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

Suspense was the immediate forerunner of Alfred Hitchcock's hugely successful TV shows of the 1950s and 1960s; indeed, one of its most admired episodes, a 1942 adaptation of Cornell Woolrich's novel The Black Curtain, was filmed by The Alfred Hitchcock Hour in 1962, under the direction of the young Sydney Pollack. Meanwhile, film noir's most celebrated character type, the hard-boiled private eye, remained a staple of entertainment programs on both radio and television from the 1940s through the 1980s. On radio in the period between 1948 and 1952, Dick Powell was singing-detective Richard Diamond, and Howard Duff was a particularly effective Sam Spade. One of the earliest examples of such characters on TV was Charlie Wild, Private Eye (19501952), a production of CBS, ABC, and Dumont, which freely adapted Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade adventures, concealing the literary source and changing the hero's name because of the HUAC investigations into Hollywood communism (Kevin O'Morrison played Wild, and Cloris Leachman was featured as Effie Perinne). Later in the decade, David Janssen was Richard Diamond, Private Detective (19571960), Philip Carey was Philip Marlowe (19591960), Darren McGavin was Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer (19571960), and Craig Stevens was Peter Gunn (19581961).

The best-known police procedural on U.S. radio and television from 1949 until the early 1970s was Jack Webb's increasingly bland and conservative Dragnet, which evolved from He Walked by Night (1949), and which, in its later episodes, costarred Webb and Harry Morgan, who had acted together as a pair of heavies in another film noir called Appointment with Danger (1951). (Webb's wide-screen and color movie version of Dragnet in 1954 was also inflected with noirlike photographic and performance conventions, as was his 1955 movie and radio series entitled Pete Kelly's Blues .) Other TV productions derived from classical noir include Naked City (19581963), the BBC's Third Man (19591964), and Mike Hammer, who resurfaced in a successful series featuring Stacy Keach (19841987). In the same years as the last of these shows, ITV in London produced a series of artful, atmospheric adaptations of Raymond Chandler's short stories, featuring Powers Boothe as Philip Marlowe. At this point, the classic private eye was becoming an antique, but he could be brought up to date by transforming him into a somewhat yuppiefied, postfeminist type, as in Robert B. Parker's Spencer novels and TV show (19851988) and in John Sayles's exceptionally good series of TV dramas entitled Shannon's Deal (19891991). He could also become a certified born loser, as in a made-for-cable thriller like Third-Degree Burn (1989).

It would require a small book merely to list all the burnt-out police officers and philosophical private eyes in American pop culture over the past three decades. Both genders and nearly all sexual inclinations have been represented by such figures, and every large city in the country has been mapped by them. Among the cop shows and criminal adventures on U.S. television, The Fugitive (319631967) and Miami Vice (19841989) are particularly important to the history of noir. Consider as well two expensively produced British exports, Cracker and Prime Suspect, which not only depict a society in decay but also make the detective protagonists seem almost as darkly compulsive as the criminals. These and some of the other examples I have mentioned are sometimes only remotely noirlike, but we should recognize that they all have familial connections with the classical thrillers of the 1940s, which they often acknowledge. The eponymous hero of Cracker, for instance, has a Bogart poster on the wall in his house. When producer-director Blake Edwards turned his highly successful Peter Gunn TV series into a rather bad movie called Gunn (1967), he staged the climax in a hall of mirrors that was reminiscent of The Lady from Shanghai. In one episode of the Mike Hammer TV series in the late 1980s, director Ray Danton did the same thing, achieving somewhat better results than Edwards on a lower budget.

At the very least, we need to recognize that noir is a much more flexible, pervasive, and durable mood, style, or narrative tendency than is commonly supposed and that it embraces different media and different national cultures throughout the twentieth century. Contrary to what Alain Silver and Elizabeth Ward tell us on the first page of their indispensable encyclopedia of Hollywood noir, the form in question does not constitute "a self-contained reflection of [post-World War II] American cultural preoccupations," and it is certainly not "the unique example of a wholly American film Style." 4The term film noir was used in France in the 1930s (if not earlier), and it was first applied to the American cinema by the French; in fact, a great many of the Hollywood films designated by the term were remakes of European pictures, made by émigré directors and writers. Certain of the characteristic expressions of film noirespecially the never-ending cycle of policiers and criminal adventureshave been produced by virtually every medium and every cinema in the world, and no doubt they will continue to be produced. If, as Jean-François Lyotard and others suggest, postmodernity is merely a restaging of modernist preoccupations on the grounds of contemporary technology and economics, then noir is likely to be with us for a long time to come.

This being said, the contemporary American scene has distinctive features that mark it off from the past. We can never know exactly how audiences in the 1940s and 1950s viewed the dark movies of their day, but it seems obvious that we view those same films differently, in contexts far removed from the ones for which they were originally intended. The postwar films noirs now occupy the same shelf space in video stores and the same time slots on TV as last year's Hollywood thrillers; their reception, furthermore, is mediated by an extensive critical discourse (as in the case of this book), which gives them a certain status. Some people regard them as artistic visions of paranoia and entrapment; others view them in a spirit of Reaganite nostalgia for the glamour and simplicity of pre-Vietnam America.

In certain instances, the classic films noirs also provide contemporary audiences with material for what Barbara Klinger calls "mass camp." Anyone who has watched Laura or Out of the Past in a crowded university auditorium will know that such movies require a suspension of disbelief best achieved at home or in a select revival theater. Some of the most serious lines of noir dialogue, written in the spirit of hard-boiled poetry or psychoanalytic profundity, have become unintentionally funny. (Peggy Thomson and Saeko Usukawa have published two amusing and nostalgic volumes made up entirely of dialogue from classical noir: The Little Black and White Book of Film Noir [ 1992] and Hard-Boiled [ 1994].) Where Laura i s concerned, the camp effect is at least partly intendedany movie that puts Clifton Webb, Judith Anderson, and Vincent Price in the same drawing room is inviting a mood of fey theatricality. In the 1940s, however, camp was a marginal or subcultural style, risking criticism or censure. Today, as Klinger observes, the camp sensibility has been fully democratized by changes in social attitudes about gender and sexuality, by the liberalization of censorship rules, by the critical legitimization of pop art, and by the culture industry itself, which has learned how to market old products in new ways. Camp in the late twentieth century has therefore acquired a kind of "mainstream chicness," especially evident in the Batman blockbusters, which is grounded in the audience's sense of superiority over outdated conventions. An almost completely ahistorical mode of reception, it is marked by a strong tendency "to embrace what is perceived as mediocrity for a transient, disinterested form of recreation without group affiliation or political bite." 5