|
Yet film noir, with its fatalistic roots in fog-shrouded French films of the 1930s, can be more difficult to define accurately than an indigenous genre such as the Western. Despite the consistent streak of darkness (literal and metaphoric) that runs through these pictures, they are united less in theme or even style than, as critic Raymond Durgnat pointed out, in a particular tone, a mood. In that sense, it belongs primarily to the 1940s and early 1950s. The growing sense of paranoia and pessimism that permeated screens is irretrievably linked to feelings generated by the outbreak of World War II. Suspicion, disillusionment and misogyny had by no means been absent from the American cinema, but it was not until then WWII and its aftermath the dark abyss could be fully acknowledged and artfully explored. Far from an exhaustive program, the retrospective features some glaring omissions. Where, for instance, is Joseph Losey's The Prowler? Or Joseph H. Lewis' Gun Crazy? Or any of Otto Preminger's early classics? On the whole, however, moviegoers will have a feast. With its stylish luridness and hard-boiled cynicism, film noir continues to grip generation after generation. Here are a few choice highlights from the selected entries. Check your local paper for exact dates and times. Beyond the Forest (King Vidor, 1949): Best known for Bette Davis' "What a dump!" line (immortalized by Edward Albee in his play Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?), the film has too often been relegated to camp cultists ready to skewer it with derisive chortling. In reality, it showcases Vidor's audacious visual conceptions at full throttle while trenchantly tackling the country's covert fear of empowered women following the war. Davis' performance as a hot-and-bothered small-town Madame Bovary -- impulsively passionate, frighteningly intense, operatically erotic -- proves that one must be ridiculous before one can be sublime. Detour (Edgar G. Ulmer, 1945): The epitome of film noir. Ulmer, an emigré genius working on Poverty Row budgets, distilled the genre down to a feature so astringent that it makes the chintziest film school project look voluptuous. Shot in six days for what looks like about 30 dollars, the film boils away all but the barest necessary elements for the lurid doomed- patsy plot. As the loser "hero" on the run and his implacable hitchhiking nemesis, Tom Neal and the superbly named Ann Savage are locked in an inexorable dance of death that puts far costlier, more accomplished films to shame. Technically squalid, frequently ludicrous and completely unforgettable. Kiss Me Deadly (Robert Aldrich, 1955): By the mid-1950s, moral ambiguity in the genre had reached such a point that the supposed hero could hardly be distinguished from the villains. In Aldrich's ferociously brutal, exhilaratingly sleazy adaptation of Mickey Spillane's pulp fiction, the canny shamus of the 1940s has become a strutting fascist in the person of "bedroom dick" Mike Hammer (Ralph Meeker). Amid a filthy ocean of outsized grotesqueries, alarmingly blank-faced dames and glowing suitcases, the movie pushes noir conventions past the breaking point, exposing a nation's underlying hysteria in the literally explosive climax. For Aldrich, the world must be destroyed before it can be purified. One of the final incantations of the genre, and a key film of the decade. On Dangerous Ground (Nicholas Ray, 1951): Perched between late-'40s noir and mid-'50s crime drama, this is one of the great, forgotten films of the genre. Robert Ryan is a time-bomb of a cop, tormented by the urban squalor he sees all around him. After roughing up one too many crooks, he is assigned to track down a killer in wintry upstate, where he falls for the main suspect's blind sister (Ida Lupino). Easily mushy, the material achieves a transcendental beauty in the hands of Ray, a poet of anguished expression -- the harshness of the city is contrasted with the austere snowy countryside for some of the most disconcertingly moving effects in all of film noir. Despite the shocking violence and the steady intensity, an astoundingly pure film. Out of the Past (Jacques Tourneur, 1947): Gangster Kirk Douglas hires private eye pal Robert Mitchum to track down his mistress (Jane Geer), who's snatched 40 grand from him and disappeared down in Acapulco. That Mitchum is destined to fall for Geer and join her on the run seems inevitable, but then again the tone of the movie is one of unearthly inevitability: Tourneur, one of the most underrated of all noir masters, structures the plot, told in flashback, as an eerie, flowing journey, with characters elegantly gliding down the tangled rails of death and desire. Though a relatively early entry in the noir cycle, the movie displays a sophisticated awareness of its themes and styles -- one sees Mitchum, Geer and Douglas shifting from characters to icons as the film unfurls. Raw Deal (Anthony Mann, 1948): Mann, best known for his 1950s Westerns, got started cutting his teeth in noir thrillers every bit as intense and neurotic as his later work. This one, with escaped con Dennis O'Keefe aided by weary moll Claire Trevor to exact revenge on the crime boss who railroaded him, is practically an essay on the visualization of the genre. Working with cinematographer John Alton, Mann created a canvas of insinuating malice and cruelty where light pierces through darkness only surreptitiously. Studded with sudden bursts of brutality, it is a prime example of Manny Farber's characteristically punchy description of Mann's style: "Germanic rigor, caterpillar intimacy, and an original dictionary of ways in which to punish the human body." The Reckless Moment (Max Ophüls, 1949): Arguably the retrospective's greatest entry, The Reckless Moment fits into the noir category almost incidentally. Despite the expressive chiaroscuro of its cinematography, the movie is less interested in engulfing its characters in shadows than in exploring their souls with a mellifluously moving camera. Joan Bennett, the trampy siren of the Langian thrillers, here is decked in a hausfrau frock, ready to do anything to keep her suburban family together, including disposing of the body of the lecherous sponge who was praying on her daughter. In walks Irish blackmailer James Mason, sent to exploit the homemaker's secret but instead discovering in her a kindred trapped spirit. Ophüls, a romantic master with a delicate, Viennese temperament, paints a devastating portrait of the repression beneath all-American placidity, and the possibility of redemption through love. A must-see.
The Woman in the Window (Fritz Lang, 1945): The polar opposite of fellow émigré Ophüls', Lang's cinema
is one of chilling paranoia and moralist suspicion, where the wheels of fate grind slowly but inexorably. Joan Bennett, the
redemptive angel of the suburbs in The Reckless Moment, here plays the source of torment for affluent university
Professor Edward G. Robinson. Looking for excitement, he accepts Bennett's invitation to her apartment, where he ends
up offing her beau in self-defense. Their troubles are just beginning when reptilian heel Dan Duryea muscles in, eager
to put a price on his silence. Though a bit watered down by a tacked-on happy ending (see the following year's
Scarlet Street for Lang's pitiless darkness undiluted), the movie grapples fascinatingly with the whisper-thin line between
respectable citizen and desperate murderer that lies at the heart of the noir protagonist.
|