 Starring: Glenn Ford, Gloria Grahame, Jocelyn Brando, Adrian Scourby
Director: Fritz Lang
Year Of Release: 1953
Plot: Det. Sgt. Dave Bannion is sent to investigate the apparent suicide of a fellow policeman, but a few kinks are revealed when the dead man’s mistress claims he was murdered. As a result of his investigations, Bannion gets too close to the people who run organised crime in the city. They put a hit on him, which ends up with Bannion’s wife getting killed instead. In his anger, the policeman is thrown off the force and goes on a path of revenge, striking up an uneasy friendship with the disfigured former girlfriend of one of the gangster’s along the way. |
When people were making the wonderful film noir movies of the 40s and early 50s, such a Fritz Lang’s wonderful The Big Heat, they weren’t consciously thinking they were making ‘noir’ film, they just thought they were making some crime thrillers. The term ‘film noir’ only came along in 1955, when French film critics started talking about how this loosely similar group of movies should be considered as a specific genre in its own right. Partly because no one ever consciously made a ‘film noir’ back then, there’s little that all of these movie actually share, making it very difficult to say exactly what film noir is.
Although film noir movies often centre of crime and murder, have unreliable narrators, femme fatales, hard-boiled dialogue, extensive use of shadows, a subdued eroticism, use of cruelty, a dream-like feel and a fluid sense of right and wrong, few films classed as film noir have all of these, and there are none of these things that all of them share. Even something as simple as film noir featuring a policeman or detective investigating a crime (normally a simple crime leading to the protagonist getting mixed up in something bigger, as in The Big Heat) isn’t a hard and fast rule, as something like Sunset Boulevard is normally classed as film noir, but features very little investigation of anything, instead having a narrator relating what led to a crime.
Some film noir are even only tangentially crime thrillers, such as Mildred Pierce, which has crime elements and murder but is largely a female melodrama.
The problem of defining exactly what film noir is has plagued film critics ever since the term was coined. It’s certain that these film shared something and are unique and different to what was going on elsewhere in Hollywood (particular because only a relative few of the movies about crime in the 40s and 50s are now classed as film noir), but saying exactly what separates them out into a distinct genre has always proved tough.
The one thing most agree on is that visually the look of film noir grew out of German expressionist filmmaking of the 1930s, with its extensive use of symbolism (where things like door and stairs take on a meaning beyond just their practical use), unbalanced frame composition to create a sense of unease, and sharp-edged lighting that contrasts areas of brightness with large pools of darkness (technically known as chiaroscuro). However even here things aren’t simple.
For example The Big Heat was directed by the wonderful Fritz Lang, who was a German expressionist filmmaker in the 1930s, however his Hollywood film noir, which also include great films like Woman In The Window and Scarlet Street, don’t tend to use particularly expressionist lighting (although they do occasionally), and visually sit comfortably in the Hollywood mainstream. However others from the German school who ended up working in Hollywood (often making film noir), such as Billy Wilder, Michael Curtiz, Josef Von Sternberg and Robert Siodmak, definitely did adapt the expressionist visual style for their American movies.
Others point to an urban setting being an essential feature of classic noir movies, and indeed most are set in crime-riddled cities, but some take place in small towns or on the road, so there’s no specific setting that you can say tie these films together with (such as with the western, which spans a massive range of movies but are all linked by being set in the wild west – in fact there are even film noir westerns).
The other main thing that’s said to link film noir movies is their roots in hard-boiled pulp novels. This is true for many of them, with James M. Cain’s books getting turned into the likes of The Postman Always Rings Twice, Mildred Pierce, Double Indemnity and Slighty Scarlet, while Raymond Chandler provided the source for the likes of The Big Sleep and Lady In The Lake (Chandler also wrote several noir screenplays directly for the screen), and Dashiell Hammett creating The Glass Key and The Maltese Falcon. However again this isn’t hard and fast, with quite a lot of film noir not being based on pulp fiction, or have particularly hard-boiled dialogue.
There is pretty much nothing that is definitively film noir. Most have a down beat ending, but not all. There’s a generally pessimistic, cynical tone to many, but not every single one. A lot deal with cultural paranoia (such as the fear of communism, nuclear power or the changing role of women – the last being where the femme fatale comes from), but many othesr don’t. Generally they feature an alienated protagonist, but it’s certainly not universal.
As a result of all this confusion, there’s not even a consensus on which films are film noir and which aren’t. For example, many say that the classic Night of the Hunter and Hitchcock’s Suspicion both fit within the genre, while other are just as adamant that they don’t. Likewise Sunset Boulevard seems like film noir in most respects, from the unreliable narrator and downbeat ending, to the chiaroscuro lighting and cynical tone, but some are reluctant to include it because it’s a satire on the film industry.
In many ways it’s all rather unsatisfactory, because when you watch a film noir movie, most of the time you’re in little doubt what ‘genre’ it fits in, but while you might be able to point out the noir-esque things about that particular film, if you watched another one, you might have a completely different list about what made that one a noir.
It’s also true that a lot of the things that we now think of as essential parts of film noir, such as femme fatales and private eyes, only feature in a minority of the classic films generally considered as part of the genre – for example, the Big Heat has neither. The reason why we now see them as so vital a part of the genre is because of the films that came after the term film noir was created, when filmmakers started to recreate the noir feel in later decades. For example Roman Polaski’s Chinatown has had a huge influence on how we view film noir, because it was a deliberate attempt to bring together and distil all the different elements of classic film noir into something new (neo-noir). However both the private eye and femme fatale have become the stock characters more because they sum up various different aspects of male and female characters in film noir, than because they were in a vast amount of classic noir movies.
In the end all you can say is that film noir is a mixture of all the things above and that the films of the 40s and 50s that are part of the genre share some but not all of these things. In fact the only thing they do all share is a sense of unease, and the feel that there’s something rotten going on under the surface. It’s not a particularly strong thing to hang an entire genre on, but film noir is such a nebulous term, that a stronger definition always remains beyond reach. However they do include as awful lot of great film, quite a lot of which we’ll see in later Movie-A-Day features, such as The Maltese Falcon, Double Indemnity and Mildred Pierce. It’s one of my favourite genres, even if it is incredibly difficult to define exactly what it is.
TIM ISAAC
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