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It ain't right and it ain't natural
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alexx_kay offered a definition of film noir in comments and my brain generated a textbrick in reply. It maxed out the character limits for LJ-comments, so as long as I'm thinking in public, I might as well stick it here.That starts me thinking about how I define noir—if indeed I have a definition for it. I think of it as a style or a mood as much as a genre; I find it much easier to categorize by the themes it examines or the emotions it evokes than by the elements that comprise its plots. It's not precisely the cinematic counterpart of hardboiled or pulp fiction, although there's a lot of overlap and interaction between the two. Crime films can be noirs, but they don't have to be. I think it has phases, influenced by the prevailing concerns of the times. For me, I think all of the best examples of film noir are categorized by varying degrees of moral ambiguity and a theme of instability: the world isn't what you thought it was, the person you love isn't who you thought they were, you aren't who you thought you were. Something you have always taken for granted drops out from under you. It could be your scruples, it could be your heart. Why pick just one? I agree with you that a deep suspicion of institutions is part of it, whether that means the law or government or marriage or the American dream. Noir is the genre where things go wrong, where all the national anxieties come out to play. I think that's one of the reasons that—despite the visual and verbal stylization that are also hallmarks of the genre—it feels much more realistic to me than many of its contemporaries. I don't think it's merely that my life has been on the rocks for months and therefore I am more inclined to believe a narrative full of bad decisions and moral fog than one which ties up all loose ends in a heteronormative Technicolor bow. The Production Code sold America the white picket fence and the sanctity of marriage, 2.5 children and a proper respect for authority; its Catholic morals permitted a very narrow range of acceptable behavior for its heroes, its good people who were both exemplars to the populace and assumed points of identification. Populate a genre with grifters and gangsters and social deviants and people with just plain bad judgment, on the other hand, and all of a sudden the range of representation explodes in all directions. It doesn't matter if the final curtain still sees the guilty punished and the good rewarded, sometimes with whiplash speed before the credits roll; all of the stuff outside the lines was still there. These last eight to nine months getting formally interested in film noir have reminded me of my initial plunge into pre-Code cinema, where all of a sudden I could find heroes with heroin habits and triumphantly promiscuous women and romantic Jewish bootleggers who bumped off any tough who roughed up the heroine. Noir has given me female heroes and antiheroes, sympathetic queer characters and monstrous men, failure modes for everything from personal integrity to the patriarchy, a skeptical scrutiny of all kinds of American myths and values. I don't mean you can't find anything interesting in other genres of the time—subversion gets in anywhere it can. Stories always say something about the people who tell them. You want to talk id-fests, anyway, check out an MGM musical sometime. Whoo boy. But I am starting to feel as though film noir is where a lot of the transgressiveness displaced from the pre-Code era ended up and then multiplied with new social issues like the independence of women during wartime or the shock of soldiers returning to civilian life or the whole question of America's postwar place in the world, not to mention the atom bomb.1 A lot of really good noir has an ethical dimension, not necessarily in that any of the characters are Aristotelian models, but in that the stories themselves care about exploring questions of ethics—loyalty, betrayal, identity, justice, what people hold on to, what they relinquish, what they'll acknowledge, how far they'll go—even if they have no answers. That, too, I find more realistic than being instructed as if by a primer for a school I don't believe in. I am making all of these statements based primarily on American film noir, of course. I have a decent knowledge of British noir and some familiarity with French noir, though mostly if it's by Jules Dassin—I think of Jean-Pierre Melville as moving into the neo-noir period. I know almost nothing about Japanese or Mexican noir and other nationalities are blinking question marks, though I'd like to learn more. Everything I say here could be wrong. I don't yet have a comprehensive data set. I am really enjoying the collection process, though.
Tagged for Patreon because it's still spinning off my thoughts on Criss Cross (1949). I appreciate the excuse to examine my own free-floating opinions and see if I can nail some of them down.
1. Pre-Code movies are still generally better about race, in that I associate them with shockingly unstereotyped black characters every now and then. I'm a little cautious of saying that any Hollywood era was really great on the subject. I still want to see some of the so-called race films, made outside of the Hollywood studio system by black production companies with black casts specifically for black audiences. Their existence fascinates me and very few of them have survived. I don't know if an equivalent existed for Asian-American audiences. That's an entire topic of its own.
