One day in 1993, Emmy Award-winning filmmaker Ara Chekmayan visited a Pennsylvania fleamarket, where he discovered a statuette that looked exactly like the Maltese Falcon. Chekmayan purchased the black bird for $8 and, not long afterward, believing it to be one of two identical props that had been used in the famous 1941 Warner Bros. movie, he offered it up for auction at Christie’s, who estimated its value at $50,000. Before an auction could take place, however, a Los Angeles collector pointed out that identical copies of the statuette could be purchased at $45 a piece from a book dealer in Long Beach…
– James Naremore (1998: 254)
James Naremore takes this anecdote to prove that certain 1940s Hollywood thrillers have accumulated sufficient ‘artistic and cultural cachet’ to become ‘valuable as other things besides movies’ (1998: 255). Looked at differently, it provides a key to the central problematic of identifying, delineating, defining film noir: this book opens by quoting from another book on film noir which retells a story from People magazine about a man who found one of many copies based on the original (two copies of the) prop of the Maltese Falcon – which, diegetically, was a fake – in the third film to be based on Dashiell Hammett’s 1931 hard-boiled detective novel The Maltese Falcon, itself originally serialised in Black Mask pulp magazine between September 1929 and January 1930. So what exactly was it that Chekmayan thought he had found when he thought he had found (one of) the original Falcon(s)? In this welter of copies of copies in different media and adaptations from one medium to another the notion of an original evanesces. Even Hammett is no guarantor. His cynical deflation of the Grail myth in the modern urban waste land is not the first (his 1931 The Glass Key alludes to T. S. Eliot’s 1922 ‘The Waste Land’), nor is his Sam Spade the original hard-boiled detective (a more likely contender is Carroll John Daly’s Terry Mack).
Similarly, when we approach film noir, we are faced with neither an objectively-existing object out there in the world nor some ideal to which particular films more or less conform. Instead, as Naremore argues, film noir ‘has less to do with a group of artefacts than with a discourse – a loose evolving system of arguments and readings that helps to shape commercial strategies and aesthetic ideologies’ (1998: 11). Like any genre, film noir is an intersubjective discursive phenomenon: a fabrication. But as Dudley Andrew observes, ‘A fabrication … is by no means a fiction’ (1995: 12).
After indicating the number of films that have been considered film noirs, this introduction suggests how that canon might be further expanded and considers one influential attempt to more rigidly delineate the genre, detailing some of the difficulties implicit in it. Marc Vernet notes that ‘the Americans made [film noir] and then the French invented it’ (1993: 1). Chapter one therefore surveys some of the Francophone criticism which first identified – or fabricated the idea of – film noir before outlining some of the early Anglophone statements about film noir, showing how the idea was taken up and developed prior to the academicisation of film studies in the 1970s. The purpose of this chapter is to demonstrate the historically-contingent discursive fabrication of the genre.
If the idea of film noir originated in mid-1940s Paris, the origins of the genre are typically traced back to four sources: German expressionism, French poetic realism, American hard-boiled fiction and American crime films (see Richardson 1992 on Italian neorealism as a neglected influence). Chapter two expands the consideration of interwar German cinema beyond expressionism, noting similarities with Hollywood’s 1930s fallen-women cycle before turning to the work of Robert Siodmak and Fritz Lang, German directors who made numerous film noirs in exile. It then considers 1930s French cinema, contrasting several poetic realist films with American film noirs. It examines 1930s American crime films, particularly the gangster cycle – how the anachronistic figure of the 1930s gangster proved integral to the meaning of 1940s film noirs, and how the moratorium on producing gangster pictures produced alternative kinds of crime film – and three films, two of them directed by Lang, in which the increasing psychologisation of crime already apparent in hard-boiled fiction can be traced. In focusing on these filmic sources, the treatment of literary sources will remain cursory (on hard-boiled fiction, see Forter 2000, Madden 1968, Marling 1995, McCann 2000, Nolan 1985, O’Brien 1997, O’Connell 2002).
