Film Noir

Dark rooms with light slicing through venetian blinds, alleys cluttered with garbage, abandoned warehouses where dust hangs in the air, rain-slickened streets with water still running in the gutters, dark detective offices overlooking busy streets: this is the stuff of film noir--that most magnificent of film forms--a perfect blend of form and content, where the desperation and hopelessness of the situations is reflected in the visual style, which drenches the world in shadows and only occasional bursts of sunlight. Film noir, occasionally acerbic, usually cynical, and often enthralling, gave us characters trying to elude some mysterious past that continues to haunt them, hunting them down with a fatalism that taunts and teases before delivering the final, definitive blow.

Unlike other forms of cinema, the film noir has no paraphernalia that it can truly call its own. Unlike the western, with cattle drives, lonely towns on the prairie, homesteading farmers, Winchester rifles, and Colt 45s, the film noir borrows its paraphernalia from other forms, usually from the crime and detective genres, but often overlapping into thrillers, horror, and even science fiction (as in the great "what's it" box from Kiss Me Deadly). The visual style echoes German expressionism, painting shafts of light that temporarily illuminate small chunks of an ominous and overbearing universe that limits a person's chances to slim and none. For as Paul Schrader said in his influential "Notes on Film Noir" essay, "No character can speak authoritatively from a space which is continually being cut into ribbons of light."

Out of the Past, for example, is one of the archetypal noirs, giving us a protagonist who has tried to escape his past (he betrayed a partner by running away with his girlfriend), but fate won't let him escape. He inhabits a world that constantly pulls people back into a morass of existence that is bound to suffocate them. Jeff (played by Robert Mitchum) is a seemingly good guy, but one bad turn has made his life a hell that he can never completely escape. Kirk Douglas plays the racketeer who needs to use Jeff and he does so by planting one of the great femmes fatales, Jane Greer, within Jeff's easy reach. And she consumes him.


Jane Greer and Robert Mitchum in Out of the Past.

The femme fatale would play a crucial role in the film noir, whether in the guise of Jane Greer in Out of the Past, Rita Hayworth in Lady From Shanghai, Veronica Lake in The Blue Dahlia, Joan Bennett in Scarlet Street, Peggy Cummins in Gun Crazy, Gloria Grahame in Human Desire, Lizbeth Scott in Dead Reckoning, Ava Gardner in The Killers, or Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity. These women were black widows who slowly drew in the heroes with come-hither looks and breathless voices. Communicating a danger of sex that is worthy of the '90s AIDS epidemic, the femme fatale knew how to use men to get whatever she wanted, whether it was just a little murder between lovers (as in Double Indemnity) or a wild, on-the-run lifestyle (as in Gun Crazy). The femme fatale was always there to help pull the hero down. And in the case of Mildred Pierce, we even get a femme fatale in the form of a daughter who threatens to destroy her mother's life.

Heroes in the film noir world would forever struggle to survive. Some of the heroes learned to play by the rules of film noir and survived by exposing corruption, such as Humphrey Bogart in The Big Sleep and Dick Powell in Murder, My Sweet. But more often than not, they were the saps destroyed by love (Fred MacMurray in Double Indemnity and Edward G. Robinson in Scarlet Street), a past transgression (Robert Mitchum in Out of the Past), or overly ambitious goals (Richard Widmark in Night and the City and Sterling Hayden in The Killing).


Sterling Hayden and his gang in The Killing.

Titles like Pitfall, Nightmare, Kiss of Death, and Edge of Doom describe what you'll find in film noir. And titles like Night and the City, Side Street, Hell's Island and The Asphalt Jungle convey the terrain. But maybe it's titles such as The Big Heat and The Big Sleep that most simply convey the film noir essence--an overpowering force that can't be avoided.

Film noir first appeared in the early '40s in movies such as Stranger on the Third Floor (often cited as the first full-fledged noir) and This Gun For Hire. While soldiers went to war, film noir exposed a darker side of life, balancing the optimism of Hollywood musicals and comedies by supplying seedy, two-bit criminals and doom-laden atmospheres. While Hollywood strove to help keep public morale high, film noir gave us a peek into the alleys and backrooms of a world filled with corruption. And film noir remained an important form in Hollywood until the late '50s. Films such as Touch of Evil (1958) closed out the cycle. By then, the crime and detective genres were playing out their dramas in bright lights, with movies such as The Lineup containing noir elements but not the iconography of darkened streets and chiaroscuro lighting. (Post-'50s noirs such as Farewell, My Lovely and Body Heat are nostalgia first and noirs second.)

In this issue's "In Focus," we give you a look at 10 different film noir classics. These are some of the essential noirs, movies that we strongly recommend, movies that all movie buffs should be familiar with. We invite you to test out the links below and witness the various shades of noir. In addition, Alain Silver reveals the truth about the ending of noir classic Kiss Me Deadly.

The Big Combo

The Big Combo (1955), Allied Artists' seedy B-noir directed by Joseph H. Lewis and photographed exquisitely by John Alton, opens with Susan Lowell (Jean Wallace) splashed in slanting shadows as she runs through tunnels along a boxing ring. She's chased by two hitmen, Fanty and Mingo, who are hired by her Napoleonic lover, Mr. Brown (Richard Conte), to keep an eye on her. Cornered, she emerges from Alton's poetic darkness and agrees to stop running. By contrast, the hitmen remain in the evil dark, shapeless. Susan, centered in an almost spot-effect, looks stark, pale and naked.



Alton's "mystery lighting" imbues Susan's nakedness with the noir concerns of guilt and obsession. She's not a femme fatale, but Lewis and Alton's shot compositions and Wallace's characterization treat Susan as an obsessive female who needs to be contained by the law (Lt. Leonard Diamond) and atone for sexual transgressions. Diamond (Cornell Wilde and Wallace's offscreen husband), too, is obsessed. He has tracked Susan for months and spent his own money in his crazed pursuit to bring down Brown and the combination. He tells the captain, "If I could get a hold of her and make her talk," but the captain reminds Diamond of his real agenda: to reform a "wayward" girl that he loves.

Susan's guilt develops across scenes. Following the elegiac opening, she meets Mr. Audobon, an old family friend, at a posh restaurant. Cryptically, Mr. Audobon comments, "Well you look so different, Susan. Why, I hardly recognized you." Susan says she hasn't changed, but Lewis' cutaway to the two hitmen sitting and eating undercuts her denials. As Susan and Mr. Audobon stroll across the dance floor, Susan, unable to run from herself, collapses: "I've taken some pills. I think I'm dying." Later, at the hospital, Susan's made to feel worse by Diamond who hounds her about Alicia (one of the film's narrative threads). Susan backs away, but Diamond hovers across the bed, "You think you're the bright respectable girl you were four years ago? You're not. You attempted suicide. You're under arrest. You can be sentenced to jail for six months." Diamond's words center around suicide but the real undercurrent of his accusations concern what Susan and Brown do in the dark.

Diamond's obsession slowly reaches Susan. Susan, in white, tries to reclaim lost innocence by listening to a private recital, but Diamond barges in and shocks her reveries. "You think this is mink, Miss Lowell," he asks, grabbing her furs. "These are the skins of human beings, Miss Lowell. People who have been beaten, sold, robbed, doped, murdered by Mr. Brown." She doesn't want to hear the truth, and Lewis and Alton reflect this mood by alienating Wallace from Wilde in a wonderfully staged two-shot. The performers look ahead, through the camera, rarely at each other. Separate but together, she offers her first confession: "I live in a maze, Mr. Diamond. A strange blind and blackened maze and all of the little twisting paths lead back to Mr. Brown." Earlier she had told Brown, "I hate and despise you," but his power of lovemaking captivated her with noir's transgressive promise. Conte had followed her statement with kisses to her cheek, neck and then traveled down, behind her body, as the camera dollied in for a stunning erotic close-up. Diamond follows her confession with one of his own. He tells her to get out, to save herself from Brown, and then admits that he, too, loves her. Susan breaks the mood of alienation. She turns and looks directly at Diamond.

Her first look becomes a committed second look following the brutal death of Rita (Diamond's on-and-off again burlesque-hall girlfriend). Susan visits Diamond at the police precinct with a photograph of Alicia. The thread is followed and they find Alicia, Brown's estranged wife, at a sanatorium. Susan, in front of the police, Diamond and Alicia pleads, "Haven't I humiliated myself enough?" Diamond says no one has done enough, and Susan provides her second confession, admitting before Alicia and a group of men that she was Brown's girl. Alicia acknowledges Susan's guilt and punishes her further, "Then why did you stay four years, why did you start?" Diamond asks Alicia to see the connection between herself and Susan, a younger version of herself. Alicia refuses to help and then Diamond shows her a photograph of Rita's bullet-riddled body. Alicia acquiesces and Susan, glancing at the photograph and guilty by association, crumples in tears, her transgressive sexuality punished.

The film's ending is cathartic: Susan frees herself from guilt and Brown's gaze; Brown, who's responsible for the deaths of Rita, McClure, Dreyer, Fanty and Mingo and lived by the ruthless motto "First is first and second is nobody," is reduced to a nobody. As Brown paces inside the airport hangar and wonders where that "stupid pilot" is, Susan coolly lights a cigarette. Conte knocks the lighter free with a left hand, and then slaps her with his right. "I want to be seen," she says, and Brown threatens, "Don't try that again." Moments later, a police car pulls up, and Brown looks into the dark fog and retreats, sliding into a corrugated tin wall. Susan watches and sizes him up. Diamond's disembodied voice tells Brown to "C'mon out." He starts firing into the darkness and Susan adjusts the car searchlight and shines it on Brown. She seizes control of the mise-en-scene and ascertains somebody else's guilt besides her own. Brown is now totally undercut. Through a series of eyeline matches he can't see anything, only fog, darkness and bright glaring spots of light. He can no longer order the universe. Impotent, he fires at the beam but she keeps it shining. Emblematically, he no longer possesses her.

Framing and lighting render Brown powerless, and Susan, although cleansing her guilt by displacing it to Brown, remains somewhat passive moving from one man to another. She watches Brown empty his gun and Diamond emerge, towering over the "little man." Diamond grabs him--"Let's go hoodlum"--and sends him sliding toward two police officers. Diamond then lingers in the hangar, his back to the camera, poignantly silhouetted, and Susan walks toward him. Backlit they stand together, and as David Raksin's love theme swells, they exit into swirling fog. We are left contemplating a haunting image of sentimental toughness. Maybe there's hope for these two, even in a dark world called film noir

The Big Heat

A third of the way through Fritz Lang's brutally beautiful The Big Heat, Glenn Ford as detective Dave Bannion returns to his now bare home and stands separate, alone. He looks toward the kitchen, where his wife once cooked steaks and took drags off his cigarettes, sips off his beer.


In one of the most shocking scenes in all of film noir, Lee Marvin throws scalding hot coffee on Gloria Grahame, and later she shows him her scarred face (above).




She's dead, blown up in a dynamited car, dynamite meant for him. Lang's eyeline match captures the noir mood of alienation and more importantly devastates the audience as he closes it off with a medium close up of Ford, eyes watered. Bannion was investigating the suicide of Tom Duncan and the evidence had lead him to the mobster, Lagana. Lagana's men took the corruption of the mean streets and spilled them into the detective's home, destroying his domestic space. Angry and alienated from humanity, the invasion spins Bannion in a new direction of personal revenge.

But revenge in this film rings hollow. Whereas many noirs contain the tradition of the femme-fatale, the deadly spiderwoman who destroys her man and his family and career, The Big Heat inverts this narrative paradigm, making Ford the indirect agent of fatal destruction. All four women he meets--from clip joint singer, Lucy Chapman to gun moll Debby--are destroyed.

Lucy is destroyed because Bannion refuses to take her story seriously. She was Tom Duncan's lover, and Bannion sees her as a no-good party girl and refuses to go give her any respect. When he hears of her relationship with Duncan, he separates himself, sliding across the club's bench seat and surly saying, "That sounds very cozy." He mistakenly judges her. "You trying to use us for a shakedown." "Me?" Lucy says incredulously. "At least I'll show she's a liar." Lucy is right--Mrs. Duncan lies, but because of Bannion's class prejudices, he is taken in by Mrs. Duncan's performance. Earlier Mrs Duncan had won over his sympathy. As she sat by a three-way mirror, Ford knocked at the door. Suddenly her face turned from a mean scowl to a sudden propriety, and her voice adopted the grieving quaver of a recent widow. Eventually, because Lucy's had talked to Bannion, she is killed--her body found on a county road, burned, tortured, by cigarette butts. Her death motivated Bannion to pursue Duncan's death with more rigor.

Mrs. Bannion is destroyed by Bannion's aggressive masculinity. Following a lewd, threatening phone call at his home, Bannion barges into Lagana's estate and insults the mobster, by talking about Lucy Chapman's murder: "Yeah, it was an old-fashioned killing, prohibition kind. . . ." Lagana, sits calmly behind the desk, quietly enraged at the prohibition reference. Ford pushes his luck, "What's a matter, you think I live under a rock or something? You creeps have no compunction about phoning my home talking to my wife like she was--" George, Lagana's strong arm, enters and Ford with a right cross, a left, and a two-handed smash buries him. "You want to pinch-hit for your boy, Lagana?" Ford challenges. Lagana, threatened, eventually responds with two other pinch-hitters: Vince Stone (Lee Marvin in one of his deliciously dangerous roles) and Larry Gordon are hired to kill Bannion. Unfortunately, Gordon gets a little sloppy, his bombing targeting the wrong Bannion.

Bertha Duncan is destroyed by Bannion's doppelganger, Debby (Gloria Grahame in her greatest role). Bannion's investigation leads him to reassess Bertha Duncan. Tom Duncan had written a suicide note in which he named names. Bertha found it and used it to blackmail Lagana and Stone. Bannion wants that note to go public, so he threatens Bertha: "If anything happens to you, the evidence comes out." He pushes her into the mantle. "With you dead, The Big Heat falls." He starts to strangle her, but stops as the cops arrive. He then returns to Debby and tells her how close he came to killing Bertha. "I wish I had," he says. Debby says that he couldn't do it, and then he runs to take care of his child. As he leaves he throws a gun on the bed, "Keep that for company" he says, indirectly giving her the means to kill Duncan. And that's what she does, becoming an extension of Bannion's will. She visits Bertha--they're both in minks, as Lang layers his doppelgangers "I never felt better in my life," Debby says, after she shoots her. Her gun falls on the floor and Lang makes an implicit moral comment through a dissolve. The gun is overlapped with an image of Bannion alone on the street, clearly linking Debby's action with Bannion's hidden desire.

Finally, Debby's actions, too have their destructive consequences. Earlier Vince Stone had splashed hot coffee in her face following her information rendezvous with Bannion. At the end of the film, Debby returns the favor, scalding Vince, and as she brags about her moral reformation, "The lid's off the garbage can and I did it," Vince shoots her in the back. Before she dies, she heals Bannion, opening him up to feeling. "Remember how angry you got when I asked you about your wife," she says, and Bannion eloquently speaks about his past domestic life: "Kate was a sampler. She'd take sips of my drink and puffs on my cigarette--" Debby's death restores Bannion and our moral order, but Lang's ending is cautious and grim. Later, Bannion picks up the phone: there's a hit and run over on South Street. As he exits, we are reminded of the circularity of crime and its cost. A huge poster on the office wall reads, "Give Blood, Now." It seems that the women in this dark noir have given more than their fair share.

The Big Sleep

To Have and Have Not was one of the surprises of 1944. The film's pairing of middle-aged screen veteran Humphrey Bogart and 18 year-old Lauren Bacall had proven incendiary at the box-office. As the film racked up huge profits, Warner Brothers turned to independent producer-director Howard Hawks and asked him to repeat the magic. He was ready.



He told Warners he would need $50,000 to buy a story he assured them could be transformed into a tough yet romantic vehicle for the two stars. $5,000 went to Raymond Chandler, the author of the crime thriller The Big Sleep. The remaining $45,000 went to Hawks. When he looked at the finished version, Chandler would be the first to say that Hawks had earned his cut. For, when completed, The Big Sleep had been through so many rewrites that it had gone from being an existential meditation on modern life as told through the eyes of a world-weary detective, to a sexy, funny, hair-raising trip (on rationed gas) through '40s Los Angeles.

The Big Sleep's narrative convolution is, far from being frustrating, a major source of joy in the film. Characters like deluded little Harry Jones enter and exit without fanfare; others, like soldier-of-fortune Sean Regan, are somehow major characters without ever being seen on screen. And there are others: General Sternwood, a shriveled hothouse flower; Geiger, the fastidiously sleazy bookstore proprietor; Eddie Mars, the shady casino owner; Carol Lundgren, the grifter-assassin; Art Huck, the lowlife filling station owner; Joe Brody, the dumb, ill-fated hood and Agnes, his treacherous lady friend; the cruel Canino and a host of others. Giggling killers and gruesome butlers pass through without even the courtesy of a name. A sideshow of criminality wanders in and out of The Big Sleep like so many underworld supernumeraries, crowding the film not so much with "characters," but with tiny, finely-etched, one-note portrayals of deceit and self-interest.

The most famous loose end in the story concerns a chauffeur, one Owen Taylor, who turns up dead in a water-logged Packard, "washing around off Lido Pier." Questions on the set arose as to who, in the carnival of conflicting motives that made the film a Chinese box of mayhem, actually did kill Owen Taylor? Hawks realized he didn't know, and successive calls were put in to screenwriters Leigh Brackett, Jules Furthman, and William Faulkner; they didn't know, either. Finally, Chandler himself was reached; no, he said, he guessed he didn't know, either. Editor Christian Nyby remembered years later that work on the film stopped for two days while a way out of this narrative cul-de-sac was sought. At that point, Hawks realized it didn't matter who killed Owen Taylor, and the film went ahead, its atmosphere of treachery somehow improved by the ambiguity.

What The Big Sleep did have, most of all, was an actress like Lauren Bacall. It was Hawks and his wife Slim who had discovered Bacall, a shy, willowy cover model for Harper's Bazaar, whose real name was Betty Jane Perske. Hawks, a gambler, had signed the girl to a personal contract and then set to remaking her as a screen siren. According to a half-dozen different versions of the story, Hawks had Bacall declaiming poetry at full throat in deserted Malibu canyons in order to heighten her naturally gravelly baritone. There were still some rough edges; for many years, one of the weirdest rumors was that Bacall's smoky singing voice in To Have and Have Not had been dubbed by the youthful Andy Williams. But by and large, Lauren Bacall was a polished performer by the time The Big Sleep rolled, and viewers and the public responded. As critic James Agee said at the time, "Lauren Bacall has cinema personality to burn. She has a javelin-like vitality, a born dancer's eloquence of movement, a fierce female shrewdness, and a special sweet sourness. With these faculties, plus a stone-crushing self-confidence and a trombone voice, she manages to get across the toughest girl Hollywood has dreamed of in a long, long while."

So complete was Bacall's success that after the film was previewed to servicemen in 1945, additional scenes between Bogart and Bacall were shot to heighten the sexual tension between Bogart and Bacall. Thus, a year after the film had begun shooting, Hawks and company returned to the set to shoot the famous "horse racing" patter between Bogart and Bacall, the most outrageous extended double entendre the screen had yet seen. Indeed, the entire film somehow manages to be as impish as it is violent, an erotic gangland picaresque played productively against the metropolitan gloom of Chandler's original novel.

Shot during wartime, the film turns the draft-induced "man shortage" into a satyr's fantasy; sloe-eyed heiresses, hash-slingers with come-hither looks, and horny lady cab drivers brazenly proposition Marlowe, who regrettably stiff-arms most of them in the name of business. A rainy-day tryst behind demurely lowered blinds with a beautiful bookstore clerk (Dorothy Malone, in one of her earliest roles, is the exception, an artful and sensual addition to Chandler's story.

Romance and an easy, comfortable sexuality are at the heart of The Big Sleep's accomplishment. Philip Marlowe, the knightly loner of the Chandler novels, has been transformed by Bogart, Hawks and certainly by Bacall into a relaxed, chuckling professional, comfortable with the ways of this upside-down world, and agile enough to play all its angles. For Bogart's Philip Marlowe, the nearly-anarchic plot never provides the reassuring stability of the whodunit; at the end of the film, we hardly know which of the film's multitude of crimes has been solved. What has become meaningful for Marlowe in this absurd universe is love, and the many paradoxes Bacall brings to Vivian Sternwood--she is sly and naïve, brave and fearful, witty and earnest, elegant and earthy--provide a startling depth of character in the midst of Grand Guignol Gargoyles and cardboard gangsters. In the dangerous night world of The Big Sleep, on its deserted rain-slicked streets and in its cold ritzy mansions, the capable Marlowe is truly surprised only once: when he discovers unadulterated loyalty and love in the least likely place.

Double Indemnity


The Street
A long silent street.
I walk in blackness and I stumble and fall
and rise, and I walk blind, my feet
stepping on silent stones and dry leaves.
Someone behind me also stepping on stones, leaves:
if I slow down, he slows;
if I run, he runs. I turn: nobody.
Everything dark and doorless.
Turning and turning these corners
which lead forever to the street
where nobody waits for, nobody follows me,
where I pursue a man who stumbles
and rises and says when he sees me: nobody.
---Octavio Paz


The long silent street of film noir, a street where it is always night, and where the songs are always sad. That street is usually a dingy urban alley or a dank sidestreet, but in Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity, it was a deceptively quiet suburban avenue. "Down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself necessarily mean," wrote novelist Raymond Chandler, and as a screenwriter, he joined Wilder in sending one Walter Neff, insurance investigator, down the crookedest of these dead end lanes of the spirit.



Neff works for the ill-named Pacific All-Risk Insurance Company, and his grim escapades with the icy Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck) as they plot the murder of her husband are followed by the obsessive, relentless Keyes (Edward G. Robinson). For Neff, the long hot Southern California nights quickly frame a tortured psychic journey. As he confesses to Keyes:

Nothing had slipped, nothing had been overlooked. There was nothing to give us away. And yet, as I was walking down the street to the drugstore, suddenly it came over me that everything would go wrong. It sounds crazy, Keyes, but it's true, so help me. I couldn't hear my own footsteps. It was the walk of a dead man. That was the longest night I ever lived through...
Double Indemnity had many ancestors, including the silent German Expressionist cinema Wilder had worked in during the 1920's, but between them, Wilder and Chandler helped to invent the film noir genre.

The novel Double Indemnity had been written by another master of the hardboiled novel, James M. Cain, and Paramount producer Joseph Sistrom guessed that Chandler, who had written such Philip Marlowe classics as The Big Sleep and Farewell, My Lovely, knew the turf. Chandler had never worked in film before, and his odd combination of timorousness and brazenness initially drove the cynical but professional Wilder crazy. Wilder admired the British-born Chandler's novels for their corrosive images of Los Angeles of the 1930's; only painter David Hockney, another Englishman, said Wilder many years later, has been as adept as Chandler at capturing Los Angeles. But when Chandler began their collaboration by providing a script loaded with screen directions and camera angles, Wilder shuddered, and began a stormy lecture on 'how to write for the movies.' Chandler quickly turned "bad-tempered -- kind of acid, sour and grouchy," said Wilder, but the novelist adapted himself to the rigors of collaborative writing with a grace that startled Wilder, and the two settled down in their cubbyhole on the fourth floor of the Paramount writers' building. "Yes, we worked well," said Wilder, speaking of their methods on Double Indemnity: "We would discuss a situation. Once we had the broad outline, we added to and changed the original story and arrived at certain points or orientation that we needed. Then we would start scene by scene, and we started with dialogue, and then with transitions. And he was very good at that, just very, very good." Chandler proved adept at screenwriting. His scripts for the film noir thrillers The Blue Dahlia and Alfred Hitchcock's Strangers On A Train are among his best work in any medium, and James M. Cain felt Chandler had done a better job on the film of Double Indemnity than Cain had done on the novel. Indeed, Chandler found it difficult to return to novel writing. His last novels feel unfinished, inchoate; Wilder believes that the intensely insecure and lonely Chandler had come to depend upon the comradeship and reassurance of studio screenwriting.

The streets of Los Angeles are busier and deadlier than they were in Chandler's heyday. Yet Chandler's disquieting, existential take on the City of Angels transcends fashions in both transportation and crime. Those mean streets remain mean, and mementos of Double Indemnity can still be seen all over the city. The Hollywood Bowl where Walter and Lola Dietrichson meet; Walter's apartment at the Chateau Marmont; the Glendale train station where the "perfect crime" begins... And the "death house" of Double Indemnity, where Phyllis and Walter meet, plot murder, and where their strange love finally reaches its apocalypse, still stands, secluded and quiet, high in the Hollywood Hills, at 6301 Quebec Street, in Los Angeles. Exteriors were shot there, and sets were modeled after the inside of the house. The house seems to rear up in the summer twilight, remembering the night fifty years ago when a cruel woman brought her husband out to a big LaSalle sedan idling in the garage, with a killer in the back seat. The house's silent, stuccoed cloisters look gloomily down on Quebec Street, while Walter Neff's disembodied footfalls echo off the asphalt.

Force of Evil



According to Martin Scorsese nobody portrayed guilt on the American screen better than John Garfield in Abraham Polonsky's hard-hitting Force of Evil (1948).

As Joe Morse, "a crooked little lawyer," Garfield has reason to feel guilty. He's in league with Ben Tucker, a former beer-runner, who's planning to takeover the numbers racket by fixing the old liberty number, 776, to fall on July 4th. After 776 hits, the big Tucker corporation will move in and consolidate the small numbers banks that can't pay off their debts and form a monopoly.



Garfield's opening voiceover suggests his guiltless, matter-of-fact involvement in the enterprise: "Tomorrow, July 4th, I intended to make my first million," but Polonsky's mise-en-scene troubles the confidence. A quick tilt down and swish pan shows spots of people moving along Wall Street. Polonsky's visuals suggest that Morse and Tucker's success in business is contingent upon their ability to aggressively crush others.

