An Analysis of Films Noir

What were later called New Wave movie directors in France were apparently quite taken by a type of film that came out of Hollywood in the 1940's. They called them Films Noir, dark movies. They were so fascinated by them that men like Jean Luc Godard and later Francois Truffaut tried to make similar movies themselves.

I've seen Godard's BREATHLESS, and Truffaut's MISSISSIPPI MERMAID, and while I appreciate their efforts and must admit that BREATHLESS came close to the mark, MERMAID came nowhere near it, although the vision of Catherine Deneuve's naked breasts in a few scenes were worth watching the entire movie to see.

Wondering about it, I eventually decided that the reason they seemed to fall short of the American movies was that the French, they are too intelligent. Part of the requirement of the dread-filled movies they were emulating is that its audience be not too discriminating in the brain-power department. The French audience presumably remained relentlessly logical. Even Belmondo's feckless would-be gangster in BREATHLESS moved through a world that made sense, a world which remained a rational one that still went on around him.

In the American movies, not necessarily. There is an aura of terror generated in them that subsumes logic and the sensible everyday, and the American movie audience suspends its disbelief enough to go along with it. There is also a saturation of darkness and shadows permeating many of the dark movies that came from our shores, and neither BREATHLESS nor MERMAID captured anything like the menace that darkness would have given their audiences.

Perhaps some of the gangster movies Alain Delon later made for awhile came closer, but I haven't yet seen any of them, nor THE BRIDE WORE BLACK, by Truffaut. Possibly he achieved what he was after in his BRIDE, but I skipped the chance to see it once on TV and have regretted it ever since. Someday!

I've given films noir considerable thought over the years. When did these dark movies begin? When did they end, and why?

I think they may have begun during and as a result of the war years, in the first half of the 1940's, but the intriguing part is that they didn't stop making them when the war ended in '45. Why not?

I'll make an effort to come up with some answers to those questions, and maybe even with some conclusions.

Perhaps the earliest progenitor of films noir came out as far back as l942 in THIS GUN FOR HIRE, the movie that catapulted Alan Ladd into instant stardom playing a hired killer named Raven.

This was the sort of character that hadn't been portrayed in movies before. Plenty of murderers, sure, but not a professional killer. It also contained a war motif as background.

Raven was hired by an industrial magnate through Laird Cregar, the go-between. For the payoff, he takes his hired killer to dinner at a restaurant, where he asks Raven what he would do if the money he's just been handed turned out to be marked money.

"What would you do?" he presses, curious. "You can't go to the police..."

Raven shrugs and growls: "I'm my own police."

Which he proves for the remainder of the movie, when it turns out that the money he's been paid is indeed marked money.

Although we are duly informed as to just why Raven has turned into a killer...he was beaten by his father when he was a kid, and one day he grabbed a knife and finished his old man off...there is only a half-hearted attempt on the part of Veronica Lake to turn him away from his chosen profession. At the end, although he refrains from killing her fiancé, played by Robert Preston, when security guards a moment later break into the room in which Raven is trapped, he whirls and shoots it out with them, getting killed in the process.

You see? There's no real reform going on here. He's true to his fate to the end. That was the key to THIS GUN FOR HIRE's uniqueness. It broke the mold!

Which may be why it just might qualify as the progenitor of the dark movies our sometimes allies across the water were so fascinated by, during the late forties and fifties and perhaps even longer.

But there was nothing very "dark" about this movie. Everything was clear in the light of day. Even in the opening shot showing Raven waking up in his cheap furnished room wearing his trousers and shirt, and with his tie still on, although loose, it's bright morning, not gloom and doom. That didn't matter, though, because you could see from the weary way he woke that he hated to face the day. And you sensed that he would hate to face any day of his life.

Incidentally, a year after THIS GUN FOR HIRE appeared, the great Alfred Hitchcock brought out one of his finest movies, SHADOW OF A DOUBT, which also opened, wouldn't you know, with its murderer, Joseph Cotten, lying in bed, comfortably smoking a cigar, with cash money scattered carelessly on a dresser-top and mad Merry Widow Waltz music playing in the background, presumably in memory of the elderly women he has murdered.

Interesting, huh? Frank Tuttle directed THIS GUN FOR HIRE, but Hitch wasn't too proud to begin his movie with an attempt to approximate the same sort of opening Tuttle had used in his terrific movie the year before.

If THIS GUN FOR HIRE wasn't big on shadows and dark corners, the next two movies that qualify as films noir certainly did.

