Film Noir
German Origins
The origins of film noir were predominantly German. The shadowy world of German Expressionism and the cold eye of the late Weimar era bequeathed a distinctive visual style and dark tonal attitude.
This was manifest in the warped mindscapes of Robert Weine’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), the waking nightmares conjured by F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) and Faust (1926), and the criminal characters in Fritz Lang’s M (1931) and The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933).
In 1927, when Murnau defected from Ufa to Fox, much of the local talent, including John Ford and Frank Borzage, came by the lot to check out his style, the moving camera, the lighting effects, the multiple exposures.
The great noir progenitors (Fritz Lang, Robert Siodmak, Billy Wilder, Edgar G. Ulmer, Otto Preminger) fled Nazi Germany a step ahead of the Gestapo or were smart enough to sense what lurked around. They were joined by desperate refugees who didn’t need to master the English language to find means of expression in visual medium: set designers, lighting technicians, cameramen and musicians.
First American Noirs?
Boris Ingster’s Stranger on The Third Floor (1940), which has low lighting, flashbacks and Elisha Cook Jr., is often cited as the first true noir exemplar.
However, Hitchcock’s first American film, Rebecca, which won the 1940 Best Picture Oscar (his only winner), contains many quintessential elements of film noir, even if it were soled to the public (and the Academy voters) as a well-acted, sumptuously crafted as a romantic thriller–more in the vein of a woman’s picture than a suspense thriller–let alone film noir perse.
The next year saw the release of half a dozen influential noirs, including Hitchcock’s Suspicion (1941) John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon (1941), I Wake Up Screaming (1941, originally released as Hot Spot) and Orson Welles’ seminal Citizen Kane (1941).
It was during World War II that film noir set down its firmer grounds.
In Blackout: World War II and the Origins of Film Noir, scholar Sheri Chinen Biesen locates the emergence of the genre in the “bleak realities of a world at war,” a cinematic projection of the daily terrors of a generation dreading a telegram from the War Department or a bullet from the Wehrmacht, that knew what it was like to live on borrowed time.
However, amid the patriotic uplift and upbeat escapism purveyed by wartime Hollywood, the films only seemed like outliers.
Among the notable ones were: Frank Tuttle’s This Gun for Hire (1942), Lang’s Ministry of Fear (1943), Cukor’s Gaslight, Preminger’s Laura (1944), and the landmark Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944), one of the few noirs to be nominated for Best Picture in the 1940s (or 1950s)
By 1946, a major strain of American cinema looked darker and grimmer, more off-kilter and unbalanced, that the secure grounding of Hollywood’s moral universe was being shaken and undercut.
Critics described them as seamy, sordid, morbid, lurid, sadistic, vulgar and “fundamentally unpleasant.”
Christine Smith, the censor of Atlanta, decried the postwar wave of “pictures centered around undesirable characters engaged in brutal and sordid undertakings.”
Since the film noir tag had not yet been established, the US struggled for suitable terms like “murder mellers,” “celluloid dirt” and “films of masculine brutality.”
The great film scholar Thomas Doherty observes:
The Roman Catholic Legion of Decency tracked an uptick of 100 percent in objectionable motion picture content in the postwar period and blamed the surge on the backfire from World War II. “Audiences had become used to pictures of great physical violence and in the search for material to be substituted for war themes, Hollywood turned from physical violence to violence of the human spirit,” explained William H. Mooring, the Legion’s film critic, in 1946. “Thus, we have gotten pictures that are immoral, unmoral, and culturally violent.”
Mooring understood how deeply the noir vision challenged the Catholic catechism upheld by the Hollywood Production Code. “Objections to pictures now are of much graver nature than formerly,” he said. “It’s not the routine of bare legs and low-cut gowns, but offenses against basic morality.”
Joseph I. Breen, tasked with enforcing the Code’s rules, had a hell of a time with the noirs; the whole atmosphere was so corrosive that the end reel wrap-up fooled no one. Breen understood that the genre was irredeemable.
It took over 10 years before his office greenlit James M. Cain’s novel of adultery and murder, The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946). “Strictly for adults, with appeal chiefly to those who can stand sordidness dished up by the carload,” wrote trade reviewer Peter Harrison.
Resistance to film noir was not limited to critics and censors, however. The florid chiaroscuro and extravagant lighting schemes were disparaged by some members of the American Society of Cinematographers as “arty camera effects” at odds with Hollywood’s “invisible style.” All the swirling cigarette smoke, mirrored reflections, cantered angles, blinding fluorescent lights, and Stygian blackness — how was a moviegoer supposed to dive into a story with such distractions?
“It isn’t necessary to complicate your style with trick lighting effects or odd, surrealistic angles,” cinematographer Russell Metty lectured his colleagues in 1947. “Perhaps these tricks will appeal to a few artistic highbrows, but they are way above the head of the average moviegoer.”
The most dreaded of all postwar epithets: subversive. “We cannot send pictures overseas which show Americans as sordid people intent upon low objectives and willing to go to any lengths of violence to achieve them,” declared an unnamed studio head, who sounded like Louis B. Mayer, in 1946.[vi]
In 1947, another vintage year for cold-blooded noir (Crossfire, Out of the Past, Nightmare Alley, Body and Soul, They Won’t Believe Me, Born to Kill).
In the same year, the House Committee on Un-American Activities launched its first round of investigations into alleged communist subversion in Hollywood.
HUAC may have been onto something. Film noir was deeply un-American in what it said about freedom, individualism, capitalism, hard work, upward mobility.
The limitless possibilities of the New Frontier became an asphalt jungle of blind alleys and dead ends, where individual agency and free will counted for nothing.
The fatalistic vision found apt expression in the genre’s recurrent device, the flashback: your fate is already sealed, everything has already happened and nothing you can do can change what comes at you from out of the past.
“It’s straight down the line for both of us, remember?” Phyllis Dietrichson tells Walter Neff in Double Indemnity, reminding him that neither can get off the trolley car that they’ve already set in motion.
“Scarlet Street is not Main Street,” Terry Ramsaye had warned Hollywood, but Main Street made Scarlet Street — and Double Indemnity, The Killers (1946), Gilda (1946) and The Postman Always Rings Twice — major box office hits.
The noirs played better in big cities than in rural America or small towns, but the genre tapped into a powerful undercurrent of popular resistance to mainstreams cinema.
