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

41. Dennis Hopper quoted by Leighton Grist, "Moving Targets and Black Widows: Film Noir in Modern Hollywood," in Cameron, Book of Film Noir, 267.

42. J. Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum, Midnight Movies (New York: Harper and Row, 1983), 41. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically in the text.

43. The Harvard students were, of course, especially fond of Casablanca, which has never been called a film noir, even though it contains practically everything we associate with the form: a smoky nightclub, a fog-laden airport, a feeling of containment or huis-clos, Arthur Edeson's gothic photography, Bogart in a trenchcoat, Lorre and Greenstreet in supporting roles, and so on. Borde and Chaumeton excluded Casablanca from Panorama du film noir américain, arguing that it is nothing more than a wartime propaganda film with a romantic ending; and yet they describe Paramount's This Gun for Hire, which is equally propagandistic and in some ways quite saccharine, as a definitive film noir. Perhaps the real reason for the absence of Casablanca from histories of noir has more to do with the specific content of its propaganda. The French may have been cool toward the film because of the way it depicts their role in the war.

44. Noel Burch, Theory of Film Practice (New York: Praeger, 1973), 123.

45. Durgnat, "Paint It Black: The Family Tree of Film Noir," Film Comment (6 November 1974): 6. Hereafter, all quotations are from this version of Durgnat's essay (condensed from an earlier, somewhat less playful article in the British journal Cinema).

46. Molly Haskell, Love and Other Infectious Diseases (New York: Morrow, 1990), 1012.

47. Schrader, "Notes on Film Noir," in Silver and Ursini, Film Noir Reader, 5361. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically in the text.

48. Schrader has a sophisticated literary education, and Martin Scorsese's early films are filled with fairly explicit allusions to James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. According to Schrader's own account, he wrote the script of Taxi Driver when he was undergoing a spiritual and psychological crisis similar to the one T. S. Eliot describes in The Waste Land. I discuss the more general influence of literary modernism on Hollywood in chapter 2.

49. In much of the subsequent critical literature, noir is defined in such a way as to frustrate political or didactic reading. In Silver and Ward's Film Noir, for example, see Carl Macek's account of Cyril Endfield's left-wing, social-realist Try and Get Me (1950), which supposedly "functions better as a film noir than it does as a quasidocumentary exposing environment as the true producer of crime" (296). See also Dennis White's comments on The Mask of Dimitrios (1944): "It is possible that [Eric] Ambler's characters are not cynical enough for American noir or that his point of view is more radical than existential" (187).

50. An influential essay written at this time on contemporary Hollywood was Richard T. Jameson, "Son of Noir," Film Comment 10 (1974): 3033. For evidence of how the term became popular within the industry, see Todd Erickson, "Kill Me Again: Movement Becomes Genre," in Silver and Ursini, Film Noir Reader, 30729.

51. For an interesting commentary on this phenomenon, see Jonathan Rosenbaum, "Allusion Profusion," Chicago Reader (21 October 1994): 12, 2526.

52. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural logic of late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991). See also Marcia Landy and Lucy Fischer, "Dead Again or A-Live Again: Postmodern or Postmortem?" Cinema Journal 33, no. 4 (summer 1994): 322.

1. George Orwell, "Raffles and Miss Blandish," in A Collection of Essays by George Orwell (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1954), 154.

2. For the discourse on Americanism in Germany, see Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg, eds., The Weimar Republic Sourcebook (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994). On Baudelaire and modernity see Antoine Compagnon, Five Paradoxes of Modernity, trans. Franklin Phillip (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).

3. Some modernist philosophers and artists were more critical of modernity than others. On the one hand were those who completely rejected Enlightenment rationalism and nineteenth-century liberalism: Martin Heidegger, Oswald Spengler, T. E. Hulme, T. S. Eliot, William Butler Yeats, and so on. On the other hand were those who criticized nineteenth-century ideas of progress and liberalism but who remained within a rationalist or humanist camp: Edmund Husserl, Thomas Mann, James Joyce, André Gide, and others.

4. Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness prefigures this theme, but I am of course alluding to Jim Thompson's Killer inside Me (1952), which is symptomatic of modernist themes in "cheap" fiction after World War II. Notice also the postwar novels of Cornell Woolrich, Fredric Brown, andabove allCharles Willeford. Willeford's High Priest of California (1956) is the story of a sociopathic used-car salesman who enjoys reading Eliot, Joyce, and Franz Kafka in his spare time. For commentary on several hard-boiled novelists who worked in this vein, see Terry Curtis Fox, "City Nights," Film Comment 20, no. 5 (October 1984): 3049. See also Patrick Raynal, "Écran blanc pour la série noire," Cahiers du cinéma, no. 490 (April 1995): 7781.

5. David Lodge, "The Language of Modernist Fiction: Metaphor and Metonymy," in Modernism: A Guide to European Literature, 18901930, ed. Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), 481.

6. For a discussion of the effect of World War I on literary language, see Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 2124.

7. Over the next two decades, Eliot's Dark City was to become a touchstone for British and American modernism, influencing Scott Fitzgerald (The Great Gatsby), Evelyn Waugh (A Handful of Dust), and W. H. Auden (The Age of Anxiety).

8. As Mike Davis has shown in City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (New York: Vintage Books, 1992), the "noir generation" of European exiles and hard-boiled writers in Hollywood was powerfully critical of the Southern California boosters and real-estate developers who had created the myth of a sunny, missionstyle utopia. For filmmakers like Orson Welles, Billy Wilder, and Raymond Chandler, the American dream was at best a "bright, guilty world." (Hereafter, Davis's work is cited parenthetically in the text.)

9. Graham Greene quoted in Norman Sherry, The Life of Graham Greene, vol. 1 (New York: Viking, 1989), 597. Hereafter, this work and volume 2, published in 1994, are cited parenthetically in the text.

10. Joseph Conrad quoted in Tony Hilfer, The Crime Novel: A Deviant Genre (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990), 98; my translation from the French.

11. Henry James, "The New York Preface," The Turn of the Screw, ed. Robert Kimbrough (New York: W. W. Norton, 1966), 120.

12. For example, Raymond Chandler's attack on Christie and Sayers in "The Simple Art of Murder" is strikingly similar to Ezra Pound's attacks on Amy Lowell and the British establishment in the period before World War I. Chandler's essays and letters are filled with savage comments on the women consumers of popular literatureas when he writes that pulp magazines "made most of the fiction of the time taste like a cup of luke-warm consomme at a spinsterish tearoom." Dashiell Hammett sometimes used the same metaphors. In one of his early book reviews, he remarked that S. S. Van Dine's upper-class detective, Philo Vance, had the conversational manner of "a high school girl who has been studying the foreign words and phrases in the back of her dictionary."