Week 3: Film Noir and the American Dream: the Dark Side of Enlightenment (for Gun Crazy)

Film Noir and the American Dream: the Dark Side of Enlightenment by Ken Hillis

This essay argues that light in post–World War II American films noir is not only an aesthetic feature but a thematic and ideological one as well. These films use Enlightenment conceptions of light to explore postwar subjectivity in ambivalent and contradictory ways. I proceed from an understanding of film noir as an historical movement and argue that noir protagonists in films such as Double Indemnity (Wilder, 1944), Mildred Pierce (Curtiz, 1945), The Dark Corner (Hathaway, 1946), D.O.A. (Maté, 1950), The Big Heat (Lang, 1953), and The Big Combo (Lewis, 1955) reflect an existential, often despairing, awareness of the impossibility of their own enlightenment and, by extension, of ever realizing the American Dream.1 This journal issue focuses on media interrogation of the construction of identity within and beyond national boundaries, and the cycle of films now iden-tified as film noir is central to understanding the formulations of postwar American identity and its relationship to the meaning of citizenship. For late 1940s and early 1950s audiences, noir protagonists—however personally to blame for lack of enlightenment they may be depicted as being within any one film's diegesis—update the Nietzschean tragic hero: a suffering and reluctantly cosmopolitan figure cast into a dark world of eternal recurrence and from whose performance geographically uprooted and socially buffeted audiences might derive a modicum of ambivalent pleasure through identification. Audiences have the opportunity to sympathize with noir's failed protagonists and so-called femmes fatales because, in terms of the structure of order, disorder, order that organizes the narrative of so many of these films, during the "disordered" middle section—when the powers of the state, the law, andthe father are most under question and attack—protagonists enact certain qualities of oppositional, often unexpressed, politics of audience members.
The success of classical Hollywood narrative cinema relies on audience identification with an on-screen character or characters. Yet while audiences may experience sympathy with postwar noir protagonists, as David Hume understood, sympathy allows us to understand that "there but for the grace of god go I" even as it also contains within itself the understanding that it is not, in fact, I who actually stand there in the place of the other. Sympathy, then, including that felt by audiences for on-screen characters, is always contingent and partial. As Hume argues in A Treatise of Human Nature, sympathy that exists only in the present is not intrinsically moral if it does not also extend into the future. While there is no necessary requirement that audience members do so, at that point near the end of the film when noir narratives move to reestablish order and punish the transgressions of the so-called femme fatale or aberrant protagonist, audience members are asked by these films to shift their identification away from the tragic protagonist to one more aligned with the interests of the father or the state.2 While audience members may sympathize with protagonists as individuals overwhelmed by "fate" or an unfortunate past they cannot escape, when order returns to the screen and the protagonist is punished, his or her individual quality of tragic and "disordered" heroism cedes to something akin to a failed citizenship worthy of state punishment. Further, films noir frequently promote the value of reconfiguring the meaning of individual identity away from the idea of the productive [End Page 3] citizen and toward one of the consumer as the centerpiece around which the new postwar economy of consumption will revolve. Yet noir protagonists, understood as placeholders for American citizen-spectators, also enact an ambivalent, imperfect Hollywood realization that somewhat confounds this ideal of consumption: while the Enlightenment idea of a universal unitary subject taking his or her place in the sun achieved cultural influence through daily rituals and belief systems, for many Americans the idea's promise would never come to pass.
In Sources of the Self philosopher Charles Taylor argues that the early modern bourgeois individual was expected, as an act of reason and self-improvement, to cultivate an inner light that would complement and extend divine illumination radiating from on high. Seekers of enlightenment, therefore, were anticipated and positioned as laboring to find their own inner lights. Amir Massoud Karimi has suggested that noir protagonists "are the negation of the American Dream" (cited in Martin 148). While a number of noir protagonists, such as the title character in Mildred Pierce, do seek to better themselves materially, films noir also frequently depict their protagonists' despairing recognition of the difficulty—if not impossibility—of achieving modernity's implicitly cosmopolitan promise that an individual, by dint of hard work, education, and reason, can develop a politically robust subjectivity illuminated by Enlightenment ideals. These films, therefore, question the underpinnings of European Enlightenment discourse even as they remain suffused by this discourse and its individuating, populist American adaptation, the American Dream. Henry Commager argues that it is America that realized the Enlightenment first imagined in Europe. Yet the "disordered" middle acts of films noir also depict the shortcomings of the utopian ideals undergirding Enlightenment theory of the progressive perfectibility of human nature, a theory that fails to account adequately for the competitive, unequal social relations within which individuals find themselves and within which any individual path to "enlightenment" must be negotiated and "traveled." The noir critique, however, is only partial: the films' narratives are often suffused with a sense that their protagonists are inadequate citizens due to their inner, personal failure to polish their inner lights and adequately reflect enlightenment ideals.
Films noir characters' belief in the American Dream allows them to see their desires for material gain as directly connected to acquiring greater agency and social status. More often than not, however, fate thwarts noir characters from achieving this status. Often they perish (the body count can be very high in these films), or if they do not perish neither do they triumph; most often they merely survive through strategies of accommodation and making do. American capitalism's vulgarization of Enlightenment ideals, encapsulated in the American Dream, whereby individuals who are both lucky and clever may get to grab the brass ring, provides an inadequate set of social tools for dispelling what these films frequently suggest is a "natural" darkness on the part of their protagonists. This vilifying suggestion is indebted, in part, to their seeming failure to conform to cultural myths beholden to Jeffersonian theories. As discussed by Leo Marx, Jefferson links the purifying qualities of the American natural landscape to the "naturally" superior character of American citizenship. Failure to achieve such illumination, then, "naturally" confirms one's fate as the alien other in "our" midst and likely in need of punishment. If the tragic hero can't get the capital, then he or she can have capital punishment instead.
In various ways, then, the films noir discussed below portray the irony at the center of Enlightenment philosophy: Protestantism, Enlightenment, and capitalism all contribute to the development of individualistic thinking, yet Enlightenment philosophy deflects consideration that it itself gestates within an economic system that confers on a select few the cultural capital and material privilege to pursue self-improvement. Their success is then taken as denoting them as naturally adequate to the task of philosophizing about the utopian potential for individual perfectability and to hold the unsuccessful as moral failures unworthy of on going sympathy and the assistance it may connote. Noir protagonists expose yet also participate in this irony of discourse and ideologized misrecognition. Frequently, noir critique remains implicit or partial as the individuals routinely are punished for their personal failure to know. In the films I examine the truth is not obvious, light is in short supply, and the focus on detection and the dead ends to which it often leads concords with the Enlightenment argument that humans, in almost [End Page 4] photomechanical fashion, discover the truth bit by bit, if at all, through empirical observation, analysis, and reason. Equally, however, tragic heroes may suppress the truth, or desire it suppressed for them, by recourse to the dark and the boundaries to knowledge it presents.
In the following sections I further discuss how, as a hybrid strategy of coping and resistance, postwar noir protagonists take on an attitude of "reluctant cosmopolitanism." These toughened protagonists, adrift in a world they do not fully understand yet also freighted with cultural baggage they understand all too well, remain constrained by their circumstances and "dark" pasts even as they seek the transcendent status promised by the American Dream. I link this inherently tough variation on cosmopolitan performance to the ways by which forms of light are distinguished as either lumen (natural sunlight) or lux (the reflected light of material culture as well as artificial illumination). In noir, lumen and lux frequently serve as metaphors for enlightenment, the possibility or presence of love, or their absence, and in the final section of this essay I examine the self-defeating strategy on view in many American films noir wherein toughness as a performance stands in for the tragic inability to love given protagonists' acceptance that, at least in part, it is their own fault that they fail to shine from within.

