It's a hard case to make and I'm hard news and I'm going to break now
Thanks to a brief exchange with ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
osprey_archer about Ida Lupino, I am now imagining a film series of women in noir—not just noirs with female protagonists like the ones I've been collecting for the last several years,1 but noirs written, directed, or produced by women, none of these categories being mutually exclusive. (In fact, they not infrequently cross-link.) Dorothy Arzner's successor as the only female director in classical Hollywood, Lupino legendarily co-wrote and directed The Hitch-Hiker (1953), one of the best-regarded noirs I have not yet seen, as well as several other films that look at least noir-adjacent. Virginia Van Upp co-wrote and produced Gilda (1946), enough said. Once she stopped writing screenplays for Hitchcock and went into business as a producer at Universal and RKO, Joan Harrison's filmography was almost entirely noir: Phantom Lady (1944), The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry (1945), Nocturne (1946), They Won't Believe Me (1947), Ride the Pink Horse (1947). Virginia Kellogg wrote the stories for T-Men (1947) and White Heat (1949) and both story and screenplay for the definitive women-in-prison Caged (1950). Vera Caspary scripted Bedelia (1946) from her own novel of the same name. Silvia Richards wrote the screenplay for Secret Beyond the Door (1948) and the story for Rancho Notorious (1952). If I start looking more purely at source material, novels, short stories, plays, I expect the numbers to keep climbing—Caspary and Laura (1944) and The Blue Gardenia (1953), Dorothy B. Hughes and In a Lonely Place (1950), Elisabeth Sanxay Holding and The Reckless Moment (1949), Charlotte Armstrong and The Unsuspected (1947) and Don't Bother to Knock (1952), Patricia Highsmith and Strangers on a Train (1951)—and that's just off the top of my head. I didn't like Sudden Fear (1952), but it was based on a novel by Edna Sherry and the screenwriter was Lenore Coffee. I poke around on the internet for forty-five seconds and I find something called No Man of Her Own (1950) starring Barbara Stanwyck and scripted by Sally Benson and Catherine Turney. I remain confused that none of Margaret Millar's excellent novels, which ranged from the domestic to the hardboiled and were sometimes both at once, were ever adapted for film. Anyway, my point is that you could run a nice little mini-festival in this line and hardly ever have to fall back on the femme fatale.2 To be honest, I suspect someone has already done it; I just didn't think of it till now. If I were actually programming this thing, I would probably wind it up with the Wachowskis' Bound (1996) despite it being neo-noir, because it's a written-directed-starring female triple threat. Man, I wish I knew a film foundation.
1. In the order in which I discovered them: The Reckless Moment (1949), Caught (1949), Phantom Lady (1944), Black Angel (1946), Too Late for Tears (1949), The Prowler (1951), Woman on the Run (1950), and The Blue Gardenia (1953). They Live by Night (1949) and This Gun for Hire (1942) are arguable on grounds of co-protagonist. The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946) is deliberately genre-slipping, but close enough to a noir that if I were really programming a series I'd include it. Ditto the definitely noir The Big Combo (1955) for its handling of female sexuality. I don't think it clears the definition, but Ann Savage is so good in Detour (1945) that I have trouble caring that Tom Neal is technically the protagonist. I know there exist more female-focused noirs of the canonical type, however, and I look forward to finding them.
2. The standard disclaimer: I believe the archetype of the femme fatale exists. I have even seen movies where it is a useful way of talking about the primary female character. I have not found it to be anywhere near as prevalent as noir criticism or popular reception appears to believe and I suspect it of being a trope that was reified by neo-noir in something of a Kirk Drift fashion. Similarly, it actively annoys me to see noir singled out as an unusually misogynist genre—usually with reference to the perceived ubiquitous duality of the femme fatale and the good girl—when noir has given female characters some of the most interesting dilemmas and agency I've seen in films of the '40's and '50's. I don't deny that Hollywood was and to far too great a degree remains not just a male-dominated, but a male-controlled environment; I don't deny that women who acted, wrote, produced, directed in the genre had to work within the space they were given or work even harder to make space for themselves. But have you seen some of the things that passed for romantic comedies in the days of the Production Code? Have you seen some of the things that pass for romantic comedies now? When noir did badly by women, it was not alone, and when it didn't, it's one of the reasons this genre so fascinates me.
