Tag: 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.

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.

Murder, My Sweet (1944): A face like a Sunday school picnic

Murder My Sweet (1944)It was a nice little front yard.
Cozy, okay for the average family…
only you’d need a compass
to go to the mailbox.

The house was all right, too,
but it wasn’t as big as Buckingham Palace.

I had to wait
while she sold me to the old folks.
It was like waiting to buy a crypt
in a mausoleum.

Watching Murder, My Sweet (aka Farewell My Lovely – 1944) , is the most fun you will ever have with a film noir. Raymond Chandler’s hard-boiled prose crackles in this screen adaption by John Paxton, with moody noir direction by Edward Dmytryk.

Inhabiting a plot about a rich dame’s stolen jade necklace almost as convoluted as The Big Sleep (1946), the cast is superb. Dick Powell has a comic edge that brings a lightness to the shenanigans, and is a superb foil to the camp turn by Claire Trevor as the putative femme-fatale. Anne Shirley is as cute a 40’s starlet as ever graced the screen. The bad guys are bigger than life and truly entertaining, and rub each other out without ceremony or prevarication. It looks like a film noir, but the bad guys and gals are truly bad, and the good guy and gal are incorruptible.

Look out for the innovative “purple haze” sequence, after PI Marlowe is drugged by a crooked quack.

Murder My Sweet (1944)

The Bridge and the City Motif in Film Noir

The bridge motif has powerful symbolism in film noir. These poignant shots from the final fatal scenes of three films noir attest to this:

Night And the City 1950
Night and the City (1950)

Force Of Evil 1948
Force of Evil (1948)

roadblock4.jpg
Roadblock (1951)

[piclens-lite-link]

Double Indemnity: The Unseen Ending

Double Indemnity (1944)

The final draft of the screenplay of Double Indemnity (1944) by Billy Wilder and Raymond Chandler in the Motion Picture Academy Library in Los Angeles – download from here – includes a final prison execution chamber scene and a line of dialog that was spoken by Walter Neff, just after he said “I love you.” to Barton Keyes. With sirens wailing in the background, Neff says: “At the end of that trolley line, just as I get off, you be there to say good bye. Will you, Keyes?” The story then shifts to the execution.

This sequence was filmed but cut (by the studio?) from the production release.

Double Indemnity (1944)

James Naremore in his 1998 book on film noir, More than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts, offers this penetrating analysis and critique:

… the execution described in the longest version of the script greatly increases our sympathy for Walter, all the while raising questions about the criminality of the state. It also provides a tragic recognition scene for Keyes, who is shaken out of his moral complacency. This last point is especially important, because Keyes functions as a representative of the insurance company. Although he approaches his work with the intuitive flair of an artist and the intellectual intensity of a scientist, he remains a loyal agent of industrial rationality—a talented bureaucrat who, in effect, has helped to create the office building, the drive-in restaurant, the supermarket, and all the other landmarks of modern Los Angeles that the film relentlessly criticizes… One of the many virtues of Wilder’s original ending is that this complex, brilliantly acted character would have been made to confront his inner demon and to experience poetic justice. Keyes would have been brought face-to-face with the culminating instance of instrumental reason, the “end of the line” for industrial culture: the California gas chamber… For the original version of Double Indemnity, Paramount built an exact replica of the [San Quentin]  gas chamber, depicting it as a modern, sanitized apparatus for administering official death sentences. At considerable expense, Wilder photographed the step-by-step procedure of execution, emphasizing its coldly mechanical efficiency. There was no blood, no agonized screaming, and, for once in the movie, almost no dialogue. Much of the sequence was shot from Walter’s point of view, looking through glass windows at the spectators outside the chamber—an angle creating a subtle parallel between the chamber and the “dark room” of a movie theater. When the fatal pellets dropped, clouds of gas obscured the windows, and we could barely make out Keyes standing amid the witnesses, turning his head away. Soon afterward, a doctor entered the chamber to pronounce Walter dead. According to the script, the original film ended as follows:

