In their 1955 Panorama of American Film Noir French film critics Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton declared the birth of a ‘neo-gangster’ film in the United States. Their exemplary titles were Jules Dassin’s Brute Force (1947), John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle, and Robert Siodmak’s The Killers and Criss Cross (2002: 78). The French critics were attuned to the manner in which these films reworked the gangster genre, splintering the 1930s archetype into other forms. In hindsight, however, it is striking that three of the four ‘neo-gangster’ films named were heists. Indeed, critics and filmmakers alike generally take John Huston’s crime thriller as the historical point of departure for the heist film, the work that first distilled the semantic and syntactic elements of this cinematic form. As far as the heist film in the United States is concerned, this etiological claim must be qualified by articulating the relationship between the 1930s gangster film, 1940s film noir, crime fiction and the new heist genre in the post-war context.
The genre that found its particular form in
The Asphalt Jungle implies a long tradition of crime movies dating back to the origins of cinema. These early films lack the most salient semantic and syntactic features of the post-war films designated as heists, yet they conditioned audiences to the psychological thrill of seeing representations of the underworld and transgressive behaviour. The relation of most early crime films to the later heist is primarily thematic and affective, not necessarily semantic or syntactic, which is to say that they told stories about criminal masterminds, gangs, and daring actions that thrilled their audience; for the most part these stories possess identifiable features of the heist while not shaping repeatable plot elements or characters in as significant a way as the heist’s more immediate predecessors: gangster and lone-wolf thief movies. For example, early crime films used violence and robbery as stimulating plot elements in films such as
A Daring Daylight Burglary,
Trailed by Blood-hounds and
A Desperate Poaching Affray (all from 1903) (see Musser 1990: 365; these British films were themselves ‘duped’, a fraudulent form of copying in the burgeoning American film industry, and a case of life imitating art). But these films did harbour other qualities that make them relevant to the heist. The most important early film of this sort, in the United States at least, is Edwin S. Porter’s
The Great Train Robbery (1903). Kaminsky called it ‘the first Big Caper film’ (1974: 81). Rosow, on the other hand, in his history of gangster movies, dismissed Porter’s film as an original heist film because it lacked the ‘balletic teamwork, precision, and underworld settings that are characteristic of films like
The Asphalt Jungle or
The Killing [and that] are first clearly discernible in [1930s] gangster movies, as in the montage sequence in
Little Caesar’ (1978: 282). Although the vast majority of these early films may justifiably be excluded as influences, we miss an opportunity to draw a connection to them in the very terms Rosow uses to define the heist – the ‘hold-up montage’ as a special representational moment that anticipates the very ‘balletic teamwork [and] precision’ that would come to characterise the heist. In
The Great Train Robbery, bandits stage a hold-up that turns violent and finally fails when lawmen catch the thieves. The film, long for its time at eleven minutes, does not set out to detail the plans of the hold-up or the assembly and preparations of the gang. Yet Charles Musser identifies an ‘operational aesthetic’ (1990: 354) in Porter’s adventure that anticipates elements of the full-blown caper: ‘The careful attention to the details of robbing a train, the emphasis on process as narrative, almost takes
The Great Train Robbery out of the realm of fiction and suggests a documentary intent’ (Musser 1990: 355).
The Great Train Robbery is aware, however inchoately, of the representation of process, of the filmic construction of temporal unfolding and, specifically, of criminal spatial penetrations typical of the heist.
Nor can we gloss over those crime serials from the 1910s involving underground crime organisations and professional thieves. This new cinematic form, Tom Gunning reminds us, ‘provided ready-made plot formulas familiar to a mass audience and also challenged filmmakers to develop visual means for telling economic and fast moving stories with a certain degree of complexity’ (2000: 88). Notable among them are Louis Feuillade’s French productions
Fantômas (1913–14) and
Les Vampires (1915–16). The alternate realities of the underworld operating on quiet Paris streets and the sympathetic criminals who contend with each other as much as with the police are elements that persist into later heists. Feuillade’s stories feature antisocial but likeable ‘anarchist villains’ who assault elite culture, and ‘convoluted plot reversals’ involving daring thefts and covert break-ins (Andrew 1995: 27). The semantic possibilities for the big caper developed in these early crime melodramas such as
Les Vampires, in which criminals ‘commandeer automobiles, scramble about moving trains, disappear around corners and down manholes, and creep unseen over the rooftops of the city … anesthetise a whole party of wealthy Parisians and rob them of their jewels’ (Abel 1984: 73). These elements may be mere semantic resemblances more than atavistic generic traits that suddenly reappear in the heist; more certain is that they aestheticise transgressive social behaviours crucial to the fully formed heist film. Moreover, the social complexities operating in early crime serials in France appealed to popular audiences and avant-garde aesthetic groups alike, notably the Surrealists. The films deserve credit for presaging gangster movies in representing criminal organisations in competition with each other. Pointedly, the heist lacks the fantastic atmosphere we find in Feuillade’s films, but the affective power of his direction is akin to the suspense of the best heist sequences.
Other resonances with the heist are apparent in German cinema of the Weimar Republic (1919–33). For the most part the German crime film in the 1910s lagged behind its counterparts in England or France, focusing less on thrillers than on detectives. With more animus than the social allegorisation of the French serials, the Weimar cinema of the political left endorsed a scathing social critique. Walter Benjamin’s anti-capitalist tirade drawn from a review of Bertold Brecht’s
The Threepenny Novel is applicable to this cinema: ‘Bourgeois legality and crime – these are, by the rules of the crime novel, opposites. Brecht’s … novel depicts the actual relation between bourgeois legality and crime. The latter is shown to be a special case of exploitation sanctioned by the former’ (2002: 9). Benjamin’s claim resonates with Stuart Kaminsky’s about the ‘collective, antisocial’ attitude of the criminal specialists in the heist who ‘usually work unappreciated and unrecognized’ by society at large (1974: 79).
