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

Despite their obvious ideological purpose, Borde and Chaumeton often seem unclear or inconsistent. They initially describe film noir as a series, but at later points they also discuss it as a genre, a mood, and a Zeitgeist. In the introduction, Duhamel claims that noir is as old as cinema and has never been healthier, whereas in the text, Borde and Chaumeton say that the American series began in 1941 and ended in the early 1950s. (A postscript to the 1988 paperback edition moves the end of noir forward to 1955 and then notes its "fascinating renaissance" in Point Blank, Dirty Harry, and Badlands .) 25Throughout, an "objective" tone serves as a mask for the indulgence of a desire. Borde and Chaumeton have surprisingly little to say about visual style (the French were generally unimpressed by what Bazin later called "plastics,'' or expressionist imagery); in fact, they emphasize that the dark atmosphere of Hollywood crime movies is "nothing in itself ' and ought not to be adopted for its own sake (180). Instead, they place great emphasis on the theme of death, and on "essential" affective qualities, which at one point they list in the form of five adjectives typical of surrealism: "oneiric, bizarre, erotic, ambivalent, and cruel" (3). 26Sometimes one of these qualities is said to dominate: The Shanghai Gesture (which had prompted one of the surrealist experiments in "irrational expansion") is supposedly "oneiric," whereas Gilda is "erotic" (3). Sometimes, too, the traits are unevenly distributed, with the "noir aspect" manifesting itself in a tangential form that resembles Aragon's synthetic criticism: "The Set Up is a good documentary about boxing: it becomes film noir in the sequence where accounts are settled by a savage beating in a blind alley. Rope is a psychological film that can be linked to the noir series only because of its spellbinding sadism" (3).

But according to Borde and Chaumeton, there are also noir narratives and characters; and at this level film noir becomes a full-fledged outlaw genre, systematically reversing Hollywood's foundational myths. True films of the type, Borde and Chaumeton insist, not only take place inside the criminal milieu," but also represent "the point of view of criminals" (7). Such films are "moral" in an approximately surrealist sense: instead of incorruptible legal agents, they give us shady private eyes, crooked police, murderous plainclothes detectives, or lying district attorneys. Often they depict the gentry as corrupt, and whenever they deal with gangsters, they replace the "grand primitives" of earlier gangster movies like Scarface with angelic killers or neurotics (7).

It follows that the ideal noir hero is the opposite of John Wayne. Psychologically, he is passive, masochistic, morbidly curious; physically, he is "often mature, almost old, not very handsome. Humphrey Bogart is the type" (10). By the same logic, the noir heroine is no Doris Day. Borde and Chaumeton never allude to the Marquis de Sade's Julliette, one of the most famous sexual terrorists in French literature, but the character they describe resembles her in every respect save the fact that she is "fatal even to herself 1' (10). Beautiful, adept with firearms, and "probably frigid," this new woman contributes to a distinctive noir eroticism, "which is usually no more than the eroticization of violence'' (10). Her best representative on the screen, Borde and Chaumeton argue, is Gloria Grahame, who, even though she was seldom cast as a femme fatale, always suggested "cold calculation and sensuality" (125).

Above all, Borde and Chaumeton are intrigued by the way film noir has "renovated the theme of violence" (10). One of the major accomplishments of the series, they observe, is to replace the melodramatic combat of arms between hero and villain (the swordplay at the climax of a swashbuckler, the gun duel at the end of a western, and so on) with a richly elaborated "ceremony of killing." Death in such films usually takes the form of a professional execution (a locus classicus is The Killers, a 1946 adaptation of Ernest Hemingway) or a sadistic ritual: in The High Wall, a publisher of religious books murders an elevator repairman by hooking an umbrella under the stool on which the man is standing, sending him plummeting down an empty shaft; in Kiss of Death, a demented gangster laughs as he shoves a little old lady in a wheelchair down a flight of stairs; in Brute Force, a fascistic prison guard tortures inmates with an elaborate, stylized brutality; and in Border Incident, an undercover policeman is slowly run over by a tractor and a field plow while his helpless confederate stands by and watches.

"In this incoherent brutality," Borde and Chaumeton remark, "there is the feeling of a dream" (12). Indeed, the narratives themselves are often situated on the margins of dreams, as if to intensify the surrealist atmosphere of violent confusion, ambiguity, or disequilibrium that Borde and Chaumeton regard as the basis of noir. ''All the components of noir style," they write, are designed to "disorient the spectator" by attacking certain conventions: "a logical action, an evident distinction between good and evil, well-defined characters with clear motives, scenes that are more spectacular than brutal, a heroine who is exquisitely feminine and a hero who is honest" (14). The "vocation" of film noir is to reverse these norms and thereby create a specific tension that results from the disruption of order and "the disappearance of psychological bearings or guideposts" (15).

But film noir was also a prisoner of conventions. Borde and Chaumeton contend that in the 1940s, films about crime and gangs possessed a bizarre quality reminiscent of the surrealists or Kafka; by the 1950s, however, the implicit social criticism in thrillers was smothered by banal plot devices, and the "exploitation of incoherence" was becoming predictable (180). Even the original pictures were beginning to look dated: at a revival of Murder, My Sweet presented by the Cine-Club of Toulouse in 1953, people laughed whenever Philip Marlowe lost consciousness and disappeared into a black pool, and in the discussion afterward the picture was treated as a "parody of horror" (181).

From the perspective of the mid 1950s, it appeared that noir was dying. Borde and Chaumeton attribute this "decadence" to the exhaustion of a formula and to the rise of neorealist social-problem pictures. To these factors, we might add several economic and political determinants: in response to television and the growing leisure industry, Hollywood was turning to Cinemascope, color, and biblical epics; at the same time, many of the key writers and directors of the previous decade had been blacklisted by the major studios. As if to signal the end of a cycle, urban thrillers were increasingly produced for the lower end of the market. Hence, the two pictures of the 1950s that the Panorama singles out as truly disorienting were both filmed on relatively low budgets, without stars. The first is Joseph H. Lewis's Gun Crazy (1950), the story of a murderous heterosexual couple of "exemplary beauty" (9), which allows the woman to wear pants and act as the aggressive partner. Borde and Chaumeton regard Gun Crazy as a profound and unselfconscious expression of the surrealist credo; in their words, it is "one of the rarest contemporary illustrations of L'AMOUR FOU (in every sense of that term)," and it deserves to be called "a sort of L 'Age d'Or of the American film noir" (118).

Next in importance is the Robert Aldrich adaptation of Mickey Spillane's Kiss Me Deadly (1955), which Borde and Chaumeton discuss in their 1988 postscript. Like The Maltese Falcon, this film involves a private eye and the search for a mysterious object; nevertheless, Borde and Chaumeton describe it as the "despairing opposite" of the picture that inaugurated the noir series: "From the eve of war to the society of consumption, the tone has changed. A savage lyricism throws us into a world in complete decomposition, ruled by debauchery and brutality; to the intrigues of these wild beasts and specters, Aldrich provides the most radical of solutions: nuclear apocalypse" (277).