PHANTOM LADY and DEADLINE AT DAWN were both published by Cornell Woolrich under his pen name, William Irish, and both pictures used darkness and shadows and the night streets of New York City to create mood and suspense almost as skillfully as the author used them in much of his fiction.

I remember wondering about Woolrich when I was young and reading his fiction. He had dropped out of Columbia to make a living writing fiction, but not much more was known about him. I pictured him as a thin burning type who roamed the night streets gathering material for his fiction, but I was wrong.

Just recently, forty or fifty years later, I read a newspaper article about him which revealed that he had been a plump "anguished" homosexual, and you'll be amazed at how much that explained, especially about his profound knowledge of the city's streets at night.

In the thirties, if a queer tried to make a move on you, you were supposed to beat him up. It was that simple. No question. You simply beat him up. Of course, some guys would go a little farther, and some a lot farther.

That was the kind of thing the young Woolrich faced each night when he went "cruising" in search of male companionship. And that must have been the source of the uncanny terror he had the genius to use so effectively in his fiction: knowing that he literally faced the possibility of being killed every time he went out trying to pick up some guy.

His talent was unusual and effective. He worked best in the short story form. Tension can only be kept at pitch for brief periods of reading time. But how amazingly well he produced his effects! I've finished reading a five thousand word short suspense story of his, and my guts were tied up in knots, the suspense had gotten to me so totally. Not even reading one or two of Truman Capote's early short stories could produce tension the way the fiction of Cornell Woolrich could.

PHANTOM LADY had all the requirements dark movies should have, even in 1943. Mood, atmosphere, the reality of everyday life with a strange terror super-imposed on it. In short, it was an extension of the springboard Hitchcock had been using in movies like SABOTAGE and THE SECRET AGENT for years: the ordinariness of the everyday intruded upon by some kind of madness or terror threat, seemingly out of nowhere and for no logical reason.

It was the kind of thing that baffled the police who were trying to investigate what had happened, and their confusion only added to the panic of the isolated individual these strange things had trapped.

Alan Baxter was accused of murdering a man he knew, because he had no witnesses to help prove where he was at the time of the murder. The closest he came to one was a lady he had spoken to in a bar for a

few minutes at the crucial time, but when he and the cops went back to the bar and asked the bartender and a few regular customers if they remembered the woman Baxter claimed to have spoken to, no one could recall her.

Talk about making a guy's mind reel, huh!

So PHANTOM LADY possessed the first qualifier for film noiriety. The second was the atmosphere created around his secretary, played by Ella Raines, as she tried to investigate the crime, to help prove Alan Baxter had indeed not done it. Particularly in one scene on a Third Avenue El station platform, at two or three in the morning, the terror generated was almost unbearable, while Ella waited for a train to arrive and get her out of there before whoever hovered nearby in the darkness of the night did something terrible to her.

DEADLINE AT DAWN also used night-time scariness, shadows, mean streets, and above all, darkness, as we followed a sailor in his efforts to prove he didn't commit a murder the cops were sure to arrest him for the following morning if he couldn't prove he didn't do it by then.

Bill Williams got the help of taxi dancer Susan Hayward, and partway along, the two of them got the added assistance of cab driver Paul Lukas in tracing the six or seven people who might help Bill prove he was innocent.

So we follow each of them hunting down this person, and then that one, first Bill, then Susan, and finally Paul Lukas. They meet after each search to pool their knowledge and decide what to do next.

And, of course, each of those searches the three make constitutes a short story on its own, at which Mr. Irish was a master. He had a field day, Susan entering some dingy hovel of a tenement, trying to talk to some hammerhead, and Bill Williams doing the same somewhere, in an effort to make contact with another possible exonerating witness, or perhaps even with the murderer himself. And the same with Paul Lukas, putting in time and effort entering dangerous night streets and alleys and tenements, places no cab driver should properly be asked to enter even in broad daylight.

And remember, the danger each faced was real, because the murderer might be any one of the people they sought out and questioned.

So I think we can agree that both PHANTOM LADY and DEADLINE AT DAWN more than qualify for inclusion among the early entries in the dark movies roster. In the use of darkness alone, they more than qualify.

Another early specimen of this genre was the John Garfield and Walter Slezak psychological thriller based on a Dorothy B. Hughes novel titled THE FALLEN SPARROW.