The same critique of social relations in modernity is evident in the work of the German director Fritz Lang. Lang’s famous cross-cutting between the police and criminal leaders, debating how to capture a child murderer in M (1931), aligned and equated the two. Anton Kaes’s study of M describes the gang-like Ringvereine, or ring clubs, of Weimar-era Berlin that were ‘structured like small companies’ or ‘legitimate businesses’ lead by ‘charismatic figure[s]’ (2001: 51). Like Lang’s M, the heist frequently examines the relationship between legitimate and illicit social activity and institutions and the sometimes arbitrary distinctions drawn between them. Critics also perceive in M an incipient heist narrative. The film’s office break-in to capture the child murderer Beckert was inspired by a well-publicised and successful 1929 bank ‘coup’ by the very real criminals, the Saas brothers, who broke into Berlin’s Disconto Bank through the ceiling, much to the pleasure of a sympathetic public, who ‘relished the battle between ultra-cool thieves and the convivial but ill-starred police inspector … Lang shows [in M], in an admiring touch, a professional break-in artist loosening his fingers like a pianist, as he readies to pick a lock’ (Kaes 2001: 51). In his analysis of M, Kaes captures the aesthetic appeal and the implicit analogy between crime and art that will become a central tenet of the heist.
Lang had already mythologised the eponymous criminal mastermind of
Dr. Mabuse, The Gambler (1922), the ‘evil genius of modernity’ (Gunning 2000: 97) who assumes various disguises to carry out his attacks on high finance in gambling houses or the stock market. The film’s opening features a complex cross-cutting sequence that depicts Mabuse and his gang stealing a monetary contract on a train, all measured to exact chronological precision. The coordinated cutting between the train, an accomplice on a telephone pole, a getaway vehicle and Mabuse waiting by his telephone for news of the theft, anticipates the spatial and temporal complexities of later heist montages as well as the technological deceptions used against the regimentation of ‘a system already obsessed with precise timing and schedules’ (Gunning 2000: 98). Lang’s own ‘mastery of the co-ordination of space and time through parallel editing’, his ‘rigorous and unswerving temporality’ (Gunning 2000: 97) – not unlike Mabuse’s – is an early version of the heist’s syntax, the complex montage of a collaborative crime. In addition, the film’s delight in role-playing produces scene after scene of Mabuse in disguise, the same kind of play-acting that characterises many a heist and underscores the underlying challenge Mabuse poses: ‘the root of his criminality lies … in his multiplicity. His very being elides the mechanisms of containment and control regulating the modern urban society in which he lives’ (Hall 2003: 385). Fatal flaws will undo the perfectly wrought plans and play-acting of masterminds and gangs in most early heists while more recent ones exploit this system to their advantage, much like Mabuse. They all face the same hostile and complex technological environments of urban modernity in Lang’s films.
Heist Predecessors: The Gangster and Gentleman Thief Film
The heist inherited its most significant semantic and syntactic features, and some of its generic function, from two cinematic precursors: the gangster film and the gentleman thief film (Kaminsky 1974: 75; Newman 1997: 71). Kaminsky points to two separate lines of heist films deriving from these co-generators of the heist: ‘gang capers’, like Basil Dearden’s
The League of Gentlemen or Lewis Milestone’s
Ocean’s Eleven stem from the former, while William Wyler’s
How To Steal a Million (1966) and Don Taylor’s
Jack of Diamonds (1967) grow out of the latter. At one level these two film types provide polarising traits, with the socially outcast professional team of manual labourers or amateur crooks on one side, and the sophisticated, high-society jewel thief on the other. But at another level, the heist film condenses aspects from each. Their common inheritance is ‘the possibility of sympathy for and admiration of the criminal’ (Kaminsky 1974: 76). However the heist is conceived in relation to the gangster film – as a ‘variation’ or ‘root’ (Kaminsky 1974: 74, 76), ‘spawn’ (Rosow 1978: 279), ‘strain’ (Schatz 1981: 82), ‘derivative’ (Krutnik 1991: 201), ‘intermittent series’ (Neale 2000: 81), ‘embryonic form’ (Newman 1997: 71) or sub-genre – the gangster film provides the most immediate and salient semantic preliminaries for the heist. The heist can be sensed in gangster films like
Little Caesar (Mervyn Le Roy, 1931) and in westerns like
Jesse James (Irving Cummings, 1939). But merely ‘show[ing] a few robberies’ does not suffice for a full-blown heist (Newman 1997: 71). What differentiates the heist? According to Newman, around 1950 the robbery that had been ‘incidental’ in gangster films emerges as a self-sufficient aesthetic core, a critical representational mass, ‘as meticulously-staged robberies interrupt stories of betrayal’ in certain films noirs (ibid.). Eventually, in the wake of
The Asphalt Jungle, ‘the heist itself rather than the doomed gangsters assumes narrative centre stage’ (ibid.). The displacement from criminals to the operation of the crime, from the crime’s tangential role in the diegesis to its organising principle and central aesthetic object, affords an autonomous form. The resulting ‘plot concentration’ on a ‘single crime of great monetary value’ (Kaminsky 1974: 77) is not merely a semantic adjustment to the gangster film; it constitutes an axial shift that engenders a new form with its own generic syntax. That syntax is one of process.
