COMMENTARY : Out of the Past, Darkly : A new crop of movies looks back to the wonderfully menacing old days of film noir

In Alfred Hitchcock’s 1951 “Strangers on a Train,” a handsome tennis pro, played by Farley Granger, is befriended by an engaging, screw-loose stranger, Robert Walker’s Bruno, and, without his conscious awareness, inexorably enmeshed in a murder. In Curtis Hanson’s “Bad Influence,” James Spader’s securities analyst is befriended by an engaging, malevolent drifter, played by Rob Lowe, and drawn into a nightmare world of killing and retribution.

Both films are ticklishly perverse examples of the psychological crime thriller--what is usually referred to as film noir . Both films carry a mood of dread and apprehension that is far more eloquent than their relatively straightforward crime thriller plots can account for. This eloquent moodiness, this sense of larger and darker forces overwhelming the simple stories we’re witnessing, is typical of the form. It’s a demonstration of how in our popular culture the thriller drains a septic tank of contemporary anxieties, the kind that go unvoiced in most mainstream Hollywood entertainments.

If the film noir is emerging as the most galvanizing and upsetting of modern genres, there’s ample reason for this. The resurgence of noir thrills is a dramatic response to the dutiful feel-goodism of the times. It’s a way of darkening the landscape, of taunting us with the notion that all is not kinder and gentler.

Besides “Bad Influence,” we’ve had, in only the last three months, a veritable ink pool of noir. In Mike Figgis’ “Internal Affairs,” an excruciatingly crooked policeman (Richard Gere) squares off with an internal-affairs investigator (Andy Garcia) who believes that his wife may be cuckolding him with the cop. In Sondra Locke’s “Impulse,” Theresa Russell plays a vice cop who moonlights as a decoy--i.e. prostitute--in drug busts. In Kathryn Bigelow’s “Blue Steel,” Jamie Lee Curtis plays a rookie cop terrorized by the deranged commodities broker (Ron Silver) with whom she was romantically involved.

The quality of these films is highly variable: “Internal Affairs” and “Bad Influence” are smart, terrific, voluptuously nasty; “Blue Steel” is a reprehensibly effective porno-violent blow-out; “Impulse” is dreary. But, whatever their merits, the ways in which these films draw on the conventions of their ‘40s and early ‘50s antecedents point up both how far we are from those times and how close we still are.

The first films noir were products of the fallout from the Great Depression. The peachy-keen classics of the Depression era--the great musicals and romantic comedies--represented Hollywood’s signal response to the Depression, and they’re among its most blissful and enduring entertainments. But they also represented an evasion of an underlying pessimism. The World War II years allowed this pessimism expression; it took the immediate postwar years, after the requirements of patriotic tub-thumping had passed, before this pessimism became rampant in the movies.

The film noir, with its moody, rootless heroes and stark, demented bad guys and black widows, its rain-slicked streets and pervasive claustrophobic fatalism, was a genre made to order. And there was in Hollywood at the time a concentration of refugeed German film directors and cinematographers whose Expressionistic skills were the ideal instrument with which to emblematize this home-grown Angst . Their movies derived their psychological resonances from their style.

The film noir was, finally, about being trapped, and the patterns of entrapment were rendered in near-abstract visuals. Characters were rendered as half-shadowed, almost sculptural forms; the light from a street lamp through Venetian blinds functioned as ghostly prison bars on the sodden, aghast face peering through the window. The gallery of mugs from the classic films noir are a murderers’ row any self-respecting police blotter would kill for: Richard Widmark’s giggly, death’s-head baby face in “Kiss of Death”; Barbara Stanwyck’s cruel, thin-lipped sensuality in “Double Indemnity,” with her flesh glinting like gun metal in the haze of Fred MacMurray’s ardor; Robert Ryan, as the Howard Hughes-like tycoon in “Caught,” jutting his hawk’s profile out of the shadows and into the light.

The resurgence of the modern film noir parallels in many ways the psycho-social developments of the ‘40s and ‘50s. Like that era, we are still coming to terms with both a great war and a species of economic depression. The confluence of Vietnam and Wall Street’s 1987 crash is fertile ground for the black orchid of film noir. A specific postwar malaise common to noir--a malaise built on the realization that our lives are not living up to the era’s cozy shibboleths of prosperity and optimism--is just now beginning to seep like a bloodstain through our films. Even the yuppies, once the bright and shining icons of the consumerist culture, have now, in movies like “Bad Influence,” been dragooned into nightmarishness.

The city, that wellspring of film noir, has been de-romanticized in the popular imagination by crime, violence, overcrowding, despair. The sexual paranoia that snakes through the old crime thrillers snakes through the new ones too. In the ‘40s postwar films, returning servicemen could never be sure what their women were up to while they were gone. And when they did find out, a corpse usually ensued. (Perhaps the best serviceman-encounters-faithless-wife-who-then-becomes-corpse movie was the 1946 “The Blue Dahlia,” starring Alan Ladd and scripted by that corpse-master par excellence Raymond Chandler.) In the modern AIDS era, the sexual paranoia is comparable and free-floating. And the sexual rage is even more pronounced: Richard Gere’s character in “Internal Affairs” humiliates his women; Rob Lowe’s character murders them. In “Impulse,” Theresa Russell’s cop returns the compliment. Her sharpest line is: “Inside every man is a pervert waiting to get out.”

