Category: Lobby

All Time Greatest Films Noir By FilmsNoir.Net

The greatest films noir of all time. Ambitious and perhaps presumptuous. But without apology or regrets. A list of 65 movies which I rate 5-stars…

The greatest films noir of all time. Ambitious and perhaps presumptuous. But without apology or regrets.

A  list of 65  movies which I rate 5-star – the top films noir.  As  have an aversion to rankings, my list of the best films noir is listed by year of production.

5 star Noirs Click on the title for the FilmsNoir.Net review
La Nuit de Carrefour 1931
France		 Aka ‘Night at the Crossroads’. Early Jean Renoir poetics. Magically delicious femme-noir and a brilliant car chase at night. Moody and bizarrre!
You Only Live Once 1937
US		 Fritz Lang and Hollywood kick-start poetic realism! Henry Fonda and Sylvia Sidney are the doomed lovers on the run.
Hotel du Nord 1938
France		 Poetic realist melodrama of lives at a downtown Paris hotel. As moody as noir with a darkly absurd resolution.
Port of Shadows 1938
France		 Aka Le Quai des brumes. Fate a dank existential fog ensnares doomed lovers Jean Gabin and Michèle Morgan after one night of happiness.
I Wake Up Screaming 1941
US		 Early crooked cop psycho-noir. Redolent noir motifs, dark shadows, off-kilter framing and expressionist imagery.
The Maltese Falcon 1941
US		 Bogart as Sam Spade the quintessential noir protagonist. A loner on the edge of polite society, sorely tempted to transgress but declines and is neither saved nor redeemed.
Journey Into Fear 1943
US		 Moody Orson Welles’ noir. Exotic locales, sexy dames, weird villains, politics, wisdom, philosophy, and a wry humor.
The Seventh Victim 1943
US		 “Despair behind, and death before doth cast”. The terror of an empty existence. Brilliant Lewton gothic melodrama.
Double Indemnity 1944
US		 All the elements of the archetypal film noir are distilled into a gothic LA tale of greed, sex, and betrayal.
Laura 1944
US		 Gene Tierney is an exquisite iridescent angel and Dana Andrews a stolid cop who nails the killer after falling for a dead dame.
Murder, My Sweet 1944
US		 (Aka Farewell, my Lovely). The most noir fun you will ever have. Raymond Chandler’s prose crackles with moody noir direction from Edward Dmytryk.
Mildred Pierce 1945
US		 Joan Crawford in classy melodrama by Michael Curtiz lensed by Ernest Haller. Self-made woman escapes morass of greed.
The Lost Weekend 1945
US		 ‘Most men lead lives of quiet desperation. I can’t take quiet desperation.’ Ray Milland against type on a bender.
Ride the Pink Horse 1946
US		 Disillusioned WW2 vet arrives in a New Mexico town to blackmail a war racketeer. Imbued with a rare humanity.
Scarlet Street 1946
US		 Classic noir from Fritz Lang. Unremitting in its pessimism. A dark mood and pervading doom of devastating intensity.
The Big Sleep 1946
US		 Love’s Vengeance Lost. Darker than Dmytryk’s Murder, My Sweet. Bogart is tougher, more driven, and morally suspect.
The Killers 1946
US		 Siodmak’s classic noir. Burt Lancaster’s masterful debut performance in a tragedy of a decent man destroyed by fate.
The Postman Always Rings Twice 1946
US		 Fate ensures adulterous lovers who murder the woman’s husband, suffer definite and final retribution.
Body and Soul 1947
US		 A masterwork. Melodramatic expose of the fight game and a savage indictment of money capitalism. Garfield’s picture.
Brighton Rock 1947
UK		 Greatest British noir is dark and chilling. A cinematic tour-de-force: from the direction and cinematography to top cast and editing.
Nightmare Alley 1947
US		 Predatory femme-fatale uses greed not sex to trap her prey in a hell of hangmen at the bottom of an empty gin bottle.
Nora Prentiss 1947
US		 Doctor is plunged into a dark pool of noir angst in a turbo-charged melodrama of tortured loyalty and thwarted passion.
Out of the Past 1947
US		 Quintessential film noir. Inspired direction, exquisite expressionist cinematography, and legendary Mitchum and Greer.
The Gangster 1947
US		 Hell of a b-movie. Very dark noir ‘opera’ brutally critiques the ‘entrepreneurial spirit’. Bravado Dalton Trumbo script.
The Lady From Shanghai 1947
US		 Orson Welles’ brilliant jigsaw noir with a femme-fatale to die for and a script so sharp you relish every scene.
T-Men 1947
US		 Mann and Alton offer a visionary descent into a noir realm of dark tenements, nightclubs, mobsters, and hellish steam baths.
Act of Violence 1948
US		 Long-shot and deep focus climax filmed night-for-night on a railway platform: the stuff noirs are made of.
Drunken Angel 1948
Japan		 Aka ‘Yoidore tenshi’. Kurosawa noir. A loser doctor with soul takes on the fetid moral swamp of Yakuza degradation.
Force of Evil 1948
US		 Polonsky transcends noir in a tragic allegory on greed and family. Garfield adds signature honesty and gritty complexity .
Hollow Triumph 1948
US		 Baroque journey to perdition traversing a noir topography redolent with noir archetypes. Audacious and enthralling.
Raw Deal 1948
US		 Sublime noir from Anthony Mann and John Alton. Knockout cast in a strong story stunningly rendered as expressionist art.