The question will be to determine what potential social functions movies about gangsters and high-society jewel thieves bequeath to the heist, if any. Crime films have pointed economic underpinnings that allegorically mirror and critique society. Note, for example, the consumerist parable operating in the serial killer film, the ‘epitome’ of ‘consumption practices of late commodity capitalism’ according to Thompson: ‘In films like Copycat (1995), in which killer Daryll Lee Cullum (Harry Connick Jr.) commits crimes modeled on famous earlier serial killer cases, or Suspect Zero (2004), in which a serial killer executes other serial killers, this genre self-reflexively foregrounds themes of seriality and repetition, and also subtly echoes the repetition compulsions of both killer and genre consumer’ (2007: 88). Gangster films, for their part, consistently comment on American capitalism and business success. Audiences from different decades and races have identified with characters aggressively pursuing socio-economic parity in this genre revealing ‘the particularly mythic contradictions of capitalist culture in American’s urban industrial society’ (Rosow 1978: 279). Thompson concludes that ‘the fall of the gangster in classic films like Little Caesar and The Public Enemy represents the ritualised disposal of a figure whose violent entrepreneurial actions are merely an extreme and transgressive form of capitalism’ (2007: 3). The ritualistic, almost sacrificial aspect of gangster films also informs the heist.
What does the heist share in common with ‘lone wolf’ (Kaminsky) or ‘gentleman’ (Newman) jewel thief films, such as
Raffles (1917, 1925, 1930, 1939), the
Pink Panther films (1963–2009),
Arsène Lupin (Jack Conway, 1932), and others? In the very label ‘gentleman’ we gather there is a disinterested, aristocratic thread running latently through the heist, where money is everywhere present but not necessarily what counts above all. This idea toys with a distinctive thrust in which work, at least the work of the criminal-artist, is not motivated solely, not even primarily, by financial compensation. On a social plane, this appears to run in stark contrast to the economic interests that drive heist criminals to steal. But it also opens onto one central trait of the heist: a disinterestedness with regards to the intended monetary gain that complicates the ostensible desire for money. The heist film is about an
acte gratuit. The money counts, but thieves in heist films steal as a means for some other end, usually to acquire escape or freedom from society. But this is not all. The motive behind a theft that is not reducible to financial gain is also typically predicated on getting away with something original and extraordinary. In this we understand the frequent reference to the ‘perfect’ crime. What does perfection have to do with it? Why not use a blunt but effective instrument to get what is wanted? That the heist is built around a collaborative and choreographed activity aimed at perfect execution shows that it celebrates a collective
aesthetic act – even in the grittiest heists, the thieves steal with style.
The confluence of these two generic strands – of the gangster film critical of American economic and social life, and of the disinterested aesthetic motives of the gentleman thief film – suggests the heist film examines the relationship between economic freedom and aesthetic activity.
Noir Heist Turning Points: Walsh and Siodmak
To Borde and Chaumeton’s list of neo-gangster films we add two protoheist films by Raoul Walsh, each essential to the development of the genre. Walsh’s
High Sierra, starring Humphrey Bogart in a breakout role, was adapted by W. R. Burnett and John Huston (the latter was working as a screenwriter at the time), the same team that would go on to make
The Asphalt Jungle. Burnett’s Depression-era fiction had already influenced the gangster film in the 1930s. His first successful novel in film terms had been
Little Caesar, which Warner Bros. picked up, hiring Burnett on contract and putting him in regular contact with John Huston.
High Sierra was produced for Warner Bros. by Mark Hellinger, who would later yield influence over noir productions for Universal Pictures, including Robert Siodmak’s
The Killers, and Jules Dassin’s
Brute Force and
The Naked City (1948).
High Sierra features a ‘caper’ orchestrated by Roy Earle (Bogart), a good-hearted country boy from the Midwest gone rogue with the Dillinger gang. After being released from prison, Roy organises a hotel robbery from atop a mountain. Roy’s shuttling between the rugged western landscape and a Los Angeles on the verge of bursting into a metropolis points to the changing social and spatial dynamics of America at the time, just as it links the film to the western genre. Roy’s plan also gently anticipates another feature of the heist: the use of architectural plans, in an insert shot, that detail the spatial layout of the hotel for the purpose of pre-staging the robbery. The graphic resembles a maze as much as a rational diagram. Roy’s plan to pull off ‘the big one’ unravels, and he is killed by the police. Walsh would go on to direct, at the end of the decade,
White Heat (1949), with James Cagney playing an ageing, epileptic psychotic named Cody Jarrett. This was not a mere reprisal of Cagney’s iconic roles from 1930s gangster movies. Of note are Jarrett’s reliance upon the detailed architectural drawings of a chemical plant, his allusion to the Trojan Horse – a classical archetype for the inside-man heist – and a flamboyant ending to the payroll heist of the plant, where Jarrett dies on an exploding gas tank. The complex choreography and timing of the heist in
White Heat becomes a key theme in the planning of the job. But neither film is classically noir in style, nor do these films convert the robbery in their narratives into a cinematic problem or opportunity, any more than they pause on process, a key element of the heist. Yet they are significant in other ways. A ‘transitional work’,
High Sierra formulates ‘a more or less self-conscious farewell’ to the 1930s film gangster and the genre itself (Irwin 2006: 213). The same could be said of
White Heat. The films hint at inchoate possibilities for the heist form that would be more fully exploited later by Hellinger and especially by Huston and Burnett, who together are credited with ‘humanizing’ the gangster in a way that opens the door for the new noir antihero (Irwin 2006: 216).