Chapter three offers detailed consideration of a variety of film noirs from the main cycle, which began with Stranger on the Third Floor (1940) and The Maltese Falcon (1941). Production peaked in the late 1940s and early 1950s and continued into the late 1950s, petering out with Cape Fear (1962), The Manchurian Candidate (1962), Shock Corridor (1963) and The Naked Kiss (1964). The films treated in this chapter were selected in order to explore the genre’s recurring concern with notions of determinism, particularly the constitution and shaping – and simultaneous shattering and dissolution – of individual subjectivity. By examining two overlapping groups of film noirs – one dominated by images and ideas of entrapment, the other by images and ideas of investigation – this chapter does not argue that these are the primary concerns of the genre or even necessarily of these particular films, but rather explores how they are articulated in a significant proportion of film noirs. The construction of gender, particularly white masculinities, is a recurring concern throughout (on film noir and race, see Diawara 1993, Kaplan 1998b, Oliver and Trigo 2003).
Chapter four offers a brief overview of the development of neo-noir, culminating in a discussion of Femme Fatale (2002), a film whose self-conscious combination of various elements of film noir, spectacle-dominated action movie and erotic thriller is typical of many neo-noirs (as are its homophobia, misogyny and racism), while its major plot twist combines a fantastic coincidence which rearticulates noirish determinism.
Finally, the afterword considers This Is Not a Love Song (2002) and Sin City (2005) as digital remediations of film noir.
The inclusive filmography offered by Paul Duncan (2003) lists 1,028 film noirs:
| German expressionist films, 1920–33 |
5 |
| American precursors, 1927–39 |
26 |
| French poetic realist films, 1931–43 |
8 |
| American film noirs, 1940–60 |
647 |
| American noir westerns, 1940–53 |
7 |
| American post-noirs, 1961–76 |
48 |
| American neo-noirs, 1976–92 |
167 |
| French films, 1949–91 |
31 |
| British films, 1927–91 |
71 |
| Italian films, 1943–71 |
5 |
| Mexican films, 1949–71 |
3 |
| Japanese films, 1962–2000 |
10 |
Foster Hirsch (1999) lists a further 47 American neo-noirs released between 1993 and 1997, and Robin Buss (1994) a further 79 French film noirs between 1942 and 1992. Although Andrew Spicer (2002) only lists 538 films, this includes almost 200 titles not mentioned by these other authors, many of them among the 104 British film noirs he identifies. These figures illustrate two important points.
First, that the main cycle of American film noirs is recorded in sufficient detail that, despite the debatable inclusion of many of the titles in these encyclopaedic listings, few more additions are likely to be unearthed, although some might arise from critically rethinking other genres, especially melodrama and, possibly, the western. Several westerns – Pursued (1947), Ramrod (1947), High Noon (1952), Rancho Notorious (1952), the five James Stewart westerns directed by Anthony Mann – have been described as noir westerns and many more from the 1950s feature badly disturbed protagonists or, like some scenes in My Darling Clementine (1946), noirish lighting. Additionally, several film noirs utilise western imagery: Florian’s bar in Murder, My Sweet (1944) seems to be an only-slightly-redressed western saloon, complete with swinging doors and music that stops when Marlowe (Dick Powell) and Moose Malloy (Mike Mazurki) enter; in High Sierra (1941) and White Heat (1949) western costumes and settings anachronise their protagonists; in Gun Crazy (1950) similar costumes expose the tendency to romanticise crime and outlaws even as, contradictorily, it depicts a passionate amour fou. Furthermore, the growing number of science fiction films which play on and with film noir conventions, from Alphaville (1965) to Cypher (2003), might encourage a re-examination of earlier science fiction films for traces of or affiliations to film noir.
Second, that outside of the main period of American film noir the terrain is still lacking any kind of consensus. There is still work to be done on film noirs before film noir, film noirs after film noir and film noirs in other national, linguistic and international contexts. For example, Michael Walker suggests that further research into 1930s crime films might produce ‘more proto-noir films’ (1992a: 33) like Nancy Steele is Missing (1936), and James Naremore notes the critical neglect of the direct-to-video industry – in the mid-1990s, a ‘seventeen-billion-dollar-a-year industry, involving more money than all the major studios combined’ (1998: 161) – which produces numerous softcore erotic thrillers, perhaps the primary contemporary manifestation of film noirs about sexual obsession, blackmail and murder. Similarly, research into other national cinemas might uncover more films like the Japanese Keisatsukan (1933), while discussions of neo-noir have yet to consider East Asian crime cinema in detail. Furthermore, if one accepts that film noirs are still being made, then each fresh example could potentially reshape the genre, narrowing or, more probably, widening it. Questions of omissions and additions inevitably return to questions of definition, and any attempt at definition restructures the genre, drawing in or casting out particular titles. It is through such complex feedback processes that genres form and reform.
