Dangerous liaisons

FILM noir remains a genre in search of its roots -- and perhaps even a proper definition. That’s because, unlike other genres (westerns, musicals, romantic comedies), it was not identified as one until dozens, perhaps hundreds, of movies in the noir vein had been made. In the 1940s, no one in Hollywood -- asked what he or she was currently doing -- would have replied, “Oh, you know, a nice little noir over at Warner Bros.”

The very term “film noir” derives from the paperback editions of hard-boiled crime fiction that Gallimard published in postwar Paris under the title “Serie Noire.” The books arrived on shelves more or less simultaneously with the release in France of American movies derived from or influenced by these novels but unseen in Europe because of World War II. The term did not really catch on in the United States until much later, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, with the publication of pieces such as Paul Schrader’s 1972 article, “Notes on Film Noir.”

Since then, there has undoubtedly been more heavy-duty writing about noir than about any other genre -- which includes disputes about whether it really is a genre. This endlessly fascinates both academics and film buffs, in part because so many of the films of noir’s classic era, which Schrader dates from 1941 to 1953, are so seductively realized -- well-written, handsomely directed (all those shadows, rain-wet streets, blinking neon signs) and played with such harsh authority, often by otherwise quite ordinary actors. Schrader says, inarguably, that in that period almost every serious American dramatic movie contained some noir elements.

Yet, for all the critical-historical attention lavished on noir, the task of analyzing the genre hasn’t advanced much beyond what Schrader offered 35 years ago. That’s certainly true of “Unless the Threat of Death Is Behind Them,” which considers in numbing detail five hard-boiled novels (“The Maltese Falcon,” “The Big Sleep,” “Double Indemnity,” “High Sierra” and “Night Has a Thousand Eyes”), each the work of a major first-generation tough-guy novelist (Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, W.R. Burnett and Cornell Woolrich, respectively) and the movies derived from them. The author, John T. Irwin, a humanities professor at Johns Hopkins University, basically has just one (rather paltry) idea about these books: namely, that they are about men who are forced to choose between work and love -- and invariably opt for the former. That formulation applies neatly to the Hammett and Chandler novels, less so to the Burnett and Cain works and not at all to Woolrich’s. His novel is not really hard-boiled (except, on occasion, rhetorically), and its film version has almost nothing to do with its source.

The good professor opens by saying that he rereads “The Maltese Falcon” at least once a year -- a confession I find less disarming than alarming. In writing about it and other hard-boiled novels, he draws to his side Hawthorne, Poe, Fitzgerald, Freud and other ace literary and intellectual figures. You get the impression that he has to justify his passion for pulp by granting it a literary pedigree. Among more reasonable people, of course, the best of these novelists have long since achieved respectability without making high-toned associations.

Irwin also approaches the topic in genteel fashion, even though noir was sexy on the page and on the screen. I kept waiting for him to parse the scene in “The Maltese Falcon” -- it couldn’t make it to the movie version in those censorious days -- in which Sam Spade takes Brigid O’Shaughnessy into a bathroom and forces her to strip to see if she has purloined some money.

This is not a throwaway scene, a little dollop of sadism for the mouth-breathers. It signals yet another shift in the tricky, fluid relationship between “The Maltese Falcon’s” two major characters that is at least as important as others Irwin spends his time on. Indeed, more often than not, it is the female characters who represent the largest, scariest departures from the previous norms in popular crime fiction and films. We’d had bitchy ones before, but killers? Not often. Irwin should be more aware of the sexual component in their restless scheming.

Of course, noir is capacious. Another excellent early scholar of the genre, Raymond Durgnat, listed 11 thematic categories encompassed by noir, not all of them sexually driven. In arguing that noir was more a matter of tone than plot -- that’s what makes definitions so difficult -- Schrader laid out four “conditions” for the genre’s creation. Two of them -- a literary root in easily adaptable hard-boiled fiction (the matter that concerns Irwin) and the presence in Hollywood of European emigre directors well-versed in an expressionistic style -- seem unquestionable. Two of them, I think, require a bit more comment. Schrader correctly cited the drive for greater realism (neorealism in Italy, semi-documentary in the United States) that was powerfully influential on noir. If he were solely concerned with psychology -- the sudden emergence of manipulative women clawing at strangely passive men whose wise-guy patter belies their victimized status -- I’d have no quarrel with him. But if, as he contends, film noir was a stylistic itch in search of suitable subject matter to scratch, I think he slightly misses the point.

Noir is not a realistic style. It’s a transformative one, imparting to the city and its denizens a sort of darkly glamorous menace. As Schrader observes, it rarely rains in Los Angeles, one of noir’s prime venues, yet the streets are always wet with rain, and the fog is always rolling in. The same is true of the writing in these films. The pace and wit of the often outrageously strained metaphors of the voice-over narrations (see “Double Indemnity,” “The Big Sleep,” “Out of the Past” and a dozen lesser works) are not “real.” They are as stylized as the forced lighting and the settings.

Schrader also thought that the immediate postwar years were an “acute downer” in America and that noir reflected that general disillusion. He may have been right about the mood in Hollywood, which had devoted so much energy to supplying peppy optimism during the Depression and war years and was now ready to purvey a much gloomier view of human nature. That darker outlook coincided with a bad financial patch as the studios lost something like two-thirds of their audience to television in that period. Here, however, a certain cognitive dissonance enters our consideration. The country was prospering as it hadn’t since the 1920s, entering a sunny, seemingly endless consumer spree and suburbanization. Sure, that presented problems, but they did not significantly involve private eyes, amoral seductresses, sadistic nightclub owners and corrupt cops. If anything, the mean streets down which the noir antihero strode (or stumbled) were prime candidates for slum clearance.

Does that mean there is -- and perhaps always was -- something wistful in our regard for film noir, a little like our nostalgia for the old, sordid Times Square, now that it has been Disneyfied? Possibly. Does it mean there was something more devouring in the suburban wife-mother than Jane Wyatt cared to play? Maybe. Was there something more frenzied in the commuting male’s misery than he typically let on? Could be. Is it possible that in its highly stylized way, film noir symbolized (and distanced) these discontents, displacing them in melodramatic contexts that had no apparent connection with the way audiences lived? I don’t really know. I do know, though, that Andre de Toth’s 1948 film, “Pitfall,” brought the basic noir tropes into close proximity with suburbia and, to this day, remains largely unknown, perhaps because it dared to do so.

I don’t know of a serious, readable study of “Pitfall” or, for that matter, a number of other noir films that I treasure. Much of the writing on the subject strikes me as nerdy, cultish and self-reflexive. Except for Schrader’s piece and a few others, no one has yet written anything that brings together broad-scaled social and film history to solve the central noir mystery: its lightning rise in an era in which our larger cultural preoccupations were antithetically focused elsewhere. Enough of the prissy, picky Irwins. What this field needs is a De Tocqueville. *