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

Like the B movies of yesteryear, DTVs sometimes imitate the plots of more lavishly produced pictures. But in an era when videotape has become the dominant form through which people see feature films, it is difficult to say whether the big-budget theatrical market actually determines the important stylistic or generic trends. Major-studio films such as Basic Instinct (1992), Sliver (1993), The Color of Night (1994), Showgirls (1995), and Striptease (1996) were almost certainly made in imitation of DTVs, hoping to capture their particular section of the home-video market. In most cases, however, the equivalent DTVs achieved a higher percentage of profit. The difference, as Lance Robbins explains, is that DTV producers "are doing Sliver without the $10-million actress attached" (quoted in Willens, 25).

DTV thrillers provide audiences with a special kind of narrative pleasure, paying somewhat more attention to what Linda Williams calls the lovemaking "numbers" of pornographic cinema than to the goals or enigmas of mainstream theatrical narrative. For this reason, they are regularly distributed in alternative versions, allowing viewers a choice between "softer" and "harder" scenes of sex and violence. The major studios have responded by offering "director's cut" videos of such big-budget pictures as Basic Instinct, Sliver, The Color of Night, and The Getaway, which contain an extra few seconds of frontal nudity. But the audience's curiosity about the bodies of celebrated movie stars seems limited, and the DTV market has continued to grow. DTV has even created its own star system, without the benefit of press agents. In addition to women like Tweed and Whirry, who are reliable and effective thespians, erotic thrillers feature such male players as Andrew Stevens (also a writer, director, and auteur for the Night Eyes films) and the critically underrated Eric Roberts.

In recent years, the cable networks have begun to imitate DTVs, producing woman-in-distress melodramas like Apology (1986), shady-cop-and-sexy-lady mysteries like Deceptions (1990), and low-budget remakes of classics such as This Gun for Hire (1991), Night of the Hunter (1991), and Notorious (1992). Gotham, the story of a Manhattan detective investigating a woman who is supposed to be dead, was Showtime's highest-rated made-for-TV movie in 1988. Third-Degree Burn, an erotic mystery about a cheap private eye hired to follow a beautiful blond, was HBO's highest-rated production in 1989. By 1990, according to Time magazine, these and other types of "film noir thriller" had become the "hottest new ticket on the cable dial," and they are probably the closest the contemporary market has come to the old-style program pictures of classic Hollywood. Time reporter Richard Zoglin describes them as "a bit more graphic in sex and violence than network movies" but as a valid and "unsettling" form of popular art: "The cable networks may get more attention for their high-minded docudramas (Mandela) and gourmet remakes (Charlton Heston in A Man for All Seasons), but these unpretentious B movies are their doughy bread and butter'' (23 July 1990). Zoglin's language is similar to what we find in most of the critical literature on hard-boiled movies from the 1940s and 1950s. Media critics have always defended certain types of ostensibly disreputable, formulaic thrillers by appealing to their moral ambiguity and their lack of bourgeois sentimentality or "high-mindedness," and such a defense is valuable to the movie industry because it enhances the films' crossover potential, allowing them to play at the higher end of the market. No wonder that varieties of dark cinema have proliferated in video stores, where low and high levels of production meet, and where upscale cable-noirs and DTV erotic thrillers mingle with stylish theatrical films like Casino (1995) and Seven (1995).

Most of the profits in contemporary cinema are generated in video stores, which are melting pots of American film culture. But critical attention, publicity, and professional cachet are derived almost exclusively from theatrical exhibition. It has therefore become commonplace for both DTV and cable producers to slightly raise their budgets, aiming for a more discriminating or intermediate audience and hoping to play at least marginally in another medium. Sophisticated, expensively produced British television exports, such the Prime Suspect and Cracker films that have appeared on PBS and the Arts and Entertainment channel, sometimes find rental outlets in America, and there is a growing collector's market for all sorts of TV nostalgia; in general, however, made-for-TV noir acquires no cultural capital and little chance of video distribution unless it takes the form of high-profile, subscription-network shows like Fallen Angels, which is a series of medium-budget anthology films involving some of the best-known actors and directors in Hollywood (including an excellent adaptation of a Jim Thompson story directed by none other than Tom Cruise). For similar reasons, DTVs get more attention from large chains like Blockbuster if they receive big-screen showing, no matter how brief or inconsequential. Mark Damon, producer of at least ten DTVs a year during the early 1990s, argues that thrillers must have "a good look, and be shot with some quality." He also gives exhibitors a financial incentive if they book his films in limited theatrical runsnot because he expects box-office success, but because "it gives the film a bit more clout in the stores, overseas or in the cable markets" (quoted in Willens, 25).

Tommy Lee Jones in Gotham (1988), a made-for-TV thriller that helped inspire the trend toward cable-noir."

Mainstream studios are better situated to take advantage of the different ways a movie can be sold or rented, and as a result they have begun to develop their own DTV subsidiaries, negotiating easy crossovers between theaters and video outlets. Organizations like Columbia Tri-Star and Live Home Entertainment make a policy of financing independent, medium-budget movies that play in theaters but at the same time are "video protected." Among recent films, John Dahl's Red Rock West (1994) is a good example. When executives at Columbia Tri-Star decided that this modestly produced mixture of film noir and western would not play well in theaters, they quickly sold it to HBO and to video stores as an "erotic thriller." But it did good business in European theaters, and on the strength of a showing at the Toronto Film Festival, it was booked into a San Francisco art house, where it broke all box-office records. Columbia Tri-Star suddenly executed a complete about-face and arranged for a nationwide release in selected cities. The new strategy paid off, even though copies of the film had already found their way into video stores. Red Rock West acquired theatrical profits, favorable reviews in the New Yorker and other journals, and greatly enhanced video rentals; indeed, it was such a success that Dahl's next film, The Last Seduction (1995), which had been intended for cable TV, went straight to art theaters across the country, earning major profits and greatly boosting the career of actress Linda Fiorentino.

From the purely commercial point of view, the most notable "sleepers" or crossover noirs in the American market during the past decade have been The Crying Game (1992) and Reservoir Dogs (1992). The first is a British production containing an elaborate allusion to Welles's Mr. Arkadin and a sensationally clever plot development; critically overrated, it nevertheless provoked a good deal of debate over racial, national, and sexual politics, and it became a fashionably scandalous date movie, playing mainstream theaters and winning a screenplay Oscar for writer-director Neil Jordan. The second is a stylish and equally shocking "caper" picture by Quentin Tarantino, financed with DTV money. Reservoir Dogs bristles with allusions to Godard, Kubrick, and others and is in many ways a dazzlingly innovative picture, but it also works at the level of "drive-in" entertainment, offering enough graphic, eroticized violence to please Joe Bob Briggs. Both The Crying Game and Reservoir Dogs earned substantial profits in video rentals, and they acquired large enough followings to be rereleased several times in urban theaters. Like T-Men in the late 1940s, they mixed generic conventions with artistic effects, blurring the line between exploitation and sophistication. Their success reveals that despite many differences between the past and the present, certain aspects of the marketplace have not changed. Filmmakers still transform inexpensive movies about sex and violence into hot properties that earn critical respect. This project inevitably attracts them to the film noiror at any rate to the particular economic and discursive space where noir has always been appreciated.