Film Noir: The Darkness Returns

Jane Greer and Robert Mitchum in ‘Out of the Past’ (1947)

Okay, I’ll spill.  I promised four long years ago to write some follow-up posts on film noir after my first one, saying what I think does and does not make a movie “noir.”  Well, time got away from me like an escaped con high-tailing it from the heat.  And I didn’t think that I had very much to add to Alain Silver and Elizabeth Ward’s explanation of why they excluded gangster films, period pieces, and comedies from Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference to the American Style.  Plus, after several blogposts about what does or does not constitute a particular genre, I started feeling like a member of the genre police.  Still, I thought that a few more ramblings from me about film noir (unlike the tales told by the movies themselves) wouldn’t kill anyone. 

First, one reason why so many film buffs have so many different definitions for what film noir is and isn’t is because the concept of “film noir” was established virtually after the fact.  French critics in the late 1940s assigned the label film noir (‘black film’) to a number of American movies that these critics saw as darker and more cynical than the typical Hollywood fare.  The filmmakers who produced these movies didn’t see their offerings as related (except in the most obvious ways, of course) and therefore didn’t see any need to ensure that any of these films possessed one attribute or another. 

In his excellent book More Than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts (which I recommend to any reader of an academic bent), James Naremore writes that “film noir” is an idea more than it is a body of film texts.  So, “film noir,” in this view, can mean anything that anyone wants the term to mean.  Moreover, Naremore points out that when French critics first applied the label “film noir” to American movies, they also attached it to non-crime motion pictures, such as Billy Wilder’s The Lost Weekend (1945), and only later was the term seen to apply exclusively to crime films.  So, the term itself has evolved over time, and it will probably evolve some more, making any attempt (like this one) to ascertain a hard-and-fast definition of “film noir” a fool’s errand, much like trying to determine the identity of the first rock & roll record. 

At the same time, if the mantle of “film noir” can be applied to anything, that renders the term virtually meaningless.  If you type the phrase “best noir films” into a Google search engine, a number of movie posters for works described as such on the Web appear at the top of your computer screen.  In addition to such widely accepted noir titles as Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944), Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past (1947), and Joseph H. Lewis’ Gun Crazy (1950), there appears a poster for Ridley Scott’s 1982 science-fiction film Blade Runner.  Is Blade Runner a true example of noir?  If so, why?  Yes, Blade Runner has many of noir’s trappings: the relentless investigator, the hardboiled voiceover dialogue, shadowy photography, etc.  But is this enough?  If a category of film can encompass both Gun Crazy and Blade Runner, is that category helpful?  Let’s take a closer look. 

 

Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall in ‘The Big Sleep’ (1946)

In my inaugural essay, I refer to film noir as a subgenre.  I realize now that isn’t the word that I was looking for.  Noir films can be made of any crime genre: a number are whodunits (The Big Sleep, Black Angel, etc.), suspense thrillers (Sleep, My Love; The Window; Alfred Hitchcock’s works, etc.), and gangster films (most notably, White Heat, which, while not a “classic” rise-and-fall story, is still about a gangster).  So, film noir is something that can permeate genres, not a subset of one.  Therefore, I think that we should retire the word “genre” and call noir something else.  Since film noir is a vague concept, I can’t think of anything better than the equally vague word “cycle.”  Film noir — something that I think lasted only in American-centered crime movies from the 1940s until the end of the 1950s — was a collection of styles and motifs that evolved, flourished, and then ran its course.  From here on out, noir is a “cycle,” not a “subgenre.”

My earlier definition of film noir, for the most part, still holds: “a specifically Hollywood [or American-centered] crime drama made sometime between the mid-1940s to late 1950s, characterized by cinematography with shadowy low-key lighting and an urban-inflected story with the strong potential to unnerve its audience.”  The key phrase is “unnerve its audience.”  The best noir films seem to pose some kind of existential dilemma to the audience.  The best tell stories that, at least for a moment, unmoor the audience from a sense of moral certainty and a sense of a steady place in the world around them.  Silver and Ward say that one of film noir’s most “consistent” attributes is the paranoid protagonist.  They illustrate their point by quoting dialogue spoken by detective Bradford Galt (Mark Stevens) in The Dark Corner (1946): “I feel all dead inside.  I’m backed up in a dark corner, and I don’t know who’s hitting me.”  Silver and Ward write:

