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Home is where you come when you run out of places
Fritz Lang's Clash by Night (1952) has its problems, mostly concentrated in its admirable but awkward determination to give its protagonist a happy ending rather than the punishing tragedy toward which Clifford Odets' 1941 stage play built and whose echoes remain like misdirection in Alfred Hayes' screenplay, but there is absolutely nothing wrong with the premise or even much of the plot of this fascinating blend of film noir and women's picture starring Barbara Stanwyck as a world-wounded woman returned in midlife to her fishing hometown of Monterey, trying to reinvent herself with a stable marriage while falling into the self-destructive orbit of a caustic misogynist with whom she has blow-the-bloody-doors-off sexual chemistry.
Cleverly, this romantic triangle which looks so typically, reductively melodramatic—the eternal dilemma of the woman torn between boring security and exciting danger—turns out to be no such thing. Mae Doyle got herself out of the wharves and canneries of the world she was born into on her brains as much as her looks, which being Stanwyck's own must always have had that tough vulnerability, and she lived in the big cities and she even found happiness with a man for a time, but his family closed ranks against her after he died—she was a wealthy politician's mistress, not his wife—and after weeks of sleeping in her mother's bedroom, haunting the windows of her brother's house, silently enduring the role of returned but unwelcome prodigal, she's dangerously tempted to say yes to good-hearted fisherman Jerry D'Amato (Paul Douglas) even knowing they have little in common besides loneliness, not because he can offer her riches or respectability, but because he's gentle and he doesn't judge her. "You don't have a mean thought in your head, do you, Jerry?" she observes at the end of their modest first date, a movie and a beer and her first night out in a fortnight. "That's nice and comfortable. A man who isn't mean and doesn't hate women." Her voice is faintly dry as usual, but she's not being condescending. When she speaks of her lover as "a man who didn't tear a woman down. He made her feel confident . . . sure of herself. More than she was, not less. He's the only man I ever knew who gave me that feeling," we can hear the tenderness and the bitterness together, the treasuring of his strength that never felt threatened and the stupidity that it should have been so rare. More than anything else, she marries Jerry in the hope of finding that confidence again. He's not afraid of her worldliness or her moods or even of being the more loving one, a big, shy, inarticulate, romantic man who can look boyishly transparent, though never slender or young. He understands, or thinks he understands, that what he can best give her is "a place to rest."
And no one in their right mind would call Cannery Row in the mid-'50's a Garden of Eden, but it contains a snake nonetheless; that's Earl Pfeiffer, played by Robert Ryan with a kind of sting-tailed charm. He is the character I should like best, the character I suspect a lot of viewers should like best—the melancholy cynic, the self-lacerating wit, the one-time "Kingfish of Buckman County" who these days works as a projectionist for the Bijou and gripes colorfully about having to wire spot cash to his wife the burlesque dancer in St. Louis, other people's dreams running through his hands—but he's not safe to like best, because he'll use it against you. Meeting Mae for the first time after her date-night movie with Jerry, he knocks back her friendly remarks about the lead actress with a counter-offer to "cut her up a little bit, she'd look more interesting . . . Didn't you ever want to cut up a beautiful dame?" He's handling spliceable, trimmable celluloid as he says it and he apologizes self-deprecatingly when he gets no response, but the audience can't say they haven't been warned. All of Earl's jokes have a raw edge on them and some are jokes in name only. He claims to fantasize about sticking his wife "full of pins just to see if blood runs out." He taunts Mae that she can't cut him down to size because he "happen[s] to be pre-shrunk." His Chinese impression is fucking racist and Mae is not only not charmed by it, she's a little appalled that nice-guy Jerry thinks it's funny. Brooding like a California Rochester, with the dark, not quite good looks to match, Earl drinks too much and can complicate a metaphor with the best of Odets and he's sickeningly attractive to Mae even though he is exactly the kind of man she doesn't miss, for reasons it will take her nearly the entire second half of the neatly split film to sort out.