Reluctant Cosmopolitans

The word "cosmopolitan" is from the Greek, originating perhaps with the cynic Diogenes. When asked where he was from, Diogenes uttered, "Kosmopolites" [I am cosmopolitan], meaning without country, society, orplace (Borgmann 131). Whatever the level of Diogenes' detachment, the idea of cosmopolitanism has con-tinued to evoke an image of the world citizen. Formid-Victorians cosmopolitanism "was almost synonymous with humanism and progress" (Oshagan 194). However, to be fully cosmopolitan, that is, to be enlightened and with the power to act as an independent agent, is a privileged, elite position. Whatever Diogenes' intended (dis)associations, cosmopolitanism's connotations of urban sophistication reflect a modern privileging of assumed links between cities and civilization in contrast to the presumed yoking of locality to cultivation. The acontextual theories of human perfectibility upon which enlightenment philosophy relies presuppose that each fully formed subjective individual can be cosmopolitan, and while cosmopolitan status does not guarantee enlightenment, all enlightened people are cosmopolitan. Bruce Robbins has argued the value of renovating the idea of cosmopolitanism and then applying it to contemporary geopolitical, globally networked social dynamics that render aspects of the boundary between local and global increasingly permeable. Robbins argues that "cosmos" originally referred to adornment—as in cosmetics—and was only later extended metaphorically to refer to "the world" (176). In the sense that cosmetics refers to an adorned arrangement or ordering of the surface, cosmopolitanism organizes a concern for what is visible, for ornamentation, but it also suggests a "rising to the top." Cosmopolitanism seeks the top, the world view (the urban noir penthouse comes to mind) but, like a cosmetic, in its application and adherence it never takes leave of the body or the culture that it simultaneously adorns, masks, and appears to alter. The idea of cosmopolitanism, therefore, is profoundly ambivalent. While cosmopolitanism's quality of adornment and masking may imply the capacity for a self-alienation ironically coupled to performance of the self, the placeless aspect of cosmopolitanism also resists the qualities of locality favored by Thomas Jefferson that, while anchoring lived experience, also threaten aspects of individual freedom through their potentially repressive enforcement, maintenance, and repair of dominant cultural norms.
Noir protagonists such as the psychically itinerant Frank Bigelow in D.O.A. or the uprooted Debby Marsh in The Big Heat are reluctant cosmopolitans. These toughened men and women enter the postwar mise-en-scéne just as America takes on the mantle of a reluctantly global cosmopolitanism. Noir develops not in isolation from other cultural trends but as a historical movement that is part of the period's structure of feeling expressed, in part, through its various cultural productions.3 Rapid social change and geographic displacement parallel a diffuse nostalgia for prewar isolationism so as to mitigate awareness of the horrors of Nazi Germany, Iwo Jima, and Hiroshima; fear of "displaced persons" arriving stateside as refugees; as well as the Marshall Plan and Pax Americana's cultural and geopolitical entanglements. By necessity, an incipient American cosmopolitan awareness of the world's complexity and the changing meaning of geopolitical and social boundaries takes shape [End Page 5] during this period—a seeming loss of innocence thrust upon a citizenry offered little choice but to accept the new state of affairs. Noir, then, is also a reflection on these changes enacted for audiences hoping for an economic rebound after a generation of depression and war.
In the postwar noir world rootlessness is not balanced by the material and status privileges that attend a fuller cosmopolitanism. Rootedness—long habitation in one locality—implies "being at home in an unself-conscious way" (Tuan 4), yet gaining command over one's subjectivity demands a perfect reason theoretically detached from locality, for locality keeps one rooted in place and in the supposedly narrow particularisms high modernism believed it to organize and reproduce. To be fully rooted, then, is the antithesis of cosmopolitanism and enlightenment. Tough noir protagonists, recently urbanized or returned from the war, are rootless; however, this has not brought them cosmopolitan advantage. The performance of toughness in noir—a masking of the self and a strategy frequently depicted as making do—is cosmopolitan in its surficial quality of ornamentation; toughness, therefore, is a defensive armoring against the world through which the donning of a tough mask-as-identity functions as a kind of amulet or, in the anthropological understanding of the term, a fetish performance to buffer oneself against the difficulties of achieving self-improvement due to unequal access to economic opportunities. Noir protagonists engage in toughness regardless of the potential difficulties in seeing things clearly that the donning of this mask may entail. Further, noir cosmopolitan status is almost always white and most often male. For example, with the exceptions of No Way Out (Mankiewicz, 1950) and Odds Against Tomorrow (Wise, 1959) black protagonists are absent.4 And while depictions of rootless white women are common, their gendered access to cosmopolitan status proceeds differently from men and often depends on their use of men. The Big Heat's Debbie Marsh, asked by principal protagonist and good cop on the brink Dave Bannion (Glenn Ford) why she endures the corrupt luxe that accompanies her kept status as gangster Vince Stone's (Lee Marvin) woman, invokes her ongoing struggle to grasp the adornments that are the markers of arriviste status: "I've been rich and I've been poor, and believe me—rich is better."5
Yet by the Archimedean logic of enlightenment, toughness is also a self-defeating strategy, blocking one from further enlightenment in a cycle that may be conceptualized as "the eternal return of the same," where toughness must be constantly performed, a self-imposed boundary only transcended at the price of a loss ofidentity status. For it is precisely when one is thwarted from gaining greater agency, or when one experiences the denial of one's subjectivity at the hands of the more powerful, that one thinks about donning a mask. Here, something akin to Sartrean existentialism's claim that "what I am is for me to decide" is perversely operation-alized in the ongoing context of social inequality. As the ancient Greeks understood, donning a mask permits looking into the face of horror or tragedy to obtain a glimpse of the real that would otherwise be impossible. Andnoir offerings frequently suggest that the toughness-as-mask persona is how protagonists can best "make do," even as the resulting spiral of alienation works to confirm that enlightenment, along with any mutualrecognition among subjects for which it might allow, remains largely a dream—a potent symbol they are unable to actualize.
If the mask connotes cynical knowledge joined to a cosmopolitan quality of detachment, the noir protagonist, like the cosmopolitan, is frequently a traveler on the byway of urban technological culture. Yet the rootlessness of noir protagonists—Al and Vera in Detour (Ulmer, 1945), Johnny and Gilda in Gilda (Vidor, 1946), Morgan in He Walked by Night (Werker, 1949), Frank Bigelow in D.O.A., Laurie Starr and Bart Tare in Gun Crazy/Deadly Is the Female (Lewis, 1949), Charles Tatum and Lorraine Minosa in Ace in the Hole/The Big Carnival (Wilder, 1951)—while reflecting their potential to grab the brass ring to the extent that they do, speaks equally if not more so to their lack of sufficient cultural moorings and hence also to their disposability even unto death. The safety net of class privilege is unavailable to the majority of these individuals, and while a noir such as Force of Evil (Polonsky, 1948) critiques power's articulation to corruption as unhinging the lives of working people, a film such as Gun Crazy, in which the characters refuse to "stay at home," depicts rootlessness as a transgression to be punished. Indeed, both thematics are often deployed in the same film.
The noir protagonist's rootlessness is related to his or her awareness not only of the world's complex injustices but also of a personal inability to alter these realities. The American Dream's application of [End Page 6] Enlightenment thought to "opportunity" and "achievement" suggests that by dint of hard work, a modicum of education, "natural" intelligence, and luck, people may achieve a measure of self-advancement and prosperity. Each American is raised within this hybrid ideology of Enlightenment utilitarianism, fatalism, social Darwinism, and aspects of Calvinist and Puritan belief systems about the self, the meaning of personal gain, and the supposed abiding competitive advantage available to Americans and newcomers hoping to become citizens alike by virtue of their residency in the United States. From knowledge without power, however (awareness without the ability to achieve the dream's promise), flows cynicism, alienation, and bitterness: the toughness so frequently characteristic of noir protagonists faced with dark, bitter, immutable truths.
The American Dream coexists with a Platonic value system that privileges reason over emotion. Apollo trumps Dionysus. As the story goes, this focus on reason, coupled to an emphasis on "self-improvement," allows for the gestation of a political subjectivity that thinks for itself and decides what it will be. However, noir protagonists realize that equal access to enlightenment is an absurd premise. In Double Indemnity, a poorly illuminated Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) and Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck) problematize the naturalized axis of capitalism, enlightenment, and Platonic belief. They are aware of the ideology this axis organizes and at times seem to buy into its promise. Yet the film's narrative reveals their growing comprehension that they will never fully grasp the brass ring, the circular logic of which equates more money to more status, greater cosmopolitanism, and therefore more enlightenment and happiness. And unlike, for example, screwball comedies such as The Lady Eve (Sturges, 1941) or Ball of Fire (Hawks, 1941), in which movement up the social ladder equates to personal success, if a noir character moves from low to high cultural status, he or she often remains unchanged, discovering that life at the top is as rotten as it is at the bottom. In addition to Dietrichson, such a fate awaits Johnny Farrell (Glenn Ford) and Gilda (Rita Hayworth) in Gilda and also Leonora Eames (Barbara Bel Geddes), who, in Caught (Ophuls, 1949), finds her marriage to deranged tycoon Smith Ohlrig (Robert Ryan) a cross between a snake pit and a velvet cage. In a world where life at the top is no better than below and where upward mobility offers little chance of cosmopolitan enlightenment, the progress myth appears dethroned. Yet not quite, for while the American Dream posits luck, or fate, as a component of individual success, and while an existentialist acknowledgment of the world's absurdity admits a place for fate in enlightened discourse, the noir world indicates how modern notions of subjectivity nevertheless are deployed to reject the explanatory power of fate (frequently suggested in these films as equal to gender and class position) in favor of instrumental notions of personal failings. This displacement leads to the constellation of class- and gender-ridden "blame the victim" strategies on view within noir.
