Freshman year of college, I took a film course, and as an example of noir — a term that was only then making the rounds of academic circles — the professor screened The Big Sleep. The title proved prophetic; I nodded off halfway through. Was this, I wondered, a style of film that did nothing for me?
The origin of the term “film noir” is an oft-repeated, apocryphal story. It’s commonly accepted that French film critic Nino Frank coined the phrase in 1946. Amusingly, that never happened. “Film noir” was, in fact, a term widely used in France in the 1930’s to describe films from such directors as Jean Renoir, Marcel Carné and Pierre Chenal: films about everyday people facing what the French called “destined tragedy.” When Nino Frank reviewed several American movies that debuted in France at the end of the war, he noted that a few of the crime films differed from Hollywood’s typical “run-of-the mill” police dramas; instead, these were nuanced, with “psychological plots” unfolding through “facial expressions, gestures, utterances [that rendered] the truth of the characters” — qualities he tangentially likened to the French noirs. A few months later, influential French critic Jean-Pierre Chartier looked at three Hollywood films and linked them clearly, thematically, to the traditions of French noir, hailing the “pessimism and despair that radiates from these characters.” (The French noirs, he noted, contained “some glimmer of resistance to the dark side, where love provides at least the mirage of a better world,” whereas their American counterparts featured characters “without redemptive qualities who behave according to [their] preordained disposition to evil.”)
But in 1955, authors Raymond Borde and Étienne Chaumeton, in compiling A Panorama of American Film Noir, seized on Frank’s essay (ignoring Chartier’s), somehow missed that he was referencing a style of cinema that had flourished for a decade in France and credited him with coining the phrase “film noir.” Furthermore, unable to grasp that these Hollywood films that dealt in mystery and murder reminded Frank of French noir not because of their subject matter, but because of the ways in which their damaged characters were drawn and developed, the authors determined that American noirs must be, by definition, “crime films.” And their “seminal” book on the subject inspired the next “scholarly” edition: 1979’s Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference to the American Style, which only doubled down on all the disastrous misreadings of Frank’s text.
It’s common today to say of noir that no one can agree if it’s a genre or a style or a sensibility — or even which films apply. Is it any wonder? The definition was flawed from the get-go. (The notion of “American film noir,” mind you, didn’t enter the public consciousness until the late ’80s, nearly half a century after the movies themselves were released. No mid-century Hollywood filmmaker thought they were making noirs; they were making melodramas or thrillers or crime stories.) But for a while, the assertions set forth by Panorama and the Encyclopedic Reference stuck. American noirs of the ’40 and ’50s were crime films: often populated by familiar character types, frequently doused in rain and shadow — but still, pretty much any old crime film.
But you know, there’s already a term for crime films: we call them “crime films.” Mercifully, the latest generation of noir aficionados have steered scholarship away from the Panorama and Encyclopedic texts and back to what French critics so admired in the ’40s — and likened to their own explorations of “destined tragedy.” And as for me, I came to realize early on that although I wasn’t particularly drawn to the visual motifs that had come to symbolize American noir — hard-boiled detectives solving impenetrable mysteries, sultry femme fatales bringing down decent but weak men — I was totally smitten with the themes that first defined it: isolation, alienation, predestination, obsession, fatalism, duality, duplicity, disillusion, despair, detachment, entrapment, existential angst and nothing less than the sad unraveling of the American dream.
And it’s those elements that help me decide if a film is a noir. Can noirs take place in the daytime? Of course. Can they have happy endings? Why not? Are there noirs that eschew the common visual components but embrace the thematic ones? Absolutely. And conversely, are there crime films that aren’t noirs? Oh, I sure think so. If a crime story isn’t driven by at least a few of the psychological and emotional markers I described above, I have a lot of trouble labeling it a noir. (The same goes for murder mysteries and thrillers.) Identifying noirs has become even trickier in recent years, as studios — recognizing the growing thirst for “rediscovered noirs” — have started packaging all their old black-and-white dramas in “noir collections,” regardless of content. Similarly, sites like IMDb try to cover every possible base in their listings — categorizing a film as, say, a thriller-mystery-romance-noir, further diluting the term.