With its simple graphic language, Galt’s statement captures the basic emotion of the noir figure.  The assailant is not a person but an unseen force.  The pain is more often mental than physical: the plunge into spiritual darkness, the sense of being “dead inside.”  For Galt in his dark corner the mere fact of being outside the law is neither new nor terrifying.  It is the loss of order, the inability either to discover or to control the underlying cause of his distress, that is mentally intolerable.  (p. 4)

This component of uncertainty — however fleeting or however weakly contradicted by the Production Code-approved happy endings — is key.  If a 1940s-’50s crime drama doesn’t do something to unsettle the audience, aficionados are unlikely to embrace the film as an example of noir.  In a DVD review of the by-the-numbers police-procedural Union Station (1950) for the magazine Sight & Sound, Tim Lucas says:

True noir is something specific, tales of existential entrapment, drenched in irony and fatality.  Films such as Union Station — monochromatic tales of trenchcoated dicks and sadistic criminals staying resolutely on their own sides of the moral fence in a world where good wholesomely prevails — cry out for a category all their own.  So why not call them ‘near-noir’?  (Sight & Sound, XX, 10, p. 88)

Sounds good to me.  One film that I propose would be better branded as “near-noir” is a title often extolled as an exemplar of the film-noir cycle: Jules Dassin’s The Naked City (1948).  Critically praised for, among other things, its pioneering use of location photography, The Naked City is often one of the titles first mentioned as a pre-eminent specimen of the cycle.  However, there’s little sense of moral ambiguity in Dassin’s film.  It’s a straight-ahead police-procedural starring Barry Fitzgerald as an avuncular police investigator whose twinkling presence soothes rather than unsettles.  His younger plainclothes sidekick, played by Don Taylor, is likewise uncomplicated: the biggest moral quandary he faces is a boys-will-be-boys problem with his young son at home, and his pinup-worthy wife (Anne Sargent) suggests that all is basically well within the household.  (Is there any doubt that such a blissfully wedded and photogenic couple would have great sex?)  In short, there’s nothing about The Naked City that implies any ethical abstruseness: we know who the good guys are and who the bad guys are, and justice prevails.  Why do so many movie-savvy critics regard The Naked City as a film noir? 

Mark Stevens (right) in ‘The Dark Corner’ (1946)

One point of contention among noir enthusiasts is whether or not a particular movie succeeds in unsettling its audience and, if so, to what degree.  Two pictures often labeled as film noir are two crime dramas with strong racial themes: Joseph L. Makiewicz’s No Way Out (1950) and Samuel Fuller’s The Crimson Kimono (1959).  However, from where I stand, these two anti-racism tracts take such pains to paint their minority co-leads as exemplars of all that is right and good (Sidney Poitier in the former and James Shigeta in the latter) that this leaves very little room for moral ambiguity or psychological dislocation.  So, I have great difficulty accepting No Way Out and The Crimson Kimono as examples of film noir.  But I’m sure that other movie mavens would disagree with me. 

Similarly, if there is anything else about a noir-era crime film that intervenes between the audience and an inchoate sense of dread, such a movie would have a hard time being seen as part of the cycle.  Silver and Ward list some elements that would likely keep the audience at an arm’s length from the “true” noir experience.  Here are some other necessary requirements for film noir:

A crime: Film noir is, first and foremost, a type of crime drama.  The element of crime decisively ruptures the veneer of the placid, morally secure society, and this usually snowballs into noir’s murky interrogation of humanity’s dark side.  So, if no criminal conduct is present in a movie, it’s not a film noir.  For all of its pioneering narrative and visual stylistics that would eventually become absorbed by film noir, Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941) isn’t an example of the cycle: no crime is committed.  On the other hand, such a requisite crime may be large or small: it may be a vicious murder; or it may merely be a robbery that is set right before it is discovered, as in The Steel Trap (1952); it may be only the nominal “kidnapping” of a child in the next hotel room, as in Don’t Bother to Knock (1952); or it may be trying to frame someone and an implied murder at the end, as in Sweet Smell of Success (1957).  Any crime will do.  But no crime, no film noir. 

