Hate Poetry: Film Noir’s Final Form
It is the epitome of John Alton's vision of the night. A darkness at once creamy and sour, suffused with smoke, misery, and the jawlines of strange looking character actors.
Alton seems to operate from a principle of pitch darkness, interrupting its velvet flow with the bare minimum of lamps and lightbulbs, creating little pools of illumination amid the pervasive dark that forever seem on the verge of being swallowed up by the great inky amoeba they nestle in.
Is cinematography the sum and substance of Noir — Noir itself — or does baseline hostility to American optimism define a genre benchmark, 1955’s The Big Combo?
Richard Conte’s “Mr. Brown” may spit out his cold Noir sermon — “First is first and second is nobody” — faster than James Cagney, his spiritual forebear in the 1931 pre-Code classic, Blonde Crazy: “The age of chivalry is past — this, honey, is the Age of Chiselry.”
Noir was never fundamentally a genre of shadows, but rather defined itself as a set of underlying attitudes and assumptions — All Talking Pictures were poised, Johnny-on-the-spot, to capture the ensuing madness when the stockmarket crashed in 1929.
It’s tempting to posit this moment of serendipity as both Noir’s metaphysical and political birth, and to suggest that economic calamity and advancing technology met for preordained reasons.
But what sinister apostate canon could possibly have contrived a history of cinema to beat the band where raw indifference is concerned — to produce a Robert Mitchum, whose physical beauty is an effortless nihilist shrug?
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Film is light. There are times, though, when that light may take on a Stygian cast, burning with a flamme noire severity, a weird and otherworldly keenness. Or it may burn lurid and loud — especially if it’s a very old film, acting like a séance that summons the unruly dead. The darkness in cinema best typified by that form we call Film Noir is in its essence an extension of the peculiarly American darkness of Edgar Allan Poe.
Early, nitrate-based film stock, with its twinkling mineral core, gives Poe’s crepuscular light its time to shine and thereby illuminate the world. No longer held in the solitary confinement of a page of reproduced text or an image, frozen, rendered in paint or ink. Poe’s singularly tormented vision is finally written alchemically, in cinematographic rays beamed through silver salts; into moving images of such aggressive vitality as to blast every rational thing from one’s mind.
A Black & White image flipped into negative makes black fire, or black sunlight such as illumines Nosferatu’s Transylvanian forests, through which a box-like carriage rattles at Mack Sennett speed. But with the slightest underexposure, a little dupey degradation of the print, or even a little imagination (such collaboration is not discouraged), this liquid blackness will spread everywhere and anywhere, the most luminous pestilence known to creation. Be it in the laughing nightmare of Fleischer cartoons of old (Out of the Inkwell, indeed) or John Alton’s vision of the night, we are left to wonder: is daylight burning out the corner of a building, or is it the blackness of the building which is eating into the sky?
As with many such questions, film permits us no easy answer. We are simply to watch as the characters smudge. As their shadows pulsate and flicker, emanate out beyond themselves. But if Poe represents the loss of control over one’s existence and the ensuing panic, then cinema, consciously or not, takes existential dread as a given.
God, a vague and unseen deity, died at the moment cinema was born, replaced by a new celestial order. Saints and prophets made poor film characters, giving off the feeling of having stepped out of a stained glass window, flat, Day-Glo icons moving uncomfortably through three-dimensional space. Movies rather rejoiced in dirt and rags, texture and imperfection, so that the most lackluster clown easily outperformed all the icon messiahs. At 45 minutes, Fernand Zecca’s The Life and Passion of Christ (1903) is one of the earliest feature films, but compared to the same filmmaker’s less ambitious, more playful shorts, it’s a beautiful snooze. A different execution climaxes his Story of a Crime (1901), in which we get to see, by brutal jump cut, a guillotine decapitation before our very eyes. This, as Maxim Gorky prophesied, is what the public wants. Or maybe the events of 1901, cinematic and otherwise, allow “the public” to define itself in ways heretofore unthinkable. The year brings Victoria Regina’s propitious death. And with her passing, Edgar Allan Poe’s pronunciamento on celebrity, “the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque,“ comes to new and anarchic fruition as an incendiary schnook, one of history’s finest.