With Walsh’s transitional films in mind, the appearance of the noir-inflected heist steers us towards a set of films by Robert Siodmak,
The Killers and
Criss Cross. The films of this German exile director ‘foreshadow’ what is eventually ‘consolidated’ in
The Asphalt Jungle (Leitch 2002: 36). It turns out that they too intersect with Burnett and Huston, as had Walsh’s films, the result of a happy confluence of good filmmaking and crime fiction, independent production possibilities, and new cultural anxieties arising from post-war urban space and rationalised time. Sharing a host of similarities between them, the two Siodmak films emblematised the noir vision and were instrumental in giving the heist its noir strain in America. They pushed towards the heist as an autonomous offshoot that would be more readily perceived in Huston’s
The Asphalt Jungle despite fundamental aesthetic differences between the two filmmakers.
Siodmak’s films amplified the representational attention given to the planning and execution of the heist. On the one hand, they devoted lengthy screen time to the crime’s planning, the moment of collective social organisation, while on the other the robberies themselves were presented through a stylised formal treatment that stands out in – or against – the narrative. Prior to this, the robbery may have existed as a narrative element, as a semantic feature of crime films; it’s amplified role in these 1940s narrative subsequently allowed it to alter or offer an alternative to the ‘syntactic’ nature of the gangster film. The robbery had become a central representational problem around which the film’s action is predicated, rather than a secondary complement to the gangster’s character. Both The Killers and Criss Cross were financially successful, and the genre’s lineaments would congeal into a repeatable form while being produced independently of the usual studio strictures, under Mark Hellinger, now working for International Pictures through Universal. Anthony Veiller was credited for the screenplay, based on an Ernest Hemingway story, but by Siodmak’s account John Huston was the unseen hand that crafted the screenplay for his direction (Taylor 1959: 182). Huston, in fact, would have directed the film had he not gotten into a dispute with Hellinger (Clarens 1997: 199). Siodmak took over, making what he viewed as a gangster film and what critics have subsequently celebrated as one of the most telling examples of film noir. Suffice it to say, the genesis of the noir heist in the United States around 1950 rests largely on the shoulders of Burnett, Huston, Hellinger and Siodmak.
The Killers and
Criss Cross are both gangster noirs with a double-cross narrative built around a heist. The films share an Expressionist style – ‘chiaroscuro lighting, minimalist sets, mobile camera, extreme angle shots, and the use of narrative fragmentation through flashback’ (Munby 1999: 201). They focus on the patsy who allies himself with an unsympathetic gang in order to achieve or retrieve masculine power in a way that committing the crime will afford. Given his impressive physique, Burt Lancaster was well cast in the role of a vulnerable, feckless male hopelessly trapped in doomed relationships with disloyal women (Porfirio 1996: 121; see also Munby 1999: 190, 194). In archetypal noir fashion, the male character is the victim and prisoner of a past he cannot escape, and these films heighten tension between their evident fatalism and the hero’s tragic yearning for freedom, be it metaphysical or material, a point which the heist film has pursued relentlessly.
The Killers recounts in baroque flashback the demise of Ole Anderson (Lancaster), known as ‘the Swede’, after his boxing career is cut short by injury. His infatuation with Kitty Collins (Ava Gardner), the kept mistress of crime boss Big Jim Colfax (Albert Dekker), ushers him into their underworld activities. The Swede’s story is focalised primarily through an insurance agent, Reardon (Edmond O’Brien), who, like a detective, reconstructs its elements from the vantage point of those who knew the Swede. Colfax and Collins use the Swede to double cross the gang after they pull a payroll hold-up. Our interest in both of the Siodmak films stems primarily from two elements that run parallel in each, a doubling or repetition indicative of semantic and syntactic consolidation: the planning of the heist and the execution of the robbery. (I recommend the close readings of the film in Shadoian 1977: 83–113, and Walker 1992: 128–35.)
The planning meeting in The Killers does not consist of an autonomous preparation montage, but it is a dramatic piece in its own right that sets up the ulterior stakes of the crime. Colfax, waiting for the Swede and illuminated by the sole light in a darkened room, calmly asks his men to play cards, metonymically marking the robbery as a gamble, a game to him but also a serious risk. As the Swede comes in and greets everyone, his face changes dramatically when Kitty’s voice addresses him off-screen, a haunting aural presence. The Swede runs his hands over a green handkerchief decorated with golden harps that Kitty had given him while he was in prison. We cut to her lying on the bed in deep focus in the background. The handkerchief is a token of the power she wields over him even when absent – she is the object of his interest in the caper. When Colfax asks whether he is in, the Swede agrees and looks off-screen to Kitty and we cut to her as further confirmation of his obsessive intentions. One man asks Colfax about the job in a meta-cinematic way – ‘What’s the picture?’ – that Siodmak then visualises in the subsequent sequence.
Siodmak fashioned the robbery sequence into a formal focal point. He bookends the entire sequence by means of an ironic voice-over that contrasts with what is on the screen. Reardon’s insurance boss reads a newspaper account of the robbery, as if captioning the images in a documentary fashion and situating the event in relation to the general public, who have no knowledge of the individual players. The filmed robbery unfolds in a single long take of great complexity, much of it with a mobile frame. ‘The normal emphasis [in later heists] would be to bring us in close to the robbery, create suspense about the mechanics of the heist and about the potential of imperfect performance on the part of members of the gang’ (Shadoian 1977: 106). Yet here a crane-mounted camera follows the action through different spaces of the factory towards a gun battle on the street outside the factory, its detachment mirroring the journalistic perspective of Reardon’s boss. To film the thieves’ escape, Siodmak and his director of photography, Elwood Bredell, raised the camera to a high-angle in order to take in the entire street and factory. For its formal idiosyncrasy and technical complexity, the sequence surprises the viewer. The camera’s ‘godlike objectivity’ (Shadoian 1977: 106) or ‘Olympian viewpoint’ (Clarens 1997: 200) ultimately undermines the voice-over’s documentary objectivity because we see gang members not identified by the newspaper (Walker 1992: 131). ‘The whole episode seems evanescent, unreal, unimportant [because so detached in shot scale], a fragment of a dream’ (Shadoian 1977: 107).
