Notes on Film Noir
By Paul Schrader
In 1946 French critics, seeing the American films they had missed during the war,
noticed the new mood of cynicism, pessimism and darkness which had crept into the
American cinema. The darkening stain was most evident in routine crime thrillers, but
was also apparent in prestigious melodramas.
The French cineastes soon realized they had seen only the tip of the iceberg: As the
years went by, Hollywood lighting grew darker, characters more corrupt, themes more
fatalistic and the tone more hopeless. By 1949 American movies were in the throes of
their deepest and most creative funk. Never before had films dared to take such a harsh
uncomplimentary look at American life, and they would not dare to do so again for
twenty years.
Hollywood’s film noir has recently become the subject of renewed interest among
moviegoers and critics. The fascination film noir holds for today’s young filmgoers and
film students reflects recent trends in American cinema: American movies are again
1
taking a look at the underside of the American character, but compared to such
relentlessly cynical film noir as Kiss Me Deadly or Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye, the new
self-hate cinema of Easy Rider and Medium Cool seems naive and romantic. As the
current political mood hardens, filmgoers and filmmakers will find the film noir of the late
Forties increasingly attractive. The Forties may be to the Seventies what the Thirties
were to the Sixties.
Film noir is equally interesting to critics. It offers writers a cache of excellent, little-known
films (film noir is oddly both one of Hollywood’s best periods and least known), and gives
auteur-weary critics an opportunity to apply themselves to the newer questions of
classification and transdirectorial style. After all, what is film noir?
Film noir is not a genre (as Raymond Durgnat has helpfully pointed out over the
objections of Higham and Greenberg’s Hollywood in the Forties). It is not defined, as are
the western and gangster genres, by conventions of setting and conflict, but rather by
the more subtle qualities of tone and mood. It is a film “noir”, as opposed to the possible
variants of film grey or film off-white.
Film noir is also a specific period of film history, like German Expressionism or the
French New Wave. In general, film noir refers to those Hollywood films of the Forties and
early Fifties which portrayed the world of dark, slick city streets, crime and corruption.
Film noir is an extremely unwieldy period. It harks back to many previous periods:
Warner’s Thirties gangster films, the French “poetic realism” of Carne and Duvivier, Von
Sternbergian melodrama, and, farthest back, German Expressionist crime films (Lang’s
Mabuse cycle). Film noir can stretch at its outer limits from The Maltese Falcon (1941) to
Touch of Evil (1958), and most every dramatic Hollywood film from 1941 to 1953
contains some noir elements. There are also foreign offshoots of film noir, such as The
Third man, Breathless and Le Doulos.
Almost every critic has his own definition of film noir, and a personal list of film titles and
dates to back it up. Personal and descriptive definitions, however, can get a bit sticky. A
film of urban night life is not necessarily a film noir, and a film noir need not necessarily
concern crime and corruption. Since film noir is defined by tone rather than genre, it is
almost impossible to argue one critic’s descriptive definition against another’s. How
many noir elements does it take to make a film noir noir?
2
Rather than haggle definitions, I would rather attempt to reduce film noir to its primary
colors (all shades of black), those cultural and stylistic elements to which any definition
must return.
At the risk of sounding like Arthur Knight, I would suggest that there were four conditions
in Hollywood in the Forties which brought about the film noir. (The danger of Knight’s
Livliest Art method is that it makes film history less a matter of structural analysis, and
more a case of artistic and social forces magically interacting and coalescing.) Each of
the following four catalytic elements, however, can define the film noir; the distinctly noir
tonality draws from each of these elements.
WAR AND POST-WAR DISILLUSIONMENTS. The acute downer which hit the U. S.
after the Second World War was, in fact, a delayed reaction to the Thirties. All through
the Depression movies were needed to keep people’s spirits up, and, for the most part,
they did. The crime films of this period were Horatio Algerish and socially conscious.
Toward the end of the Thirties a darker crime film began to appear(You Only Live Once,
The Roaring Twenties) and were it not for the War film noir would have been at full
steam by the early Forties.
The need to produce Allied propaganda abroad and promote patriotism at home blunted
the fledgling moves toward a dark cinema, and the film noir thrashed about in the studio
system, not quite able to come into full prominence. During the War the first uniquely film
noir appeared: The Maltese Falcon, The Glass Key, This Gun for Hire, Laura, but these
films lacked the distinctly noir bite the end of the War would bring.
As soon as the War was over, however, American films became markedly more
sardonic—and there was a boom in the crime film. For fifteen years the pressures
against America’s amelioristic cinema had been building up, and, given the freedom,
audiences and artists were now eager to take a less optimistic view of things. The
disillusionment many soldiers, small businessmen and housewife/factory employees felt
in returning to a peacetime economy was directly mirrored in the sordidness of the urban
crime film.
This immediate post-war disillusionments was directly demonstrated in films like
Cornered, The Blue Dahlia, Dead Reckoning, and Ride a Pink Horse, in which a
serviceman returns from the war to find his sweetheart unfaithful or dead, or his
3
business partner cheating him, or the whole society something less than worth fighting
for. The war continues, but now the antagonism turns with a new viciousness toward the
American society itself.
POST-WAR REALISM. Shortly after the war every film-producing country had a
resurgence of realism. In America it first took the form of films by such producers as
Louis de Rochemont (House on 92nd Street, Call Northside 777) and Mark Hellinger
(The Killers, Brute Force), and directors like Henry Hathaway and Jules Dassin. “Every
scene was filmed on the actual location depicted,” the 1947 de Rochemont-Hathaway
Kiss of Death proudly proclaimed. Even after de Rochemont’s particular “March of Time”
authenticity fell from vogue, realistic exteriors remained a permanent fixture of film noir.
The realistic movement also suited America’s post-war mood; the public’s desire for a
more honest and harsh view of America would not be satisfied by the same studio
streets they had been watching for a dozen years. The post-war realistic trend
succeeded in breaking film noir away from the domain of the high-class melodrama,
placing it where it more properly belonged, in the streets with everyday people. In
retrospect, the pre-de Rochemont film noir looks definitely tamer than the post-war
realistic films. The studio look of films like The Big Sleep and The Mask of Dimitrios
blunts their sting, making them seem more polite and conventional in contrast to their
later, more realistic counterparts.
THE GERMAN INFLUENCE. Hollywood played host to an influx of German expatriates
in the Twenties and Thirties, and these filmmakers and technicians had, for the most
part, integrated themselves into the American film establishment. Hollywood never
experienced the “Germanization” some civic-minded natives feared, and there is a
danger of over-emphasizing the German influence in Hollywood.
But when, in the late Forties, Hollywood decided to paint it black, there were no greater
masters of chiaroscuro than the Germans. The influence of expressionist lighting has
always been just beneath the surface of Hollywood films, and it is not surprising, in film
noir, to find it bursting out full bloom. Neither is it surprising to find a large number of
Germans and East Europeans working in film noir: Fritz Lang, Robert Siodmak, Billy
Wilder, Franz Waxman, Otto Preminger, John Braham, Anatole Litvak, Karl Freund, Max
Ophuls, John Alton, Douglas Sirk, Fred Zinnemann, William Dieterle, Max Steiner, Edgar
G. Ulmer, Curtis Bernhardt, Rudolph Mate.
4
On the surface the German expressionist influence, with its reliance on artificial studio
lighting, seems incompatible with post-war realism, with its harsh unadorned exteriors;
but it is the unique quality of film noir that it was able to weld seemingly contradictory
elements into a uniform style. The best noir technicians simply made all the world a
sound stage, directing unnatural and expressionistic lighting onto realistic settings. In
films like Union Station, They Live By Night, The Killers there is an uneasy, exhilarating
combination of realism and expressionism.