John McGuire (left) and Peter Lorre in ‘Stranger on the Third Floor’ (1940), which many critics consider the first film noir

A film made during the 1940s or 1950s: While some commentators have seen so-called “neo-noir” films of later decades as a direct extension of film noir into the present day, most critics agree that the “classic” period for film noir lasted only from the 1940s to the 1950s.  As Foster Hirsch puts it in Film Noir: The Dark Side of the Screen:

Film noir erupted in full creative force during a comparatively concentrated period.  In an early and influential article, “Notes on Film Noir” (1972), Paul Schrader places its outer limits from The Maltese Falcon in 1941 to Touch of Evil in 1958.  In a more strict dating, Amir Karimi, in Toward a Definition of American Film Noir, limits the period from 1941 to 1949.  Later critics suggest that the true heyday of noir lasted only a few years, from Wilder’s Double Indemnity in 1944 to the same director’s Sunset Boulevard in 1950.  But the long-range view, with noir extending from the early forties to the late fifties, is the most sensible, for the crime films of this period are noticeably different in theme and style from those made before and after.  

Films noirs share a vision and sensibility, indicated by their echoing titles: No Way Out, Detour, Street with No Name, Scarlet Street, Panic in the Streets, The Naked City, Cry of the City, The Dark Past, The Dark Corner, The Dark Mirror, Night and the City, Phenix City Story, They Live by Night, The Black Angel, The Window, Rear Window, The Woman in the Window, D.O.A., Kiss of Death, Killer’s Kiss, The Killing, The Big Sleep, Murder[,] My Sweet, Caught, The Narrow Margin, Edge of Doom, Ruthless, Possessed, Jeopardy.  These wonderfully evocative titles conjure up a dark, urban world of neurotic entrapment leading to delirium.  The repetition of key words (street, city, dark, death, murder) and things (windows, mirrors) points up the thematic and tonal similarities among the films.  (p. 10)
 

The largest consensus among movie commentators that I’ve seen seems to be that the first film noir is Boris Ingster’s The Stranger on the Third Floor (1940 — with its European director, its “wrongly accused murderer” story, its expressionistic dream sequences, and its strong suggestion of sexual desire), and the cycle ends with such unease-inducing films as Robert Wise’s Odds Against Tomorrow, Irving Lerner’s City of Fear, and John Cromwell’s The Scavengers (all 1959). 

As I said in my first essay, film noir was largely shaped by the constraints of the Hollywood Production Code, a sanitizing set of rules which compelled filmmakers merely to imply disturbing issues (such as losing one’s sanity or the desirability of social transgression) between the lines of a censor-approved optimistic story.  This created a disconnect between the disturbing themes and the movies’ reassuring veneer, a disconnect that fragmented the perceived wholeness and self-containment of the filmic text.  By 1960, the weakening grip of the Hollywood Production Code meant that disturbing, impolite themes no longer needed to be hidden, no longer ran the risk of potentially bursting the bounds of a bowdlerized story.  By the time Alfred Hitchcock made Psycho in 1960, the film’s openness about such heretofore-verboten themes like adultery, non-marital sex, unambiguous gender ambiguity, all-but-shown nudity, and the grisly gore of murder eliminated the need merely to hint at their existence between the lines of a sanitized movie, thus eliminating the danger of fracturing the film via such suggestive indirection.  So, like many others, I set the timeframe of  “true” film noir between 1940 and 1959. 

 

Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth in ‘Lady from Shanghai’ (1947)

American protagonists or an American milieu:  Film noir intrigues its audience because it questions the optimism — and, some would say, the naïveté — of the American dream and the American mythos.  Noir films are stories of moral scarcity in the land of plenty.  This is what gives film noir its disquieting edge.  So, a film noir must either be set in the U.S. or be about Americans living abroad, such as Charles Vidor’s Gilda (1946), Carol Reed’s The Third Man (1949, a British film), and Jules Dassin’s Night and the City (1950).  Lewis Milestone’s Arch of Triumph (1948) tells a sinister story of intrigue with low-key lighting and high-contrast black & white photography, but its French (and wartime) setting and French characters shield it from any unsettling implications for an American audience.  Two films often associated with noir are Fritz Lang’s M (1931) and Luchino Visconti’s Ossessione (1942), but since these are European productions with European characters and European content (German and Italian, respectively), they don’t fit the bill for noir.  If a film noir is going to have a non-American protagonist, the setting should still be in or around the United States, as in Lady from Shanghai (1947), The Other Woman (1954), and Touch of Evil (1958).

