The Big Screen (35 page)

Do you feel like a noir tonight, or a musical, the two genres that flowered after the war? You want both?

Martin Scorsese's
New York, New York
, which was regarded as a failure in 1977, opens with the news of VJ day hitting New York in August 1945. In all the joy and frenzy, guys and girls are kissing each other and looking to make out on the curl of the mood. We notice one such encounter, and it's weird: she is Francine Evans, a singer with a band, and Liza Minnelli (who was born in 1946) does a pretty job delivering a girl who doesn't think to argue with the sweet sentiments of her songs.

But she is pursued by this wild guy in a Hawaiian shirt, Jimmy Doyle (Robert De Niro), who will not let her go. Does he really want her, or does he just crave the challenge of winning her? He is torrential, a mile-a-minute talker, yet at the same time secretive or shut away. He might be crazy, or acting crazy to divert that aberrant energy. He is too much for her. But he will marry her. They have a child. Then the marriage comes apart—did it ever really come together except as his big show—because he is selfish, sinister, and a little psychotic. He plays tenor sax and will open his own jazz club while she becomes Doris Day—or Liza Minnelli, an adored movie star. She's fond of him always as she sings about “Happy Endings,” but she's rueful, because she has learned there is a solitude and an intensity in Jimmy that doesn't do happiness or being together. He talks all the time or he says nothing. Francine is from the church of the musical, and Jimmy is film noir, together in one picture. It's the best movie Scorsese has ever done about a man and a woman.

“Noir” today may be the best known and most honored of American movie genres, and you can make a case for it as the most culturally influential. But in the era when the best noir films were being made, the word would have meant nothing in America except an affected way of ordering your coffee.
Noir
enters American English consciousness only from French writing on film, above all in the book by Raymond Borde and Étienne Chaumeton,
Panorama du Film Noir Américain
,
1941–1953
, published in 1955 (but not translated into English until 2002). It is one of the first examples of French eyes recognizing truths in American film, a search in which America itself was negligent for decades. What Borde and Chaumeton saw as noir was “oneiric, strange, erotic, ambivalent and cruel”:

During the war, there was a gentleman's agreement in Hollywood to ease off on making gangster pictures, because they might present the nation in a poor light. But later, many noir films were B pictures, shot quickly on low budgets, because the noir areas of the screen saved on décor. There is a legend that
Detour
was shot in six days for around $50,000. The truth is not as striking, but it's still typical: it cost $100,000 for a sixty-eight-minute film and seems to have been done in fourteen days. Its director was Edgar G. Ulmer, who had come to America in 1927 as part of F. W. Murnau's team on
Sunrise
.

Sunrise
itself is oneiric, strange, erotic, ambivalent, and cruel, and it has all those scenes in the swamp where the hero and a femme fatale, the city woman, are lovers planning to kill an inconvenient spouse. There's more to Murnau's film—including light, an attractive city, love, redemption, and happiness—but there's no mistaking its resemblance to
A Place in the Sun
(1951), a story of gathering gloom in which the wretched Montgomery Clift is shut out of the sunlight of American opportunity, and thinks to drown his pregnant girlfriend in a lake, in imagery of encroaching darkness.

The conventional history of noir says that American hardboiled literature (Hammett, Chandler, and so on) had a lot to do with its development: casual violence, dames and hoodlums, and disenchanted dialogue. But they are both more robust than the neurotic personality of noir. Hammett is tough, practical, and cold; Chandler is romantic and funny—that's one reason Howard Hawks's
The Big Sleep
(1946) behaves like a noir thriller but deeply belongs as a screwball romance. Hammett and Chandler were upright men and battered gentlemen. There's no real doubt in their books about the place of good and evil. But an enigmatic possibility in noir is our growing uncertainty over which is which. So you can find its uneasiness in the light in paintings by René Magritte, and in the voice of Louis-Ferdinand Céline and Patrick Hamilton, too.

Hamilton is a fascinating figure, not just because of how regularly his books and plays were adapted to the screen—
Gaslight
(1944),
Rope
(1948),
Hangover Square
(1945),
Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky
(2005)—or because he was himself depressed and alcoholic in disturbing ways. But listen to this, the opening to his novel
Hangover Square
, published in 1941:

That is an insidious but overwhelming start to a book in which the mind of George Harvey Bone is slipped inside ours, or run as a movie on our screen. He is a pathetic man, living in the London of the phony war, waiting for the bombs to fall, and thinking of murdering the stupid, spiteful woman he loves—when the right “click” sounds. As in some of the best noir films, there is no escaping this insinuation of self-pity and criminal response. Thus the feeling of futility and calm in the narrative voice of Fred MacMurray throughout
Double Indemnity
. (You could add William Holden in
Sunset Blvd.
; Billy Wilder excelled at people luxuriating in their own fatal story.)

