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

Like a good many classic films noirs, The Manchurian Candidate subscribes to Sigmund Freud's theory that male homosexuality is caused by a son's unresolved romantic attachment to his motherindeed, it alludes to Freud and to Greek drama during an extended flashback sequence, when the brainwashed son tries to explain his evil mother to Frank Sinatra. This "tragic" determinism is intensified through the casting and acting: the maternal "Red Queen" is played by Angela Lansbury, whose performance skillfully evokes both a vamp and a matron; and the unwilling assassin is played by Laurence Harvey, who exaggerates his prissy, slightly effeminate mannerisms, as if to suggest a young man struggling to maintain a hold on his sexuality. Michael Rogin observes that the Lansbury character is a neat reversal of the sweet mother played by Helen Hayes in Leo McCarey's right-wing spy melodrama of the 1950s, My Son John. (She also has something in common with Norman Bates's mom in Psycho .) Notice, however, that although The Manchurian Candidate creates a maternal dominatrix who threatens to turn her son into a sissy, it also reasserts the values of domestic femininity and maternal care, chiefly in the form of two "good" women. Janet Leigh nurses Sinatra's wounds after a karate fight and cooks him a spaghetti dinner. Leslie Parrish (who looks rather like a young version of Lansbury) gives Laurence Harvey first aid for snake bite and seems to like it when he slaps her on the bottom and tells her to "act like a housewife." Throughout the film, as Rogin notes, the evil, politically ambitious mother functions as little more than a scapegoat to avoid "having actually to come to terms with politics," and the ultimate irony is that in reviving a cold-war mythology, the picture foreshadows the actual Kennedy assassination, which "brought the cold-war consensus to an end'' (17).

The mother's embrace in The Manchurian Candidate (1962).

The ironies in The Manchurian Candidate are in fact so numerous that one cannot be sure whether Frankenheimer and his collaborators were purveying old myths or making fun of them. The picture is remarkably witty and inventive at the level of cinematic technique, exhibiting a rare self-consciousness about its own methods. A dream sequence near the beginning is far more interesting than the equivalent "surrealist" nightmare in a film like Murder, My Sweet, because it so cleverly subverts the continuity principle of Hollywood editing and camera movement. In a later sequence, Frankenheimer depicts a television news conference that seems as dynamic and crazy in its own way as the courtroom scenes in Welles's Lady from Shanghai. Surrounded by reporters, the bumbling right-wing senator causes a near riot by claiming to have in his hand a list of 207 "card-carrying" communists who work for the Defense Department. As pandemonium breaks out, and as the senator keeps changing the number of communists on his list, Frankenheimer uses the monitors arranged around the room to create split-screen effects, counterpointing "behind the scenes" activity with ''managed" images. Eventually, the dizzy crowd, the ubiquitous TV monitors, the wide-angle movie photography, and the discontinuous editing create such a disorienting spectacle that nobody can tell image from reality or truth from fiction.

In the last analysis, Frankenheimer's bewildering liberalism may amount to little more than what Jonathan Rosenbaum describes as "a kind of shadow play, manipulated like the Hollywood clichés for the sake of jazzy effects." One benefit of this procedure, however, is that the film exposes "the deceptive mechanisms of political and Hollywood mythmaking in general" (Placing Movies, 120). Rosenbaum correctly observes that whatever its politics, The Manchurian Candidate can be bracketed formally with a group of truly adventurous narratives operating on the margins of film noiramong them, pictures such as Citizen Kane, Breathless, and La Jetée (1963). It also seems to predict a new stage in the history of mainstream crime and espionage movies, brought on in part by the assassination of Kennedy, the Vietnam War, the advent of postmodern visual technologies, and the increasing liberalization of censorship regulations. Film noir had certainly not outlived its usefulness, but its "historical" phase was ending; it was now undergoing a sea change, or perhaps a birth into Hollywood's cultural memory.

Murder stories are easy to produce, and a medium-budget, occasionally cheesy-looking thriller like Pushover (1954) is almost as fascinating to watch as Double Indemnity or Rear Window, two expensive films with which it has a good deal in common. But as Andrew Sarris suggests, there are also some important cultural reasons for the large number of "fondly remembered B pictures" in the noir category. The very idea of film noir took root in America retrospectively, during the heyday of urban art theaters, when Bogart thrillers were especially popular in revival houses and college film societies, and when advanced film criticism took its inspiration from Cahiers du cinéma and the French New Wave. Key examples of classic film noir (often looking cheaper than they actually were, merely by virtue of being old and in black and white) were exhibited late at night in funky venues like the Charles Theater in New York, which also featured 16 mm experiments by the local avant-gardeor in the espresso-bar surroundings of the Surf Theater in San Francisco, which later became a setting for Woody Allen's Play It Again, Sam (1972). Critical commentary circulated through alternative newspapers and campus film journals, and from the beginning, aficionados lavished special praise on B movies or slightly pulpish genre films. It was hip, for instance, to prefer Murder Is My Beat over The Maltese Falcon, or to argue that Touch of Evil was a better movie than Citizen Kane.

Jean-Luc Godard employed a similar strategy: Breathless was dedicated to Monogram Pictures, and it deliberately cultivated the grainy, improvised look of a low-budget production. Like much of the vanguard photography and painting of the previous decade, it was visibly "imperfect," evoking a jazzy, existential "spirit of poverty" (the phrase is Jacques Rivette's), which could be set off against Hollywood's glossy illusionism. 1Its allusions to down-market thrillers were particularly appealing to cosmopolitan audiences: after all, Hollywood films of the type had been staged on the streets where the bohemian intelligentsia lived, and they were usually photographed in a style that blended perfectly with the ambience of the commercially modest yet artistically sophisticated revival theaters. Hard-boiled pictures like Monogram's Decoy (1946) and PRC's Railroaded (1947) still play superbly well at nighttime screenings in museums or art houses, giving a hallucinated poetry to life in the "naked city."

Both Godard and the 1960s revival theaters were symptoms of an emerging postmodernism. To the new generation, the highest sophistication usually involved what Susan Sontag called an "erotics," or an appreciation of surfacesan intellectual hedonism that dissolved the distinction between highbrow and lowbrow. In a somewhat different way, Andrew Sarris contributed to this phenomenon. As he wryly observes, the auteurists were "vulnerable to the charge of preferring trash to art," because they took iconoclastic pleasure out of announcing that a film like Kiss Me Deadly was superior to Marty; in effect, they were employing "the classic highbrow gambit of elevating lowbrow art at the expense of middle-brow art." 3But the film critic who most exemplified the new spirit was Manny Farber, an early advocate of "perceptive trash" (Sams 24), who brought a painter's sensibility to bear on male action directors. Farber had a great deal in common with Godard, and for many years he had been writing in The Nation about unheralded pictures from the middle or lower levels of Hollywood. As we have seen, he never used the term film noir, but he helped to establish a noir canon through his vivid, sharply intelligent discussion of Orson Welles, Anthony Mann, and John Farrow. He also greatly increased critical interest in what he called "termite art'' as opposed to "white elephant art." In his famous 1957 essay "Underground Cinema," he makes the ordinary run of genre movies, many of which were thrillers, seem like a kind of primitive American poetry: