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

In America, however, it was difficult to turn far away from commercial entertainment. The younger generation of Hollywood directors tended to incorporate New Wave techniques or retro style into spectacularly violent crime pictures, both attacking and preserving traditional values. Most of their films can be described as parodic in a loose sensethat is, they openly borrow from a large and diverse body of earlier movies, establishing a more or less ironic filiation with a supposed classical norm. There are, of course, many important exceptions to this rule: crime pictures such as The French Connection (1971), The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976), Straight Time (1978), and Miami Blues (1990) can be called noir, even though they make no special attempt to reproduce stylistic conventions of the 1940s and 1950s. I am speaking here of latter-day noirs that have a quality of deliberate allusiveness, as if they were trying to display a certain wit or sophistication about the cinematic past.

One of the most interesting if problematic American attempts to follow in the path of the Europeans is Robert Altman's revisionist production of The Long Goodbye (1973), which subjects the Chandleresque detective film to offbeat casting and a certain amount of derisive parody, all the while making Brechtian jokes about Hollywood. The underlying concept is intriguing: Elliot Gould is intentionally miscast as Philip Marlowe, and the setting is updated to contemporary, dope-crazed Los Angeles, where the private eye becomes a ridiculous anachronism. (Altman referred to the character as "Rip Van Marlowe," and at one point in the film we hear a policeman remark, "Marlowe with an e. Sounds like a fag name.") The feeling of historical dissonance is especially strong at the level of style, which involves Panavision, zoom lenses, improvised dialogue, unorthodox sound recording and mixing, and a rather diffused, pastel-colored photography by Vilmos Zsigmond, who "flashed" the film stock to degrade contrasts. On many levels, the picture completely reverses the values we associate with Chandler and classic noir: in place of witty dialogue and wry offscreen narration, it gives us inarticulate characters and a mumbling private eye who incessantly talks to himself; in place of carefully framed, angular compositions, it uses a roving, almost arbitrary series of panning and zooming shots that continually flatten perspective; and in place of romantic music, it employs a 1940s-style theme (composed by John Williams) that undergoes countless rearrangementsincluding versions for door chimes, a sitar, and a mariachi band.

Altman turns Marlowe into a chain-smoking slob and a nerdy sentimentalist, and novelist Roger Wade (Sterling Hayden) into an aging Hemingway type who brutalizes his wife (Nina van Pallandt). The theme of macho brutality, which is in some ways the flip side of Marlowe's and Chandler's chivalrousness, finds its most disturbing expression in a scene that the old Breen Office would never have allowed: gangster Marry Augustine (Mark Rydell) smashes a coke bottle into the face of a beautiful young woman. In other respects, however, The Long Goodbye is faithful to its source. Significantly, its initial script was written by veteran pulp novelist Leigh Brackett, who also worked on Howard Hawks's version of The Big Sleep and who tried to achieve a more or less straightforward adaptation. Much of its commentary on the chaos and soulessness of Southern California is perfectly in keeping with the original novel, and despite the fact that it creates a new ending, it preserves Chandler's basic plot. 36

Although The Long Goodbye has an impressively hallucinatory effect and a good deal of satiric edge, it seems to me to work best at a fairly traditional level. When Altman tries to send up the novel, introducing alienation effects and snide jokes about classic Hollywood, he usually achieves very little; after all, hard-boiled fiction always skirted close to satire or burlesque, and Chandler himself was already a savage critic of the movies. Significantly, Chandler was also far more critical than Altman of the Los Angeles police; the film merely makes a few jokes about the corruption of small-town Mexican cops. Notice, too, that certain of Altman's more freewheeling inventionssuch as the coke-bottle attack and the running gag about the stoned, bare-breasted girls who live in an apartment across from Marloweseem designed to exploit a new style of misogyny and violence under the cover of a smugly superior attitude toward private-eye stories.

These problems are especially evident in the last scenes, when Altman employs a sophomoric trick reminiscent of the football game at the end of MA*SH (1970). Marlowe discovers that his friend Terry Lennox (Jim Bouton) has committed murder. Lennox says, "What the hell, nobody cares," and Marlowe replies, "Nobody but me."

Then, in a gesture that runs completely against the grain of his character, Marlowe shoots Lennox, who falls dead in a lake. Marlowe turns and walks off down a long road lined with trees, passing Eileen Wade, who is riding toward him in a Jeep from the opposite direction. The image is an obvious allusion to The Third Man, but on the soundtrack, instead of romantic music, we hear "Hooray for Hollywood." In this shot and at several other junctures, it is difficult to determine exactly what Altman is satirizing. Is his film a Chandleresque attack on L.A.'s gangsters and hippies, or is it a pot-induced attack on Chandler's novel? Audiences at the time were unsure what to think, and the initial advertising campaign did not help, because it made viewers expect a classic thriller. When the film did poor business in Los Angeles and other cities, United Artists withdrew it from circulation and designed a new set of trailers and posters to emphasize its parodic aspects. Surrounded by these cues to interpretation, it was rereleased eight months later in New York, where it received good reviews but continued to perform poorly at the box office.

An almost completely opposite and more successful use of the hardboiled tradition can be seen in Chinatown (1974), a lavishly produced picture that opens with the 1940s Paramount logo and closes with the new logo of the 1970s. The contrast between this film and Altman's is remarkably systematic: The Long Goodbye completely dispenses with an art director, but Chinatown depends heavily on the production designs of Richard Sylbert; The Long Goodbye engages in jokey, New Wave digressions from its central narrative, but Chinatown is an engrossing, classically constructed thriller; The Long Goodbye inhibits identification with the protagonist, but Chinatown encourages it; The Long Goodbye treats old Hollywood derisively, but Chinatown returns wholeheartedly to the past, recreating 1930s Los Angeles in meticulous detail and acknowledging its indebtedness to The Maltese Falcon by casting John Huston in an important role.

Though Chinatown makes use of Panavision and highly mobile camera equipment that enables an operator to walk with characters through doorways and into tight spaces, it cleverly adapts the new technology to the feel of the old studio films; throughout, the framing is tight and restrictive, and the color scheme is relatively muted and monochromatic. Scriptwriter Robert Towne and director Roman Polanski, the chief authors, were obviously devoted to old movies. "I love the cliches," Polanski told Newsweek magazine when the film was released. But Towne borrowed more from Hammett than from Chandler, and Polanski went back to even earlier models, bringing Chinatown close to the tale of gothic horror. Ostensibly a nostalgia or retro film, Chinatown is actually a critique of the American past, inflected by Marxist and Freudian themes that were latent in some varieties of classic noir, and inspired to some degree by Bertolucci's Conformist. Its particular qualities arise from a tension between Towne's socially acute, melancholy private-eye story and Polanski's slightly perverse, absurdist tastes. These two attitudes can be sensed in nearly every aspect of the production, even in Jerry Goldsmith's theme music: a low, plaintive trumpet solo counterpointed by an eerie string passage. Between them, they give considerable shading and dimension to the film's protagonist, J. J. Gittes (Jack Nicholson), who is an ethically compromised character, even less conventionally heroic than Sam Spade.