Perhaps the greatest master of noir was Hungarian-born John Alton, an expressionist
cinematographer who could relight Times Square at noon if necessary. No
cinematographer better adapted the old expressionist techniques to the new desire for
realism, and his black-and-white photography in such gritty film noir as T-Men, Raw
Deal, I’ the Jury, The Big Combo equals that of such German expressionist masters as
Fritz Wagner and Karl Freund.
THE HARD-BOILED TRADITION. Another stylistic influence waiting in the wings was
the “hard-boiled” school of writers. In the Thirties authors such as Ernest Hemingway,
Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, Horace McCoy and John
O’Hara created the “tough”, cynical way of acting and thinking which separated one from
the world of everyday emotions—romanticism with a protective shell. The hard-boiled
writers had their roots in pulp fiction or journalism, and their protagonists lived out a
narcissistic, defeatist code. The hard-boiled hero was, in reality, a soft egg compared to
his existential counterpart (Camus is said to have based The Stranger on McCoy), but
he was a good deal tougher than anything American fiction had seen.
When the movies of the Forties turned to the American “tough” moral understrata, the
hard-boiled school was waiting with preset conventions of heroes, minor characters,
plots, dialogue and themes. Like the German expatriates, the hard-boiled writers had a
style made to order for film noir; and, in turn, they influenced noir screenwriting as much
as the German influenced noir cinematography.
The most hard-boiled of Hollywood’s writers was Raymond Chandler himself, whose
script of Double Indemnity (from a James M. Cain story) was the best written and most
characteristically noir of the period. Double Indemnity was the first film which played film
5
noir for what it essentially was: small-time, unredeemed, unheroic; it made a break from
the romantic noir cinema of (the later) Mildred Pierce and The Big Sleep.
(In its final stages, however, film noir adapted then bypassed the hard-boiled school.
Manic, neurotic post-1948 films such as Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye, D. O. A., Where the
Sidewalk Ends, White Heat, and The Big Heat are all post-hard-boiled: the air in these
regions was even too thin for old-time cynics like Chandler.)
STYLISTICS. There is not yet a study of the stylistics of film noir, and the task is
certainly too large to be attempted here. Like all film movements film noir drew upon a
reservoir of film techniques, and given the time one could correlate its techniques,
themes and causal elements into a stylistic schema. For the present, however, I’d like to
point out some of film noir’s recurring techniques.
------The majority of scenes are lit for night. Gangsters sit in the offices at midday with
the shades pulled and the lights off. Ceiling lights are hung low and floor lamps are
seldom more than five feet high. One always has the suspicion that if the lights were all
suddenly flipped on the characters would shriek and shrink from the scene like Count
Dracula at noontime.
------As in German expressionism, oblique and vertical lines are preferred to horizontal.
Obliquity adheres to the choreography of the city, and is in direct opposition to the
horizontal American tradition of Griffith and Ford. Oblique lines tend to splinter a screen,
making it restless and unstable. Light enters the dingy rooms of film noir in such odd
shapes-jagged trapezoids, obtuse triangles, vertical slits—that one suspects the
windows were cut out with a pen knife. No character can speak authoritatively from a
space which is being continually cut into ribbons of light. The Anthony Mann/John Alton
T-Men is the most dramatic but far from the only example of oblique noir choreography.
------The actors and setting are often given equal lighting emphasis. An actor is often
hidden in the realistic tableau of the city at night, and, more obviously, his face is often
blacked out by shadow as he speaks. These shadow effects are unlike the famous
Warner Brothers lighting of the Thirties in which the central character was accentuated
by a heavy shadow; in film noir, the central character is likely to be standing in the
shadow. When the environment is given an equal or greater weight than the actor, it, of
6
course, creates a fatalistic, hopeless mood. There is nothing the protagonist can do; the
city will outlast and negate even his best efforts.
------Compositional tension is preferred to physical action. A typical film noir would rather
move the scene cinematographically around the actor than have the actor control the
scene by physical action. The beating of Robert Ryan in The Set-Up, the gunning down
of Farley Granger in They Live By Night, the execution of the taxi driver in The Enforcer
and of Brian Donlevy in The Big Combo are all marked by measured pacing, restrained
anger and oppressive compositions, and seem much closer to the film noir spirit than the
rat-tat-tat and screeching tires of Scarface twenty years before or the violent, expression
actions of Underworld U. S. A. ten years later.
------There seems to be an almost Freudian attachment to water. The empty noir streets
are almost always glistening with fresh evening rain (even in Los Angeles), and the
rainfall tends to increase in direct proportion to the drama. Docks and piers are second
only to alleyways as the most popular rendezvous points.
------There is a love of romantic narration. In such films as The Postman Always Rings
Twice, Laura, Double Indemnity, The Lady from Shanghai, Out of the Past and Sunset
Boulevard the narration creates a mood of temps perdu: an irretrievable past, a
predetermined fate and an all-enveloping hopelessness. In Out of the Past Robert
Mitchum relates his history with such pathetic relish that it is obvious there is no hope for
any future: one can only take pleasure in reliving a doomed past.
------A complex chronological order is frequently used to reinforce the feelings of
hopelessness and lost time. Such films as The Enforcer, The Killers, Mildred Pierce, The
Dark Past, Chicago Deadline, Out of the Past and The Killing use a convoluted time
sequence to immerse the viewer in a time-disoriented but highly stylized world. The
manipulation of time, whether slight or complex, is often used to reinforce a noir
principle: the how is always more important than the what.
THEMES. Raymond Durgnat has delineated the themes of film noir in an excellent
article in British Cinema magazine (“The Family Tree of Film Noir,” August, 1970),
and it would be foolish for me to attempt to redo his thorough work in this short space.
Durgnat divides film noir into eleven thematic categories, and although one might
7
criticize some of his specific groupings, he does cover the whole gamut of noir
production (thematically categorizing over 300 films).
In each of Durgnat’s noir themes (whether Black Widow, killers-on-the-run,
dopplegangers) one finds that the upwardly mobile forces of the Thirties have halted;
frontierism has turned to paranoia and claustrophobia. The small-time gangster has now
made it big and sits in the mayor’s chair, the private eye has quit the police force in
disgust, and the young heroine, sick of going along for the ride, is taking others for a
ride.
Durgnat, however, does not touch upon what is perhaps the most over-riding noir theme:
a passion for the past and present, but a fear of the future. The noir hero dreads to look
ahead, but instead tries to survive by the day, and if unsuccessful at that, he retreats to
the past. Thus film noir’s techniques emphasize loss, nostalgia, lack of clear priorities,
insecurity; then submerge these self-doubts in mannerism and style. In such a world
style becomes paramount; it is all that separates one from meaninglessness. Chandler
described this fundamental noir theme when he described his own fictional world: “It is
not a very fragrant world, but it is the world you live in, and certain writers with tough
minds and a cool spirit of detachment can make very interesting patterns out of it.”