They Live by Night 1948
US		 Nicholas Ray’s first feature. A tragedy of Shakespearean dimensions which transcends film noir.
Too Late For Tears 1948
US		 Preposterous chance event launches wild descent into dark avarice and eroticised violence as relentless as fate.
Bitter Rice 1949
Italy		 Aka ‘Riso Amaro’. Classic neo-realist socialist melodrama. Homme-fatale destroys a passionate innocent. A bad girl is redeemed and homme-fatale meets a gruesome noir end in an abattoir.
Border Incident 1949
US		 Subversive expressionist noir from Dir Anthony Mann DP John Alton and writer John C Higgin indicts US agribusiness.
Criss-Cross 1949
US		 Accomplished noir showcased by Siodmak’s masterful aerial opening shot into parking lot onto a passing car exposing the doomed lovers to the spotlight.
Stray Dog 1949
Japan		 Aka ‘Nora inu’. Kurosawa’s ying and yang take on reality informs this 5-star noir: the pursuer could as easily have been the pursued.
The Reckless Moment 1949
US		 Max Ophuls takes a blackmail story and infuses it with a complexity and subtlety rarely matched in film noir.
The Set-Up 1949
US		 Robert Ryan is great as washed-up boxer in Robert Wise’ sharp expose of the fight game. Brooding and intense noir classic.
The Third Man 1949
UK		 Sublime. An engaging cavalcade of characters in a human comedy of love, friendship, and the imperatives of conscience.
Thieves’ Highway 1949
US		 Moody Richard Conte hauling fruit to Frisco. Rich socio-realist melodrama from Jules Dassin and A.I. Bezzerides. AAA.
Une Si Jolie Petite Plage 1949
France		 Aka ‘Riptide’. Iron in the soul: savage irony, withering subversion, and desolation mark the rain-sodden angst of a young man’s end.
White Heat 1949
US		 Fission Noir. Taut electric thriller straps you in an emotional strait-jacket released only in the final explosive frames.
Breaking Point 1950
US		 Great John Garfield vehicle with strong social subtext. Much stronger than from the same source To Have and Have Not.
Caged 1950
US		 Eleanor Parker leads a great female cast in a dark women’s prison picture with a savage climax and a gutsy downbeat ending.
D.O.A. 1950
US		 Gritty on-the-street in-your-face melodrama of innocent act a decent man’s un-doing. Edmund O’Brien is intense. The goons rock!
In A Lonely Place 1950
US		 Nick Ray deftly explores effect of isolation, frustration, and anxiety on the creative psyche as noir entrapment.
Night And the City 1950
US/UK		 Dassin’s stark existential journey played out in the dark dives of post-war London as a quintessential noir city.
Sunset Boulevard 1950
US		 Wilder’s sympathetic story of four decent people each sadly complicit in the inevitable doom that will engulf them.
The Asphalt Jungle 1950
US		 Quintessential heist movie transcends melodrama and noir. A police siren wails: “Sounds like a soul in hell.”
The Sound of Fury 1950
US		 Great noir! Outdoes Lang’s Fury and brilliantly prefigures Wilder’s Ace in the Hole. Climactic mob scenes mesmerise.
On Dangerous Ground 1951
US		 City cop battling inner demons is sent to ‘Siberia’. A film of dark beauty and haunting characterisations.
The Prowler 1951
US		 Van Heflin is homme-fatale in Tumbo thriller. Director Losey is unforgiving. Each squalid act is suffocatingly framed.
Ace in the Hole 1952
US		 A savage critique of a corrupted and corrupting modern mass media. Billy Wilder’s best movie. Kirk Douglas owns it.
Clash By Night 1952
US		 Cheating wife Stanwyck faces the music. Fritz Lang puts sexual license and existential entitlement on trial and wins.
The Big Heat 1953
US		 Gloria Grahame as existential hero in Fritz Lang’s brooding socio-realist noir critique.
Crime Wave 1954
US		 Andre de Toth noir masterwork set on the streets of LA is so authentic it plays for real with each character deeply drawn.
Kiss Me Deadly 1955
US		 Anti-fascist Hollywood Dada. Aldrich’s surreal noir a totally weird yet compelling exploration of urban paranoia.
Rififi 1955
France		 Dassin’s classic heist thriller culminating in the terrific final scenes of a car desperately careening through Paris streets.
The Big Combo 1955
US		 “I live in a maze… a strange blind backward maze’. Obsessed cop hunts down a psychotic crime boss in the best noir of 50s.
Sweet Smell of Success 1957
US		 DP James Wong Howe’s sharpest picture. As bracing as vinegar and cold as ice. Ambition stripped of all pretense.
Touch of Evil 1958
US		 Welles’ masterwork is a disconnected emotionally remote study of moral dissipation. Crisp b&w lensing by Russell Metty.
Underworld USA 1961
US		 Fast and furious pulp from Sam Fuller. Revenge finds redemption in death up a back alley the genesis of dark vengeance.
A Colt is My Passport 1967
Japan		 Aka ‘Koruto wa ore no pasupoto’. Hip acid Nikkatsu noir with surreal spaghetti-western score.
Klute 1971
Japan		 Alan J. Pakula’s signature reworking of classic noir motifs in a masterly study of urban paranoia and alienation. Jane Fonda earned an Oscar for her brilliant portrayal of articulate b-girl the target of mystery psychopath.