In 1978, James Damico proposed a working model of film noir in terms of characters and plot structure so as to cut through the ill-discipline of encyclopaedic listings and the confusions they engender:
Either because he is fated to do so by chance, or because he has been hired for a job specifically associated with her, a man whose experience of life has left him sanguine and often bitter meets a not-innocent woman of similar outlook to whom he is sexually and fatally attracted. Through this attraction, either because the woman induces him to it or because it is the natural result of their relationship, the man comes to cheat, attempt to murder, or actually murder a second man to whom the woman is unhappily or unwillingly attached (generally he is her husband or lover), an act which often leads to the woman’s betrayal of the protagonist, but which in any event brings about the sometimes metaphoric, but usually literal destruction of the woman, the man to whom she is attached, and frequently the protagonist himself. (1996: 137)
This narrative structure, familiar from James M. Cain’s novels The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934) and Double Indemnity (1936), is found in the nine films, uncontroversially film noirs, on which Damico focuses: Double Indemnity (1944), The Woman in the Window (1945), Scarlet Street (1945), The Killers (1946), The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946), Out of the Past (1947), The Lady from Shanghai (1948), Pitfall (1948) and Criss Cross (1949). Damico suggests that Murder, My Sweet (1944), The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946) and The Blue Dahlia (1946) contain only ‘slight variations’, while The Maltese Falcon anticipates key aspects and In a Lonely Place (1950) contains ‘apparent mutations and [a] collapsing of elements’ (1996: 138).
Although Damico recognises that there are ‘a multitude of other correspondences to be evaluated which will perhaps delimit, broaden or even invalidate this provisional model’, including ‘the pervasive atmosphere of corruption, crime, psychopathology and evil; the constant resort to gratuitous violence; the omnipresence of the returning veteran; the importance of the oneiric in structure and substance; and recurrent visuals’ (ibid.), he argues that it can be used to exclude certain films from the film noir canon, such as the postwar semi-documentary films which reconstructed actual crimes, pioneered by producer Louis de Rochemont and beginning with The House on 92nd Street (1945). Damico also claims that his model enables an understanding of how, in other films, the ‘elements have been altered and condensed or expanded’ (1996: 139), but his example of giggling psychopath Tommy Udo (Richard Widmark) in Kiss of Death (1947) as someone who combines ‘the masculine and feminine qualities of the other man and the fatal woman’ (ibid.) conveniently overlooks the film’s indebtedness to the semi-documentary cycle.
Damico’s elaborations demonstrate a tension in any attempt to delimit a genre, best understood through the distinction between semantic and syntactic approaches to genre. Semantic approaches catalogue ‘common traits, attitudes, characters, shots, locations’ (Altman 1999: 219), and then list all the films which contain (at least some of) them. Despite generating exhaustive lists, this approach has little explanatory power. In contrast, syntactic approaches like Damico’s model identify and explore ‘certain constitutive relationships between undesignated and variable place-holders’ (ibid.) in a handful of canonical texts seen as exemplifying the particular genre’s core concerns. However, no sooner than Damico imposes a syntactic model he expands his initially exclusive list into a far more inclusive one, reinterpreting and reshaping excluded films so that they more closely approximate to his model and can therefore be readmitted into the genre. Indeed, this problem is evident even in the nine films he considers an unequivocal match for his model, as a description of The Killers will show.