Garfield seems unconcerned about this, but when he fears that his brother Leo (Thomas Gomez), a small numbers banker, will also get destroyed in the scheme, he jeopardizes his success in order to bring him in on the deal. He wants to protect Leo's small business, to pay him back for putting him through college. Leo is not gracious about the opportunity. He calls Joe a "gangster" and shouts "my own brother blackmailing me." Joe is alarmed and embarrassed, but his attempts to save his brother help bring about his redemption.

Following Leo's rejection, Garfield emotes one of cinema's great meditations on guilt. In a two shot, he stops his playful conversation with Doris Lowry (Beatrice Pearson) for one of serious angst. His face no longer looks brightly outward but inward with distraction. His poetically paralleled language elides his identity with his brother's, creating a noir distortion, a weird sense of connectedness. To give and not want anything back, he claims is "perversion." "To reach out, to take it, that's human, that's natural. But to get your pleasure from not taking. From cheating yourself deliberately like my brother did today, from not getting, from not taking. Don't you see what a black thing that is for a man to do? How it is to hate yourself, your brother, to make him feel that he's guilty, that I'm guilty. Just to live and be guilty." Joe's trailing words mirror his central dilemma. He may be willing to take risks in Tucker's enterprise, but as his last name suggests, (re)Morse, and his self-absorbed repetition of "guilty," he's a man of conscience, who vainly tries to hide behind a street-smart sense of Social Darwinism.

Eventually Joe forces Leo in on the scheme, but he can't save him. Doris speaks the film's noirish fatalism: "Oh, you'll make him rich, in his death," she says, angrily from inside a phone booth. As the film's moral center, she's right. The whole "Tucker business," the money-making scheme, alienates workers from their work and each other. One of the disconsolate workers, Bauer, stools to the cops and eventually betrays Leo to Tucker's rival, Ficco. Leo's death is placed by Polonsky and screenwriter Ira Wolfert in a social context. Unlike other noirs, Force of Evil blames institutions (Wall Street) and the pursuit of monopoly capital for dehumanizing and destroying people.

Doris, too, is nearly destroyed by the darkness of business, the desire for the "ruby" of money. Newcomer Beatrice Pearson plays her character in a naive, ingenue way, and represents the force of evil within us all. As a young worker at Leo's bank, she denies her own guilt in the shady business, but when quick-talking Garfield accuses her of being in on a "Policy" racket that takes nickels from hard-working folks who should be paying their weekly insurance premiums, she quits. Morse's words make her realize the truth, but she gets too comfortable in her easy transition to knowledge, and assumes, through the power of quitting, that she understands more than she does. He later asks her out, buys her flowers and offers her a metaphorical "ruby." She finally accepts his attractive wickedness and tries to work from within it, being neither naive or judgmental. At the night club, she confesses her redemptive love, "Oh, Joe, I don't want this money. Nobody wants it. I want to somehow to get you, Joe, to save you for yourself and myself. Somehow you're wild and crazy and stuck in a trap and somehow you won't fight to get out," she pauses, grabbing his face, the repetition of "somehow" suggesting the chaotic randomness of their love. "And somehow I love you." She kisses him and helps move the tarnished hero towards grace.

But love isn't enough, Garfield must fully face his guilt and descend deep into the darkness to be reborn. In the film's dreamlike ending, he searches for his brother's body, running down a path, and then a steep set of stairs, his own body lost, insignificant against a brick wall. In romantic voiceover he tells us, "I just kept going down and down there. It was like going down to the bottom of the world." He eventually moves across bridge girders, large rock formations and a lighthouse, before stopping, recoiling. "I found my brother's body at the bottom there." Polonsky suddenly cuts away to a low-angle shot of Doris framed below a lighthouse, as Garfield confesses, "He was dead." The juxtaposition between word and image, death and a living woman, jars but suggests a dual motivation: Leo's death and Doris' love motivate Joe to take action. He fully admits his guilt, "I had killed him," and decides to turn state evidence to District Attorney Hall: "Because if a man's life could be lived so long and come out this way--like rubbish . . . then something was horrible." Once more Joe connects his guilt with his brother's (both lives are rubbish). With this final epiphany, he places a hand on Doris' shoulder and together they walk up toward the lighthouse of hope. It had been a long downward trek to find his brother. Will the climb to redemption be as rapid?

Gun Crazy



"Bart, I've never been much good--at least up till now I haven't. You aren't getting any bargain, but I've got a funny feeling that I want to be good. I don't know. Maybe I can't. But I'm gonna try. I'll try hard, Bart. I'll try."



Poor Bart. He's got a thing for guns and when he meets a woman who loves guns also, he's smitten for life. But as the carnival clown tells him: "Some guys are born smart about women and some guys are born dumb . . . You were born dumb." And thus starts his downward spiral in one of the greatest B movies ever made, Gun Crazy. Directed by Joseph H. Lewis, Gun Crazy is anything but typical film noir. It's a stylish, exhilarating rush of startling camera work and amazing characterizations. Its audacious visual style makes Gun Crazy as fresh today as it was nearly fifty years ago.

And the story is quintessentially American--a Bonnie and Clyde-like saga of two lovers who go on a robbery spree across several states. Bart and Annie Laurie Starr first meet at a carnival. He's fresh out of the Army, where he tired of the routine. Back in his hometown, he's taking in the carnival with his two old school chums, when they stop at a sideshow shooting exhibition. And Laurie struts forward onto the stage, dressed in a cowgirl outfit and firing her pistols--pow! pow! pow!--over her head. Sparks fly from the pistols and smoke curls toward the ceiling. She sees Bart in the first row, and her eyes eagerly size him up, head to toe, the way a sailor on leave might size up a woman at a bar. And she grins--a delicious, devious grin--that suggests she'd just love to eat him all up. Bart watches from the edge of his chair, rapt and already in love as she performs her shooting tricks.


Bart and Laurie meet during her shooting exhibition at a carnival.
He jumps at the chance to join her on stage in a shooting match. They prowl around one another like two dogs sniffing out each other's goods. In an interview with Danny Peary (Cult Movies, New York: Delacorte Press, 1981), director Lewis revealed his instructions to actors John Dall (Bart) and Peggy Cummins (Laurie Starr):

I told John, "Your cock's never been so hard," and I told Peggy, "You're a female dog in heat, and you want him. But don't let him have it in a hurry. Keep him waiting." That's exactly how I talked to them and I turned them loose. I didn't have to give them more directions.

And that's exactly how they played it.

For both John Dall and Peggy Cummins, these are the performances of their careers. Dall also starred in The Corn is Green (for which he received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor) and Alfred Hitchcock's Rope, and Peggy Cummins would star in the excellent horror movie Curse of the Demon (directed by Jacques Tourneur); but neither actor ever came close to capturing the same degree of devotion to character. They create two people who desperately need one another, two lovers who can't hardly survive without the other. "We go together, Laurie," says Bart. "I don't know why. Maybe like guns and ammunition go together."


Bart and Laurie are always on the lam in Gun Crazy.
The scene that best illustrates the total conviction in Dall and Cummins' performances is also one of the most ballyhooed scenes in the movie: a single take episode where Bart and Laurie rob a bank. All the while, the camera never leaves the back seat of the getaway car. Many writers have commented on the audaciousness of filming the entire sequence in just one take--and it indeed does give the sequence a documentary-like realism--but it's Dall and Cummins that really make the scene work. We watch them from the back seat as they nervously drive around the city block, looking for a parking space near the bank. It's a busy day and cars are everywhere. Dall and Cummins talk to one another like an old couple--in dialogue that must have been ad-libbed it's so spontaneous. Dall sits on the edge of his seat, his eyes groping for a parking place, while Cummins twists and turns behind the wheel. And later as they speed away from the crime scene, we see Cummins as she looks back and sees no cars are following. She grins broadly, a beautiful, deadly grin that is full of delight and danger.

Dall and Cummins are perfect for each other. Dall's innately weak and troubled Bart finds a perfect mate in Cummins' thrill-seeking Laurie Starr ("I want things. A lot of things. Big things."). Of course, no good can come from their union, but while it lasts they give each other a lifetime of thrills. And while Cummins does indeed lead Bart into a life of crime, teasing him with sex and luring him with her proclamations of love, she eventually falls in love with him.