… All the witnesses have now left except Keyes, who stares, shocked and tragic, beyond the door. The guard goes to him and touches his arm, indicating to him that he must leave. Keyes glances for the last time towards the gas chamber and slowly moves to go out. CORRIDOR OUTSIDE THE DEATH CHAMBER CAMERA SHOOTING IN THROUGH THE OPEN DOOR AT KEYES , who is just turning to leave. Keyes comes slowly out into the dark, narrow corridor. His hat is on his head now, his overcoat is pulled around him loosely. He walks like an old man. He takes eight or ten steps, then mechanically reaches a cigar out of his vest pocket and puts it in his mouth. His hands, in the now familiar gesture, begin to pat his pockets for matches. Suddenly he stops, with a look of horror on his face. He stands rigid, pressing hand against his heart. He takes the cigar out of his mouth and goes slowly on toward the door, CAMERA PANNING with him. When he has almost reached the door, the guard stationed there throws it wide, and a blaze of sunlight comes in from the open prison yard outside. Keyes slowly walks out into the sunshine, a forlorn and lonely man.

Until someone rescues this scene from the Paramount vaults, we will never know if it is superior to the current version, and even then there may be room for debate. One thing, however, is clear: Keyes’s lonely walk out of the prison would have thrown a shadow over everything that preceded it. It was not until Sunset Boulevard and Ace in the Hole that Wilder would produce such a savage critique of modernity. Although the released version of his famous thriller remains an iconoclastic satire that challenges the censors, it is a lighter entertainment than the original and a much easier product for Hollywood to market. (According to the Paramount press book, photographs of Barbara Stanwyck in her wig and tight sweater were circulated to American soldiers overseas, and Edward G. Robinson’s performance enabled the studio to obtain a tie-in from the Cigar Institute of America.) No matter how much we admire the film that was exhibited in 1944, the form of cinema that the French described as noir is probably better exemplified by another Double Indemnity, which we have yet to see.

The rare (Spanish?) poster featured at the top of this post features a rendering of Neff from the gas chamber scene. Note also the nightmarish imagery which has a definite surrealist quality, making this perhaps one of the most intriguing film noir posters ever. I am unsure of its origin or the artist. Perhaps a reader of filmsnoir.net can help in tracing its origin? The signature seems to be “Lopez Riem”?

Noir Novelists in Hollywood

Noir Novelists in Hollywood: An Overview
Free Seminar with Film Scholar James Naremore
Thursday, April 10, 2008 @ 6:00 p.m.
Chicago Public Library
400 S. State Street
312-747-1194

Scholar and film noir writer, James Naremore, professor emeritus of film studies at Indiana University-Bloomington, and author of More than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts, explores how the work of authors such as Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett and James Cain was adapted by Hollywood. This is a One Book, One Chicago event.

Progressive Origins of Film Noir

Force Of Evil

Force of Evil (1948)

With the passing of Jules Dassin, it is worth noting that social criticism in early film noir is largely ignored by most contemporary noir pundits and populists.
James Naremore in his 1998 book on film noir, More than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts, mounts a strong argument for the leftist origins of film noir (my emphasis):

…most of the 1940s noir directors — including Orson Welles, John Huston, Edward Dmytryk, Jules Dassin, Joseph Losey, Robert Rossen, Abraham Polonsky, and Nicholas Ray—were members of Hollywood’s committed left-wing community. Among the major crime writers who provided source material for dark thrillers, Dashiell Hammett, Graham Greene, and Eric Ambler were Marxists to one degree or another, and Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain were widely regarded as social realists. Among what Robert Sklar has described as the major “city boy” actors of the period, Bogart and John Garfield, who played veterans of the Lincoln Brigade in Casablanca and The Fallen Sparrow (1943), were icons respectively of liberalism and leftist radicalism. Meanwhile, the credits for noir screenplays usually included such names as Albert Maltz, Howard Kotch, Waldo Salt, and Dalton Trumbo, all of whom were eventually blacklisted, and these screenplays were often based on literature by such politically engaged figures as Kenneth Fearing, Vera Caspary, Daniel Fuchs, and Ira Wolfert.