Two hitmen, Al (Charles McGraw) and Max (William Conrad), arrive in Brentwood, New Jersey, take over Henry’s Diner and await the arrival of Swede (Burt Lancaster), who works at the gas station. When he fails to appear, the hitmen head for his boarding house. Warned of their approach, Swede, who has clearly been waiting for something like this to happen, refuses to do anything, explaining, ‘I did something wrong – once’. He is killed. This opening sequence, a textbook example of film noir lighting and composition, is based on Ernest Hemingway’s story ‘The Killers’ (1928), which ends at this point. The remainder of the film takes the form of a quest to uncover the reason for Swede’s murder. Insurance investigator Riordan (Edmond O’Brien) is intrigued. In the first of the film’s eleven flashbacks, he learns that a stranger – Colfax (Albert Dekker) – stopped for gas several days earlier, since when Swede had been laid up in his room, ‘sick’. Riordan traces Swede’s beneficiary, Queenie (Queenie Smith), a maid at an Atlantic City hotel where Swede stayed with a woman for several days in 1940, who recalls Swede’s attempted suicide after the woman left him. Swede’s former boxing career leads Riordan to Lieutenant Sam Lubinsky (Sam Levene), Swede’s childhood friend who became a cop. Sam’s first flashback is to the night of Swede’s last fight, when he injured his hand so badly he had to quit boxing. Sam’s wife, Lilly (Virginia Christine), who used to be Swede’s girlfriend, introduces a flashback in which it becomes clear that Swede then became involved with criminals, falling for Kitty Collins (Ava Gardner), the mistress of the incarcerated Colfax. In Sam’s second flashback he tells of arresting Swede when he insisted on taking the rap for Kitty. At Swede’s funeral, Riordan meets Charleston (Vince Barnett), Swede’s ex-cellmate. In a pair of flashbacks, he tells Riordan about Swede’s obsession with Kitty, and how he introduced Swede to Colfax; Charleston refused to become involved in the heist Colfax was planning, but Swede, lured by Kitty’s presence, agreed. The eighth flashback is narrated by Riordan’s boss, who reads a newspaper account of the 1940 Prentiss Hat Company robbery which Riordan has linked to Swede. Sam summons Riordan to a hospital where Blinky (Jeff Corey), one of Colfax’s gang, is dying of gunshot wounds. Delirious, he introduces two flashbacks: in the first, on the eve of the robbery, Swede threatens Colfax; in the second, Swede, claiming that he has been double-crossed, arrives at the altered rendezvous after the robbery and takes all the money. Riordan returns to Swede’s room in Brentwood where Dum-Dum (Jack Lambert), the gang member who killed Blinky, is searching for a clue as to where Swede hid the money. After a scuffle, Dum-Dum escapes. Riordan questions Colfax, now an apparently respectable businessman, who denies all knowledge of the robbery. Riordan arranges a meeting with Kitty. She introduces the final flashback, in which she convinces Swede the gang are double-crossing him so as to get him to double-cross them. It was, however, all a set-up, a complex double-cross planned by Colfax, to whom Kitty is now married. Back in the present, Sam kills the hitmen as they try to gun down Riordan, but Kitty escapes. Riordan, Sam and the police arrive at Colfax’s house to find Dum-Dum dead and Colfax dying. Colfax, who stumbled across Swede, killed him so that no-one from the gang might find him and thus work out that Colfax and Kitty actually stole the money. Kitty arrives, but Colfax refuses to falsely clear her name before he dies.
This account demonstrates the extent of the violence Damico must perform on The Killers for it to conform to his model. If the film, shot by Woody Bredell, is a virtual inventory of film noir’s low-key, expressionist cinematography, it is also a compendium of film noir plots. Walker suggests that it forms, along with Criss Cross and The File on Thelma Jordan (1950), Siodmak’s trilogy ‘dealing with "the mystery of woman"’ (1992b: 151), and Damico’s narrative structure can be found in the flashback story, albeit with deviations. Although Kitty does induce Swede to cheat Colfax, it is only as part of a larger scheme with Colfax, and there is little to suggest that Kitty is ‘unhappily or unwillingly attached’ to Colfax. This triangular relationship is simultaneously at the centre of the film and marginalised because the narrative foregrounds Riordan’s investigation. Kitty’s femme fatale and Swede’s victim-hero, character types at the centre of Damico’s model, are subordinated and subjected to Riordan’s seeker-hero narrative (on these character types, see Walker 1992a). The film might then be better understood as a male investigation of the mystery of a man, lending it a homoerotic frisson.
