Hollywood’s dark shadows

Film noir presents one of film history’s more slippery problems of definition. To begin with, it was, as Alain Silver and Elizabeth Ward argue in their classic, invaluable encyclopedia of the genre, “Film Noir,” a purely American invention (although significantly shaped by European emigre filmmakers), yet, ironically, it was initially named and anatomized by French critics just after World War II.

It is also a genre without deep roots in movie or cultural history. Yes, you can find gangster and horror films of the 1930s that predict some of noir’s classic tics. And, as Woody Haut reminds us in “Heartbreak and Vine,” you can find many of noir’s socio-psychological tropes in 1930s pulp fiction. But, in truth, it was an essentially new visual manner, something the written word could not conjure up that gave noir its unique glory.

There is endless disagreement among cinephiles as to what film began the cycle and where exactly it ended -- if, indeed, it ever did. Neo-noir rolls endlessly on and includes such great works as “Chinatown” and “Miller’s Crossing.” Frankly, though, most of the latter-day noirs don’t quite cut it for a classicist like me, in part because they are in color and, for me, aesthetic bliss in this genre depends on full exploitation of the gray scale.

Most of the criticism of classic noir, which has become a perfect subject for academics and cultists -- it’s as highly stylized as opera and reached its heights within an even shorter time frame -- doesn’t quite cut it, either, particularly when it comes to defining the larger social forces behind the genre. Certainly none of the books under review here is helpful in that regard. Indeed, “The Art of Noir” doesn’t even try, and for that reason it may be the most successful of them. It is an oversize volume handsomely reprinting hundreds of noir posters and briefly discussing, in captions and text blocks, the unknown artists who created them. Basically, we have a lot of garish representations of guys in fedoras pointing their gats at tense women who seem about to fall out of their dresses. But still -- if any collection of pictures that don’t move can be said to capture the essential noir spirit, Eddie Muller’s book does.

Haut’s oafishly written book -- he seems to think the word “Tinseltown” is a really clever synonym for Hollywood -- offers short biographical profiles of 29 tough guy novelists who wrote screenplays and were mostly miserable doing so. He has almost no critical sensibility beyond a generalized enthusiasm for their novels and a certain contempt for the way they were treated by Hollywood. And the telling details of their work, both on the page and the screen, consistently elude him.

Still, “Heartbreak and Vine” does remind us that these writers were twice marginalized. The literary community patronized them, and Hollywood contemptuously condemned them, for the most part, to ill-paid B picture work. Beyond that, the preponderance of them were drunks (Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Jim Thompson) and social misfits (Cornell Woolrich, David Goodis). This, as it happened, was useful to the movies since they supplied the noir cycle with dozens of stories about fringe figures just like themselves. The difference was that their fictional alter egos were more up and doing, while their creators hung glumly about the bar at Musso & Frank’s, cadging drinks.

Haut also notes, although he doesn’t make much of the fact, that postwar France became, for some of them, their most reliable source of royalties and repute. That’s because Gallimard began publishing their works in its “Serie Noire” paperback line just as the movies based on or influenced by their novels started appearing in French theaters. The congruity was noted, the name “film noir” (literally “black film”) came into use and slowly made its way across the Atlantic. “A Panorama of American Film Noir” is the first book-length consideration of this cinematic phenomenon. The work of two provincial cinephiles, it appeared in France 1955 and only now appears in English for the first time. It is, needless to say, tres French: humorless, abstract in tone, full of woolly generalizations, odd enthusiasms and equally odd lacunas.

Still, Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton have a valid point or two to make. Defining noir as basically “oneiric [that’s the fancy word for “dreamy”], strange, erotic, ambivalent and cruel,” they make a strong and interesting connection between it and surrealism. Many of the films quite literally include bad dreams and hallucinations. But their characteristic style -- fog, blinking neon, light pouring through the slats of Venetian blinds -- does “surrealize” cinematically unprecedented behavior, which is, yes, “strange, erotic, ambivalent and cruel” in psychopathic ways that were previously unfilmed. There are, for example, neurotic criminals (see “White Heat”) whose erratic and deadly conduct cannot be explained away by the Depression era’s sociology of deprivation. And, of course, there’s the new cat-and-mouse sexuality with its cold women manipulating heated-up men (and often enough themselves) to their doom (“Double Indemnity,” “Out of the Past,” et al., ad infinitum).

Nearly everyone who writes about noir makes the point that mega-politics -- postwar atomic anxieties, McCarthyism -- must account for their doomy prevalence in the late ‘40s and early ‘50s. But I think there’s something more subtle to be said on that topic, which foreign observers like Borde and Chaumeton can’t quite get at. It is perhaps symbolized by the fact that noir cops are more corrupt and brutal than movie cops had ever been. They represent, I think, an early sign of the breakup of the 1930s to 1940s liberal-democratic American consensus, which held that government was an essentially benign court of last resort for even our most marginalized citizens.

Something similar might be said about noir’s anti-heroes. Of late, fashionable criticism makes much of the “unreliable” narrator in fiction. But these private eyes (and sore-beset private citizens, many of them damaged war veterans) are, in an even larger sense, unreliable. “Destabilized” might be a better word for them. Some of them are temporary amnesiacs, unable to recall the past. Even when they can remember it, personal history turns out to be a labyrinth in which long-ago events nurture current criminal activity.

There is obviously something deeply Freudian in all this, and the rise of noir coincides with the rise of interest in psychiatry throughout popular culture. It certainly accounts for the new male-female equation in noir, which deeply twisted the old boy-meets-girl formula, pushing romance into the realm of abnormal psychology.

Put simply, noir was at heart an anti-bourgeois formula, suggesting that the world was a more dangerous and morally ambiguous place than we wanted it to be, that criminal anarchy was closer to suburbia than we dared imagine (Andre De Toth’s largely unknown “Pitfall” is an excellent example).

America looked and listened, for a while, then pulled up its neckties, straightened its skirts and opted for something less scary: color, wide screen, Doris Day. Changes in movie technology had something to do with noir’s demise. So did the human impulse to parody any intensely stated expressive form (see the Mickey Spillane ballet in “The Band Wagon,” or, for that matter, the self-parody of Robert Aldrich’s “Kiss Me Deadly”). But, lest we forget, surrealism literally means super-real. Now the things that once really mattered in these movies -- corruption, eroticism, madness, death -- have lost their sting. Death, especially, is often without consequence in modern film. It is presented balletically. Or as a spectacle of mass destruction that claims only anonymous extras or digital doodles. In noir, it was passion’s final expenditure, obsession’s last terrible gasp, projected in vivid, unforgettable ways. *