There is good reason to conclude that the first decade of American film noir was largely the product of a socially committed fraction or artistic movement in Hollywood, composed of “Browderite” communists (after Earl Browder, head of the American Communist Party) and “Wallace” Democrats (after Henry Wallace, the radical vice president and potential successor to Franklin Delano Roosevelt). This movement is somewhat downplayed by Borde and Chaumeton, who emphasize the anarchic, antisocial qualities of noir and who initially argued that the form died off with the rise of neorealist policiers in the late 1940s. The Cahiers critics and subsequent American commentators tended to depoliticize noir even further, thereby obscuring the fact that many of the best thrillers of the 1940s and early 1950s were expressions of the Popular Front and the radical elements of the New Deal. A more accurate account would show that although the noir category viewed as a whole has no essential politics, it has formative roots in the left culture of the Roosevelt years—a culture that was repressed, marginalized, and virtually extinguished during the postwar decade, when noir took on increasingly cynical and even right-wing implications. During the 1950s, the congressional hunts for communists in Hollywood were themselves based on a kind of noir scenario and were crucially important to the history of American crime movies, affecting not only their politics and their doom-laden atmosphere, but also their reception by later generations. (pp 104-105)

Jules Dassin (1911-2008): Rebel With a Cause

Night And the City 1950
Richard Widmark in Night and The City (1950)

Jules Dassin, one of the great noir directors, died in Athens overnight.

Born in Middletown, Connecticut in 1911, Dassin’s ground-breaking noirs of the late 1940’s rank among the great films noir:

Brute Force (1947)
The Naked City (1948)
Thieves’ Highway (1949)

A committed leftist, Dassin was blacklisted by the HUAC and left the US before the final cut of Thieves Highway was made. In London he made in 1950 Night and the City, another classic noir starring Richard Widmark, in perhaps his best dramatic role.

In Europe, Dassins’ attempts to work as a director were vengefully thwarted by Hollywood mogules until 1955, when penniless and in despair he was offered Du rififi chez les hommes (1955) [“Rififi”], which he crafted into the greatest french noir of the 50’s. Dassin also played the Italian safe-cracker in the picture. The movie, which featured the legendary 32 minute heist scene filmed in almost total silence, desevedly won him the best director prize at the Cannes Film Festival, where he met his second wife, the Greek actress Melina Mercouri, who died in 1994.

An interesting Salo.com interview with the 89-yo Dassin in August 2000 by Michael Sragow offers some background on Dassin’s attitudes to his early noir work.

Check out my reviews of Thieves’ Highway, Rififi and Night And the City.

His major noir releases are available as Criterion DVDs, and these essays on the Criterion web-site are elegant dissertations on Dassins’ artistry:

Brute Force: Screws and Proles by Michael Atkinson Here we are in the dark territories again, the republic of bitternesses and bile known as noir, squaring our jaws against an amoral universe and roaming the rain-wet, lightless American City as if it were a circle of the inferno where backstabbers, goldbricks, and unfortunates march in closed patterns and puzzle >>>

The Naked City: New York Plays Itself by Luc Sante In 1945 Arthur Fellig, known as Weegee, a canny and gifted tabloid newspaper photographer, did something unprecedented: he assembled some of his best shots, of corpses and fires and arrests and crowds and spectacles, and made them into a book, published in hardcover—this at a time when photography books were still >>>

Night and the City: In the Labyrinth by Paul Arthur Within film noir’s unparalleled roster of resonant titles—Kiss of Death, Out of the Past, Where Danger Lives, to name three—none is more emblematic or iconographically cogent than Night and the City. Juxtaposing two of noir’s essential, virtually ontological qualities, the title of Jules Dassin’s underrated elegy for a self-annihilating hustler reminds >>>

Rififi: Love Made Invisible by Jamie Hook In 1955, Jules Dassin, an American director in exile in Paris, made this flat-out perfect piece of cinema. The film came as a redemption for Dassin: a one-time promising young director cranking out B-movies under an MGM contract (“They were awful. It was just plain unhappiness and embarrassment,” he later said >>>

Thieves Highway: Dangerous Fruit by Michael Sragow Like the movie’s rattletrap trucks lurching down the highway as they carry way-too-heavy loads, the characters in Jules Dassin’s brilliantly volatile Thieves’ Highway struggle under psychological and moral baggage until they can lay their burdens down. Working from a novel and script by A.I. Bezzerides, Dassin made this swift, fluid melodrama >>>