Film Noir Essay Research Paper Film noir

Film Noir Essay, Research Paper

Film noir is one of the most beloved and popular "period" film genres of the late twentieth century, although at the time that the movies comprising the genre were made, the term film noir was unknown. Essentially, it mean "black film" — a variation on the nineteenth-century French critical term roman noir, or "black novel" — referring to any number of doom-laden, deeply psychological crime dramas of the 1940s and 1950s. At the time they were made, the movies were simply gangster films or mysteries, with no consciously perceived qualities separating them from other movies. French critics originally used the designation film noir to define films of the 1930s, such as Jean Renoir's La Chienne (later remade by Fritz Lang in Hollywood as the classic film noir Scarlet Street); but it applied equally well to a particular brand of American film and was accepted by the American critical establishment of the late 1950s and beyond as suitably defining the genre — really a sub-genre of the crime movie. Today, there are whole festivals of film noir shown at revival and repertory theaters and on television, a great irony for a genre that was defined with a term that American producers and critics of the era would scarcely have understood. The development of film noir was a gradual one, coming long after the end of the classic Hollywood gangster movie cycle. Crime movies of the 1920s and 1930s had their psychological sides — from The Last Mile to Alfred Hitchcock's Sabotage to The Petrified Forest, it was possible to find films about criminals whose motivations were as fascinating as their crimes. Even The Roaring Twenties, with James Cagney, at the tail-end of Warner Bros.' gangster-movie cycle, featured an anti-hero whose psychology allowed for an acceptance of death — after surviving World War I, the early gang wars, and the end of Prohibition. And a few such films, most notably Fritz Lang's M (starring a young Peter Lorre), focused as much on the psychology of the criminal mind as it did on its story of a manhunt for a murderer of young children. But these relatively sophisticated works were the exception rather than the rule, and most crime films of the 1930s were, at best, well-made shoot-'em-ups laced with fanciful police/detective procedural material. Film noir as a defined genre began during the early 1940s, with films that dwelt on the darker side of the psychology of pursuers and the criminals alike — indeed, sometimes, as in the case of Howard Hawks' The Big Sleep (1946), the sequence of crimes that set up the plot was difficult to discern. The first true film noir, according to many scholars, was H. Bruce Humberstone's I Wake Up Screaming, based on a novel by Steve Fisher and starring Victor Mature, Betty Grable, and Laird Cregar — the title reeks of nightmarish fear, but the actual noir elements lay in the doom-laden sadism of Cregar's character, an obsessive, sadistic homicide detective who torments the two suspects (Mature, Grable) in the murder of an actress. The film tells the story of the murder and the investigation, but its real power lays in its ability to make the viewer feel as trapped as the two suspects — they find themselves trapped in a dark psychological and legal web woven by the disturbed police detective. The viewer feels each shock, as the strands of the web are pulled and yanked tighter, as strongly as the characters themselves. It becomes clear only minutes into the film that we are in the presence of something dangerous and unhealthy; even in the 1990s, watching this movie — which FoxVideo has wisely made available on videocassette — is an unsettling experience. Although nobody was consciously emulating I Wake Up Screaming, it established what became known as standard film noir attributes — the gritty urban setting populated by characters who seem lost or psychologically wounded and surrounded by threats that are as much imagined as real, with the law and a higher justice always looming just out of frame waiting to destroy them. I Wake Up Screaming adds the further twist of portraying the representative of the law as a dark, threatening force embodying injustice. John Huston's The Maltese Falcon (1941) is also frequently cited as a pioneering film noir, but its psychology is somewhat more muted than that of Humberstone's movie. Humphrey Bogart's Sam Spade, however, moves through a world recognizable to film noir fans, filled with murderously obsessive men and women, police officers whose dedication borders on sadism, women whose sexuality is scarcely in control — and is consciously used for destructive purposes — and at its center a hero who constantly struggles with his own worst impulses. Another movie from the same period that seemed to define the birth of the genre was Frank Tuttle's This Gun For Hire(1941), based on Graham Greene's story A Gun For Sale, starring Alan Ladd, Veronica Lake, and the ubiquitous Laird Cregar. The story of a murder for hire was unconventional by Hollywood standards, but Ladd brought a depth of humanity and despair to his portrayal of the hired killer that audiences found irresistible — and his mix of psychosis and nobility made him a most extraordinary anti-hero in Hollywood, contrasting well with the pathetic whimperings of Laird Cregar's go-between and Tully Marshall's traitorous industrialist. The origins of film noir during this era, against the backdrop of the outbre