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Thank you.
I tend to think of film noir as stylish paranoia, but that's a very basic definition.
It's a good image, though.
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Thank you. I had the time and the energy to think about things.
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Wait, seriously? Holy blap. Thank you for telling me!
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Does that make much of a difference to the plot?
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Thank you.
If you think the world "should" work as advertised, they're tragedies. If you don't, they're...well, not the opposite, but definitely something different. They show another path.
Yes! I wonder if that's why I don't find prolonged exposure to noir depressing. I've been upset by individual films, but apparently I could watch the genre forever.
Belated comment again
I would be very interested to know if you have further thoughts on the relationship between the pre-Codes and film noir (not that the pre-Codes are a genre as such, but there seem to be some recurring themes and attitudes).
I have a vague inchoate sense that noir films exist in relation to the Code, even if they're getting as much by it as they possibly can -- it's both restricting what can be shown directly on screen, which forces certain kinds of creativity, and also enshrining some principles which dictate how the stuff outside the lines exists -- the lines are grimly there and there's no hope of changing them, whereas in some of the pre-Codes they are at least considerably more negotiable.
I don't mind belated comments!
Okay. So the surface-layer answer is that in the same way that pre-Code Hollywood movies portray behaviors, attitudes, and realities that would functionally vanish from American cinema for the next thirty years at minimum, film noir is where I have similarly discovered characters, subjects, and themes that I didn't think were being—could be—explored on film at the time when they were made. I'm not trying to argue that noir as a genre (to call it that for convenience; I think of it more as a mode) existed outside the purview of the Production Code. It couldn't, if it was coming out of Hollywood; even Poverty Row studios got their memos from Joseph Breen. But for all the reasons cited in the post, it seems to have been able to get a much wider range of moral grey area and realism onto the screen than any other contemporary genre I can think of.1 What you don't get in film noir, almost by definition, is the freewheeling joy of many of the pre-Codes, the sense of happily getting away with defying society. You do get a lot of the same skeptical interrogation of American platitudes, however, and especially when this tendency in noir crosses with a clear-eyed examination of the state of the nation rather than a reassuring papering-over of the stresses of war or the messy loose ends of peacetime, the two kinds of filmmaking really remind me of one another. The slightly more analytical answer is that both genres feel incredibly like the national id splashed up onscreen. Pre-Code cinema is, among other things, a product of the Great Depression, right on the heels of Prohibition and World War I before that. The bottom gets knocked out of all kinds of national security: banks, government, patriotism. It's a cynical time and it generates cynical pictures—many of them enormously fun, but most of them still pretty sharp. Musicals, all right, generally considered the most escapist of film genres unless maybe you count porn? 42nd Street (1933) proceeds from the premise that the director lost all his money in the crash of '29 and needs a hit to retire on, otherwise his doctors can't be held responsible for his health. Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933) opens with the surreal optimism of "We're in the Money," which turns out to be a rehearsal for a show that never opens because the producer's gone broke; it throws the plate-spinning fun of a backstage comedy into the air and smacks it all back down at the finale, seriously and persuasively, with the explicitly political showstopper "Remember My Forgotten Man." I think it would be simplistic and overstating the case to claim that you got a lot of movies about sex and crime and heroes who were fast-talking hustlers because that's what everyone was living with on a day-to-day basis, but I believe that pre-Code Hollywood was not inaccurately recording a sea-change in social mores that the PCA tried to hold back time by suppressing and mostly only succeeded in screwing up American cinema for decades. Film noir comes into being during World War II—visually, deeply influenced by European filmmaking trends brought directly to Hollywood by emigré cast and crew—and really gathers momentum in the years immediately afterward. It's a disillusioned genre. It's an anxious one. It questions its country, it makes characters examine their own ethics and/or observes what happens when they fail to, it puts little faith in institutions and it knows that individuals, yourself included, can't always be counted on to do the right thing. It's not a miserablist genre, though, which I find myself stressing to people in an effort to explain why watching tons of noir does not leave me depressed. I have seen happy endings in film noir, real ones, not the unconvincing plaster of the Production Code. It does not dismiss small victories. The strongest noirs feel like nightmares; surviving them can feel like a nightmare breaking. And the sheer existence on film of some of the questions it asks, decades earlier than I thought was pop-culturally permissible, weirdly cheers me even when the answers are equivocal, Code-derailed, or not easily come by. I can give specific examples if you would like; I'm trying to avoid accidentally publishing a monograph here.
