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

If Miramax were to distribute a Mike Danger film, it would be contributing to the low end of a motion-picture cycle that began in 1989 with Batman and threatens to die off in the late 1990s with productions like Barb Wire (a sort of noir Barbarella). Over the past decade, Hollywood has regularly issued summertime adventures based on the dark side of comic strips. The formula has not always been profitable, but it accounts for such mildly entertaining if extravagant movies as Dick Tracy (1990), The Shadow (1994), and Batman Forever (1995), all of which are aimed at an audience of older children and adults. The major films in the cycle are derived from slightly infantile and outmoded sources, but in true postmodern fashion, they create glossy, show business "events," featuring award-winning actors like Jack Nicholson and Al Pacino and lavish sets by Anton Furst and Joseph Nemec III, who employ a style known in the business as ' 'noir lite." High production values and straightforward comic-book heroics are mingled with over-the-top performances, double-entendre dialogue, dystopian satire, and a good deal of directorial self-consciousness (as in Batman's allusions to Alfred Hitchcock and Fritz Lang). The result is a pop-art spectacle that tries to provide something for almost everybody, enabling the more sophisticated adults to feel knowledgeable while they regress into nostalgia and childhood fantasy.

As we have seen, modestly budgeted and somewhat nostalgic versions of feature-length film noir have also become a staple of cable television. A typical 1996 picture, Café Society (distributed theatrically in 1997), is described as follows in the Showtime program guide: "The year is 1952. New York City's El Casbah nightclub, where Manhattan's fabulously wealthy gather to wallow in the gluttonies of success. One of them, Mickey Jelke (Frank Whaley), is heir to a tremendous fortune when he turns 25. Ask undercover agent Jack Kale (Peter Gallagher) about him, however, and he'll tell you he believes Jelke to be part of a big pornography ring. Then there's Patricia Ward (Lara Flynn Boyle), another society kid who's probably not what she seems to be. Three characters, one film noir triangle. Coffee?" In some cases, a similar nostalgia (if it is, in fact, nostalgia) extends even to the city streets, which are transformed by the tourist industry into simulacra of old Hollywood sets. The San Francisco tourist office provides a "Dashiell Hammett walking tour" to complement its "Victorian Architecture tour" and "Flower Power tour." Fans of The Maltese Falcon can visit a dark alley near Union Square, where a brass plaque memorializes the scene of a famous crime. ''On approximately this spot," the plaque reads, "Miles Archer, partner of Sam Spade, was done in by Brigid O'Shaughnessy."

In one sense, the circulation and transformation of noir motifs is merely an exaggerated expression of modernity itself. The various aspects of the leisure economy have always been related, and film styles or genres have always tended to mirror or influence other types of entertainment. The pulp fiction magazines of the 1930s offered many of the same things westerns, melodramatic "love stories," tales of crime and horrorthat could be seen in theaters or heard on the radio during that decade. Even in the 1940s and 1950s, the barely articulated noir sensibility was not confined to movies or literature; on the contrary, it spread across every form of narrative or protonarrative communication. As one instance, consider Entertainment Comics, better known as EC, which in the early 1950s took direct aim at the libido of adolescent boys, specializing in black comedy (Tales from the Crypt and The Vault of Horror), grotesque "speculative fiction" (WeirdScience), and anarchic satires of pop culture (Mad and its short-lived clone, Panic). At one point, EC adapted a number of short stories by noir novelist Ray Bradbury, and it nurtured a group of stylish, groundbreaking illustrators who borrowed conventions from noirlike movies and pulp magazine covers. The entire EC line was unusually sexy, violent, and iconoclastic. Its two most obviously noir venues, Crime Suspenstories and Shock Suspenstories, were filled with restless suburban marriages, neurotic killers, and corrupt police who administered third-degree punishment to innocent civilians. Drawn in an angular, chiaroscuro style, EC's ten-cent crime anthologies often showed voluptuous women being murdered or tortured, but they also gave vivid treatment to controversial issues such as race prejudice and drug addiction.

Not surprisingly the success of EC prompted an outcry from guardians of morality. In 1954, at the height of the McCarthy era, psychiatrist Fredric Wertham wrote a best-selling exposé of the comic industry, The Seduction of the Innocent, which led to a full-scale Senate investigation headed by Estes Kefauver of Tennessee. EC's maj or competitors quickly appointed a censorship board administered by moral czar Judge Charles F. Murphy, which denied an official "seal of approval" to any comic that used words such as crime, horror, terror, and weird. In response, EC killed off its leading titles and experimented briefly with a melodramatic but "educational" volume called Psychoanalysis. In 1955, it converted its most popular genres into twenty-five-cent "picto-fictions" for adultsamong them, Crime Illustrated: Adult Suspense Stories and Shock Illustrated: Adult Psychoanalytical Tales. The company disappeared at about the same time as classic film noir, although its most popular offering, the parodic Mad, metamorphosed into a relatively sanitized and uninventive "magazine." Then in the 1980s, with the relaxation of censorship and the reconfiguration of the marketplace, some of its original volumes began to resurface as expensive reprints for nostalgic older adults and affluent teenagers; the volumes were a strong influence on Stephen King, and they eventually inspired a movie and a cable TV series called Tales from the Crypt (19891996). Nearly a third of the shows in the series were adapted from the original EC crime comics and were directed by such figures as John Frankenheimer, Walter Hill, and Robert Zemeckis.

Television and radio have also been crucial to the history and dissemination of noir taste. EC was inspired in part by the dark or horrific radio dramas of the 1940sespecially by CBS's Suspense , which featured the major Hollywood stars of its day. Following in a tradition established by Orson Welles at the same network, Suspense devised ingenious ways to motivate retrospective forms of first-person narration: a dead man (Robert Taylor) leaves a manuscript in a shoe box; an invalid (Agnes Moorehead) makes desperate telephone calls to several people because she suspects that she is about to be murdered; and a killer (Peter Lorre) breaks into a police station and holds the cops at gunpoint, forcing them to listen to the weird story of his crimes. The series often adapted novelists such as Cornell Woolrich and James M. Cain, and at least two of its original scripts Cyril Endfield's "The Argyle Inheritance" and Lucille Fletcher's "Sorry, Wrong Number"were later turned into films noirs. Many of its episodes (marketed today as nostalgia radio, with the commercials intact) still have a power to entertain. Among the more compellingly bizarre shows of 1949, for example, were "Consequence," starring James Stewart as a doctor who tries to escape a bad marriage by faking his death; "For Love or Murder," starring Mickey Rooney as a murderous, romantically infatuated jazz musician who hears drums in his head; and "The Bullet,'' starring Ida Lupino as a career woman whose success causes her jealous, ex-convict husband to threaten to shoot her.