Earl thinks he knows them, of course: "You're like me. A dash of Tabasco or the meat tastes flat." He's right that she needs complexity and isn't getting it from Jerry, as clear and true-ringing and sometimes as dense as a crystal of salt; he's tellingly, damningly wrong that she needs cruelty. For Mae, being with Earl is like looking into a mirror. He's her male self, the demon lover of all her faults and virtues, as intelligent as she is, as unhappy as she is, and taking it out as she does, on herself first and inevitably on others. Their first lovemaking—in the small, still breakfast-cluttered kitchen of Jerry's apartment that Mae has moved into, right up against the sink with Earl still in his undershirt like some kind of tenement porn—is a violent, clawing thing, as if they were trying to climb inside each another's skins, wear one another like new but familiar clothes. It's almost hate sex, if the hate is self-hatred; sex as substance abuse, sex as self-harm. They don't wrestle for dominance so much as abasement. They flick their own insecurities open like knives. A cry for help is a bid for control; an admission of love is a warning. It's breathtakingly crude stuff and like so much of Stanwyck's character in this movie suggests that Lang had serious dirt on someone at the PCA, because she is punished for this violent transgression of her marital responsibilities and her own boundaries only in the sense that the longer the affair wears on, the more obvious it becomes that she doesn't really want herself, at least not this version of herself at her most abrasive and nihilistic, excusing the pain she causes with the pain she feels: "You're born and you'd like to get unborn." She has herself already. She needs a break from it sometimes. Then she wants someone who's nothing like a mirror, domestic as she isn't, patient as she isn't, easily kind as she isn't—painfully aware that pregnancy, childbirth, and new motherhood will not rank among his wife's fondest memories, Jerry who adores being a father says with gallant adynaton, "I wish I could've had the kid for you"—and perhaps someone who doesn't feel that she's incapable of these qualities herself. Earl loves best all the hard edges and disappointment he sees in Mae. Even as the cracks widen between her and a not so oblivious Jerry, whose puzzled hurt is gleefully played upon by his layabout uncle (J. Carrol Naish, I believe the formal taxonomy here is a mean little rat bastard), she has trouble seeing the rest of her life in Earl. One minute she calls him her "last shot at happiness" and the next she's musing, "How hard-boiled we are."
The ending is an honorable mess. I don't know whether the censors got in on the script at the last minute or whether Hayes and Lang just never figured out a smooth recovery from an implosion of murderous jealousy, but the last twenty minutes slew wildly from stick-and-carrot melodrama to surprisingly adult poignancy and while they end up somewhere I quite like, I give you fair warning that you will have to stick out some ham-handed story beats and some head-shaking dialogue to get there. Especially after all the kitchen-sink negativity, it is not soothing but bracing that Clash by Night, like its even more female-focused and thoroughly noir follow-up The Blue Gardenia (1953), allows its protagonist to engage in risky, damaging behavior for which she is neither thrown out into the streets without her child nor submissively broken to the yoke of her husband's benevolence; it understands that she has to make her final decision without consideration of any man at all and it observes almost as a matter of course that as soon as Mae disturbs Earl's image of her as his like-minded female self, her immunity from his casual contempt for women evaporates, bearing out her long-ago judgment that whatever his wife was or was not doing on the burlesque circuit, "he'd be the same with any woman." I like that she doesn't have a road to Damascus so much as a crystallization of something she's known for a long time, her reckoning with who she wants to be. I do not like the film's description of love as "the responsibility of belonging to someone," which it at least grants runs both ways, but that's still too much confusion of marriage with ownership for my tastes. Its last scene is right, though, with Jerry giving her that confidence at last, bruised and half-unspoken but unambiguous: "That's what the terrible thing is. You got to trust somebody. There ain't no other way."