A contemporary setting: To really shake up an audience, the viewer should feel that his or her sense of security could be whipped out from under them at any moment.  When a film is set in the recognizable past, it removes this aura of urgency.  I say “recognizable” past because films set in the recent past (e.g., Double Indemnity [1944] is set six years before the movie was made, probably to avoid any reference to World War Two) are usually indistinguishable from films with a here-and-now setting and don’t have this problem.  Therefore, a crime film like Hangover Square (1945), with its Victorian London setting, reassures the audience that its unpleasant story is safely secured in the unreachable past — have no fear.  For this reason (and its English characters), Hangover Square would not be considered noir. 

However, one period piece is often cited as an important film noir: Charles Laughton’s Night of the Hunter (1955), set in the 1930s, some 20 years in the past.  This period setting, the Southern Gothic trappings, and Robert Mitchum’s flamboyant take on the lead character cushion the audience from any sense of dread caused by the morally ambiguous plot or shadowy, low-key lighting.  As Silver and Ward put it: “[T]he period context [in the film] insulates [any noir] elements, as well as perverse sexuality or character alienation, and mitigates the immediacy of their impact” (p. 330).  So, I don’t regard the canonized Night of the Hunter as noir. 

No supernatural story element: A story instigated by a magical or paranormal problem can easily be resolved by a magical or paranormal solution.  A film noir should give its audience the sense that a recognizable, real-life, uneasily rectifiable dilemma may just be around the corner.  A movie featuring such an out-of-this-world problem cushions any sense of immediacy, any sense that the viewer might soon face the same problem.  So, for all of their noir-ish trappings, a horror film like The Cat People (1942) and a science-fiction movie like Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) don’t count as the real deal.  (I hope that I have now given my reasons why Blade Runner, a science-fiction film from the 1980s, isn’t a film noir.) 

Joseph Cotten and Marilyn Monroe in ‘Niagara’ (1953)

Black & white photography?: And speaking solely for myself — and if you follow my blog at all, you could probably guess this — I prefer a film noir to be in black & white.  Some color films are championed as film noir because of their quasi-expressionistic use of a many-pigmented palette.  Films frequently held up as color noirs include John M. Stahl’s Leave Her to Heaven (1945), Henry Hathaway’s Niagara (1953), Samuel Fuller’s House of Bamboo (1955), Raoul Walsh’s The Revolt of Mamie Stover (1956), Alan Dwan’s Slightly Scarlet (1956), and Alfred Hitchcock’s polychrome productions of the 1940s to ’50s.  But I’ve only seen a few of these movies.  When I’m in the mood for film noir, I want to see the shadowy patterns on the screen shaped by the interplay of blacks, whites, and grays.  These are the kind of movies that come to mind when I hear the words “film noir.”  However, I wouldn’t want to rule out the possibility of a noir film shot in color.  While such a movie wouldn’t be my first choice when I’m in the mood for a film noir, if color can abet any feelings of unease or disquiet in a crime drama, I would be interested to see how its done.  A film noir in color is like life on other planets: it’s not something I’m likely to see anytime soon, but I wouldn’t want to say it doesn’t exist.  

Film Noir, Part Three

Here is a post that I originally wrote on the Internet Movie Database:

Still from the trailer for ‘The Big Sleep’ (1946)

Stylistically speaking, The Big Sleep (1946) is not the most exemplary film noir. The best noir films seethe with hard, stark shadows and heroes (or anti-heroes) feverishly unraveling under ominous circumstances. And The Big Sleep is missing this kind of visual and narrative delirium. The cinematography, compared to other film noirs, is relatively even-toned, and the lead character is too self-assured, and too reassuring to the viewer, to allow the story to spiral into uncertainty.  In fact, Foster Hirsch, author of the book Film Noir: The Dark Side of the Screen, considers The Big Sleep to be the most overrated film noir.