The kinder, gentler era is built on shifting sands, and the new thrillers are a way of planting a marker--a skull and crossbones--on those sands. They are an implicit rejection of the bland uplift and evasions that have characterized the ‘80s, just as the film noirs of the ‘40s and, even more so, the early ‘50s, were a rejection of the homilies of the postwar world. By framing this rejection in terms of the thriller genre, these films are able to disguise their subversiveness and still satisfy the audience’s desire for action. The ghetto-ization of genre is a convenient and, for now, necessary camouflage.

There are, of course, stylistic differences between the thrillers of then and now. Obviously, color has replaced black and white. Voice-over narration and time-sequence juggling are mostly gone; the sex and violence are more plentiful, more languorously shot and edited. The scripts derive less from hard-boiled pulp fiction than from its modern equivalent--the pulp TV thriller, which at its most rococo, in its Michael Mann-erist phase in shows like “Crime Story,” defines the hard-boiled raciness and shadowings of video noir.

Bad guys were often portrayed in the old days as gross, stubby, gelatinous specimens, like, most memorably, Sydney Greenstreet in “The Maltese Falcon,” or Edward G. Robinson in “Key Largo.” Now they’re much more likely to be Ward Cleaver-ish (like Terry O’Quinn in Joseph Ruben’s “The Stepfather”); sleekly handsome (like Rob Lowe in “Bad Influence”) or well-conditioned (like Ron Silver in “Blue Steel,” who, appropriately enough, has a psychotic break while working out on his Soloflex). But, in most of the important ways, the modern thriller has simply shifted in key the basic chordal progression. In the new films mentioned above, the hero is someone with an uneasy, or nonexistent, psychosexual relationship at home, who is drawn by an avenging, seductive adversary into a reckoning with his (or her) own capacity for horror.

The primal noir theme of the innocent drawn into a pact with one’s dark double is the subtext of all these films. This doubling of innocence and malevolence is particularly conducive to noir stylistics, where, in the shadows, everybody is rendered equally featureless, anonymous. These films may be shot in color, but they all find their fulfillment in the muted end of the palette. “Internal Affairs” pays homage to its forebears by fading its final violent tableau to black and white.

The modern thrillers may dabble in character pathology, but, like the earlier thrillers, they are not primarily psychological or sociological investigations. In the ‘40s and ‘50s, a popularized Freudianism sometimes buttressed the thrills; social explanations--poverty, a bad upbringing, and so on--were occasionally hauled in to reason away the villainy. But most of the time the bad guys were just . . . bad. Faced with Richard Widmark, in “Kiss of Death,” pushing an old lady in a wheelchair down the stairs, any Psych 1a explanation is bound to be comically inadequate. In the new thrillers, the bad guys’ motivations go equally undeciphered, which gives the films both a modernist and an archaic veneer. The characters played by Richard Gere, Ron Silver, Rob Lowe are, we are made to feel, born bad. The films in which they figure express a particularly modern disillusionment: our helplessness, despite our vast stockpile of learning, to truly understand someone else’s depravity.

Perhaps the greater disillusionment in these movies is with the supposed comforts of the middle-class. Dissatisfied with the bourgeois blandishments that were supposed to make us all happier, or deprived even of the promise or continuance of those comforts, we become enraged at the wealthy. The film noir has always been one of the few genres that explicitly recognized, if only for the purposes of plot, the class system in America. So many of the plots--think of “They Live by Night”--have been about the poor trying to get rich. And in the new thrillers, as in the old, the rich are almost without exception rotters. Wealth becomes the hallmark of wickedness: In “Internal Affairs,” a mobster kingpin hires Richard Gere’s Dennis Peck to kill his parents because they’re standing in the way of a business deal; in “Blue Steel,” the rantings of Ron Silver’s Eugene on the floor of the stock exchange are masked as part of the money-grubbing din.

Since great wealth is portrayed as the entrance to all manner of corruption, it follows that the yuppies in these movies who aspire to such wealth are foredoomed. “Bad Influence” is the most fascinating of the modern thrillers because, as did Jonathan Demme’s “Something Wild,” it stands the yuppie stereotype on its head. Despite initial impressions, the James Spader character’s fast-track job as securities analyst gives him no real satisfaction. His Deco condo is devoid of warmth; it has the appearance of wealth stripped of all human meaning. The gleaming home-entertainment equipment and New Wave furnishings and objets d’art are like talismans of corruption. Rob Lowe’s character, inhumanly smooth, is like an emanation of these yuppie accouterments; he pops out of the surroundings like a malevolent genie. The film noir, with its absolute reliance on style, is uniquely capable of setting and expressing its basic themes amid the gleaming surfaces of yuppie land.

What all of these movies are saying is that ultimately the laws of society cannot protect you. Its good-time reassurances are a con. The female leads in “Blue Steel” and “Impulse” may be cops but they’re still victims--the traditional role for women in urban jungle scenarios. To the extent that these films all conclude with last-minute rescue operations by the forces of good, they seem phony.

The function of the law, of the police, in these movies is far more ambiguous than it was in the old B-thriller days. Back then, a renegade cop was the exception in a well-protected universe. Now there is the widespread perception of corruption among our upholders of the law. The new thrillers are blatantly cynical, and in that cynicism is at least a measure of truth. It may be a bum’s truth, but it connects up with the fearsomeness of contemporary urban life in a way that the comfy, feel-good movies don’t. The modern crime thriller is the nightmare in the Field of Dreams.