Criterion To Release Remastered Film Noir Classics: Kiss Me Deadly and Le cercle rouge

Criterion has announced the coming release of remastered prints of two major films noir on DVD and Blu-Ray

Criterion has announced the coming release of remastered prints of two major films noir on DVD and Blu-Ray: Kiss Me Deadly (1955) and Le cercle rouge (France 1970).

Kiss Me Deadly (1955) This cult classic from Robert Aldrich is a noir masterpiece and an essential relic of cold war paranoia.  Totally weird and compelling.  The release is scheduled for June 21. Pre-order.

Extras:

  • New high-definition restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition
  • Audio commentary by film noir specialists Alain Silver and James Ursini
  • New video tribute from director Alex Cox (Repo Man, Walker)
  • Excerpts from The Long Haul of A. I. Bezzerides, a 2005 documentary on the Kiss Me Deadly screenwriter
  • Excerpts from Mike Hammer’s Mickey Spillane, a 1998 documentary on the author whose book inspired the film
  • A look at the film’s locations
  • Altered ending
  • Theatrical trailer
  • PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by critic J. Hoberman and a 1955 reprint by director Robert Aldrich

Le cercle rouge (France 1970) From the master of dark urban cool Jean-Pierre Melville.  Alain Delon plays a master thief, fresh out of prison, who crosses paths with a notorious escapee (Gian Maria Volonté) and an alcoholic ex-cop (Yves Montand).  The release is scheduled for April 12. Pre-order.