Although a film such as Laura (Preminger, 1944) critiques the cosmopolitan elite and the politics of consumption and "good taste," women of lower socioeconomic status such as Vera (Ann Savage) in Detour, Laurie Starr (Peggy Cummins) in Gun Crazy, and Sherry Peatty (Marie Windsor) in The Killing (Kubrick, 1956) all crave entry into that class; they desire the luxury that surrounds Laura Hunt (Gene Tierney) and her mentor, Waldo Lydecker (Clifton Webb). Though often reduced by the films to the status of "double-crossing dames," a more productive understanding of these women, whether positioned as femmes fatales or not, lies in viewing their performances as seeking, at the margins of contemporary gendered expectations, the full measure of enlightened subjectivity that attends to cosmopolitan status implicitly gendered as male. And it is frequently women who carry this message, for their greater ability on-screen to speak or talk back allows them to upbraid the tough guys around them in terms that reproduce a dominant assessment that such men are personal failures who end up as losers due to their insufficient subjectivity and a related failure to "profit from opportunities." These tough women, then, operating within a patriarchal political economy, rehearse its expectations of masculinity and success. Nevertheless, films such as Detour, Gun Crazy, and The Killing, in which the women who strive to go from low to high all die, still convey something of the polyvalent contexts within which character and environment intersect, anticipating Michel de Certeau's observation that "[e]ach individual is a locus in which an incoherent (and often contradictory) plurality of . . . relational determinations interact" (xi). Several noirs also imply that "natural" beauty is a power flowing from the above-mentioned good luck—hence the "beautiful" Lauras, Johnnys, and [End Page 7] Gildas escape the body bag. It follows that, within the misogynist logic of The Big Heat, the errant Debbie Marsh, also denoted as beautiful, must be disfigured—rendered a broken ornament by the patriarchy—so that she then can be killed.
Enlightenment ideology, and the communication of ideas in a public sphere upon which it depends, posits a society of freely communicating, self-contained individuals. The success of capitalism likewise requiresputting into practice this conception of the discreteindividual—one that need not contradict the interpersonal dynamics of sympathy. As Norbert Elias noted more than sixty years ago, while mutual recognition is necessary, the modern sense that we are also each psycho-spatially apart from one another is equally necessary for the production of competitive advantage and the division of labor in the world of work and, by extension, the world of pleasure, desire, and individuated consumption. And as Kant, that earlier cosmopolitan, noted about the relationship among success, understanding, and competition among individuals, "[w]e must look to . . . providence . . . for a successful outcome which will first affect the whole and then the individual parts. . . . The whole is too great for men to encompass . . . especially since their schemes conflict with one another to such an extent that they could hardly reach agreement of their own free will" (Reiss 90). Within a world where seeing is believing, therefore, from the situated vantage point from which my subjectivity proceeds, how can I decide if there is not enough light to see? And if I don the mask of toughness, how will I manage adequate mutual recognition (or even a Humean quality of sympathy) of others?
The film Double Indemnity depicts its protagonists' stark recognition that more money equals more subjectivity (an issue of considerable interest to audience members having similar desires). No fugitive from the work ethic, Neff declines the status of an office job, along with its connotations of organization man, preferring the greater independence of field sales. Like other classic noir protagonists, however, Neff is also an iconic placeholder for what cannot yet be narrated directly; he does not yet possess the ability to fully accept his already polyvalent subjectivity—an acceptance that would have allowed him the breathing space of the "rooted cosmopolitan." Writing about the idea of rooted cosmopolitanism, Bruce Robbins notes that "not enough imagination has gone into the different modalities of situatedness-in-displacement" (173). Neff has one foot on the ground (of work) and one in the imaginative realm (of sexual desire). But, as a placeholder, he has not yet achieved an ability to see himself in a more favorable light through articulating the commonalities between these positions. I am not suggesting that a rooted cosmopolitan approach constitutes a reformist agenda for working people, whether as salesmen or housewives, to deal with the contradictions of American capitalism and patriarchy. Rather, its depiction might have offered audiences a twofold way for imagining a future freer from the belief that fate and past indiscretions always already taint desire—freer from a sense of being trapped in a set of life circumstances conceived as conforming to the logic of "eternal return of the same." Neff, like others, responds to this sense of circular fate with toughness, an absurdly logical performance, the last act of which is death.
Though the film also reveals Neff's character as that of a likeable everyman, Double Indemnity also linksNeff's implicitly plural subjectivity to the sociopath. Further, the film indicates that a complex interplay of polyvalent subjectivity (what the current jargon of corporate globalization appropriates with the term "flexible" identity) is not, in 1944, yet conceived as dovetailing productively with the interests of the state and a Fordist economy. The polyvalency of audiences allows for a complexity of narratological "effects," including a range of readings from dominant to oppositional to askance. If Double Indemnity initially allows its audiences a cathartic identification with Neff as a manifestation of the tragic hero doing the best he can in a world over which he has little control, the film finally suggests that socioeconomic problems are traceable to individuals' "insufficiently illuminated" life strategies regardless of their positions within social hierarchies. Structurally, therefore, while a resistant toughness may be symptomatic of one's failure to adequately grab the brass ring, such films often punish tough strategy by existential alienation and despair, imprisonment, or death. As a response to their protagonists' inability to realize their vague desires for something better or somewhere else, films such as Double Indemnity ask audiences to focus on the fate of tainted pasts. Noir toughness, then, is frequently an eviscerated critique. While "disorder," social critique, and the anarchic play of desire do inform the centers of these films, the order (or preferred reading) reimposed [End Page 8] during the final reel encourages audience members to consider that toughness is an inadequate, aberrant (though ironically understandable) personal response to a world in which it is safest to not question the statusof one's own enlightenment. The dynamic by which audience members may "blame the victim" they earlier identified with as the tragic hero exemplifies Hume's understanding that sympathy, if remaining rooted only in the present and not extended toward the other in the future, need not be moral. At the moment when Neff's punishment for his transgressions is nigh audiences are asked to shift their sympathies from a stance inherently critical of capitalist organizational structures to one more in line with the interests of the Father (Neff's boss, Barton Keyes), the corporation, and the state. If audience members do so, they also take on a different kind of moral polyvalency—to recall at the moment of the tragic hero's punishment that it is safest to suppress any understanding that state-sponsored capitalism might be inimical to their interests in order to avoid a "fate" similar to that just witnessed on-screen. To the degree, then, that spectators consent to reidentify with the father and the state, they gain a kind of quisling pleasure that also confirms their sense of reluctantly cosmopolitan citizenship. They do so, moreover, only by reigning in and partially denying the possibility that their own individuality need not always be subservient to dominant values.
The postwar period has witnessed the emergence of an economic model connecting identity with consumption. The act of consumption increasingly is linked to the production of one's individual identity as a shiny commodity without a past. The past, whether tainted by fated indiscretion or polished by nostalgia, occupies a less and less central role in the new consumer economy than in an earlier prewar economy predicated on an understanding of personal identity as productive, responsible, and continuous in time. An identity too firmly linked to a past, like an outmoded commodity, becomes superfluous, and films such as Double Indemnity, Laura, and Sorry, Wrong Number (Litvak, 1948), with their fatalistic emphasis on past mistakes coupled to a fascination with the complexities of characters' motivation, are on the pivot point marking this shift.6
The European Enlightenment and its American counterpart promote the ideal of a liberated, self-contained individual, and capitalism depends upon her or hissteady supply. American capitalism hews to a Benthamite pursuit of happiness equated to money, with both tied to progress. While Neff is capable of imagining further enlightenment, his increasingly adversarial relationships with Dietrichson and his boss, Barton Keyes (Edward G. Robinson), suggest his parallel ability to imagine a regressive material future ever more concording with the competitive, individuating social Darwinist structure of feeling under which he labors and tries to love. As protagonists, Neff and Dietrichson enact the contradictory ideals they implicitly find incoherent but that the film never allows them to fully critique. Hence the film never allows audiences a glimpse of what, other than money, these characters really seek. The response in the face of this paralyzing illogic is toughness; in Double Indemnity mutual recognition between the doomed lovers leads to their mutual execution; the outcome of their tainted love and adventure reveals to each that, for the other, the mask, like a machine, is all that remains.
Dietrichson and Neff fail to achieve a rooted cosmopolitanism, which might have allowed their acceptance of plural loyalties and multiple identities and thereby might have suggested to them how something like a making peace with others could be imagined or achieved. Such a harmonization of difference is never easy and requires synthesizing realist and utopian conceptions of the self and a future. But in avoiding narrow particularism as well as the disembodied form of cosmopolitanism practiced by Laura's Lydecker (an art with high cultural capital but not fully of this world), a middle way that allows individuals such as Dietrichson and Neff to imagine themselves as citizens might have been open to them, in theory and in actuality.