The Killers represents another crucial transitional phase in the gangster film in which the stylised display and technical challenge of the robbery is realised as a montage and thus finally imagined as the kernel for its own concentrated aesthetic approach.
Formal experimentation with a crane shot and voice-over narration in Siodmak’s The Killers
Siodmak’s Criss Cross further crystallised the heist as an organised process narrative. In its stylised robbery – punctuated by another formally striking overhead shot – we see the reliance on specialists and an emphasis on precision timing that would become a temporal hallmark of the heist. Like The Killers, Criss Cross recounts a fatalistic triangular relationship. Burt Lancaster stars as Steve Thompson, whose ex-wife, Anna (Yvonne de Carlo), will drag him into criminal activity with her new husband, Slim Dundee (Dan Duryea). Steve gets a job with an armoured car company and moves back in with his mother in the Bunker Hill area of Los Angeles, a location Siodmak uses more pointedly than the nondescript settings of Criss Cross. The opening shot and credit sequence is an aerial view at dusk, the city illuminated by its street lights; the camera flies over the urban expanse of Los Angeles, hovering over City Hall before descending towards the parking lot of a club in Bunker Hill. The frame dissolves to a street-level shot, then cuts to a car pulling up, shining headlights on Steve and Anna kissing. Anna tells him their relationship will be the way it should have been, the two of them together. Torn between the depravity she experienced during the Depression and her sensual cravings, Anna is divided between the security Slim can provide and the sexual fulfillment she derives from Steve. Knowingly or not, she induces Steve to hatch a plot to rob the armoured car company as an insider – a model for the ‘inside job’ semantics of the heist genre.
As in
The Killers, Siodmak reconfigures the plot according to a set of flashbacks, notably as Steve drives to the robbery (see the narrative analysis in Walker 1992: 139–45). Though the events are separated by a long time, Steve’s recollections order the heist planning and execution consecutively. In the former, Anna is lying on a divan near the table around which the robbery is planned; she represents both the stakes and the threat to the plan. But here the sequence is more than just a structure for furthering the dramatic rivalry of the trio. It is also a commentary on the need for specialists (an explosives expert, a locksmith, a getaway driver and so on), detailed maps and a plan.
The robbery sequence unfolds as if it were a scene of combat, the residual effect of World War II on American life. Bells, whistles and sirens sound, and diversionary smoke bombs explode, as if it were a military action. It begins as an intricate, oblique interplay of medium two-shots, long shots and high-angle shots that establishes the space and creates clashing vectors for dramatic intensity. While factory employees run around chaotically, the crew members emerge out of the smoke. Steve is unable to protect his partner Howard when Slim walks up and calmly shoots the old man; then another gang member shoots Steve. The frame dissolves as he loses consciousness, before refocusing on faces looking into the frame, from Steve’s point of view. He is now in traction in a hospital bed.
The defamiliarising photography of the sequence is highly self-conscious. Relying on the talents of his editor, Ted Kent, and his DP, fellow exile Franz Planer, Siodmak made the prologue hint at the modernist sensibility of earlier European avant-garde movements. The first element here is the striking high-angle shot of the armoured truck coming into the factory premises. The shot lasts some twenty seconds and is taken from a roof several stories up. The truck pulls across tracks where a train car is moving forward – vertically upward in the frame – and seems to defy gravity. Then the camera pans left, horizontally in the frame, to follow the truck down a narrow corridor, creating by contrast with the preceding motion the shape of a cross – the iconographic realisation of Slim’s double-cross. It also conforms to the narrative’s criss-crossing structure as it loops back on itself to the middle point where Steve, hoping to cross the double-crossing Slim, is driving to the heist. In addition, the shot distance changes the human figures into ant-like creatures. For a brief moment the disorienting shot leaves the audience struggling to recognise the space of the action.
This shot is reminiscent of the 1920s and 1930s European avant-garde documentary cinema and photography of Germany’s
Neue Sachlichkeit (‘New Objectivity’), which was familiar to Siodmak before he left Germany. Siodmak’s mother had hosted events with a ‘dizzying’ array of artistic talents of the time (Alpi 1998: 11), and in 1929–30 Siodmak collaborated with the self-styled avant-garde group Filmstudio 29 on the naturalistic
Kammerspiel (‘slice of life’) film
Menschen am Sonntag (1930). This was a seminal work in German cinema that involved several Jewish film artists who would later flee to Hollywood after the Nazis came to power, including Edgar Ulmer, Oscar-winning directors Billy Wilder and Fred Zinneman, and DP Eugen Schüfftan. The formally striking establishing shot of
Criss Cross also recalls the Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov’s framing, particularly high-angle shots in industrial spaces, in
The Man with the Movie Camera (1929). Vertov’s film was part of the so-called City Symphony films, avant-garde documentary works that developed an urban cinematic discourse of ‘fragmentation and evocation’ through a concerted formalism of, among other things, alienating angles, ‘skewed perspective and violent changes in scale, [and] simultaneous perception of different sites and objects’ (Uricchio 2008: 107). The shot brings to mind similar photographic manoeuvres by Alexander Rodchenko or Otto Umbehr’s overhead Berlin photograph
Unheimliche Straße (‘Uncanny Street’, 1928) (Webber 2008: 66–7). Ulmer claimed he had the idea for
Menschen after seeing the Vertov film (Alpi 1998: 20); Umbehr, meanwhile, had worked as an assistant cameraman on Walter Ruttmann’s documentary
Berlin: The Symphony of The Great City (1927). Furthermore, in Siodmak’s film about a labour-management conflict from the same period,
The Whistle at Eaton Falls (1951), it appears he ‘wanted to break away from the restrictions of Hollywood, and was excited about returning to a contemporary form of the
neue Sachlichkeit (‘New Objectivity’) he had pursued in
Menschen am Sonntag’ (Alpi 1998: 200). In both of the proto-heists, then, Siodmak returned to his modernist avant-garde roots, at least in a restricted formalistic sense. The heist would therefore be born under the sign of a self-conscious aesthetic and ideological agenda.
