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I don't think you handled that too well, Max
Anthony Mann's The Black Book (1949) is one of the best arguments I know for noir as a mode, not a genre. I doubt I recognized it as such in 2011 when I caught the first ten minutes on TCM, but I knew I'd seen something special; eventually I tracked down the other seventy-nine minutes on YouTube and jumped at the chance to watch a less jittery, fuzzy version when it came back around on TCM this week. I love this movie and I don't think beyond its deserts. It is sometimes shown under the alternate title Reign of Terror. It's French Revolution noir.
It's not that I haven't seen noir hybrids before, but very few are as fearlessly full-tilt with their conceits as The Black Book. While its plot retells the Thermidorian Reaction as zestily as any costume drama, everything from its dark, dramatic lighting to its hard-boiled dialogue to its cynical nerve is noir, right down to the damaged hero and his ambiguously faithful old flame. Give him a century and a half and he might be a G-man among gangsters, but on July 26, 1794, Charles D'Aubigny (Robert Cummings) is a Lafayette loyalist gone undercover as a notoriously bloodthirsty prosecutor in order to get close to Robespierre (Richard Basehart), who has just denounced Danton and stands ready to declare himself dictator of France. Charged with recovering the missing "black book" of the title—Robespierre's private hit list, fatally incriminating if its contents were known—D'Aubigny hopes instead to turn it over to Robespierre's rivals, but his only contact with the underground is the scornfully patriotic Madelon (Arlene Dahl) from whom he parted some years previously under mutually embittering circumstances and in any case, in the last paranoid thrashings of the Terror, trust can get you killed faster than actual treachery. Please make no attempt to anticipate the twists and double-crosses of the forty-eight-hour roller coaster; you'll put yourself in a neck brace. All you need to know is that the results are darkly funny, pulpily violent, and compulsively watchable, if only to see what sometimes literally cloak-and-dagger craziness this mashup of contemporary style and historical subject will throw at the national mythos next.
Like most B-noirs and especially Mann's, The Black Book turns its lack of budget into an occasion for atmosphere: William Cameron Menzies' production design and John Alton's cinematography have to create their revolutionary Paris mostly through small rooms and shadows and they succeed with baroque claustrophobia. Close-ups are lit every way but directly, angled to fragmentation or tight enough to choke. Characters are framed by quills, doorways, muskets, stalls, draperies, rain-slicked, torch-lit cobbled streets receding like blind alleys. Real prison bars are almost honest enough to be refreshing. Someone is always looking over the characters' shoulders, even if it's just the audience. You never know who's listening and you never know what they'll do with the information.![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
handful_ofdust once memorably described this aesthetic as "Stalinist Russia with hoop-skirts"; the McCarthy echoes are unavoidable, but the film's more interested in thrills than a treatise. There are horse chases, coach chases, a murder conducted like spirit photography in a darkened mirror which moments later holds in its depths an even more unwelcome recognition scene. People burst out of bakery windows, swim like microbes in the Convention's engorging eye. When wine seeps from underneath a bookcase to give a secret room away, it pools and glistens like blood, a leftover crime. All mounted riders race against the same dawn-streaked cyclotron sky. I'd love to see it on film, velvety and baleful. Co-scripted by Aeneas MacKenzie and Philip Yordan, the screenplay does its Black Mask best to keep up. "Anarchy—misery—murder—arson—fear—these are the weapons of dictatorship!" a newsreel narrator barks before running us through a quick rogue's gallery of relevant parties from Robespierre to Tallien; then we're flung among the revolutionaries and conspirators themselves, some of whom say things like "We didn't storm the Bastille to make any man dictator" and others "Don't call me Max!" It's tough, cagey, demotic without overcooking into gumshoe parody. Estranged lovers and uncertain allies flirt with the same fencing dares. The heroes appeal to liberty like the God the Revolution is supposed to have abolished—the villains wield it like a protection racket. Best of all, at no point is the slightest effort made by the all-American cast to sound French or even English, Hollywood's cachet of historical class. I happen to prefer this approach in general, but it adds an especially anti-prestige kick to the liberty caps and powdered wigs. Lots of cities have a Brooklyn.
