations of French writings.

11. For a discussion of the Americanization of French culture in general during this period, see Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Decolonization, and the Reordering of French Society (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995).

12. For recent books on these films in English, see Edward Byron Turk, Child of Paradise: Marcel Carne and the Golden Age of French cinéma (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989); Alan Williams, Republic of Images: A History of French Filmmaking (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992); and Dudley Andrew, Mists of Regret (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1995). For an amusing discussion of “noir-like” aspects of French movies in the 1930s, see Manohla Dargis, “Cool Chats,” The Village Voice, 6 July 1993: 50. The importance of noir in France both before and after the war has also been suggested in two essays by Ginette Vincendeau: “France 1945–1965 and Hollywood: The Policier as Inter-national Text,” Screen 33, no. 1 (spring 1992): 50–80; and “Noir Is Also a French Word: The French Antecedents of Film Noir,” in The Book of Film Noir, ed. Ian Cameron (New York: Continuum, 1993), 49–58.

13. Charles O’Brien, “Film Noir in France: Before the Liberation,” Iris 21 (spring 1996): 7–20. Of course the term noir has an even older history; it describes the roman noir, or gothic novel, and in French literary criticism it suggests the decadent tendencies of late romanticism.

14. The Philadelphia Inquirer wrote that The Maltese Falcon was “worthy to stand with the English-made mysteries of Alfred Hitchcock” (25 October 1941), and The New York Times described John Huston as “a coming American match for Alfred Hitchcock” (12 October 1941). Time magazine compared Falcon with films by Hitchcock and Carol Reed (20 October 1941). Wilder’s statement is quoted from The Los Angeles Times (6 August 1944).

15. The omission of Germany is not surprising, given the historical circumstances. The French “rediscovery” of German cinema began in the 1950s and was stimulated by the French publication of Lotte Eisner’s work on expressionism. See Thomas Elsaesser, “A German Ancestry to Film Noir? Film History and Its Imaginary,” Iris 21 (spring 1996): 129–43. In the mid 1940s, the French also failed to mention that the vogue for James M. Cain had started outside America: The Postman Always Rings Twice was adapted by the French themselves in 1939, and by the Italians in 1943. Among the British films that could have been discussed alongside the new Hollywood thrillers was Hotel Reserve (1944), which was based on an Eric Ambler novel. Directed by Lance Comfort, with James Mason and Herbert Lom in featured roles, this picture looks quite noirish in retrospect.

16. Nino Frank, “Un nouveau genre ‘policier’: L’aventure criminelle,” L’écran français 61 (28 August 1946): 14; my translation. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically in the text. Frank mentions Hitchcock’s Suspicion but only to note that he finds it an “absolute failure,” unworthy of comparison with Double Indemnity.

17. Jean-Pierre Chartier, “Les Américains aussi font des films noirs,” Revue du cinéma 2 (1946): 67; my translation. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically in the text.

18. One exception was Sigfried Kracauer, “Hollywood’s Terror Films: Do They Reflect an American State of Mind?” Commentary (August 1946): 132–36. Kracauer had recently completed From Caligari to Hitler, and he used the same arguments to discuss American “terror films,” including Shadow of a Doubt, The Stranger, The Dark Corner, The Spiral Staircase, and The Lost Weekend. His essay is discussed in Telotte, Voices in the Dark, 4–5, and in Edward Dimendberg, “Film Noir and Urban Space,” Ph.D. diss., University of California Santa Cruz, 1992, 116–63.

19. André Bazin, “Six Characters in Search of Auteurs,” in Cahiers du cinéma: The 1950s, ed. Jim Hillier, trans. Liz Heron (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), 37. Hereafter, Bazin’s essay in Hillier’s anthology is cited parenthetically in the text.

20. For information on Duhamel’s involvement with surrealism, see Marcel Jean, ed., The Autobiography of Surrealism (New York: Viking Press, 1980). See also José Pierre, ed., Investigating Sex: Surrealist Discussions, 1928–1932, trans. Malcom Imrie (London: Verso, 1992).

21. Both the plots and the dialogue created confusion, and this confusion was not always to the liking of American reviewers. In The New Republic (24 August 1944), Manny Farber said that Double Indemnity was “the most incomprehensible film in years.” He praised it for being “less repressed than usual,” but he disliked the incessant talk: “I think you could get at the Underlying Thread of this film the same as you could in The Maltese Falcon—by being allowed to take the dialogue home with you to study at length.”

22. Louis Aragon, “On Decor,” in The Shadow and Its Shadow: Surrealist Writings on cinéma, ed. Paul Hammond (London: BFI, 1978), 29. I am indebted to Hammond’s introduction to this volume, which provides an excellent commentary on surrealist film criticism.

23. Silver and Ward, Film Noir, 372. Among the other French writers who might be mentioned in this context is Fereydoun Hoveyda, who published Histoire du roman policier, the first book on the Série noire, in 1956.

24. Marcel Duhamel, preface to Borde and Chaumeton, Panorama du film noir américain, vii; my translation. Hereafter, Borde and Chaumeton’s work is cited parenthetically in the text. Duhamel alludes to several unnamed gangster films starring George O’Brien, and to William Wellman’s Chinatown Nights. The Wellman film, however, was not released until 1929.

25. In the postscript to Panorama du film noir américain, Borde and Chaumeton also discuss the James Bond movies. Notice that the first James Bond film, Dr. No, makes the protagonist seem rather like a cold-blooded killer and borrows several ideas from Fritz Lang’s Mabuse pictures of the 1920s and 1930s. The second film, From Russia with Love, is vaguely indebted to the Orient Express thrillers of Eric Ambler and Graham Greene, which are strongly associated with noir.

26. Untranslated, the text reads, “onirique, insolite, erotique, ambivalent, et cruel.” I have translated insolite as “bizarre,” but there is no good English equivalent. It connotes the gothic, somewhat like the Freudian unheimlich, but with a more shocking or horrific effect. Judging from its frequency, insolite is the most important adjective in the Panorama.

27. For a brilliant discussion of Julliette, see Angela Carter, The Sadeian Woman (New York: Pantheon, 1979). Carter points out that in contrast with Sade’s Justine, who is derived from the virginal heroines of the sentimental novel, Julliette appropriates the values of patriarchy and uses them for her own ends. In one sense a radical, she is also a figment of the male imagination and a product of the system she exploits. Her most obvious representation in recent cinema is the antiheroine of John Dahl’s The Last Seduction (1994), who uses all the men in her path and rides off victorious, in the back seat of a chauffeur-driven limousine.

28. Compare Sharon Stone’s comments to a reporter about the role she played in Basic Instinct (1992): “I never thought the character really cared about sex at all. That’s why it was so easy for her to use her sexuality—it had no value.” Parade Magazine (30 January 1994): 10.

29. Rebecca West quoted in Roy Hoopes, Cain: The Biography of James M. Cain (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1982), xiii. Hereafter, Hoopes’s work is cited parenthetically in the text.

30. Hence the French treated Hollywood as if it were filled with primitives, unburdened by European sophistication. Godard, for example, argued that “the Americans, who are much more stupid when it comes to analysis,…have a gift for the kind of simplicity which brings depth.…The Americans are real and natural” (quoted in Hillier, Cahiers du cinéma, 8).

31. André Gide quoted by Diane Johnson, Dashiell Hammett: A Life (New York: Random House, 1983), 322 n. 7. See also Perry Miller, “Europe’s Faith in American Fiction,” Atlantic Monthly (December 1951): 50–56.

32. Jean-Paul Sartre, “The Situation of the Writer in 1947,” in What Is Literature? trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Washington Square Press, 1966), 156. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically in the text.

33. Sartre quoted by Dana Polan, Power and Paranoia: History, Narrative, and the American cinéma, 1940–1950 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 252.

34. For a discussion of this tendency, see Robert Denoon Cummings’s introduction to The Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre (New York: The Modern Library, 1966), 3–47.

35. Like all other French critics, Eric Rohmer believed that film noir had reached a dead end by the mid 1950s. He remarked that, for his generation, “the charm of these works lies in the delirious romanticism of their heroes and the modernism of their technique. Hollywood, shy of them for so long, suddenly noticed their existence, and a breath of the avant-garde made the studios tremble. What came of it? There is now enough distance for us to judge: the answer is very little, if anything.” Rohmer, “Rediscovering America,” in Hillier, Cahiers du cinéma, 91.

36. The political context in Paris is sometimes obscure, but in general the existentialist-inspired readings of film noir tend to be less activist or overtly left wing than the surrealist readings. Bazin himself was a liberal Catholic who appears to have been influenced by Emmanuel Mournier’s “personalism.” For a discussion of the politics of French intellectuals during the period, see Tony Judt, Past Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944–1956 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). On the avant-garde end of the political spectrum, a vaguely surrealist interest in film noir persisted throughout most of the 1950s, especially in the journal Positif. In 1957, activist Guy Debord, who was the leader of the French Internationale situationiste, published The Naked City, a collage map of Paris that took its title from the 1948 movie. For a discussion of Debord’s appropriation of noir, see Thomas F. McDonough, “Situationist Space,” October (winter 1994): 59–77. See also Jill Forbes, “The Série Noir,” in France and the Mass Media, ed. Brian Rigby and Nicholas Hewett (London: Macmillan, 1993).

37. At about this time, France’s leading academic phenomenologist, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, proclaimed in a lecture to the College de France that henceforth the work of cinema and the work of philosophy would be parallel. See Dudley Andrew, “Breathless: Old as New,” in Breathless, ed. Dudley Andrew (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1987), 8.

38. Claude-Edmonde Magny, The Age of the American Novel: The Film Aesthetic of Fiction between the Two Wars, trans. Eleanor Hochman (New York: Ungar, 1972). This book, published in France in the 1950s, helped to transmit Sartre’s ideas about the novel into French film theory.

39. François Truffaut, “A Wonderful Certainty,” in Hillier, Cahiers du cinema, 107; and Jacques Rivette, “On Imagination,” in Hillier, Cahiers du cinema, 105.

