Robert Siodmak's The Killers (1946)

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Rudolph Maté’s D.O.A. (1950)

Alain Silver and Elizabeth Ward, in their book Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference to the American Style, call Rudolph Maté’s D.O.A., which stands for “dead on arrival,” an “unusually cynical film.” That’s quite an eye-opening statement considering that one of the defining characteristics of classic film noir is its cynicism. That’s like saying SPA is an unusually educational place to go to school. It seems to us that when you tell stories about characters who are either obsessed or, more likely, alienated and thrown into a fatalistic, irrational world where the primary protagonist is not so much another person as the malevolent force of a corrupt society, and they end up dead, then cynicism is a natural result.

D.O.A. has a great plot. It’s about a certified public accountant named Frank Bigelow who goes on vacation to San Francisco. Feeling sick, he consults a doctor and learns that he has been poisoned (radiation!) and has only a day or two to live. He begins to search for his killers.

So here we have another film noir protagonist who will be destroyed by forces outside his control, joining doomed men such as Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) in Double Indemnity, Frank Chambers (John Garfield) in The Postman Always Rings Twice, Dix Handley (Sterling Hayden) in Asphalt Jungle, and Jeff (Robert Mitchum) in Out of the Past. Each reaches a point in the story when he accepts what will happen, embraces the inevitably of his destruction. Silver and Ward suggest “this resignation to being annihilated by a relentless, deterministic abstraction, is the only, bitter solace that the noir vision permits.” If that’s not cynical, then we don’t know what is.

But here’s the point. Cynicism is not a pleasant or respected outlook on life. It involves pessimism, disdain, disparagement, distrust, contempt, and a whole host of other rather ugly words that fly in the face of what we believe to be the American spirit. Yet film noir was and is again a relatively popular genre. (Heck, D.O.A. itself was remade in 1988 starring film’s paragon of pert perkiness, Meg Ryan.) So what’s our obsession with film noir?

Perhaps it is because Americans see themselves as an optimistic, Fate beating, can-do people that we are fascinated by the seamy underbelly of it all, like children, grossed-out but drawn to and fascinated enough to gather around and poke at fresh roadkill. Maybe film noir is another form of thriller, where the audience can sit for a couple hours, watch a life transformed by horror, feel the frisson of “there but for the grace of god…” and then walk blithely out of the theater, into the sun and home to dinner.

Film noir says we are all corrupt in some way, all vulnerable to Fate, all out of sync with society, all at sea in an existential world, all involved with people whose motives we don’t really understand and really shouldn’t trust. Do we believe it? Maybe the only thing that protects us from such a reality, and the cynicism that would result, is that we don’t, that we trust in good, in hope, in honesty, and the benevolence of our fellow men. Maybe, if we believe that hard enough, it’ll be true. And maybe Frank Bigelow will find his killer, convince him to reveal some unexpected antidote, and survive his personal nightmare. Check yourself; see how many times you think such a thing will happen as you watch D.O.A. Then you’ll know if you’re a cynic.

R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser

John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle (1950)

We’ve said before that critics claim that film noir is not a genre, but a style – that you can have a noir-ist western or a noir-ist science fiction film or a noir-ist crime drama, but that a film is rarely just a film noir. Tonight’s movie is a good example of this. John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle makes most critics’ top 10 film noir lists because it has so many of the conventions we’ve come to associate with the style – a dark, urban filmscape, a corrupt, amoral world, a deep feeling of paranoia and alienation, a pervasive sense of guilt and despair. You can see this (or feel it because it is as much a mood as a visual style) from the very beginning of the film.

Foster Hirsch writes in his book, Film Noir: The Dark Side of the Screen, that “The Asphalt Jungle begins with shots of empty New York streets, with scattered newspapers blown about by the wind the only signs of movement in the early morning gloom. The film’s kaleidoscope of the city at dawn is beautiful but threatening, as if New York is ready to explode; the city’s awesome canyons seem indifferent to human concerns.” Well, you might ask, does a city in any movie ever care about the humans that live in it?

Sure. Watch Peter Weir’s The Truman Show, where all the buildings seem friendly, built to happily serve and contain the needs and desires of the protagonist. (The irony in Truman is that they are built to make Truman happy, but that’s another story.) Or check out Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, where the city in which Sam Lowry lives and works seems to take a malicious glee in making his life difficult. It may not be friendly, but it has personality. The point is that film-makers endow settings with character just as much as they do the people in a movie. And in film noir the depiction of the city sets a definite mood.

So, The Asphalt Jungle is noirist, but a noirist what? The genre here is heist. If you’ve seen Spike Lee’s Inside Man or The Thomas Crown Affair or The Italian Job or Ocean’s Eleven, you’ve seen a heist film. Essentially, the plot revolves around the elaborate plan and execution of a robbery. We would further separate the heist film from the con film in that the robbery involves defeating a challenging technical anti-theft apparatus, like a impenetrable bank vault with a flawless time-lock or an alarm system with random roving electric eyes, whereas a con film focuses on an elaborate deception that results in people willingly parting with something valuable (think The Sting or The Grifters).

In The Asphalt Jungle, a group of criminals led by a “mastermind” plan a jewelry heist. One of the conventions of a heist film is that the robbery itself comprises a significant part of the movie – here it is 11 minutes long. Another important convention is the complication. Few heists go according to plan, and often participants plan to double-cross one another or something causes the plan to unravel. This is one of the joys of the genre – what does the unraveling reveal in terms of character? What storytelling trick will surprise us with unexpected exposition or resolution? What suspense will result from improvising on a meticulously pre-conceived plan?

