Articles – Page 24 – FilmsNoir.Net

James M. Cain on the Origins of Film Noir

James M. Cain, who wrote the novels, Double Indemnity, The Postman Always Rings Twice, and Mildred Pierce, said in 1946 that the changes seen in Hollywood movies like Double Indemnity (1944):

“ [have] …nothing to do with the war [or any] … of that bunk… it’s just that producers have got hep to the fact that plenty of real crime takes place every day and that makes it a good movie. The public is fed up with the old-fashioned melodramatic type of hokum. You know, the whodunit at which the audience after the second reel starts shouting, “We know the murderer. It’s the butler. It’s the butler. It’s the butler.”

From Alain Silver and James Ursini (ed), Film Noir Reader 2, pp 12-13

Raymond Chandler: God and The Lost Screenplay

During 1948-49 Raymond Chandler completed a Philip Marlowe screenplay titled Playback for Universal Pictures, but for financial and other reasons the movie was never produced. After starting a novelisation in 1953, he put the draft aside until 1957 when at the age of 70 in a final Scotch-fueled effort he completed the novel. It was Chandler’s last completed work of fiction. Chandler suffered from depression in his final years and attempted suicide in 1955. He died in March 1959 from natural causes.

In Playback the book, Chandler makes his only cameo appearance in a Marlowe story, as an old hotel lobby-sitter who gives PI Marlowe some information. In the persona of Henry Clarendon IV, who like Chandler in his later years used a walking cane and wore white gloves to hide a skin ailment, he says to Marlowe:

“ …you may not question a man’s religious beliefs however idiotic they may be. Of course I have no right to assume that I shall go to heaven. Sounds rather dull, as a matter of fact. On the other hand how can I imagine a hell in which a baby that died before baptism occupies the same degraded position as a hired killer or a Nazi death-camp commandant or a member of the Politburo? How strange it is that man’s finest aspirations, dirty little animal that he is, his finest actions also, his great and unselfish heroism, his constant daily courage in a harsh world—how strange that these things should be so much finer than his fate on this earth. That has to be somehow made reasonable. Don’t tell me that honor is merely a chemical reaction or that a man who deliberately gives his life for another is merely following a behavior pattern. Is God happy with the poisoned cat dying alone in convulsions behind the billboard? Is God happy that life is cruel and that only the fittest survive? The fittest for what? Oh no, far from it. If God were omnipotent and omniscient in any literal sense, he wouldn’t have bothered to make the universe at all. There is no success where there is no possibility of failure, no art without the resistance of the medium. Is it blasphemy to suggest that God has his bad days when nothing goes right, and that God’s days are very, very long?”

References:

1. The script for Playback is available here
2. Gene D. Phillips, Creatures of Darkness: Raymond Chandler, Detective Fiction, and Film Noir (University Press of Kentucky, 2003) pp. 217-221

Possessed (1947): Melodramatic Soap

A repressed woman is pushed into the abyss of schizophrenia by unrequited love
(1947 Warner Bros. Directed by Curtis Bernhardt 108 mins)

A tour-de-force performance from an aging Joan Crawford impresses, but the gestalt of this movie rarely strays beyond melodrama – more a soap-opera on steroids than film noir.

The use of flash-back and dark moody lighting make it look noirish, but the deranged protagonist is not responsible for the consequences of her delusions, and there is no redemption, only the hope of recovery.

Visually the opening scenes on the streets of LA and in the corridors of a hospital are stunning, but this virtuosity is not sustained, and the only visual interest in the rest of the film is the brutal and visceral murder at the end.