40. Claude Chabrol, “The Evolution of the Thriller,” in Hillier, Cahiers du cinema, 160, 163.

41. Dennis Hopper quoted by Leighton Grist, “Moving Targets and Black Widows: Film Noir in Modern Hollywood,” in Cameron, Book of Film Noir, 267.

42. J. Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum, Midnight Movies (New York: Harper and Row, 1983), 41. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically in the text.

43. The Harvard students were, of course, especially fond of Casablanca, which has never been called a film noir, even though it contains practically everything we associate with the form: a smoky nightclub, a fog-laden airport, a feeling of containment or huis-clos, Arthur Edeson’s gothic photography, Bogart in a trenchcoat, Lorre and Greenstreet in supporting roles, and so on. Borde and Chaumeton excluded Casablanca from Panorama du film noir américain, arguing that it is nothing more than a wartime propaganda film with a romantic ending; and yet they describe Paramount’s This Gun for Hire, which is equally propagandistic and in some ways quite saccharine, as a definitive film noir. Perhaps the real reason for the absence of Casablanca from histories of noir has more to do with the specific content of its propaganda. The French may have been cool toward the film because of the way it depicts their role in the war.

44. Noel Burch, Theory of Film Practice (New York: Praeger, 1973), 123.

45. Durgnat, “Paint It Black: The Family Tree of Film Noir,” Film Comment (6 November 1974): 6. Hereafter, all quotations are from this version of Durgnat’s essay (condensed from an earlier, somewhat less playful article in the British journal cinema).

46. Molly Haskell, Love and Other Infectious Diseases (New York: Morrow, 1990), 101–2.

47. Schrader, “Notes on Film Noir,” in Silver and Ursini, Film Noir Reader, 53–61. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically in the text.

48. Schrader has a sophisticated literary education, and Martin Scorsese’s early films are filled with fairly explicit allusions to James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. According to Schrader’s own account, he wrote the script of Taxi Driver when he was undergoing a spiritual and psychological crisis similar to the one T. S. Eliot describes in The Waste Land. I discuss the more general influence of literary modernism on Hollywood in chapter 2.

49. In much of the subsequent critical literature, noir is defined in such a way as to frustrate political or didactic reading. In Silver and Ward’s Film Noir, for example, see Carl Macek’s account of Cyril Endfield’s left-wing, social-realist Try and Get Me (1950), which supposedly “functions better as a film noir than it does as a quasi-documentary exposing environment as the true producer of crime” (296). See also Dennis White’s comments on The Mask of Dimitrios (1944): “It is possible that [Eric] Ambler’s characters are not cynical enough for American noir or that his point of view is more radical than existential” (187).

50. An influential essay written at this time on contemporary Hollywood was Richard T. Jameson, “Son of Noir,” Film Comment 10 (1974): 30–33. For evidence of how the term became popular within the industry, see Todd Erickson, “Kill Me Again: Movement Becomes Genre,” in Silver and Ursini, Film Noir Reader, 307–29.

51. For an interesting commentary on this phenomenon, see Jonathan Rosenbaum, “Allusion Profusion,” Chicago Reader (21 October 1994): 12, 25–26.

52. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991). See also Marcia Landy and Lucy Fischer, “Dead Again or A-Live Again: Postmodern or Postmortem?” cinema Journal 33, no. 4 (summer 1994): 3–22.

CHAPTER 2

1. George Orwell, “Raffles and Miss Blandish,” in A Collection of Essays by George Orwell (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1954), 154.

2. For the discourse on Americanism in Germany, see Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg, eds., The Weimar Republic Sourcebook (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). On Baudelaire and modernity, see Antoine Compagnon, Five Paradoxes of Modernity, trans. Franklin Phillip (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).

3. Some modernist philosophers and artists were more critical of modernity than others. On the one hand were those who completely rejected Enlightenment rationalism and nineteenth-century liberalism: Martin Heidegger, Oswald Spengler, T. E. Hulme, T. S. Eliot, William Butler Yeats, and so on. On the other hand were those who criticized nineteenth-century ideas of progress and liberalism but who remained within a rationalist or humanist camp: Edmund Husserl, Thomas Mann, James Joyce, André Gide, and others.

4. Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness prefigures this theme, but I am of course alluding to Jim Thompson’s Killer inside Me (1952), which is symptomatic of modernist themes in “cheap” fiction after World War II. Notice also the postwar novels of Cornell Woolrich, Fredric Brown, and—above all—Charles Willeford. Willeford’s High Priest of California (1956) is the story of a sociopathic used-car salesman who enjoys reading Eliot, Joyce, and Franz Kafka in his spare time. For commentary on several hard-boiled novelists who worked in this vein, see Terry Curtis Fox, “City Nights,” Film Comment 20, no. 5 (October 1984): 30–49. See also Patrick Raynal, Écran blanc pour la Série noire,” Cahiers du cinéma, no. 490 (April 1995): 77–81.

5. David Lodge, “The Language of Modernist Fiction: Metaphor and Metonymy,” in Modernism: A Guide to European Literature, 1890–1930, ed. Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), 481.

6. For a discussion of the effect of World War I on literary language, see Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 21–24.

7. Over the next two decades, Eliot’s Dark City was to become a touchstone for British and American modernism, influencing Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby), Evelyn Waugh (A Handful of Dust), and W. H. Auden (The Age of Anxiety).

8. As Mike Davis has shown in City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), the “noir generation” of European exiles and hard-boiled writers in Hollywood was powerfully critical of the Southern California boosters and real-estate developers who had created the myth of a sunny, mission-style utopia. For filmmakers like Orson Welles, Billy Wilder, and Raymond Chandler, the American dream was at best a “bright, guilty world.” (Hereafter, Davis’s work is cited parenthetically in the text.)

9. Graham Greene quoted in Norman Sherry, The Life of Graham Greene, vol. 1 (New York: Viking, 1989), 597. Hereafter, this work and volume 2, published in 1994, are cited parenthetically in the text.

10. Joseph Conrad quoted in Tony Hilfer, The Crime Novel: A Deviant Genre (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990), 98; my translation from the French.

11. Henry James, “The New York Preface,” The Turn of the Screw, ed. Robert Kimbrough (New York: W. W. Norton, 1966), 120.

12. For example, Raymond Chandler’s attack on Christie and Sayers in “The Simple Art of Murder” is strikingly similar to Ezra Pound’s attacks on Amy Lowell and the British establishment in the period before World War I. Chandler’s essays and letters are filled with savage comments on the women consumers of popular literature—as when he writes that pulp magazines “made most of the fiction of the time taste like a cup of luke-warm consomme at a spinsterish tearoom.” Dashiell Hammett sometimes used the same metaphors. In one of his early book reviews, he remarked that S. S. Van Dine’s upper-class detective, Philo Vance, had the conversational manner of “a high school girl who has been studying the foreign words and phrases in the back of her dictionary.”

13. Double Indemnity was budgeted by Paramount for $980,000 and was one of the most critically admired films of the year. Although it was not among the box-office champions of the decade, it was widely regarded as a new and important kind of product. As Boxoffice magazine reported, Indemnity was a “precedent-setting, cycle-initiating hit” that elevated “the cops-and-robbers melodrama to a new stratum of exhibition importance” (2 February 1946).

14. Almost every Hollywood director who wanted to do something “deep” experimented with some variation of this style. Consider James Cruz (Beggar on Horseback, 1923), Josef von Sternberg (Underworld, 1927), King Vidor (The Crowd, 1928), Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur (Crime without Passion, 1934), and John Ford (The Informer, 1935).

15. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914–1991 (New York: Pantheon, 1994), 182. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically in the text.

16. The institutionalization of modern art went hand in hand with a widespread dissemination of Freudian ideas. During the 1930s and 1940s in America, highbrow psychoanalysis had split into two terrains, described by Russell Jacoby as a “technical orthodoxy restricted to doctors” and a “looser revisionism that encouraged cultural and moral theorizing” (The Repression of Psychoanalysis [New York: Basic Books, 1983], 153). Meanwhile, the Frankfort School settled in New York and California, Theodor Adorno wrote psychoanalytic studies of the Hitlerian personality, and Freudian-inspired literary criticism began to appear everywhere. Among the most influential examples of such writing in the 1940s and 1950s are the translation of Marie Bonaparte’s study of Edgar Allan Poe, Edmund Wilson’s interpretation of “Turn of the Screw,” and Lionel Trilling’s essays on Freud and art. As many commentators have shown, Freudian ideas pervaded Hollywood in the 1940s, affecting all the genres and stars to some degree: compare John Wayne in Stagecoach (1939) with John Wayne in Red River (1948); or compare Ginger Rogers in Top Hat (1935) with Ginger Rogers in Lady in the Dark (1944). For a discussion of actual psychoanalysts who worked in Hollywood during this period, see Stephen Farber and Marc Green, Hollywood on the Couch (New York: William Morrow, 1993).

17. Fredric Jameson, “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture,” Social Text 1 (1979): 135.

18. Frederic Jameson, The Political Unconscious (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 206.

19. I have discussed Hammett’s career at greater length in an earlier essay, “Dashiell Hammett and the Poetics of Hard-Boiled Detection,” in Essays on Detective Fiction, ed. Bernard Benstock (London: Macmillan, 1983), 49–72.

20. Lee Server, Danger Is My Business: An Illustrated History of the Fabulous Pulp Magazines (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1993), 9.

21. Joseph T. “Cap” Shaw quoted in Frank MacShane, The Life of Raymond Chandler (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1976), 46. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically in the text.

22. Dashiell Hammett, Red Harvest (London: Pan Books, 1975), 39; The Maltese Falcon (New York: Vintage, 1972), 227; The Glass Key (New York: Vintage, 1972), 169. Hereafter, these works are cited parenthetically in the text.

23. Blanche Knopf quoted in Diane Johnson, Dashiell Hammett: A Life (New York: Random House, 1983), 70. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically in the text.

24. David O. Selznick, Memo from David O. Selznick, ed. Rudy Behlmer (New York: Viking Press, 1972), 26.

25. Stephen Marcus, introduction to The Continental Op, by Dashiell Hammett (New York: Random House, 1974), xvii.

26. Dashiell Hammett, The Thin Man (New York: Vintage, 1972), 12. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically in the text.