Occasionally, I hear fans — and sometimes filmmakers — trumpet the theory that the cheaper the budget, the better the noir. The lack of funds, the logic goes, not only invites a seedier and gloomier atmosphere (imbuing the film with an air of hopelessness), but requires the creative team to think fast on their feet. But personally, I’m unimpressed by the line of thinking that goes “the script is second rate, and the cast isn't up to snuff, but the rain-soaked streets more than make up for it.” That’s not a great film; that’s just a wet one. (Nor am I convinced of a noir’s quality simply because the actors appeared in a lot of similar films: “the cast is full of noir staples” isn’t, in and of itself, a selling point. It’s not even a selling point for why a film is a noir.) There are big-budget noirs I love, and there are low-budget noirs I love, and most of the time, I’m unaware of which I’m watching; the budget is the last thing on my mind. As with other styles of films, I like strong scripts and solid casts. And for my money, it takes just one actor of limited range — be it an A-lister like Victor Mature or Gene Tierney or a B-lister like Stephen McNally or Evelyn Keyes — to dull the edge of a sharp noir.
Below, my top 25 film noirs; I limited them to American films, and because there were roughly 50 I really wanted to praise, I include after each entry an “honorable mention.” (The honorable mentions are in no particular order, but figure if I were doing a top 50, they would fall somewhere between 26 and 50.) Below you’ll see all sorts of film noirs: noirs that play like thrillers, noirs that overflow with romance, noirs with a touch of the supernatural. (The one thing you won’t see is noirs that make no sense. I’ve never bought into the notion that one of the chief attractions of film noir is a plot so convoluted you can’t follow it.) When I wrote up "The 10 Best Screwball Comedies," folks wondered if I had excluded certain familiar titles not because I didn’t care for them, but because I didn’t see them as screwballs. So let me be clear about the list that follows. Although there are certainly films commonly deemed noirs that I don’t see as such, few of them would’ve cracked my top 50. So if you don’t see a movie here that you love, feel free to ask about it; it’s possible that I disqualified it, but more likely that I simply don’t rate it highly enough to place in my top 50. And you might just discover I place it in my bottom 50, and then we’ll have lots to talk about. Enjoy!
25. Pitfall (1948): From its opening scenes, it purposefully captures the deadening impact of a 9-to-5 existence. Insurance adjuster John Forbes (Dick Powell) feels like “a wheel within a wheel within a wheel,” and when wife Sue (Jane Wyatt) reminds him it’s “you and 50 million others,” he whines, “I don’t want to be like 50 million others.” Pitfall gets under your skin as much for what it doesn’t say as what it does. The ambiguity is key. The state of John and Sue’s marriage is open to debate; are the half-heard conversations — the gentle joshing tinged with regret — evocative of a troubled union, or just the sort of shorthand longtime couples settle into? John’s state of mind as he takes up with Mona Stevens (whose boyfriend used embezzled funds to shower her with gifts) is open to debate. Oh, it’s clear that John’s wife reinforces an image of himself that he hates, whereas Mona challenges it. (She gives him permission to laugh.) But does he feel something for Mona, or is she a distraction — or merely an excuse for breaking rules that he’s too spoiled or self-entitled to obey? Any number of readings is possible. What isn’t open to debate is the fact that it’s ultimately a woman — one of the most faultless of characters — who winds up taking the rap for her association with three troubled men. Pitfall is a film that practically cries out for a feminist reading, and director André De Toth was wise to cast Lizabeth Scott as the object of desire, because it’s the sort of role at which she excels: a woman trying to get by in a world far more wicked than she fully understands. Mona Stevens is no femme fatale; she’s just an attractive lady who makes a lot of bad choices: who has lousy luck and horrible taste in men. As the movie gets darker in the second half — as the entanglements grow more intense — both Mona and John end up shooting men who are threatening them; John gets an admonishment from the police, while Mona gets jail time. And as John watches Mona taking her final steps of freedom, then pretty much puts her out of his mind, it’s like a punch to the gut. The male lead — you couldn’t very well call him “the hero,” although he’s the only man in the cast you’re encouraged to empathize with — is content to let the woman he was involved with take the fall, so that he can preserve the life he was so willing to throw away. (And his wife makes it clear that they’ll never discuss his infidelities again.) Pitfall not only examines the discontent and disillusion of the postwar years, it anticipates the blind, pressurized conformity of the Eisenhower era. It’s shockingly prescient. My honorary mention entry: Andrew Stone’s The Steel Trap (1952), another film about 9-to-5 malaise and the need for escape — in this case, literal escape, as bank manager Joseph Cotten decides to empty the contents of a vault and make his way to Brazil. But as always in noir, and heists in particular, you can account for every detail except the ones you don’t account for — and rarely have the fates so conspired against one man. Stone sustains an impressive level of tension from the first frame to the last.