Extras:

  • Restored uncut version (with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition)
  • Excerpts from Cinéastes de notre temps: “Jean-Pierre Melville”
  • Video interviews with assistant director Bernard Stora and Rui Nogueria, the author of Melville on Melville
  • Thirty minutes of rare on-set and archival footage, featuring interviews with director Jean-Pierre Melville and stars Alain Delon, Yves Montand, and André Bourvil
  • Original theatrical trailer and 2003 Rialto Pictures rerelease trailer
  • PLUS: A booklet featuring essays by film critics Michael Sragow and Chris Fujiwara, excerpts fromMelville on Melville, a reprinted interview with composer Eric Demarsan, and an appreciation from director John Woo

Dark Borders: Film Noir and American Citizenship

Jonathan Auerbach, Professor of English at the University of Maryland and regular presenter at film noir screenings, has just published his much anticipated book on film noir, Dark Borders…

Jonathan Auerbach, Professor of English at the University of Maryland and regular presenter at film noir screenings,  has just published his much anticipated book on film noir,  Dark Borders: Film Noir and American Citizenship, a study which connects the sense of alienation conveyed by American film noir in the 40s and 50s with the anxieties about citizenship and national belonging in mid-20th century America, by providing in-depth interpretations of more than a dozen noir movies.  Professor Auerbach shows how politics and aesthetics merge in these noirs,  where the fear of  subversive “un-American” foes is reflected in noirs such as Double Indemnity, Out of the Past, Border Incident, Pickup on South Street, Stranger on the Third Floor, The Chase, and Ride the Pink Horse.  These anxieties surfaced during a series of wartime and post war emergency measures, beginning with the anti-sedition Smith Act (1940), the Mexican migrant worker Bracero Program (1942), the domestic internment of Americans of Japanese ancestry (1942), and the HUAC hearings in 1947.

Professor Auerbach, in 2008 in an issue of the scholarly Cinema Journal (47, No. 4, Summer 2008) in an article anticipating his book and titled ‘Noir Citizenship: Anthony Mann’s Border Incident’, posits an ambitious thesis about national borders and the borders of film genres:  “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 offered a rich analysis of Border Incident, and developed 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.  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”.

The paperback is available for only US$20.48 from Amazon.  A great price for a book offering an original perspective that demands the attention of anyone interested in the origins of film noir.

Noir Poetica: The Art of the B-Movie

Hollywood b-movies are a treasure trove of haunting images as arresting and poetic as any in cinema. Check out the slideshow of magic scenes from classic b-noirs…

Hollywood b-movies are a treasure trove of haunting images as arresting and poetic as any in cinema.

Check out the slideshow – move you mouse over the image for a navigation menu.

High and Low (aka Tengoku to jigoku – Japan 1963): Kurosawa’s Heaven and Hell

High and Low, based on American Ed McBain’s 1959 pulp thriller King’s Ransom is a noir in four acts

There are highs and lows in Akira Kurosawa’s High and Low (1963): the highs of a master film-maker and the lows that come from privileging  technique over drama.

High and Low, based on American Ed McBain’s 1959 pulp thriller King’s Ransom is a noir in four acts: the crime, the investigation, the manhunt, and the confrontation. Kurosawa takes the kidnapping of a young boy as the premise for a hard-edged examination of Japanese society of the period.  The film opens in the luxurious house of a shoe company director, Gondo-san, atop a hill in Yokohama overlooking the squalor of the teeming suburbs below.  Floor-to-ceiling windows afford a view of  a hellish suburbia while insulating his family from the noise of the burgeoning industrial metropolis.

After mortgaging all his assets to fend off a power-play from other directors, Gondo first has to face the ransom demands of a kidnapper for the safe return of his son, and then the decision of whether to pay the hefty ransom to secure the release of his chauffer’s son, who it is later revealed has been mistakenly taken for his son. The drama begins.

Act 1. The executive aerie: angst, cops, phone-calls, and wire-taps

The drapes are drawn – the kidnapper can see right into the living room from somewhere below. At one point the cops crawl on the floor when the kidnapper questions why the drapes are drawn and demands that they be opened.  This establishment scenario is expertly staged and edited, but lacks tension.  We have to sit through the bickering of a bunch of corporate suits for a lengthy time before the protagonists learn of the kidnapping.  The scenario would have worked better with an underlying tension: move the scene where the two boys are seen to go outside and play to the start, then during the corporate shenanigans cross to a fast abduction scene – the audience knows but the protagonists don’t.   Kurosawa also appears overly enamored of the wide-screen he has to play with.  He fills the frame with all the characters in the room once the cops arrive.  There are few close-ups of the personal drama involving Gondo, his wife, and the chauffer, as Gondo battles with the dilemma of not paying the ransom, or paying and facing financial ruin, played out in the presence of the cops who stand or sit in superfluous poses, looking away or at the floor.

