Category: Articles

The Big Sleep (1946): Love’s Vengeance Lost

The Big Sleep 1946

Howard Hawks’ The Big Sleep is one of the truly great Hollywood pictures: the Raymond Chandler novel is brought to the screen with panache and authority, and the chemistry between Bogart and Bacall is unsurpassed.

While the protagonist lovers are good guys and there is no femme-fatale, the movie has a strong noir aura. The darkly lit atmosphere and strong sexual tension shape our response to a grim and dissolute nether world where PI Philip Marlowe doggedly solves an enigma within a mystery, in a plot so convoluted not even the film-makers fully understood it.

The picture is essentially a love story where the lovers must overcome mutual distrust and risk all to escape a brutal nightmare of betrayal and death. The Big Sleep is a lot darker than the earlier Murder, My Sweet (aka Farwell, My Lovely – 1944). The Marlowe of The Big Sleep is tougher, more driven, and morally suspect.

I find the actions of Marlowe in the final reel disturbing. He is almost a proto-Dirty Harry. Clearly shaken by the death by poisoning while he stood by of the small-time hood who leads Marlowe to the final showdown, Marlowe responds with vengeful brutality in the shootout with the goon, Canino, and then in the final scene when he confronts the crooked casino-operater, Eddie Mars.

While the killing of Canino at a stretch can be put down to self-defense, there is no moral justification apart from vengeance in the way Marlowe engineers the death of Eddie Mars – the killing is gratuitous and was not the only way out for Marlowe and Vivian. It is this final scene that marks The Big Sleep as a film noir. Marlowe has survived and got the girl – but at what cost?

Split Second (1953): No cops required

Split Second 1953Escaped con holds a motley crew hostage in a Nevada ghost town on the eve of an atomic bomb test

First time director Dick Powell delivers a powerful crime melodrama from RKO, ably assisted by veteran noir cameraman Nicholas Musuraca. A solid ensemble cast is led by Stephen McNally as Sam Hurley, a fugitive on the run.

McNally dominates this movie as the brutal but complex killer: the noir motifs of the damaged war veteran and nuclear paranoia are deftly interwoven in an intelligent script from William Bowers and Irving Wallace from a story by Wallace and Chester Erskine.

Not a cop is to be seen and cruel destiny deals with the protagonists in an explosive finale. In one scene, Hurley tells his hostages that he doesn’t like heroes, and this movie doesn’t have any. Retribution is in the hands of fate and the weather.

A must see cult classic. Watch the trailer at TCM.

Split Second 1953

Dalton Trumbo: Blast from the Past

A documentary, Trumbo (2007),  on HUAC-blacklisted screenwiter, Dalton Trumbo, who penned the noirs, The Prowler (1951) and The Brothers Rico (1957), opens in NY and LA on June 27. Scripted by Trumbo’s son, and based on letters from his father, this movie is said to be a highly emotive account of the years Trumbo spent in exile:

A number of celebrities take turns narrating from the script, including [Nathan] Lane, Paul Giamatti, Brian Dennehy, Donald Sutherland and others. As a visual accompaniment, the film intercuts home movie footage from the Trumbos’ lives, incisive interview material with Trumbo, his family, friends and collaborators; and haunting glimpses of the HUAC trial hearings with the Hollywood Ten, led by Senator Joseph McCarthy; as well as extracts from The Sandpiper, Johnny Got His Gun, Spartacus and other productions authored by Trumbo. Peter Askin, who helmed the stage play, directs.

– Nathan Southern, All Movie Guide

Update 27 June 2008: In today’s NY Times Stephen Holder reviews Trumbo in an interesting article that looks basck at the dark days of the HUAC in the early 50’s:

Trumbo emerges as a fervently resolute, highly literate man of principle who, along with the other members of the Hollywood Ten, cited the First Amendment, protecting free speech, and not the Fifth, protecting self-incrimination, as his defense…If only the movers and shakers of Hollywood…  had stood together like the slaves in “Spartacus” and all claimed to have been Communists, the blacklist might have been averted. But they didn’t. Fear can make people instant cowards and informers. Resisting it may be the ultimate test of character. Today few would dispute Trumbo’s assessment of that very dark period: “The blacklist was a time of evil, and no one who survived it on either side came through untouched by evil.”

Noir America: The Genius of Film Noir

crimsonkimono_tn

This article by Stanley Crouch on Slate.com is one of the best written and most entertaining surveys of film noir I have read: Noir America: Cynics, sluts, heists, and murder most foul. An extract follows:

Noir’s popularity was inevitable. How could American audiences resist the combative stance of an unimpressed hero whose ethos could be reduced to: “Is that so?” How could they fail to be lured by all of the actresses cast as Venus’ flytraps? Everything in film noir takes place at the bottom, in the sewers of sensibility. It holds that the force of the world is not only indifferent to, but obviously bigger than, the individual, which is why personal satisfaction, whether illegal or immoral, is the solution to the obligatory ride through an unavoidably brittle universe.

Offscreen Com: Noir Essays

Man With a Trumpet

The film site Offscreen.com has published an interesting collection of articles on film noir:

Gloria Grahame: Incendiary Blonde

New York-based film writer, Dan Callahan, has written a penetrating article on the films and life of film noir regular, Gloria Grahame, for the May edition of Bright Lights Film Journal, Fatal Instincts: The Dangerous Pout of Gloria Grahame.