Tough Lux

If noir toughness suggests the impossibility of fully actualizing the American Dream, the films through which tough characters circulate also trade in technologies and philosophies of light productively understood in tandem with their depictions of reluctant cosmopolitans. Hans Blumenberg notes that Augustine understood humans as a light lit by light and introduced a dialectic between God's light and the reflected light of culture (43). For Augustine, lumen is the objective, inexhaustible, intelligible, and divinely created radiance passing through and illuminating space; lux is lumen's earthly reflection but also our physiological experience of light [End Page 9] and our capacity to receive it. The human, then, is a light also lit by light. Lux, I would add, is also the root of luxury, and in its association with the earth and reflection lux haunts Plato's cave where the illusion (of culture) is misrecognized as the real (ideal light).Privileging the Platonic ideal, for Augustine everything created on this planet is secondary. Modern capitalism, however, has worked to invert this ideal and to reposition the commodity form as divine illumination itself. One outcome of this is to render "natural" illumination secondary to lux and its cultural offerings; within this context of how ideas of light and illumination are culturally deployed noir can be understood as a focus on the unequal distribution of lux and its power.7
While spectators may imagine how postwar noir characters may once have been God's children in the light, lumen—natural light—is frequently absent from their adult worlds. Within the dark, urban, and frequently interior places these films depict, it is the reflected light of lux that counts. The resulting sharp filmic contrasts between dark and light—one of film noir's defining technological and aesthetic characteristics—suggest the quality of an individual's subjectivity and social position within political economies and cultural hierarchies. Enlightenment expectations about polishing one's inner light depend on an extant access to divine light—to fully becoming a light lit by light. Noir, however, suggests that not only do protagonists find natural light in short supply but that such a shortage, frequently depicted as a personal failing or experienced as a personal lack, further contributes to an unequal access to culture's reflected light. Noir proposes that all are not equally capable of cultivating an inner light, an invidious proposal based on assuming the natural order of social inequities based on class, gender, and fate.
It is also the case, however, that Hollywood noirs span a range of ideological positions from left to right and frequently promote discrepant political philosophies within the same film. Considered in toto, noir is able to mount political critique, depicting in films such as Brute Force (Dassin, 1947), The Big Heat, Force of Evil, The Racket (Cromwell, 1951), and The Big Combo an endemic structure of political and economic corruption that extends from the bottom to the top rung of the socioeconomic ladder. At the same time, however, this critique is counterbalanced by other films with similar themes but that depict their protagonists as personally failing to attain sufficient lumen or lux. Films in this second strata include Sorry, Wrong Number, Caught, Born to Kill (Wise, 1947), and Criss Cross (Siodmak, 1949). Several noirs [End Page 10] achieve a further refinement of Hollywood's Janus-like stance toward critique through distinguishing culpability according to a narrative taxonomy that works to establish identification between audiences and principal stars while encouraging a more ambivalent reading of supporting characters. A film such as Sudden Fear (Miller, 1952), for example, allows lead character Myra Hudson (Joan Crawford) to plot revenge masked as self-defense, while her husband, Lester Blaine (Jack Palance), and his accomplice and lover, Irene Neves (Gloria Grahame), must pay for their deviousness with their lives. The film positions these characters, who seek to move from low to high social status, as incapable of transcending the dim world of reflected illumination from which they issue; they are denied the material lux they seek through acquiring the money underpinning the naturalized, luminary status of society playwright and heiress Hudson.
At times noir offerings also position science and its technologies of light or lux as producers of truth. The truth-seeking high intensity police light illuminating the suspect and the screen is a standard trope. Yet this truth's empirical production often has an ironic outcome. In Kiss Me Deadly (Aldrich, 1955) it is "the great whatzit," the mysterious and deadly nuclear light inside the black box (figure 1).
In the final scene from The Big Combo, one strongly emphasizing the contrasting play of light and dark, a belatedly toughened Susan Cowell (Jean Wallace) repudiates her mafioso lover, Mr. Brown (Richard Conte), by taking control of a searchlight to illuminate and reject him as well as by her defiant reply to his demand for darkness: "I want to be seen."8 Cowell's actions and words indicate that a desperate resort to lighting technology can signal a draining away or a loss of inner light equal to the loss of humanity itself. Yet in taking control of the searchlight, the formerly elite Cowell, who seeks to shed her status as Brown's kept ornament, regains her cosmopolitan status and independent agency through engagement with this technology of lux (figure 2).
In D.O.A. it is luminous poison that kills Frank Bigelow. In the scene in which Bigelow discovers he has been murdered, a doctor presents him with evidence that he has imbibed iridium, or luminous poison (figure 3). The glowing test tube radiates not just any light but the purest lux, a form only visible in the dark. The poison, a technology of science, is lumen's earthly reflection through culture, and it is deadly. Ironically, as a film, D.O.A. itself, with its world of shadowy illusions, both filmic and dashed, is also a technology of lux, or lumen's earthly, hence sensual, and therefore "faulty" cultural reflection. [End Page 11]
Toughness in noir films reflects protagonists' keen awareness of their subordinate class position and their interest in pursuing the benefits that flow from lux even as they grasp that knowledge on its own cannot guarantee cultural status or material benefit. Their subjectivities, depicted as unstable, suggest that identity is always in flux with respect to one's environment. Yet because tough protagonists typically lack access to power that would match their awareness of the world as a dark place, they also lack access to the truth; hence the emphasis on lowbrow detection and paranoia in a film such as Kiss Me Deadly, in which Mike Hammer's lux comes face to face with science's own explosive version in the form of nuclear fission.
Protagonists such as Mike Hammer, Al Roberts in Detour, and Frank Bigelow in D.O.A. are trapped in the fierce light of Western power and capitalism. Consider the existential despair of Roberts's nightmare coast-to-coast road trip, Bigelow's toughness after discovering he has been murdered by parties unknown, or the callow violence attending Hammer's naive pursuit of money at the possible cost of millions of lives. Each character's toughness, articulated to his low social standing, performs the belief that he does not shine from within, or at least not in socially approved ways. Consequently, the films imply they each prefer, or gravitate toward, the dark. Embittered, these men do not speak a fully formed subjectivity available to the illuminati, even as their interpellation within capitalist logic promotes a self-acceptance that they are without lux. In The Dark Corner Brad Galt tries to extinguish the romantic interest of Kathleen (Lucille Ball) with the following lines: "Listen. If you don't want to lose that stardust look in your eyes, get going while the door's still open. You stick around here and you'll get grafters, shysters, two-bit thugs, and maybe worse . . . maybe me." In Double Indemnity Dietrichson and Neff tell each other they are "no good" and "rotten," yet by whose lights are they rotten? Rotten because they do not possess the luxury they covet? Rotten because the film's preferred reading judges them as having insufficient inner light and therefore not "naturally" deserving the luxury they crave? These questions point in the same direction: Phyllis and Walter are frustrated by their inability to achieve something other than what they have; that is to say, they seek an enlightenment based on natural lumen and cultural lux. In the end their mutual execution and the chiaroscuro lighting that marks the shadowy scene within which this takes place suggest that, their inner lights growing dimmer, they lack even the modicum of illumination [End Page 12] necessary to have perceived the reality effect of their dark corner (figure 4).
D.O.A. marks the playing out of residual fears of Nazi atomic power and the beginning of noir's peculiar participation in cold war paranoia. And in Kiss Me Deadly director Robert Aldrich, anticipating Peter Sloterdijk's observation in Critique of Cynical Reason that "the bomb" culminates the cynicism central to the enlightenment project, critiques the will to power to which he articulates both pulp author Mickey Spillane and nuclear technology. Both films show that enlightenment may lead to death if one eschews illumination in the pursuit of lux for its own sake, whether this eschewal takes place at the scale of Mike Hammer's postmodern venality, where, anticipating Lyotard, money is his only value, or at the global scale of competing postwar superpowers. In D.O.A. legerdemain tricks Bigelow into imbibing luminous poison in a dark nightclub, and after receiving his diagnosis of death in a doctor's darkened chamber, he sprints through the sun-drenched San Francisco streets, finally coming to his senses when he looks up and opens his eyes fully to the sun's light. As he does so viewers are presented with the value of life: the mise-en-scéne places Bigelow beside a newsstand festooned with copies of Life magazine. Bigelow becomes the solitary seeker at this point, one who has transcended darkness and his own limited lux and entered into lumen's powerful and dazzling natural sphere (figure 5). And out of this dazzlement flows his subsequent resolve and newfound toughness. Bigelow, finally a light lit by light, suggests how toughness, in specific moral circumstances, can merge with a final act of desperate and brilliant illumination. Bigelow deploys his illumination retributively against those who tricked him into swallowing poison, yet, in a manner similar to Susan Cowell's embrace of the searchlight in The Big Combo, his toughness has originated in swallowing (literally interiorizing) the lux of science. Bigelow's toughness, moreover, helps him see that the bourgeois existence to which he can never return, structured around his love for fiancée Paula Gibson (Pamela Britton), was sound.
Under the rubric of postwar patriarchal morality, the prevaricating Bigelow must perish because he cannot commit to Gibson, choosing instead to vacation solo in San Francisco, on the prowl for life that the film codes as lust. Bigelow is punished for deviating from petit bourgeois sexual morality, for his flight from a resurgent "father knows best" and its attendant repressive duties. Because lux is culturally produced, however, it is always overdetermined. Its outcomes may be scientific—the [End Page 13] luminous poison Bigelow imbibes—or moral—the patriarchal and heteronormative socioeconomic production and maintenance of "father knows best." D.O.A. works to suggest that any anarchic, life-affirming tendencies positioned as inimical to capitalist production yet still underlying a "mass individual" such as Bigelow-the-small-businessman are amenable to policing through social technologies such as D.O.A. itself. Like Double Indemnity, D.O.A. was produced in the context of a Fordism not yet structured to exploit fully the possibilities of a consumer economy predicated on stimulating and responding to the contradictory desires attending the kind of nascent multiple subjectivity formation Bigelow represents. Viewed today, D.O.A. marries commentaries on the amoral dynamics underpinning lux's unequal distribution and a desire for freedom in the face of Fordist strategies of class accommodation to a separate suggestion that Bigelow's fractured subjectivity—as with Walter Neff's, part of the identity reformation that postwar economic restructuring will require—cannot, as of yet, fully articulate to capital's bottom line.
In The Big Heat Debby Marsh examines her mirrored reflection in four separate scenes, actions critics have linked to narcissism. Within the framework I offer here, however, the possibility is that it is not misrecognition she seeks but confirmation of her lux (figure 6). Indeed, Marsh starts out as lux incarnate. She lives in a luxurious penthouse, lives to shop, and enjoys the nightlife of the city. Marsh is the ornament or the deluxe product that marks, articulates, and reflects both lux and male cosmopolitan status. In director Fritz Lang's world a decadent culture's limited capacity to achieve illuminated enlightenment degrades to the luxurious spaces of penthouse, mansion, nightclub. The nightclub, as Vivian Sobchak notes, is the chronotope of noir. It is also lux incarnate, the mirror world of night. It is the place wherein—interiorizing the logic of Augustine's theory—one is reflected and reflects in and by the thousand little points of tabletop lamp light and limelight. Plato's cave redux, the nightclub, like the commodity, is where lux seems divine, its mirroring and spectacular artificial light rendering it a luminous space. Hence it is perfectly logical that the nightclub is where D.O.A.'s Bigelow, still a consuming tourist at this point in the film, ingests the luminous poison that leads to his death.
In The Big Heat Debby Marsh exemplifies the relationship between self-identity and lux. Toughened by life yet seeking opportunity, and equating self-improvement with access to luxury, she seeks confirmation of her cultural enlightenment in the mirror. After she is disfigured by the [End Page 14] boiling coffee Vince Stone throws in her face, however, she no longer seeks the mirror and its associations with adornment and masking. Rather, like Bigelow, she becomes enlightened, albeit in a mode of cynical toughness. She has developed her own light within to such an extent that she no longer seeks its confirmation in a mirror. And she uses her toughness—greater than Dave Bannion's—to act as an avenging angel, doing for her male counterpart what early 1950s morality will not allow the film to depict him doing. At issue here is the film's concern with lux; we cannot, the film suggests, whether a good cop or kept woman, shine very brightly. The Big Heat, therefore, makes a rather tough suggestion that updates and refuses utopian Enlightenment beliefs about human perfectibility: more often than not fate determines that lux is the only kind of "light" that most modern subjects are likely to get. This cyclical pattern precludes illumination, leaving subjects to avail themselves of what lux they find around them if they are to "improve" in any way. Noir, then, is also a spatial metaphor for lux's limited capacity to shed light on the subject.
A final example, Mildred Pierce, also illustrates well lux's limited capacity. By the film's middle point, divorced single mother Pierce (Joan Crawford), driven by her status-obsessed and money-hungry daughter Veda (Ann Blyth) and her own ambition to better herself through hard work and its promise of material gain, has achieved all the markers of the American Dream—a successful business, shiny cars, luxurious homes, and lover Monte Beragon (Zachary Scott). Spectators soon learn, however, that a fall from the top can be swift and that luxury masks the corrupt venality of Pierce's swindling lover and murdering daughter. In the film's final scene, set at dawn in a police interrogation room after Pierce abandons the lie she has told to protect her daughter from prosecution, a detective raises the window blinds. Lumen floods the chamber, and viewers comprehend that Pierce will succeed in regaining control of her life and moving beyond the limited world of lux. As she leaves police headquarters, accompanied by her ex-husband, she approaches a light-filled archway through which she must pass and be bathed in the light of the rising sun. In the final shot, "The End" appears on the screen, and spectators are witnesses to a writing over and banishment of the noir world by lumen.