However, The Big Sleep boasts something that no other film noir can: the ultimate film-noir actor — Humphrey Bogart — playing the ultimate film-noir character — quintessential hard-boiled private eye Philip Marlowe. And this distinction more than makes up for any stylistic shortcomings. 

I wish that Bogart had done more films as Raymond Chandler’s creation. Wouldn’t it have been terrific if Warner Brothers had shortly afterwards adapted Chandler’s The High Window (a.k.a. The Brasher Doubloon) and The Lady in the Lake with Bogart playing Marlowe, instead of the adaptations that were ultimately made with other actors by other studios? In such a case, maybe Robert Montgomery’s noble experiment of a Hollywood movie seen almost entirely from a subjective camera — which his Lady in the Lake (1947) was — could have been based on a less canonical hard-boiled book. (But Dick Powell’s turn as Marlowe in Murder, My Sweet [1944] is so good that I wouldn’t want to erase it from the history books.) 

Some might say that Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade, also played by Bogart in The Maltese Falcon (1941), was the more definitive film-noir private eye and wish that Bogart had done more movies as that character instead. But Spade only appeared in that one novel and a few short stories, while Marlowe appeared in a series of novels by Chandler. 

Since the actor’s death in 1957, Humphrey Bogart has become an icon, a true star of the cinema whose image and mannerisms are indelibly ingrained in our popular consciousness — so much so that the American Film Institute named him the greatest male screen legend of all time.  Bogart has come to define the postwar Hollywood hard-boiled hero as much as John Wayne has come to define the western-movie hero.  Even now, when a mystery movie depicts a streetwise sleuth, that character — however tangentially, however unconsciously, and often deliberately — evokes Bogart.  And yet, he played fewer investigators in his varied career than his popular image would suggest.  


I can’t help wondering what it would have been like if Bogart’s filmography did more to live up to that image of the definitive hard-boiled private eye.  And I think that our popular conception of this kind of fictional figure owes more to the character of Philip Marlowe than it does to Sam Spade, whose name is usually invoked in summoning up this kind of detective.  For these reasons, I think that a handful of big-budget films with this archetypal actor as this archetypal character would do better justice to the standings of both Bogart and Marlowe in our popular culture and our collective unconscious.  



The trailer for ‘The Big Sleep’ (1946)

Film Noir, Part Two

Not too long ago, I heard Bruce Springsteen’s haunting rendition of the old song-book standard “Angel Eyes,” and it stayed with me. While the song is best remember as sung by Ella Fitzgerald or Frank Sinatra, accompanied by a lush orchestra, Springsteen stripped the song down. His voice barely escaping through clenched teeth, seething into the microphone and backed only by a solo acoustic guitar, Springsteen conveyed the wrecked spirit of a man devastated by the mysterious absence of his love. Springsteen took a song usually associated with sophistication and laid bare the narrator’s incomprehension, his vulnerability, and his sense of being utterly alone.

In other words, Springsteen’s version of “Angel Eyes” did to a familiar standard what film noir did to studio-era Hollywood: take an entity associated with glamour and twist it to reveal the darkness within.

Film Noir, Part One

‘The Big Combo’ (1955)

FILM NOIR — like pornography, no one can tell you what it is, but they know it when they see it.

Actually, that’s not entirely true. Problem is, if you ask 100 different film buffs for a definition, you’ll probably get 100 different answers. Here’s how Merriam-Webster takes a stab at it: “a type of crime film featuring cynical malevolent characters in a sleazy setting and an ominous atmosphere that is conveyed by shadowy photography and foreboding background music; also: a film of this type.” And that’s a pretty good place to start.

I, along with several other aficionados, would throw in a few other qualifiers. To me, a “true” film noir is a specifically Hollywood crime drama made sometime between the mid-1940s to late 1950s, characterized by cinematography with shadowy low-key lighting and an urban-inflected story with the strong potential to unnerve its audience.

Some refer to film noir as a “genre.” I don’t. To me, the hallmarks of noir aren’t as radically different from those of other kinds of crime films as, say, the western’s are from those of other kinds of action movies. I consider film noir to be a subgenre of the crime film, along with the whodunnit, the gangster picture, and the suspense thriller. (Originally a French term, film noir — “black film” — would be rendered in the plural as films noirs to be grammatically correct. But since the phrase has been adopted into English, I will Americanize the plural as “film noirs.”)