27. Andrew Sarris quoted by Tom Milne in Mamoulian (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970), 36.

28. James Agee quoted in Patricia King Hanson and Alan Gevinson, eds., American Film Institute Catalog: Feature Films, 1931–1940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 782.

29. I have discussed James Agee’s comments and examined the “male myth” underlying the film in “John Huston and The Maltese Falcon,” reprinted in The Maltese Falcon, ed. William Luhr (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 149–60. That volume contains a continuity script of the film and other useful material. For additional background on Huston, see Gaylyn Studlar and David Desser, Reflections in a Male Eye: John Huston and the American Experience (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993), where my essay on Falcon is also reprinted.

30. Jonathan Latimer’s best novel, Solomon’s Vineyard, is a synthesis of The Maltese Falcon, Red Harvest, and The Dain Curse. It was written in 1940 but was not published in the United States in an unexpurgated trade version until 1988. It deserves to be placed alongside Paul Cain’s Fast One (1933) as one of the toughest, most sadomasochistic Hammett imitations of all time.

31. The myth that Hammett was a relatively simple stylist, together with the myth that he did not write about a world in which “gangsters can rule nations,” seems to have been generated by Raymond Chandler in “The Simple Art of Murder.” Critics have seldom noted that Hammett was also to some degree a typical southern writer (he was born in Maryland). He could render wild landscapes with the accuracy of a man who has lived outdoors, and he must have loved dogs, because his books contain several beautifully observed descriptions of canine behavior. (The original Asta is as funny as MGM’s but much less cute.)

32. Graham Greene, The Ministry of Fear (New York: Penguin, 1978), 65. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically in the text.

33. Graham Greene’s religion and politics may seem contradictory, but they were consistent with his educational background. There was a strong tradition of Catholicism and high-church religion among British literary aesthetes, beginning with nineteenth-century figures like Cardinal Newman and Frederic Rolfe and culminating in “revolutionary classicists” T. E. Hulme and T. S. Eliot. However, many among Greene’s generation at Oxford had also become interested in Karl Marx. Greene managed to keep the two impulses in balance, behaving like a high modernist in cultural matters but supporting socialist government.

34. Graham Greene, Collected Essays (Harmandsworth: Penguin, 1970), 167.

35. The quote is from Martin Seymour-Smith, Who’s Who in Twentieth-Century Literature (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976), 142.

36. Graham Greene, A Gun for Sale (New York: Penguin, 1974), 28. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically in the text.

37. During his early years in Paris, Eliot was attracted to the protofascist l’Action français. His style of anti-Semitism in such poems as “Gerontion” and “Sweeny among the Nightingales” was fashionable among the intellectuals of his day, and it exerted a strong influence on the next generation. (See The Great Gatsby, which is filled with anti-Semitic references and wasteland imagery.) Interestingly, Eliot was also a great admirer of crime and detective fiction. He praised Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins for their melodramatic effects, which he claimed were “perennial and must be satisfied,” and he insisted that “literature” ought to give the same pleasure as “thrillers” (see Michael Shelden, Graham Greene: The Man Within [London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1994], 100–101; hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically in the text).

38. Graham Greene, The Pleasure Dome: Collected Film Criticism, 1935–1940, ed. John Russell Taylor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 5. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically in the text.

39. For a discussion of poetic realism as a critical term, see Dudley Andrew, Mists of Regret (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), especially 11–17. See also his discussion of Greene and the French cinema, 255–57.

40. Red Harvest inspired Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo (1961) and Sergio Leone’s Fistful of Dollars (1971). The Coen brothers used it as one of the sources for Miller’s Crossing (1990), as did Walter Hill for The Last Man Standing (1996). In 1982, shortly after Chinatown had created a vogue for period movies about private detectives, Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci attempted to film Red Harvest in Hollywood. The picture was never produced, but Bertolucci’s script, written with Marilyn Goldin, was impressive. The early scenes powerfully evoke the horrors of Personville, viewing them through the eyes of the Continental Op as he arrives in town. The hellish streets are enveloped in smoke, and a blade of fire spurs up an alley, running along the walls “in crazy patterns like a wild animal.” Bill Quint, the Wobbly organizer, explains to the Op that the smoke and fire originate in one of the old mining tunnels nearby: “Fifteen years of discussion,” he says. “Who’s going to put it out—the city or the state or the mining company or the Federal Government? Meanwhile, the fire’s still going—burning houses, putting families in the street, poisoning people.” At the end of the film, after the Op destroys a band of gangsters and discovers the identity of a murderer, the fire still burns, and even though occupied by the National Guard, the streets look as depressing as ever. On a train out of town, the Op finds himself sitting across from the brutal capitalist Elihu Willsson, who remarks, “I’m not going to let a man like you get away from me.…I want you to run for governor.” (Unpublished screenplay by Bernardo Bertolucci and Marilyn Goldin, June 1982, Lilly Library manuscripts collection, Bloomington, Indiana.)

41. T. S. Eliot, Selected Prose (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1953), 183. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically in the text.

42. George Orwell later wrote of Greene, “He appears to share the idea, which has been floating around ever since Baudelaire, that there is something rather distingué in being damned; Hell is a sort of high-class nightclub, entry to which is reserved for Catholics only” (quoted in Shelden, Graham Greene, 350). For a commentary on how Brighton Rock was appropriated by a later subculture, see Niel Nehring, “Revolt into Style: Graham Greene Meets the Sex Pistols,” PMLA 106, no. 2 (March 1991): 222–37.

43. Graham Greene, Brighton Rock (New York: Viking Press, 1967), 58. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically in the text.

44. Norman Sherry has suggested that Ida Arnold was modeled on Mae West, whose films greatly amused Greene (Sherry, Life of Graham Greene, 1:635–36). But the name “Arnold” also points to Matthew Arnold, a liberal humanist whom T. S. Eliot described as an “undergraduate” in philosophy and a “philistine” in religion (Eliot, “Matthew Arnold,” in Selected Prose, 165).

45. A Gun for Sale was published in America as This Gun for Hire. Throughout this chapter, I use the British title of the novel in order to distinguish it from the film adaptation.

46. Like the novel, the film gives a “psychoanalytic” and sociological interpretation of Raven, who has witnessed the hanging of his father, the suicide of his mother, and the horrors of an orphanage. Alan Ladd alludes to these experiences in a slightly mad speech to Veronica Lake as the two are hiding out from the police in an abandoned railway yard—a scene clearly influenced by radical scriptwriter Albert Maltz. His worst memory, however, seems to be of a cruel stepmother who broke his wrist with an iron.

47. The Ministry of Fear was directed by Fritz Lang, a great admirer of Greene’s novel, who tried unsuccessfully to purchase the rights for himself. When Lang saw the studio’s script (by Seton I. Miller, an alumnus of Warner Brothers in the 1930s), he tried to escape his contract (Peter Bogdanovich, Fritz Lang in America [New York: Praeger, 1969], 65). The completed picture is in fact significantly different from the novel. In Greene’s version, the scruffy protagonist has just been released from prison for the mercy-killing of his wife; in the film, this character is a handsome fellow (Ray Milland) who is judged innocent of the killing. Paramount also fails to achieve anything like Greene’s phantasmagoric descriptions of London during the blitz. The best moments are the scenes of violent action, which are staged and photographed in perversely witty fashion.

48. In Greene’s novelized version of the story, Harry Lime is a surprisingly ordinary fellow (just as Kurtz is surprisingly small when Marlow discovers him in the jungle). By contrast, Welles is so compelling that he later became the star of a radio series in which Harry Lime was the hero.

49. “It won’t do, boys.…It’s sheer buggery,” David Selznick told Carol Reed and Greene when he read the script of the movie. Greene later joked about Selznick’s remark (Greene, The Pleasure Dome, 3). But in fact the relationship between Martins and Lime seems far more intense than schoolboy loyalty.

50. There are many differences between Greene’s published novella and the film. In the novella, for example, the story is narrated by the British officer Callaway. The American and British versions of the film are also different: the American print contains a brief opening narration by Joseph Cotten, whereas the British print is narrated by Carol Reed. As Greene pointed out, Welles was responsible for Lime’s famous speech about Italy and Switzerland; other uncredited writers for the film included Peter Smolka and Mabbie Poole. According to Joseph Cotten, Carol Reed improvised the ending to the film on the last day of shooting (see Joseph Cotten, Vanity Will Get You Somewhere [San Francisco: Mercury House, 1987], 97–98). In the British version, the closing shot runs much longer than in the American version, which was shortened by David Selznick in accordance with Hollywood practice.

51. In The Ministry of Fear, Greene describes the difference between childhood and adult reading: In childhood we live under the brightness of immortality—heaven is as near and actual as the seaside. Behind the complicated details of the world stand the simplicities: God is good, the grown-up man or woman knows the answer to every question, there is such a thing as truth, and justice is as measured and faultless as a clock. Our heroes are simple: they are brave, they tell the truth, they are good swordsmen and they are never in the long run really defeated. That is why no later books satisfy us like those which were read to us in childhood—for those promised a world of great simplicity of which we knew the rules, but the later books are complicated and contradictory with experience.

52. Ivan Moffat, “On the Fourth Floor of Paramount: Interview with Billy Wilder,” in The World of Raymond Chandler, ed. Miriam Gross (New York: A and W Publishers, 1977), 49.

53. PCA report, December 1, 1943, Margaret Herrick Library of the Motion Picture Academy, Los Angeles.

54. Two of Cain’s hard-boiled stories had been filmed in Hollywood prior to this time. She Made Her Bed (Paramount, 1934), starring Richard Arlen, was a loose adaptation of his famous satire of California road culture, “The Baby in the Icebox.” Money and the Woman (Warner Brothers, 1940), starring Jeffrey Lynn, was a B-budget version of Cain’s novella of the same title and might be described as a sentimental precursor of Double Indemnity.