Film noir can be subdivided into three broad phases. The first, the wartime period, 194146 approximately, was the phase of the private eye and the lone wolf, of Chandler,
Hammett and Greene, of Bogart and Bacall, Ladd and Lake, classy directors like Curtiz
and Garnett, studio sets, and, in general, more talk than action. The studio look of this
period was reflected in such pictures as The Maltese Falcon, Casablanca, Gaslight, This
Gun for Hire, The Lodger, The Woman in the Window, Mildred Pierce, Spellbound, The
Big Sleep, Laura, The Lost Weekend, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, To Have and
Have Not, Fallen Angel, Gilda, Murder My Sweet, The Postman Always Rings Twice,
Dark Waters, Scarlet Street, So Dark the Night, The Glass Key, The Mask of Dimitrios,
and The Dark Mirror.
The Wilder/Chandler Double Indemnity provided a bridge to the post-war phase of film
noir. The unflinching noir vision of Double Indemnity came as a shock in 1944, and the
film was almost blocked by the combined efforts of Paramount, the Hays Office and star
Fred McMurray. Three years later, however, Double Indemnitys were dropping off the
studio assembly line.
8
The second phase was the post-war realistic period from 1945-49 (the dates overlap and
so do the films; these are all approximate phases for which there are many exceptions).
These films tended more toward the problems of crime in the streets, political corruption
and police routine. Less romantic heroes like Richard Conte, Burt Lancaster and Charles
McGraw were more suited to this period, as were proletarian directors like Hathaway,
Dassin and Kazan. The realistic urban look of this phase is seen in such films as The
House on 92nd Street, The Killers, Raw Deal, Act of Violence, Union Station, Kiss of
Death, Johnny O’Clock, Force of Evil, Dead Reckoning, Ride the Pink Horse, Dark
Passage, Cry of the City, The Set-Up, T-Men, Call Northside 777, Brute Force, The Big
Clock, Thieves’ Highway, Ruthless, Pitfall, Boomerang!, and The Naked City.
The third and final phase of film noir, from 1949-53, was the period of psychotic action
and suicidal impulse. The noir hero, seemingly under the weight of ten years of despair,
started to get bananas. The psychotic killer, who had in the first period been a subject
worthy of study (Olivia de Havilland in The Dark Mirror), in the second a fringe threat
(Richard Widmark in Kiss of Death), now became the active protagonist (James Cagney
in Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye). There were no excuses given for the psychopathy in Gun
Crazy—it was just “crazy”. James Cagney made a neurotic comeback and his instability
was matched by that of younger actors like Robert Ryan and Lee Marvin. This was the
phase of the “B” noir film, and of psychoanalytically-inclined directors like Ray and
Walsh. The forces of personal disintegration are reflected in such films as White Heat,
Gun Crazy, D. O. A., Caught, They Live By Night, Where the Sidewalk Ends, Kiss
Tomorrow Goodbye, Detective Story, In a Lonely Place, I’ the Jury, Ace in the Hole,
Panic in the Streets, The Big Heat, On Dangerous Ground, Sunset Boulevard.
The third phase is the cream of the film noir period. Some critics may prefer the early
“gray” melodramas, others the post-war “street” films, but film noir’s final phase was the
most aesthetically and sociologically piercing, the later noir films finally got down to the
root causes of the period: the loss of public honor, heroic conventions, personal integrity,
and, finally, psychic stability. The third-phase films were painfully self-aware; they
seemed to know they stood at the end of a long tradition based on despair and
disintegration and did not shy away from that fact. The best and most characteristically
noir films—Gun Crazy, White Heat, Out of the Past, Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye, D. O. A.,
They Live By Night, and The Big Heat—stand at the end of the period and are the
results of self-awareness. The third phase is in rife with end-of-the-line noir heroes: The
Big Heat and Where the Sidewalk Ends are the last stops for the urban cop, Ace in the
9
Hole for the newspaper man, the Victor Saville-produced Spillane series (I’ the Jury, The
Long Wait, Kiss Me Deadly) for the private eye, Sunset Boulevard for the Black Widow,
White Heat and Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye for the gangster, D. O. A. for the John Doe
American.
By the middle Fifties film noir had ground to a halt. There were a few notable stragglers,
Kiss Me Deadly, the Lewis/Alton The Big Combo, and film noir’s epitaph, Touch of Evil,
but for the most part a new style of crime film had become popular.
As the rise of McCarthy and Eisenhower demonstrated, Americans were eager to see a
more bourgeois view of themselves. Crime had to move to the suburbs. The criminal put
on a gray flannel suit and the footsore cop was replaced by the “mobile unit” careening
down the expressway. Any attempt at social criticism had to be cloaked in ludicrous
affirmations of the American way of life. Technically, television, with its demand for full
lighting and close-ups, gradually undercut the German influence, and color
cinematography was, of course, the final blow to the “noir” look. New directors like
Seigel, Fleischer, Karlson and Fuller, and TV shows like Dragnet, M-Squad, Lineup and
Highway Patrol stepped in to create the new crime drama.
Film noir was an immensely creative period—probably the most creative in Hollywood’s
history—at least, if this creativity is measured not by its peaks but by its median level of
artistry. Picked at random, a film noir is likely to be a better made film than a randomly
selected silent comedy, musical, western and so on. (A Joseph H. Lewis “B” film noir is
better than a Lewis “B” western, for example.) Taken as a whole period, film noir
achieved an unusually high level of artistry.
Film noir seemed to bring out the best in everyone: directors, cameramen, screenwriters,
actors. Again and again, a film noir will make the high point on an artist’s career graph.
Some directors, for example, did their best work in film noir (Stuart Heisler, Robert
Siodmak, Gordon Douglas, Edward Dmytryk, John Brahm, John Cromwell, Raoul Walsh,
Henry Hathaway); other directors began in film noir, and it seems to me, never regained
their original heights (Otto Preminger, Rudolph Mate, Nicholas Ray, Robert Wise, Jules
Dassin, Richard Fleischer, John Huston, Andre de Toth, and Robert Aldrich); and other
directors who made great films in other molds also made great film noir (Orson Welles,
Max Ophuls, Fritz Lang, Elia Kazan, Howard Hawks, Robert Rossen, Anthony Mann,
Joseph Losey, Alfred Hitchcock, and Stanley Kubrick). Whether or not one agrees with
10
this particular schema, its message is irrefutable: film noir was good for practically every
director’s career. (Two interesting exceptions to prove the case are King Vidor and Jean
Renoir.)
Film noir seems to have been a creative release for everyone involved. It gave artists a
chance to work with previously forbidden themes, yet had conventions strong enough to
protect the mediocre. Cinematographers were allowed to become highly mannered, and
actors were sheltered by the cinematographers to distinguish between great directors
and great noir directors.
Film noir’s remarkable creativity makes its longtime neglect the more baffling. The
French, of course, have been students of the period for some time (Borde and
Chaumeton’s Panorama du Film Noir was published in 1955), but American critics until
recently have preferred the western, the musical or the gangster film to the film noir.
Some of the reasons for this neglect are superficial; others strike to the heart of the noir
style. For a long time film noir, with its emphasis on corruption and despair, was
considered an aberration of the American character. The western, with its moral
primitivism, and the gangster film, with its Horatio Alger values, were considered more
American than the film noir.
This prejudice was reinforced by the fact that film noir was ideally suited to the low
budget “B” film, and many of the best noir films were “B” films. This odd sort of economic
snobbery still lingers on in some critical circles: high- budget trash is considered more
worthy of attention than low-budget trash, and to praise a “B” film is somehow to
slight(often intentionally) an “A” film.
There has been a critical revival in the U. S. over the last ten years, but film noir lost out
on that too. The revival as auteur (director) oriented, and film noir wasn’t. Auteur
criticism is interested in how directors are different; film noir criticism is concerned with
what they have in common.
The fundamental reason for film noir’s neglect, however, is the fact that it depends more
on choreography than sociology, and American critics have always been slow on the
uptake when it comes to visual style. Like its protagonists, film noir is more interested in
style than theme; whereas American critics have been traditionally more interested in
theme than style.
11
American film critics have always been sociologists first and scientists second: film is
important as it relates to large masses, and if a film goes awry it is often because the
theme has been somehow “violated” by the style. Film noir operates on opposite
principles: the theme is hidden in the style, and bogus themes are often haunted
(“middle class values are best”) which contradict the style. Although, I believe, style
determines the theme in every film, it was easier for sociological critics to discuss the
themes of the western and gangster film apart from stylistic analysis than it was to do for
film noir.
Not surprisingly it was the gangster film, not the film noir, which was canonized in The
Partisan Review in 1948 by Robert Warshow’s famous essay, “The Gangster as Tragic
Hero.” Although Warshow could be an aesthetic as well as a sociological critic, he was
interested in the western and gangster film as “popular” art rather than as style. This
sociological orientation blinded Warshow, as it has many subsequent critics, to an
aesthetically more important development in the gangster film—film noir.
The irony of this neglect is that in retrospect the gangster films Warshow wrote about are
inferior to film noir. The Thirties gangster was primarily a reflection of what was
happening in the country, and Warshow analyzed this. The film noir, although it was also
a sociological reflection, went further than the gangster film. Toward the end film noir
was engaged in a life-and-death struggle with the materials it reflected; it tried to make
America accept a moral vision of life based on style. That very contradiction—promoting
style in a culture which valued themes—forced film noir into artistically invigorating twists
and turns. Film noir attacked and interpreted its sociological conditions, and, by the close
of the noir period, created a new artistic world which went beyond a simple sociological
reflection, a nightmarish world of American mannerism which was by far more a creation
than a reflection.
Because film noir was first of all a style, because it worked out its conflicts visually rather
than thematically, because it was aware of its own identity, it was able to create artistic
solutions to sociological problems. And for these reasons films like Kiss Me Deadly, Kiss
Tomorrow Goodbye and Gun Crazy can be works of art in a way that gangster films like
Scarface, Public Enemy and Little Caesar can never be.
http://www.mtime.com/my/Noir/blog/1433838/
12
Murder, My Sweet
—Mark Bourne
It's easy to describe a film as a "definitive" example of this or that style, but harder
to make the description stick with a literal interpretation of the word. When it comes
to Murder, My Sweet, the 1944 adaptation of Raymond Chandler's pulp novel
Farewell, My Lovely, it not only sticks, it clings like the shimmery black dress on the
gorgeous gams of a dame with a revolver aimed at your belly. The term "film noir"
was first used by French critic Nino Frank in a 1946 essay in which he singled out
Murder, My Sweet and Double Indemnity as quintessential, defining examples of the
form. From its canted camera angles and darkness-drenched nighttime action to the
hardboiled narration of a cynical Los Angeles gumshoe outfitted in trenchcoat and
fedora, Murder, My Sweet is pure Detective Noir 101.
All the essentials are here: laconic private dick Philip Marlowe (Dick Powell), a slinky
femme fatale (Claire Trevor) who'd kiss you one minute then put a slug into you the
next, a second dame who might not be as innocent as she seems (Anne Shirley), all
wrapped into a twisty — and rather over-populated — mystery involving a murder, a
priceless jade necklace, the missing moll of hulking thug Moose Malloy (Mike
Mazurki), a blackmail scheme, and a con-man psychic (Otto Kruger). Everyone's at
the top of his or her game, with Trevor and Mazurki in particular displaying careershaping performances. Powell, who'd been known as a juvenile lead singer-dancer in
light comedies and Busby Berkeley musicals, was an odd choice for the archetypal
tough-guy Marlowe. Nonetheless, he pulled it off and Murder, My Sweet boosted his
career the way Pulp Fiction jolted John Travolta's. He gives us a wittier, lighter (and
more authentic) Marlowe than Humphrey Bogart's in The Big Sleep ('46), although
without Bogart's matchless charisma. His voice-over is straight-up Chandler — "I
caught the blackjack right behind my ear. A black pool opened up at my feet. I dived
in. It had no bottom. I felt pretty good. Like an amputated leg."
Marlowe is a hard-bitten romantic knight-errant working the mean streets, so the
black-and-white cinematography is all about improbable but visually effective
shadows, its mood trumping realism as Marlowe descends deeper into the seedy L.A.
netherworld. After Marlowe is beaten and drugged, a Vertigo-like "crazy coked-up
dream" sequence is a memorable highlight. With an assist from RKO set designs and
compositions as perfected by Orson Welles, director Edward Dmytryk practically
invents the film genre's tropes of bleak alienation, paranoia, and off-kilter visual
distortions. He keeps it all moving forward at a brisk clip, despite a nearly
indecipherable screenplay that can't work up much suspense between its two
competing storylines stapled together by coincidence. (Chandler cobbled his novel
from three short stories he sold in the '30s, and that patchwork structure carries
through to this film.) Yet despite its narrative contortions, Murder, My Sweet is so
full of canonical noirishness that it'll remind you of every "hardboiled detective"
parody you've ever enjoyed. If you're a fan of the form you'll also recognize it as a
seminal influence that remains entertaining, like a shot of first-rate hooch on a dark
night, with the staccato patter of rain on the office window, then she walks in....
13
hen Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray), doomed insurance
investigator, arrives in the offices of Pacific All-Risk Insurance
in the middle of the night, he leaks a little blood on the floor.
He has paid his film noir dues, coming out on the distaff side of
a battle with an original femme noir, the lovely spider woman
Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck). He narrates this tale of
sex and intrigue into a tape recorder, providing a clipped,
slangy voice-over for the extended flashbacks which reveal the
process of his descent into hell. Billy Wilder’s Double
Indemnity (1944), based on a James M. Cain story, and
scripted by Wilder and Raymond Chandler, brought into sharp
relief the archetypal film noir opposition. God is no longer in His heaven. All is not right
with the world.
Double Indemnity has become a standard to which other films noir are compared (see
Lawrence Kasdan’s 1981 homage/remake/update, Body Heat). All of the archetypes and
iconography are in place—or are promised, since Hollywood must always rejuvenate the
next picture in a cycle with something new that builds from the original work. The sets
and lighting have a decided Expressionist feel, with plenty of deep shadows and pools of
light flickering around the characters as they plot and scheme. Common spaces—grocery
markets, trains, office buildings, middle-class neighborhoods redolent with the smell of
overheated flowers—take on a sense of alienation. The middle class, the housewife, and
the door-to-door salesman have gained an Existentialist edge that reminds us that hell
consists of other people.