When he shot President William McKinley at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo on September 6th, 1901, the currents of fear and vengeance unleashed by Leon Czolgosz would carry him on a journey from reflexive beatings at the hands of police and a post-Victorian mob — ladies in bustles shedding all restraint, transformed from well-honed symbols of middle-class decorum into yowling banshees, screaming “GIVE HIM TO US!” — straight to the electric chair, from whence his corpse would be taken for additional punishment, a process where ghoulish prison authorities at Auburn separated the head from the body, and then poured sulfuric acid on what remained, before secreting the sorry residue of America’s lost anarchist son into an unmarked grave.
Despite attempts to erase Czoglosz from history, a visual document survives, oozing with pathos and bitter recrimination. It is impossible, looking into those eyes, not to feel unnerved and, yes, sympathetic with him — his desperate act, after all, was as critical a part of America’s greed-engorged industrial fantasia as the near daily spectacle of peaceful strikers, his friends among them, being slaughtered in the name of profit.
If you like, the last photograph of Leon Czolgosz is a parable whose moral lesson has been swallowed by America’s collective madness. As when Poe’s fictive victim finds himself entombed alive behind a madman’s avenging masonry in The Cask of Amontillado. Whatever ethical aptitude we possess simply freezes, horror boring itself into the same hidden domain where rogue impulses boil, potentially releasing our repressed insurrections.
Motion pictures have presented similar threats to authority — from their misspent childhood years in late-Victorian fairgrounds to their grimy adolescence in Edwardian nickelodeon parlors. The inmates, emboldened under the spell of Klieg lights, were not only running the asylum, but re-shaping the world in its image, and the blunt instruments of church and state proved impotent against the anarchy of this freshly liberated ghetto. More profoundly than any other of cinema’s shady genres, it is Film Noir that embodies Edgar Allan Poe, Leon Czolgosz, and their respective relationships to our nation’s skittering, self-immolating rage.
Look at Cyril Endfield's Try and Get Me! (1950) — the last movie he would make in the United States before other ladies in bustles (or, more properly, the institutional shade of those who once bedeviled Czolgosz) chased him onto the Blacklist, then across the Atlantic — gives us two American saps for the price of one: a chronically underemployed veteran (Frank Lovejoy), lost amid post-war, petit bourgeois prosperity, and his opposite number: a swaggering crook (Lloyd Bridges) with all the charm of a fourth-rate aluminum siding hustler. The two meet. A spree of small-time stick-ups ensues. The fast money brings faster ambition, and ideas above their station (the kidnapping and ransom of the son of a local moneybags that can only go sideways) that soon look like destiny.
Try and Get Me! was adapted by Jo Pagano from his 1947 novel, The Condemned. It was inspired by the 1933 kidnapping and murder of California department store heir Brooke Hart and the subsequent lynching of the two men responsible. But while Pagano's novel focuses largely upon media's responsibility for stoking, and then unleashing the public's inner lunacy, Endfield's film never entirely leaves behind his two American losers, strung up with the blessing of at least one duly elected governor.
The censors were on to something, even if they could never fully articulate what precise blasphemies were being committed.
Take Hitchcock’s Vertigo, for instance, which isn’t pure Noir but is pure Poe: what would the surgical excision of an influence look like? Granted, the Noir genre seems an unlikely Poe derivative, but what of Laura — fatalism, romance and necro-fantasy (with Lydecker as Usher)? DOA is the kind of concept Poe might have dreamed up; one of the great Noir scribes, Cornell Woolrich is channeling Poe through an all-thumbs pulp sensibility. And how hard would it be to cast Val Lewton as the Horror Noir hybrid, with premature burials, ancestral disease, lunatics taking over bedlam?
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Long before the official beginning of Noir in the forties, Hollywood thrillers routinely used the visual tropes of dark shadows, low-key lighting, and expressionist angles while also showcasing detectives, gangsters, and the like. What Noir added was a sense of corruption, of capitalist society gone awry (or, perhaps, to the detriment of honest citizens, working exactly as it was designed to work). In Post-WWII America, this served as a catharsis to release the pent-up pressure: criticism of the status quo was considered unpatriotic during the war. Suddenly, it was acceptable, even desirable, to turn that righteous anger inward and expose the shortcomings of home. It's not that Noir movies were crusaders against injustice. They rather assumed that the system’s rot was the norm, a realistic backdrop that any adult story needed to acknowledge to gain credibility. Veterans lugged their battlefield experience of violence home with them; another American principle brought to new fruition.
Or to quote dirty cop Detective Lieutenant Barney Nolan (Edmond O’Brien) in 1954’s Shield for Murder… “You come to hate people. All of them. Everyone you meet.”
By Daniel Riccuito, Tom Sutpen and David Cairns