I learned about film noir early on in my readings about cinema. By the time I finished studying cinema history in college, I either had seen or was familiar with many of the canonized “classics” of this kind of film: Double Indemnity (1944), The Big Sleep (1946), Out of the Past (1947), In a Lonely Place (1950), and some others. However, my interest in film history lay elsewhere (the European and Japanese art films of the 1960s), so the subgenre largely escaped any extra scrutiny from me.

When I attended grad school, where feminism was a particularly strong influence in my female-run film-history department, my main impression of film noir was as a misogynistic kind of movie. I understood that the subgenre primarily and actively sought to return newly empowered American women of the post-World War II years — those employed in traditionally male jobs on the homefront while most able-bodied men were fighting overseas — to their customary roles as homemakers. After all, many antagonists in film noirs are manipulative women — femmes fatales — hoping to ensnare a fall guy (usually the protagonist) in some evil scheme: cunning witches whom the audience would want defeated and put in their place.

Although I think it’s important to recognize this aspect of film noir, it’s far from the be-all and end-all of the subgenre, and a portrayal of a wicked femme fatale need not contaminate the entire movie with irredeemable misogyny and thus render it totally without value. Besides, this perspective overlooks those entries with strong, sympathetic women at their centers: Laura (1944), Phantom Lady (1944), Mildred Pierce (1945), and others. Also, some recent feminist criticism of film noir reinterprets the femme fatale as a figure of women’s resistance against a male-dominated world.

‘Phantom Lady’ (1944)

What makes a movie a film noir and not something else? First, it’s important to remember that the term “film noir” was applied by French critics to certain American movies only in retrospect. At the time these films were released, popular audiences didn’t think of them as a special category of cinema. No U.S. viewer in the 1940s would say, “Hey, they’re showing a film noir at the Bijou tonight!” Only in the years after their first release were these movies seen, primarily by French critics, to share common and distinctive traits. And the vast majority of literature about film noir was written in the years after the subgenre’s “classic” period.

Why limit myself to movies made during the 1940s and ’50s when considering film noir? After all, lots of pictures released in the years since have been favorably hailed by critics — and others self-proclaimed — as neo-noir: films that update the hallmarks of classic noir to more contemporary settings and with contemporary attitudes, films such as Point Blank (1967), Body Heat (1981), and Bound (1996). Also, why limit myself to Hollywood movies? There are entire books published on “British film noir,” “Japanese film noir,” and the like. So, the term must have meaning for films beyond American shores. Right?

Well, if anyone wants to defend neo-noir as a direct continuation of the subgenre or stick up for noirish films made overseas, I won’t stop them. In fact, such defenders would probably have some intriguing observations to make. But such cinematic candidates for the mantle of film noir will be missing what is, to me, the most salient characteristic of the subgenre: its constraint and shaping by the Hollywood Production Code. (The parameters of film noir that I am about to lay out are my own, but many of the following observations about the subgenre, and about Hollywood cinema in general, have been made elsewhere by others.)

Film noir emerged at a time, Hollywood’s studio era, when most kinds of American movies sought to give their viewers a reassuring view of the world around them. This meant portraying the world of the characters — a surrogate for the world of the viewers — as a wholly contained, apprehensible, and ultimately comforting environment in which (ideally) to live one’s dreams. Westerns would give their audiences parables of a hero rising to the occasion to vanquish a villain. Musicals would tell stories of romantic couples falling in love and living happily and effortlessly ever after. Hollywood films would usually affirm by the final fade-out that the characters’ world — and thus the audience’s world — was ultimately an understandable and uncomplicated place to live. This mission was abetted by the Production Code, which would often snuff out any story element that would challenge such an unfissured worldview, especially when challenges took the form of sex, violence, or questioning institutional authority.

This imposed sense of optimism and prudishness was, film-wise, uniquely American. Adult-oriented British productions, for example, could pepper their dialogue with damns and hells — words usually unutterable on Hollywood soundtracks — and their costume pictures could include low-cut necklines on the ladies that could show off more décolletage than the Production Code would have allowed. Of course, a film like Gustav Machaty’s Czech production Ecstasy (1933) — with its scenes of a skinny-dipping, streaking, orgasming Heddy Lamarr — would have been precluded once the Code took earnest effect in 1934.

