Day into Noir
Between the Great Depression and the start of the Cold War, Hollywood went noir, reflecting the worldly, weary, wised-up undercurrent of midcentury America. The author explores the genre's origins, its look, its politics, and its geography, and shows how noir's poignant cynicism took hold—and why it remains embedded in the national psyche today.
by Ann Douglas March 2007
Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray in Billy Wilder's classic 1944 study of love and hate, Double Indemnity. From Photofest.
It's only real when it's dark. —Hush … Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964).
I belong to the last movie-centric generation; my family didn't own a television until I was eight. It was not on the small screen but in the art houses and rerun theaters springing up everywhere during my college years that I discovered the noir movies of the 1940s and 50s. Launched just before this country's entry into the war and peaking in the Cold War years, whether one calls it a genre or a style—critics disagree—noir was a hybrid of glamour and grittiness, exposing the enticingly seamy underside of midcentury America, a world untouched by the national sport of self-justification then reaching Olympic proportions.
Directed by such outstanding artists as Fritz Lang, Samuel Fuller, Robert Siodmak, and Nicholas Ray, and shot by the best cameramen in the business, noir was peopled not with the gratingly ill-timed figures blotting much of Hollywood's mainstream fare but with wised-up men and worldly women who had none of the right answers but all the smart moves, whose motives were always mixed and quite possibly malign, and who spoke some of the sharpest lines in American film history. "You're a cookie full of arsenic," Burt Lancaster tells a hustling publicity agent played by Tony Curtis in Sweet Smell of Success (1957). "Is there any way to win?," Jane Greer asks Robert Mitchum in Out of the Past (1947). "There's a way to lose more slowly," he replies.
But cynicism is not all noir's protagonists offer. Many of them are in the grip of an intoxicating metaphysics of utterness that creates signature moments of total theatrics. A suicidal Burt Lancaster, dressed in pants and an undershirt, abandoned by Ava Gardner in Siodmak's The Killers (1946), smashes a chair through the window of his Atlantic City hotel room and starts to jump, all in one seamless rush of magnificent, amour fou movement. (Lancaster's body, trained by his early years as a high-wire circus performer, was almost always a great actor, whatever the face was doing.) A cleaning lady stops him, saying, "You'll never see the face of God!," an intervention, though it only postpones his destruction, he will never forget—he makes her, years later, the sole beneficiary of his life-insurance policy.
In Fritz Lang's Clash by Night (1952), Robert Ryan, wary to the point of paranoia and transparently defenseless, his face beautiful, frightening, and worn with the wrong kind of waiting, begs Barbara Stanwyck, "Help me—I'm dying of loneliness!" Ryan, one of the finest actors of his day, was noir's theologian, mixing purity and guilt into lethal new combinations, poisons he administered, despite the corpses often mounting around him, solely to himself. The protagonists of this vein of noir were among those Amiri Baraka would describe a few years later as "the last romantics of our age." They may not believe in the American pieties, but they believe in something.
The term noir was coined in 1946 by French critics reviewing a group of American thrillers, including Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity and Otto Preminger's Laura, both from 1944, to mark a phenomenon they thought new to American cinema, a "harsh," "true to life" quality, a mood of "pessimism and despair." Noir was the last product of the studio system, itself now fighting for survival, and unlike the genres that preceded it, it worked best as a showcase for situations and problems that were palpably unsolvable and systemic, endemic to the social, economic, and even cosmic order.
"So you're unhappy," the tough-minded moll played by Mary Astor tells a distraught Van Heflin in Fred Zinnemann's Act of Violence (1949). "Relax. No law says you got to be happy." In noir, and only in noir, it's possible to be both archetypically American and irremediably unhappy—a good thing for Heflin, a bogus war hero, who has a vengeful Robert Ryan on his trail. After fleeing to downtown L.A., Heflin deliberately gets himself shot, then jumps onto an auto that crashes and explodes for good measure, leaving a young widow and infant son to fend as best they can in an upscale suburban housing development for which he served as contractor. The inner city was Heflin's all but inevitable destination. Noir, in Tony Curtis's phrase, was a "feel-bad" genre, and America's metropoles, shadowy, glittering, perilous netherworlds, "too vast to know," in Allen Ginsberg's words, "too myriad windowed to govern," hemorrhaging their middle classes even as they spawned a teeming new multi-ethnic underclass, provided its natural habitat.
Roughly 75 percent of American noirs are set in cities; of these, two-thirds take place in New York or Los Angeles, the twin capitals of American movies. Finding its sources and setting its stories in roughly equal numbers in both locales, noir constituted an arena of cooperation and competition for the two cities, now rivals on the national and international stages: one bursting upward from its claustrophobic island base, densely settled in the European manner, its infrastructure already riddled with decay, the other the world's first suburbopolis, sprawling outward at a rate only cars, not people, could cover, gripped in the sci-fi grotesqueries of gestation and waste, both surreal in scope and ambition, both inventories of noir contrasts, with outrageous possibilities of darkness and light, isolation and contact.
In Anatole Litvak's chilly shocker, Sorry, Wrong Number (1948), a repentant Burt Lancaster warns Barbara Stanwyck by phone that he's hired a hit man to kill her—tonight. She's on Sutton Place, "the heart of New York City," in his words. "Walk to the window," he urges, "scream out on the street!" But we've looked out that window over the course of the film, repeatedly. There's no neighborhood there, no sidewalk, just the East River, its highway, and an elevated train, all distant and impervious. Besides, the killer is already in the house; the camera follows him into her room, then shows the murder, without ever revealing his face—only the camera and the city know who he is, and neither is talking. The credits for Fritz Lang's The Blue Gardenia (1953), a crisp, proto-feminist whodunit set in L.A.'s garden-court apartments, newspaper offices, and nightclubs, unroll over shots of a traffic-laden freeway with an overpass; then the camera pans to City Hall, moving next to a strip, where it finally cuts to Richard Conte, the male lead, in a convertible. Los Angeles, as Lang saw it, had to come first.
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