GUYS, DOLLS & BIT PLAYERS : In Film Noir, He’s a Loner, She’s a Vixen and Everyone Else Is Along for the Ride

Someone, somewhere, is alone in a dark office, barking out the I-did-it in a raspy, wounded alto, making that ultimate confession, the one that’ll send him to The Big House, The Chair or Eternity.

Or they’re out hoofing it in the pitiless night, indirectly lit by the gritty scrim of ominous loneliness. The moon is unwitting witness to their emotional decay. Something is about to happen to a white male anyone.

Our hero/anti-hero is a private eye, ex-Marine or flyboy, transient good-Joe-gone-bad, prizefighter on the skids, gigolo in vicuna, a mug with a heart of goo. He’s a two-bit lone wolf, a coolly offbeat nonconformist. Formerly clean-cut, he’s gone craggy, desperately ghost-eyed with terminal 5 o’clock shadow.

He’s got quirky demons. An unsolved slaying, a husband begging cuckoldry, a luscious siren in trouble, a nest of Nazi vipers, a poisonous coincidence--plot complications derived from one or more melodramatic convolutions. Plus there’s a secret buried hatchet-deep in his heart--a prison record, a moment of cowardice.

He drinks straight or on the rocks, occasionally with a chaser. Never touches drugs unless some villainous slime is trying to hot-pop him into next week.

He’s existentially alone over his bottle in a sleazy dive, peering at a hostile typewriter or silently scheming destruction during happy hour in a crowded bar. Or he’s hitchhiking along a dangerous curve on an endless road or buying a bus ticket at a scrubby little depot on the edge of nowhere.

She’s a blonde, strawberry or platinum, or brunette, raven-haired or auburn. But always a lady--vixen, femme fatale, waif next-door, heart-stopper. Gowns that shimmer and cling, lames, satins. Nylons and pumps. Frills and feathered brims. Her dopey eyes fill the lens with a dewy tenderness, exotic witchery or smoldering allure.

They’re about to find each other in the shadowy landscape of blue gardenias, white orchids and black dahlias, igniting the silver screen with fireworks. Of course, he’ll be alone when he discovers her betrayal, which can only lead to one thing--the eventual kill-of-passion. Along the way the local gendarmes will inevitably get involved, if only during the sweetly sour denouement.

The weapon is a telephone cord, a low-hung coupe, a smoking gat, enormous, bare psychotic hands. But with unreeling certainty there’s a corpse. The body may be discovered in a rapidly jelling pool of blood or grossly cyanotic, stretched out under the expensive illumination of a Tiffany lamp.

Nothing cinematic excites me more than film noir. Five minutes of the grainy black-and-white genre thrills me more than any contemporary first-run flick. But . . . .

“Uh-oh,” I say, “here comes one of us.”

My husband groans and my son laughs. Someone black has suddenly appeared on-screen. My stomach tightens and I feel the rage start to rise. My psyche is caught behind the metaphorical door, slammed on my temporary exit from reality. It hurts.

At such jarring moments it takes all my strength to resist zapping the TV set. Instead, I reach deep down into my “willing suspension of disbelief.” It’s only make-believe, my mantra. To enjoy that sentimental journey back to yesteryear, I have to pretend I live in a perfect world. I have to accept the isms that go with film noir turf. I have to force myself back through the door, back into the movie.

He’s a Pullman porter, redcap, bandleader or sideman, shoeshine boy, chef, valet, butler, chauffeur, janitor, or humming blues in the next cell over. He then disappears, never to be seen again unless he’s resident piano man at a Moroccan cafe or the mulatto son of a fallen horn player. She’s a cook, maid, lindy-hopper, finger-popper or nightclub singer.

Theirs is a world of ethnic caricature, bit players always pripheral to the action. They suggest that the progress made by today’s Afro-American filmmakers, and others outside the movie business mainstream, is still too painfully little, coming far too late. The past can’t be undone, and these worn stereotypes are disturbing and important reminders that movies, considered pure entertainment, do, over time, become sociopolitical documents. That, like murder, the cultural subtext will out.