Callahan concludes his article with stunning directness:

Gloria Grahame lived on the sidelines of her films because it was there that she could cause the most trouble; she might appear in any movie, young and sullen, aged and insistent, under a pound of make-up or plain-faced, fucking the pain away, putting out a cigarette in someone’s eye, giggling for no reason. She’s inescapable, a disruptive force, and when I hear her in my head, she seems to say, “C’mon, you know you want to . . .”

Noir filmography for Gloria Grahame:

Crossfire (1947)
In a Lonely Place (1950)
The Bad and the Beautiful (1952)
Macao (1952)
Sudden Fear (1952)
The Big Heat (1953)
Human Desire (1954)
Naked Alibi (1954)
Odds Against Tomorrow (1959)

Related FilmsNoir.Net posts:

The Big Heat (1953): Film Noir As Social Criticism
The Big Heat (1953) Revisited
Crossfire (1947)
In A Lonely Place (1950): The “Creative” Outsider
In A Lonely Place (1950): A Psychic Prison

The Long Goodbye (1973): Redefining Philip Marlowe

The Long Goodbye (1973)

The House of Mirth and Movies blog has posted an excellent review of Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye (1973). An extract from The Long Goodbye: Recreating Noir:

The Long Goodbye maintains the thematic associations of noir, while altering the physical environment. The location remains much the same, as the conventional noir, as the film is set in Los Angeles, and the urban setting plays heavily into creating mood and atmosphere. The most apparent change is no doubt the shift from black and white to colour. The added choice to expose the undeveloped film negative to additional pure light in post production, until the colours were softened and the darks faded, further differentiate the look with the genre’s original stylistic trademark. Instead of the high contrast, low key lighting that characterizes film noir, the film is almost washed away. This technique works at creating a similar atmosphere as the traditional noir model despite being so different. Life and existence lack all vibrancy, and the uniform shade of grey that seems to pervade every scene emphasizes the moral ambiguity of all those who inhabit the city. There is little difference between black and white, so everyone is living in a perpetually grey and faded environment, living between the traditional models of good and evil instead of clearly on one side or the other…

This blog also has an interesting post on The Big Sleep (1946): Thinking about The Big Sleep and Howard Hawks.

Armored Car Robbery (1950): Solid B-Noir

Armored Car Robbery 1950Director, Richard Fleischer, teams with B-movie stalwart, Charles McGraw, in a tight 67 minutes of classic b-noir mayhem. A daring heist goes wrong and the criminal mastermind tries to shoot his way out, with a final take-out on an airport runway. A police procedural firmly grounded in the steets of LA with dark noir atmospherics. Recommended.

Fliescher and McGraw teamed again in The Narrow Margin (1952).

The Noir City: Imagining Gotham

Hugh Ferriss: Gothic Noir in Gotham

The nonist blog has a fascinating article on (and including images from) the reprint of a 1929 book by Hugh Ferriss titled The Metropolis of Tomorrow: “Ferriss was the preeminent architectural draftsman of his time who through his moody chiaroscuro renderings of skyscrapers virtually inventing the image of Gotham…”

Ferriss’ gothic renderings of modern architecture have an uncanny affinity with the noir city of the classic film noir cycle.

The Fight Movie and Film Noir

The Set-Up 1949

The Set-Up (1949)

Film-maker David Mamet, in an interesting piece in today’s New York Times on his new film, Redbelt, about a movie fight director, has written eloquently on the fight movie and film noir:

Fight films are sad. There is nobility in effort, in discipline and, if not in suffering, in trying to live through suffering and endeavour to find its meaning… the fight film is a celebration of submission, which is to say, of loss. As such, it finds itself on the outskirts of my beloved genre of film noir. The punch-line of drama is “Isn’t life like that. …” But its elder brother, tragedy, is the struggle of good against evil, of man against the gods. In tragedy, good, and the gods, are proclaimed winners; in film noir, which is tragedy manqué, the gods still win, but good’s triumph gets an asterisk… The true story of any true fight must be sad. As Wellington said, “Nothing except a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won.”

Mamet explores this thesis that “All fighters are sad” by analysing the scenes featuring real-life fighters playing fighters in Jules Dassin’s Night And the City (1950) and Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing (1956), and goes on to explore it more deeply in Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai (1954).

Surprisingly, Mamet does not mention two other films noir: Robert Rossen’s Body and Soul (1947), or Robert Wise’s The Set-Up (1949). The wrestlers in Night and the City and The Killing are not central characters, while in Body And Soul and The Set-Up, a boxer is the central character, and the tragedies played-out in these two movies more strongly evoke the existential angst of the ‘fight’. Indeed, The Set-Up as a real-time evocation of one fight, brilliantly confronts Mamet’s theme of the melancholy duality of winning and losing. Robert Ryan, also once a real-life boxer, as the aging fighter, “Stoker” Thompson, refuses to throw the fight and by winning loses when the heavies, who paid his trainer for the fall, cripple him in a dark back-alley outside the stadium.