Here, darkness and shadows were palpable. The movie was drenched in both, and the effectiveness was enhanced because much of what we saw was seen through the eyes of this terrified former soldier in the Spanish Civil War who had been taken prisoner and tortured, and who still felt the psychic reverberations of it back in civilized New York.

Or were they psychic? Was he just having flashbacks, or was he still being brainwashed in some way?

The search for the answer to that question was presented on screen so closely, so intimately, that we the audience felt almost as if we were inside John Garfield's mind while he was listening to the too-familiar sound he had heard so many times in the Spanish prison, the sound of someone approaching who dragged one foot behind him with each step, someone who brought with him pain and torture.

Two of Graham Greene's novels made excellent dark movies, both of which appeared late in the war: THE CONFIDENTIAL AGENT and THE MINISTRY OF FEAR.

MINISTRY seems to have carved out a special niche of its own, perhaps in the espionage genre, but both qualify quite well in the early examples of dark movies. Their connection to the war is unmistakable, and their use of imminent danger hovering just around the nearest corner was ever-present.

Though not as intense and claustrophobic as THE FALLEN SPARROW, certainly THE CONFIDENTIAL AGENT'S portrayal of the dreadful cruelty with which Katina Paxinou dealt with the lovely little girl played by Wanda Hendrix in her first movie role was enough to fill any audience with horror and sympathy.

MINISTRY didn't get that close to the bone, but I may not have been paying enough attention to it when I saw it on its initial release. Perhaps if I watch it again, I'll be able to perceive some of the reasons it has achieved its near cult status in the opinion of some movie addicts.

A recent film festival here in New York ran some of the movies they considered prime examples of films noir. The first one they exhibited was MURDER, MY SWEET, followed by OUT OF THE PAST and a couple of others, and ending finally with IN A LONELY PLACE.

Okay, I guess MURDER, MY SWEET would qualify as a dark enough movie, although I was so accustomed to thinking of it as a hard-boiled private eye flick that I wouldn't on my own have included it among films noir. But it certainly qualifies in the mood area and the use of darkness and shadow to create atmosphere.

With OUT OF THE PAST, there's no question. It was at the top of the list of all the dark movies of the time.

Based on the Geoffrey Holmes novel, BUILD MY GALLOWS HIGH, the story tells of Robert Mitchum's attempt to live a quiet life up in a small mountain town, when one day a car stops at the gas station where he works and the driver is an old acquaintance, Paul Valentine.

It seems his gangster boss, played by Kirk Douglas in one of his first movie roles, would still like to collect whatever it was he thought Mitchum owed him.

And that's what the rest of the movie is about: Mitchum is forced to do Kirk's bidding, presumably because they've got something on him, some crime from out of Mitchum's past, and all the while Jane Greer is spinning her own web of deceit and double-crossing in such a way that we're not sure who she's trying to give the shaft to, Mitchum, Kirk Douglas, or both.

The novel was unusually well-written, and all the players did splendid jobs acting in its movie version, including young Dick Moore, the teen-aged former child actor I remembered from the Thirties, Dickie Moore. He played a mute friend of Mitchum's who spent his every spare moment fly-fishing in a clear-water mountain stream outside the little town, there in the Sierras.

My problem with movies of this nature is that I become impatient. Why does the hero go on taking this treatment from the mob chief, or a woman like the one Jane Greer played, with bruiser Paul Valentine hovering nearby as a permanent threat to Mitchum? We all know that, one way or another, when the story plays itself out, the bad guys are going to get hurt or even killed, so why are we messing around with all this intrigue?

Okay, granted, without all the intrigue, we wouldn't have much in the way of a movie, would we?

In the end, when two of Kirk's hard cases are finally going to whack our hero in his small town, Mitchum can take care of one, but it's Dickie Moore his fisherman friend who deals with the other, just as the man is about to shoot Mitchum: from fifty feet away, the hook at the end of Dick's line comes whistling through the air and sinks into the shooter's back, spoiling his aim and sending him plunging off the rocky bank into the stream, where he drowns.

I can't recall what happens to Kirk Douglas and treacherous Jane Greer, but I was pleased to see the title of the book woven into the dialogue the movie contained, when Mitchum looks down with those lazy eyes of his and, fully aware that she's going to betray him, tells Jane: "Build my gallows high, baby."

There are dozens, perhaps scores of movies that came along at the time, all of which qualify as dark movies, too, but although I saw all or most of them when they came out, I can't remember any of them especially. They were just movies. I had no inkling that someday they would come to be labeled Films Noir! I mean, who knew?