Tough Love, Tough Guise

KATHLEEN: "You're stubborn and impulsive and you think you're tough. You've got some blind spots too." [End Page 15]
BRAD: "Yeah? Name one."
KATHLEEN: "Sentiment about women, for instance. You're afraid of emotion. You keep your heart in a sealed safe."
—The Dark Corner
Toughness is a fatalistic answer to modernity's im-possible demand to fully know one's self—to generate sufficient light, both "inner" and technological, in a situation where the dark is a natural state. And this defensive posturing articulates to the difficulty or near impossibility of intimacy. As The Dark Corner's Kathleen implies, toughness is a persona in the word's older meaning of a mask or an exterior one dons; hence my earlier suggestion that toughness is related to the cosmetic ornamentation of a pure cosmopolitanism. But such armoring deflects consideration of tough guys' unverifiable "inner" emotional "states"—performing toughness seemingly shields their fragility from the view of others and from themselves to the point that it limits their ability to achieve intimacy and full subjectivity. Because these protagonists are often incapable of giving adequate voice to their desires, the mask may be all that remains.
In a homosocial world this defensive strategy appears a safe one in terms of the crisis of intimacy to which this toughness points, an observation resonant with Deborah Thomas's assessment of the often-noted fragility of noir males in terms of the social construction of masculinity and masculinity's blocked emotions. These blocked emotions, I suggest, link to the hegemonized expectation that we can all be fully enlightened subjects as well as to the inequitably distributed material and status rewards promised by the American Dream upon realization of this subjectivity. This is a patriarchal promise made largely to male breadwinners. Noir depicts the production of male toughness as an outcome of a patriarchal class system in which some non-powerful, nonelite white men can, like Saint Paul, "see through a glass, darkly." The toughness that issues from the resulting alienation, moreover, confirms for such men, and others who do not see past the performance, that tough guys cannot find the switch to turn on their love light. The noir male's crisis of intimacy connects to this feeling of low wattage, a metaphor of knowledge without access to power. Subjectivity so organized suggests the extent to which these characters have accepted the ideology that the different scales of power, lux, and subjectivity operate in tandem. Yet because tough guys doubt their inner light, tough performances can also be read as a quasi-ethical refusal of intimacy. Some tough guys don't believe that they are able to take it on, or if they do take it on, they do so only as obsession. The [End Page 16] instability or semi-autonomy of American work conditions and labor practices—Galt framed by a corrupt competitor, Bannion's curtailment of privilege by the corrupt representatives of the state, the treasonous death of small businessman Bigelow—produces awareness of the erosion of one's always already precarious subjectivity. After all, the fully enlightened subject is idealized as never on retainer. Within an earlier context, full independence was a liberating Jeffersonian message to citizen yeomen believing themselves connected to the purifying quality of the American landscape, but when such early modern ideals are reconfigured within postwar urban American contexts, what may once have been a utopian program for imagining social change degenerates into a regressive way of thinking about one's place in the world. Toughness is one absurdly logical response, even in the face of love, death, and mourning.
Donning a tough persona, or performing it obsessively so that it becomes the self, compensates for having internalized the belief that one has failed for not being fully in the know. Yet this remains a critical factor in understanding why these films achieved any degree of contemporary popularity or why they enjoy renewed appeal. This is why Walter Neff and Phyllis Dietrichson can be acknowledged if not finally loved by audiences, because their experiences convey the quotidian reality of ambivalent and fractured subjectivity—the discrepant, reluctant cosmopolitanism by which most Americans live their lives. These characters act out an excess of the armoring that spectator-citizens also take on or construct as part of making do. Noir protagonists enact our contradictory experiences of fragmentation of identity, eternal return of the same, and resulting confusion and pain.
Tough noirs are a protective stance: an ironic cultural technology of lux fetishistically deployed against fate and the incipiently violent world of which we each form a part. Within the convention of order, disorder, and return to order, Double Indemnity, D.O.A., The Big Heat, and In a Lonely Place (Ray, 1950) posit loneliness as the normal way. Love ruptures this loneliness as a kind of disorder, but as Dave Bannion's fate at the end of The Big Heat or that of survivors Dixon Steele (Humphrey Bogart) and Laurel Gray (Gloria Grahame) in the existential In a Lonely Place each suggest, it is to repression and isolation one inevitably returns. Therefore, the films offer an instruction in contradiction: be tough in this dimly lit world, try to decide what you are, but conform or suffer the consequences. These characters "strike a pose," yet the resulting performances are less about the existential ideal that "what I am is for me to decide" than they are commodity-identities revealing that the absurd price of toughness is loss of intimacy compensated through the off-chance that contingency might favor the dimly lit subject with good news.
If noir toughness depicts a Hollywood recognition of an individual's relative powerlessness, then the protagonists discussed here judge themselves less as "other" or "askance positionalities" than as "lesser" beings; they frequently are depicted as seeing themselves as rotten or losers or both. The protagonists are often out of step with elites and the values of postwar mass culture, and at their best a number of these films question the sociopolitical contexts within which individual political realization is unequally organized. This remains a critical intervention largely absent in current Hollywood film. And yet, while the disorderliness in these films opens a critique of American capitalism as Enlightenment progress, by the films' end protagonists often have become culpable monsters, and audience members are left with a general comment on individual participation within "the human condition."
In 1954 Robert Warshow observed that the gangster in American film "appeals to that side of all of us which refuses to believe in the 'normal' possibilities of happiness and achievement; the gangster is the 'no' to that great American 'yes' which is stamped so big over our official culture and yet has so little to do with the way we really feel about our lives" (454). Films noir at times operate similarly; they depict toughness at the core of American life and enlightenment at the crossroads of fiction and nonfiction. Yet while closure is never complete and audiences buy into narratives in a multiplicity of ways, the use of Enlightenment tropes of illumination or the lack thereof instruct that "a little knowledge is a dangerous thing" and work to reauthorize, within lux's realm of popular culture, the voice of the father, the dollar sign, and the power of the state—all tough customers with whom postwar Hollywood made common cause.

Endnotes

1. While many films noir deploy the relationship between light and subjectivity in ways that I discuss in this essay, I develop arguments around such films as Double Indemnity, D.O.A., The Big Combo, [End Page 17] Kiss Me Deadly, and The Big Heat in part because they remain in video and DVD distribution and therefore are known to current audiences. Readers may have seen at least one of these films and therefore have the opportunity of relating my arguments to their own viewing experiences.
2. Andrea Martin observes that the term femme fatale achieved definition when film theory remained male dominated and still grappling with how to position central female characters, including not only women who kill but also, for example, Laura and Gilda, who pose no real threat to the lives of the men with whom they interact (206).
3. As a concept, Raymond Williams's term "structure of feeling" articulates a discursive structure underlying the shared values of a particular group, class, or society. Such a structure sutures ideology to a collective cultural sensibility (63–64).
4. For a reading of noir as a racialized chronotope see Murphet 22–35.
5. I note the considerable history of this gendered observation. Similar phrases were authored earlier by Mae West, Sophie Tucker, and Gertrude Stein.
6. For an inspired discussion of Laura's status in the shift from a producer to a consumer economy see Corber 55–78.
7. While much has been written within film studies about the aesthetic use of light in film noir, my emphasis is on the ways that noir can be seen as a theoretical, at times critical, depiction of philosophical conceptions of light. Jean-Pierre Geuen is also interested in the relationship between critical theory and lighting; he devotes a chapter ("Lighting") to this relationship, with particular emphasis on Martin Heidegger's discussion of Lichtung, concealment, and revelation.
8. See John Alton, director of photography for The Big Combo, for a detailed account of the use of lighting technologies in black-and-white film.
Works Cited
Alton, John. Painting with Light. Berkeley: U of California P, 1995.
Blumenberg, Hans. "Light as a Metaphor for Truth: At the Preliminary Stage of Philosophical Concept Formation." Trans. Joel Anderson. Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision. Ed. Roger Friedland and Deirdre Boden. Berkeley: U of California P, 1994.
Borgmann, Albert. "Cosmopolitanism and Provincialism: On Heidegger's Errors and Insights." Philosophy Today 36.2 (1992).
Certeau, Michel de. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: U of California P, 1984.
Commager, Henry Steele. The Empire of Reason. Garden City: Anchor P, 1977.
Corber, Robert J. Homosexuality in Cold War America: Resistance and the Crisis of Masculinity. Durham: Duke UP, 1997.
Elias, Norbert. The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. New York: Urizen, 1968.
Geuen, Jean-Pierre. Film Production Theory. Albany: SUNY P, 2000.
Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature. Ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1967.
Karimi, Amir Massoud. Toward a Definition of the American Film Noir (1941–1949). New York: Arno P, 1976.
Martin, Andrea. "'Gilda Didn't Do Any of Those Things You've Been Losing Sleep Over!': The Central Women of 40s Films Noirs." Women in Film Noir. Ed. E. Ann Kaplan. London: BFI Publishing, 1998.
Marx, Leo. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. New York: Oxford UP, 1965.
Murphet, Julian. "Film Noir and the Racial Unconscious." Screen 39.1 (1998): 22–35.
Oshagan, Vahe. "Cosmopolitanism in West Armenian Literature." Review of National Literatures 13 (1984).
Reiss, Hans Reiss. Kant's Political Writings. Trans. H. B. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1970.
Robbins, Bruce. "Comparative Cosmopolitanism." Social Text 31/32 (1992).
Sloterdijk, Peter. Critique of Cynical Reason. Trans. Michael Eldred. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987.
Sobchak, Vivian. "Lounge Time: Postwar Crises and the Chronotope of Film Noir." Shades of Noir: A Reader. Ed. Joan Copjec. New York: Verso, 1993.
Taylor, Charles. Sources of the Self. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1989.
Thomas, Deborah. "Psychoanalysis and Film Noir." The Book of Film Noir. Ed. Ian Cameron. London: Continuum, 1993.
Tuan, Yi-Fu. "Rootedness versus Sense of Place." Landscape 24.1 (1980).
Warshow, Robert. "Movie Chronicle: The Westerner." Film Theory and Criticism. Ed. Gerald Mast, Marshall Cohen, and Leo Braudy. New York: Oxford UP, 1992.
Williams, Raymond. The Long Revolution. London: Chatto and Windus, 1960.

Week 2: Ulmer and the Noir Femme Fatale (for Detour)

Week 2: Ida Lupino (for The Hitch-hiker)

Week 2: Notes on Film Noir

Notes on Film Noir by Paul Schrader

In 1946 French critics, seeing the American films they had missed during the war, noticed the new mood of cynicism, pessimism and darkness which had crept into the American cinema. The darkening stain was most evident in routine crime thrillers, but was also apparent in prestigious melodramas.

