Category: Articles

Fritz Lang’s Human Desire, made after The Big Heat (1953), brings together the two stars from that film, Glenn Ford and Gloria Grahame, in a relentlessly sordid noir melodrama of lust, infidelity, murder, and deceit played out on a wide screen.

The screenplay by Alfred Hayes, who worked on Lang’s Clash By Night (1952), is based on Emil Zola’s novel La Bête Humaine, which was first adapted for the screen by Jean Renoir in 1938 in one of the major films of the French poetic realism cycle, and starred Jean Gabin and Simone Simon. The poetic realism cycle of the late 1930s in France is considered by some film scholars a precursor to American film noir, and the eroticism of the Renoir film makes the strongest case for such a connection. That said, I see that little is to be gained by comparing Lang’s picture with Renoir’s.  Each film is grounded in a different social milieu, and Lang’s effort is more deterministic as befits a late cycle American noir.

For the first five minutes of the picture Lang introduces his story using shots of a locomotive-powered inter-urban passenger train barrelling through a flat landscape and one last tunnel before it reaches the ordered tangle of converging and diverging tracks at its destination.  From the first frame the evocative musical score of Daniele Amfitheatrof  establishes both an echo of the train’s rumbling progress and a dark counterpoint that portends the dark drama that will follow in the diesel’s wake.  Lang brilliantly uses the train’s inexorable passage and the determinism of the rails that brook no turning back or detour: fate is laid out in hard steel, and the switches and way-lays are beyond the driver’s control – all he can do is slow or speed his progress along an ineluctable pre-ordained trajectory – and even then he has a schedule to stick to.

Jeff Warren (Glenn Ford), a returning Korean war vet is shown as the driver in fast cuts to the cabin of the speeding locomotive. This  montage of scenes establishes a parallel metaphor. Jeff as the train driver is essentially passive and has no control over the train’s path, and in his life he is also happy to go with the flow, not to think too much about where his headed or why.

When he hits town his stated ambition is to keep a steady job, go fishing, and take in a movie.  A decent young girl who has been waiting for him declares herself as the ‘right woman’ to share this life, but he is passive and makes no serious effort to deepen the relationship.  Trouble starts when he meets the wrong woman on a train, soon after a murder has been committed in an adjoining carriage. Enter the erotic Gloria Grahame, sexually available and looking for a drink, but she settles for a cigarette and a languorous kiss between strangers. She is married to an insanely jealous older man, whom she does not love. But can she love any man? She is damaged goods and desperately needs help to escape not only the confines of her marriage but destroy the terrible secret hold her husband has over her. Situation dire.  Is she a femme-fatale, or a woman so used and abused by men from a young age that she is forced to use her sexuality as a weapon just to survive?   She lies but she doesn’t lie, she tells the truth but not the whole truth, and not all at once.

Grahame’s performance is powerfully convincing and Broderick Crawford is solid as the husband, but Ford lets the team down badly – rarely is his lack of depth so visible and so damaging. The strength of the climax requires more than Ford is capable of and the drama is dissipated to the extent that he needs to show terror, contempt, or real anger.

Even with this significant weakness, Lang and his cameraman, Burnett Guffey, are unrelenting in their unblinking gaze on the dark underside of modern American life.  Lang does not flinch from showing the ugliness and malevolence in a world brightly lit and without visible shadows: a man has been murdered behind a closed train compartment door – cut to a close-up of another man’s hand holding a bloodied knife wiping the blood off by rubbing the blade on his suit.

An under-rated film noir from director Fred Zinnemann, Act Of Violence is to my mind one of the great 40s noirs.  A strong story and fast-paced direction combine with brilliant moody photography from Robert Surtees to deliver a solid cinematic experience. The noir themes of the damaged war veteran and a protagonist desperately trying to break free of the past are woven into a dark scenario of entrapment.

The idyllic family life of a vet, Frank Enley (Van Heflin), living the good life in a small town outside LA but harboring a dark secret, is torn apart by another vet, Joe Parkson (Robert Ryan), with a gun and a terrible unrelenting need for vengeance.

Zinneman has compete control of his mise-en-scene. The movie’s opening scene showing a dark figure in long shot against NY harbor limping hurriedly towards a tenement in the rain at night, telegraphs the darkness to follow without a line of dialog. The tension is established when the man is seen in an apartment hastily packing a revolver and filling a suitcase before boarding a bus for LA. When he tracks down his target the bright world of a loving family, a successful business, community respect, and fishing on the lake, becomes progressively darker and dangerous, and the action moves from comfortable suburbia in daylight to dark threatening city locales at night. A fishing trip is cut short, but not before a strong wind across the lake occasions a sense of unease.  Back home, life for Frank’s unsuspecting young wife (Janet Leigh) and their small child is turned upside down when he returns a scared desperate man in terror of what lies outside his placid suburban garden.  First the lights go out, and then as each shade in the house is drawn down in turn, the dream is transformed into a nightmare.  A man with a limp shuffles outside and tries the doors of the house. In the darkness, a dripping kitchen tap which in the distraught silence is like the sound of a fast-beating heart, attests to the terror of the moment.  Later on with considerable irony, in the confines of an LA hotel fire-escape, Frank reveals to his wife the terrible truth behind this calamity, lamenting that there is nothing he can do to escape his pursuer.