So perhaps Hammett and Chandler enriched the chat and the iconography of noir. But
Hangover Square
is an intuition of the physical or neurological experience of watching film as signs of human and social pathology. No one was bothered or able to spell this out at the time, but maybe the deepest significance in noir is a disquiet over film itself and the ways in which it has enacted and armored our detachment from the world.

In those same years of noir, there were obvious circumstantial events to contribute to uneasiness, or the age of anxiety. I mean the revelation of the banality of evil, of cruelty and torture, that spilled out in the imagery of liberated concentration camps. I mean the realization that weapons now existed with a destructive power that might be sudden and universal. In that mood, some people involved in picture-making and its factory for happiness felt ashamed of the foolish lies that had been perpetrated. Another betrayal came as the state turned on Hollywood for harboring subversive elements, and the craven picture business succumbed to that specious pressure and blacklisted some members of its own family.

That makes a heavy package of grief and regret, and after 1947 so many people in filmmaking lost their jobs and their confidence. Then came the chance to hesitate as American happiness was mocked by the shrill assertions of advertising (given unprecedented currency and life as the motor of television) that of course we all wanted to be happy, and would be nervous wrecks if we didn't make it. But what if our failure to make a community out of the huddled masses may have been assisted by the separating device of film itself? We thought we were looking at the world in fellowship with it, but the screen doesn't care if we are there, or who we are, so long as we have paid for the seat. The humanism that we hoped was the purpose of art doesn't quite travel in the dark or past the privilege of voyeurism.

In time, a number of films will see this alienation as a subject. In a teasing way, Fritz Lang's
The Woman in the Window
(1944) suggests, “Don't fall asleep—and then don't fall for sleep's screen,” because it is a trap waiting for you. Joseph Losey's
The Prowler
(1951) hints that the cop who answers the call reporting a prowler may himself have been that prowler. Dixon Steele (Humphrey Bogart) isn't the murderer in
In a Lonely Place
(1950), but the investigation will reveal that he could have been, because he occupies that poisoned emotional solitude, alone in the movie city.
Sunset Blvd.
(1950) is a melodrama filled with gallows humor, an insider story that jabs us in the ribs; but it knows that even the successes in Hollywood go mad. In Otto Preminger's
Angel Face
(1952), we guess early on that the angel (Jean Simmons) is a deliverer of death, but we can't give her up any more than the Robert Mitchum character who falls for her.
Rear Window
(1954) is a step toward confession from Alfred Hitchcock about the uneasiness of the habitual watcher. That will come to a head in
Vertigo
(1958) and
Psycho
(1960), and nothing less than horror over film runs through Michael Powell's
Peeping Tom
(1960).

That picture is notorious for raising a stream of critical abuse in the London press sufficient to interrupt Powell's postwar career as a director. But Powell was not a defeatist, and he did not lack ingenuity in the face of opposition. So credit something in his withdrawal to at least a passing dismay over what film was doing. The very means of desire were being invaded by dread.

That emerging anxiety is more deep-seated than all the immediate worries in noir: that the lovers in
They Live by Night
(1949) may be killed; that people on the run could end up mad; that the great criminal enterprise may come undone; that Joe Gillis in
Sunset Blvd.
will end up facedown in a swimming pool, still telling a story—the one thing he longed to do on-screen; or even that the end of life may be approaching. Sometimes noir faded into science fiction, and it's in
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
(1956) that death by uniformity overtakes people when they fall asleep and start to dream. You can say that is a metaphor for a society that could not handle radical outsiders (such as Communists? Or blacks? Or women?) or people determined to think for themselves, to be part of the huddled masses but known, individual, different. Isn't that a crux of America's dilemma now? Isn't it critical thinking that risks being snatched? So in noir, outsiders (even the mad and the dangerous) begin to become attractive.

This shift can be seen as part of a filmmaker's feeling that the old code of happy endings and unmistakable virtue had to be abandoned if film was going to grow up and earn respect. That's the first hint, on “home” ground, that villainy (such a hokey word) might be a new facet of our behavioral mix, that evil might be understandable. The bad guys were becoming the glowing roles. In
Kiss of Death
(1947), a standard film noir, it's hard to recall the hero, Victor Mature, not just because that actor was so subdued, but because the film had lost interest in his character. Instead, we watch Tommy Udo (Richard Widmark), in a black shirt, a white tie, and a filthy raincoat, who pushes an old woman in a wheelchair down a staircase. And then he laughs in his giggly, whining way. He seems like a concentration camp guard who got away. It was Widmark's first film, and it launched his career while presenting him with the problem that had dogged Peter Lorre: no one might take him seriously except as a killer. (The film was cowritten by Ben Hecht, who had just been through analysis.)