I have a better idea of what the movie is doing with D'Aubigny now that I've seen more of Mann's noir; as in T-Men (1947) and Border Incident (1949), the director is interested in the moral wear of undercover work, especially when it involves convincing as the kind of sadistic ideologue who only burnishes his laurels when he confesses deprecatingly, "The real pleasure of my work went out with the guillotine. It's all over too fast now . . . What this country needs is an elegant slow death. Give a man four hours to die. It's worth watching." I still feel Cummings could give us a better sense of D'Aubigny himself, the secret agent heartbroken into bitter recklessness; he adopts the role of the "Terror of Strasbourg" almost as soon as he appears, but there's still room for nuance in between the faces he shows the men whose confidence he must gain, the woman he won't admit never lost his heart. With her beauty mark and her muff pistol, Dahl is very good in her early, mistrustful, provocative scenes, but her Madelon fades into the plot the more it aligns her romantically with D'Aubigny. She may be one of the few female characters where I don't feel it's cheap of the narrative to have her arrested and even tortured, however: it's the risk all her cell agreed to run when they allied themselves with the impersonator of Citizen Duval, who they knew might have to blow a fellow-agent or two in order not to blow his cover ("A few lives won't matter, but Robespierre must never become dictator"), and she neither breaks nor betrays anyone. Norman Lloyd has a nice turn as trigger-happy Tallien, who almost shoots D'Aubigny just for talking to a member of the Committee of Public Safety; Richard Hart's Barras is a tricky crusader; Beulah Bondi makes an indomitable peasant grandmother. Charles McGraw even shows up as a brutal sergeant, albeit with his rocky charisma somewhat muted by facial hair. The film still really belongs to its villains. They're world-historical; they're the ones everyone from Stanisława Przybyszewska through Hilary Mantel and Tanith Lee has a different angle on. Basehart's Robespierre is an icy fanatic with ambitions of despotism who styles himself the incarnation of the people's will and genuinely seems to believe it, which makes him scarier than Jess Barker's smoothly sinister and unusually heterosexual Saint-Just. "We're living in a perpetual state of violence," he observes to a disguised D'Aubigny, without judgment or regret. "Each day this monster must drink its quota. There's only one man who can control this beast and that man must be dictator of France." Incorruptible to the last, he doesn't even attempt suicide; he's shot in the mouth—a startling gore-spatter—to silence his unadorned, spellbinding words, seconds away from regaining control of the violent crowd. Arnold Moss as Citizen Fouché enters the picture at the six-minute mark and steals every scene he's in, one of those reprehensible charmers whose eye for the main chance is as genial as it is ruthless. I love his deep, amused voice; it's as confiding and trustworthy as his character is not. You'd think he was a hero if you heard him in the dark. Instead he sits in Robespierre's own chair with his feet on Directoire marble, a saturnine man with an ironic smile and contemptuous cat-eyes, and ticks off his secret policeman's virtues on his fingertips with a dancing quill: "Where in all Paris would you find anybody as disloyal, unscrupulous, scheming, treacherous, cunning, or deceitful as I? Oh, you'd have to do some tall looking, Max." He gets the last word, a deliberate historical stinger. It's much more ambiguous than the celebratory fireworks suggest.
I recognize that in our current golden age of remix culture, historical noir is a no-brainer—it's hard to avoid, even, in some eras of history—but I have difficulty thinking of other first-generation examples beyond the previously identified subgenre of the noir Western and Mann's The Tall Target (1951), a nineteenth-century American assassination thriller that's less gonzo than The Black Book but just as visually and thematically noir. It works so well, I wish it hadn't taken the rest of the moviemaking world decades to catch up to him. At least we got this eighteenth-century dark city. I regret only that no one in it plays Camille Desmoulins. This state brought to you by my elegant backers at Patreon.
It's not that I haven't seen noir hybrids before, but very few are as fearlessly full-tilt with their conceits as The Black Book. While its plot retells the Thermidorian Reaction as zestily as any costume drama, everything from its dark, dramatic lighting to its hard-boiled dialogue to its cynical nerve is noir, right down to the damaged hero and his ambiguously faithful old flame. Give him a century and a half and he might be a G-man among gangsters, but on July 26, 1794, Charles D'Aubigny (Robert Cummings) is a Lafayette loyalist gone undercover as a notoriously bloodthirsty prosecutor in order to get close to Robespierre (Richard Basehart), who has just denounced Danton and stands ready to declare himself dictator of France. Charged with recovering the missing "black book" of the title—Robespierre's private hit list, fatally incriminating if its contents were known—D'Aubigny hopes instead to turn it over to Robespierre's rivals, but his only contact with the underground is the scornfully patriotic Madelon (Arlene Dahl) from whom he parted some years previously under mutually embittering circumstances and in any case, in the last paranoid thrashings of the Terror, trust can get you killed faster than actual treachery. Please make no attempt to anticipate the twists and double-crosses of the forty-eight-hour roller coaster; you'll put yourself in a neck brace. All you need to know is that the results are darkly funny, pulpily violent, and compulsively watchable, if only to see what sometimes literally cloak-and-dagger craziness this mashup of contemporary style and historical subject will throw at the national mythos next.
Like most B-noirs and especially Mann's, The Black Book turns its lack of budget into an occasion for atmosphere: William Cameron Menzies' production design and John Alton's cinematography have to create their revolutionary Paris mostly through small rooms and shadows and they succeed with baroque claustrophobia. Close-ups are lit every way but directly, angled to fragmentation or tight enough to choke. Characters are framed by quills, doorways, muskets, stalls, draperies, rain-slicked, torch-lit cobbled streets receding like blind alleys. Real prison bars are almost honest enough to be refreshing. Someone is always looking over the characters' shoulders, even if it's just the audience. You never know who's listening and you never know what they'll do with the information.
handful_ofdust once memorably described this aesthetic as "Stalinist Russia with hoop-skirts"; the McCarthy echoes are unavoidable, but the film's more interested in thrills than a treatise. There are horse chases, coach chases, a murder conducted like spirit photography in a darkened mirror which moments later holds in its depths an even more unwelcome recognition scene. People burst out of bakery windows, swim like microbes in the Convention's engorging eye. When wine seeps from underneath a bookcase to give a secret room away, it pools and glistens like blood, a leftover crime. All mounted riders race against the same dawn-streaked cyclotron sky. I'd love to see it on film, velvety and baleful. Co-scripted by Aeneas MacKenzie and Philip Yordan, the screenplay does its Black Mask best to keep up. "Anarchy—misery—murder—arson—fear—these are the weapons of dictatorship!" a newsreel narrator barks before running us through a quick rogue's gallery of relevant parties from Robespierre to Tallien; then we're flung among the revolutionaries and conspirators themselves, some of whom say things like "We didn't storm the Bastille to make any man dictator" and others "Don't call me Max!" It's tough, cagey, demotic without overcooking into gumshoe parody. Estranged lovers and uncertain allies flirt with the same fencing dares. The heroes appeal to liberty like the God the Revolution is supposed to have abolished—the villains wield it like a protection racket. Best of all, at no point is the slightest effort made by the all-American cast to sound French or even English, Hollywood's cachet of historical class. I happen to prefer this approach in general, but it adds an especially anti-prestige kick to the liberty caps and powdered wigs. Lots of cities have a Brooklyn.I have a better idea of what the movie is doing with D'Aubigny now that I've seen more of Mann's noir; as in T-Men (1947) and Border Incident (1949), the director is interested in the moral wear of undercover work, especially when it involves convincing as the kind of sadistic ideologue who only burnishes his laurels when he confesses deprecatingly, "The real pleasure of my work went out with the guillotine. It's all over too fast now . . . What this country needs is an elegant slow death. Give a man four hours to die. It's worth watching." I still feel Cummings could give us a better sense of D'Aubigny himself, the secret agent heartbroken into bitter recklessness; he adopts the role of the "Terror of Strasbourg" almost as soon as he appears, but there's still room for nuance in between the faces he shows the men whose confidence he must gain, the woman he won't admit never lost his heart. With her beauty mark and her muff pistol, Dahl is very good in her early, mistrustful, provocative scenes, but her Madelon fades into the plot the more it aligns her romantically with D'Aubigny. She may be one of the few female characters where I don't feel it's cheap of the narrative to have her arrested and even tortured, however: it's the risk all her cell agreed to run when they allied themselves with the impersonator of Citizen Duval, who they knew might have to blow a fellow-agent or two in order not to blow his cover ("A few lives won't matter, but Robespierre must never become dictator"), and she neither breaks nor betrays anyone. Norman Lloyd has a nice turn as trigger-happy Tallien, who almost shoots D'Aubigny just for talking to a member of the Committee of Public Safety; Richard Hart's Barras is a tricky crusader; Beulah Bondi makes an indomitable peasant grandmother. Charles McGraw even shows up as a brutal sergeant, albeit with his rocky charisma somewhat muted by facial hair. The film still really belongs to its villains. They're world-historical; they're the ones everyone from Stanisława Przybyszewska through Hilary Mantel and Tanith Lee has a different angle on. Basehart's Robespierre is an icy fanatic with ambitions of despotism who styles himself the incarnation of the people's will and genuinely