55. Cain worked briefly for the Baltimore Sun, where H. L. Mencken became his mentor. His first short story, “Pastorale,” a grotesquely comic tale of murder in the Appalachian backlands, was published in Mencken’s American Mercury in 1928—the same year as Ernest Hemingway’s Men without Women, and a year before Hammett’s Red Harvest.

56. Edmund Wilson, “The Boys in the Back Room,” in Classics and Commercials (New York: Farrar, Straus, 1950), 21.

57. Cain was seldom assigned film noir projects, but he received screen credit for Algiers (1937), a Hollywood remake of Pépé le Moko. He also worked on The Shanghai Gesture (1941), which Raymond Borde and Étienne Chaumeton regard as an important early instance of noir. Later, he performed uncredited and apparently insignificant labor on an adaptation of Daniel Mainwaring’s Build My Gallows High, which eventually became Out of the Past.

58. H. L. Mencken, Prejudices: A Selection, ed. James T. Farrell (New York: Vintage, 1958), 247–48.

59. James M. Cain, Double Indemnity (New York: Vintage, 1978), 8. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically in the text.

60. Jacques Barzun, “The Illusion of the Real,” in Gross, 162.

61. Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep, in Raymond Chandler: Stories and Early Novels (New York: Library of America, 1995), 612.

62. As we have seen, Weimar intellectual life—including movies, cabaret, literature, and cultural criticism—was obsessed with industrial America, which seemed both seductive and frightening. (Consider the theory and criticism of figures like Sigfried Kracauer, Theodor Adorno, and Max Horkheimer.) Wilder is demonstrably preoccupied with this theme, but he also resembles such Americans as Mencken and Hecht, especially in his contempt for the populist masses. Interestingly, Horkheimer and Adorno’s famous essay on the culture industry was written in California at almost the same time that Double Indemnity was made.

63. The Double Indemnity house is located at 6301 Quebec Street in Los Angeles, and today it costs considerably more than the “30 thousand bucks” estimated by Walter Neff.

64. Present-day viewers of Double Indemnity are seldom aware that the film is set in the recent past. When Walter Neff begins his Dictaphone message to Keyes, he announces the date as “July 16, 1938.” This enables the filmmakers to show a market like Jerry’s without wartime rationing. Throughout, the Los Angeles locales are free of any sign of military activity. Thomas Doherty has suggested that one reason for the night-for-night photography at the Glendale train station was the government’s desire to keep information about such places secret.

65. In another famous film noir, The File on Thelma Jordan (1949), Wendell Corey discovers that Barbara Stanwyck has a dark past: he finds a photograph of her as a hard-boiled blond who looks just like Phyllis Dietrichson.

66. Richard Schickel, Double Indemnity (London: BFI, 1992), 64. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically in the text.

67. More than a decade passed before Hollywood attempted a similar scene again. In 1958, Robert Wise filmed a blow-by-blow account of a gas-chamber execution for I Want to Live!, which won Susan Hayward the Oscar. In 1961, Irvin Kershner and Don Murray devised a harrowing execution sequence for Hoodlum Priest, in which Keir Dullea plays the criminal.

CHAPTER 3

1. Cobbett Steinberg, Reel Facts: The Movie Book of Records (New York: Vintage Books, 1978), 464. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically in the text.

2. Will Hays quoted in Nancy Lynn Schwartz, The Hollywood Writer’s Wars (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982), 192. Hereafter, Schwartz’s work is cited parenthetically in the text.

3. For more detailed discussions of figures such as Joseph Breen and Martin Quigley, see Leonard Leff and Jerrold L. Simmons, The Dame in the Kimono: Hollywood Censorship and the Production Code from the 1920s to the 1960s (New York: Anchor Books, 1990). Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically in the text. See also Gregory D. Black, Hollywood Censored: Morality Codes, Catholics, and the Movies (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

4. Unless otherwise noted, this form and all other Breen Office correspondence are quoted from the PCA files at the Margaret Herrick Library of the Motion Picture Academy in Los Angeles.

5. Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier, trans. Celia Britton, Annwyl Williams, Ben Brewster, and Alfred Guzzetti (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 254.

6. Notice, however, that the Breen Office had been created partly in response to proto–films noirs such as The Story of Temple Drake (1933), Paramount’s Bowdlerized adaptation of William Faulkner’s Sanctuary (a novel that, as we have seen in chapter 1, was also an inspiration for Boris Vian’s scandalous roman noir of 1946).

7. Marc Vernet, “Film Noir on the Edge of Doom,” in Shades of Noir, ed. Joan Copjec (London: Verso, 1993), 24.

8. Even with these precautions, films were always subject to local censorship restrictions. In Ohio, censors cut the scene of Wilmer kicking Spade in The Maltese Falcon. They also cut the famous line about crime as a “left-handed form of endeavor” from The Asphalt Jungle. For additional information on such matters, see Matthew Bernstein’s “A Tale of Three Cities: The Banning of Scarlet Street,” cinema Journal 35, no. 1 (1995): 27–52. Bernstein’s research suggests that film noir in the 1940s was aimed primarily at “adult” and relatively cosmopolitan audiences and that it encountered resistance from review boards in the Midwest and South.

9. From 1947 to 1953, Mickey Spillane was the best-selling author in the United States, his success far exceeding anything ever achieved by Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler. Even so, his sales came mainly from paperbacks, and Hollywood regarded him as a low-end vulgarian. Films based on his work tended to come from the fringes of the industry. For a discussion of his impact on American publishing, see Geoffrey O’Brien, Hard-Boiled America (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1981). See also Lee Server, Over My Dead Body: The Sensational Age of the American Paperback: 1945–1955 (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1994).

10. James Agee, Agee on Film, vol. 1 (New York: McDowell, Obolensky, 1958), 217. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically in the text.

11. I take the term Browderite from Thom Andersen, “Red Hollywood,” in Literature and the Visual Arts in Contemporary Society, ed. Suzanne Ferguson and Barbara Groseclose (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1985), 141–96. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically in the text. Andersen has elaborated his argument in a recent book, coauthored with Noel Burch: Les Communistes de Hollywood: Autre choses que les martyrs (Paris: Presses universitaires de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 1994). See also Brian Neve, Film and Politics in America: A Social Tradition (London: Routledge, 1992).

12. The history of this important cultural formation is described by Michael Denning in The Cultural Front (London: Verso, 1997). Denning observes that the American Left was interested in gangster narratives but was divided over the problem of whether serious writers could work in Hollywood. According to the naturalistic novelist James T. Farrell (author of Studs Lonigan), any writer who experimented with thrillers could not avoid capitulation to a “movietone realism” and “a melodramatically simplified conception of good girls and bad girls” (quoted in Denning, 257).

13. It should be emphasized that atmospheric crime movies of the 1940s and 1950s were always open to different political inflections. Robert Montgomery’s Ride the Pink Horse (1947), scripted by Ben Hecht and Charles Lederer, has been described as “Republican noir.” In most cases, however, Hollywood tried to avoid any clear-cut party allegiances.

14. To see how the prototypical film noir narrative could be made to suit conservative interests, consider the style and technique of Whittaker Chambers’s famous memoir, Witness.

15. John Houseman quoted in Richard Maltby, “The Politics of the Maladjusted Text,” in The Book of Film Noir, ed. Ian Cameron (New York: Continuum, 1993), 41. Maltby offers an especially intelligent commentary on the dubious, circular nature of zeitgeist criticism. He also notes that the tendency to relate film noir to a “postwar malaise” seems to derive from the mostly conservative sociological critics of the McCarthy years, who were worried about the political implications of certain movies. For another effective critique of historical generalizations about noir, see David Reid and Jayne L. Walker, “Strange Pursuit: Cornell Woolrich and the Abandoned City of the Forties,” in Copjec, Shades of Noir, 57–96.

16. Chandler quoted in William Luhr, Raymond Chandler and Film (Tallahassee: Florida State University Press, 1991), 136.

17. John Houseman, Front and Center (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979). Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically in the text.

18. For other accounts that tell the same story of Chandler’s work on The Blue Dahlia, see Frank MacShane, The Life of Raymond Chandler (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1976); Luhr, Raymond Chandler and Film; and Raymond Chandler, The Blue Dahlia: A Screenplay, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1976). Hereafter, this last work is cited parenthetically in the text.

19. Raymond Chandler, “The Blue Dahlia: Treatment,” manuscript collection, Margaret Herrick Library of the Motion Picture Academy, 87.

20. Unless otherwise noted, all quotations regarding the production background and scripts of Crossfire are taken from the files of the John Paxton collection at the Margaret Herrick Library in Los Angeles.

21. At about this time, Orson Welles, who had already suggested that Charles Foster Kane was anti-Semitic, was approaching the same theme from another angle in The Lady from Shanghai, treating it more subtly and slightly in advance of either Darryl Zanuck or Dore Schary.

22. In the completed film, the date of Thomas Finlay’s death has been changed to 1848. Keith Kelly and Clay Steinman suggest that this change enabled the filmmakers to allude to a crucial year in the prehistory of Marxism. See “ Crossfire: A Dialectical Attack,” Film Reader 3 (1978): 120. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically in the text.

23. Schary’s copy of the script, together with other materials related to the production, is in the Special Collections department of the University of California, Los Angeles, library.

24. Kelly and Steinman interpret the “mystery man” as a self-conscious commentary on the unreliability of the film’s narration (“Crossfire,” 117). In my own view, Crossfire is a realistic text, quite different from a radically ambiguous art movie such as Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blowup (1966). Notice, however, that the Antonioni film contains a scene that operates according to exactly the same principle as the “mystery man” in Crossfire: during a conversation with Vanessa Redgrave, David Hemmings receives a telephone call from another woman; he gives Redgrave various explanations of his relationship to the caller and then systematically denies all of them.

25. See Louis E. Raths and Frank N. Trager, “Public Opinion and Crossfire,” Journal of Educational Sociology (February 1948): 345–69.

26. The literature on this topic is vast. Andersen, whose work I discuss later in more detail, offers an incisive review of the major writings. In addition to his “Red Hollywood,” I recommend Schwartz, Hollywood Writer’s Wars; and Larry Ceplair and Stephen Englund, The Inquisition in Hollywood: Politics in the Film Community, 1930–1960 (Garden City, N.Y.: Garden City Press, 1980).

27. Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg, Hollywood in the Forties (New York: A. S. Barnes, 1968), 38. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically in the text.

28. For an eloquent defense of Andersen’s position and a fine commentary on the politics of Nicholas Ray, John Berry, and Cyril Endfield, see Jonathan Rosenbaum, “Guilty by Omission,” in Placing Movies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). Hereafter, Rosenbaum’s Placing Movies is cited parenthetically in the text.

29. Big Jim McLain was preceded by several examples of anticommunist noir, including I Married a Communist (1950, a.k.a. The Woman on Pier 13); I Was a Communist for the F.B.I. (1951, directed by “reformed” leftist Gordon Douglas); and The Thief (1952, a technical experiment, filmed entirely without dialogue). These films were neither artistically nor commercially successful, although I Was a Communist for the F.B.I. spun off into a widely syndicated television series entitled I Led Three Lives.

30. For more commentary and details on the production of this film, see Dana Polan, In a Lonely Place (London: BFI, 1994).

31. Quotations of The Asphalt Jungle scripts are taken from the John Huston collection at the Margaret Herrick Library.

32. One of the most interesting documents in The Asphalt Jungle file at the Herrick Library is a letter to Huston, addressed “Carissimo Gianni” and signed “Hugh,” which offers sympathetic and intelligent criticism of the completed film. After praising Huston’s work, the writer goes on to say,

I am not impressed by Hardy’s statement that the police send assistance calls for help, as if there were something magnificent about that. This is what they exist for and what they are paid to do.…Hardy’s remark, “Suppose we had no police force,” strikes me as very naive and irrelevant to the point under discussion. Nobody thinks in terms of “a police force or no police force.” The whole problem is “a good police force or a corrupt police force.”

33. I have discussed the FBI investigation of Welles in “The Trial: Orson Welles vs. The FBI,” Film Comment (January–February 1991): 22–27.

34. Jules Dassin’s and Joseph Losey’s best European films are clearly in the noir tradition. Immediately after moving to France, Dassin made a commercially successful and influential “caper” movie, Rififi (1956). Losey’s early credits in England included The Sleeping Tiger (1954, directed under the name “Joseph Walton”), The Criminal (1960), and The Servant (1963). For an interesting conversation with Dassin regarding his blacklist experience, see Patrick McGilligan, “’I’ll Always be an American’: Jules Dassin Interviewed,” Film Comment (November–December 1996): 34–48.

35. The film version of The Big Knife belongs to a cycle of quasi-noirish movies about Hollywood that were released in the early 1950s. (Notice also that the Hollywood novel had long been a favored genre of the American modernists and the literary left.) The cycle was initiated by Sunset Boulevard (1950), and it included such films as The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), A Star Is Born (1954), and The Barefoot Contessa (1954). These pictures coincide not only with the blacklist, but also with the loss of studio-owned theater chains and the rise of television. They seem to reflect Hollywood’s guilty conscience and its sense that an era was ending.

36. In this period, John Frankenheimer was responsible for two other highly effective movies that might be read as films noirs: Seven Days in May (1964), a tense, underrated thriller about a fascist coup in Washington, D.C.; and Seconds (1966), a darkly satiric “Twilight Zone” story about a middle-aged executive’s desire to change himself into a younger man (played by Rock Hudson). The style of both films is indebted to Welles, but also to Frankenheimer’s experience as a brilliant director of live television.

37. Michael Rogin, “Kiss Me Deadly: Communism, Motherhood, and Cold War Movies,” Representations 6 (spring 1984): 6–7. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically in the text.

CHAPTER 4

1. See Jacques Rivette’s comments on postwar French cinema in “Six Characters in Search of Auteurs,” in Cahiers du cinema: The 1950s, ed. Jim Hillier (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985), 4.

2. Elsewhere, I have discussed the French auteurists in the context of an emerging postmodernism. See “Authorship and the Cultural Politics of Film Criticism,” Film Quarterly 44, no. 1 (fall 1990): 14–23. For an excellent account of how auteurist criticism affected the career of Alfred Hitchcock and several other directors, see Robert E. Kapsis, Hitchcock: The Making of a Reputation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).

3. Andrew Sarris, The American cinema (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1968), 29. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically in the text.

4. Manny Farber, Negative Space (New York: Praeger, 1971), 16. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically in the text.

5. In the late 1950s, when Farber wrote about the “underground,” the films he described were in fact playing in shabby, disreputable theaters. The film industry had become interested in spectacular, wide-screen productions, and many of the old action movies were being shown as re-releases in drive-ins or cheap urban settings.

6. The most wide-ranging attempt to explain the economic and industrial determinants for “B film noir” is Paul Kerr, “Out of What Past? Notes on the B Film Noir,” in The Hollywood Film Industry, ed. Paul Kerr (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1986), 220–44.

7. Among the top moneymaking films of 1941–1965, none of the classic films noirs were true industry leaders. If we construct the category loosely, its most profitable films would be Casablanca, To Have and Have Not, Gilda, Leave Her to Heaven, The Lost Weekend, Mildred Pierce, Notorious, Spellbound, Possessed, Key Largo, A Place in the Sun, Detective Story, Dragnet, Pete Kelly’s Blues, The Man with a Golden Arm, Anatomy of a Murder, Psycho, Portrait in Black, Midnight Lace, and Doctor Strangelove. (This list is based on box-office statistics in Cobbett Steinberg, Reel Facts: The Movie Book of Records [New York: Vintage Books, 1978].) In 1994, Entertainment Weekly magazine published a list of “America’s 100 All-Time Favorite Films,” which was derived from an analysis of ticket sales and video rentals. The only classical-era film on the list that is even remotely connected with the noir category is Casablanca, although the contemporary films include Fatal Attraction, Basic Instinct, Batman, and Batman Returns (Entertainment Weekly, no. 220 [29 April 1994]: 22–40). Noir also scores weakly in terms of official recognition within the industry. Leaving aside Citizen Kane, noir nominees for Academy Awards in the Best Picture category between 1941 and 1965 were The Maltese Falcon, Heaven Can Wait, Double Indemnity, Gaslight, The Lost Weekend, Spellbound, Mildred Pierce, Crossfire, Sunset Boulevard, Anatomy of a Murder, and The Hustler. The most noirlike films to actually win the award were Casablanca, The Lost Weekend, Hamlet, All the King’s Men, and On the Waterfront. Noirlike winners of “worst film” awards from The Harvard Lampoon in the same period included Spellbound, Scarlet Street, Leave Her to Heaven, The Paradine Case, Sorry, Wrong Number, The Night Has a Thousand Eyes, Niagara, and I, the Jury.

8. Charles P. Skouras quoted in Richard Maltby, “The Politics of the Maladjusted Text,” in The Book of Film Noir, ed. Ian Cameron (New York: Continuum, 1993), 46. Hereafter, Cameron’s work is cited parenthetically in the text.

9. Charles Korner is quoted by Anna Lewton in Joel E. Siegel, Val Lewton: The Reality of Terror (New York: The Viking Press, 1973), 40. Siegel’s superb book contains a great deal of useful information about production conditions in the 1940s.

10. Unless otherwise noted, production data in this paragraph and in my subsequent discussion of the 1940s and 1950s comes from Todd McCarthy and Charles Flynn, eds., Kings of the Bs: Working within the Hollywood System (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1975).

11. In The Avant-Garde Finds Andy Hardy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), Robert B. Ray observes that one of the Hardy films, 1941’s Life Begins for Andy Hardy, could be read as a film noir. “Inevitably, therefore, to advanced students only casually interested in the Hardy movies, this film seems the most ‘serious’ entry in the series” (159).

12. Lea Jacobs, “The B Film and the Problem of Cultural Distinction,” Screen 33, no. 1 (spring 1992): 3.

13. For a more complete discussion of T-Men and an analysis of how Anthony Mann’s career was affected by the change from B pictures to intermediates, see Cimberli Kearns, “Making Crime Matter: The Violent Style of the ‘Formative’ B-Film,” USC Spectator (forthcoming 1998).

14. My Name Is Julia Ross even received a favorable review in The New Yorker. Joseph H. Lewis contributed to the notion that such films were true B movies. See Gerald Peary, “Portrait de en cinéaste l’artiste de Série ‘B’: Entretien avec Joseph H. Lewis,” Positif (July–August 1975): 42–52. (This issue of Positif also has a special section on “le film criminel,” containing several interesting essays on American noir.)

15. For an intelligent discussion of The Argyle Secrets, see Jonathan Rosenbaum, Movies as Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 329–31.

16. Edgar G. Ulmer, quoted in Peter Bogdanovich, “Interview with Edgar G. Ulmer,” McCarthy and Flynn, 396.

17. Perhaps because of his extremely tight schedule, Edgar G. Ulmer’s cutting style is equally unorthodox. When Al places a long–distance call to Sue, we see an elaborate montage of long–distance operators and telephone lines, followed by a brief close-up of Sue holding a receiver in her hand; the entire conversation, however, is shown from Al’s end of the line, and we never even hear Sue’s voice. Several days later, when Al calls a second time, we see the same close-up of Sue; this time she says “hello,” but Al hangs up.

18. Andrew Britton, “Detour,” in Cameron, Book of Film Noir, 174–83.

19. Dana Polan, In a Lonely Place (London: BFI, 1994), 268.

20. Alain Silver and Carl Macek, “Gun Crazy,” in Film Noir: An Encyclopedia of the American Style, rev. ed., ed. Alain Silver and Elizabeth Ward (Woodstock: Overlook Press, 1992), 118. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically in the text.

21. A. I. Bezzerides, quoted in J. Hoberman, “The Great Whatzit,” The Village Voice (15 March 1994): 43.

22. For a good discussion of Robert Aldrich’s wavering attitude toward the film, see Edward Gallafent, “Kiss Me, Deadly,” in Cameron, Book of Film Noir, 240–46. My quote of Aldrich comes from page 240 of this essay.