1. I make exceptions for individual movies whatever their genre. William Wyler's The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) still really impresses me. So does Vincente Minnelli's Madame Bovary (1949).
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Yes, I see the continuity in terms of exploring "transgressive" topics; I suppose what my brain's idly fretting at is the differences (notably in mood) that come with both the changing times and the Code restrictions.
I think it would be simplistic and overstating the case to claim that you got a lot of movies about sex and crime and heroes who were fast-talking hustlers because that's what everyone was living with on a day-to-day basis,
Parenthetical: I think you'd enjoy LaSalle on why the fast-talking hustler became one of the new modes of male hero at this point.
with the explicitly political showstopper "Remember My Forgotten Man.
Which is, in a way, an optimistic gesture of sorts -- I mean, despite the sense that the institutions are broken, there's sometimes the idea that reform could be possible, if you crusade enough, or find the right person in office, or even make the right outrage-inspiring film.
(This is me thinking aloud here, not producing considered opinions.)
I can give specific examples if you would like; I'm trying to avoid accidentally publishing a monograph here.
*starry eyes* I would love examples (and monographs) should you have time/energy/inclination. My noir knowledge is very patchy.
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Understood. The changing times feel like the most significant factor to me; if the Production Code had successfully stamped out socially transgressive happy endings, I don't think the screwball comedy would have flourished as it did after 1934. It's the most disorderly and adult of the romance genres, the one that pulls the happiest endings out of the most unlikely places and sounds great doing it; it's the other poster child for Code-dodging. Maybe that's where the freewheeling joy went. I will be shocked if someone before me hasn't made the case for screwball as the positive complement of noir—everything is unstable, nothing is in your control, even you aren't as you believed yourself to be and it's wonderful. I remain wary of considering them as neatly related as this train of thought makes them sound, both because the timing doesn't work for a genuine divergence—the earliest screwball comedies date from the very last months of the pre-Code era, while the last films of the classic cycle come out in the early '40's just as noir is getting started—and because they are not demonstrably not mutually exclusive. The Big Sleep (1946) as directed by Howard Hawks is essentially a screwball noir.1 I love it and I have no idea why it's one of the type species of the genre. It wasn't even one of the five films seen by Nino Frank in the summer of 1946. When I have source material to compare to, I can always see Code interference from page to screen, usually in the decreased explicitness with which the movie is permitted to present certain elements of its narrative—sometimes necessitating major plot work-around, sometimes just bringing Yiddish gay slang into pop lingo—and occasionally in the outright burial of them. Because most of the movies now categorized as film noir were adapted from hardboiled fiction, thrillers, or mysteries, however, I'm not sure I've ever seen a total alteration in tone.
Parenthetical: I think you'd enjoy LaSalle on why the fast-talking hustler became one of the new modes of male hero at this point.
I am sure I would! I am also hoping he can explain what happened to Richard Barthelmess, who transitioned successfully from silent to sound film, but not really from pre-Code to Code. He's so good in Only Angels Have Wings (1939) that I don't understand why he didn't age into a regular character actor. I still need to write about that movie.
Which is, in a way, an optimistic gesture of sorts -- I mean, despite the sense that the institutions are broken, there's sometimes the idea that reform could be possible, if you crusade enough, or find the right person in office, or even make the right outrage-inspiring film.
I agree with you. It's not directionless anger; it's trying to reach someone who could make a difference. In some pre-Code social justice pictures, the characters even do.
I would love examples (and monographs) should you have time/energy/inclination.
Okay! Have a selection of films noirs that surprised me.
