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

They are faceless movies, taken from a type of half-polished trash writing, that scorns like a mixture of Burt L. Standish, Max Brand, and Raymond Chandler. Tight, cliche-ridden melodramas about stock musclemen. A stool pigeon gurgling with scissors in his back; a fat, nasal-voiced gang leader; escaped convicts; . . . exhausted GT's; an incompetent kid hoodlum hiding out in an Fast Side building; . . . an underpaid shames signing tip to stop the blackmailing of a tough millionaire's depraved thumb-sucking daughter. 4

Farber's iconoclasm lay in the fact that he used the idea of the underground, long associated with outlaws and bohemian artists, on behalf of old-fashioned products of the culture industry. Such movies, he argued, have their "natural home in caves: the murky, congested theaters, looking like glorified tattoo parlors on the outside and located near bus terminals in big cities" (15). Offering a powerful antidote to the "banality and pomp" of Radio City Music Hall, they are best viewed in "outcast theatersthe Lyric on Times Square, the Liberty on Market Street, the Victory on Chestnut,'' where the "cutthroat atmosphere" resembles the action on the screen, and where "the broken seats are only a minor annoyance in the unpredictable terrain" (18).

Ironically, the original French discussion of American film noir, which had helped to validate many of the pictures Farber admired, was stimulated not by fleabag productions, but by a series of major-studio releases that attracted widespread critical attention. Despite their sordid subject matter, prototypical films noirs such as The Maltese Falcon and Laura were highly publicized events and involved well-paid stars and directors. Howard Hawks, one of Farber's favorite "underground" artists, was in fact one of the most prosperous and respected producer-directors in Hollywood, responsible for a string of box-office hits featuring the leading personalities of his day. What qualified Hawks for membership in Farber's "trash" pantheon was not his working conditions, budgets, or exhibition venues, but his subject matter and style. Hawks specialized in unpretentious action pictures rather than well-made literary adaptations or liberal social-problem pictures; his skillful treatment of ostensibly lowbrow material made him attractive to Farber, who tended to write about some types of film as if they were always as cheap as the worlds they depicted. In other words, like many critics of the French New Wave, Farher blurred the distinction between economics and artistic politics. Ultimately, his notion of the "underground" had less to do with material poverty than with a supposed lack of cultural capital.

This being said, it must also be emphasized that films noirs of the 1940s were symptomatic of a wartime economy and that many of their characteristic visual effects could be immediately duplicated at every level of the industry.

Thus a kind of generic cinema grew up around the "original" films and remained in force until the mid 1950s. 5Roy William Neill's modestly budgeted Black Angel (1946), based on a Cornell Woolrich novel, was almost as enjoyable as Hawks's high-profile adaptation of Raymond Chandler's Big Sleep, which was released to great fanfare in the same year. William Castle's even cheaper Monogram thriller, When Strangers Marry (1944), drew extravagant praise from both Farber and Orson Welles, who admired its innovative use of sparse resourcesas when Castle illuminated Kim Hunter's drab hotel room with nothing more than a pulsing neon light from outside the window. (Castle may not have invented this device, but his use of it anticipates many films with bigger budgets, including Michael Curtiz's Unsuspected [1947] and Welles's Touch of Evil) Along similar lines, Val Lewton's horror films, which played in bargain-basement theaters without studio promotion, were among Farber's and James Agee's favorite movies of the period.

Throughout the 1940s, there was a stable marketplace for low-budget thrillers, and the noir category itself later became associated with so-called B pictures. 6But critics often use adjectives like underground or B quite loosely, in reference to a great many things that were not actually inferior or disreputable. The fact is, most of the respected examples of classic noir belong not to Poverty Row but to an ambiguous middle range of the industry. Very few films about urban darkness and murder in the 1940s and 1950S were among the most expensive Hollywood productions, but neither were they truly cheap. Even when they were not among the industry's leading moneymakers, they were reasonably popular and widely distributed; and although they tended to win awards only when they were perceived as social-problem pictures, most of them were favorably reviewed in the national press. 7In both economic and cultural terms, therefore, they are best described as liminal products, and it seems appropriate that they eventually came to occupy a borderland somewhere between generic thrillers and art movies.

A sense of middle-to-low-range economic activity was often inscribed in the films themselvesespecially in the hard-boiled stories, which depicted white-collar protagonists living in a world of cheap rooming houses and battered offices. Perhaps for that reason, the literature on Hollywood thrillers has tended to foster myths of a cultural underworld. Figures like Dashiell Hammett, Chandler, and James M. Cain are sometimes incorrectly described as low-culture artists, and almost from the beginning, certain films noirs have been mistakenly associated with art maudit and sleazy theaters. For example, in a 1947 essay on exhibition, sociologist Charles P. Skouras refers to "the grind house, a small theater along a busy downtown street catering to transients, [which] does its biggest business with action melodramas like The Killers."

We should recall that The Killers was a major-studio production based on the work of a prestigious novelist and that it received Academy Award nominations for best director and screenplay; no doubt it played in "grind houses," but it also played in expensive ones. Such a film is quite different from Lewton's B-budget horror pictures for RKO, which were confined to the lower levels of the industry. Lewton's biggest success, Cat People, earned a considerable profit and an impressive degree of critical attention; even so, RKO executive Charles Korner complained, "The (only people who saw that film were Negroes and defense workers." 9

All of which suggests that we need to look more closely at the complex relationship between economics, reception, and cultural prestige. In so doing, we shall discover that film noir has a deceptive and somewhat paradoxical status. Cheapness, after all, is sometimes in the eye of the beholder, and some forms of lowness are more valuable than others.

Hollywood has always made low-budget pictures, but the "B" designation originated in the 1930s, when exhibitors began to offer Depressionera moviegoers two features for the price of one. Although the palatial theaters in big cities continued to function as showcases for single attractions, the general audience grew to expect a three-hour program consisting of two movies and several short subjects. In most cases, the first or "A" picture was a star-filled "quality" production, backed by a major-studio advertising campaign; whatever its actual budget, it was rented on a percentage basis, with the producer-distributor sometimes getting as much as 80 percent of the gross. The ''B," or "program," picture was usually a genre movie from one of the Poverty Row studios and was rented at a flat rate of $100 or $200.

A wide range of movies fell into the B category, but the cheapest productions in the 1940s were aimed at audiences in the provinces, or at kids who attended Saturday matinees. To understand the purely budgetary limitations of such films, it may help to note that between 1945 and 1950, when production costs and ticket prices rose almost 60 percent, the average B western from Republic Pictures was made for about $50,000. Meanwhile, Fritz Lang's Secret beyond the Door (1948), a melodrama involving the theme of psychoanalysis, was budgeted by the same studio at $615,065. 10The Lang picture is sometimes described as if it were an example of bargain-basement noir. Certainly it looks inexpensive compared to the Selznick-Hitchcock Spellbound (1945); even so, it was intended for the better theaters in the cities, and despite its somewhat tacky production values, it does not actually qualify as a B movie.