osprey_archer about Ida Lupino, I am now imagining a film series of women in noir—not just noirs with female protagonists like the ones I've been collecting for the last several years,1 but noirs written, directed, or produced by women, none of these categories being mutually exclusive. (In fact, they not infrequently cross-link.) Dorothy Arzner's successor as the only female director in classical Hollywood, Lupino legendarily co-wrote and directed The Hitch-Hiker (1953), one of the best-regarded noirs I have not yet seen, as well as several other films that look at least noir-adjacent. Virginia Van Upp co-wrote and produced Gilda (1946), enough said. Once she stopped writing screenplays for Hitchcock and went into business as a producer at Universal and RKO, Joan Harrison's filmography was almost entirely noir: Phantom Lady (1944), The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry (1945), Nocturne (1946), They Won't Believe Me (1947), Ride the Pink Horse (1947). Virginia Kellogg wrote the stories for T-Men (1947) and White Heat (1949) and both story and screenplay for the definitive women-in-prison Caged (1950). Vera Caspary scripted Bedelia (1946) from her own novel of the same name. Silvia Richards wrote the screenplay for Secret Beyond the Door (1948) and the story for Rancho Notorious (1952). If I start looking more purely at source material, novels, short stories, plays, I expect the numbers to keep climbing—Caspary and Laura (1944) and The Blue Gardenia (1953), Dorothy B. Hughes and In a Lonely Place (1950), Elisabeth Sanxay Holding and The Reckless Moment (1949), Charlotte Armstrong and The Unsuspected (1947) and Don't Bother to Knock (1952), Patricia Highsmith and Strangers on a Train (1951)—and that's just off the top of my head. I didn't like Sudden Fear (1952), but it was based on a novel by Edna Sherry and the screenwriter was Lenore Coffee. I poke around on the internet for forty-five seconds and I find something called No Man of Her Own (1950) starring Barbara Stanwyck and scripted by Sally Benson and Catherine Turney. I remain confused that none of Margaret Millar's excellent novels, which ranged from the domestic to the hardboiled and were sometimes both at once, were ever adapted for film. Anyway, my point is that you could run a nice little mini-festival in this line and hardly ever have to fall back on the femme fatale.2 To be honest, I suspect someone has already done it; I just didn't think of it till now. If I were actually programming this thing, I would probably wind it up with the Wachowskis' Bound (1996) despite it being neo-noir, because it's a written-directed-starring female triple threat. Man, I wish I knew a film foundation.1. In the order in which I discovered them: The Reckless Moment (1949), Caught (1949), Phantom Lady (1944), Black Angel (1946), Too Late for Tears (1949), The Prowler (1951), Woman on the Run (1950), and The Blue Gardenia (1953). They Live by Night (1949) and This Gun for Hire (1942) are arguable on grounds of co-protagonist. The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946) is deliberately genre-slipping, but close enough to a noir that if I were really programming a series I'd include it. Ditto the definitely noir The Big Combo (1955) for its handling of female sexuality. I don't think it clears the definition, but Ann Savage is so good in Detour (1945) that I have trouble caring that Tom Neal is technically the protagonist. I know there exist more female-focused noirs of the canonical type, however, and I look forward to finding them.
2. The standard disclaimer: I believe the archetype of the femme fatale exists. I have even seen movies where it is a useful way of talking about the primary female character. I have not found it to be anywhere near as prevalent as noir criticism or popular reception appears to believe and I suspect it of being a trope that was reified by neo-noir in something of a Kirk Drift fashion. Similarly, it actively annoys me to see noir singled out as an unusually misogynist genre—usually with reference to the perceived ubiquitous duality of the femme fatale and the good girl—when noir has given female characters some of the most interesting dilemmas and agency I've seen in films of the '40's and '50's. I don't deny that Hollywood was and to far too great a degree remains not just a male-dominated, but a male-controlled environment; I don't deny that women who acted, wrote, produced, directed in the genre had to work within the space they were given or work even harder to make space for themselves. But have you seen some of the things that passed for romantic comedies in the days of the Production Code? Have you seen some of the things that pass for romantic comedies now? When noir did badly by women, it was not alone, and when it didn't, it's one of the reasons this genre so fascinates me.
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I'm flattered. I would first have to find out if someone else has already written them.
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I have major, major impostor syndrome about the idea of publishing anything critical or academic. I haven't been in grad school for a dozen years now, but the circumstances under which I left were traumatic. I still have nightmares that I try to find another program to finish my PhD and as soon as people see that I washed out of my first one (never mind that my health crashed, never mind that my department saw attrition as a sign of quality, never mind that my advisor was actively invested in getting rid of me, never mind that it took me five to seven years to recover physically and I have lived and always will live with life-limiting pain every day since) they tell me to my face that I'm not worth giving another chance. I had some a couple of nights ago. I know I could do the research that would be necessary for the book; I would enjoy the primary part far more than the secondary, since I generally enjoy watching movies more than I do arguing with people, but I am still capable of reading critically as opposed to cherry-picking for support. The idea of actually writing a book when I don't even have a dissertation as a dry run makes me feel convinced that I will do it wrong, it will be shallow, it will be incoherent, it will be dilettante-ish, it will be exactly what a somewhat argumentative survey of women in noir doesn't need. It took a very long time for people to persuade me to take money for my film writing at all. I still feel like people who are actual film critics will look at me like amateur hour. I know this isn't even true—
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//HEART EYES
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Thank you.
I have James Agee to thank for some of the background inspiration for this post: in both of his reviews of Phantom Lady, he refers favorably to Harrison's nearly ten-year history with Hitchcock and then suggests, less dismissively in the second review, that her first independent production is Hitchcock-derivative ("nothing that Hitchcock has not done a great deal better . . . a good deal of Hitchcock's sinister melo-realistic melancholy") and I thought, all right, look, if you grant that Harrison was one of Hitchcock's longest-term and most valuable collaborators, and if you praise her for being so closely involved in the production of Phantom Lady that she worked personally with the art director, the screenwriter, the director, and did the casting and some of the costuming herself, then why shouldn't some of the Hitchcockian touches shared between their films be, in fact, Harrisonian? And then I went to see what else she had done besides The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry, which I have always wanted to see even though the ending is famously not so much a cheese sandwich as an entire buffet, and I became really interested. I am desperately sorry neither of these projects to which Agee alludes ever seem to have come off: "Her current ideas are 1) a film to be made entirely by women; 2) a murder story involving only children."
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Curate this series! Noircom, coming to a Vimeo near you!
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I know! Dammit.
Curate this series! Noircom, coming to a Vimeo near you!
When I have seen more of these movies, I will see what I can do!
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//drags hands down face
No, the men, they have the influence over the women! Women do not influence the men! //bad pseudo-Freudian accent
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It was one of the few points in the book where I thought, "Oh, come on, Agee."
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I watched Subway to the Sky (1959) this year, which was directed by Muriel Box & starred Hildegard Knef. I don't know if it actually counts as a noir, because I'm never very clear on that, but it was certainly heading in that direction. It wasn't a bad little film, either. (I am always wary of the 50s, possibly unfairly, but so far I much prefer the 30s.)
Have you seen some of the things that pass for romantic comedies now?
So true. (I asked my friend to just give me some random films for Christmas, especially the kind of things we'd have watched together when I was well and she was living here, as I haven't been to the cinema since some time in 2010 or had a video night, because I can't watch a whole film at once and until last year, couldn't cope with watching them in bits, either (it's been fun) & she did, including two romcoms, which weren't too abd, but AARGH on so many levels, especially the second. But I wanted to see some silly things as well, and she also got me Gravity (which I'm saving for when I have more brain) and The Duchess, which I did enjoy. But argh. I think we've gone backwards since the 90s on the romcom front somehow.)
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Thank you! I'd like to. I have not yet seen all of the movies named in this post, and I know there will be more I don't even know about.