23. For an interesting discussion of the film’s potentially deconstructive, “apocalyptic discourse,” see J. P. Telotte, Voices in the Dark: The Narrative Patterns of Film Noir (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 198–215. For a lively surrealistic reading in French, see Louis Seguin, “Kiss Me Mike,” Bizarre, no. 2 (October 1955): 68–71.

24. Slightly before this film, Vince Edwards had been an effective costar with Cleo Moore in Hit and Run (1957), a sub–James M. Cain thriller produced by low-budget auteur Hugo Hass.

25. The Martin Scorsese film is an undeniably powerful remake. In my own view, however, it suffers from a kind of overstatement, both in technical and thematic terms. For a discussion of how it relates formally to its “precursor” texts, see Brian McFarlane, Novel into Film (London: Oxford University Press, 1996). For a dazzling analysis of how it grows out of Scorsese’s cinephilia, and of how it exemplifies postmodern intertextuality in general, see Lesley Stern, The Scorsese Connection (London: BFI, 1995). Other elaborately produced noir remakes include Against All Odds (1984), which is based on Out of the Past, and No Way Out (1987), which is based on The Big Clock. Perhaps the most egregious instance of remake inflation is the 1988 version of D.O.A., which is actually the second remake of a movie that was already a remake. The well-known 1950 production, directed by Rudolph Mate, was loosely based on Robert Siodmak and Billy Wilder’s 1931 German film, Der Mann, Der Seinen Morder Sucht. In 1969, Australian director Eddie Davis filmed Color Me Dead, an inexpensive and uninspired modernization of the same basic story. Then came Rocky Morton’s expensive and loudly expressionistic retelling for the 1980s. The 1950 Mate film is a relatively straightforward thriller with a shocking plot twist (the star dies, after telling a couple of cops how he tracked down his own murderer), and much of its fascination derives from documentary-style shots of pudgy, sweating Edmond O’Brien as a small-time accountant running through San Francisco and Los Angeles. In contrast, the 1988 film casts trim, athletic Dennis Quaid in the role of a college English teacher, and it treats the action in the style of MTV art, using rapid cutting, lurid colors, tilted compositions, and every camera trick known to the industry.

26. Financial data and quotations from DTV producers are taken from Michele Willens, “Bypassing the Big Picture,” Los Angeles Times “Calendar” section (Sunday, 28 November 1993): 25.

27. For information on the marketing of Red Rock West, see the “Arts and Entertainment” section of The New York Times (Sunday, 3 April 1994): 19.

28. Probably the award should have been given to Jaye Davidson, whose performance gave the film much of its shock value and popularity.

CHAPTER 5

1. Janey Place and Lowell Peterson, “Some Visual Motifs of Film Noir,” in Film Noir Reader, ed. Alain Silver and James Ursini (New York: Limelight Editions, 1996), 69.

2. Geoffrey O’Brien, “The Return of Film Noir!” New York Review of Books (15 August 1991): 45.

3. In their “balance sheet” or summary argument about American film noir, Raymond Borde and Étienne Chaumeton make the following remarks on style: “One notes the German influence and its taste for high-contrast lighting. The systematic investigation of depth of field is rare; it has best suited certain ‘psychological’ films where it is used to illustrate complex relationships among multiple characters who are arranged at different distances from the lens.…The subjective camera is used often, and, in the years 1945–47, an offscreen commentary that is nowadays reserved for the police procedural” (Panorama du film noir américain, 1941–1953 [Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1955], 179, my translation).

4. Edward Dimendberg, “Kiss the City Goodbye,” Lusitania 7 (spring 1996): 56–57.

5. Dimendberg’s argument is developed further in “City of Fear: Defensive Dispersal and the End of Film Noir,” Any, no. 18 (1997): 14–18. His book on this issue, Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity, is forthcoming from Harvard University Press. For a discussion of how technology affected style across the entire history of Hollywood, see Barry Salt, Film Style and Technology: History and Analysis (London: Starword, 1983).

6. Medical officer quoted in Thomas Doherty, Projections of War: Hollywood, American Culture, and World War II (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 264.

7. Tom Gunning’s term, the cinema of attraction, is designed to indicate certain affinities between popular and avant-garde spectatorship in the earliest days of the movies. One of his most recent discussions of the idea may be found in “An Aesthetic of Astonishment,” in Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film, ed. Linda Williams (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 114–33.

8. Three-strip Technicolor cameras of the 1930s cost as much as thirty thousand dollars to build. They were rented, not purchased, from the Technicolor organization, and the cost of making color release prints for distribution was significantly greater than the cost of black and white. Variety estimated that color added as much as 25 percent to the earning power of a film, but it could also increase the budget by as much as 30 percent. See Gorham A. Kinden, “Hollywood’s Conversion to Color: The Technological, Economic, and Aesthetic Factors,” Journal of the University Film Association 31, no. 2 (spring 1979): 29–36.

9. Guy Green quoted in Steve Neale, cinema and Technology: Image, Sound, Color (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 149.

10. This was also a period when a great many musical comedies were still being made in black and white. As only one example, consider I’ll See You In My Dreams (1951), starring Doris Day and Danny Thomas.

11. Louise Nevelson quoted in Wodek, Black in Sculptural Art (Brussels: Atelier 340, 1993), 193. Hereafter, Wodek’s work is cited parenthetically in the text.

12. David Anfam, Franz Kline: Black and White, 1950–1961 (Houston: Houston Fine Art Press, 1994), 20–21. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically in the text.

13. Michael Leja, Reframing Abstract Expressionism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 110–11.

14. Leja points out that in 1949, Life magazine published a black-and-white photo of an unsmiling Jackson Pollock, standing next to one of his paintings and looking slightly off to the right; the near side of Pollock’s face was illuminated by a hard light, and the far side was hidden by the long shadow he cast against the canvas. The caption beneath the image asked whether he might be “the greatest living painter in the United States.” Leja remarks that this “noir-ish presentation was often more influential in the culture’s absorption of the New School artists than was their work” (Reframing Abstract Expressionism, 113).

15. For a discussion of the cultural politics of postwar modernism, see Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art, trans. Arthur Gold-hammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983).

16. John Alton, Painting with Light (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 45. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically in the text.

17. Conversation with the author, Hollywood, California, May 1996.

18. In his useful introduction to the 1955 edition of Alton’s Painting with Light, Todd McCarthy observes that “Alton habitually wears a beret and has the air of a Continental bohemian of the 1920s” (xvi). At MGM, Alton became one of Vin-cente Minnelli’s favorite cameramen and was given an Academy Award for the Technicolor dream sequence in An American in Paris. Besides that film, his color work with Minnelli includes Designing Woman, which occasionally parodies the hard-boiled style. He also photographed the noirlike nightmare in Father of the Bride.

19. Notice also that Out of the Past contains several brief but eloquent camera movements—as in the scene in which the camera pans slowly from Jeff Bailey, who is seated at a bar, to Kathie Moffat, who enters the room. Midway through the pan, the image dissolves, signifying the passage of time. This photographic lyricism, which is evident in both low-key and high-key scenes, can also be found in Tourneur’s other great film noir, Nightfall (1957), photographed by Burnett Guffey.

20. Whether we are speaking of black and white or color, it is much more difficult for a photographer to make films look interesting in daylight than in darkness. On sunny days, it helps a great deal to have the spectacular mountain scenery and expansive sky of westerns, as in Out of the Past. The most difficult scenes in daytime are the ones shot on city streets. “If you have a totally dark room and you have a night scene,” photographer Michael Chapman observes, “you do it all.…But if you have a day exterior, there’s just plain less you can do on it.…I think a lot of [the problem] is simply the enormous recalcitrance of daytime. It’s simply unavoidable” (Dennis Schaefer and Larry Salvato, Masters of Light: Conversations with Contemporary cinematographers [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984], 106).

21. Most of the statistics in this paragraph are derived from Kinden, “Hollywood’s Conversion to Color.” An extensive discussion of color technology and its ideological implications may be found in Neale, cinema and Technology.

22. François Truffaut, Hitchcock/Truffaut (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967), 131–32. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically in the text.

23. A similar lighting style was used in The Dark Corner (1946), an impressive black-and-white thriller on which Henry Hathaway and Joe MacDonald also collaborated.

24. To get a sense of how foreign pictures were perceived in America at the time, see J. Lee Thompson’s comedy, What a Way to Go! (1964), which parodies a wide range of contemporary styles, including a Ross Hunter melodrama in wide screen, and a European art movie in black and white.

25. Raging Bull also mixes color with black and white, but it reserves the color for a brief montage of grainy home movies. Martin Scorsese used the release of the film as an occasion to argue publicly for the preservation of old Technicolor prints and to call attention to the inferiority of contemporary color stocks. It should also be noted that most of the filmmakers I have mentioned were quick to protest television mogul Ted Turner’s attempt to computer-colorize the classic black-and-white movies.

26. There are practical as well as cultural reasons for New York cinema’s affinity with darkness. Hollywood cameraman Bill Butler, who began his career in Chicago and who later photographed such noirlike pictures as The Conversation (1974), remarks that “the people who shoot the best at night come out of New York. They’ve shot on the streets of New York so much, they don’t use anything hardly in the way of light. But they’ve got street lights and store windows to do it there” (Schaefer and Salvato, Masters of Light, 86).

27. Gordon Willis says that the technique of amber light “broke out like a plague” after he completed The Godfather. “And today, people still apply it. It’s applied indiscriminately, I might add. Because doing that does not automatically make it a period movie” (Schaefer and Salvato, Masters of Light, 288). Another fashion—now happily passing away—was the use of fog machines to give a smoky Stimmung to interiors. Along similar lines, the better photographers of the period began to shoot outdoor scenes at the “magic hour” of dusk—a technique that gave the actors a natural rimlight, and the world around them a kind of glow. This style was used effectively by Jordan Cronenweter in one of the most unusual and neglected films noirs of recent decades: Ivan Passer’s Cutter’s Way (1981).