In another of the movie's great scenes, we see Bart and Laurie after they pull a major payroll heist. Their plan calls for them to split up and meet again in three or four months. They each jump in separate cars and start to drive away, but then they look back and stop. They turn around and Bart leaves his car on the side of the road. He grabs his suitcase and runs to Laurie. They embrace like long lost lovers, and we see that wonderful, beautiful, obsessive smile of Laurie again. Pure ecstasy. It's not just love in her eyes. It's the thrill of totally possessing Bart. That's what really gets her off. To totally possess the poor sap. For Laurie, that feeling is exhilarating. Hell, it's even better than sex. And maybe that's why she loves him--because here's one poor sap that'll do whatever she wants and yet still be totally devoted to her. He might complain about their life of crime, that they can never ask anyone for help ever again, they're totally on their own, but that's part of Laurie's plan. To isolate themselves in their own world, which thrives on their need for each other in order to survive. Yes, she truly loves the guy. But it's a twisted, perverse brand of love, albeit it's all she can manage. Initially she just wants Bart for sex. And initially she probably plans to just use and discard him, the same way she used and discarded the carnival manager. (In an early scene, we see Laurie getting gussied up for a night out with Bart, while the carnival manager sits on her sofa and watches, powerless to stop her.) But eventually she comes to depend on Bart's presence and then she loves him.

For director Lewis, Gun Crazy remains a testament to his brilliant use of the camera (cinematography by Russell Harlan). Lewis was never satisfied with just filming two characters talking. His camera dips low in one take and then soars high in the next, constantly searching for unexpected and enlightening perspectives. In one scene, we see the young Bart as his boyhood friends are in the hills, when they spot a mountain lion. They urge Bart to shoot the cat so they can claim the bounty. But Bart isn't a killer and he won't fire. Another boy grabs the gun away from him. In the foreground, we see Bart's fist clench and tighten as the other boy, visible in the background, jerks the trigger and sends shots skittering across the rocks. Lewis uses the whole frame to constantly give us information about the characters and the situations. In Gun Crazy, he found the perfect vehicle for his visual style, as the stylish, kinetic camerawork captures the destructive, crazed amour of the story.

Gun Crazy is one of the great American movies, a giddily romantic story of two people who thrive off of each other and only completely come to life when in each other's presence. Some people might call Citizen Kane the great American movie. I might just opt for Gun Crazy instead

The Lady from Shanghai



Orson Welles' shoots were always Homeric adventures, as cast and crew struggled to meet his obscure, brilliant visions while Orson himself struggled to keep one step ahead of his creditors, and just out of reach of apoplectic studio heads. The Lady From Shanghai, one of Welles' most brilliant works and one of the great American surrealist works of art, was as ill-starred as any of his films. Its production was marred by everything from costly retakes to death. Perhaps by some perverse Wellesian logic that accounted for its brilliance.



The film was already ransomed when it began. Welles had to make the film because Columbia Studios' tyrannical production chief, Harry Cohn, had backed Welles' disastrous epic play Around the World in 80 Days, which closed with a whimper after 79 hugely expensive performances on Broadway. But if Cohn thought that merely having Orson's IOU's put him at an advantage, he was hopelessly mistaken.

Cohn complained bitterly when Welles had Rita Hayworth's luxurious dark hair cut short and colored blonde; he had for years lusted after his star, and besides, such decisions were traditionally his prerogative. For his part, Welles actually liked the loutish Cohn, probably because he was so easy to bait. Cohn, who had once complained that he knew when a film was too long because his posterior began to ache (the writer who responded, "Imagine that -- the whole world wired to Harry Cohn's ass!" was summarily dismissed), became infuriated by Welles' constant tweaking. Said Welles of Cohn: "He snarled at you as you came in the door...and you could gradually throw him little goodies and he would quiet down and start lashing his tail." When a paranoid Cohn bugged Welles' office in order to document the director's various transgressions, Welles' used the bug as a broadcasting service, happily narrating a comic version of the day's events on the set. Welles must have been happy at Cohn's reaction to the complex narrative of The Lady from Shanghai: "I'll give a thousand dollars to anyone who can explain the story to me." Cohn wanted the film reshot as a simple flashback drama, to uncoil Welles' labyrinthine narrative a bit.

Welles stymied him on this, but Cohn won in other arenas. Hayworth's recent Gilda had made Cohn believe that a Hayworth film without songs was box office poison. He had a scene inserted into the film at a cost of $60,000 in which Hayworth sang a forgettable lyric, "Please Don't Kiss Me," by Alan Roberts and Doris Fisher, in her own unforgettable way. To be sure the song became as inescapable as "Put The Blame on Mame" had been in Gilda, Cohn ordered orchestrator Heinz Roemheld to insinuate the melody of "Please Don't Kiss Me" into the film, ad nauseum. As a way of making the film's story more comprehensible, Roemheld was also ordered to "mickey mouse" his score, to underline key points of action, a literalism that enraged Welles.

Meanwhile, Welles was designing expensive set pieces, the bills from which must have had Cohn fuming. The sequence in Central park in which muggers attack Elsa/Rita was the longest crane shot yet attempted in Hollywood; Welles' harried cinematographer was ordered to keep Welles/Michael and Rita/Elsa in focus for three-quarters of a mile in a horse-drawn carriage. And the film's spectacular fun house finale required the construction of a 125-foot slide that began at the roof of Columbia's biggest soundstage and ended in an eighty-foot pit. The mirror maze in the sequence used 2,912 square feet of glass -- eighty mirrors, each seven feet high, and another twenty four distorting mirrors, all rigged as one-way mirrors, so they could be filmed through.

Shooting was plagued with so many disasters and rancorous personal squabbles that The Lady from Shanghai seems more like a documentary of its own making than a fiction film. Much of the film was shot on location near Acapulco, aboard Errol Flynn's infamous yacht, Zaca, which Flynn maintained as a perpetual floating party. A drunken Flynn often captained the boat during shooting, and his rages and debaucheries put the film hugely behind schedule. When, on the first day of work on the Zaca, a camera assistant died of a heart attack, Flynn ordered the corpse sewn inside a duffel bag and buried at sea; quietly, the body was put ashore in Mexico and the incident hushed up. Then, one night, Welles was bitten by an exotic insect. His eye swelled up to three times its normal size, and he wailed from a bunk aboard the Zaca that he was surely going to die. Matters were complicated even further by the fact that Welles and Rita Hayworth's stormy marriage was on the rocks. Incapacitated by the heat and sinus problems, nervous about her radically changed appearance and role as a villainess, Rita still seemed hypnotized by Welles' fabulous vision, and to her credit, worked tirelessly on the film. The Lady from Shanghai was finally finished in the early spring of 1947, after further savage cutting by Cohn, including the fun house finale, which was dramatically reduced. Yet Cohn ordered the completed film shelved for nearly a year. When it was released, Columbia was as confused with the film's art house intricacies as RKO studios had been with Welles' The Magnificent Ambersons a few years previously. As RKO had done with Ambersons, Columbia allowed The Lady from Shanghai to languish on the bottom half of double bills, and it quickly slipped away, a hideous financial disaster for all concerned. Perhaps, as historian Frank Brady has suggested, this treatment was intentional; maybe a pained Cohn saw the parallels between the Michael-Elsa-Bannister triangle in the film and the Welles-Hayworth-Cohn armature in real life, and was instinctively reacting to paralyze his rival. Like the scorpion who stings the toad on whose back he is swimming, ensuring his own drowning, Cohn played his own part in the offscreen drama of The Lady from Shanghai only too well.

Pickup On South Street

Pickup on South Street (1953), directed by movie maverick Samuel Fuller, contains a stunning opening that establishes a double complication. Subway rider Candy (Susan Peters) collides with pickpocket Skip McCoy (Richard Widmark dipped in shades of Sinatra cool). She's unaware that she carries valuable microfilm; McCoy is unaware of grifting it. Both are unaware of being observed by two federal agents. Thus the grift sets in motion a degree of knowledges. Candy is doubly watched (Skip and the police) and therefore doubly naive; Skip, the overconfident petty thief, is singularly unaware, trailed by federal agents; the feds, all knowing, are ultimately helpless. They can't stop the "passing" of government secrets or the spread of communism.


This double-complicated exposition opens up the text's two quests and the film's dual point-of-view. Candy has no idea that she's in league with communists or that she poses a threat to national security. Her ignorance is revealed through Fuller's eyeline matches. The feds, on the subway, continually look at each other and at her; she, unaware of their presence, doesn't return their gaze. Afterall, her former lover, Joey, has told her that he's involved in the manufacturing business and she's carrying industry-related information. Later, at Joey's apartment, she acquires knowledge. As she paces, Fuller juxtaposes her movement with the languid torpor of Joey and his comrades, smoking cigars and sitting stiffly. "You know what's crazy about the whole thing? You know what he wants? $25,000? . . . You know why? You know what he said? He's crazy. He said I was a commie. What makes people like that?" Her rapid movements suggest freedom from their values, while her questioning words, indicate incredulity. But when she's suddenly told to sit down by a thin-faced aesthete holding a cigarette holder, she performs a series of her own rapid eyeline matches and realizes Skip's truth. She is in league with "commies."

