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

Not surprisingly, its narrative technique reminds contemporary critic Andrew Britton of both Henry, James's fiction and Sigmund Freud's writings on "secondary revision." Britton seems to me to overstate the moral culpability of Ulmer's protagonist, but he is surely correct to argue that Al Roberts is an unreliable narrator who travels through an American wasteland. The last of these themes is particularly important. Like a great many films noirs about the open road, Detour represents the western frontier as a desert and the quest for individual freedom as a meaningless circle or a trap. It anticipates the imagery of Hitchcock's Psycho by almost thirty years: a barren landscape viewed through an automobile window; a protagonist who drives by day and night, staring into a rear-view mirror and hearing voices from out of the past; a sinister highway patrol officer with dark glasses; a used-car dealership; and a cheap and deadly motel room.

Here again, Ulmer's low budget works to his advantage. Detour has no need to indulge in a Hollywood designer's idea of despair, because its own cost-cutting produces an atmosphere of pinched difficulty and claustrophobia. The flimsy sets reinforce the theme of social and cultural impoverishment, and the actors seem to belong to the same marginal world as the characters they play. Everyone in the film is a low-rent pretender or impostor (even Haskell turns out to be a "hymnal salesman"), and nobody has a chance of success.

The most disturbing of these pretenders is Vera, who makes every femme fatale in the period look genteel by comparison. Like Al, she has been hitchhiking across country, and she claims that when Haskell picked her up just outside Shreveport, she fought off his advances, leaving him with an infected hand. In some ways, she is a double for Al, but when she wakes from her brief nap on the passenger seat of the car, she also suggests a ghostly reincarnation of Haskell, come back to wreak vengeance. Al can't figure out what to make of Vera. "She looked as if she'd just been thrown off the worst freight train in the world," he says, but then he notices her "beauty," which seems "homely, but real.''

Actually, she has dark rings around her eyes, and she suffers from a consumptive cough. ("Hitching rides," she comments, "isn't exactly the way to keep your schoolgirl complexion.") Al compares her with Camille, but clearly she is no wilting, sacrificial heroine of sentimental melodrama; instead, she taps into a raw nerve of greed and exploitation that lies at the core of the film. Ruthlessly hard and half-crazed, she lolls about the Los Angeles hotel rooms in her bathrobe, downing straight whiskey, chainsmoking, and plotting to get rich. She probably knows that she is dying, but she easily dominates Al, first insulting him and then inviting him to bed. A sullen, dangerous, yet sympathetic figure, she leaves an indelible impression, and it is impossible to imagine any A-budget picture that would have been allowed to depict her. When Al sits alone in the Reno diner and recalls her image, he seems to be looking into a void.

On many levels, Detour provides justification for the idea that down-market thrillers are more authentic, less compromised by bourgeois-liberal sentiment or totalitarian spectacle, than the usual Hollywood product. Unfortunately, however, few if any of the most critically respected films of this type were so unsettling, and none were made on such a low budget. The Poverty Row mode of production was given its death warrant in 1948, when the major studios were ordered to divest themselves of theaters; connoisseurship of so-called B film noir began much later, and the use of the term by critics often has less to do with actual costs than with a misperception of povertya misperception that involves a particular blend of failed theatricality, artistic sophistication, and subversive implication.

One of the best illustrations of such critical reception can be found in the writing about Gun Crazy, another movie about violence on the American road, which inspired several other pictures about outlaw lovers. Gun Crazy has much more elaborate production values than Detour, and its premiere was held at the somewhat dilapidated but still respectable Palace Theater in New York. Nevertheless, it was produced at a minor studio (Allied Artists); its mise-en-scene creates what Dana Polan accurately describes as "a typology of nonpastoral, wasteland sites"; 19and it lacks the formal coherence of a well-made, major-league feature. Veering back and forth between badness and brilliance, it repeatedly subverts its own earnestness with an anarchic romanticism. As a result, latter-day critics have usually disregarded its actual position in the market and placed it on the level of the pulp sublime.

Shortly after Gun Crazy opened, Bosley Crowther gave it a mixed review in The New York Times, devoting most of his favorable comments to the script, which was adapted from a story by MacKinlay Kantor in the slickest of all magazines, The Saturday Evening Post. Otherwise, Crowther thought the film was "pretty cheap stuff," on a par with "the most humdrum of pulp fiction" (25 August 1950). For later critics, Gun Crazy has seemed charming precisely because of its failure to maintain the lofty, sociological tone of Kantor's work, or even the poetic realism of such movies as You Only Live Once and They Live by Night. Its very title is ambiguous, suggesting both shocked censure and gleeful exploitation, and several of its most enjoyable effects seem unintended. The dialogue, for example, contains lines such as "Two people dead, just so we can live without working!" The two leading players, Peggy Cummins and John Dall, are slightly miscast, and a few of the early scenes are laughable. At one point we see the Dall character as a boy, shooting a chicken in a farmyard; when we cut to an insert of the dead bird, it looks like something that has been lying around the property department for weeks. And yet director. Joseph H. Lewis achieves one of the most celebrated sequence shots in the history of moviesa bank robbery in a southwestern town, photographed by Russell Harlan in documentary style from the back seat of the getaway car. This shot is refreshingly free of studioish mannerisms, and the robbery itself (which takes place offscreen) gains considerable tension from being represented as an urgent and partly improvised piece of "real time.'' Elsewhere, Gun Crazy offers a superbly staged holdup of an Armour meat-packing plant, and (for the period) a delightfully forthright eroticism. Although it somewhat villainizes the female, denying her the point-of-view shots it gives to the male, it also inverts the usual sex roles, hinting at John Dall's "feminine" qualities (he had recently played a homosexual for Hitchcock) and allowing Peggy Cummins to play a kind of murderous Annie Oakley. As Alain Silver and Carl Macek point out, most of the film is "atavistic," providing few social or psychological motivations for the outlaw couple; instead, it appears to celebrate their passionate attachment and "basic lawlessness."

Because Gun Crazy's lack of cinematic polish was homologous with the outlaw couple's disregard of bourgeois morality, viewers were given an opportunity to feel irresponsible and discriminating at the same time. The surrealists loved the film, Godard alluded to it several times in Breathless, and cinephiles everywhere used it as a weapon against middlebrow critics and major Hollywood studios. However, despite its "underground" appeal, Gun Crazy was not a B movie in the same sense as Detour. An intermediate production, it was typical of a period when the studio system was undergoing reorganization. Looked at today, what makes it strikingly different from its many big-budget successorsincluding not only Bonnie and Clyde but also Wild at Heart (1990), True Romance (1993), and Natural Born Killers (1994)is not so much its cheapness but its relative innocence. It belongs to a time before Elvis, before Vietnam, before the collapse of the classic censorship code, before music videos, before the widespread popularity of old movies like The Wizard of Oz, and before film noir itself became an idea in the minds of producers. It has no need to allude to most of these things (as its imitators do), nor to devise increasingly spectacular scenes of sex and violence. It simply waivers between entertainment and art, creating a somewhat naive, "good-bad" effect.