Walter Neff is not a fool; he is cold, hard, and bored with his success as an insurance
agent. He doesn’t want promotion up the corporate ladder, turning down a better position
as the assistant to his friend, Barton Keyes (Edward G. Robinson). When he and Phyllis
meet, they size each other up, cautiously; he at the bottom of the stairs looking up at a
sensual woman draped in a white towel, provoking him, yet remaining distant, with a
staircase and banister between them. Phyllis finally presents herself. She tantalizes
Walter with her anklet, emblazoned with her name, a symbol of barely bridled sexuality
at a time when housewives were expected to be demure. These soon-to-be lovers make
brilliant adversaries; neither is interested in love or domesticity, both want power and
money and a chance to shoot craps with the universe.
There is irony in the title; “indemnity” suggests security against harm or loss, and
“double indemnity” assures the bearer of protection from liability or penalty. In the film
noir universe, such promises guarantee that fate will intercede. Walter and Phyllis pay the
price for their desires; there are no exemptions for one’s actions, and no intercession by
friends or family or deities will occur. Those who profess to love the noir hero bring
pain; those who truly love also pay, as Walter causes his dear friend Keyes to suffer near
the conclusion of the film. To believe in indemnity is to place faith in nothing, and
Double Indemnity, one of the finest of all noir films, is a study in nothingness as the
ultimate condition of human endeavor.
14
Is Tom Neal’s Al Roberts really
Fate’s Plaything or just the ultimate
pushy bottom?
BY GARY MORRIS
Edgar G. Ulmer is one of the more provocative auteurs in movie history. His provenance
is impeccable in its early phases. A set designer, production designer, and/or codirector
with the likes of Max Reinhardt, Murnau, Lang, and Lubitsch in the 1920s (see Peter
Bogdanovich’s interview with Ulmer in The Devil Made Me Do It for the details), he
joined the parade of émigrés from the Viennese high-art community who came to
America and changed its artistic landscape. In 1934, he made the Universal classic The
Black Cat, pushing the limits of acceptability even for that period’s gruesome horror
films. A year later he was toiling in the depths of poverty row. He began this part of his
career by making bargain-basement westerns under the name of John Warner, then
directed a series of cheap ethnic-market movies — Ukrainian, Yiddish, black — before
moving into the phase for which he’s best known: a string of stylish low-budget 1940s
horror films and noirs (Bluebeard, Strange Illusion, Detour, The Strange Woman,
Ruthless). The precise cause of Ulmer’s early fall from grace has yet to be determined
with absolute accuracy, but his cuckolding of the son of a powerful Hollywood mogul,
along with his well-known personal intransigence and refusal/inability to put commercial
considerations over aesthetics, must have been major factors.
Ulmer may have been bitter about his change of fortune, but his extreme productivity
from the mid-1930s to the early 1960s speaks of an artistic temperament engaged with
even the most improbable projects. Most of these projects were made for tiny PRC, one
of Hollywood’s least luxurious studios. There was never enough money from studio head
Leon Fromkess to produce the kinds of first-rate effects he would have liked (Ulmer was
a visual artist and music aficionado as well as a filmmaker), but at least he had creative
freedom and the talent to implement whatever ideas he could afford. (For a good example
of what he could do with very little, check out the gorgeous forced-perspective sets of
Paris he devised for Bluebeard.) In the case of his unquestioned masterpiece, Detour,
the lack of resources Ulmer suffered at PRC is reflected in the film itself and in the lives
of his shabby, desperate characters.
15
Detour has one of the more convoluted plots in noir, packing a flashback structure, an
extended voiceover, a cross-country trek, a mysterious death, an "accidental" murder, an
identity exchange, an unforgettable femme fatale, and one of the most pathetic,
masochistic antiheroes ever into its 67-minute running time. The film opens in the
present, with Al Roberts (Neal) an unhinged hitchhiker trying to score a ride "east." At a
diner, he starts a fight with a customer who plays a jukebox tune that gives him the jitters.
The song, the standard "I Can’t Believe That You’re in Love with Me," was once a
favorite. Its reappearance triggers a flood of memories that explain how the once
respectable Roberts has become a pitiful bum and psychological wreck wandering along
the dark highways of postwar America.
Roberts, it seems, was once a classically trained pianist working in a dive, New York’s
"Break o’ Dawn" club, where his girlfriend Sue (Claudia Drake) was a singer. Evidence
that Roberts is not exactly a regular guy is hinted at early by a string of complaints and
self-pitying comments he makes. Even getting a tip means nothing to Roberts. When he
receives a ten-dollar bill from a pleased customer, his reaction skirts the psychotic: "What
was it? A piece of paper, crawling with germs." Sue’s plan to seek her fortune in
Hollywood further unbalances him, and when she leaves, he decides to follow her by the
only method available to a guy with no money: hitchhiking.
Ulmer, like the "fate" that Roberts blames for everything wrong in his life, closes in on
his hero from the beginning; even a romantic twilight stroll is played as a low-key
nightmare, with Sue saying the two have "struck out" as a thick, threatening fog swirls
around them. Critic John Belton wrote in his profile of the director in The Hollywood
Professionals that Ulmer’s world "has no fixity and is incomprehensible," and this
supposedly romantic sequence shows that is indeed the case. The comforting details of
mise-en-scene are missing entirely from much of the film, with Roberts wandering
through a desolate, fog-drenched world that offers neither comfort nor even reassuring
reality.
Roberts goes by fits and starts from New York to California, finally getting a boost in
Arizona, where he’s picked up by the flashy Charlie Haskell, a man going "all the way."
But something’s amiss: Haskell has claw marks on his hand from, as he explains,
"tussling with the most dangerous animal in the world — a woman!" Roberts is almost
masochistically sympathetic to this blowhard, fretting over hitchhiker "etiquette" and
nearly drooling with gratitude when Haskell pays for his meal. Their scenes together
16
highlight some of the film’s typical hard-boiled dialogue: "There oughta be a law against
dames with claws!"
Adding to Roberts’ bad luck, Haskell dies mysteriously during the ride in a heavy
rainstorm. Roberts has stopped to put up the convertible top when the supposedly
sleeping Haskell falls out of the car, bumping his head. Was he dead before he fell, or did
Roberts "accidentally" kill him by opening the door? The film leaves the viewer with
several possible scenarios, including that Roberts may in fact be lying about what
happened. Things spiral heavily downward from here as Roberts foolishly decides that no
one would believe he didn't kill Haskell. He then exchanges identities with the dead man,
putting his I.D. in Haskell’s pocket in an act that symbolically redefines himself as a dead
man. That way, as he says while rolling Haskell into the bushes, it will seem that Al
Roberts is dead, not Charlie Haskell. Meanwhile Roberts, no longer protected by his own
name, assumes Haskell’s identity long enough to ditch the car and find Sue.
In a monumental miscalculation, Roberts then picks up a hitchchiker who happens to be
the "dame with claws" who attacked Haskell. Roberts’ attraction to the netherworld
represented by Vera is evident quickly in his voiceover, as he recalls that she had "a
beauty that’s almost homely because it’s so real." Whatever his other failings, Roberts is
no slouch with words; author of the novel and screenplay Martin Goldsmith gives him
some of the film’s most vivid lines, for example, when he says Vera looked like she was
"thrown off the crummiest freight train in the world." Vera too turns out to be a noir
wordsmith second to none. She instantly divines both the situation and his weakness.