Shortly after, in flight from Joe, Frank running desperately down dark desolate and dirty city streets, lands in a bar, where he hooks up with an aging b-girl played by Mary Astor. She takes him home and in a calculated act of ‘charity’ then takes Frank to a dive to meet a shyster lawyer who she says can help him. A plan is hatched with a goon to get rid of the pursuer for 10 grand, and Frank spends the night at the girl’s apartment. Next morning he comes to his senses and confronts what has to be done.

The final climactic scene is played out in long-shot and in deep focus, night-for-night on a railway platform.  The stuff noirs are made of.

A young woman who is a kleptomaniac and a pathological
liar wreaks havoc in the lives of three men
(1946 RKO. Direction by John Brahm 85 mins)

Cinematography by Nicholas Musuraca
Screenplay by Norma Barzman (uncredited) and Sheridan Gibney
Original Music by Roy Webb
Art Direction by Albert S. D’Agostino and Alfred Herman

Starring:
Laraine Day – Nancy Monks Blair Patton
Brian Aherne – Dr. Harry Blair
Robert Mitchum – Norman Clyde
Gene Raymond – John Willis

“Never has the device of the flashback been taken so far.  Narratives are jumbled up, parentheses opened, exploits slot one inside the other like those Chinese toys sold in bazaars, and the figure of the heroine gradually comes into focus: beneath her somewhat obscure charm there lurks a dangerous and perverse mythomaniac”
– Borde & Chaumeton,  A Panorama of American Film Noir 1941-1953 (1955)

“The Locket is a radically ambivalent film… [it’s] oscillation between condemnation and sympathy for its central protagonist, draws attention to the processes of narration and to the attempt of male narrators to control the ‘problem’ of femininity.”
– Andrew Spicer, Film Noir (2002)

The Locket is a bizarre melodrama that marks one the first films noir to use Freudian concepts to explore criminal psychology.  Though the film is studio bound, the film-makers have used this constraint to advantage. Under the assured direction of John Brahm [who also directed The Brasher Doubloon (1947), Hangover Square (1945), and The Lodger (1944)], cinematographer Musuruca, and art directors Albert S. D’Agostino and Alfred Herman, place the story firmly in a suffocatingly surreal mise-en-scene.  The atmosphere is decidedly gloomy – even baroque – with many dramatic scenes so darkly lit that there is aura of grim foreboding that goes far beyond the immediate action.

Larain Day, a little known b-actress, is entirely convincing as Nancy, the woman who weaves an elaborate charade only a disturbed mind could navigate, handling the melodramatic climax with considerable style.

The first thing that takes your breath away is what Borde & Chaumeton describe as a “technical shot in the dark”:  the audacious use of flashback. There are two male narrators and finally Nancy herself, who each in turn construct a flashback within a flashback within a flashback. The final flashback takes Nany back to her childhood where her widowed mother works as a servant in the mansion of a haughty rich woman.  The scenario in this flashback intelligently establishes the root cause of Nancy’s psychosis, while her treatment as a child of ‘the help’ initiates in the viewer sympathy for the character as a child, and an ambivalent empathy for the troubled woman she becomes.

A music box and its tune is a strong motif in the film, and in the climactic ending, this musical motif triggers a psychotic episode that is both cathartic and catastrophic. These scenes depicting Nancy’s disintegrating mental and physical state are inventively portrayed by innovative camera-work and by Roy Webb’s musical acumen.

The theme of entrapment is multi-layered.  While Nancy is a prisoner of her compulsion and childhood trauma, each of the men who love her is equally attracted and repelled by the enigma that lies beneath her longed for persona. One of the men, an artist played by Robert Mitchum, expresses this exasperation in a portrait of Nancy in which her eyes are incomplete.

A must-see noir.

In Nightmare Alley (1947), based on the dark novel by William Lindsay Gresham, you enter a bizarre oneiric universe of thwarted ambition and inescapable degradation.

A world of geeks and freaks, where a predatory femme-fatale uses greed not sex to trap her prey, where the hallucinations at the bottom of an empty gin bottle transport you to hell, where illusion and reality fuse into a phantasmagoria of tarot cards and hangmen, and where both tabernacles and carnival tents mock faith and trade on gullibility.  Life is a squalid con where you can trust no one, the only solace is in booze, and redemption is as a carnival geek fed on live chickens.

Director Edmund Goulding and cinematographer Lee Garmes fashion a monstrous world of dark nights and sordid shadows.  Death and opportunism are pulled out of an illusionist’s trunk, and a fog of angst shrouds all in its wake. There are no actors here: only visages and apparitions that inhabit a shadow play where Jungian archetypes invade your subconscious.

Never was a film noir more aptly titled – the nightmare at the end of the dark alley of the soul.

Jonathan Auerbach is professor of English at the University of Maryland, and is currently writing a book titled ‘Dark Borders: The Un-Americaness of Film Noir’.

Professor Auerbach, in a recent issue of the scholarly Cinema Journal (47, No. 4, Summer 2008) in an article titled Noir Citizenship: Anthony Mann’s Border Incident, posits an ambitious thesis about national borders and the borders of film genres, as set out in the article’s abstract:

Looking closely at how images subvert words in Anthony Mann’s generic hybrid Border Incident (1949), this article develops the concept of noir citizenship, exploring how Mexican migrant workers smuggled into the United States experience dislocation and disenfranchisement in ways that help us appreciate film noir’s relation to questions of national belonging.

The article offers a rich analysis of Anthony Mann’s Border Incident (1949), and develops a fascinating study of the sometimes antagonistic dynamic between the police procedural plot imperatives of the screenplay, and the subversive visual imagery fashioned by cinematographer John Alton.  It is essential reading for anyone interested in film noir.

Professor Auerbach’s conclusions are compelling, but to my mind can be taken further.  In his final paragraph he says:

Throughout, I have been using the word ‘noir’ as a noun and adjective in ways that inevitably suggest that the term has some substantive, intrinsic meaning, just as I have similarly referred to ‘America’ and ‘Mexico’ as fixed entities. But, as… other scholars have insisted, ‘film noir’ as coined by the French soon after World War II had absolutely no institutional bearing on American studio production and marketing during the 1940s (unlike Westerns or musicals), and took on critical significance in the United States only as a generic category well after the fact. In this regard, it makes more sense to think of film noir less as a bounded genre that a ‘meta-genre’—a threshold concept, or better yet, a concept or mode that tests the very permeability and limits of borders… In the case of Border Incident—especially due to Alton’s cinematography—what cannot be named in terms of generic narrative is the elemental muck and chaos that underlies civilization (contra the Western), the lack of any moral compensation for injustice (contra the social problem film), and, most profoundly, the exercise of law based on nothing but the sovereign nation’s capacity to invoke at will a state of exception or emergency (contra the police procedural). These truths do not themselves constitute the content of Border Incident, and cannot be contained by the generic label ‘film noir’.  But in so powerfully probing boundaries, they do compel us to consider how genres are made and remade, and nations as well.

The scene in Border Incident where the undercover agent Jack, is murdered by the furrowing blades of a tractor is one of the most horrific in film noir, and Professor Auerbach rightly observes that the agent “gets ground into American soil by the monstrous machinery of US agribusiness… [this is] a purely noir moment of recognition that reveals the terrifying underbelly of the American farm industry itself in its dependence on and ruthless exploitation of Mexican labor”.

But Professor Auerbach skirts the irony of the history of wider US involvement in Central and South America, where the integrity of national borders has been ignored and the poor exploited in the service of US strategic and corporate interests.

I came across this article in The Guardian (UK) today by film writer, Andrew Pulver:
Is Graham Greene the father of film noir?.

Graham Greene wrote an original script for a British crime thriller called The Green Cockatoo (aka Four Dark Hours or Race Gang), released in 1937, which is hardly-ever screened and is available only from the British National Film Archive. Pulver requested a screening and in his article he reports that the movie “has a similar [to film noir] commitment to the boiled-down essentials of the crime genre” . He also discusses these Greene noirs: The Third Man, Ministry of Fear, Brighton Rock, The Fallen Idol, and This Gun For Hire.  Coincidentally, Allan Fish of Wonders in the Dark posted an excellent review of Brighton Rock yesterday.

I have not seen The Green Cockatoo, so I must rely on the writing of others. I have not seen The Green Cockatoo, so I must rely on the writing of others. The Green Cockatoo since reviewed on December 3, 2010.

The Green Cockatoo was screened at the 43rd New York Film Festival in September 2005 and was reviewed by Keith Uhlich of Slant, and his closing remarks seem to establish its noir credentials: “Director William Cameron Menzies, an award-winning production designer, grounds The Green Cockatoo in expressionist shadows that anticipate Carol Reed’s The Third Man (the ne plus ultra of Greene’s cinema output) and the writer himself is evident via the piece’s sense of a veiled, yet inescapable moral outcome with which each character must deal.”

Hal Erickson in the All Movie Guide says of the film: “Filmed in 1937, the British Four Dark Hours wasn’t generally released until 1940, and then only after several minutes’ running time had been shaved off. The existing 65-minute version stars John Mills, uncharacteristically cast as a Soho song and dance man. When Mills’ racketeer brother Robert Newton is murdered, Mills takes it upon himself to track down and punish the killers. Rene Ray, the girl who was with Newton when he died, helps Mills in his vengeful task.”

Bosley Crowther in the NY Times: “With all its disintegration, though, it is still better melodramatic fare than is usually dished out to the patient Rialto audiences… An unknown here, Rene Ray, is very attractive as a wide-eyed country girl unwittingly involved in the Soho proceedings.”