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

For some readers today, a joke of this kind may seem condescending; but the lawn ornament tells us everything we need to know about the ruthless, repressive Mrs.

Murdock, and it helps to establish Marlowe's class position as a paid servant of the vulgar rich. (For a manifestly racist treatment of black people in hard-boiled literature of the period, see the novels of Chandler's contemporary Jonathan Latimer.) Furthermore, there is an intriguing historical circumstance that makes the comparison between Marlowe and a black man not entirely inappropriate. The heyday of tough-guy realism, which produced Chandler, James M. Cain, Horace McCoy, and the other white writers whom Edmund Wilson describes as "poets of the tabloid murder," was also a major period of socialprotest literature by African Americans, and the black social-protest novelists especially Richard Wright and Chester Himeswere intensely and necessarily preoccupied with murder and mean streets. Wright's Native Son and The Outsider were plotted like thrillers, and so was Himes's If He Hollers, Let Him Go; in fact, as Mike Davis points out, Himes's skillfully crafted early work could be placed among the finest examples of Los Angeles noir, offering a ''brilliant and disturbing analysis of the psychotic dynamics of racism in the land of sunshine" (43).

Himes was rarely discussed in such terms during his lifetime, but at the suggestion of Marcel Duhamel, editor of Gallimard's Série noire, he eventually became a successful writer of tough detective fiction. In the years after the war, French critics saw a connection between the white tough guys and the black protest writers, who could be assimilated into a left-existentialism that Jean-Paul Sartre and many of his followers believed was at the very heart of the American novel. Hence both groups were given a cultural acceptance in France that they had not fully received in the United States. Significantly, Wright himself was living in Paris, and The Outsider, which he wrote during those years, has a good deal in common with Sartre's own novel about crime, Les jeux sont faits. Himes, too, moved to Paris in the early 1950s, and most of his early crime novels were first published in French; his most commercial work was done for the Série noire, and he was the first non-French author to receive the Grand Prix de la litérature policière, which was awarded in 1958 for La reine des pommes (A Rage in Harlem).

It would be wrong to fully equate either the hard-boiled school or the black social-protest novelists with European existentialism. The overwhelming sense of alienation, entrapment, and paranoia in Wright's and Himes's fiction rises out of a relentless social fact rather than a Kafkaesque abstraction, and the somewhat similar themes in the white writers can be traced back to the main tradition of naturalism and social realism in the American novel. But even though the three distinct cultural formations have separate histories, they share a common ground. The tough school of literature and film is filled with motifs that can be explained in vaguely existentialist terms; and as Roger Rosenblatt observes, the single place where "modern black and white heroes come closest to each other in terms of common atmosphere and situations is in the literature of the existentialists." 15Wright and Himes therefore might have had as much to contribute to the French discourse on film noir as Chandler and Graham Greene. 16If they did not, the reason is that Hollywood in the 1940s and 19950s did not adapt black novelists, or even show many black characters on the screen.

Most films noirs of the 1940s are staged in artificially white settings, with occasional black figures as extras in the backgrounds. The African-American writer Wanda Coleman has commented on this phenomenon in an article for The Los Angeles Times Magazine (17 October 1993), in which she also admits that she loves to watch old thrillers on TV. "Nothing cinematic excites me more than film noir," she remarks; even so, there often comes a moment when her suspension of disbelief is shattered. The black Pullman porters, musicians, shoeshine boys, janitors, maids, and nightclub singers in these films are created out of a narrow range of stereotypes, and they painfully remind Coleman that, "like murder, the cultural subtext will out": "My husband groans and my son laughs. Someone black has suddenly appeared onscreen. My stomach tightens and I feel the rage start to rise. . . . To enjoy that sentimental journey back to yesteryear, I have to pretend I live in a perfect world. . . . I have to force myself back through the door, back into the movie" (6).

Some black players in the 1940s were treated in relatively dignified ways, in part because the movie industry and the U.S. government were attempting to liberalize race relations during World War II. But in the era before the full-scale civil rights movement, film noir made no overt attempt to criticize the segregated society, and it never presented anything from a black point of view. Even a breakthrough actor like Canada Lee, who gave impressive but rather Uncle Tomish performances in Lifeboat (1944) and Body and Soul (1947), was never allowed to appear in a film version of his greatest stage role, as Bigger Thomas in Orson Welles's 1940 production of Native Son. 17Welles, in fact, was the one white director in the period who might have made racial blackness more consistently and disturbingly present for white audiences. His incomplete documentary, It's All True (1942), was abandoned by RKO largely because it paid too much attention to the black population in Brazil. At about the same time, he wanted to produce a film based on Native Son, but the project was much too controversial for the studios. For similar reasons, he was forced to put aside his fascinating adaptation of Heart of Darknesswhich, had it been produced in 1940, would probably be regarded today as the first example of American film noir.

As we have seen, Conrad's novella was already a kind of roman noir, and it served as an inspiration for Graham Greene's thrillers, especially The Third Man. Welles's screen version would have updated the African materials in the original text, placing the opening narration against the background of a sound montage and a series of dissolves that took the viewer through contemporary Manhattan at night, ending with a Harlem jazz club. When the action moved to the Congo, the exploitation and murder of the black population would have been carried out by modern-day fascists. "This shouldn't surprise you," one of them says. "You've seen this kind of thing on city streets." 19RKO executive George Schaefer wrote to Welles that the script "[lost] something'' because of these references to contemporary politics, but Welles's proposed method of shooting the film was equally troubling. He intended to use an expensive, mobile camera equipped with a gyroscope, and he organized his technically detailed, camera-specific screenplay in terms of long takes representing Marlow's point of view. 21Where the politics of spectatorship were concerned, the technique was especially controversial, because it so often brought the viewer and Marlow into face-to-face contact with black characters.

To fully appreciate what Welles's screenplay achieves, we need to understand that he did not plan to make a mere recording of what the narrator sees, as in Robert Montgomery's unintentionally comic Lady in the Lake (1947), or as in the opening sequences of Delmer Daves's Dark Passage (1947). The camera he describes is impressionistic and subjective in a more complete sense, often showing us what Marlow thinks or feels. Like Conrad's prose, it is capable of shifting its focalization within a single take, moving from literal point-of-view shots to poetic omniscienceas when it suddenly tracks backward out of the manager's office in the Congo Station, tilts down to look at a sick man on the floor, passes through the front entrance, cranes over the roof to show the jungle beyond, and then tilts up to a starry sky. Ultimately, it creates a kind of white dream or hallucination about blackness, and one of the many reasons why it might have been effective on the screen (contrary to what most people have said) is that, unlike Chandler's Marlowe in Lady in the Lake, Conrad's Marlow is a relatively passive and highly imaginative witness. Welles never treats the camera as an action hero who is periodically socked in the jaw by a gangster or kissed by a gorgeous woman; instead, he gives us an eerie narrative presence who stands by and watches, occasionally being confronted by grotesque sights and sounds. His script describes a bewildering variety of characters who bob in and out of the frame, and it is filled with precise instructions for a delirious, overlapping dialogue that helps to convey Marlow's mounting confusion and disorientation. The uncanny effect would have been enhanced by a sophisticated, expressionistic use of process screens, showing bizarre images of the journey downriver toward the Central Station. On a more immediate level, however, the camera would have administered mild shocks in the form of characters who sometimes look back at the lens, arresting Marlow's attention and making both him and the ordinary white viewer feel slightly uncomfortable or self-aware. These characters would have included not only the dictator, Kurtz, and his millions, but also the Africans themselves. Soon after Marlow's arrival at the Outer