Modernist compositional strategies in Robert Siodmak’s Criss Cross
What, then, would this ‘contemporary form’ of the New Objectivity mean, and what would its utility be, when deferred by twenty years and displaced culturally and institutionally into a mass-media Hollywood genre? After all, these formal, film-specific elements that recall European modernism prior to the 1940s must be articulated to specific social dynamics. In a study on urban settings in film noir, Edward Dimendberg suggests that a post-war contextual shift put these avant-garde practices ‘in the service of an aesthetic transfiguration without social transcendence. The metropolis portrayed in the film noir cycle seldom appears [as] a space of genuinely enhanced freedom and possibility’ (2004: 13; emphasis added). In other words, the modernism of Hollywood noir – a ‘vernacular,’ or middle-brow mass culture phenomenon, as Miriam Hansen describes it (1999: 23) – was also about freedom and liberation, but had turned inward and fatalistic in the period following the war. Dimendberg’s point requires one major qualification with regards to its effect on the heist. The heist is sustained by a similar urban backdrop that reacts to an ‘alienating system of exploitative drudgery permitting few possibilities of escape’ (Dimendberg 2004: 13). In this context, ‘the possibility of meaningful activity and freedom inherent to the caper was choked off in the fatalistic contexts of forties melodramas’ (Shadoian 1977: 339). Such fatalism marks much of Siodmak’s work that follows the blockage experienced by the modernist avant-garde movements of the late interwar and war period. But it is precisely a tarnished utopian impulse, a damaged search for ‘transcendence’ and ‘enhanced freedom and possibility’, that underwrites the collective effort of the noir heist team. Significantly, Siodmak’s films were watched by a mainstream American audience. One device marks the shift: we do not identify with the gang, only with the doomed male lead. Starting with Huston’s Asphalt Jungle, the heist begins to elicit sympathy for the crewmembers.
The technical bravura displayed in the heist sequences of
The Killers and
Criss Cross are not just empty virtuosity but rather pivotal. The sequences undeniably eschew dialogue-laden representation in favour of pure action and movement. Their stylised presentation, particularly the high-angle shots, become figures for the filmmaker’s craft itself, a possibility hinted at by Clarens when he grasps that the single-take location tracking shot of
The Killers’ sequence is ‘as daring as the heist itself’ (1997: 200). In a different context and with reference to the ‘bravado’ of the opening to
Criss Cross, Dimendberg warns us to be suspicious that the film ‘display[s] far more of the city than is necessary to commence [its] narrative and do[es] so through complications and expense of aerial cinematography’ (2004: 89). There is another way to interpret the extended aerial shot. When Steve gets hired at Horten’s Armored Car service, he wonders aloud whether there is a ‘defense against an aerial holdup? Who knows, they’re liable to start coming at you one day with a helicopter.’ His coworker replies that there has been no holdup in twenty-eight years. Steve’s comment recalls the prologue’s exceptional device for representing the urban landscape of L.A. – Siodmak has already ‘heisted’ the city and gotten away with it. These moments call to mind a host of mannerist modernist tropes of god-like artistry, asserting the superiority of aesthetic prowess even in the sombre, godless world of noir.
The implications, then, are twofold. First, the planning and robbery sequences break away from gangster and neo-gangster films. Second, they foretell the meta-cinematic potential of the heist structure as a collaborative, technical and technological parable of film art. The common themes between Walsh’s and Siodmak’s film noirs find a motivated fitness in the generic environment of the heist. ‘Noir laid the groundwork,’ Shadoian tells us ‘ – a motley crew united by a specific task, the concern with expertise and precise execution, the lone woman, aloof, still, but observant amid an atmosphere charged with male ego – but it was only in the psychological inertia of the fifties that the slow-fuse caper film took clear shape’ (1977: 339, n2). Siodmak’s legacy for the heist was not merely to open the door to a new form; it reiterated a promise to realise the utopian implications of its interwar roots in a new cultural context.
The Heist Comes of Age
Carlos Clarens rightly claims that the ‘subjective realism’ of Siodmak’s
Criss Cross gave it a European ‘aesthetic’ as opposed to the American ‘realism’ of John Huston’s
Asphalt Jungle (1997: 202–3). The representational strategy of American realism, however, even when coupled with noir’s modernist fatalism, inherited a utopian impulse for social transcendence and freedom in the heist. The title
The Asphalt Jungle, taken from W. R. Burnett’s novel, calls to mind the brutal forces vying in America’s urban landscape. The film tells the story of organised crooks setting out on a million-dollar caper and the central figure of Dix Handley (Sterling Hayden), a rural Kentuckian down on his luck and caught up in the big city (Cleveland). He dreams of escaping from the urban jungle and of returning to his native thoroughbred-horse country. As with Huston’s films generally,
The Asphalt Jungle derives its power as a tale in which a group of individuals tackle a task but fail. Doc Riedenschneider, an older man recently out of prison, masterminds the jewelry heist. His team consists of Dix, Gus the driver (James Whitmore) and the Italian-American safecracker, Louis Ciavelli (Anthony Caruso). By repeatedly showing the faces of these men at work in close-up, the film humanises them and shows affection for work, effort and labour. The robbery goes as planned until a snooping security guard fatally wounds Louis. From there, the plan unravels at both ends. Dix is severely injured when he confronts their corrupt fence, an attorney named Emmerich (Louis Calhern), who tries to double-cross them. Doc, meanwhile, gets caught during his escape. As the perpetrators of the crime are hunted down, the film ends with Dix and his adoring girlfriend, Doll (Jean Hagen), finally making it back to Kentucky after a harrying car ride towards a sunlit countryside, but Dix’s wounds prove fatal, and he dies in a field surrounded by horses grazing near his body.