Skip might have spoken the truth, but he, too is a threat to national security. In '50s-noir fashion, he's another ambiguous hero, cut-off from respectability and institutions. Widmark's version of world weariness is willing to sell out his country for big bucks. When picked up at his South Street shack and brought in by the feds, he refuses to get the kink out of his mouth and cooperate. "Are you waving the flag at me?" Widmark says. In a medium close-up, he smirks, "Is there a law now that I gotta listen to lectures?" with a Sinatra inflection. The feds appeal to his patriotism. "Do you know what treason means?" "Who cares?" says the jaded hero, a two-time loser who fears getting slapped with a third. Fuller's McCoy is a city soldier: patriotism and the flag are no longer relevant--survival is.

In several noirs, Phantom Lady (1944), Dark Corner (1946), Kansas City Confidential (1952) and 99 River Street (1953) a somewhat innocent man gets caught in a dizzying world of murder and intrigue. This isn't Fuller's universe. Instead, following on his wartime experiences and the realities of Dachau, Fuller's world view is one of irrational chaos--we're all guilty and responsible. McCoy is an outsider and a criminal, but he is society's hope to beat a totalitarian threat to democracy. His quest, therefore, becomes one of recovery, being reclaimed by society through the love of two women, Candy and Mo.

But Skip doesn't trust Candy. He doesn't believe that she didn't know about the microfilm and he treats her like a femme-fatale, roughing her up, pouring beer on her, and always looking for duplicitous motives. Skip's friend Mo, played by Thelma Ritter with her usual disarming frankness, is the central figure, the bridge connecting the two points-of-view. Candy visits Mo when she fears for Skip's life, and then Mo visits Skip at a lakeshore diner. "Stay away from your shack, Skip. There's a guy gunning for ya," she says, and then she critiques her friend's motives, "What's a matter with you? Playing footsie with the commies." Skip is nonplussed. "You waving the flag, too?" But Mo doesn't let up. She links Skip with Candy, "That muffin you grifted. She's okay," and reclaims him for society, "Stop using your hands, Skip, and start using your head. The kid loves you."

Mo dies for her beliefs and Skip, like a series of other noir heroes--Victor Mature in Kiss of Death (1947), John Garfield in Force of Evil (1948) and Glen Ford in The Big Heat (1953)--seeks to affirm value, faith and hope in the face of darkness. In a poignant moment, Skip reclaims Mo's body from a tugboat, readying to take her in box 11 to potter's field. "Relative?" the captain asks. "Nope," Skip says with Hemingway terseness. "I'm going to bury her." This act of feeling opens the narrative for his epiphany.

When Skip visits Candy at the hospital, he acquires full knowledge of her truth. Previously, she had smacked him on the head, stolen the microfilm and returned it to the feds in the hope of bringing Skip back into the community. She had told the police it was Skip's idea, and they had suggested that she return to her apartment with the film, in order to lay a trap for Joey and the communist cell. But when Joey discovers that one of the frames is missing, he brutally beats her across the apartment, breaking lamps, picture frames and tables before shooting her. At the hospital, Skip asks the battered Candy, "You all right?" As he speaks, Fuller, in an amazing cheat shot from behind Peters, frames Widmark through the bars of the headboard. This flamboyant shot strongly suggests both Widmark's dubiousness and lack of faith. Candy justifies her actions, "I'd rather have a live pickpocket, than a dead traitor," and Widmark, still framed by bars, silently spits, "And I'd rather have you talk without a twist." But when she confesses that Joey kicked her face in "Because I wouldn't tell him where you lived," the bars disappear. Suddenly Widmark, in an unobstructed close-up, has found trust and faith. He kisses her, and Fuller's opening exposition of narrative collision is closed.

Shadow of a Doubt

After making five films in the United States since his arrival in 1939 (Rebecca, Foreign Correspondent, Mr. & Mrs Smith, Suspicion and Saboteur) Alfred Hitchcock believed he was at last able to imagine a true picture of America on celluloid. Saboteur, 1942's picaresque tour over a condensed map of the country, highlighting the nation's archetypes and oddities in a brisk chase between enemy agents and True Love, was a very rough draft of this vision.

1943's Shadow Of A Doubt, however, was Hitchcock's first fully realized cinema masterpiece, a grim, sad picture of American docility and Babbittry. The film moved Hitchcock out of the category of mere genre director and into the realm of the essayist on the universal fears and discontents of his species. In the process, Shadow Of A Doubt slanders that most cherished of American landscapes, the small town. That such a thorough critique of American mores appeared during World War II, a time when other directors were enshrining rather than embalming these standards, seems nothing short of incredible.

Shadow Of A Doubt began life as the story "Uncle Charlie," by Gordon McDonell. Eventually, two very different specialists in American ways would be credited with work on the screenplay. Thornton Wilder, before enlisting in the Army, prepared the prose outline of the film. In many ways, Shadow Of A Doubt is the exact inverse of his paean to small-town life, the drama Our Town, for the film features the venality and the provincialism of the small town just as Our Town chose the companion virtues of simplicity and regionalism. After Wilder, Sally Benson, who was responsible for the stories on which the film Meet Me In St. Louis was based, (another, far more optimistic monument of wartime Americana) assisted in writing the dialogue.

Yet the finished screenplay was Hitchcock's own, along with his faithful collaborator, his wife, Alma Reville. Hitchcock essentially acted as his own producer at Universal Pictures, then one of the smaller of the Hollywood dream factories. As a result, Hitchcock made few compromises in his careful examination of American life. As he wrote at the time:

If possible I am extremely anxious to avoid the conventional small town American scene. By conventional I mean stock figures which have been seen in so many films of this type. I would like them to be very modern...by modern I mean that the small town should be influenced by movies, radio, juke boxes, etc.; in other words, as it were, life in a small town lit by neon signs.
The only problem in the film's smooth production, which ran an efficient $813,000, was Hitchcock's failure to get Joan Fontaine for the leading role of young Charlie Newton. Eventually, he settled on Teresa Wright, who had understudied the part of Emily in Our Town on Broadway, and so knew her way around Wilder's small town as well as anyone. Wright recalls the association with undimmed appreciation: "He was the easiest of directors to work with." The rest of the film was as perfectly cast as any Hitchcock would ever make, including Joseph Cotten as a smooth, terrifying villain, productively cast against type. Hume Cronyn made his film debut in Shadow Of A Doubt as timid murder fancier Herb Hawkins; later, he would write the screenplays for two of Hitchcock's films. And Patricia Collinge, as Emma Newton, sounded a note of tremulous, dull-witted motherlove which belied the actress' own intelligence; she wrote many of her character's long speeches, one of the few times in Hitchcock's career an actress was allowed this freedom.

Cinematographer Joseph Valentine filmed the streets of Santa Rosa, California with documentary clarity; the town was used that same year for another drama of the American small town, The Happy Land. Art director Robert Boyle built the interior of the Newtons' rambling Victorian house on Universal's Stage 22 under deliberate instructions from Hitchcock to make the structure amenable to camera set-ups and movement. ("No director I've worked with knew as much about films as he did," said Boyle, "He was always trying to make the visual statement, and there was no such thing as the throwaway shot.") The house was literally designed around the shots Hitchcock wanted to get inside it, the walls, windows, porch and roof swinging silently away in front of the moving camera. As a result, we get as clear a sense of the floorplan of the Newton home as any in American cinema.

It's easy to imagine ourselves wandering its wide, dark, upstairs halls, and just as easy to imagine being stalked by the frightening Uncle Charlie. Hitchcock made the home a place where exotic terror lives uneasily with domesticity, an innovation he remembered when he returned to the Universal lot many years later to build the more famous Bates house for Psycho.

Hitchcock's Santa Rosa was instantly recognizable as the quintessential American town of the 1940's. Yet in Shadow Of A Doubt, the bizarre and the fantastic seem by the end of the film to shriek at us, slaughtering everything prosaic in Santa Rosa. In his memorable speech to young Charlie in the 'Til Two club, Uncle Charlie reveals his awful vision of "what you'd find if you ripped the fronts off the houses" on Santa Rosa's tree-shaded streets. And as the film ends, young Charlie, and the audience in the theater, both shaken, are left with Uncle Charlie's grim, self-spoken memorial:

You wake up every morning of your life and you know perfectly well that there's nothing in the world to trouble you. You go through your ordinary little day and at night you sleep your untroubled, ordinary little sleep filled with peaceful, stupid dreams. And I brought you nightmares...

Sweet Smell of Success


Alexander Mackendrick's Sweet Smell of Success is an acid-eaten picture of the rich and famous and what they do to stay that way.

Told through the medium of the dark career of one "Sidney Falco" (Tony Curtis), a slimy publicity man who's an expert in what another character in the film calls, "the theology of making a fast buck," Sweet Smell of Success documents the last years of the great Broadway columnists: the Winchells, the Skolskys, the Sullivans, and their grim hangers-on, the stringers and hopefuls for whom toadying was a high art form. In cinematographer James Wong Howe's glistening, hard-surfaced black and white images, New York has never looked so cruel -- or so beautiful. Along with Orson Welles' Touch Of Evil (1958), Sweet Smell of Success is the last of the great film noirs.