Act 2. The pay-off and the manhunt

The pay-off is made from a fast-moving train in six minutes of real time and is exquisitely filmed, edited, and paced.  The action then moves onto the investigation and manhunt, with the focus moving away from the family to the cops. We go from high drama to police procedural, which while convincing, goes on for far too long and in tedious detail.  Thankfully, the cops while competent are drawn with engaging characters, and there is some welcome humor.  Though, I wonder if a Hollywood-b would not have handled it better with more economy and a  fast-paced panache.

Act 3. The net closes on the perp

An elaborate setup has the unsuspecting perp, a young cold-blooded killer, meandering through the inner-city streets of  low dives and dope dens.  In one scene, the fugitive, a chain-smoker in sunglasses, spots Gondo looking in a shop window and cadges a light as a cool as a cucumber.  A sequence in a dance-club where the perp goes to score some heroin is brilliantly conceived, with a masterful ebb and flow as he seeks out the dealer.  The action then cuts to ‘Dope Alley’ where addicts are operatically hanging out for a fix.  This scene is the weakest in the movie: it is plastic and unconvincing.  Though there is a certain irony with the soundtrack featuring a single piano note played at intervals.

Act 4. The confrontation

At the end Gondo is confronted with the kidnapper in a prison interview cell.  The inchoate anger of the young man is rendered by a simple yet dramatic mis-en-scene.  The two men are separated by a wired glass partition. Their conversation is filmed so that the active speaker is shown from the other side through the glass partition with the other man reflected in the glass.

There is a resolution but it does not provide any clear answers. Kurosawa observes more then he analyses.  The perp’s motivation is not only a mystery to Gondo but to himself.

This film rewards patience and at 143 minutes also demands it.  While a major work, the weaknesses are significant.   Moreover, while Kurosawa’s refusal to engage with the social implications of the inequalities he explores are not  seen by most critics  as a weakness, I would have preferred less police procedure and more social investigation.   Kurosawa’s earlier noirs Drunken Angel (1948) and Stray Dog (1949) were stronger in that regard.

Still Cause for Alarm

Noir lifts the veil of normality to reveal the chaos below

Noir is subversive.  Noir lifts the veil of normality to reveal the chaos below. The underbelly of reality.  The insanity of sanity.  The furtive destructiveness of obsession. The truth behind the lies.  The disaster of success.  The ‘ghost in the machine’.

Many of the artists of the classic noir cycle, from the writers of the hard-boiled fiction of the 20s, 30s, and 40s to those involved in the making of the films noir of the 40s and 50s, were ‘subversives’.  Artists whose art was a politic statement, a social critique, a thesis on the nature of freedom and social responsibility.

Novelists like Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Ira Wolfert, Graham Greene, and Eric Ambler.  Screenwriters like Dalton Trumbo, John Paxton, A. I. Bezzeridis, and Carl Foreman. Film-makers and actors like Abraham Polonsky, Jules Dassin, Orson Welles, Edward Dmytryk, Adrian Scott, Joan Scott, John Garfield, and Marsha Hunt.

A number of these artists were vilified and their careers destroyed during the ‘red menace’ years of HUAC and the blacklist.  What was ignored then and largely forgotten now is that these men and women were united and largely animated by a common cause: anti-fascism.  These liberals and leftists were warning of the dangers of fascism well before the outbreak of WW2, when many of the rightists that later prosecuted the anti-communist hysteria of the immediate cold-war period were apologists of fascism.

Eric Ambler was a thriller writer whose best work was written during the late 30s and early 40s.  His novels Journey into Fear (1943) and The Mask of Dimitrios (1944) were made into films noir during the war.  In 1938 Ambler published ‘Cause for Alarm’ – not related to any movie with the same title – a story about a British munitions engineer, Marlow, haplessly caught up in espionage in Fascist Italy.  The protagonist is aided in his escape from fascist death squads by a mysterious American, Zaleshoff, who may be a Soviet spy but is definitely a socialist.  Caught in a snow storm just before crossing into Yugoslavia to freedom, the pair is given shelter for the night by an artist and her elderly father.  It transpires that the father is a mathematician, a Professor Beronelli, whose career was destroyed after he refused to pledge a loyalty oath to fascism.  The trauma has plunged the man into insanity.  The two fugitives discover this after a reviewing the professor’s notes on a perpetual motion machine, and after they realize the daughter is helping them even though she is aware of their fugitive  status.  After the old man goes to bed, Zaleshoff says to Marlow:

