Why noir? Why now?
In the 1940s, when film noir kings Humphrey Bogart or Robert Mitchum stared out through a latticework of shadows at the rain-soaked streets and ominous buildings of their movies, they seemed to have a magnificent wariness and brashness: a savvy that set them apart from other movie denizens.
No one was as insolent or lonely as the ’50s Bogart, no one so languidly tough as Mitchum. Nobody was as heartlessly sexy as Barbara Stanwyck, as creepy or craven as Peter Lorre, as tough and mollish as Ida Lupino. And no world seemed to vibrate with as much picturesque menace as the one that all of these types — along with Dana Andrews, Alan Ladd, Lauren Bacall, Dan Duryea and all their movie kin — were trapped in: the same genre that continues through modern movies like “Pulp Fiction,” “The Usual Suspects,” “Seven” and “Face/Off” (which opens Friday; see review on Page A).
They were private eyes (usually), criminals (sometimes), victims (almost always) and occasionally all three at the same time: detectives who were treated as crooks and wound up being suspected of the very murders they investigated.
It fit. This was a world created seemingly without pity. A world of rats, killers, grifters, thieves, degenerates and dirty-dealers. There were a few cops — rarely around when you needed them. And some reporters, many of whom had the facts wrong. There were women, few of them pure — and some with more murder in their eyes than the men. There were rich society people up at the top, almost all of them sitting on private time bombs, guilty secrets just about to blow their lives apart.
Then there were the victims: the cuckolds, drunks and junkies, the two-time losers and doomed squealers, dragging themselves through paranoia-ridden streets, soaked in shadows and fear. The regular citizens: the restaurant employees, gas station attendants, newsstand vendors, cab drivers — mostly on the edges of the action but occasionally stumbling right into the line of fire. Average Joes and Janes who walked around the sides of the murky arena, mostly unaware of the deadly games played there, the murder in their midst.
Secrets always lay under dark surfaces, poisoning everything. Psychiatrists in penthouses sometimes ruminated on the doings below; a world so rotten and crawling with danger, it often seemed the characters wouldn’t last out the night, not reach the “Deadline at Dawn” that writer Cornell Woolrich used for the title of one archetypal 1946 noir. Time and justice were out of joint. Evil seemed comfortably ensconced and good always one step ahead of doom.
The night always ended, somehow. But will film noir ever die?
Watching “Face/Off” last week, I had to wonder again. This new and noir-esque John Travolta/Nicolas Cage thriller caps a kind of local noir mini-boom: the recent Chicago revivals of two classics, Howard Hawks’ 1946 “The Big Sleep” and Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1967 genre homage “Le Samourai.”
Just last month, the unabashed noir “L.A. Confidential” was a Cannes Film Festival sensation. Next month, a series of neglected noirs (“Five Against the House,” “My Name is Julia Ross”) is planned at the Film Center of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
What these older movies demonstrate is the durability of old-time noir. But what “Face/Off” shows is how the stories play today. Reprising the many standard noir themes, “Face/Off” pairs two actors, Travolta and Cage, who’ve shown a taste for the genre (Travolta in “Pulp Fiction” and Cage in “Red Rock West”). And it was made by a director, John Woo, who has called “Le Samourai” a nearly “perfect” film.
These days, noir often depends on an awareness of its traditions. “Pulp Fiction” (1994) was packed by Quentin Tarantino with riffs and lifts from earlier classics, and John Dahl’s “Red Rock West” and “The Last Seduction” are both made in conscious homage to “Double Indemnity” (1944). Beyond Dahl or Tarantino, there are noir-makers like David Lynch (“Blue Velvet” and “Lost Highway”), Roman Polanski (“Chinatown”), Lawrence Kasdan (“Body Heat”) and the Coen brothers (“Miller’s Crossing,” “Fargo”). And Bryan Singer, with his wittily Byzantine “The Usual Suspects” (1995) — which takes its title from one of Claude Rains’ lines in “Casablanca.”
“Film noir” itself was a term invented by French movie enthusiasts to describe part of the flood of wartime and postwar American movies that hit their shores when the Nazis were defeated. (Originally, the name referred to movie adaptations of books appearing in the “serie noire,” by Dashiell Hammett, Chandler, James M. Cain and others.) Suddenly the Germans and the Vichy government were gone, and into the French theaters poured the movies they missed during the war: “The Maltese Falcon” (1941), “Double Indemnity” (1944) and numerous others.
The French — emerging from a great national nightmare themselves, loved this new vision of their American liberators, filtered through a richly scary cinematic style derived from the German film industry that the Nazis had destroyed and that had produced the ’20s-’30s Weimar era expressionist masterpieces. Hollywood’s German and Austrian emigre filmmakers, Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder, Robert Siodmak, Otto Preminger and Edgar Ulmer — and others influenced by Lang, like Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock — set the noir style: the weird angles, shadowy sets and streets, the sense of barrenness and urban terror that painter Edward Hopper caught in his famous painting “Nighthawks.”