seems to believe it, which makes him scarier than Jess Barker's smoothly sinister and unusually heterosexual Saint-Just. "We're living in a perpetual state of violence," he observes to a disguised D'Aubigny, without judgment or regret. "Each day this monster must drink its quota. There's only one man who can control this beast and that man must be dictator of France." Incorruptible to the last, he doesn't even attempt suicide; he's shot in the mouth—a startling gore-spatter—to silence his unadorned, spellbinding words, seconds away from regaining control of the violent crowd. Arnold Moss as Citizen Fouché enters the picture at the six-minute mark and steals every scene he's in, one of those reprehensible charmers whose eye for the main chance is as genial as it is ruthless. I love his deep, amused voice; it's as confiding and trustworthy as his character is not. You'd think he was a hero if you heard him in the dark. Instead he sits in Robespierre's own chair with his feet on Directoire marble, a saturnine man with an ironic smile and contemptuous cat-eyes, and ticks off his secret policeman's virtues on his fingertips with a dancing quill: "Where in all Paris would you find anybody as disloyal, unscrupulous, scheming, treacherous, cunning, or deceitful as I? Oh, you'd have to do some tall looking, Max." He gets the last word, a deliberate historical stinger. It's much more ambiguous than the celebratory fireworks suggest.
I recognize that in our current golden age of remix culture, historical noir is a no-brainer—it's hard to avoid, even, in some eras of history—but I have difficulty thinking of other first-generation examples beyond the previously identified subgenre of the noir Western and Mann's The Tall Target (1951), a nineteenth-century American assassination thriller that's less gonzo than The Black Book but just as visually and thematically noir. It works so well, I wish it hadn't taken the rest of the moviemaking world decades to catch up to him. At least we got this eighteenth-century dark city. I regret only that no one in it plays Camille Desmoulins. This state brought to you by my elegant backers at Patreon.
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"There's a revolution going on—don't stay out late."
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It is entirely possible that someone else wrote about this movie recently, because it did just air on TCM, but it is almost a certainty that I've talked to you about it, because I love it. I did write about it a little when I finally tracked down a full copy on YouTube, but that would have been five years ago and less of a review than a lot of exclamation points.
There really should be more French Revolution noir. It just writes itself.
[edit] I AM ACTIVELY SURPRISED THERE IS NOT NOIR SCARLET PIMPERNEL.
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Okay, I've seen examples of the other genres you cite, but what's the epic fantasy?!
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The other one, Mara, is a basically immortal warrior - the idea is that there's something called the Rituals of Blood where you make yourself a god by murdering a lot of people, so Mara stalks through history taking those people down. For the first two or three books (of... I think it's going to be five. Four so far) her storyline is a story-in-a-story of her telling it to Aleister Crowley in a bar, to warn him off doing anything silly. One of those stories is the French Revolution, and how much she liked Voltaire. Inveterate name-dropper, Mara, but it's great and because Roz Kaveney is very well-educated there are loads of little asides about various historical events and then I wiki them and learn things.
I love that Mara's powers aren't all-encompassing, too, though she gains power from killing as much as the bad guys do. She's from Mesopotamia or thereabouts, and travels a lot, but she's still from the Old World. So she has a sense of something wrong, and Rituals happening, when Aztec human sacrifice being used to make the priests gods - but she doesn't know about this other continent and couldn't get there anyway, so she doesn't know why she felt that until much later.
Interesting world! Well-written! Queer women everywhere! Roz is actually a friend of mine, full disclosure, but I'm not saying this cos she's a friend - she's a friend because I went up to her after a queer meetup at a con a few years ago and was all I LIKE YOUR BOOKS.
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I've heard good things about it! Just not that it included Robespierre.
her storyline is a story-in-a-story of her telling it to Aleister Crowley in a bar, to warn him off doing anything silly.
. . . Does that work?
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