Mackendrick was, oddly enough, a Britisher, whose great success at legendary Ealing Studios, with shy, ironic comedies like The Man In The White Suit and Tight Little Island (Whisky Galore) gave no portent of the astonishing bitterness of Sweet Smell of Success. Screenwriters Ernest Lehman and Clifford Odets provided Mackendrick with a uniquely American type of villain, the sanctimonious gossip-monger who could shoot down a career from a corner table at "21."

Although the film was most clearly based on the world of Ed Sullivan, Sweet Smell of Success' "J.J. Hunsecker" (Burt Lancaster) is a composite of a half-dozen columnists on the Broadway beat. As television turned New York's newspaper circulation wars into death grapples, desperate editors allowed more and more innuendo and invention to seep into print. Soon, columnists such as Sullivan and Walter Winchell outgrew simple celebrity-stalking to become hysterical voices for `100% Americanism'. Lehman and Odet's script is a brave, explicit indictment of witchhunting in all media.

Lehman and Odets also gave Mackendrick an even greater gift. Sweet Smell of Success has its own agate-type poetry, as the characters speak in the hyperbolic, not-really-very-funny language of the columns themselves. Like Cockney rhyming slang, the columnist's argot can be understood only by the initiate. Lehman, Odets, and Mackendrick dutifully see to it that we are immersed in a columnist's underworld of swank nightclubs, walk-up offices at the fringes of the theatre district, and cramped, dingy jazz hangouts.

Even the character and bit performances in Sweet Smell of Success are, like smoking manhole covers, precisely New York, and grotesquely picturesque; they are one part Damon Runyon, two parts Hubert Selby. There is Emile Meyer's gruesome cop, Kello, screeching down a deserted avenue to mock Falco: "C'mere, Sidney, I wanna chastise ya!"; cigarette girl Barbara Nichols forcing herself into "that tropical island kinda mood" for one of J.J.'s oily competitors; hapless secretary Jeff Donnell mooning over and lying for the seedy Falco; veteran character actor Sam Levene as a beleaguered agent begging Falco and J.J. for his young client's job and life back. The gargoyles and broken spirits who populate what Sidney calls "my bilious private life" make Sweet Smell of Success a gallery of urban despair.

Through New York's chill night streets, collar turned up against the cold of his own heart, stalks the restless, relentless Falco, played by Curtis in what is undeniably his greatest performance. As indigestible as a Broadway hot dog, Sidney is a former poolhall gopher, and in Curtis' best up-from-Brooklyn manner, is determined to do whatever it takes not to ever have to hunt up a pack of butts for another hustler again. But Curtis' Falco is no mere rogue. He is an assassin's handyman, forging the knives that will slice up a young musician (Martin Milner) and helpfully passing them to the reptilian J.J. Hunsecker.

Hunsecker looms over the film's New York like the Grim Reaper, reaching out to crush the unsuspecting and promote the undeserving. Lancaster, along with agent Harold Hecht, produced the film, but he elected to hide his well-known physical energy -- he had been an acrobat in a WPA circus in the 1930's, and had just finished several swashbucklers -- behind steel-rimmed glasses and an equally steely, hulking, deliberate performance style. J.J.'s low tones and mortician's mien shroud a warped love for his sister, whom he has trapped with him in his inaccessible penthouse apartment, seemingly for life; less easily masked is his sadism. "I love this dirty town," says J.J. with genuine adoration, looking down at his beloved New York from on high. And on those days when New York City turns its bitterest face toward the young and the idealistic, the man and the city deserve each other.

By turns shrill and tragic, Sweet Smell of Success pulsates with Elmer Bernstein's discordant, jazzy score, which sends shrieking trumpets up dead-end alleys after characters, and throbs deep bass ostinatos under scenes of agonized internal conflict. Even when Chico Hamilton's experimental jazz quartet takes a confident, thoughtful turn in the Elysian Room, it plays against the tense background of Sidney's Byzantine cloakroom intriguing.

In this grifter's ode, the smell of success is acrid, and burns in the nostrils long after Times Square's marquee lights go off in the frozen Sunday dawn.


During the '40s and '50s, Hollywood turned out 4 or 5 top notch noir films every year. And so here's some short takes on several more essential noirs:

The Asphalt Jungle
(directed by John Huston, MGM, 1950)
Sam Jaffee plays Doc, the mastermind planning a jewel robbery. He's backed by a lawyer (Louis Calhern) and assisted by a crew of small-time criminals, including Sterling Hayden as Dix, but in the world of film noir, nothing works out like you plan. In this case, the world is a hopelessly corrupt place, populated by cops and lawyers forever on the take. As Doc's plan goes into motion, we watch as all his planning begins to slowly fall apart. The Asphalt Jungle ends with a magnificent scene, one of the great endings in film history, with a wounded Dix returning to the Kentucky countryside where he was raised. A young Marilyn Monroe is featured in a supporting role.

Detour
(directed by Edgar G. Ulmer, PRC, 1945)
Few movies are more dark and more bleak than Detour. Tom Neal plays a hitchhiker who thumbs a ride with a businessman who complains about this last passenger, a wild woman who scratched him. After the driver mysteriously dies, Neal panics, throws the body into the desert and drives off. But in the world of film noir, you can never escape from your actions. In this case, he picks up a hitchhiker, a nasty-tempered red head (Ann Savage), who instantly recognizes the car. Filmed on a minuscule budget by the great B-movie director Edgar G. Ulmer, Detour is a bleak and claustrophobic thriller that plays out as a cynical, minimalist drama with touches of existentialist angst.



Follow Me Quietly
(directed by Richard Fleischer, RKO, 1949)
Before he turned to big budget Hollywood extravaganzas such as 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and The Vikings, Richard Fleischer churned out efficient, hour long B-movie thrillers for RKO, such as Armored Car Robbery, The Narrow Margin, and this one, Follow Me Quietly, arguably his best. Based on a story by Anthony Mann and Francis Rosenwald, Follow Me Quietly tells the story of a murderer known only as "The Judge." With no one getting a clear look at the killer, the police put together a mannequin from the bits and pieces of witness descriptions. The detectives begin talking to the mannequin, revealing their frustrations. After they leave the room, we see the mannequin move and we know "The Judge" is underneath, having heard their plans. One of the great B movies.

Gilda
(directed by Charles Vidor, Columbia, 1946)
When we see Rita Hayworth slink her way through "Put the Blame on Mame," we know Glenn Ford is a gonner. It's one of the sexiest, sultriest numbers in Hollywood history, and with it, Hayworth is like a spider drawing a fly into her web. She plays the hedonistic wife of Ford's boss. When the boss is away on business, he leaves Hayworth in Ford's care. But who could blame him? The poor sap. Gilda contains a cop out ending that goes against the world of noir, but the rest of the movie is essential noir.

In a Lonely Place
(directed by Nicolas Ray, Columbia, 1950)
Humphrey Bogart, in one of his greatest roles, plays a war veteran who suffers from frequent blackouts. He invites a woman back to his apartment and later that night she's found dead beside a road. A neighbor, Gloria Grahame, tells police she saw the woman leave his apartment. And soon afterwards Bogart and Grahame start to fall in love. But then Grahame keeps finding clues that Bogart may in fact be the killer. Part of the power of this movie comes from never completely answering all the questions it raises. It creates a dangerous world where people have no control over their actions, where they are possibly even responsible for murder but don't know what they've done. In a Lonely Place is an uncompromising thriller that gives us a central character we like--but we don't know for sure whether to trust him.

The Killers
(directed by Robert Siodmak, Universal, 1946)
Gorgeously filmed in deep black shadows and brilliant flashes of light by cinematographer Woody Bredell, The Killers (based on the short story by Ernest Hemingway) gives us a hero who dies in the first few minutes of the movie, gunned down by hired killers. The Swede (Burt Lancaster) doesn't try to run, he calmly accepts his fate. But why? To find an answer, the killers begin to look into his past and uncover a gang of thieves and a lethal femme fatale, Ava Gardner, who pushed Swede into double crossing the gang. The Killers emphasizes the hopelessness of our actions after we commit indiscretions. Swede can't escape. Unlike so many other noir heroes who struggle to survive, Swede sees his fate and waits.


Lurid movie poster for Kiss Me Deadly.