Heist movies also offer one of film’s most delicious ironies – a plot that often makes you root for the criminal element of society. This is especially hard in a noir film where people aren’t especially likable, but it is an interesting element in human nature that we tend to root for humans to succeed at difficult tasks, even if the task in question is a robbery. Why do you suppose that is? Anyway, we hope you enjoy tonight’s film noir heist film as both a remarkable example of a genre and a style

R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser

Howard Hawk’s The Big Sleep (1946)

One of the most intriguing aspects of film noir is its use of a strong narrator. Voice-overs and first-person, or restricted, narration are used with both style and consistency in the genre, so much so that we tend to associate those characteristics with film noir and to describe other movies that use the technique as “noirist.” (There is even one film, Lady in the Lake, filmed entirely from the main character’s point of view; that is, all the camera shots are all restricted to what he sees, as if the camera were his head, and the only time you see the character himself is when he’s looking in a mirror.)

Let’s hit the quote machine: “What is significant about The Big Sleep in terms of narration is that is strictly adheres to restricted narration – that is, the camera is always tied to Marlowe (Humphrey Bogart’s character), so the spectator finds out what happens in the narrative when Marlowe does. For example, while waiting outside Geiger’s house, Marlowe sees a car pull up outside. He hides in his car so as not to be seen. Interestingly, the camera remains outside the car and shows a figure get of the other car and enter Geiger’s house. Yet, the figure remains in shadow. So, even though the camera does not directly imitate Marlowe’s point of view as he hides in the car, it does not privilege the spectator either” (Buckland, Film Studies, 43-44).

So what does this limited perspective do for our understanding of this film and of the film noir genre? Well, for The Big Sleep, we get a simple connection. Based on a Raymond Chandler novel, The Big Sleep is a detective story, a genre that likes to unravel mysteries one clue at a time. Limiting our experience to what Marlowe learns as he learns it both maintains the suspense and allows us to enjoy the step-by-step solving of an intricate puzzle.

Beyond this, we may conclude that film noir employs this technique consistently because it tends to depict an urban world in which a single character struggles (usually unsuccessfully) against the forces of corruption, temptation, and chaos. A first-person narration enhances this focus. In addition, film noir frequently delves into the psychological effects or torment of its characters, and this is more cathartic for the audience if we are closer to the character.

This is not to say that film noir avoids third-person or omniscient narration. Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil, regarded as the final film noir of its period, employs third-person very effectively, from its opening scene where we watch someone put a bomb in the rear of a car, then follow the car as it works its way slowly through a Mexican border town, then shift to follow the two protagonists as they take an evening stroll. The third-person here allows us to meet characters (exposition) and regard the situation (with its rampant hypocrisy and corruption) objectively and a kind of distanced horror.

But The Big Sleep loves its protagonists. And with Bogart we’re unlikely to get a character who suffers because of the disillusionment of the post-war generation. He may be cynical (world-wise). He may be imperfect (human). He may struggle with a world going to hell. But Bogart usually, as you’ll see here, remains above the morass. The film’s restricted narration makes us his sidekick. It’s a great place to be.

R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser

Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944)

So, what the heck is feelm no-wahr, anyway? Tonight’s screening of Double Indemnity inaugurates our year long introduction to both classic and neo- noir. We’ll be showing seven films, and you get to decide what the heck noir really is. Until then, here’s a brief discussion of the matter.

First, the term film noir is French for “black film,” which is kind of ironic because in many ways film noir is a unique American style. Second, film noir isn’t really a genre of film, like westerns or romantic comedies or action flicks; rather, it’s a mood, a style, applied to a variety of film types. But even this is a bit misleading because it suggests that the classic films we now describe as examples of noir, films like The Maltese Falcon, Shadow of a Doubt, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Gun Crazy, Out of the Past, The Big Clock, The Set-Up, D.O.A., Asphalt Jungle, and Touch of Evil, were made by people who knew they were making noirist films. And they didn’t. The term itself didn’t even come around until 1946, and while some critics date the advent of the style from the end of WWII, others see it beginning as early as 1927.

Instead, these filmmakers simply captured a mood, a feeling that was in the air. It’s an urban feeling, a paranoid feeling, a feeling that everything has gone to hell, no one’s on the level, and everyone is guilty. It’s a world of moral ambiguity, and according to film archivist Hayden Guest, the hero, if one exists, “is not necessarily grounded in any sense of right or wrong.”

There’s also a look to film noir, and you’ll see it in Double Indemnity. Darkness, filtered light sliding through blinds, creating odd angles of light and dark across rooms and characters, trenchcoats, cigarettes, rain slickened streets. Really, though, the best way to get to know and to enjoy this particular style of film is to watch some. When we get to neo-noir, noirist films made after 1979, we’ll see the style make a serious comeback until we can almost find elements in every movie currently coming out of Hollywood, if not other countries. (The current cinema of South Korea, stuff like Oldboy and Shiri, is seriously noirist.)

In the meantime, you’re sitting in front of Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (from a novel by edgy crime writer James M. Cain and a screenplay by hardboiled fiction writer Raymond Chandler) with Fred MacMurray and Barabara Stanwyck. Stanwyck is the classic femme fatale (“dangerous woman”), another frequent convention of noir. Watch her twist MacMurray’s character around, until he has agreed to help her murder her husband.

In the end, and we won’t give it away here, MacMurray’s character Walter Neff, is a great example of crime writer James Ellroy’s definition of film noir: “A righteous, generically American film movement that went from 1945 to 1958, and exposited one great theme and that theme is: you’re f---ed.”

R. Findlay
Film Club Adviser