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

36. According to Leigh Brackett, the script was designed to make Chandler's novel more straightforward, less morally ambiguous and inconclusive: "Our only achievements were two: Terry Lennox has become a clear-cut villain, and it seemed that the only satisfactory ending was for the cruelly-diddled Marlowe to blow Terry's guts out." (Leigh Brackett, "From The Big Sleep to The Long Goodbye, and More or Less How We Got There," Take One 1, no. 1 [1974]: 2728.) For his own part, Altman wanted to create an anti-Bogart movie: "I think Marlowe's dead. I think that was 'the long goodbye.' I think it's a goodbye to that genrea genre that I don't think is going to be acceptable any more." (Jan Dawson, "Robert Altman Speaking," Film Comment [MarchApril 1974]: 41.)

37. Photographer John Alonzo recalls that Polanski "liked putting the camera very close to the performers, right on top of them. Now that's an intimidating thing to any actress who is so beautiful [as Faye Dunaway]. Well, it added to her performance. I really believe, it made her nervous" (Schaefer and Salvato, Masters of Light, 32).

38. John G. Cawelti, " Chinatown and Generic Transformation in Recent American Films," in Film Theory and Criticism, 2d ed., ed. Gerald Mast and Marshall Cohen (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 200. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically in the text.

39. Barbara Creed, "From Here to Modernity: Feminism and Postmodernism," in A Postmodern Reader, ed. Joseph Natoli and Linda Hutcheon (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 407

40. For a discussion of consumerism and postmodern spectatorship, see Anne Friedberg, Window Shopping: Cinema and the Post-Modern Condition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).

41. Quentin Tarantino quoted in Paul A. Woods, King Pulp: The Wild World of Quentin Tarantino (New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 1996), 103. Hereafter, Woods's work is cited parenthetically in the text.

42. Peter Bogdanovich and Jonathan Rosenbaum, This Is Orson Welles (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), 168.

1. E. Ann Kaplan, ed., Women in Film Noir (London: BFI, 1980), 4. Hereafter, this work will be cited parenthetically in the text.

2. See especially the essays by Sylvia Harvey and Janey Place in Kaplan, Women in Film Noir. It should also be noted that the sexual politics of film noir are complicated by a strong current of masochistic eroticism. For a particularly cogent discussion of such matters, see Gaylyn Studlar, In the Realm of Pleasure: Von Sternberg, Dietrich, and the Masochistic Aesthetic (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988).

3. Frank Krutnick, In a Lonely Street: Film Noir, Genre, Masculinity (London: Routledge, 1991), 91. For an analysis of the "masculinity in crisis" argument in recent film study, see Tania Modleski, Feminism without Women (New York: Routledge, 1991).

4. R. Barton Palmer, Hollywood's Dark Cinema: The American Film Noir (New York: Twayne, 1994), 171.

5. See the commentary on Blue Steel and Love Crimes in Alain Silver and Elizabeth Ward, eds., Film Noir: An Encyclopedia of the American Style, rev. ed. (Woodstock: Overlook Press, 1992), 41819.

6. Manthia Diawara, "Noirs by Noirs: Towards a New Realism in Black Cinema," in Joan Copjec, ed. Shades of Noir (London: Verso, 1993), 262.

7. A wide-ranging discussion of Orientalist motifs in other kinds of movies may be found in Matthew Bernstein and Gaylyn Studlar, eds., Visions of the East: Orientalism in Film (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997).

8. Dashiell Hammett, "Dead Yellow Women," in The BigKnockover , ed. Lillian Hellman (New York: Vintage, 1972), 246.

9. For discussion of this and other kinds of Hollywood films involving romantic relations between Asians and Anglos, see Gina Marchetti, Romance and the "Yellow Peril": Race, Sex, and Discursive Strategies in Hollywood Fiction (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).

10. A particularly informative interview with Wayne Wang about these and other matters may be found in Owen Shapiro and Chen-Tsung Yau, "Film-Making and Ethnic Boundaries: A Conversation with Wayne Wang," Point of Contact (winter/spring 1997): 7187. Wang says that he would like to make films "with a Chinese content, but which also have something in the structure that is Chinese." At the same time, he notes, ''it becomes a tricky question as to what is the Chinese aesthetic in film" and "even more complicated when asked about Chinese-American aesthetics." His own practice is strongly influenced by the Frenchman Jean-Luc Godard and the Japanese Yasujiro Ozu. Although he never mentions noir, his interview is filled with references to motifs we can associate with the form: multiple perspectives, offscreen narration, mirror shots, imagery of water, and so on.

11. Wayne Wang quoted in Peter Feng, "Being Chinese American, Becoming Asian American: Chan Is Missing''Cinema Journal 35, no. 4 (summer 1996): 99.

12. Julian Stringer, "Your tender smiles give me strength': Paradigms of Masculinity in John Woo's A Better Tomorrow and The Killer," Screen 38, no. 1 (spring 1997): 2541.

13. See Rolando J. Romero, "The Postmodern Hybrid: Do Aliens Dream of Alien Sheep?" Post Script 16, no. 1 (fall 1996): 4152. The Chicano character does not exist in the Philip K. Dick novel that was the source of Blade Runner, but the William Burroughs story that gave the film its title involves a dystopian influx of Puerto Ricans and African Americans into Manhattan. Romero notes that the original script for the film was written by Hampton Fancher, who was himself partly Chicano. Both versions of the completed picture, he argues, reflect "postmodernism's ambivalence toward hybridity," together with a certain "indeterminacy towards the representation of the most visible population in the California landscape" (43).

14. Notice also that both adaptations of Farewell, My Lovely are more misogynistic than Raymond Chandler had been. In the novel, Velma ValentoHelen Grayle sacrifices her life to avoid causing trouble for the rich man she has married; indeed Marlowe's attitude in telling the story (as the title of the book suggests) is elegiac. The Dick Richards movie is especially out of keeping with this effect. It not only portrays Velma-Helen as a conventional femme fatale, but also has Marlowe kill her off at the end.

15. For a discussion of "existential" motifs in American film noir, see Robert Porfirio, "No Way Out: Existential Motifs in the Film Noir," in The Film Noir Reader, ed.

Alain Silver and James Ursini (New York: Limelight Editions, 1996). For the quote, see Roger Rosenblatt, Black Fiction (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974), 162.

16. For additional discussion of African-American writers in Paris during the 1940s and 1950s, see Christopher Sawyer-Lausanno, The Continental Pilgrimage: Amertcan Writers in Paris, 19441960 (New York: Grove Press, 1992).

17. Richard Wright himself directed and starred in a disappointing film adaptation of Native Son in the late 1950s. For a discussion of this film, see Peter Brunette,

"Two Wrights, One Wrong," in Gerald Peary and Roger Shatzkin, eds., The Modern American Novel and the Movies (New York: Ungar, 1978), pp. 13142.

18. An excellent discussion of this production may be found in Robert Stam, "Orson Welles, Brazil, and the Power of Blackness," Persistence of Vision, no. 7 (1989): 93112.

19. All quotations from Welles's Heart of Darkness are from the script dated November 30, 1939, in the Orson Welles archive at the Lilly Library in Bloomington, Indiana. This and other materials on the film arc located in box 14, folders 1519.