James Naremore - More Than Night - Film Noir in Its Contexts

Authors like Conrad and James, however, did not seem to be writing for the same public as Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers. (James described "The Turn of the Screw" as "an amusette to catch those not easily caught . . . the jaded, the disillusioned, the fastidious.") 11In the English language during the first three decades of the century, crime novels were usually conservative, supporting the prewar culture that modernism regarded as bankrupt. The Christie-style detective story, one of the most successful creations of modern publishing, seemed especially retrograde when viewed from a modernist perspective and was sometimes criticized for appealing to a genteel audience of females and academics. 12Two symptomatic developments of modernity enabled a countertradition to emerge: first was the rapid growth in the 1920s of sensationalized American pulp fiction addressed chiefly to working-class men; second was the development in the late 1920s and 1930s of literary novels about crime, published in hardback and supported by middle-class book clubs. In these venues, a second-generation modernism interacted with mass culture and eventually made its way into the respectable realms of New York publishing, Broadway theater, and Hollywood.

In one sense, the movies had always been interested in the new wave of crime writers; of the four American thrillers initially described as noir by the French, two were remakes. Unlike their predecessors, however, all four of the 1940s pictures were A-budget productions, bearing the marks of literary sophistication, attracting favorable commentary from urban reviewers, and competing for Academy Awards. Likewise, Hollywood was never unaware of vanguard European cinema. The most obvious sign of "artistic-ness" in America during the interwar years was a slightly UFA-esque or expressionist style, which gained favor soon after the New York premiere of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari in 1920. 14Hence the most critically respected film produced in Hollywood prior to 1941 was F. W. Murnau's Sunrise, and the most respected film after 1941 was Orson Welles's Citizen Kane. What seemed different about Kane was its synthesis of cinematic and literary modernism: it showed the influence of expressionism, surrealism, and Soviet montage, but at the same time it reminded critics of Heart of Darkness, The Great Gatsby, and the USA trilogy. (On top of everything, it made use of an irreverent, somewhat wisecracking dialogue that was associated with Herman Mankiewicz, Ben Hecht, Charles MacArthur, and the "newspaper wits" who had worshipped H. L. Mencken.)

Welles was only the most spectacular manifestation of a growing acceptance of modernist values throughout the culture. Eric Hobsbawm observes that before 1914, the philistine public jeered at postimpressionism, Igor Stravinsky, and the Armory Show; afterward, that same public usually fell silent before artistic "declarations of independence from a discredited pre-war world." 15Such art, Hobsbawm remarks, was not necessarily what most people actually enjoyed; it nevertheless managed to coexist with "the classic and the fashionable," becoming "proof of a serious interest in cultural matters" (181). Meanwhile, from the late 1920s until the 1940s, under the shadow of depression, fascist dictators, and European war, many artists turned to socialism and were increasingly attracted to popular forms and realist narratives (a trend encouraged by the Popular Front, which is discussed more fully in the next chapter). Given this tendency, plus the culture industry's appetite for talent, traces of modernism were increasingly absorbed into everyday life.

In the process of becoming normalized, modern art inevitably lost some of its critical edge. Its early manifestations were shocking and willfully difficult, resisting the marketplace and often treating the audience as what Baudelaire and Eliot called a "hypocrite lecteur." By midcentury, nearly all the modernist leopards were safely ensconced in the temple, and serious art was expected to create an atmosphere of toughness, darkness, and alienation. 16There is a sense, however, in which modernism and mass culture had never been quite so far apart as we imagine. Fredric Jameson, who defines modernist art in terms of its resistance to the culture industry, notes that there were also "profound structural relations" between modernism and the new economy. 17A text like Heart of Darkness, for example, is both an experimental narrative and an adventure story derived from the "sensation" literature of the mid-Victorian period; as, Jameson has remarked, Conrad's work in general reveals "the emergence not merely of what will be contemporary modernism . . . but also, still tangibly juxtaposed with it, what will variously be called popular culture or mass culture, the commercialized discourse of what, in late capitalism, is often described as media society."

The contradiction Jameson observes is especially apparent in the Hollywood film noir, which is both a type of modernism and a type of commercial melodrama. I refer not only to the melos of the Hollywood style, but alsomore importantlyto the "moral occult" of tales in which the forces of good battle violently against the forces of evil. Especially in Hollywood, melodrama is a conservative or sentimental form associated with stalwart heroes, unscrupulous villains, vivid action, and last-minute rescues. Certain attributes of modernism (its links to high culture, its formal and moral complexity, its disdain for classical narrative, its frankness about sex, and its increasingly critical stance toward America) threatened this kind of film and were never totally absorbed into the mainstream. High modernism and Hollywood "blood melodrama" nevertheless formed a symbiotic relationship that generated an intriguing artistic tension.

By way of illustrating this phenomenon, let me now turn to three case studies that provide evidence of a link between modernism and mass culture on the grounds of noir narrative. The first involves Dashicll Hammett, who is widely recognized as the founder of the hard-boiled detective novel; the second deals with Graham Greene, who, according to Borde and Chaumeton, "played a role in the birth of film noir (This Gun for Hire), in the acclimatization of noir in England (Brighton Rock), and in its international development (The Third Man )" (18); and the third centers on the Billy Wilder-Raymond Chandler adaptation of James M. Cain's Double Indemnity, which is arguably the definitive film noir of the 1940s. Each of the writers I discuss brought an intense awareness of modernist literature to the making of criminal adventures, and each gained money and fame from the Hollywood studios. Taken together, their work demonstrates how a certain kind of "art thriller" could be critical of the institutions that supported it; but at the same time, their careers reveal that the movie studios needed to lighten or ameliorate the darkness of modernism and mute its intensity.

The earliest and most radical of the popular modernists was Dashiell Hammett, a working-class author who began his career in the pulps and soon crossed over to the prestigious firm of Alfred A. Knopf. During his most productive years, Hammett managed to reconcile some of the deepest contradictions in his culture: he was an ex-Pinkerton detective who looked like an aristocrat, and a writer of pulp mysteries who was treated as an authority on language by none other than Gertrude Stein. The most important innovator of popular detective fiction since Edgar Allan Poe, he was also at various points an advertising man, a Hollywood hack, a drinking partner of William Faulkner, a writer for a comic strip, and a committed Marxist. 19

Hammett's early stories and novels were published by a factory of cheap, all-fiction periodicals that provided melodramatic fantasy to an audience of millions in the days before paperbacks and television. Historian Lee Server remarks that in their heydaychiefly the 1920s and 1930sthe pulps were "held accountable to few standards of logic, believability, or 'good taste.'" Whenever they exhausted the possibilities of standard characters or genres (science fiction, western, spy, South Seas adventure, or modern romance), they spawned new formulas and strange hybrids (sword-and-sorcery, "weird menace," gangster, superhero, or masked avenger). The detective story was among the most popular of the pulp commodities, and it came in every variety: "spicy" detective, cowboy detective, occult detective, and so on. Like all the other genres, it was packaged behind lurid, brightly hued covers depicting half-dressed women and men frozen in violent tableaux.