The major thing I am tracking right now is women in noir, since classic film noir2, in direct contradiction of the popular image of the default femme fatale, turns out to be full of women with agency, sympathy, and moral complexity, often depicted concurrently with criticism of masculinity and patriarchy. I started noticing this trend with Max Ophüls' The Reckless Moment (1949), in which the nightmare that traps the protagonist is much less the murder she's being blackmailed over than the American nuclear family and her place as a woman in it. I found it thunderously depressing and equally fascinating. The protagonist receives no conventional punishment for her involvement in more than one crime; her heartbreak has to do with discovering what it is like to be seen as a person on her own terms, rather than strictly in relation to her husband or her family, and then losing that perspective because the relationship that enabled it was foredoomed by its criminal associations from the start. The window of independence that opened even more widely for women in America3 during World War II is closing with the onset of the '50's and the film knows this is a bad thing. There is a particular sting in its recognition that the man who actually treats the protagonist best (until he makes a crucial decision for her, under the misguided impression that he has her best interests at heart) is the story's career criminal. A similar dynamic in the pre-Code Night Nurse (1931) ended with two young people laughing, in love, and driving a car very badly; The Reckless Moment follows its source novel in giving neither the housewife nor the criminal a happy ending, which feels to me less like the heavy hand of the PCA than a bleak contrast with Depression days. Ophüls' earlier noir Caught (1949) is blunter in that its protagonist's husband is a monster rather than a loving but oblivious father knowing best, but it is similarly attentive to the inequalities of power and light-years ahead of its time in its understanding of domestic abuse. Its idea of a happy ending blew my mind and delighted me.
Both of Ophüls' films are meticulously sympathetic to women who behave "badly"—covering up a suspicious death, marrying for money against her own better judgment, taking increasingly less "moral" actions to survive the situations in which they find themselves—which is refreshing enough in itself, but noir also contains straight-up heroic women, like the protagonist of Robert Siodmak's Phantom Lady (1944). True, the object of her heroism is the life of the man she's in love with. But he's so absent from the story and she's so present and active that their eventual reunion feels a lot more like her being awarded him than any kind of return to the heteronormative status quo. (I was totally wrong about the unusualness of the protagonist's agency when I wrote up the movie. I just hadn't seen enough of the right noir.) I saw it paired with Roy William Neill's Black Angel (1946) and that movie doesn't even rap its heroine on the wrist for pursuing an extramarital affair in her quest to clear her husband's name. Whether he's worth the effort is an open question even within the movie, but it doesn't shame her for her devotion; like The Reckless Moment, it looks bittersweetly at an alternative and wonders against its own closed-loop plot, what if?
At the other end of the range, I love Byron Haskin's Too Late for Tears (1949) because it plays from the perspective of the story's femme fatale and shows that what that archetype looks like from the inside is an antihero: a woman who takes control of her life in any way she can, even if that means theft and murder. She's not a nice person and the film doesn't let her get away with it forever (I have not yet read the novel by Roy Huggins, so I can't tell if this is fidelity to the source material or Code interference), but she gets much farther than I thought she would and she is the main character throughout; the camera does not switch sides. Her urgency, determination, and invention give her the same awful attractiveness of many antiheroes, even when the viewer knows she would merely use and discard whatever sympathy or reluctant admiration they might feel for her. Joseph Losey's The Prowler (1951) is much less kind to its male protagonist who takes a similarly ruthless tack in his pursuit of the classic trifecta of money, sex, and power—it understands where he's coming from, but refuses to cut him any slack for the lengths he goes to get what he thinks he's owed. He's the perfect genderswap of the stereotypical femme fatale: seductive, materialistic, untrustworthy, spellbinding. But he has institutional power, too, which is rarely available to his female counterpart, and it makes a difference to the character. His downfall doesn't feel like an arbitrary moral shutdown; it's a narrow escape from something the audience recognizes as all too real in the world we still live in.
All of these movies offer a much more nuanced view of gender in noir than I feel the genre gets credit for. A panel on film I signed up for at Arisia prefaced its inclusion of noir by expecting panelists to acknowledge and engage with the inherent misogyny of the genre. I'm fine with acknowledging and engaging when I see it—and I have seen it—but then I also want to talk about the examples where women in noir are straightforwardly people, because they're really not rare. Check out the drifter in E. A. Dupont's The Scarf (1951) or the title character in Charles Vidor's Gilda (1946). I need to give Norman Foster's Woman on the Run (1950) a writeup of its own, but while its ending suffers more from reaffirmed gender roles than any other housewife noir I've seen—I know it wasn't like a shutter slammed down at the end of 1949, but I still blame the '50's—it remains a notable portrayal of a female protagonist who doesn't want your sympathy, isn't interested in being nice, and is still a compelling, three-dimensional character toward whom the audience feels quite positively, especially since her reasons for wanting out of her marriage are undramatic but wholly understandable. Also, she gets all of the best lines.