Dix’s fragile humanity crops up in two sequences organised around a black colt owned by his family that is both a metaphor and metonym for the character. In these sequences, his fixation on returning to Kentucky encompasses his nostalgic and troubled longing for a bygone America. The film implies that the Depression severed the agricultural and community roots of everyday Americans, leaving people at the whims of the market and sometimes needing to look to crime as the only solution to their material woes. Early in the film, Doll tells Dix he had mumbled about a ‘corn cracker’ during a fitful night of sleep. In Dix’s dream he had ridden a bucking black colt, with his father and grandfather praising him as a ‘real Handley’, when in reality, he admits to her, the colt had thrown him. Dix goes on to say that the colt broke its leg and had to be shot the ‘rotten year’ the Depression hit; then his father died and the family lost the farm. The difference between dream and reality, especially the violent death of the colt, proleptically announces his own demise, but also serves to articulate his buried dream to regain the status and stability his family had enjoyed prior to the Depression.
Huston disposes of the planning and heist sequences with as much efficiency as the caper itself. The planning takes place rather quickly and consists essentially of three shots in low-key, high-contrast lighting. The first is of Doc, Dix and Louis hunched around a table and looking at Doc’s papers, with Gus standing by. An overhead lamp casts light on the faces of the men at the table, while their backs and shoulders and Gus remain in the shadows. The shot resembles Siodmak’s compositions in The Killers and Criss Cross, but the brief sequence lacks the intense suspicion Siodmak developed, owing to the absence of the female stakes (Kitty Collins and Anna). In The Asphalt Jungle, the men trust each other; their solidarity is born of common socio-economic circumstances, despite different dispositions and cultural backgrounds.
Chiaroscuro lighting and Dix’s determination as Gus and Louis commit to Doc’s plan
Doc’s plan is strategic both spatially and temporally. He maps it out, literally, on an architectural drawing of the sewer, bank and street, and describes the timing: Louis will take six minutes to penetrate the bank before opening the door for Doc and Dix ‘at exactly 11:54’, and the job should be done before a watchman arrives at 12:15. The heist sequence takes about six minutes of screen time. While Gus waits outside in the getaway car, Doc, Dix and Louis get into the bank. The film must be one of the first in history to evoke new surveillance technologies and practices: Doc points out the ‘electric eye’ security system they have to avoid to access the vault. Louis’s job is physical and requires a drill and nitroglycerin. One succinct shot from the rear of the vault captures Louis’s frame right in close up, acrobatically extracting the nitroglycerin from a small bottle; his face and extended hand frame Doc in the middle plane, outside the vault, looking on intently. What ensues is the condensed process of Louis applying drop after drop to the vault hinges with Doc looking on. The explosion opens the door but sets off an alarm. In democratic fashion, they vote unanimously to carry on with the job – ‘the biggest one yet’, according to Doc. Before leaving, Louis places his bottle of nitro in the vault’s safe as a signature of his talented work.
The crucial two-part semantic shift in the heist brought about by The Asphalt Jungle consists of its sympathetic treatment of the criminal gang, portrayed as a brotherhood of small-time crooks with big aspirations, and the correlated audience response to their professionalism. Despite the ultimate failure of the heist – or precisely because of it – spectatorial identification with the crew as a social unit changes from previous noir robberies. Kaminsky sums it up: ‘Huston … not only creates sympathy for the criminal but respect for the way he does his job’ (1978: 71). The attention to sympathetic, industrious, working-class criminals has been read as an instance of social noir, films made by leftist filmmakers who were implicated in House Un-American Activities Committee hearings: ‘it is not surprising that they made some of their best pictures from the point of view of criminals,’ James Naremore points out (2008: 28). This context sits squarely with the film’s oft-quoted line that ‘crime is only a left-handed form of human endeavor’.
The Production Code attended to the depiction of criminal acts and the treatment of professions in
The Asphalt Jungle. While the Production Code Administration’s (PCA) report raised some concerns, notably regarding the unsympathetic portrayal of the police, and the PCA’s direct formal question asked of all films whether ‘the story tends to enlist the sympathy of the audience for criminals’, it nevertheless read Doc’s capture and Dix’s death as ‘justice triumph[ing] through efforts of law’ (Naremore 1998: 128–9). Yet such an assertion runs counter to Huston’s affection for the criminal gang – though less so for the double-crossing Emmerich – and against the narrative frame of W. R. Burnett’s source novel. Burnett’s novels, as mentioned, provided a narrative groundwork for the gangster film, as well as for the heist. Huston and Ben Maddow adapted the novel, an adaptation Burnett admired even more than those of
Little Caesar and
High Sierra (Burnett 1980: 145). The adaptation’s success can partially be measured by the fact that Huston garnered an Academy Award nomination for Best Screenplay. Still, Burnett objected to Huston ‘overdramatiz[ing]’ Dix’s death (Kaminsky 1978: 145) and editing that undermined the police radio report by showing Dix struggling to get back to the farm his family had lost during the Great Depression (Naremore 2008: 129–30). Huston’s emplotment, then, undermines Burnett’s novel and the PCA’s expectations. No matter, the potent combination of Mark Hellinger’s production vision, Burnett’s generally sympathetic take on the professionalism of criminals, and Huston’s taut attention to criminals at work condensed years of related movements into a single film.