If you are at all interested in Marilyn Monroe, you will want to see this movie for her first role credited above the title and for her fresh-faced performance as a spunky, dungaree-wearing sardine-canner who unwraps another chocolate bar with the unworried "So, I'll spread," although I cannot say as much for Keith Andes as the bossy young fisherman she winds up with. (Robert Ryan had played the role on Broadway and I'd like a time machine just to see if he could make the character palatable.) Nicholas Musuraca shoots seals and gulls and rocks and booming tide with such laid-back naturalism, the first human characters onscreen look like just another part of the shoaling, spindrift world, separating and darkening only by degrees into the deep, clear, noir-defining shadows for which he was known. I did not know when I began this movie that I would finish it longing for Fritz Lang's Cannery Row. I just got so burned by Paste's blinkered writeoff of Stanwyck's Mae as a femme fatale that I had to say something. This Tabasco brought to you by my comfortable backers at Patreon.
Cleverly, this romantic triangle which looks so typically, reductively melodramatic—the eternal dilemma of the woman torn between boring security and exciting danger—turns out to be no such thing. Mae Doyle got herself out of the wharves and canneries of the world she was born into on her brains as much as her looks, which being Stanwyck's own must always have had that tough vulnerability, and she lived in the big cities and she even found happiness with a man for a time, but his family closed ranks against her after he died—she was a wealthy politician's mistress, not his wife—and after weeks of sleeping in her mother's bedroom, haunting the windows of her brother's house, silently enduring the role of returned but unwelcome prodigal, she's dangerously tempted to say yes to good-hearted fisherman Jerry D'Amato (Paul Douglas) even knowing they have little in common besides loneliness, not because he can offer her riches or respectability, but because he's gentle and he doesn't judge her. "You don't have a mean thought in your head, do you, Jerry?" she observes at the end of their modest first date, a movie and a beer and her first night out in a fortnight. "That's nice and comfortable. A man who isn't mean and doesn't hate women." Her voice is faintly dry as usual, but she's not being condescending. When she speaks of her lover as "a man who didn't tear a woman down. He made her feel confident . . . sure of herself. More than she was, not less. He's the only man I ever knew who gave me that feeling," we can hear the tenderness and the bitterness together, the treasuring of his strength that never felt threatened and the stupidity that it should have been so rare. More than anything else, she marries Jerry in the hope of finding that confidence again. He's not afraid of her worldliness or her moods or even of being the more loving one, a big, shy, inarticulate, romantic man who can look boyishly transparent, though never slender or young. He understands, or thinks he understands, that what he can best give her is "a place to rest."
And no one in their right mind would call Cannery Row in the mid-'50's a Garden of Eden, but it contains a snake nonetheless; that's Earl Pfeiffer, played by Robert Ryan with a kind of sting-tailed charm. He is the character I should like best, the character I suspect a lot of viewers should like best—the melancholy cynic, the self-lacerating wit, the one-time "Kingfish of Buckman County" who these days works as a projectionist for the Bijou and gripes colorfully about having to wire spot cash to his wife the burlesque dancer in St. Louis, other people's dreams running through his hands—but he's not safe to like best, because he'll use it against you. Meeting Mae for the first time after her date-night movie with Jerry, he knocks back her friendly remarks about the lead actress with a counter-offer to "cut her up a little bit, she'd look more interesting . . . Didn't you ever want to cut up a beautiful dame?" He's handling spliceable, trimmable celluloid as he says it and he apologizes self-deprecatingly when he gets no response, but the audience can't say they haven't been warned. All of Earl's jokes have a raw edge on them and some are jokes in name only. He claims to fantasize about sticking his wife "full of pins just to see if blood runs out." He taunts Mae that she can't cut him down to size because he "happen[s] to be pre-shrunk." His Chinese impression is fucking racist and Mae is not only not charmed by it, she's a little appalled that nice-guy Jerry thinks it's funny. Brooding like a California Rochester, with the dark, not quite good looks to match, Earl drinks too much and can complicate a metaphor with the best of Odets and he's sickeningly attractive to Mae even though he is exactly the kind of man she doesn't miss, for reasons it will take her nearly the entire second half of the neatly split film to sort out.