‘Sure! That’s right. What a tragedy! We’re horrified. Hell! Beronelli went crazy because he had to, because it hurt him too much to stay sane in a crazy world. He had to find a way of escape, to make his own world, a world in which he counted, a world in which a man could work according to his rights and know that there was nobody to stop him. His mind created the lie for him and now he’s happy. He’s escaped from everybody’s insanity into his own private one. But you and me, Marlow, we’re still in with the other nuts. The only difference between our obsessions and Beronelli’s is that we share ours with the other citizens of Europe. We’re still listening sympathetically to guys telling us that you can only secure peace and justice with war and injustice, that the patch of earth on which one nation lives is mystically superior to the patch their neighbours live on, that a man who uses a different set of noises to praise God is your natural born enemy. We escape into lies. We don’t even bother to make them good lies. If you say a thing often enough, if you like to believe it, it must be true. That’s the way it works. No need for thinking. Let’s follow our bellies. Down with intelligence. You can’t change human nature, buddy. Bunk! Human nature is part of the social system it works in. Change your system and you change your man. When honesty really is good business, you’ll be honest. When rooting for the next guy means that you’re rooting for yourself too, the brotherhood of man becomes a fact. But you and I don’t think that, do we, Marlow? We still have our pipe dreams. You’re British. You believe in England, in muddling through, in business, and in the dole to keep quiet the starving suckers who have no business to mind. If you were an American you’d believe in America and making good, in breadlines and in baton charges. Beronelli’s crazy. Poor devil. A shocking tragedy. He believes that the laws of thermodynamics are all wrong. Crazy? Sure he is. But we’re crazier. We believe that the laws of the jungle are allright!’

Fate: “a belly-laugh on Olympus”

The gods, like most other practical jokers, have a habit of repeating themselves too often

The gods, like most other practical jokers, have a habit of repeating themselves too often. Man has, so to speak, learned to expect the pail of water on his head. He may try to sidestep, but when, as always, he gets wet, he is more concerned about his new hat than the ironies of fate. He has lost the faculty of wonder.

The tortured shriek of high tragedy has degenerated into a petulant grunt. But there is still one minor booby-trap in the repertoire which, I suspect, never fails to provoke a belly-laugh on Olympus. I, at any rate, succumb to it with regularity. The kernel of the jest is an illusion; the illusion that the simple emotional sterility, the partial mental paralysis that comes with the light of the morning, is really sanity.

– Eric Ambler, ‘Cause For Alarm’, London, 1938. Ambler, an English writer, wrote the source novels for the films noir Journey Into Fear (1943) and The Mask of  Dimitrios (1944).

Great Noir Posters: Trapped (1949)

A really stunning graphic poster…

Plato and Noir: “Incoherence partly resolved”

“The effect of this dialogue… is not to offer the reader a system, a structure of propositions, but to disturb and upset him in a certain way, to leave him in a kind of radical distress.”

[Properties ascribed by James Boyd White to Plato’s Crito]:  “The effect of this dialogue… is not to offer the reader a system, a structure of propositions, but to disturb and upset him in a certain way, to leave him in a kind of radical distress.”  According to White, Plato’s literary technique reflects his philosophical stance: “This text offers us the experience of incoherence partly resolved, then, but resolved only by seeing that in our own desires for certainty in argument, for authority in the laws—or in reason, or in persuasion—are self-misleading; that we can not rest upon schemes or formulae, either in life or in reading, but must accept the responsibility of living, which is ultimately one of establishing a narrative, a character, a set of relations with others, which have the kinds of coherence and meaning it is given us to have, replete with tension and uncertainty.”