Quickly assuming the role of hectoring conscience, she makes blatant threats ("If you act
wise, well, mister, you’ll pop into jail so fast it’ll give you the bends!") and offers mock
sympathy ("I’d hate to see a fellow as young as you wind up sniffin’ that perfume
Arizona hands out free to murderers!")
Much of their interaction plays like a bizarre burlesque of marriage, with Vera the
ultimate shrew and Roberts the quintessential henpecked husband. Vera — true to her
name — is aware of this and refers to it openly. She’s attracted to Roberts and makes no
bones about it: "Do I rate a whistle?" she says after dolling herself up. "Stop makin’
noises like a husband." This is the dark mirror image of Roberts’ fantasies about domestic
bliss with Sue. Vera plays him like a puppet, taking all of Haskell’s "dough" and
eventually concocting a plan for more riches that further strips away Roberts’ identity.
She tries to force him to play the masquerade to the end, to pretend to be Haskell to gain
17
the estate of the real Haskell’s wealthy dying father. This precipitates the film’s, and
Robert’s, end in a literal twist that must have shocked audiences of the time.
What happens in Detour is rendered entirely through Roberts’ eyes, the action of the
flashback consistently interrupted by creepy close-ups of him giving his version of the
events. Like many a noir narrator, his reliability is constantly questioned by the film.
He’s undercut by both his suspicious behavior in the death of Haskell (if he was really so
innocent, why did he take Haskell’s money?) and his constant self-pity and blaming of
"fate, or some other force" for what happens. And his attraction to the darkness and
nihilism of Vera — why would he pick her (or anyone!) up after his own experience
hitchchiking? — undermines his cries of victimhood.
Detour cost anywhere from $20,000 to $60,000, depending on which account you
believe. It was shot in either four or six days, a typical schedule for many of Ulmer’s
low-budget films. But it bears his distinctive stamp throughout. For the famous
penultimate scene of Vera’s "accidental" murder, the camera seems to crawl inside
Roberts’ head as he surveys the room where this happened, with the lens alternately
focusing and defocusing on various objects. Even a simple scene like Sue singing is
rendered with poverty-row panache with a low dutch angle of Sue backed up by three
musicians seen only in shadow. Forced perspectives and expressionist motifs appear
throughout, reinforcing the script’s vision of an unpredictable, ultimately terrifying
world.
Actor Tom Neal’s career, like Ulmer’s, was restricted mostly to B films, but unlike
Ulmer, Neal wound up in similar straits to Roberts. In an eerie life-imitates-art episode,
he went to prison in 1965 for six years for killing his third wife. (Like Roberts, he
claimed the killing was accidental.) Neal’s knockabout charm, his air of wounded virility,
and his skill at rendering screenwriter Goldsmith’s stylized, rapid-fire dialogue make him
one of noir’s most memorable beleaguered males, even if he does appear duplicitous or
delusional in the end. Ulmer has spoken fondly of Al Roberts ("I was always in love with
… the main character, a boy who plays piano in Greenwich Village and really wants to
be a decent pianist," he told Bogdanovich), and no wonder. Roberts is easily read as a
double for Ulmer himself — both men artists living a marginalized existence in straitened
circumstances (Ulmer in B films, Roberts as a classical pianist in a dive). The great Ann
Savage only appears in the second half of the film, but as Vera she dominates every
scene, controlling Roberts and mesmerizing the viewer with her commanding stare and
18
hard, sharp words. Savage also manages to give this harpy a human side when she makes
it clear that she’s dying of tuberculosis. Savage appeared only sporadically in film in the
1940s and early ‘50s, but her reputation is secure on the basis of the unforgettable Vera.
For years Detour was available only in battered 16mm prints and grainy or overexposed
public-domain videos. The 35mm negative was long believed lost, along with any 35mm
prints. Happily, this was not the case. Image’s DVD was transferred from the 35mm
negative in the Wade Williams collection. While it unfortunately lacks any extras, the
DVD is refreshingly sharp and detailed, with the best sound of any video version heard
by this reviewer. It is not, however, a perfect print, and some viewers may find the
transfer problematic enough to hesitate to buy it. There are several splicy sequences
where the dialogue is truncated and in one case missing entirely. In one scene, the image
appears to wobble for several seconds due to negative shrinkage or damage. One of the
reel changes is riddled with artifacts, and a vertical line occasionally appears. All that
said, this is still the best version around, and probably the closest we’ll get to
experiencing this classic (outside a rep house revival) the way Ulmer meant it to be in
1945 in its first release.
19
Detour
Release Date: 1945
Roger Ebert / Jun 7, 1998
``Detour'' is a movie so filled with imperfections that it would not earn the director a passing grade
in film school. This movie from Hollywood's poverty row, shot in six days, filled with technical
errors and ham-handed narrative, starring a man who can only pout and a woman who can only
sneer, should have faded from sight soon after it was released in 1945. And yet it lives on,
haunting and creepy, an embodiment of the guilty soul of film noir. No one who has seen it has
easily forgotten it.
``Detour'' tells the story of Al Roberts, played by Tom Neal as a petulant loser with haunted eyes
and a weak mouth, who plays piano in a nightclub and is in love, or says he is, with a singer
named Sue. Their song, significantly, is ``I Can't Believe You Fell in Love With Me.'' He wants to
get married, she leaves for the West Coast, he continues to play piano, but then: ``When this
drunk gave me a ten spot, I couldn't get very excited. What was it? A piece of paper crawling with
germs.''
So he hitchhikes to California, getting a lift in Arizona from a man named Haskell, who tells him
about a woman hitchhiker who left deep scratches on his hand: ``There oughta be a law against
dames with claws.'' Haskell dies of a heart attack. Al buries the body, and takes Haskell's car,
clothes, money and identification; he claims to have no choice, because the police will in any
event assume he murdered the man.
He picks up a hitchhiker named Vera (Ann Savage), who ``looked like she'd just been thrown off
the crummiest freight train in the world.'' She seems to doze, then sits bolt upright and makes a
sudden verbal attack: ``Where'd you leave his body? Where did you leave the owner of this car?
Your name's not Haskell!'' Al realizes he has picked up the dame with the claws.
Haskell had told them both the same unlikely story, about running away from home at 15 after
putting a friend's eye out in a duel (``My dad had a couple of FrancoPrussian sabers'').
In Los Angeles, Vera reads that Haskell's rich father is dying, and dreams up a con for Al to
impersonate the long-lost son and inherit the estate. Waiting for the old man to die, they sit in a
rented room, drinking, playing cards and fighting, until Al finds himself with another corpse on his
hands, once again in a situation that makes him look guilty of murder.
20
Roberts is played by Tom Neal as a sad sack who seems relieved to surrender to Vera (``My
favorite sport is being kept prisoner''). Ann Savage plays Vera as a venomous castrator. Every
line is acid and angry; in an era before four-letter words, she lashes Al with ``sucker'' and ``sap.''
Of course Al could simply escape from her. Sure, she has the key to the room, but any woman
who kills a bottle of booze in a night can be dodged fairly easily. Al stays because he wants to
stay. He wallows in mistreatment.