So, noirs had their heyday in the ’40s and ’50s, then seemed to pass with the demise of the black-and-white movie era in the 1960s. But they never really died, and there have been classic noirs in every decade since: “The Manchurian Candidate,” “Le Samourai” and “Point Blank” in the ’60s, “The Godfather,” “Chinatown” and “Taxi Driver” in the ’70s, “Once Upon a Time in America,” “Blue Velvet” and “Blade Runner” in the ’80s. In the ’90s, “Pulp Fiction,” “The Usual Suspects,” “Red Rock West” and “Barton Fink” carry the torch, while the flashy serial killer thriller “Seven” shows how it can burn up the mass market.
Today, the big audiences may prefer the bloodily robust hilarity of a Quentin Tarantino or the sleek paranoia of a John Grisham adaptation to the more baroque nightmares of the Coen brothers, Lynch or Polanski. But what’s primarily different about the new noirs is the new tendency toward happy endings. Think of a great noir of the past — from “The Maltese Falcon” to “Touch of Evil” — and you’re often recalling a movie with a pessimistic, melancholy (or at least ambivalent) ending. Many modern noirs end on an upbeat note, including a movie as raw as Oliver Stone’s “Natural Born Killers.” (The bleaker ending on the “director’s cut” video — with the outlaw couple killed as they flee from a city in flames — is a truer noir vision.)
Just as in the 1940s and ’50s, most of noir’s shady populace — the laconic sleuths, femme fatales, maniacal gangsters and hapless victims — still prowl the mean streets of the ’90s. When the huge audiences go to “Face/Off,” of course, they won’t necessarily recognize the whole territory. What they will sense, though, is something strange and menacing in the atmosphere. A bizarre angle to the shots, a sense of darkness within the frame, an eerie edge to the performances. That’s all part of film noir. And, as long as there’s an America — and mean city streets — noir will always have a home in the dark.
THE BEST CLASSICS
Here’s a suggested basic library of essential noirs from the classic era (1940-59).
Ground rules: All films are black-and-white crime stories, set in America — which eliminates great exotica like “Casablanca,” “The Third Man” or “To Have and Have Not.”
1. “The Maltese Falcon” (1941)
2. “High Sierra” (1941)
3. “Shadow of a Doubt” (1943)
4. “Double Indemnity” (1944)
5. “Laura” (1944)
6. “Scarlet Street” (1945)
7. “Spellbound” (1945)
8. “Mildred Pierce” (1945)
9. “Detour” (1945)
10. “The Big Sleep” (1946)
11. “The Killers” (1946)
12. “Out of the Past” (1947)
13. “Kiss of Death” (1947)
14. “T-Men” (1947)
15. “The Lady From Shanghai” (1948)
16. “Force of Evil” (1948)
17. “White Heat” (1949)
18. “They Live By Night” (1949)
19. “Gun Crazy” (1949)
20. “The Asphalt Jungle” (1950)
21. “In a Lonely Place” (1950)
22. “Strangers on a Train” (1951)
23. “On Dangerous Ground” (1951)
24. “The Big Heat” (1952)
25. “Pickup on South Street” (1953)
26. “The Night of the Hunter” (1955)
27. “Kiss Me Deadly” (1956)
28. “The Killing” (1956)
29. “Touch of Evil” (1958)
30. “Odds Against Tomorrow” (1959)
FILM NOIR GALLERY
The modern Hollywood reincarnations of the great noir types of the past:
– Humphrey Bogart — The brooding loner (today: Robert De Niro)
– James Cagney — The mercurial toughie (Jack Nicholson)
– Barbara Stanwyck — The amoral femme fatale (Linda Fiorentino)
– Edward G. Robinson — The guy who knows the ropes (Harvey Keitel)
– Robert Mitchum — The sleepy-eyed bruiser (Michael Madsen)
– Kirk Douglas — The slick, smiling con artist (John Travolta; Michael Douglas disqualified)
– Lauren Bacall — The cold-eyed cynic/sexpot (Uma Thurman)
– Richard Widmark — Mr. Unpredictable (Nicolas Cage)
– Ida Lupino — The dame who sticks (Anjelica Huston)
– Burt Lancaster — The handsome slugger (Clint Eastwood)
– Robert Ryan — The guy you don’t cross (Samuel Jackson)
– William Holden — The flawed golden boy (Jeff Bridges)
– John Garfield — The fighter who won’t quit (Bruce Willis)
– Dana Andrews — The smart guy with a problem (Al Pacino)
– Peter Lorre — The weirdo druggie (Dennis Hopper)
– Elisha Cook Jr. — The shrimp loser (Steve Buscemi)
– Sidney Greenstreet — The fat man with a gift of gab (Marlon Brando)
– Gene Tierney — The society girl (Kathleen Turner)
– Vincent Price — The snob bully (Christopher Walken)
– Dan Duryea — The weasel with a gun (James Woods)
– Lee Marvin — The thug (Ving Rhames)
– Lizabeth Scott — Blond trouble (Sharon Stone)
– Lee J. Cobb — Tough and on top (Dennis Farina)
– Claire Trevor — The hard-as-nails broad (Ellen Barkin)
– Sam Jaffe — The brains (Kevin Spacey)
– Marc Lawrence — The little hood (Joe Pesci)
– Raymond Burr — The cool-eyed sadist (John Malkovich)
– Sam Levene — The motormouth (John Turturro)
– Lawrence Tierney — The brick wall (Delroy Lindo)
– Richard Conte — The narcissist (Andy Garcia)
– Dane Clark — The second-string Bogey (Gabriel Byrne)