Marlowe: How to make a pass…

“I’m Miss Vermilyea, Mr. Umney’s secretary,” she said in a rather chintzy voice.
“Please come in.”
She was quite a doll. She wore a white belted raincoat, no hat, a well-cherished head of platinum hair, booties to match the raincoat, a folding plastic umbrella, a pair of blue-gray eyes that looked at me as if I had said a dirty word. I helped her off with her raincoat. She smelled very nice. She had a pair of legs—so far as I could determine—that were not painful to look at. She wore night sheer stockings. I stared at them rather intently, especially when she crossed her legs and held out a cigarette to be lighted.
“Christian Dior,” she said, reading my rather open mind. “I never wear anything else. A light, please.”
“You’re wearing a lot more today,” I said, snapping a lighter for her.
“I don’t greatly care for passes this early in the morning.”
“What time would suit you, Miss Vermilyea?”
She smiled rather acidly, inventoried her handbag and tossed me a manila envelope. “I think you’ll find everything you need in this.”
“Well—not quite everything.”
“Get on with it, you goof. I’ve heard all about you. Why do you think Mr. Umney chose you? He didn’t. I did. And stop looking at my legs.”
I opened the envelope. It contained another sealed envelope and two checks made out to me. One, for $250, was marked “Retainer, as an advance against fees for professional services.” The other was for $200 and was marked “Advance to Philip Marlowe for necessary expenses.”
“You will account for the expenses to me, in exact detail,” Miss Vermilyea said. “And buy your own drinks.”
The other envelope I didn’t open—not yet. “What makes Umney think I’ll take a case I know nothing about?”
“You’ll take it. You’re not asked to do anything wrong. You have my word for that.”
“What else do I have?”
“Oh, we might discuss that over a drink some rainy evening, when I’m not too busy.”
“You’ve sold me.”

From Raymond Chandler’s last competed novel Playback (1958)

Film Noir Women: Does she really love him?

But does she really love him? That’s always the question about these heroines-obsessive to the hero, central to the movie. De Carlo’s Anna [Criss-Cross], for example, is willing enough to betray her racketeer husband for love of Lancaster, but not willing to stay with him once the husband catches up with them. Not when she can take the money and run… It’s one of the noir heroine’s most invariable features that she is motivated by greed: she is poor and wants to be rich, or else she is rich and wants to be richer. She may inspire romantic dreams, but she doesn’t have them herself. Not like he does, anyway. That’s one of the advantages she has over him.

– James Harvey, Movie Love in the Fifties

NPR has posted under its You Must Read This feature, an interesting excerpt from Harvey’s book on the femme-fatale from the early 40’s to the late 50’s, with nicely drawn portraits of the femmes-fatale from The Maltese Falcon, Double Indemnity, The Killers, Criss-Cross, The Woman in the Window, Scarlet Street, Pushover, Pitfall, Gun Crazy, The File on Thelma Jordan, The Locket, and Where Danger Lives.

Road House (1948): Noirish Melodrama

The love between a sultry cabaret singer and the manager of a road-house is thwarted by the jealous and vengeful owner (1948 20th Century Fox Directed by Jean Negulesco 95 mins)

A melodrama made memorable by a bravura performance from Ida Lapino as a cynical cabaret singer who finds love. Her rendition of “One for My Baby” with a bluesy solo piano accompaniment is arresting, and her sensuality is palpable and provocative. She delivers her cynical lines with a world-weary cigarette-smokey voice and her one-liner put-downs are delivered with perfect timing. She is one hot dame, and the passions she arouses are very believable.

Richard Widmark is strong in only his third role as the schizoid road-house owner who covets Ida, but a stolid Cornel Wilde as Widmark’s manager and rival for the singer’s affection is a damper on the action.

The movie is set-bound and it shows, but veteran director Jean Negulesco composes interesting and fluid takes with almost-noir lighting.

Angel Face (1952): Gothic Noir

A young psychopath with an Electra complex tries to murder her step-mother
(1952 RKO Directed by Otto Preminger 91 mins)

Angel Face is a dark and occasionally chilling gothic melodrama with Jean Simmons effectively cast against type as an ‘enfant-terrible’, and Robert Mitchum as her hapless object of desire and manipulation. While well-made and with high production values, the film moves too slowly and Mitchum’s trademark laconic persona is a further drag on the action. The final denouement though half-expected is still a shocker. But on balance, Preminger’s sardonic detachment, which usually finds favor with film critics, makes the film look and feel one-dimensional.