Kiss Me Deadly
(directed by Robert Aldrich, United Artists, 1955)
While many other film noirs gave us men of principles, men with codes of honor, who struggled to survive in a world seething with corruption, Kiss Me Deadly gives us a central character, Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer (Ralph Meeker), who's part of the corruption. "I'm a stinker," he says. He lives like a playboy, with a flashy roadster ("Va-va-voom!") and a slick pad complete with all the latest gadgets for swinging bachelors. ("I don't care what you do to me, Mike. Just do it fast," says a woman on the movie poster.) After he picks up a woman stranded on a back road (she's only wearing a trenchcoat with nothing on underneath) he gets run off the road. He's semi-conscious as the woman is tortured. After she dies, he senses there's money to be made somewhere, if he could just figure out what the hell is going on. With purely mercenary intentions--he couldn't care less about catching the men who killed the woman--he noses around and discovers the great "what's it"--a mysterious box that glows when it's opened. With unusual camera angles and jarring editing, Kiss Me Deadly was a major influence on the French New Wave. (Go to: Alain Silver on the ending of Kiss Me Deadly.)

Laura
(directed by Otto Preminger, 20th Century Fox, 1944)
A great necrophilic drama, where Dana Andrews plays a detective who falls in love with a dead woman. He's investigating a murder, where a woman's head was blown apart by a shot gun blast at short range, and while roaming around her apartment looking for clues, he becomes obsessed with her portrait over the fireplace. But in the form of the beautiful Gene Tierney and with the haunting refrains of "Laura" playing over and over, it's easy to see the obsession. Unfortunately for him, a pesky mentor of Laura hangs around, the super-anal retentive Clifton Webb, as well as the weasely boyfriend Vincent Price. Laura is a haunting movie, surprisingly elegant and sophisticated for the film noir form, but falling into the film noir category due to the hopelessness of Andrews' obsession and the magnificent images captured by Joseph La Shelle's photography.

Mildred Pierce
(directed by Michael Curtiz, Warner Brothers, 1945)
Told in flashback form, Mildred Pierce takes an archetypal approach to noir: we already know what has happened but now we get to see the inexorable process by which the murder took place. Played out in scenes drenched in shadows and filmed by the great Ernest Haller, Mildred Pierce gives us a lead character that we like, played by Joan Crawford, but being Joan, she has to suffer. And, boy, does she suffer. Based on the novel by the great James M. Cain, Mildred is ready to sacrifice everything for her daughter: she strives to be a successful businesswoman largely to provide for her daughter. But then she learns the worst as she finds her daughter and her new husband locked in an embrace

Night and the City
(directed by Jules Dassin, 20th Century-Fox, 1950)
Among the very few noirs not made in the United States, Night and the City was directed by Jules Dassin, exiled from America during the anti-communist crusades of the ‘40s. Working in England, he created this fatalistic tale of a small time hood, Harry Fabian (Richard Widmark), who bucks the crime bosses by devising a scheme of his own to get rich quick as a sports promoter, but his plans go awry and Harry Fabian takes off running, through darkened alleys and warehouses, through seedy nightclubs and cluttered backrooms. Harry runs and runs, trying to escape an inevitable, inexorable fate.

























Nightmare Alley
(directed by Edmund Goulding, 20th Century Fox, 1947)
In the world of film noir, heroes didn't just fall, they often got their noses ground in the dirt, as with Stanton Carlisle (Tyrone Power), a small-carnival operator who gradually loses control of the carnival and begins his fall, to where we ultimately find him playing the geek in the sideshow and biting the heads off of live chickens. Based on a screenplay by Jules Furthman and photographed by Lee Garmes, Nightmare Alley is a harrowing, disturbing portrait of a man's fall to the depths of degradation, and it's all the more shocking with pretty boy Power in the lead.

Out of the Past
(directed by Jacques Tourner, RKO, 1947)
An essential noir and one of the great archetypal noirs. Out of the Past emphasizes once again the power of the past, that past indiscretions cannot be forgiven. In this case, Robert Mitchum plays Jeff Bailey, who runs a small service station in rural California, but one day a thug shows up looking for Jeff and bringing a message from the racketeer, Whit Sterling (Kirk Douglas), that Jeff once worked for. It seems you can never escape your past. Thus starts to unravel a series of flashbacks telling us how Jeff got into the mess he's in. One of the great femmes fatales, Jane Greer, is at the core of his woes. It seems Whit hired Jeff to find Kathie after she took off with Whit's money and fled to Mexico, but once he found her, he fell in love with her instead. Robert Mitchum was one of the great noir heroes. With those sleepy eyes and his laconic manner, he expressed the weight of the past and the hold it takes upon us.

Raw Deal
(directed by Anthony Mann, Eagle-Lion, 1948)
Before moving on to Jimmy Stewart westerns and, in the '60s, bloated epics like El Cid, Anthony Mann directed several B-movie film noirs, including Desperate, Side Street, and T-Men. Raw Deal is one of his best. It reverses the hero-femme fatale equation by giving us a gangster (Dennis O'Keefe) who upon breaking out of prison seduces his lawyer (Marsha Hunt) into his world of violence. At one point, she even kills for him, finding murder to be a perfect way of saying "I love you." Photographed by the great John Alton.

Scarlet Street
(directed by Fritz Lang, Universal, 1945)
All he wanted was to paint pictures, but cheap hoods Kitty (Joan Bennett) and Johnny (Dan Duryea) see a patsy ripe for picking. With Kitty posing as his mistress, Kitty and Johnny bilk him for every penny he has, which isn't much--so he turns to extortion. In the process, Christopher is reduced to Kitty's servant, painting her toenails and submitting to her tirades. Kitty is one of the nastiest women in the history of cinema. When he learns of Kitty's charade, Christopher erupts in violence. Scarlet Street is a harrowing look at a small man, tied to a nitpicking wife and a job without a future, who finds sudden happiness in his art and with a woman he idealizes only to discover it's all a sham.

Stranger on the Third Floor
(directed by Boris Ingster, RKO, 1940)
Arguably the first real film noir, Stranger on the Third Floor features a dream-like, expressionistic world as photographed by Nicolas Musuraca (one of the great cinematographers), with art direction by Van Nest Polglase (who would work on Citizen Kane). Late one night, the hero (Mike Ward) sees a stranger (Peter Lorre) lurking around an apartment building. He fears his neighbor is dead because he doesn't hear the neighbor's snoring and thinks the stranger may be responsible. He falls asleep, though, and dreams that he has been arrested for murder. When he wakes, he runs next door and finds the neighbor's throat slashed and now the police believe he is responsible for the crime. Told in only 64 minutes, Stranger on the Third Floor is drenched in paranoia.

This Gun For Hire
(directed by Frank Tuttle, Paramount, 1942)
Based on the novel by Graham Greene, This Gun For Hire gives us a mentally-unbalanced assassin named Phillip Raven (Alan Ladd) who only loves cats. After he commits a murder and gets paid off, he soon finds out he has marked money, with the police hot on his trail. And things get complicated further when he meets Ellen Graham (Veronica Lake), who is all come-hither looks as she peeks from beneath her blonde curls. She also happens to be an undercover government agent looking for a Nazi spy. Magnificent photography by John Seitz.

Touch of Evil
(directed by Orson Welles, Universal-International, 1958)
The great swan song of the film noir period. An audacious and super-stylized noir that paints a world seething in corruption and violence. The incredible opening tracking shot is legendary (thanks to Russell Metty's camerawork) as the camera shows us a bomb being planted on a car and the car's route through town. The camera dips and swoops through the squalid streets as Mexican detective Charlton Heston (!) and his wife Janet Leigh walk across the border--until the bomb explodes and a man is killed. Touch of Evil gives us a grimy, inhospitable world filled with psychotic biker gangs, lesbian tough girls, mentally-disturbed motel managers, and racketeers with kindly names (Uncle Joe). You'll find Marlene Dietrich, Zsa Zsa Gabor, and Joseph Cotton in bit roles, while Orson Welles himself plays the fat, corrupt police detective, Quinlan, who routinely plants evidence. A stunning conclusion to the film noir era.

When Strangers Marry
(directed by William Castle, Monogram, 1944)
Before he directed The Tingler and other cult horror movies, William Castle directed several B-movies, including this one, When Strangers Marry (aka Betrayed). Kim Hunter and her new husband, Dean Jagger, plan to be reunited at a hotel. But he doesn't show up. She learns that a man has been robbed and killed in one of the hotel rooms. After her husband calls her and asks to meet her secretively, she begins to suspect that he is the murderer. Robert Mitchum co-stars as her old boyfriend.

These noirs are just the tip of the iceberg. Many others merit mention, such as Phantom Lady, My Name is Julia Ross, The Woman in the Window, The Blue Dahlia, The Dark Corner, The Postman Always Rings Twice, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, Body and Soul, Brute Force, Crossfire, They Live By Night, T-Men, Caught, Criss Cross, The Set-Up, Scandal Sheet, Human Desire, The Killing and many, many others (not to mention the many movies with noir overtones which could arguably be called noirs, such as High Sierra, The Maltese Falcon, Key Largo, Ace in the Hole, Sunset Boulevard, and White Heat).