My speculations as to when and why the war years may have been at the root of their beginnings are tentative, of course. It's anyone's guess why all of a sudden that kind of movie began to be made regularly and kept being made, and then suddenly, or not so suddenly, stopped being made. Perhaps they just stopped getting produced here in the States because there was a falling-off of interest in them on the part of the audience.

And that falling-off may very well have begun with the Iron Curtain speech Winston Churchill gave in Fulton, Missouri, in 1948. When he spelled out that we were now engaged in what became known as a "cold" war with the Soviet Union, perhaps the uneasy something dreadful that people had sensed was out there, perhaps that something had been partially clarified for them. They had felt uneasy from during the war until long after the fighting ended, but they didn't know why.

It may be that the dark movies were responses to that feeling of unease, of dread, of suspicion that "something" out there was going to harm them, sooner or later, but they just didn't know what it was.

Now they knew!

Okay, it's just a guess. But the timing seems right: gradually, fewer and fewer dark movies were made, until the time came when we reached the fifties and were faced with the most boring decade the movies have ever given us: ten years or more of Doris Day-Rock Hudson romantic comedies and Cecil B. DeMille Biblical epics, and not a helluva lot else!

Except for one final shot of a dark movie that appeared in 1952, perhaps the greatest of them all, IN A LONELY PLACE.

I saw this picture when it came out, and when I emerged from the theater, I knew I had seen something special.

Humphrey Bogart played a hot-tempered screenwriter who made contact with Gloria Graham early in the movie, just around when someone was murdered in the posh garden apartment complex where they both lived. For some reason, Bogart was the prime suspect in the killing, and the movie follows the efforts of the couple to get to know each other and see if this affair of theirs is going to be able to last, yet all the while the suspicion that Bogart may have done the killing hung over them like a dark cloud.

That's pretty much the story in a nutshell, but the bare bones narration doesn't come anywhere near describing the subtlety and the richness with which the story is unfolded before our eyes, up there on the screen.

The outcome was almost tragically predictable: although Bogart could have been the murderer, it turns out he wasn't. But when the suspicions of him are lifted, it's too late for he and Gloria. He has blown his stack once too often, while the pressure on him had worn away at his nerves until they were even more raw than they ordinarily were. By the time his innocence of the crime became apparent, it was too late for the couple. They were both worn down by it, and they had to walk away from each other.

It was Nicholas Ray's masterpiece, and one of the finest movies his wife, Gloria Graham, ever appeared in. And of course, it was yet another splendid movie to be added to Humphrey Bogart's long list of first rate pictures.

One thing puzzled me, however. At the time, although I'm sure IN A LONELY PLACE got good reviews, I never heard anything more about it, then or afterward. No word of mouth, no mention here and there, nothing.

Okay, granted, I'm not a true film buff. I don't subscribe to magazines about movies or film or cinema, but I'm just talking about general knowledge. All through the subsequent years, not a word, not an inkling that anyone else in the world thought IN A LONELY PLACE was one of the most remarkable movies of our time.

Until the recent listing of movies to be run in a downtown films noir festival, here in New York.

Finally!

IN A LONELY PLACE was not only mentioned among the best of these dark movies, it was pointed out as perhaps the very best of them all.

That was a good feeling, to learn at last that I hadn't been the only one who had noticed and appreciated that movie for the great piece of work it was and is.

Anyway, there's my thesis: perhaps the war years gave a start to movies dealing with suspicions of espionage: loose lips sink ships, the enemy could be anywhere, or anyone...that sort of thing, and then extended the war-time paranoia of real possibilities beyond the war years into a general suspicion that there was still an enemy somewhere out there, and he's after us, you and me!

When the mood pieces and that darkness which was their hallmark gradually ceased to be a factor in movie making, the American movie business went on into banality for more years than I like to remember. So it was left to the French to spark a renewal of interest in what they labeled Films Noir, and for their best and most celebrated directors to imitate and sometimes to succeed in equaling even the best. Well, perhaps not OUT OF THE PAST and THE FALLEN SPARROW and IN A LONELY PLACE, but some of the others, certainly.

As for me, I was an appreciator of dark movies when they were coming out, and while I appreciate the French giving an imprimatur to our cultural endeavors, I myself don't need the French, or the Americans, either, to tell me what's good and what's damn good. I can sometimes actually spot it for myself, than kyouse very much!