Earl thinks he knows them, of course: "You're like me. A dash of Tabasco or the meat tastes flat." He's right that she needs complexity and isn't getting it from Jerry, as clear and true-ringing and sometimes as dense as a crystal of salt; he's tellingly, damningly wrong that she needs cruelty. For Mae, being with Earl is like looking into a mirror. He's her male self, the demon lover of all her faults and virtues, as intelligent as she is, as unhappy as she is, and taking it out as she does, on herself first and inevitably on others. Their first lovemaking—in the small, still breakfast-cluttered kitchen of Jerry's apartment that Mae has moved into, right up against the sink with Earl still in his undershirt like some kind of tenement porn—is a violent, clawing thing, as if they were trying to climb inside each another's skins, wear one another like new but familiar clothes. It's almost hate sex, if the hate is self-hatred; sex as substance abuse, sex as self-harm. They don't wrestle for dominance so much as abasement. They flick their own insecurities open like knives. A cry for help is a bid for control; an admission of love is a warning. It's breathtakingly crude stuff and like so much of Stanwyck's character in this movie suggests that Lang had serious dirt on someone at the PCA, because she is punished for this violent transgression of her marital responsibilities and her own boundaries only in the sense that the longer the affair wears on, the more obvious it becomes that she doesn't really want herself, at least not this version of herself at her most abrasive and nihilistic, excusing the pain she causes with the pain she feels: "You're born and you'd like to get unborn." She has herself already. She needs a break from it sometimes. Then she wants someone who's nothing like a mirror, domestic as she isn't, patient as she isn't, easily kind as she isn't—painfully aware that pregnancy, childbirth, and new motherhood will not rank among his wife's fondest memories, Jerry who adores being a father says with gallant adynaton, "I wish I could've had the kid for you"—and perhaps someone who doesn't feel that she's incapable of these qualities herself. Earl loves best all the hard edges and disappointment he sees in Mae. Even as the cracks widen between her and a not so oblivious Jerry, whose puzzled hurt is gleefully played upon by his layabout uncle (J. Carrol Naish, I believe the formal taxonomy here is a mean little rat bastard), she has trouble seeing the rest of her life in Earl. One minute she calls him her "last shot at happiness" and the next she's musing, "How hard-boiled we are."
The ending is an honorable mess. I don't know whether the censors got in on the script at the last minute or whether Hayes and Lang just never figured out a smooth recovery from an implosion of murderous jealousy, but the last twenty minutes slew wildly from stick-and-carrot melodrama to surprisingly adult poignancy and while they end up somewhere I quite like, I give you fair warning that you will have to stick out some ham-handed story beats and some head-shaking dialogue to get there. Especially after all the kitchen-sink negativity, it is not soothing but bracing that Clash by Night, like its even more female-focused and thoroughly noir follow-up The Blue Gardenia (1953), allows its protagonist to engage in risky, damaging behavior for which she is neither thrown out into the streets without her child nor submissively broken to the yoke of her husband's benevolence; it understands that she has to make her final decision without consideration of any man at all and it observes almost as a matter of course that as soon as Mae disturbs Earl's image of her as his like-minded female self, her immunity from his casual contempt for women evaporates, bearing out her long-ago judgment that whatever his wife was or was not doing on the burlesque circuit, "he'd be the same with any woman." I like that she doesn't have a road to Damascus so much as a crystallization of something she's known for a long time, her reckoning with who she wants to be. I do not like the film's description of love as "the responsibility of belonging to someone," which it at least grants runs both ways, but that's still too much confusion of marriage with ownership for my tastes. Its last scene is right, though, with Jerry giving her that confidence at last, bruised and half-unspoken but unambiguous: "That's what the terrible thing is. You got to trust somebody. There ain't no other way."