Dix – ‘the hardened killer … without human feeling or human mercy’ – at the farm his family lost during the Depression
Noir Heist as Modernism
It is important to bear in mind the immediate context in which Huston’s film appeared. The war and then the complex economic network of postwar America and Europe demanded the full realisation of ‘Fordism’ and ‘Taylorism’, those pre-war practices of precision time and the efficiency of movement, tools, task allocation and cooperation used in mass production. The targeted institution’s ‘complexity and size require a systemization which mechanizes human action or reduces such action to a subordinate role’ (Kaminsky 1974: 83). To the extent that Frederick Taylor’s theories in Principles of Scientific Management (1913) included a wage system based on worker performance, one could think of the heist as an anti-Taylorist manifesto of performance value. In terms of time, this means that ‘the gang must exploit that dependence on regimentation by employing their own skills to be, temporarily, even more regimented and precise’ (Kaminsky 1974: 84). The team thus simulates those processes of modernity in order to combat their abuses. This gives shape to what is the most obvious convention of the genre from Criss Cross and Asphalt Jungle to Heat or the insert shots of watches ticking in Inception: the team must use mechanised society’s chronometric devices against itself by mastering and manipulating time. The heist plan is a rational programme formulated with a powerful mimetic component in relation to industrial time.
The heist’s spatial aspects, as we begin to infer from these prescient proto-heists, are as complex as the temporal motifs, though less commented on. To begin with, we should point to the reliance on architectural drawings and schematics in these proto-heists. The films’ insistence on rational plans parallel the temporal precision of the heist and signify a need to master the built environment and human design of the impenetrable spaces that crews will challenge in fully formed heists. Furthermore, the metropolis – that most privileged site of modernity – is a crucial setting.
The Killers takes place in New Jersey and Philadelphia, while
Criss Cross is set in Los Angeles. Dimendberg’s study of film noir,
The Spaces of Modernity (2004) differentiates between what he deems the ‘centripetal’ cities of early modernity and the post-war, and sometimes postmodern descendant, ‘centrifugal’ spaces. Dimendberg uses
Criss Cross emblematically, to illustrate how ‘the palpable absence of a single prominent center (despite many recognisable landmarks) and the continual motion of the camera hint at a decisive shift in the identity of the postwar American city’ towards an ‘uncentered’ urban form (2004: 89). The coming-into-being of the heist around 1950 may be no accident, then, since 1949 marked a ‘pivotal’ turn in the American spatial imagination brought on by phenomena ‘ranging from a dramatic increase in television ownership, to the passage of the Federal Housing Act, to the establishment of the New Jersey Turnpike Authority, to the first successful atom bomb test by the Soviet Union, to the first transcontinental flight by the U.S. Air Force in under four hours, each of which in its own way introduced a new understanding of space’ (Dimendberg 2004: 177). Significant to this changing culture of space was the development of large-scale suburban communities starting with the first Levittown on Long Island in 1947 and later in Pennsylvania. These communities were one way of rejecting the dense urban centres that generated social anxiety at the time and that were addressed in films such as Jules Dassin’s
The Naked City and
The Asphalt Jungle.
Let me suggest one final way of framing this commentary on the space-time concerns of the noir heist by tying the genre to modernism. Situating the noir heist within modernism gives us some purchase on the expansive philosophical reach of the evolving genre between the 1940s and 1950s. For the purposes of this discussion, modernism encompasses a range of intellectual currents and artistic practices, dating roughly between the late-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries and underwritten by fervent ideological positions that oppose commodity culture and demand autonomy from political or institutional compromise. Modernism honed its aesthetic principles against those economic forces and markets that transformed the roles of art and of the artist in modern society. In relation to literature and fine art, the heist film of the 1940s and 1950s emerged belatedly and as a minor mass media form, but it appears to have found its bearings from modernism. This resonates with Jack Shadoian’s observation that film noir is a starting point for film modernism:
With
film noir … we get the beginnings of modernism: a refined technique, a disenchanted irony, self-conscious creation of filmic worlds, a metaphorical level of action, a greater degree of compositional abstraction, a photographic virtuosity with light and shadow that calls specific attention to itself as a tour de force … an increased philosophical flavor and control … as in, most notably, the metaphysical pessimism of Robert Siodmak’s
Criss Cross. (1977: 12–13)
Notably, Shadoian’s illustrations for noir’s modernist sensibility are Siodmak’s heists. Unlike high modernist art and avant-garde movements, the noir heist is an ‘expression of anxieties about modernity as a mode of simultaneously modernist and popular generic representation’ (Bergfelder 2007: 141). That is, where we tend to identify Picasso, Le Corbusier, James Joyce or Virginia Woolf as high modernists, Miriam Hansen has reclaimed classical Hollywood, film noir included, as a ‘vernacular’ modernism (see Hansen 1999). For Dudley Andrew, the consequences of Hollywood being a ‘popular rather than an official or elite’ art are far-reaching: ‘Hollywood, more than the intellectual pioneers we always adulate, brought modernism into the world’ (2006: 23). Narrow though its formula may be, the noir heist shares philosophical underpinnings with high and low modernism and thus participates in the vernacular critique of post-war modernity. Moving beyond the accomplishments of Siodmak and Huston, the noir heist would embark on a path to reflect more self-consciously on the role of art and artistic autonomy in commodity culture, but would also find itself subject to the conventionalism of all successful genres.