28. Schaefer and Salvato, Masters of Light, 111.

29. Throughout this discussion, I omit camera movements, but it should be noted that most of the best-known “neo-noirs” contain spectacular tracking shots made possible by Steadicams or other new technologies. Portable cameras and “optical tracking” movements made possible by zoom lenses are in fact the chief markers of post-1970s cinematography. Scorsese’s work, not only in Taxi Driver, but also in Raging Bull, Goodfellas, and Casino, is particularly dependent on these shots. Brian DePalma and other directors often use 360-degree tracking movements in place of shot–reverse shot combinations. The opening sequence of Kathryn Bigelow’s Strange Days (1995) is a subjective POV shot that covers a violent robbery from beginning to end, starting in the back seat of an automobile and running up and down several floors of a building.

30. Peter Wollen, “MTV, and Postmodernism, Too,” in Futures for English, ed. Colin MacCabe (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989), 168.

31. Frederic Jameson argues that parody is always critical and mocking and is typical of a society that has a normative conception of language. He therefore sharply distinguishes parody from pastiche, which he defines as a “neutral” or “blank” imitation of dead styles—a mimicry “without a satirical impulse, without laughter, without that still latent feeling that there exists something normal compared to which what is being imitated is rather comic” (“Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” in The Anti-Aesthetic, ed. Hal Foster [Port Townsend, Wash.: Bay Press, 1983], 114). My own use of the term is closer to the one in Linda Hutcheon’s useful book, A Theory of Parody. Hutcheon argues that parody need not be comic; its general purpose is to establish a “difference and distance from the original text or set of conventions,” and it has a variety of uses in contemporary art. Its modern forms usually presuppose “both a law and its transgression, or both repetition and difference.” As a result, depending on its specific context, parody can be “both conservative and transformative, both ‘mystificatory’…and critical” (Theory of Parody [New York: Methuen, 1985], 101).

32. Raymond Chandler’s eye for fashion is discussed by Dana Thomas in “Pulp Fashion,” The New York Times Magazine (4 December 1994): 104–5.

33. At the height of the craze for James M. Cain in the late 1930s, there was a popular song entitled “The Postman Always Rings Twice, the Iceman Walks Right In.” There were also countless parodies of Cain, including James Thurber’s “Hell Only Breaks Loose Once.” Where movie musicals are concerned, see George Cukor’s Les Girls (1957), which contains an elaborate parody of Brando in The Wild One (1954), performed by Gene Kelly.

34. “I am constantly tempted to burlesque the whole thing,” Chandler remarked after completing The Big Sleep. “I find myself kidding myself.…Why is it that Americans—of all people the quickest to reverse their moods—do not see the strong element of burlesque in my writing?” (quoted in Frank MacShane, The Life of Raymond Chandler [New York: E. P. Dutton, 1976], 93). He also claimed that two of his early stories, “Blackmailers Don’t Shoot” and “Smart-Aleck Kill,” were “pure pastiche” (Frank MacShane, ed., Selected Letters of Raymond Chandler [New York: Columbia University Press, 1981], 187). In the 1940s, S. J. Perelman wrote a parody of Chandler for The New Yorker (“Farewell, My Lovely Appetizer”). Chandler loved it, and he and Perelman became good friends.

35. Even though the Germans had a crucially important influence on historical film noir, Wim Wenders claimed that he was unable to make “any connections between the films Fritz Lang made in America and the ones he made in Germany.” For him, noir was a Hollywood invention, associated with the flood of American pop culture that spread throughout Germany at the end of the war. Because of his ambivalence about this culture, Wenders paid oblique, ironic tribute to American sources of the 1940s and 1950s, casting pop icon Dennis Hopper as an American crook who wants to “bring the Beatles back to Hamburg,” Samuel Fuller as a Mafia dealer in international pornography, and Nicholas Ray as an artist who lives by forgery.

36. According to Leigh Brackett, the script was designed to make Chandler’s novel more straightforward, less morally ambiguous and inconclusive: “Our only achievements were two: Terry Lennox has become a clear-cut villain, and it seemed that the only satisfactory ending was for the cruelly-diddled Marlowe to blow Terry’s guts out.” (Leigh Brackett, “From The Big Sleep to The Long Goodbye, and More or Less How We Got There,” Take One 1, no. 1 [1974]: 27–28.) For his own part, Altman wanted to create an anti-Bogart movie: “I think Marlowe’s dead. I think that was ‘the long goodbye.’ I think it’s a goodbye to that genre—a genre that I don’t think is going to be acceptable any more.” (Jan Dawson, “Robert Altman Speaking,” Film Comment [March–April 1974]: 41.)

37. Photographer John Alonzo recalls that Polanski “liked putting the camera very close to the performers, right on top of them. Now that’s an intimidating thing to any actress who is so beautiful [as Faye Dunaway]. Well, it added to her performance. I really believe, it made her nervous” (Schaefer and Salvato, Masters of Light, 32).

38. John G. Cawelti, “Chinatown and Generic Transformation in Recent American Films,” in Film Theory and Criticism, 2d ed., ed. Gerald Mast and Marshall Cohen (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 200. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically in the text.

39. Barbara Creed, “From Here to Modernity: Feminism and Postmodernism,” in A Postmodern Reader, ed. Joseph Natoli and Linda Hutcheon (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 407

40. For a discussion of consumerism and postmodern spectatorship, see Anne Friedberg, Window Shopping: cinema and the Post-Modern Condition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).

41. Quentin Tarantino quoted in Paul A. Woods, King Pulp: The Wild World of Quentin Tarantino (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1996), 103. Hereafter, Woods’s work is cited parenthetically in the text.

42. Peter Bogdanovich and Jonathan Rosenbaum, This Is Orson Welles (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), 168.

CHAPTER 6

1. E. Ann Kaplan, ed., Women in Film Noir (London: BFI, 1980), 4. Hereafter, this work will be cited parenthetically in the text.

2. See especially the essays by Sylvia Harvey and Janey Place in Kaplan, Women in Film Noir. It should also be noted that the sexual politics of film noir are complicated by a strong current of masochistic eroticism. For a particularly cogent discussion of such matters, see Gaylyn Studlar, In the Realm of Pleasure: Von Sternberg, Dietrich, and the Masochistic Aesthetic (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988).

3. Frank Krutnick, In a Lonely Street: Film Noir, Genre, Masculinity (London: Routledge, 1991), 91. For an analysis of the “masculinity in crisis” argument in recent film study, see Tania Modleski, Feminism without Women (New York: Routledge, 1991).

4. R. Barton Palmer, Hollywood’s Dark cinema: The American Film Noir (New York: Twayne, 1994), 171.

5. See the commentary on Blue Steel and Love Crimes in Alain Silver and Elizabeth Ward, eds., Film Noir: An Encyclopedia of the American Style, rev. ed. (Woodstock: Overlook Press, 1992), 418–19.

6. Manthia Diawara, “Noirs by Noirs: Towards a New Realism in Black cinema,” in Joan Copjec, ed. Shades of Noir (London: Verso, 1993), 262.

7. A wide-ranging discussion of Orientalist motifs in other kinds of movies may be found in Matthew Bernstein and Gaylyn Studlar, eds., Visions of the East: Orientalism in Film (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997).

8. Dashiell Hammett, “Dead Yellow Women,” in The Big Knockover, ed. Lillian Hellman (New York: Vintage, 1972), 246.

9. For discussion of this and other kinds of Hollywood films involving romantic relations between Asians and Anglos, see Gina Marchetti, Romance and the “Yellow Peril”: Race, Sex, and Discursive Strategies in Hollywood Fiction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).

10. A particularly informative interview with Wayne Wang about these and other matters may be found in Owen Shapiro and Chen-Tsung Yau, “Film-Making and Ethnic Boundaries: A Conversation with Wayne Wang,” Point of Contact (winter/spring 1997): 71–87. Wang says that he would like to make films “with a Chinese content, but which also have something in the structure that is Chinese.” At the same time, he notes, “it becomes a tricky question as to what is the Chinese aesthetic in film” and “even more complicated when asked about Chinese-American aesthetics.” His own practice is strongly influenced by the Frenchman Jean-Luc Godard and the Japanese Yasujiro Ozu. Although he never mentions noir, his interview is filled with references to motifs we can associate with the form: multiple perspectives, offscreen narration, mirror shots, imagery of water, and so on.

11. Wayne Wang quoted in Peter Feng, “Being Chinese American, Becoming Asian American: Chan Is Missing,” cinema Journal 35, no. 4 (summer 1996): 99.

12. Julian Stringer, “’Your tender smiles give me strength’: Paradigms of Masculinity in John Woo’s A Better Tomorrow and The Killer,” Screen 38, no. 1 (spring 1997): 25–41.

13. See Rolando J. Romero, “The Postmodern Hybrid: Do Aliens Dream of Alien Sheep?” Post Script 16, no. 1 (fall 1996): 41–52. The Chicano character does not exist in the Philip K. Dick novel that was the source of Blade Runner, but the William Burroughs story that gave the film its title involves a dystopian influx of Puerto Ricans and African Americans into Manhattan. Romero notes that the original script for the film was written by Hampton Fancher, who was himself partly Chicano. Both versions of the completed picture, he argues, reflect “postmodernism’s ambivalence toward hybridity,” together with a certain “indeterminacy towards the representation of the most visible population in the California landscape” (43).

14. Notice also that both adaptations of Farewell, My Lovely are more misogynistic than Raymond Chandler had been. In the novel, Velma Valento–Helen Grayle sacrifices her life to avoid causing trouble for the rich man she has married; indeed Marlowe’s attitude in telling the story (as the title of the book suggests) is elegiac. The Dick Richards movie is especially out of keeping with this effect. It not only portrays Velma-Helen as a conventional femme fatale, but also has Marlowe kill her off at the end.

15. For a discussion of “existential” motifs in American film noir, see Robert Porfirio, “No Way Out: Existential Motifs in the Film Noir,” in The Film Noir Reader, ed. Alain Silver and James Ursini (New York: Limelight Éditions, 1996). For the quote, see Roger Rosenblatt, Black Fiction (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974), 162.

16. For additional discussion of African-American writers in Paris during the 1940s and 1950s, see Christopher Sawyer-Lau^anno, The Continental Pilgrimage: American Writers in Paris, 1944–1960 (New York: Grove Press, 1992).