The French cineastes soon realized they had seen only the tip of the iceberg: As the years went by, Hollywood lighting grew darker, characters more corrupt, themes more fatalistic and the tone more hopeless. By 1949 American movies were in the throes of their deepest and most creative funk. Never before had films dared to take such a harsh uncomplimentary look at American life, and they would not dare to do so again for twenty years.

Hollywood’s film noir has recently become the subject of renewed interest among moviegoers and critics. The fascination film noir holds for today’s young filmgoers and film students reflects recent trends in American cinema: American movies are again taking a look at the underside of the American character, but compared to such relentlessly cynical film noir as Kiss Me Deadly or Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye, the new self-hate cinema of Easy Rider and Medium Cool seems naive and romantic. As the current political mood hardens, filmgoers and filmmakers will find the film noir of the late Forties increasingly attractive. The Forties may be to the Seventies what the Thirties were to the Sixties.

Film noir is equally interesting to critics. It offers writers a cache of excellent, little-known films (film noir is oddly both one of Hollywood’s best periods and least known), and gives auteur-weary critics an opportunity to apply themselves to the newer questions of classification and transdirectorial style. After all, what is film noir?

Film noir is not a genre (as Raymond Durgnat has helpfully pointed out over the objections of Higham and Greenberg’s Hollywood in the Forties). It is not defined, as are the western and gangster genres, by conventions of setting and conflict, but rather by the more subtle qualities of tone and mood. It is a film “noir”, as opposed to the possible variants of film grey or film off-white.

Film noir is also a specific period of film history, like German Expressionism or the French New Wave. In general, film noir refers to those Hollywood films of the Forties and early Fifties which portrayed the world of dark, slick city streets, crime and corruption.

Film noir is an extremely unwieldy period. It harks back to many previous periods: Warner’s Thirties gangster films, the French “poetic realism” of Carne and Duvivier, Von Sternbergian melodrama, and, farthest back, German Expressionist crime films (Lang’s Mabuse cycle). Film noir can stretch at its outer limits from The Maltese Falcon (1941) to Touch of Evil (1958), and most every dramatic Hollywood film from 1941 to 1953 contains some noir elements. There are also foreign offshoots of film noir, such as The Third man, Breathless and Le Doulos.

Almost every critic has his own definition of film noir, and a personal list of film titles and dates to back it up. Personal and descriptive definitions, however, can get a bit sticky. A film of urban night life is not necessarily a film noir, and a film noir need not necessarily concern crime and corruption. Since film noir is defined by tone rather than genre, it is almost impossible to argue one critic’s descriptive definition against another’s. How many noir elements does it take to make a film noir noir?

Rather than haggle definitions, I would rather attempt to reduce film noir to its primary colors (all shades of black), those cultural and stylistic elements to which any definition must return.

At the risk of sounding like Arthur Knight, I would suggest that there were four conditions in Hollywood in the Forties which brought about the film noir. (The danger of Knight’s Livliest Art method is that it makes film history less a matter of structural analysis, and more a case of artistic and social forces magically interacting and coalescing.) Each of the following four catalytic elements, however, can define the film noir; the distinctly noir tonality draws from each of these elements.

WAR AND POST-WAR DISILLUSIONMENTS. The acute downer which hit the U. S. after the Second World War was, in fact, a delayed reaction to the Thirties. All through the Depression movies were needed to keep people’s spirits up, and, for the most part, they did. The crime films of this period were Horatio Algerish and socially conscious. Toward the end of the Thirties a darker crime film began to appear(You Only Live Once, The Roaring Twenties) and were it not for the War film noir would have been at full steam by the early Forties.

The need to produce Allied propaganda abroad and promote patriotism at home blunted the fledgling moves toward a dark cinema, and the film noir thrashed about in the studio system, not quite able to come into full prominence. During the War the first uniquely film noir appeared: The Maltese Falcon, The Glass Key, This Gun for Hire, Laura, but these films lacked the distinctly noir bite the end of the War would bring.
As soon as the War was over, however, American films became markedly more sardonic—and there was a boom in the crime film. For fifteen years the pressures against America’s amelioristic cinema had been building up, and, given the freedom, audiences and artists were now eager to take a less optimistic view of things. The disillusionment many soldiers, small businessmen and housewife/factory employees felt in returning to a peacetime economy was directly mirrored in the sordidness of the urban crime film.

This immediate post-war disillusionments was directly demonstrated in films like Cornered, The Blue Dahlia, Dead Reckoning, and Ride a Pink Horse, in which a serviceman returns from the war to find his sweetheart unfaithful or dead, or his business partner cheating him, or the whole society something less than worth fighting for. The war continues, but now the antagonism turns with a new viciousness toward the American society itself.

POST-WAR REALISM. Shortly after the war every film-producing country had a resurgence of realism. In America it first took the form of films by such producers as Louis de Rochemont (House on 92nd Street, Call Northside 777) and Mark Hellinger (The Killers, Brute Force), and directors like Henry Hathaway and Jules Dassin. “Every scene was filmed on the actual location depicted,” the 1947 de Rochemont-Hathaway Kiss of Death proudly proclaimed. Even after de Rochemont’s particular “March of Time” authenticity fell from vogue, realistic exteriors remained a permanent fixture of film noir.

The realistic movement also suited America’s post-war mood; the public’s desire for a more honest and harsh view of America would not be satisfied by the same studio streets they had been watching for a dozen years. The post-war realistic trend succeeded in breaking film noir away from the domain of the high-class melodrama, placing it where it more properly belonged, in the streets with everyday people. In retrospect, the pre-de Rochemont film noir looks definitely tamer than the post-war realistic films. The studio look of films like The Big Sleep and The Mask of Dimitrios blunts their sting, making them seem more polite and conventional in contrast to their later, more realistic counterparts.

THE GERMAN INFLUENCE. Hollywood played host to an influx of German expatriates in the Twenties and Thirties, and these filmmakers and technicians had, for the most part, integrated themselves into the American film establishment. Hollywood never experienced the “Germanization” some civic-minded natives feared, and there is a danger of over-emphasizing the German influence in Hollywood.

But when, in the late Forties, Hollywood decided to paint it black, there were no greater masters of chiaroscuro than the Germans. The influence of expressionist lighting has always been just beneath the surface of Hollywood films, and it is not surprising, in film noir, to find it bursting out full bloom. Neither is it surprising to find a large number of Germans and East Europeans working in film noir: Fritz Lang, Robert Siodmak, Billy Wilder, Franz Waxman, Otto Preminger, John Braham, Anatole Litvak, Karl Freund, Max Ophuls, John Alton, Douglas Sirk, Fred Zinnemann, William Dieterle, Max Steiner, Edgar G. Ulmer, Curtis Bernhardt, Rudolph Mate.

On the surface the German expressionist influence, with its reliance on artificial studio lighting, seems incompatible with post-war realism, with its harsh unadorned exteriors; but it is the unique quality of film noir that it was able to weld seemingly contradictory elements into a uniform style. The best noir technicians simply made all the world a sound stage, directing unnatural and expressionistic lighting onto realistic settings. In films like Union Station, They Live By Night, The Killers there is an uneasy, exhilarating combination of realism and expressionism.

Perhaps the greatest master of noir was Hungarian-born John Alton, an expressionist cinematographer who could relight Times Square at noon if necessary. No cinematographer better adapted the old expressionist techniques to the new desire for realism, and his black-and-white photography in such gritty film noir as T-Men, Raw Deal, I’ the Jury, The Big Combo equals that of such German expressionist masters as Fritz Wagner and Karl Freund.

THE HARD-BOILED TRADITION. Another stylistic influence waiting in the wings was the “hard-boiled” school of writers. In the Thirties authors such as Ernest Hemingway, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, Horace McCoy and John O’Hara created the “tough”, cynical way of acting and thinking which separated one from the world of everyday emotions—romanticism with a protective shell. The hard-boiled writers had their roots in pulp fiction or journalism, and their protagonists lived out a narcissistic, defeatist code. The hard-boiled hero was, in reality, a soft egg compared to his existential counterpart (Camus is said to have based The Stranger on McCoy), but he was a good deal tougher than anything American fiction had seen.

When the movies of the Forties turned to the American “tough” moral understrata, the hard-boiled school was waiting with preset conventions of heroes, minor characters, plots, dialogue and themes. Like the German expatriates, the hard-boiled writers had a style made to order for film noir; and, in turn, they influenced noir screenwriting as much as the German influenced noir cinematography.

The most hard-boiled of Hollywood’s writers was Raymond Chandler himself, whose script of Double Indemnity (from a James M. Cain story) was the best written and most characteristically noir of the period. Double Indemnity was the first film which played film noir for what it essentially was: small-time, unredeemed, unheroic; it made a break from the romantic noir cinema of (the later) Mildred Pierce and The Big Sleep.

(In its final stages, however, film noir adapted then bypassed the hard-boiled school. Manic, neurotic post-1948 films such as Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye, D. O. A., Where the Sidewalk Ends, White Heat, and The Big Heat are all post-hard-boiled: the air in these regions was even too thin for old-time cynics like Chandler.)

STYLISTICS. There is not yet a study of the stylistics of film noir, and the task is certainly too large to be attempted here. Like all film movements film noir drew upon a reservoir of film techniques, and given the time one could correlate its techniques, themes and causal elements into a stylistic schema. For the present, however, I’d like to point out some of film noir’s recurring techniques.

------The majority of scenes are lit for night. Gangsters sit in the offices at midday with the shades pulled and the lights off. Ceiling lights are hung low and floor lamps are seldom more than five feet high. One always has the suspicion that if the lights were all suddenly flipped on the characters would shriek and shrink from the scene like Count Dracula at noontime.

------As in German expressionism, oblique and vertical lines are preferred to horizontal. Obliquity adheres to the choreography of the city, and is in direct opposition to the horizontal American tradition of Griffith and Ford. Oblique lines tend to splinter a screen, making it restless and unstable. Light enters the dingy rooms of film noir in such odd shapes-jagged trapezoids, obtuse triangles, vertical slits—that one suspects the windows were cut out with a pen knife. No character can speak authoritatively from a space which is being continually cut into ribbons of light. The Anthony Mann/John Alton T-Men is the most dramatic but far from the only example of oblique noir choreography.