The movie was shot on the cheap with B-minus actors, but it was directed by a man of qualities:
Edgar G. Ulmer (1900-1972), a refugee from Hitler, who was an assistant to the great Murnau on
``The Last Laugh'' and ``Sunrise,'' and provided one of the links between German Expressionism,
with its exaggerated lighting, camera angles and dramaturgy, and the American film noir, which
added jazz and guilt.
The difference between a crime film and a noir film is that the bad guys in crime movies know
they're bad and want to be, while a noir hero thinks he's a good guy who has been ambushed by
life. Al Roberts complains to us: ``Whichever way you turn, fate sticks out a foot to trip you.'' Most
noir heroes are defeated through their weaknesses. Few have been weaker than Roberts. He
narrates the movie by speaking directly to the audience, mostly in a self-pitying whine. He's
pleading his case, complaining that life hasn't given him a fair break.
Most critics of ``Detour'' have taken Al's story at face value: He was unlucky in love, he lost the
good girl and was savaged by the bad girl, he was an innocent bystander who looked guilty even
to himself. But the critic Andrew Britton argues a more intriguing theory in Ian Cameron's Book of
Film Noir. He emphasizes that the narration is addressed directly to us: We're not hearing what
happened, but what Al Roberts wants us to believe happened. It's a ``spurious but flattering
account,'' he writes, pointing out that Sue the singer hardly fits Al's description of her, that Al is
less in love than in need of her paycheck, and that his cover-up of Haskell's death is a
rationalization for an easy theft. For Britton, Al's version illustrates Freud's theory that traumatic
experiences can be reworked into fantasies that are easier to live with.
Maybe that's why ``Detour'' insinuates itself so well--why audiences respond so strongly. The
jumps and inconsistencies of the narrative are nightmare psychology; Al's not telling a story, but
scurrying through the raw materials, assembling an alibi. Consider the sequence where Al buries
Haskell's body and takes his identity. Immediately after, Al checks into a motel, goes to sleep,
and dreams of the very same events: It's a flashback side-by-side with the events it flashes back
to, as if his dream mind is doing a quick rewrite.
21
Tom Neal makes Al flaccid, passive and self-pitying. That's perfect for the material. (In real life,
Neal was as unlucky as Al; he was convicted of manslaughter in the death of his third wife.) Ann
Savage's work is extraordinary: There is not a single fleeting shred of tenderness or humanity in
her performance as Vera, as she snaps out her pulp dialogue (``What'd you do--kiss him with a
wrench?''). These are two pure types: the submissive man and the female hellion.
The movie's low budget is obvious. During one early scene, Ulmer uses thick fog to substitute for
New York streets. He shoots as many scenes as possible in the front seats of cars, with shabby
rear-projection (the only meal Al and Vera have together is in a drive-in). For a flashback, he
simply zooms in on Neal's face, cuts the lights in the background, and shines a light in his eyes.
Sometimes you can see him stretching to make ends meet. When Al calls long-distance to Sue,
for example, Ulmer pads his running time by editing in stock footage of telephone wires and
switchboard operators, but can't spring for any footage of Sue actually speaking into the phone
(Al does all the talking, and then Ulmer cuts to her lamely holding the receiver to her ear).
And it's strange that the first vehicles to give lifts to the hitchhiking Al seem to have right-hand
drives. He gets in on what would be the American driver's side, and the cars drive off on the
``wrong'' side of the road. Was the movie shot in England? Not at all. My guess is that the
negative was flipped. Ulmer possibly shot the scenes with the cars going from left to right, then
reflected that for a journey from the east to the west coasts, right to left would be more
conventional film grammar. Placing style above common sense is completely consistent with
Ulmer's approach throughout the film.
Do these limitations and stylistic transgressions hurt the film? No. They are the film. ``Detour'' is
an example of material finding the appropriate form. Two bottom-feeders from the swamps of
pulp swim through the murk of low-budget noir and are caught gasping in Ulmer's net. They
deserve one another. At the end, Al is still complaining: ``Fate, for some mysterious force, can put
the finger on you or me, for no good reason at all.'' Oh, it has a reason.
22
He Made His Home on the Dark Side
Kevin Turan
"I was only trying to cheat death. I was only trying to surmount for a little while the
darkness that all my life I surely knew was going to come rolling in on me some day and
obliterate me. I was only trying to stay alive a little brief while longer, after I was already
gone."
Robert Siodmak didn't write that paragraph; it was penned by one of his collaborators, the
great pulp fatalist Cornell Woolrich. But with their bleak and hopeless tone, the words
could have come from a character in his films. For as demonstrated by "Dark Mirrors:
The Films Noirs of Robert Siodmak," a fine new series at the Los Angeles County
Museum of Art, Siodmak was one of the great noir directors, a filmmaker who, for a
period of time at least, never heard of the sunny side of the street.
Siodmak had a long and varied career in several countries, running the gamut from the
celebrated 1929 German silent film "People on Sunday" to Burt Lancaster's euphoric
1952 "The Crimson Pirate." But he is best remembered, when he is remembered at all, for
the great noirs he did in Hollywood, such as "The Killers" and "Criss Cross," films that
led historian Jeanine Basinger to characterize him as "an innovative and cinematic
director [who] became a major influence in American film noir of the 1940s."
During his heyday, Siodmak was often mentioned in the same breath as Alfred
Hitchcock. In the years since, his reputation has gone into a mysterious decline even as
noir in general has prospered. Maybe it's because he worked largely in Europe for the last
20 years of his life; maybe it's his lingering reputation as strictly a director for hire;
maybe it's even the oddness of his name, which one source reports he coped with during
shooting by wearing a jacket that spelled it out phonetically: "SEE-ODD-MACK."
Whatever the reason, the LACMA series, which starts Friday with "Phantom Lady"
(based on a book by Woolrich writing as William Irish), is a rare opportunity to
appreciate the qualities that made Siodmak such a superior noir director, a true creature of
the night.
"Phantom Lady," released in 1944, is a good place to start, especially when it comes to
seeing his gifts as a creator of mood, this time joined to a typically claustrophobic
23
Woolrich plot. It's about a husband who comes home after spending an innocent few
hours with a woman he met in a bar only to discover that his wife has been murdered and
he is the prime suspect. And not only that: When the police investigate his alibi, everyone
denies having seen the woman he insists was with him.
Siodmak infuses this tale with a slightly disturbing air, a sense of menace under the
surface. You can feel it in the overly solicitous, offbeat presence of the investigating
police officers. You can feel it in the film's most celebrated section, a ferocious drum solo
acted by Elisha Cook Jr. that turns into bizarre sexual parody. You feel it most in
Siodmak's feeling for light and dark, most visible in a bravura wordless scene in which a
lone woman stalks a man who has information she needs.
Siodmak got his gift for this kind of lighting, his facility with sinister, unapologetic
shadows, as a result of pre-Hollywood years spent working for the famed UFA studio in
Germany. To see his films is to marvel at the constantly inventive ways he worked with
black and white. It's one of the things that makes "The Spiral Staircase" - - an old-darkhouse movie about a maniac on the loose threatening a lovely but mute servant played by
Dorothy McGuire -- into a classic of the genre and one of the director's favorite films.