17. Richard Wright himself directed and starred in a disappointing film adaptation of Native Son in the late 1950s. For a discussion of this film, see Peter Brunette, “Two Wrights, One Wrong,” in Gerald Peary and Roger Shatzkin, eds., The Modern American Novel and the Movies (New York: Ungar, 1978), pp. 131–42.

18. An excellent discussion of this production may be found in Robert Stam, “Orson Welles, Brazil, and the Power of Blackness,” Persistence of Vision, no. 7 (1989): 93–112.

19. All quotations from Welles’s Heart of Darkness are from the script dated November 30, 1939, in the Orson Welles archive at the Lilly Library in Bloom-ington, Indiana. This and other materials on the film are located in box 14, folders 15–19.

20. George Schaefer quoted in Frank Brady, Citizen Welles (New York: Anchor Books, 1989), 215.

21. For an extended discussion of the introduction and its relationship to the film as a whole, see Guerric DeBona, “Into Africa: Orson Welles and Heart of Darkness,” cinema Journal, 33, no. 3 (1994): 16–34.

22. Patrick Brantlinger, “Heart of Darkness: Anti-Imperialism, Racism, or Impressionism?” in Heart of Darkness, ed. Ross C. Murfin (New York: St. Martin’s Press), 364–65.

23. For a more complete history of African Americans in these and other Hollywood films, see Donald Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films (New York: Continuum, 1991); Thomas Cripps, Black Film as Genre (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979); and Mark Reid, Redefining Black Film (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).

24. Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks, 140. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically in the text.

25. Robyn Wiegman, “Black Bodies/American Commodities: Gender, Race, and the Bourgeois Ideal in Contemporary Film,” in Unspeakable Images: Ethnicity and the American cinema, ed. Lester D. Friedman (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), 323.

26. Diawara, “Noirs by Noirs,” in Copjec, Shades of Noir, 273.

27. Charles Burnett, “Inner City Blues,” in Questions of Third cinema, ed. Jim Pines and Paul Willemen (London: BFI, 1989), 224. An even more direct critique of the black “gangsta” movies (also written from a black perspective) may be found in Jacquie Jones, “The New Ghetto Aesthetic,” Wide Angle 13, nos. 3–4 (July–October 1991): 32–43.

28. Paul Arthur, “Los Angeles as Scene of the Crime,” Film Comment (July–August 1996): 26.

29. For commentary on this strategy in another film about passing, see Lauren Berlant, “National Brands/National Body: Imitation of Life,” in Phantom Public Sphere, ed. Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 173–208.

CHAPTER 7

1. Arjun Appadurai, “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy,” Public Culture 2, no. 2 (spring 1990): 2.

2. Intriguingly, Fredric Wertham’s writings had been read by Joseph Losey, as background for the character of the child-murderer in the remake of M (1951).

3. For good discussions of The Fugitive and Miami Vice, see James Ursini, “Angst at Sixty Fields per Second,” and Jeremy G. Butler, “Miami Vice: The Legacy of Film Noir,” in Alain Silver and James Ursini, eds., The Film Noir Reader (New York: Limelight Editions, 1996).

4. Alain Silver and Elizabeth Ward, eds., Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference to the American Style (Woodstock: Overlook Press, 1992), 1.

5. Barbara Klinger, Melodrama and Meaning: History, Culture, and the Films of Douglas Sirk (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 140.

6. This picture has in fact influenced the way contemporary audiences view the past. The current laser-disk edition of Possessed (1947) carries a blurb describing the film as a “Fatal-Attraction thriller.”

7. R. Barton Palmer, Hollywood’s Dark cinema: The American Film Noir (New York: Twayne, 1994), 184.

8. Thomas Pynchon, Vineland (New York: Penguin, 1991), 326.

9. For an intelligent and more sympathetic account of the postmodern marketplace, see Timothy Corrigan, A cinema without Walls (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1991). Corrigan offers a wide-ranging discussion of the ways in which contemporary movies affect spectatorship, genres, and auteurs.

10. In 1991, Stephen Soderbergh filmed Kafka, which is perhaps his most unalloyed art movie.

11. A more deconstructive use of similar materials in literature may be found in Robert Coover’s short story “Gilda’s Dream,” in Night at the Movies: Or, You Must Remember This (Normal, 1ll.: Dalkey Archive Press, 1997).

CHAPTER 8

1. On the other hand, it seems odd to describe Joseph von Sternberg as a naturalist and to treat The Blue Angel as a pure product of the German imagination. Sternberg, a flamboyant stylist of erotic and oneiric films, was of course an American, and The Blue Angel, which was shot in Germany with German actors, was chiefly produced by Paramount Pictures under the terms of the Paru-famet agreement.

2. In 2001, Broadway staged a musical adaptation of Therese Raquin, entitled Thou Shalt Not, with book by David Thomson and music by Harry Con-nick Jr. The show was set in New Orleans during the years just after World War II, which is the period of both Tennessee Williams’s Streetcar Named Desire and the glory days of U.S. film noir. It failed, but in 2005 it was revived for a short run at the Circle Theatre in Chicago. The Chicago Tribune described it in almost the same way one could describe the original Zola novel, as “ ‘Desperate Housewives’ meets film noir” (June 3, 2005).

3. Thomas Elsaesser, “A German Ancestry to Film Noir? Film History and Its Imaginary,” Iris, no. 21 (spring 1996): 129–43.

4. William Hannigan, New York Noir: Crime Photos from the Daily News Archive, introduction by Luc Sante (New York: Rizzoli, 1999).

5. For a discussion of Weegee and the movies, see Alain Bergala, “Weegee and Film Noir,” in Weegee’s World, ed. Miles Barth (Boston: Bulfinch Press, 1997), 69.

6. See Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1970), xv. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically in the text.

7. Raymond Borde and Étienne Chaumeton, A Panorama of American Film Noir, 1941–1953, trans. Paul Hammond (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2002), 161–63. Hereafter, all references are to this text, and page numbers are indicated parenthetically.

8. The Wikipedia list is available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Film_noir (accessed January 20, 2007).

9. For an interesting discussion of this film, see Ginette Vincendeau, “ ‘Avez-vous lu Freud?’: Maurice Chevalier dans Pièges de Robert Siodmak,” Iris, no. 21 (spring 1996): 89–98.

10. Adun Englelstad, Losing Streak Stories: Mapping Norwegian Film Noir (Oslo: Faculty of Humanities, University of Oslo, 2006).

11. Rick Altman, Film/Genre (London: British Film Institute, 1999); Steve Neale, Genre and Hollywood (London: Routledge, 2000).

12. Mark T. Conrad, ed., The Philosophy of Film Noir (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2005); Alain Silver and James Ursini, eds., Film Noir Reader 2 (New York: Limelight Éditions, 2000); Alain Silver, James Ursini, and Robert Porfirio, Film Noir Reader 3 (New York: Limelight Éditions, 2004); Alain Silver and James Ursini, eds., Film Noir Reader 4 (New York: Limelight Éditions, 2004); Jans B. Wager, Dames in the Driver’s Seat: Rereading Film Noir (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005); Sheri Chinen Biesen, Blackout: World War II and the Origins of Film Noir (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005); John T. Irwin, Unless the Threat of Death Is Behind Them: Hard-Boiled Fiction and Film Noir (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006); Paula Rabinowitz, Black and White and Noir: America’s Pulp Modernism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002); Alexander Nemerov, Icons of Grief: Val Lewton’s Home Front Pictures (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006).

13. David Andrews, “Sex Is Dangerous, so Satisfy Your Wife: The Softcore Thriller in Its Contexts,” cinema Journal 45, no. 3 (2006): 59–89; see also Linda Williams, The Erotic Thriller in Contemporary cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005).

14. As I write this chapter, Vivian Sobchack’s essay is due to be published soon in the Journal of Visual Culture.

15. Erik Dussere, “Out of the Past, Into the Supermarket: Consuming Film Noir,” Film Quarterly 60, no. 1 (fall 2006): 16–27.

16. Edward Dimendberg, Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004).

17. John Boorman, quoted in Robert Carringer, “Hollywood’s Los Angeles: Two Paradigms,” in Looking for Los Angeles: Architecture, Film, Photography, and the Urban Landscape, ed. Charles G. Salas and Michael S. Roth (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute Publications, 2001). Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically in the text.

18. See James Naremore, “Love and Death in A.I. Artificial Intelligence,” Michigan Quarterly Review (spring 2005): 256–84. A slightly different version of this essay can also be found in the last chapter of my book On Kubrick (London: British Film Institute, 2007).

19. David Bordwell, Figures Traced in Light: On cinematic Staging (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 27.

20. Steven Soderbergh’s The Good German (2006), which is set in 1946, is photographed in black and white and employs techniques associated with a studio like Warner Brothers in the 1940s. Soderbergh used wide-angle lenses, eschewed “coverage,” and shot the film so that it gave little opportunity for alternative editing. See Dave Kehr, “You Can Make a Movie Just the Way They Used To,” New York Times, “Arts and Entertainment” sec. (November 12, 2006) , 1, 15.

21. Thom Andersen, “Collateral Damage,” cinema Scope, no. 20 (2004): www.cinema-scope.com/cs20/ar_andersen_collat.htm (accessed January 21, 2007) .

22. Leslie Moonves, chairman of CBS, quoted in Lynn Hirschberg, “Giving Them What They Want,” New York Times Magazine, September 4, 2005, 30.

23. Slavoj Žižek, “The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime: On David Lynch’s Lost Highway,” Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities, Occasional Papers no. 1 (Seattle: University of Washington, 2000). Hereafter, references are to this edition, and page numbers are indicated in the text.

24. Warren Buckland, “ ‘A Sad, Bad Traffic Accident’: The Televisual Prehistory of David Lynch’s Film Mulholland Dr.,” New Review of Film and Television Studies 1, no. 1 (November 2003): 131–47.

25. Todd McGowan, “Lost on Mulholland Drive: Navigating David Lynch’s Panegyric to Hollywood,” cinema Journal 43, no. 2 (2004): 68.