------The actors and setting are often given equal lighting emphasis. An actor is often hidden in the realistic tableau of the city at night, and, more obviously, his face is often blacked out by shadow as he speaks. These shadow effects are unlike the famous Warner Brothers lighting of the Thirties in which the central character was accentuated by a heavy shadow; in film noir, the central character is likely to be standing in the shadow. When the environment is given an equal or greater weight than the actor, it, of course, creates a fatalistic, hopeless mood. There is nothing the protagonist can do; the city will outlast and negate even his best efforts.

------Compositional tension is preferred to physical action. A typical film noir would rather move the scene cinematographically around the actor than have the actor control the scene by physical action. The beating of Robert Ryan in The Set-Up, the gunning down of Farley Granger in They Live By Night, the execution of the taxi driver in The Enforcer and of Brian Donlevy in The Big Combo are all marked by measured pacing, restrained anger and oppressive compositions, and seem much closer to the film noir spirit than the rat-tat-tat and screeching tires of Scarface twenty years before or the violent, expression actions of Underworld U. S. A. ten years later.

------There seems to be an almost Freudian attachment to water. The empty noir streets are almost always glistening with fresh evening rain (even in Los Angeles), and the rainfall tends to increase in direct proportion to the drama. Docks and piers are second only to alleyways as the most popular rendezvous points.

------There is a love of romantic narration. In such films as The Postman Always Rings Twice, Laura, Double Indemnity, The Lady from Shanghai, Out of the Past and Sunset Boulevard the narration creates a mood of temps perdu: an irretrievable past, a predetermined fate and an all-enveloping hopelessness. In Out of the Past Robert Mitchum relates his history with such pathetic relish that it is obvious there is no hope for any future: one can only take pleasure in reliving a doomed past.

------A complex chronological order is frequently used to reinforce the feelings of hopelessness and lost time. Such films as The Enforcer, The Killers, Mildred Pierce, The Dark Past, Chicago Deadline, Out of the Past and The Killing use a convoluted time sequence to immerse the viewer in a time-disoriented but highly stylized world. The manipulation of time, whether slight or complex, is often used to reinforce a noir principle: the how is always more important than the what.

THEMES. Raymond Durgnat has delineated the themes of film noir in an excellent article in British Cinema magazine (“The Family Tree of Film Noir,” August, 1970), and it would be foolish for me to attempt to redo his thorough work in this short space. Durgnat divides film noir into eleven thematic categories, and although one might criticize some of his specific groupings, he does cover the whole gamut of noir production (thematically categorizing over 300 films).

In each of Durgnat’s noir themes (whether Black Widow, killers-on-the-run, dopplegangers) one finds that the upwardly mobile forces of the Thirties have halted; frontierism has turned to paranoia and claustrophobia. The small-time gangster has now made it big and sits in the mayor’s chair, the private eye has quit the police force in disgust, and the young heroine, sick of going along for the ride, is taking others for a ride.
Durgnat, however, does not touch upon what is perhaps the most over-riding noir theme: a passion for the past and present, but a fear of the future. The noir hero dreads to look ahead, but instead tries to survive by the day, and if unsuccessful at that, he retreats to the past. Thus film noir’s techniques emphasize loss, nostalgia, lack of clear priorities, insecurity; then submerge these self-doubts in mannerism and style. In such a world style becomes paramount; it is all that separates one from meaninglessness. Chandler described this fundamental noir theme when he described his own fictional world: “It is not a very fragrant world, but it is the world you live in, and certain writers with tough minds and a cool spirit of detachment can make very interesting patterns out of it.”

Film noir can be subdivided into three broad phases. The first, the wartime period, 1941-46 approximately, was the phase of the private eye and the lone wolf, of Chandler, Hammett and Greene, of Bogart and Bacall, Ladd and Lake, classy directors like Curtiz and Garnett, studio sets, and, in general, more talk than action. The studio look of this period was reflected in such pictures as The Maltese Falcon, Casablanca, Gaslight, This Gun for Hire, The Lodger, The Woman in the Window, Mildred Pierce, Spellbound, The Big Sleep, Laura, The Lost Weekend, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, To Have and Have Not, Fallen Angel, Gilda, Murder My Sweet, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Dark Waters, Scarlet Street, So Dark the Night, The Glass Key, The Mask of Dimitrios, and The Dark Mirror.

The Wilder/Chandler Double Indemnity provided a bridge to the post-war phase of film noir. The unflinching noir vision of Double Indemnity came as a shock in 1944, and the film was almost blocked by the combined efforts of Paramount, the Hays Office and star Fred McMurray. Three years later, however, Double Indemnitys were dropping off the studio assembly line.

The second phase was the post-war realistic period from 1945-49 (the dates overlap and so do the films; these are all approximate phases for which there are many exceptions). These films tended more toward the problems of crime in the streets, political corruption and police routine. Less romantic heroes like Richard Conte, Burt Lancaster and Charles McGraw were more suited to this period, as were proletarian directors like Hathaway, Dassin and Kazan. The realistic urban look of this phase is seen in such films as The House on 92nd Street, The Killers, Raw Deal, Act of Violence, Union Station, Kiss of Death, Johnny O’Clock, Force of Evil, Dead Reckoning, Ride the Pink Horse, Dark Passage, Cry of the City, The Set-Up, T-Men, Call Northside 777, Brute Force, The Big Clock, Thieves’ Highway, Ruthless, Pitfall, Boomerang!, and The Naked City.

The third and final phase of film noir, from 1949-53, was the period of psychotic action and suicidal impulse. The noir hero, seemingly under the weight of ten years of despair, started to get bananas. The psychotic killer, who had in the first period been a subject worthy of study (Olivia de Havilland in The Dark Mirror), in the second a fringe threat (Richard Widmark in Kiss of Death), now became the active protagonist (James Cagney in Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye). There were no excuses given for the psychopathy in Gun Crazy—it was just “crazy”. James Cagney made a neurotic comeback and his instability was matched by that of younger actors like Robert Ryan and Lee Marvin. This was the phase of the “B” noir film, and of psychoanalytically-inclined directors like Ray and Walsh. The forces of personal disintegration are reflected in such films as White Heat, Gun Crazy, D. O. A., Caught, They Live By Night, Where the Sidewalk Ends, Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye, Detective Story, In a Lonely Place, I’ the Jury, Ace in the Hole, Panic in the Streets, The Big Heat, On Dangerous Ground, Sunset Boulevard.

The third phase is the cream of the film noir period. Some critics may prefer the early “gray” melodramas, others the post-war “street” films, but film noir’s final phase was the most aesthetically and sociologically piercing, the later noir films finally got down to the root causes of the period: the loss of public honor, heroic conventions, personal integrity, and, finally, psychic stability. The third-phase films were painfully self-aware; they seemed to know they stood at the end of a long tradition based on despair and disintegration and did not shy away from that fact. The best and most characteristically noir films—Gun Crazy, White Heat, Out of the Past, Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye, D. O. A., They Live By Night, and The Big Heat—stand at the end of the period and are the results of self-awareness. The third phase is in rife with end-of-the-line noir heroes: The Big Heat and Where the Sidewalk Ends are the last stops for the urban cop, Ace in the Hole for the newspaper man, the Victor Saville-produced Spillane series (I’ the Jury, The Long Wait, Kiss Me Deadly) for the private eye, Sunset Boulevard for the Black Widow, White Heat and Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye for the gangster, D. O. A. for the John Doe American.

By the middle Fifties film noir had ground to a halt. There were a few notable stragglers, Kiss Me Deadly, the Lewis/Alton The Big Combo, and film noir’s epitaph, Touch of Evil, but for the most part a new style of crime film had become popular.

As the rise of McCarthy and Eisenhower demonstrated, Americans were eager to see a more bourgeois view of themselves. Crime had to move to the suburbs. The criminal put on a gray flannel suit and the footsore cop was replaced by the “mobile unit” careening down the expressway. Any attempt at social criticism had to be cloaked in ludicrous affirmations of the American way of life. Technically, television, with its demand for full lighting and close-ups, gradually undercut the German influence, and color cinematography was, of course, the final blow to the “noir” look. New directors like Seigel, Fleischer, Karlson and Fuller, and TV shows like Dragnet, M-Squad, Lineup and Highway Patrol stepped in to create the new crime drama.

Film noir was an immensely creative period—probably the most creative in Hollywood’s history—at least, if this creativity is measured not by its peaks but by its median level of artistry. Picked at random, a film noir is likely to be a better made film than a randomly selected silent comedy, musical, western and so on. (A Joseph H. Lewis “B” film noir is better than a Lewis “B” western, for example.) Taken as a whole period, film noir achieved an unusually high level of artistry.

Film noir seemed to bring out the best in everyone: directors, cameramen, screenwriters, actors. Again and again, a film noir will make the high point on an artist’s career graph. Some directors, for example, did their best work in film noir (Stuart Heisler, Robert Siodmak, Gordon Douglas, Edward Dmytryk, John Brahm, John Cromwell, Raoul Walsh, Henry Hathaway); other directors began in film noir, and it seems to me, never regained their original heights (Otto Preminger, Rudolph Mate, Nicholas Ray, Robert Wise, Jules Dassin, Richard Fleischer, John Huston, Andre de Toth, and Robert Aldrich); and other directors who made great films in other molds also made great film noir (Orson Welles, Max Ophuls, Fritz Lang, Elia Kazan, Howard Hawks, Robert Rossen, Anthony Mann, Joseph Losey, Alfred Hitchcock, and Stanley Kubrick). Whether or not one agrees with this particular schema, its message is irrefutable: film noir was good for practically every director’s career. (Two interesting exceptions to prove the case are King Vidor and Jean Renoir.)

Film noir seems to have been a creative release for everyone involved. It gave artists a chance to work with previously forbidden themes, yet had conventions strong enough to protect the mediocre. Cinematographers were allowed to become highly mannered, and actors were sheltered by the cinematographers to distinguish between great directors and great noir directors.

