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

Because of the relative brightness of the Eastmancolor photography, the transitional years between 1955 and 1970 were ill suited to atmospheric color movies about murder and psychological violenceeven though these themes had never been limited exclusively to black-and-white pictures. "Whether rightly or wrongly," Borde and Chaumeton observed in 1954, "color has been used only in the limit works of the noir series, in 'darkened' movies, but always in extremely interesting ways" (179, my translation). One of the most notable and uncharacteristically flamboyant of the "limit works" was Leave Her to Heaven (1945), a quasi-Freudian melodrama starring Gene Tierney as a beautiful but murderously jealous heiress. Photographer Leon Shamroy won an Academy Award for the film, chiefly because of the way he combined "mysterious'' elementslamplit rooms, extreme deep-focus compositions, low angles that brought ceilings into viewwith spectacular Technicolor scenery from locations such as Monterey, California, and Flagstaff, Arizona. His dominant color, as Meredith Brody and Lee Sanders have observed, was an orange or amber hue that suggested "the same sickness and corruption as the high contrast photography of black-and-white film noir" (Silver and Ward, 170). But Leave Her to Heaven also took advantage of a symbolic contrast between "cold" and ''hot" colors. At one point, Tierney decides to abort her pregnancy: nicely coiffured and wearing a pale blue nightgown, she deliberately falls the entire length of a grand staircase; a dissolve takes us to a sunny beachfront several months later, and she emerges from the surf, wearing a blood-red swimsuit that clings to every line of her body.

Another "limit work," much more in keeping with the repressed or "darkened" quality Borde and Chaumeton describe, was Alfred Hitchcock's Rope (1948)which, according to the Warner Brothers pressbook and The New York Daily News, was also the first film in history to use color "for a suspenseful story of murder and detection." Although a great deal has been written about the long takes in this film (like the Patrick Hamilton stage drama on which it is based, Rope is performed in "real duration"), relatively little has been said about the fact that Hitchcock was making his first picture in Technicolor. One of the cinema's purest aesthetes (almost as Wildean as the two killers in the story), he seems to have been intensely preoccupied with the lighting effects and the color scheme, even to the point of firing his photographer, Joseph Valentine, who had worked with him previously on Shadow of a Doubt (1943). As he explained in his interview with François Truffaut, he thought that Valentine lacked "artistic taste" where color was concerned:

I was determined to reduce the color to a minimum. We had built the set of an apartment, consisting of a living room, a hallway, and a kitchen. The [windows] overlooked the New York skyline, and we had that background made up in a semicircular pattern. . . . Toward the last four or five reels, in other words, by sunset, I realized that the orange in the sun was too strong, and on account of that we did the last five reels all over again. . . . [Valentine] simply said to himself, "Well, it's just another sunset. " Obviously he hadn't looked at one for a long time, If ever at all, and what he did was completely unacceptable; it was like a lurid postcard. 22

Hitchcock made sure that color in Rope would be subdued, in keeping with the upper-class, artistic-intellectual world in which the drama takes place. Notice that the framed pictures on the walls of the tastefully decorated Manhattan apartment are mainly pen-and-ink drawings or monochromatic, gray-and-white paintings. The opening shotshowing two well-dressed young men strangling a third with a ropeseems to comment on this absence of brightness: it begins in a dark room with the shades drawn and with all three characters wearing dark suits and ties, so we see only their faces, hands, and white shirt fronts, together with an expanse of beige curtains that barely admit sunlight. After stuffing the dead body in a trunk, one of the killers (John Dall), switches on a lamp, which creates a golden sidelight.

' 'Don't!" says his companion (Farley Granger). Dall switches off the lamp and lights a cigarette. "It's the darkness that's got you down," he remarks cheerfully. "Nobody feels safe in the dark.'' He turns and crosses to the drapes, pulling them open to reveal the steel-gray skyline of Manhattan, which is topped by a few pinkish, late-afternoon clouds. The room is now fully illuminated with a cool, muted light. "Pity we couldn't have done it with the curtains open," Dall says, "in the bright sunlight!"

As the two killers discuss their crime and prepare for a dinner party, they walk through the foyer, the dining room, the kitchen, and then back into the living area, which is decorated in relatively discreet, somber colors. (The camera follows them, but here and elsewhere, Hitchcock never allows it to turn 180 degrees from the original establishing angle; in other words, he avoids what would have been the equivalent of a "suturing" reverse shot, deliberately preserving the effect of fourth-wall proscenium theater.) With each successive long take, Hitchcock's technicians slightly rearrange the pattern of lights over the entire set, until the skyscrapers outside are silhouettes. In shot number 5, the horizon is amber, the tops of the buildings are almost lost in darkness, and there are shadowed areas in the room; James Stewart turns on a table lamp over the piano, but Farley Granger becomes irritable: "Would you mind turning that off?" he snaps, and Stewart complies. In shot 6, the apartment has become so dark that the maid needs to turn on most of the lights as she extinguishes candles and cleans up after the party; at this point, there is a thin rosy line on the horizon, and, amid the lighted windows of the skyscrapers, a tiny neon sign is blinking red. Finally, in the last shot, when complete darkness has fallen outside and a glow of electric light outlines the horizon, we have the most colorful effect in the film. James Stewart takes a rope out of his pocket and accuses Dall and Granger of murder; as the camera pans to show their reaction, the giant letter S on a neon sign just outside the window to the right begins blinking. When Stewart opens the trunk at the center of the room, the neon shades his face with a sickly green and then with a bloody red.

This last shot is a good example of how a familiar motif from black-and-white thrillers could be given spectacular new life through the expressive power of colored light. Hitchcock prepares his audience for the moment by maintaining a restrained color scheme through most of the picture, but also by dispensing with the high contrasts and dramatically cast shadows of a film like Out of the Past. "When I saw the initial rushes," he told Truffaut, "my first feeling was that things show up much more in color than in black and white" (Truffaut, 132). He immediately recognized that he could do without "liners," or back lights, because color tends to create an obvious separation between foreground and background. Despite strong resistance from studio technicians, he completely avoided flamboyant shadows on walls or faces. The result is a film that maintains a polite, drawing-room atmosphere until the climactic moment, when repressed color breaks free in almost garish form.

Very few directors who worked in color during the next decade were tempted to follow Hitchcock's example. In fact, the best color films about murder and suspense always reverted to the chiaroscuro effects of black-and-white lighting. A case in point is Niagara (1953), directed by Henry Hathaway and photographed by Joe MacDonald, which features postcard views of Niagara Falls and vivid images of Marilyn Monroe in a red dress, but which also provides a number of atmospheric scenes involving venetian blinds and inky shadows. 23Another example is Slightly Scarlet (1956), a loose adaptation of James M. Cain's Love's Lovely Counterfeit, directed by Alan Dwan and photographed in Technicolor and "Superscope" by. John Alton. Much of this picture is shot in high-key style, and it exploits the growing market for cheesecake by featuring a pair of voluptuous redheads (Rhonda Fleming and Arlene Dahl). In the sinister or mysterious scenes, however, Alton arranges the lights exactly as he would for a black-and-white production. He often photographs silhouetted or half-lit faces, and he makes extensive use of back-lighting and indirect light to create a sense of depth in darkened rooms. Whenever the crime boss (Ted de Corsia) enters a scene, we see a baroquely exaggerated form of "Jimmy Valentine lighting" that throws spooky shadows all the way to the ceiling.