If you are at all interested in Marilyn Monroe, you will want to see this movie for her first role credited above the title and for her fresh-faced performance as a spunky, dungaree-wearing sardine-canner who unwraps another chocolate bar with the unworried "So, I'll spread," although I cannot say as much for Keith Andes as the bossy young fisherman she winds up with. (Robert Ryan had played the role on Broadway and I'd like a time machine just to see if he could make the character palatable.) Nicholas Musuraca shoots seals and gulls and rocks and booming tide with such laid-back naturalism, the first human characters onscreen look like just another part of the shoaling, spindrift world, separating and darkening only by degrees into the deep, clear, noir-defining shadows for which he was known. I did not know when I began this movie that I would finish it longing for Fritz Lang's Cannery Row. I just got so burned by Paste's blinkered writeoff of Stanwyck's Mae as a femme fatale that I had to say something. This Tabasco brought to you by my comfortable backers at Patreon.
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Aw! Thank you. I'll keep on doing it.
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//clicks list
Voodoo plays a prominent role in this Alan Parker noir, equal parts hard-boiled detective mystery and horror movie. As gumshoe Harry Angel in 1950s Harlem, Mickey Rourke is at his best, hired by a devilish-looking man (Robert DeNiro) to track down a big band singer, only to be lured into the occult subcultures of Louisiana. As Angel’s investigation takes him south from New York City to the New Orleans neighborhood of Algiers—a change of scenery suggested to Parker by the story’s author, novelist William Hjortsberg—the color-drained, highly stylized production reflects his descent into hell. Parker wrings the humidity and torrid filth from each frame. You can practically smell the pervasive overripeness and touch Angel’s sweat-crinkled suits. The feverish mood boils to the surface, giving up bodies and body parts of assorted creatures. Lisa Bonet, as chicken-loving priestess Epiphany Proudfoot (yup), exudes a delta sensuality; the MPAA required trims of her and Rourke’s blood-bathed sex scene. Headlines aside, Angel Heart is a wanton spectacle whose extremes suit the noir genre.
AAAAAAAAAHAHAHA. ANGEL FUCKING HEART? THAT WAS ONE OF THE WORST MOVIES I HAVE EVER SEEN. WTF.
And yeah Dark City looks noir, but it's not noir. It's scifi noir, same as Bladerunner. It has the visual trappings but its questions are about entirely different things (DC is 'what is real,' Bladerunner is 'what is human').
I love Zodiac but it is really not noir.
Shane Black’s Kiss Kiss Bang Bang isn’t just one of the early stops on Robert Downey Jr.’s early aughts career redemption tour: It’s arguably the strongest American neo-noir produced in postmillennial cinema.
No. No. No. Who is the idiot who wrote this crap? They should hire you instead.
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Conversely, I do think Blade Runner qualifies; it is about human concerns, just set in a potential future. I haven't yet seen Dark City, but I suspect from what I've heard that it would be too fantastic for my definition.
In my view, noir is about human attempts to create justice in an unjust universe. Any story that includes a *literal* Christian Devil is, however bleak and cynical, necessarily a story about a *just* and *ordered* universe. Harry's fate is sealed before the movie's narrative even starts, and none of the events of that narrative offer him any chance of changing that fate.
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noir is about human attempts to create justice in an unjust universe
I truly disagree but I doubt we're going to convince each other, so. I think peoples' definition of noir -- which is usually shifting and blurry -- depends a lot on which movie they think exemplifies the genre.
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By way of proof, I think I disagree with both you and
One of the few places where I feel the Paste article is not off base is its definition of noir as a mood rather than a tickyboxable set of characters, plots, or even style. But then you have to take into account that not every viewer have the same emotional response. I think about this question a lot, in part because I had to form my own definition of noir, in part because every now and then I watch something that comes with the noir label and afterward I'm not sure I agree. Right before I got so steamed that I had to write about Clash by Night, I watched Thieves' Highway, a well-regarded 1947 film noir which I enjoyed very much and am not convinced is actually a noir as opposed to a black-and-white social-justice-crime-action film with a great central performance by Richard Conte and an even better one by Valentina Cortese. There were plenty of movies made in the '40's and '50's that weren't film noir, but it's an easy filter in hindsight.
