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

Station, for example, the script tells us that he sees a "big, ridiculous hole in the face of [a] mud bank. In it, frying in the sun, are about thirty-five dying savages and a lot of broken drain pipes. Into some of these pipes the natives have crawled, the better to expire. . . . As Marlow looks down, CAMERA PANS DOWN for a moment, registering a MED. CLOSEUP of a negro face, the eyes staring up at the lens. The CAMERA PANS UP AND AWAY."

According to Frank Brady, Welles planned to hire three thousand "very black" extras, and he resisted all of RKO's suggestions that he save time and expense by putting greasepainted figures in the distant background. Two of the black characters would have been especially significant: a solitary, "half-breed" employee of the European ivory traders (scheduled to be played by Jack Carter, the star of Welles's Harlem stage production of Macbeth), and an extremely dark-skinned woman who is Kurtz's lover at the Central Station. The half-breed is described as "an expatriate, tragic exile who can't remember the sound of his own language," and he is repeatedly given the opportunity to look Marlow in the eye. The dark woman is seen only once, near the end, when she stands on the bank of the river, looking toward Marlow and stretching out her arms in grief. Here and elsewhere, relatively marginalized black people provide important dramatic momentsas when one of them looks at the camera and makes the famous announcement, "Mister Kurtz, he dead."

All of the black characters in Welles's film are racial stereotypes, and the script as a whole never escapes from the ideological contradictions at the heart of Conrad's story. As Patrick Brantlinger observes, the original novella "offers a powerful critique of at least certain manifestations of imperialism and racism, at the same time that it presents that critique in ways that can only be characterized as imperialist and racist." 22Where the film is concerned, Welles's liberalism is frequently undercut by his use of primitivist and racist fantasies. Notice, too, that his camera would have represented a mixture of three exclusively white subjectivities: an "average" male in the audience; the fictional Marlow; and Welles himself, who not only plays Marlow but also, in the manner of Citizen Kane, fills the story with autobiographical details. Even so, Heart of Darkness would have been unique, providing the only occasion in the history of classic Hollywood when the white gaze was troubled by a returning black gaze and the imaginary spectator was made sharply conscious of racial difference.

By comparison, the ordinary run of films noirs in the 1940s made black people almost invisible, like the briefly glimpsed figures who carry Walter Neff's bags or wash his car in Double Indemnity. Close-ups of these figures were especially rare, except in brief scenes involving jazz in such pictures as Out of the Past, D. O.A., and In a Lonely Place. There were, however, occasional attempts to give brief speaking roles to black people, and a conscious effort was made to avoid depicting them as the minstrel-show caricatures or comic illiterates of the 1930s. One scene in Out of the Past illustrates the new trend: Jeff Bailey visits a black dance club, where he locates Kathie Moffat's former maid, Eunice, and asks her if she knows anything about Kathie's whereabouts. The role of Eunice is acted by Theresa Harris, who had previously given a fine, unstereotypical performance in Jacques Tourneur's I Walked with a Zombie (1942). She responds to Jeffs questions without a trace of subservience, all the while conveying a wry intelligence. Her male companion (Caleb Peterson) is an unusually dignified presenceunsmiling, silent, and slightly on guard. The scene as a whole is played without condescension, and whether it intends to or not, it makes a comment on racial segregation.

Theresa Harris and Caleb Peterson in Out of the Past (1947).

Here and in several other films of the kind, black extras or bit players also give the protagonist an aura of "cool," so that he resembles what Norman Mailer once described as the "White Negro." This effect is especially apparent in Robert Aldrich's 1956 adaptation of Kiss Me Deadly, which, as I indicate in chapter 4, seems to have a divided and somewhat incoherent attitude toward Mike Hammer. In some respects Aldrich criticizes Mickey Spillane's hero, but in others he slightly revises the character, making him a relatively sympathetic embodiment of urban liberalism. Thus when we first meet Hammer, he is listening to Nat Cole on the radio; later, we discover that he is a regular customer at an all-black jazz club, where his friendship with a black singer (Madi Comfort) and a black bartender (Art Loggins) helps to indicate his essential hipness.

At about this time, Hollywood began to produce films that involved a full-scale "buddy" relationship between male blacks and whites, thus allowing the black actors to become true characters. The phenomenon originated as early as Casablanca, but it became a formula after the 1950s, influencing such postclassical, quasi-noir pictures as In the Heat of the Night (1967), Lethal Weapon (1987), and The Last Boy Scout (1991), all of which are instances of what Thomas Bogle identifies as the "huckfinn fixation." Bogle remarks that, traditionally, "darkness and mystery have been attached to the American Negro, and it appears that the white grows in stature from his association with the dusty black." Thus in the classic huckfinn scenario of the 1950s, a white male's companionship with black people signifies his opposition to the corruption and pretense of bourgeois society and enables him to acquire a measure of "soul"; the important qualification, as Bogle observes, is that the black character ''never competes with the white man," functioning instead as a kind of "ego padder." 24At first glance, the situation in Lethal Weapon is a bit more complicated, because the black character is portrayed as a middle-class suburbanite and the white character as a social outcast. The film reverses the usual structure of racial patriarchy, showing an alienated white man who is restored to health by a black father-figure; meanwhile, it depicts the black family in the utopian style of a television sitcom, surrounded by commodities and enjoying the comforts of the American dream. Notice, however, that the white male emerges as the true phallic herothe "lethal weapon" who saves the black bourgeoise and maintains a traditional ideology. As Robyn Wiegman remarks, the film "allows the white figure to be healed by the same familial unit that he himself is responsible for preserving." 25

A much more intriguing reversal of the huckfinn relationship can be seen in Robert Wise's much earlier, independently produced noir classic, Odds against Tomorrow (1959), written without credit by blacklisted Abraham Polonsky. Operating on one level as an allegory about racial conflict, the film explores the deadly tensions that break out between three bank robbers: an aging ex-con (Ed Begley), a southern racist (Robert Ryan), and a black jazz musician who is also a compulsive gambler (Harry Belafonte). These last two figures are unwillingly bound together by the crime, but they never learn to cooperate with one another. Throughout, Wise and his collaborators are unsentimental in depicting the wounds of race and social class, and they create a number of impressively unorthodox minor charactersincluding a homosexual thug (Will Kuluva) and a sex-starved, pathetically masochistic woman who lives upstairs in Ryan's apartment building (Gloria Grahame). At the end of the film, during the brief, failed bank robbery, Begley is killed, and the picture climaxes with a gun battle between Ryan and Belafonte, who chase one another across a series of oil storage tanks. When the tanks explode in a fashion reminiscent of White Heat (1949), the two men's bodies are so broken and charred that an investigating fireman asks a police officer, "Which is which?"