[edit] For example, I just discovered that Norway's first film directed by a woman was also its first film noir! Edith Carlmar's Death Is a Caress (Døden er et kjærtegn, 1949). I really want to see it now.
I watched Subway to the Sky (1959) this year, which was directed by Muriel Box & starred Hildegard Knef. I don't know if it actually counts as a noir, because I'm never very clear on that, but it was certainly heading in that direction. It wasn't a bad little film, either.
Cool! I have never heard of it and I will keep an eye out for it. 1959 is about the last year a British or American film could have been noir rather than neo-noir, although of course plenty of crime/thriller/drama films were made in both decades that weren't noir at all.
I don't think I have seen any movies written or directed by Muriel Box, but I see from IMDb that she was responsible for Dear Murderer (1947) and Daybreak (1948), both of which I want to see for Eric Portman. So, nice.
including two romcoms, which weren't too abd, but AARGH on so many levels, especially the second.
What were they?
But argh. I think we've gone backwards since the 90s on the romcom front somehow.
This feels true. And completely unreasonable.
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Yes, I don't know if it is or not, but certainly the only thing I've watched that was heading that way - and maybe of peripheral interest anyway if you do pursue the idea. I was going to say that I wrote about it here, but not very much, because it was a competent little thriller, whereas the other two films I watched and wrote about at the same time were more complicated - maybe more uneven or questionable, but also more thought-provoking, for me, at least. (Do you know anything about The Third Secret (1964)? It seems much more your sort of thing than mine, and I am full of queries! I assume you haven't seen it, because you probably would have looked at the entry otherwise.)
What were they?
Oh, I didn't want to name them, as it's easy to bash them and I was very tired, particularly when I watched the second, so perhaps I was just being unfair. The first was Bride Wars, which did have some different and quite sweet bits, but was still kind of annoying (or I was tired), and The Back Up Plan, which annoyed me a lot by seeming to be a glued together version of several other romcoms I do like. But, as I said, I was overtired and Jennifer Lopez never seems to work for me. (But I wanted to watch silly things! I've had to be so careful about everything, it was fun to just watch some films to grumble about them. But I do wish they had been better as romcoms. OTOH, my taste is questionable, but I'm picky with romcoms.)
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I understand that. Sometimes you watch a movie and you enjoy it and you don't have much more to say about it than that, as opposed to the movie that's so close or so frustrating or so weird that hours and thousands of words later, you're still thinking.
(Do you know anything about The Third Secret (1964)? It seems much more your sort of thing than mine, and I am full of queries! I assume you haven't seen it, because you probably would have looked at the entry otherwise.)
No, but it has a great title! And a pretty excellent cast—including Judi Dench's film debut? I'll see if I can find it. Even if it's about mental illness in the '60's, which inevitably leads to facepalming. I'm sorry the final cut lost Patricia Neal.
The first was Bride Wars, which did have some different and quite sweet bits, but was still kind of annoying (or I was tired), and The Back Up Plan, which annoyed me a lot by seeming to be a glued together version of several other romcoms I do like.
I don't know if you were being unfair. The latter experience sounds extremely annoying.
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I found it very interesting. As far as mental illness goes, it's dated and it's a thriller (so there's got to be an element of threat) but it was also quite compassionate and almost everyone was either a psychiatrist or a patient of one - it was a very odd one! But, yes, certainly a very impressive cast.
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This mini film festival sounds like a wonderful idea, though there's a chasm between wonderful idea and actual event, I realize.
And I love footnote 2. Have you seen some of the things that pass for romantic comedies now? Exactly.
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Thank you! I have requested it from the library, although it may have to take a back seat to Gun Crazy (1950) and The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973), which Rob and I have been planning to watch for Robert Mitchum and Boston in winter.
(Enjoy the reviews whenever you get to them. I do not want to be an obligation!)
This mini film festival sounds like a wonderful idea, though there's a chasm between wonderful idea and actual event, I realize.
I have no idea how I would organize something like it in either real life or the internet; practically, it might work best as some kind of linked (gigantic) series of reviews. But it's really tempting!