The film was initially perceived as a gangster film – Siodmak retrospectively regarded it as such – and Walker suggests that it can be also seen, with Criss Cross and Cry of the City (1948), as part of Siodmak’s gangster trilogy (1992b: 128). It is also, like Body and Soul (1947), Champion (1949), The Set-Up (1949), Second Chance (1953), Killer’s Kiss (1955) and The Harder They Fall (1956), a boxing film noir. Swede’s attempted double-cross is a shorthand form of the revenge against the mob plot which, despite appearing in film noirs like The Big Heat (1953) and Underworld USA (1961), did not come to fruition until Point Blank (1967) and Get Carter (1970). Swede and Kitty are briefly a couple on the run, like those in They Live By Night (1949) and Gun Crazy; and like The Asphalt Jungle (1950), The Killing (1956) and Odds Against Tomorrow (1959), The Killers also contains a heist. This robbery sequence, filmed in a single two-minute crane-shot, seems to belong in one of the semi-documentary crime films Damico wishes to exclude from the genre, an affiliation made stronger by the accompanying voice-over narration whose phrasing, tone, selection of detail and apparently objective omniscience resembles the semi-documentary’s ‘official account’ voice. As these other elements suggest, Damico seriously reduces and misdescribes The Killers in order to cite it as exemplary of his model.
A further problem arises with this model when The Killers is compared to Don Siegel’s 1964 remake. Two hitmen, Charlie (Lee Marvin) and Lee (Clu Gulager), track down Johnny North (John Cassavetes), an ex-racing driver who was involved in a million-dollar robbery some years earlier. Johnny’s resignation puzzles the ageing Charlie, who wonders why he made no attempt to flee his killers, concluding that the only person who would pay to have him killed without trying to discover what happened to the stolen money would be the person who actually stole it. Hoping to retire, Charlie persuades Lee to help him track down whoever contracted the hit. They question Earl (Claude Akins), Johnny’s old mechanic. In the film’s first flashback, Earl tells how Johnny fell for Sheila Farr (Angie Dickinson), the mistress of gangster Jack Browning (Ronald Reagan). Johnny and Sheila plan to marry, but when a car crash leaves him unable to continue racing, he sends her away, believing he has been just another of her casual infidelities with physically active younger men. Charlie and Lee then track down Mickey Farmer (Norman Fell), an associate of Browning, who in flashback picks up the story: Sheila persuades Browning that they need a specialist driver for a heist he is planning and urges him to recruit Johnny; after the heist, Johnny stole the money from Browning and disappeared. When the hitmen trace Browning, he appears to be a legitimate businessman. They make him arrange a meeting with Sheila. She stonewalls them at first, but breaks down when they threaten to kill her. In the third flashback, narrated by Sheila, she convinces Johnny to rob Browning and run off with her. However, it was all part of a scheme for her and Browning to get the money and leave the rest of the gang thinking that Johnny had it. As they leave the hotel to retrieve the money, a sniper kills Lee and injures Charlie. Sheila escapes and Browning – the sniper – joins her at their house. As they empty the safe, Charlie, blood dripping from his wound, catches up with them. He kills Browning. When Sheila pleads for her life, Charlie replies, ‘Lady, I don’t have the time’, and shoots her. He stumbles from the house with the money and collapses, dead.
From this description, the remake might seem considerably more noirish than the original. The investigation is conducted by a pair of professional killers rather than official or semi-official detectives, one world-weary and cold, the other narcissistic and brutal. They are motivated by curiosity, cash and, one suspects, a need to do something between contracts; and they both die. While Kitty remains an enigma primarily because she is largely absent from a film whose entire plot hinges on her manipulation of Swede, Sheila remains an enigma because, hidden behind mask-like makeup, she is the contradictory product of an experiment in perspectivism. In the first flashback, she seems genuinely to fall for Johnny, telling him she loves him and intends to stand by him after his accident. In the second flashback, the audience is manipulated into believing she has been searching for Johnny because she still has feelings for him. When she finds him, Browning spies on her through binoculars, and only after she offers to find Johnny some well-paid work does she set about persuading Browning to employ him. The first flashback contained scenes Earl did not witness but convention implies their objectivity, a sense reinforced by showing Sheila, whom Earl did not like, in a positive light (it is Johnny who rejects Sheila, not vice versa). Consequently, we are lured into accepting the apparent objectivity of the second flashback. It is only in the third flashback that we realise Mickey’s account of the heist is actually an account of what he thought had happened; but to the extent that we accept it as objective while it unfolds, Sheila’s betrayal of Johnny seems all the more devastating.