I am also collecting a small but similarly growing number of noirs which refute the idea of the ubiquitous femme fatale with their own unreliable male narrators: so far I've got Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity (1944), Robert Siodmak's Criss Cross (1949), and Edgar G. Ulmer's Detour (1945), all of whose protagonists repeatedly disclaim culpability for their self- or other-destructive actions in favor of blaming the women in their lives while the film records their independently bad decision-making, no sexual luring required. See again Gilda, which is more complicated than this two-person pattern, but knows that its central figure is a person, not the cipher of a siren. It is devastatingly clever about how it uses the song "Put the Blame on Mame."
To touch on some other axes—
Fred Zinneman's Act of Violence (1948) is one of my favorite movies; it's the reason I started paying attention to Van Heflin; it is not the only film noir to focus on returning veterans, but it is the earliest film I've seen explicitly written around the idea that not every American soldier came back with a proud shining story of What You Did in the War, Daddy. It's deconstructing a national myth even as it's forming. It is very good about its PTSD.
John Sturges' Mystery Street (1950) has a Latino protagonist investigating a murder in a white neighborhood of Boston. It is astonishingly not ham-handed for a Hollywood picture in which racism plays a significant role and solidified my belief that Ricardo Montalbán should have been given more starring roles. There is one hilarious concession to the Code (it is not permissible to mention the pelvis onscreen, so a woman's skeleton has to be identifed by an array of other, much less significant differences between the sexes) and otherwise the forensics are very solid. Location photography of Boston also a plus if you care about that sort of thing.
I have not found a more positively portrayed queer character in American film of the 1940's—of whatever genre—than the character of Jeff Hartnett in Mervyn LeRoy's Johnny Eager (1942). By "positive" I don't mean "exemplary." He's kind of a mess. His problem, however, is not that he's queer and therefore, saith the PCA, doomed to tragedy, failure, and justly deserved moral censure. His problem is exactly the same as that of the story's heroine: he's in love with a beautiful gangster who treats him like shit. That's hell on a person. But Jeff's feelings and what he does about them—and how Johnny Eager responds—are central to the story in a way I was not expecting from a movie made anytime before the 1960's and I love it, even with the Code-compliant ending that crime does not pay and neither do OT3s.
Joseph H. Lewis' The Big Combo (1955) has an obliquely shot but unmistakable cunnilingus scene. I wasn't expecting that.
These are the first that come to mind; I'll come back with others as they occur to me. If you track any of them down, enjoy!
1. This is the thing where I think of noir as a mode, applicable to various genres. Fritz Lang's Rancho Notorious (1952) is a solid noir Western. Stanley Kubrick's The Killing (1956) is part heist film, part noir, all black comedy. This Gun for Hire (1942)—which I also need to get around to writing up—is a story of wartime espionage that turns into film noir by making its protagonist the double-crossed hitman who comes into possession of a vital chemical secret but only wants to get back at the boss who betrayed him; even when the rest of the movie around him behaves like action-comics pulp, he and his relationship with the heroine are complex and ambivalent and unpredictable enough to pull the other genre through. Correspondingly, there are a lot of movies that get classified as noirs that I really don't think are: Chicago Calling (1951) and Storm Fear (1955) are two that I discovered last year during my Dan Duryea period. They're great and they're thought-provoking, but they're not noir. Sometimes a weird existential black-and-white film is just a weird existential black-and-white film.
2. I am distinguishing here from neo-noir, much of which it turns out I don't like because it's so much more codified, consequently much more self-limiting, than the original noir cycle of the '40's and '50's, which could be absolutely gonzo if it felt like it. Douglas Sirk's Lured (1947)? Anthony Mann's The Black Book (1949)? Boris Ingster's Stranger on the Third Floor (1940) is the very start of the noir cycle and you could make a case, if you felt like being obstreperous, that it doesn't have to adhere to the rules because so far there aren't any, but again see The Big Sleep. I can understand why there's so much confusion about what's noir and what isn't because it can encompass so many tones and genres, but I think that's one of the things I like about it.
3. And elsewhere: see Leslie Howard's The Gentle Sex (1943).
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