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This is so very far from my feelings about the genre that I would like to know, non-ironically, how you arrived at this definition.
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We discussed our conflicting definitions once before, but google is failing me...
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It was in the wake of Criss Cross (1949). I remembered talking definitions, but had forgotten that your revolves around justice.
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I was sad! I really liked its willingness to include genre hybrids and multiple generations of neo-noir, including the often overlooked '60's and '70's, but I disagreed frequently with what it had to say about any of them.
AAAAAAAAAHAHAHA. ANGEL FUCKING HEART? THAT WAS ONE OF THE WORST MOVIES I HAVE EVER SEEN. WTF.
Whatever it is, I've wanted to see it for years; I know some people whose opinions I quite respect who swear by it.
No. No. No. Who is the idiot who wrote this crap? They should hire you instead.
FROM YOUR LIPS TO THE EARS OF WHOEVER HAS MONEY.
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Screwball noir is totally a thing. I'm not sure there's a better description for The Big Sleep (1946).
I've never read "Red Wind." What's the likeness?
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Lady from Shanghai is the noirest screwball noir that ever did noir.
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I believe it.
Lady from Shanghai is the noirest screwball noir that ever did noir.
I think The Big Sleep still has the edge for me in that its central couple ends up together, so on top of everything else it does function as a romantic comedy, but The Lady from Shanghai has that damn the metaphors, full speed ahead literal funhouse ending.
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her reckoning with who who she wants to be--Yes. So good, that insight. And the realization that you choose that all along, that it's yours to choose.
I like this phrase: "nor submissively broken to the yoke of her husband's benevolence"--that's breathtakingly good too. Kindness as tyranny, not because the kind person is trying to be tyrannical (though I'm not speaking for the movie--maybe Jerry **is** trying to be tyrannical, though it doesn't sound that way from what you say), but because the assumption that you'll live up to or in accordance with the rubrics of the kindness is tyrannical--unless and until you decide you yourself want to embrace the rubrics. (I may have lost myself in a maze of ideas here...)
And I like that line of Marilyn Monroe's too. Enjoy that chocolate bar, girl.
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Thank you!
I really just wish people would stop perpetuating this incredibly reductive way of looking at noir. Especially considering the odds against representing women as people in the Code era (and even still today), it does neither history nor women any favors to erase the movies or roles or actors that managed it.
Kindness as tyranny, not because the kind person is trying to be tyrannical (though I'm not speaking for the movie--maybe Jerry **is** trying to be tyrannical, though it doesn't sound that way from what you say), but because the assumption that you'll live up to or in accordance with the rubrics of the kindness is tyrannical--unless and until you decide you yourself want to embrace the rubrics. (I may have lost myself in a maze of ideas here...)
No, you're making sense: it's part of the reason I like that Jerry's reconciliation with Mae at the end is unconditional. He even tells her, "Don't make no promises." He doesn't mean because it's pointless, she'll just break her word again. He means he has to be able to trust her without fences in place. That's hard work and he failed it once already; he's not being magnanimous. It's the only thing to do if they want to make it work this time.
And I like that line of Marilyn Monroe's too. Enjoy that chocolate bar, girl.
She's so great. The film kind of shunts her and Andes off into a corner right before the third act hits the fan, so either the original play never really knew what to do with the character and/or the screenplay couldn't weave her naturally into the already tangled ending, but it's the youngest I've seen her in a part with any substance and she delivers.
I forgot to mention the movie was produced by Harriet Parsons! So it's another check for women in noir behind the camera as well as in front.