– White, James Boyd. 1994. Acts of Hope: Creating Authority in Literature, Law, and Politics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. p.40 quoted by Aronoff, Myron J. 2001. The Spy Novels of John le Carré: Balancing Ethics and Politics. New York: Palgrave. p.17

A Shooting Star: The Noir Dialectic

Seen a shooting star tonight
And I thought of you
You were trying to break into another world
A world I never knew
I always kind of wondered
If you ever made it through
Seen a shooting star tonight
And I thought of you

Seen a shooting star tonight
And I thought of me
If I was still the same
If I ever became what you wanted me to be
Did I miss the mark or overstep the line
That only you could see?
Seen a shooting star tonight
And I thought of me

Listen to the engine, listen to the bell
As the last fire truck from hell
Goes rolling by
All good people are praying
It’s the last temptation, the last account
The last time you might hear the sermon on the mount
The last radio is playing

Seen a shooting star tonight
Slip away
Tomorrow will be
Another day
Guess it’s too late to say the things to you
That you needed to hear me say
Seen a shooting star tonight
Slip away

Bob Dylan – Shooting Star (©1989 Special Rider Music)

To my mind, if there is a noir dialectic it is Nietzsche vs. Redemption: the death of God vs. the rebirth of God; chaos vs. meaning.  A metaphysical tension between despair and hope. In one of the great noir novels, ‘High Sierra’ by W. R. Burnett, a shooting star is a metaphysical event.  Midway through the novel, the existential anti-hood Roy Earle,  a guy “just rushing toward death”[1], sees a shooting star one night.

They all stood up and stared. They heard people calling to each other in the little settlement beyond the court. A woman screamed shrilly. Low in the sky and moving slowly eastward, parallel with the earth, was a huge flaming ball of green and white fire…

“Look how slow it’s moving and how bright it is,” said Velma. “Do you suppose it will hit the earth?” She was standing close to Roy. He reached down and took her hand. Her fingers clung. “Oh, but it’s scary.”

“Now, don’t you worry, honey,” said Pa, his voice trembling slightly. “It will go right on past.” Then, with a laugh, he added: “I hope.”

Roy laughed, too, but he didn’t feel like laughing. His old sense of insecurity returned. This might be the end of the world. Barmy said that stars and planets sometimes smashed into each other and busted all to hell. Just a puff of smoke and you’d be gone! He held Velma’s hand tightly.

“Look,” said Pa, “she’s spluttering. Don’t I hear a noise?”

They all stood listening, straining their ears. There was a roaring hiss, then the meteor flared up and went out. They all waited for it to hit, but nothing happened. In a moment the meteor appeared again far to the east, very low on the horizon and moving much faster, vanishing finally behind a high point in the desert floor.

Velma took her hand away and laughed.

But Roy’s rush towards death is unchecked, and at the end Roy is shot dead by a cop’s bullet.

Finally he was at the summit. He sat down and put his back against a big rock. He waited for a long time with his machinegun held in front of him, but nothing happened. He relaxed and lit a cigarette.

“My God, what a place!” Roy muttered. He bent over to look, but jerked back suddenly as a wave of dizziness swept over him. A thousand feet below he had seen Sutler’s Lake, like a silver dollar embedded in green velvet. “Baby, am I up there!”

He heard a strange flapping sound and looked up. A huge bird was flying over him, headed toward the abyss—an eagle!

“Brother,” said Roy, watching the eagle’s lazy effortless flight over the terrible chasm, “I wish I had wings!”…

Time passed. The sun began to get low in the sky and the giant peaks turned golden, then red. The big eagle flew lazily back across the chasm, sailed over Roy’s head, then disappeared above him up among the rocks.

Suddenly a voice shouted: “Earle! Come down. This’s your last chance.”

“Nuts to you, copper,” said Roy, leaning forward.

There was a short silence, then far off to Roy’s right a rifle cracked.

At first he sat without moving. The gun didn’t even fall out of his hands. The rifle cracked again and the echoes rolled off sharply, bouncing from rock to rock. Roy stood up, threw the machine-gun away from him, mumbled inarticulately, then fell forward on his face…

… It was all over now. He was falling down that black abyss. Suddenly a huge green and white ball of fire swept across in front of him and a hand reached out and took his hand. But the hand was not little and soft as it had been that other time. It was lean and firm. Marie! The hand checked his fall.

[1] John T. Irwin, Unless the Threat of Death Is Behind Them: Hard-Boiled Fiction and Film Noir (©2006 The Johns Hopkins University Press)  p.116