Film Noir!

I'm going to keep posting the stuff I wrote up for this - but please keep the conversation going - my posts are all on the simpler side to reach Noir-newbies / convert new Noir fiends.  It seems like andrew and Woland are in the advanced class, so it's making it more fun to hear your insights and favorites!








With the limitations of the Hays Code, writers and directors had to think creatively communicate the forbidden elements of the plot through acceptable means with sugarcoating or vaguery.  The Big Sleep is one example of the borderline cryptic language used to film the more scandalous elements of the story.  Watch it without a trained eye and you will miss all of the lurid details subtly incorporated.





The plotline of the Big Sleep was taken from the novel by Raymond Chandler (featured in Black Mask magazine) - an especially lurid tale that was difficult to get past the Hay's code.  In the scene above, Philip Marlowe (played by Humphrey Bogart) was supposed to enter Geiger's house to find Carmen (Martha Vickers) fully naked, high and posed provocatively.  Geiger himself was openly homosexual in the novel and his book shop was a front for selling pornography (illegal at the time).  To satiate the Code, filmmakers have Carmen fully dressed - but in a garment with Asian styling to it.  She is likewise sitting in a "Chinese chair" .  The Buddha head that obscures the camera is yet another reference to the East that goes completely over the heads of modern viewers...  but had definite symbolic meaning to the audiences at the time the movie was made.  The East was associated with sensuality, mystery and insinuation of unbridled sexual acts.  

Marlowe searches the house and then, to suggest nudity, wraps Carmen in his coat upon leaving.  The scene is a far cry from the version in the novel, but the effect of these layers of meanings added a distinctive enigmatic element to the story's feel.  Audiences loved it.

In spite of the strictness of the Hay's Code, audiences who had lived through the Great Depression were disillusioned were looking for something different.  In Film Noir, their feelings of hopelessness and cynicism found a champion: the Film Noir Anti-Hero.



(Side-track:  As I was reviewing the defining characteristics of the Anti-Hero, I was struck how they read pretty much word for word like some of the diagnostic criteria or expression of symptoms for Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (C-PTSD - the form of PTSD typically suffered by soldiers) / "shell shock" (inflammation of the brain from repeated close proximity to exploding shells).  While a solid understanding of war time trauma (psychological or physiological) wasn't really in place until the Korean War, the long term effects that would manifest for soldiers of WWII suffering C-PTSD would have had a mirror image on the big screen.  The suffering they experienced post-war would have been manifested in the Film Noir Anti-hero, where the traits inherent in that character experienced would have added to his abilities, his mysterious appeal and given him the edge to overcome.  I can only imagine that on a subconscious level, this must have been rather validating.)





In The Third Man, the extremely convoluted character of Harry Lime (Orson Welles) stirs conflict in the hearts of viewers for his alleged cruelty and contrasting personal charm - and created a story ending that defied censors and pushed label of "anti-hero" used to describe him in the film's trailer to the darkest brink. 


Holly Martins (Joseph Cotton) has the unfortunate surprised of arriving in Vienna to find his childhood friend, Harry Lime, has died - in addition he was wanted for his nefarious black market dealings.   When Lime is first seen, the movie is well underway: in a shadowy street an stray cat rubs lovingly against his shins; a window above opens, throwing a shaft of light that instantly illuminates Lime's face; in spite of the shock of the reveal, charming smile is there on his visage...  Could this really be the same man who stole penicillin, watered it down and sold it on the black market, killing so many?  He seems too human...  he fails to fit the build-up of the hardened criminal he is presented as.




In a show-down and final chase with police, Lime is wounded and cornered in the sewers below the city.  You cannot help but hope he escapes - in spite of his flaws and the lives he's harmed, you still wish a dignified end for Harry Lime.







When he laces his fingers through the sewer grate, you feel horror at his reaching for the world he harmed, and yet when confronted by his friend you see the compassion on Martin's face feel a sneaking sadness for this final moment.  Cinematically, it's brilliant...  but the mixed quality of Lime's character, in addition to the manner of his death - shot by his childhood friend in a manner that screams "mercy killing" - made this plot line difficult to sneak past the Code.  In the larger picture of the torments of war and the misery, privation and injustice that impacted civilian life, Lime was just a small example of how hard circumstances hardened the people who lived in the midst of them.  

I'm ashamed to admit I still haven't seen The Third Man.  I had it on special order from my local fringe video store, but they went belly-up about year before the lockdown. I gave up trying to get movies by mail order, since only about half of them ever arrive.  I've since found another shop that can get the movies I want, but I'll have to wait and see if they survive second lockdown.  

While films like The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep, and Double Indemnity were A-list movies, most noir movies were B-list: fast production films shot on a limited budget, intended as the opening movie of double features.  The low lighting and foggy atmosphere which has come to be associated with film noir is a product of limited budget on many productions rather than deliberate artifice. Sets can be more cheaply constructed if they are hardly visible. The backroom nature of these movies also meant they got less attention from the censors, and so directors could push the envelope a little.   Among the best of these B movies is 1945's Detour. 

A young man, hitchhiking across the country is drawn into a tangled web of deception first when his ride dies on a lonely road, and then when a woman he later picks up recognizes the car as not his. The post-production was so bad that there is a long sequence where the film is literally flopped, making it look like he's hitchhiking in Australia.  For all that, the story is gripping, as we watch the anti-hero caught by his own lies and drawn ever deeper into the sinister machinations of a scheming and manipulative woman (wonderfully portrayed by Ann Savage).  

This film suffered far less from the Production Codes than movies like the The Big Sleep, which, if we're being honest, was so badly mangled trying to meet the guidelines, many can't follow it.  The only concession made in Detour was that criminals could not be shown to profit from their misdeeds, and so the film concludes with him being put into a police car.

The Arbuckle / Rappe incident was like the last nail in the coffin - there was a string of events that prompted the need to revamp Hollywood's image.  There were a few notable overdoses, Mary Pickford shattered the wholesome image she had during a rather quick divorce and remarriage, William Desmond Taylor was found murdered with a stash of porn (illegal) and a rather large collection of women's lingerie and ties to a drug-addict teenage protégé...   

Hay's Code was similar to Prohibition - there was the idea that making what people thought were enticements to sin illegal would somehow stamp out the sin.  But with anything, that never really is the case, and much of society's evils will find a way around any legal hurtle... 

Arbuckle was perhaps too naïve: he had a rented suite full of (illegal, as it was during Prohibition) booze, Rappe's "friend" was a high-profile Madam who brought girls to be "introduced" to men at parties, and the photos of the suite after the party shows it must have been pretty out of control.  There's a lot of smashed furniture.  The Teetotalers had painted this image of the usually upright man brought to brutality by liquor, and the Arbuckle story fit that narrative so perfectly that it was almost made to order.  It was early on into Prohibition, so people were especially zealous - here was a famous man drinking and carousing.  It just ticked all the boxes at the time.  It think that Hearst said the Arbuckle headlines made him more money that the sinking of the Lusitania - so probably people who looked to profit (Hearst and Delmont) helped ruin him more than the average person or social reformers ever did.