As a result, some Production Code-era Hollywood movies’ most unique or peculiar moments may be seen as inadvertent (or sometimes not so inadvertent) indications of the messy, splintered human realm outside the theatre, a view of the outside world that the Code tried to benignly suppress. For example, overly elaborate musical numbers — perhaps with lots of dancing bodies wearing ornate costumes — could be seen as a kind of overblown over-compensation, as a stealthy but showy stand-in for the sex act that the Code would never allow on the Hollywood screen.

Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray in ‘Double Indemnity’ (1944)

Perhaps nothing challenged Hollywood’s and the Production Code’s sanitized view of studio-era society as much as the horrors and carnage of the Second World War. The evils that Hitler’s Germany unleashed around the globe, and the blood and devastation it took to defeat the Nazi forces, impressed upon once-insular America that the human world was never as tidy as Hollywood’s world. James M. Cain’s novel Double Indemnity — with its libidinously motivated, murderous lead characters — had originally been serialized back in 1936 but was thought unfilmable by Hollywood because of the story’s cynical view of human appetites. However, news of the war and its repercussions reminded America day after day that such a pitiless vision of humankind had a basis in reality. The implication of grim and chaotic truths beyond the screen had crept into studio-era Hollywood movies before, but in the decade or so after the Second World War, they took on more ominous and threatening insinuations.

To me, rupturing the Production Code was film noir’s most important function, even if rupturing anything was never the films’ intention. But in so many noirs, the pat answers and happy endings that had provided story closure in so many earlier movies no longer seemed to be enough. And as the postwar world insinuated its way into Hollywood’s crime dramas, the movie conventions that upheld such a simple worldview appeared to break down. The new uncertainties manifested themselves as odd intrusions into the world of the stories. In The Big Sleep, one of the murders is never accounted for. In Murder, My Sweet (1944), the detective hero ends the story incapacitated. In Mildred Pierce, the title character ends up going back to her good-for-nothing husband with no assurance that her previous ordeals won’t repeat themselves. And most extravagant of all, in Kiss Me Deadly (1955), the world seems to be annihilated in a nuclear explosion. The inability of the Production Code to tie up such defiant loose ends is what gives these narrative disruptions their troubling resonance.

When the Code began to lose its hold on and authority over studio content in the mid-1950s, ultimately being scrapped in 1968 in favor of today’s age-tiered rating system, more direct portrayals of social anxieties could be shown on the screen, lessening the portent of their indirect references elsewhere in the narrative. The sexually charged homicidal couple in Double Indemnity smolder with erotic energy in their scenes together precisely because the film can’t acknowledge the intensity of their libidinal urges in an unambiguous way. The sexually charged homicidal couple in Body Heat catch fire in their soft-core sex scenes, but when clothed, their moments together lack steam — it having been unambiguously blown off in the bedroom. While contemporary Hollywood movies contain their own kind of ruptures, insinuations of a nasty, messy outside world is no longer one of the crime drama’s; recent crime films will usually just confront that nasty world head-on. While I think that greater permissiveness on the post-Code Hollywood screen is overall a positive development that can produce more liberating films, the removal of the Production Code also removed the need for the kind of indirection and insinuation that can so fascinatingly fissure a crime story.

Gene Tierney and Clifton Webb in ‘Laura’ (1944)

So, it’s difficult for me to think of a film like Bound, for all of its obvious indebtedness to the subgenre, as an example of film noir — most conspicuously because the story concerns two lesbians, and the Production Code would never countenance any overt portrayal of homosexuality. In my mind, a “true” film noir would try to skirt or conceal the very existence of gay love, and in doing so, complicate the narrative in an idiosyncratic way. One example is Otto Preminger’s Laura, which goes to great lengths to code its murderer, Waldo Lydecker (Clifton Webb), as tacitly gay, only to give him a disbelief-inducing heterosexual motive for his crime. Such intriguing ruptures are, to me, the essence of noir.

That is why I only regard film noir as postwar Hollywood (or American-targeted) movies made during the studio era. In my next installment on the subgenre (whenever I get around to writing it), I’ll catalogue other characteristics that I look for. Till then, I need to go down some very mean streets.