Siodmak, who fled twice from the Nazis, first to France and then to the U.S., also found
ways to forge a genuine emotional connection to deeply pessimistic material. The better
the source material, the better his direction was, which is why "The Killers" and "Criss
Cross," both starring Burt Lancaster, are two of the director's best.
"The Killers," which was the actor's debut, had the advantage of an Ernest Hemingway
short story and a laconic script by Anthony Veiller that crackled with tension and
economy. It starts with the death of Swede (Lancaster), a character who is fatalistically
waiting for his own murder, and then uses an inventive series of flashbacks to watch
insurance investigator Edmond O'Brien try to find out why. In addition to showcasing
Lancaster's vulnerable masculinity, "The Killers" earned Siodmak his only Oscar
nomination and features Ava Gardner in what she considered her breakout role.
"Criss Cross," released in 1949, had the virtue of a strong and complex script by Daniel
Fuchs as well as an elaborate robbery plot that predated "The Asphalt Jungle." It featured
Lancaster and Yvonne De Carlo in an ill-fated romance set against a Bunker Hill
backdrop. "Criss Cross'" opens with one of Siodmak's best lighting effects, his two leads
24
caught literally -- and later figuratively -- in the headlights of illicit passion. Fatalist noirs
don't get any better than this.
Siodmak did not always elevate indifferent actors; he was at his best with the best people.
He gets a strong bittersweet performance out of Barbara Stanwyck in "The File on
Thelma Jordon" (1950) and formed the kind of rapport with Charles Laughton that led to
one of the actor's most natural roles in 1944's "The Suspect."
Laughton plays a kindly clerk married to a harridan of a wife whose life changes
radically when he enters into a sweet and innocent relationship with a shopgirl ("Phantom
Lady" veteran Ella Raines). In its story of darkness infiltrating the everyday, it is noir at
its most involving and Siodmak at his most watchable.
Kenneth Turan is a Times film critic. Copyright (c) (2005 Los Angeles Times)
25
The Killers (1946)
By Mark Frankel
As numerous critics have pointed out, film noir is the slipperiest of all film genres.
Unlike, the Western or the gangster film, film noir was not a term or category recognized
by the industry itself. Invented by French critics, the term has spawned endless debates
on what actually constitutes a film noir. Must the film take the criminal's point of view?
Must it have a femme fatale? Need there be excessive violence? Expressionist
photography? A convoluted plot? Desperate characters? A voice-over? Clearly, this is a
genre with more exceptions to the rule than there are rules. While some critics cite John
Huston's The Maltese Falcon (1941) as the first noir, others go back to Joseph von
Sternberg's Underworld(1927). And yet, despite all these disagreements, there are a few
films that every critic and film buff agree are classics in every sense of the word. The
Killers (1946) is one of these.
Directed by Robert Siodmak, The Killers boasts a script by an uncredited John Huston
and a great score by Miklos Rozsa (later mined for the theme for Dragnet). A box-office
smash, the film played round-the-clock at New York's Winter Garden theater, where over
120,000 patrons saw the film in the first two weeks. While Siodmak was widely praised
for his economical direction, most of the press and public focused their attention on the
two new newcomers: Burt Lancaster and Ava Gardner.
Lancaster, a former circus acrobat, was 23 when the picture was made, but his youthful
face allowed him to play a younger and more easily duped man. Paid $20,000 for his
work on The Killers, Lancaster was an overnight star. As the double-crossing and triplecrossed Swede, Lancaster's film debut drew immediate notice. Critic Manny Farber
called him "a fascinating, unstereotyped movie tough" with "a dreamy, peaceful,
introspective air that dissociates him from everything earthly." Farber accurately captures
what is so unique about Lancaster: the combination of American boyishness with an icy,
otherworldy presence. He was the perfect choice to play a man calmly waiting for his
own death. Siodmak was so taken with Lancaster that he cast him in two subsequent
films: the convoluted noir, Criss Cross (1949), thought by many to be Siodmak's best
film, and the swashbuckling epic, The Crimson Pirate (1952).
Ava Gardner had been under contract with MGM since 1941, and though she had been
married to Mickey Rooney, one of the studio's biggest stars (1942-1943), she had yet to
appear in any memorable roles. But independent producer Mark Hellinger had been
impressed by Gardner's performance in Whistle Stop (1946) and wanted her to play the
voluptuous and deceitful Kitty Collins. After some delays, MGM agreed to loan Gardner
(married now to bandleader Artie Shaw) out to Universal and Gardner always cited
Hellinger's interest in her as a turning point in her career: "Mark saw me as an actress, not
as a sexpot. . . . he gave me a feeling of responsibility about being a movie star that I'd
never for a moment felt before." As with Lancaster, Gardner's performance was widely
acclaimed and she won Look magazine's award for the best newcomer of the year.
The Killers was loosely based on Ernest Hemingway's 1927 short story of the same
name. In the story, neither the killing nor the motives behind it are explained. The story
26
ends with the Swede stoically waiting for the killers to find him, and the narrator, Nick
Adams (played by Phil Brown), being admonished that it was "better not to think about
it." According to Hemingway, "The story was about coming back from the war, but there
was no mention of the war in it." Hemingway had refused all of Hollywood's earlier
offers to secure the rights to his work, but because Hellinger was what Hemingway
described as an "old friend," the deal was done, though Hemingway evidently signed on
without knowledge of how drastically his story would be changed. While the script opens
with a faithful rendition of Hemingway's story, it proceeds to "think about it" for another
90 minutes, even adding two new major characters: the insurance investigator Riordan
(Edmond O'Brien) and the crime boss Colfax (Albert Dekker).
Hemingway actually offered some script advice to Huston and the two hunters became
life-long friends. The writer was also taken with Ava Gardner and they too remained
close throughout their lives. Gardner went on to appear in two other Hemingway
adaptations: The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1952) and The Sun Also Rises (1957). According
to Gardner, Hemingway "always considered The Killers the best of all the many films
his work inspired, and after Mark Hellinger, the producer, gave him a print of his own,
he'd invariably pull out a projector and show it to guests at Finca Vigia, his place in
Cuba. Of course, he'd usually fall asleep after the first reel, which made sense, because
the first reel was the only part of the movie that was really taken from what he wrote."
The film also established Siodmak as an A-list director, a reputation which was
confirmed by his next two pictures: The Spiral Staircase (1946) and The Dark Mirror
(1946). Born in the U.S. while his German parents were here for a visit, Siodmak was
raised in Germany and found work at the renowned UFA studios, alongside Billy Wilder,
Fritz Lang, and Otto Preminger. Siodmak came to Hollywood in 1940 and brought to his
pictures the expressionist techniques he had learned at UFA. He so well translated these
techniques to the American pictures that critic Andrew Sarris once noted that Siodmak's
Hollywood films are "more Germanic than his German ones." The Killers is a classic
example of Siodmak's preference for expressionist lighting and deep-focus photography.
Interestingly, Don Siegel was originally considered to direct the picture, and while
Hellinger went with Siodmak, Siegel did get his chance, though not until 1964 when he
made a version for television starring Angie Dickinson, Lee Marvin and Ronald Reagan
in a villainous role. Even acclaimed Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky adapted the
Hemingway short story into a short movie he made during his film school days.
27