Dream-making
HUM 3280: Narrative Film
Fall 2014
Dr. Perdigao
September 22-24, 2014
Origins
• Dashiell Hammett novel The Maltese Falcon (1930), serialized pulp fiction
• Hammett was a Pinkerton detective; granddaughter describes code of being a
detective, creating barrier between self and rest of the world, remaining secret,
anonymous, invulnerable
• After contracting tuberculosis, left Pinkerton, started writing short stories, pulp
fiction
• Black Mask magazine
• Started writing about Sam Spade in 1928, before Depression
• Ideas changing during the time
• “avaricious aspirations”—hunt for wealth not what one thought it would be
• Turning detective story into “literature”
“Film[ing] the book”
• Warner Bros. bought film rights
• 1931 film version, pre-Code The Maltese Falcon, originally titled “Woman of
the World,” emphasis on sex, sexuality
• Hal Wallis wanted to remake the film
• 1936 Satan Met a Lady with Bette Davis as femme fatale, falcon as ram’s horn
• Inspiration from Welles’ Citizen Kane
• Director John Huston said he would “shoot the book”
• Short shooting schedule, small budget, all interior shots
• Alterations to satisfy Code
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John Huston
The Maltese Falcon (1941)
Key Largo (1948)
The Treasure of Sierra Madre (1948)
The African Queen (1951)
The Red Badge of Courage (1951)
Moulin Rouge (1952)
Moby Dick (1956)
Casino Royale (1967)
Wise Blood (1979)
Annie (1982)
Prizzi’s Honor (1985)
The Dead (1987)
Casting
• Samuel Spade: Humphrey Bogart
• Miles Archer: Jerome Cowman
• Ruth Wonderly/Brigid O’Shaughnessy: Mary Astor, scandal in personal life,
“parody of her life in the press” as Black Widow, femme fatale
• Joel Cairo: Peter Lorre
• Kasper Gutman: Sydney Greenstreet
• Effie Perine: Lee Patrick
Defining Genres
• As first great detective film
• Breaking stereotypes—no good guys, girls
• Matching style and content
• Film noir
• Over-exposure, smoky atmospheres
• Name from French film critics but style from German expressionist
filmmaking technique
• Light and shadow, dramatic camera angles, generally pessimistic world views
• Low camera angle, asymmetrical composition
• Effects of light slashing through scenes, on bodies
Crises
• Female workforce in US in early 1940s rose from 11 million to 20 million
during the war years (Avila 223)
• Despite celebration of “Rosie the Riveter,” animosity toward women
abandoning traditional social roles (Avila 223)
• Film noir’s representation of “new breed of public women—sassy, conniving,
and out to undermine masculine authority through her many misdeeds” (Avila
223)
• “crisis of white masculinity at the outset of the postwar period” (225)
• “destabilization of the white male identity within the topsy-turvy world of the
modern city” (225), anti-hero
• Avila, Eric. “Film Noir, Disneyland, and the Cold War (Sub)Urban
Imaginary.” Hollywood’s America: Twentieth-Century America
Through Film. 4th ed. Ed. Steven Mintz and Randy W. Roberts.
Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. 219-233. print.
Defining Genres
• Drawing from characters and plots of gangster movies and hard-boiled
detective fiction of the 1930s (Mintz and Roberts 175)
• Gangster films set in the 1930s, Prohibition as context (Corrigan and White
356)
• Protagonist representing the law or more ambiguous version of it (176)
• Film noir as subgenre of crime films
• Darkness and corruption in world, characters—no resolution (176)
• Paranoia and entrapment (Dick 147)
• Canted shots to show world changed, shrouded in fog (147)
• Stock characters: private detectives, insurance salesmen, prostitutes,
murderous housewives, two-time losers, ex-convicts, and gamblers (147-148)
Defining Genres
• Femme fatale and male lover
• Death in ending, of either character (Dick 148)
• Blonde, wearing white
• Idea of fate
• Voiceover narration and flashbacks, flashbacks within flashbacks (149)
• Plots: whodunit, man/woman in hiding, old dark house, cover-up, murderous
couple, murderous lover (149)
Defining Genres
• European émigrés fleeing Hitler’s Germany—wartime necessity with limited
availability of bright lighting and effects—looming shadows, stark contrasts of
darkness and light (Mintz and Roberts 175)
• Films and directors “tap[ping] into broader cultural concerns” (175), more
realistic than Depression-era films
• Shift from or rejection of films that “sought to raise morale and reinforce
traditional values,” moving toward representation of gritty view of society in
its realism (175)
• Influenced by Freudian psychoanalysis, psychological sophistication in genre
(177)
• Film noir giving “tangible expression to the psychic confusion of a nation that
had won the largest war in history but faced even greater uncertainties in
peacetime” (Mintz and Roberts 22-23)
“I’m not heroic”
• “World War II had produced far-reaching changes in American life: it
accelerated the mobility of the population, raised living standards, and
profoundly altered race relations and the role of women. Film noir
metaphorically addressed many anxieties and apprehensions: the
disorientation of returning GIs, fear of nuclear weapons, paranoia generated by
the early Cold War, and anxieties aroused by the changing role of women.
Characterized by sexual insecurity, aberrant psychology, and nightmarish
camera work, film noir depicted a world of threatening shadows and
ambiguities—a world of obsession, alienation, corruption, deceit, blurred
identity, paranoia, dementia, weak men, cold-blooded femmes fatales, and,
inevitably, murder. Its style consisted of looming close-ups, oblique camera
angles, and crowded compositions that produced a sense of entrapment. The
films’ narratives were rarely straightforward; they contained frequent
flashbacks and voiceovers” (Mintz and Roberts 23).
• “We often think of the postwar era as a time of optimism fueled by economic
prosperity, but film noir reveals the underside of the era: its anxieties, its
paranoia, and, in the wake of the Holocaust, the concentration camp, and the
dawn of the atomic age, its doubts about the essential goodness of human
nature” (Mintz and Roberts 177).
Breaking Shots
• Camera angles similar to those in Citizen Kane
• MacGuffin—use of prop, feeding characters’ greed and giving existential
weight to tale—Hammett’s “fatalistic metaphor of the futile pursuit of wealth”
• Rosebud’s significance
• http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20010513/REVIE
WS08/105130301/1023
• Upsetting conventions
Framing
• Role of the detective
Sherlock, Jr.?
• Masculinity and femininity
• Authority
• Corruption
• Loyalty, truth, integrity (Corrigan and White 176)
• “The stuff that dreams are made of”
• “Huh?”