An interesting costuming twist telegraphs the repression of forbidden sexual desire on the day a fatal plot is executed: the protagonist contrary to her usually modestly feminine attire on this day sports a very tight sweater and a waist-hugging belt.

Dark City (1998) The Director’s Cut: Zapped by the biochemist

The Director’s cut of Dark City (1998) has been released on DVD this week. A sci-fi noir from director Alex Proyas, it explores the nature of consciousness and memory in a classic stylised noir city, which is the closest a contemporay color movie has ever come to evoking the look of a 40’s film noir.

It is a visually stunning and enigmatic dream-scape where true identity doesn’t exist, but is the construct of a biochemist in the employ of dark soul-less aliens, who inhabit cadavers, collectively employed in attempting to stave off extinction by reconstructing physical reality and manipulating the brain’s chemistry. The noir motif of an amnesiac protagonist on the run after he is implicated in the serial killing of b-girls is the arc on which the story is woven. It is an amalgam of Al Hartley’s Amateur (1994), which preceded it, and The Matrix (1999), of the following year: a brave new world with a ghost in the machine…

References:
Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
The Ghost in the Machine – Arthur Koestler

Kiss of Death (1947): More Than Udo

A reformed hood, who turns state evidence to get parole to care for his kids after his wife’s suicide, is a marked man (Fox 1947 Directed by Henry Hathaway 98 mins)

Kiss of Death is usually remembered for the debut performance of Richard Widmark as the giggling psychotic hit-man Tommy Udo and his brutal murder of a hood’s wheelchair-bound mother. But it is a strong performance by Victor Mature as the squealer, Nick Bianco, out to save his family, that holds the film together. An unaffected Coleen Gray is engaging as the love interest Nettie. Brian Donlevy gives his usual straight-up delivery as the Assistant DA who offers Bianco a get out of jail free card.

The action is tautly directed and is set mostly on the actual streets of New York, where the innocent streets of suburbia in the afternoon are a counterpoint to the dark sordid streets of the city at night. The only weakness is a redundant and banal voice-over commentary on the action by Nettie, which is also at odds with the noir theme that redemption costs. The climatic resolution is nicely nuanced and well-paced, as is the claustrophobic tension of the perps sweating out a slow elevator ride down from the 27th floor of an office building after a jewellery heist. The family scenes of Bianco with his daughters and Nettie are beautifully played and deeply moving, without resort to sentimentality.

The Breen Office and Noir

In the 1940’s the Breen Office rejected initial scripts (amongst many other films) for The Maltese Falcon (1941), Laura (1944), and Murder, My Sweet (aka Farewell, My Lovely 1944):

The Maltese Falcon… required the… following revisions: Joel Cairo should not be characterized as a ‘pansy type’; the ‘suggestion of illicit sex between Spade and Brigid’ should be eliminated; there should be less drinking; there should be no physical contact between Iva and Spade ‘other than that of decent sympathy’; Gutman should say ‘By Gad!’ less often; and ‘Spade’s speech about District Attorneys should be rewritten to get away from characterizing [them] as men who will do anything to further their careers.’ A similar pattern of objections can be seen in the Breen Office reports on other celebrated films noirs. A… review of Laura insisted that Waldo Lydecker must be portrayed as a ‘wit and debonair man-about-town’ and that ‘there can never be any suggestion that [he] and Laura have been more than friends’; meanwhile, scenes of police brutality had to be downplayed, along with the drinking at Laura’s apartment… [A] report on Farewell, My Lovely informed the producers that ‘there must, of course, be nothing of the ‘pansy’ characterization about Marriott’; by the same token, Mr. Grayle could not ‘escape punishment’ by committing suicide, and the scenes of pistol-whipping, drinking, and illicit sex would have to be reduced or treated indirectly.

– James Naremore, More Than Night – Film Noir In Its Contexts (UCLA Press 1998)

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