Siodmak’s version contrasts the noir world with a more respectable existence exemplified by the Lubinskys’ roof terrace, itself an extension of the contrast between the femme fatale Kitty and the domestic Lilly. This is ironised by the artifice of the rooftop idyll. The well-lit set is obviously a set and although it is above the noir world, it is a cramped space, confined by roof tops and chimney pots – but nonetheless it endures. After his final fight, Swede has the option of attaining this domestic idyll. Lilly was still his girlfriend and Sam offered to get him a job in the police with a steady income and a pension, but Swede sent Lilly home and parted company with Sam, turning down a noirishly-lit dark alley. (The more-than-passing facial resemblance between Swede and Riordan further emphasises this sense of alternative paths taken into alternative worlds.) Siegel’s version, which was made for television but released in cinemas, offers no such contrast. It is brightly- and uniformly-lit, conventionally-shot and in colour. Killers kill with impunity and law-enforcement agents are completely absent, appearing only as the sound of approaching sirens at the end. Arguably, the noir world has become ubiquitous and normalised, rendering a stylistically distinct representation superfluous or impossible. However, because it rejects film noir’s visual style, the consensus is that the remake, despite being closer to Damico’s model, is the less noirish version. To the extent that this is a reasonable judgement, film noirs cannot be defined solely in terms of a narrative structure.
What Damico offers is a narrative formula which recurs in some form in a significant number of film noirs, but which cannot be regarded as exclusive to film noirs unless one is prepared to include all films that follow the formula in the genre and to exclude all those which do not. Hammett’s Red Harvest (1929) and its film adaptations demonstrate the problems with this approach. The novel, featuring an unnamed detective, closely matches the narrative structure of the classic western, exemplified by Shane (1953), in which a ‘lone stranger … rides into a troubled town and cleans it up’ (Wright 1977: 32), but it has a contemporary setting and a jaded, cynical tone. Although there is no difficulty in counting one of its adaptations, Per un pugno di dollari (1964), as a western, the novel itself and the two other adaptations, the samurai film Yojimbo (1961) and the gangster film Last Man Standing (1996), are rather more problematic. Clearly there are ways in which they can be regarded as westerns, but in doing so one must recognise that genres are rather more fluid than Damico allows and that films have multiple generic tendencies.
In addition, then, to sharing several sometimes overlapping and interacting narrative (and thematic) structures, film noirs also share elements of a distinctive visual style. Low-key lighting and the positioning of key-, fill- and back-lighting produced patterns of light and dark which were, by Hollywood standards, unconventional. Increased depth of field made shots more ambiguous and, particularly during night-for-night shooting, required wide-angle lenses which also distorted foreground figures. Unbalanced and disharmonious compositions introduced tension into the mise-en-scène, subjectivising the objective third-person camera by shaping the diegesis to express the conflicts within and between characters. (On film noir style, see Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson 1988, Place and Peterson 1974; on industrial and economic determinants of this style, see Kerr 1996, Lev 2003, Maltby 2003, Schatz 1997.)
However, despite the importance of visual style to film noirs, the claim made by several critics that film noir is a style rather than a genre seems as untenable as the claims made for a specific narrative (or thematic) structure. Rather, film noirs emerge from (discussions about) the interactions of style, narrative and theme. Therefore, the solution this book adopts to the problem of defining film noir – it is, of course, no solution – is to avoid suggesting that a genre can be defined by a single paradigm. Rather it will explore the genre from several angles and attempt to represent as much of the narrative, thematic, stylistic and temporal range of film noir as possible.