Film noir’s remarkable creativity makes its longtime neglect the more baffling. The French, of course, have been students of the period for some time (Borde and Chaumeton’s Panorama du Film Noir was published in 1955), but American critics until recently have preferred the western, the musical or the gangster film to the film noir.
Some of the reasons for this neglect are superficial; others strike to the heart of the noir style. For a long time film noir, with its emphasis on corruption and despair, was considered an aberration of the American character. The western, with its moral primitivism, and the gangster film, with its Horatio Alger values, were considered more American than the film noir.

This prejudice was reinforced by the fact that film noir was ideally suited to the low budget “B” film, and many of the best noir films were “B” films. This odd sort of economic snobbery still lingers on in some critical circles: high- budget trash is considered more worthy of attention than low-budget trash, and to praise a “B” film is somehow to slight(often intentionally) an “A” film.

There has been a critical revival in the U. S. over the last ten years, but film noir lost out on that too. The revival as auteur (director) oriented, and film noir wasn’t. Auteur criticism is interested in how directors are different; film noir criticism is concerned with what they have in common.

The fundamental reason for film noir’s neglect, however, is the fact that it depends more on choreography than sociology, and American critics have always been slow on the uptake when it comes to visual style. Like its protagonists, film noir is more interested in style than theme; whereas American critics have been traditionally more interested in theme than style.

American film critics have always been sociologists first and scientists second: film is important as it relates to large masses, and if a film goes awry it is often because the theme has been somehow “violated” by the style. Film noir operates on opposite principles: the theme is hidden in the style, and bogus themes are often haunted (“middle class values are best”) which contradict the style. Although, I believe, style determines the theme in every film, it was easier for sociological critics to discuss the themes of the western and gangster film apart from stylistic analysis than it was to do for film noir.

Not surprisingly it was the gangster film, not the film noir, which was canonized in The Partisan Review in 1948 by Robert Warshow’s famous essay, “The Gangster as Tragic Hero.” Although Warshow could be an aesthetic as well as a sociological critic, he was interested in the western and gangster film as “popular” art rather than as style. This sociological orientation blinded Warshow, as it has many subsequent critics, to an aesthetically more important development in the gangster film—film noir.

The irony of this neglect is that in retrospect the gangster films Warshow wrote about are inferior to film noir. The Thirties gangster was primarily a reflection of what was happening in the country, and Warshow analyzed this. The film noir, although it was also a sociological reflection, went further than the gangster film. Toward the end film noir was engaged in a life-and-death struggle with the materials it reflected; it tried to make America accept a moral vision of life based on style. That very contradiction—promoting style in a culture which valued themes—forced film noir into artistically invigorating twists and turns. Film noir attacked and interpreted its sociological conditions, and, by the close of the noir period, created a new artistic world which went beyond a simple sociological reflection, a nightmarish world of American mannerism which was by far more a creation than a reflection.

Because film noir was first of all a style, because it worked out its conflicts visually rather than thematically, because it was aware of its own identity, it was able to create artistic solutions to sociological problems. And for these reasons films like Kiss Me Deadly, Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye and Gun Crazy can be works of art in a way that gangster films like Scarface, Public Enemy and Little Caesar can never be.

The selection of the following seven films by the Los Angeles International Film Exposition reflects a desire to select not only the best noir films, but also some of the less well known.
Kiss Me Deadly. Made in 1955, Kiss Me Deadly comes at the end of the period and is the masterpiece of film noir. Its time delay gives it a sense of detachment and thoroughgoing seediness—it stands at the end of a long sleazy tradition.
The private eye hero, Mike Hammer, undergoes the final stages of degradation. He is a small-time “bedroom dick,” and makes no qualms about it because the world around him isn’t much better. Ralph Meeker, in his best performance, plays Hammer, a midget among dwarfs.
Robert Aldrich’s teasing direction carries noir to its sleaziest, and most perversely erotic. In search of an “eternal what’s-it” Hammer overturns the underworld, causing the death of his friend in the process, and when he finally finds it, it turns out to be—joke of jokes—an exploding atomic bomb. The cruelty to the individual is only a trivial matter in a world in which the Bomb has the final say. Hammer can be seen struggling to safety as the bomb ejaculates, but for all practical purposes the forties private eye tradition is defunct. Written by A. I. Bexerides. Photographed by Eenest Laszlo. Produced by Victor Saville. With Ralph Meeker, Maxine Cooper, Nick Dennis, Gaby Rodgers, Juano Hermandez, Paul Stewart, Albert Dekker, Cloris Leachman, Jack Elam.
Gun Crazy. An early Bonnie and Clyde variant, Joseph H. Lewis’ Gun Crazy incorporates both the black widow and on-the-run themes. John Dall and Peggy Cummins play a winsome couple spinning at a dizzyling rate into the exhilarating world of action, sex, love and murder. Dall is confused, innocent and passive, Cummins is confused, vindictive and active; together they make an irresistably psychopathic pair. And their deadliness is sanctified by the fact that they know they are special people and will be given the right by the American ethic to act out their symbolic fantasies.
Gun Crazy’s lighting is not as noir as other films of the period, but its portrayal of criminal and sexual psychopathy very much is. There are no excuses for the gun craziness—it is just crazy.
Gun Crazy has three tour de force scenes: the brilliantly executed Armour robbery, the famous one-take Hampton heist, and the meeting at the carnival which is a ballet of sex and innuendo more subtle and teasing than the more famous sparing matches of Bogart and Bacall or Ladd and Lake. 1949. Written by MacKinlay Kantor and Millard Kaufman. Produced by the King Brothers. Photographed by Russell Harlan. With John Dall, Peggy Cummins, Barry Kroeger, Annabel Shaw, Harry Lewis, Nederick Young.
They Live By Night. Made in the same year as Gun Crazy, Nicholas Ray’s They Live By Night is another Bonnie and Clyde/on-the-run film. Ray’s heroes, Farley Granger and Cathy O’Donnell, as the title implies, really do live by night, and the choreography is strictly noir.
Unlike Gun Crazy, Granger and O’Donnell are not psychopathic; rather, the society is, as it makes them into bigger and bigger criminals and finally connives to gun down the unsuspecting Granger. There’s an excellent bit by Ian Wolfe as a crooked Justice of the Peace, and Marie Bryant sings “Your Red Wagon” in the best noir tradition. Written by Charles Schnee. Photographed by George E. Diskant. Produced by John Houseman. With Farley Granger, Cathy O’Donnell, Howard Da Silva, Jay C. Flippen, Helen Craig, Will Wright, Ian Wolfe, Harry Harvey.
White Heat. There was no director better suited to portray instability than Raoul Walsh, and no actor more potentially unstable than James Cagney. And when they joined forces in 1949 for White Heat, they produced one of the most exciting psychosexual crime films ever. Cagney plays an aging oedipal gangster who sits on his mother’s lap between bouts of pistol whipping cohorts, planning robberies and gunning down police.
In an exuberantly psychotic ending Cagney stands atop an exploding oil tanker yelling, “I made it Ma! Top of the World!” We’ve come a long way from Scarface where Paul Muni lies in the gutter as a neon sign ironically flashes, “Cook’s Tours. See the World.” Cagney, now the noir hero, is not so much interested in financial gain and power as he is in suicidal showmanship. Cagney tapped the same vein the following year when he produced and starred in Gordon Douglas’s Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye, one of the best of late noir films. What Douglas lacked as a director, Cagney made up in just plain craziness. White Heat. 1949. Written by Ivan Goff and Ben Roberts. Photographed by Sid Hickox. Produced by Louis Edelman. With James Cagney, Virginia Mayo, Edmund O’Brien, Margaret Wycherly, Steve Cochran, John Archer.
Out of the Past. Jacques Tourner’s Out of the Past brilliantly utilizes the noir element of narration as well as the themes of black widow and on-the-run. A gangster (the young Kirk Douglas in one of his best roles) sends his best friend Robert Mitchum to retrieve his girlfriend, Jane Greer, who has run off with his money. Mitchum, of course, teams up with Greer and they hide from Douglas.
Mitchum narrates his story with such a pathetic relish that he obviously draws comfort from being love’s perennial fool. Tourner combines Mitchum’s narration, Jane Greer’s elusive beauty and a complex chronology in such a way that there is no hope for any future; one can only take pleasure from reliving a doomed past. 1947. Written by Geoffrey Homes. Produced by Warren Duff. With Kirk Douglas, Robert Mitchum, Jane Greer, Rhonda Fleming, Steve Brodie.
Pickup on South Street. Sam Fuller’s 1953 film sacks in with an odd noir bedfellow—the red scare. The gangsters undergo a slight accent shift and become communist agents; no idealogical conversion necessary.
Richard Widmark, a characteristic noir actor who has never done as well outside the period as within it, plays a two-time loser who picks the purse of a “commie” messenger and ends up with a piece of microfilm. When the state department finally hunts him and begins the lecture, Widmark replies, “Don’t wave your flag at me.”
The scenes on the waterfront are in the best noir tradition, but a dynamic fight in the subway marks Fuller as a director who would be better suited to the action crime school of the middle fifties. Written by Samuel Fuller. Photographed by Joe MacDonald. Produced by Jules Schermer. With Richard Widmark, Jean Peters, Thelma Ritter, Murvyn Vye, Richard Kiley.
T-Men. Anthony Mann’s 1947 film was photographed by John Alton, the most characteristically noir artist of the period. Alton also photographed Joseph H. Lewis’ The Big Combo eight years later and the cinematography is so nearly identical that one has momentary doubts about the directorial difference between Mann and Lewis. In each film light only enters the scene in odd slants, jagged slices and vertical or horizontal strips.
T-Men is a bastard child of the post-war realistic school and purports to be the documented story of two treasury agents who break a ring of counterfeiters. Complications set in when the good guys don’t act any differently from the bad ones. In the end it doesn’t matter anyway, since they all die in the late night shoot-outs. 1948. Written by John Higgins. Photographed by John Alton. Produced by Edward Small and Aubrey Schneck. With Dennis O’Keefe, Alfred Ryder, Mary Meade, Wallace Ford, June Lockhart, Charles McGraw, Art Smith.

Filmex, 1971 (The Film Noir, at the First Los Angeles International Film Exposition)
(Reprinted in Film Comment, Spring 1972)