Tag: film noir

Marcel Carne’s Hotel Du Nord is seen as part of a trilogy that encompasses two other of his films from the 1930s: Le quai des brumes (Port of Shadows 1938) and Le jour se lève (Daybreak  1939).  These films represent what has been termed ‘poetic realism’, a gritty fatalistic French cycle of films seen as a precursor of the classic film noir cycle, with a male protagonist failing dismally to escape a dark past with a doomed romantic entanglement.  Unlike the other two movies, Hotel du Nord is not based on a script from Carne’s famed collaborator, Jacques Prévert, but by scenarist Jean Aurenche, which some critics see as a weakness. The film has on the surface a lighter touch, and much of the dialog crackles with simple humanity,  jokes and good-natured innuendo.  But there are deeper layers of meaning, and these come from the screenplay.

The scenario revolves around the daily dramas of a not-so-grande hotel in downtown Paris. Amongst others, of principal interest for me are the indomitable Arletty as a b-girl shacked up with a hood, played by Louis Jouvet with world-weary elegance, who is in hiding after ratting on an accomplice.  The story revolves around a botched suicide pact between a pair of young lovers, and the dénouement is driven by the arrival of Jouvet’s framed accomplice out for revenge.  The whole affair plays out in front of the real Hotel du Nord and in a magnificent studio lot, complete with a canal, bridges, trams, village shops, and the Hotel,  conceived by art director, Alexandre Trauner, who also worked on Carne’s masterpiece, Les enfant du Paradis (1945).  Maurice Jaubert’s deeply romantic and evocative score completes the scene.

Aurenche’s script and Carne’s mis-en-scene develop a duality: the generosity and humanity of daily life versus the dark flip-side of angst, cowardice, and cruelty. Goodness nurtures healing and reconciliation, while falsity and lies breed suffering and terrible revenge.  When the hood Jouvet declares his love for a young woman and failed-suicide, Renée, he proposes as ‘Robert’, the man he was before he became a criminal and who then took on another bi-polar identity to hide from his pursuer –  love demands purity of intent and the grace he desperately seeks to recover –  fate however, has other ideas.  Jouvert as the squealer  ‘Paulo’ was a shy bumbling petty-crook scared of blood, and now in hiding as ‘Monsieur Edmond’ he is a severe dandy who kills chickens for local housewives by strangling them with his bare hands.  Arletty’s whore Raymonde is engaging, tolerant, and sharp, with a seeming heart of gold. But her final revenge as spurned lover is a dark act of treachery.

Raymonde survives without regrets between the sheets of a more compliant lover, Robert’s ultimate self-abnegation is absurd rather than tragic, and the final reconciliation of the young lovers in the closing scene is more fantasy than real.  As dark as any noir.

Laura (1944)

I recently started reading a ‘heavy’ tome by feminist academic Susan Felleman, Art in the Cinematic Imagination (University of Texas Press, 2006), and found her discussion of the portrait as a central motif  in certain films noir worth sharing.

The portraits, too inert and non narrative to realistically inspire such identification within a realist scenario, threaten the viewer with awareness of the magic of the mimetic and narrative devices employed by the film itself to engage him or her. This is very much a danger in a number of movies in which the portrait assumes a more explicit role and is incorporated into narratives whose realism is strained by, if not abandoned to, psychological or supernatural treatment of mortal desire. In Otto Preminger’s Laura and Fritz Lang’s The Woman in the Window, both from 1944, the male protagonists fall in love with portraits of beautiful women. In Laura, it is ambiguous, at first, when Detective McPherson (Dana Andrews) falls asleep beneath the portrait of Laura (Gene Tierney)—his desire for which has been established—and then awakens to the ‘‘real’’ Laura, presumed dead, whether or not he is dreaming. This ambiguity is a function, as [scholar] Reynold Humphries has indicated, of the uncanny: ‘‘The irruption of Laura the woman into the privileged space of Laura the portrait is not just a question of a return from the dead but rather of a return of the repressed.’’   Humphries aptly relates this to the even more explicit scenario of The Woman in the Window, in which the entire narrative, stemming from Professor Wanley’s fascination with the portrait, is revealed—only finally—as a dream: a dream in which mortal terror and death are conceived as the inevitable outcome of his desire.

Film noir’s peculiar amalgam of sexual angst,morbidity, and the portrait may well find its apogee in another Fritz Lang film, Scarlet Street (1945), in the painfully ironic scene in which the defeated and dispossessed portraitist (Edward G.Robinson) witnesses the sale of what might be called his ‘‘self-portrait as femme fatale,’’ that is, the portrait Chris painted of Kitty ( Joan Bennett) that was exhibited as her self-portrait. The cadaverous image of the woman who stole his meager self-respect, along with the authorship of the painting, and whom he murdered in a fit of sexual jealousy, is borne, funereally, out of the gallery and past the painter, as he shuffles past in a schizophrenic oblivion. The pathological possibilities of mimesis and its subject-object confusions reach so fevered a pitch in Scarlet Street that it’s hard to imagine a sicker scenario…” (pp 17-18).

On reading this passage, the thought came to me, and I don’t claim that I am the first to have had this ‘revelation’,  that in Laura, Detective McPherson doesn’t actually wake-up to be greeted by the living Laura but dreams what he subconsciously desires – that Laura is not dead but alive.   To this ambiguity challenged by necromancy, add Felleman’s bizarre description of  “[his ]self-portrait as femme fatale”!