24. Panic in the Streets (1950): Four similarly-themed films opened over a two-day period in August of 1950, prompting The New York Times to note, “Melodramas in which murderers and smugglers are the objects of intense manhunts are as much in evidence at Broadway movie houses just now as weeds are in suburban gardens.” These sorts of films had been in vogue for years, and the biggest challenge was making the hunters as interesting as their prey. In Panic in the Streets, a John Doe is discovered on the docks of New Orleans. Although he died of a gunshot wound, closer inspection reveals that he was suffering from pneumonic plague. Lieutenant Commander Clint Reed, a doctor with the US Public Health Service, is assigned to track down the infected, and casting Richard Widmark was a stroke of genius. He had first achieved fame — and an Oscar nod — as a laughing sociopath; Panic in the Streets was part of his transition to leading man status, but he still brings some of that wiry energy that first distinguished him, as well as elements of cunning, rawness and rage. And he needs them. Part of what makes Panic an effective noir is that everywhere Widmark turns — to law enforcement, to journalists, to everyday citizens — he meets with resistance; no one understands the concept of such a virulent airborne illness. The lack of cooperation — and Reed’s own inadequacies as a communicator — seem likely to doom him to failure. Panic in the Streets works today in all the ways that it worked in 1950. Widmark and Paul Douglas (as Captain Tom Warren, of the NOPD) are effectively paired; director Elia Kazan’s location shooting heightens the potential horror; and as the leader of a criminal gang, Jack Palance makes an electrifying screen debut. That said, it’s unlikely that anyone back then thought, “And this movie will play even better when the country has actually experienced a plague,” but well, here we are, and indeed it does. Details that in 1950 seemed there only there to promote conflict — the mistrust of scientists; citizens putting their personal needs ahead of society’s; the federal government withholding key information — have all played out in vibrant color. Now even the element that seemed least compelling in 1950 (a scene between Widmark and wife Barbara Bel Geddes near the end) rings true in a way that wasn’t readily understood in 1950, as the doctor — after treating patients all day — has to sleep on the front porch, because he can’t risk entering his own house. My honorable mention entry? Well, that would be the “intense manhunt for a murderer” that opened the previous day, Edge of Doom. Farley Granger is a young man from the slums caring for an infirm mother; when she passes on, and the local priest refuses to perform last rites, Granger searches for answers, for help and for blame. Critics complained it had watered down the bite of the original novel, and indeed, RKO’s new owner, Howard Hughes, had such cold feet that he called for major retakes, seeking to soften its attacks on the Catholic Church. But if you’ve watched any noirs, you know how to spot and ignore studio interference, and besides, Dana Andrews — there to provide most of the uplift — is so bland, you pretty much ignore what he’s saying. What sticks with you is an unsparing tale of the effects of soul-crushing poverty and a church mired in hypocrisy and indifference.
23. The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946): She’s Cora Smith, wife of the owner of a dusty roadside restaurant; he’s Frank Chambers, a drifter whom her husband hires as handyman. Cora married her (older) husband because he was the only man in town not thirsting for her — who didn’t make her feel cheap — but she’s come to realize she wants more. Frank only wants Cora. They see doing away with her husband as the solution to their problems, but they’re not smart, these two. They can’t think three steps ahead; neither one has the artfulness or the heartlessness to plan a murder, and so they stumble. They make unnecessary mistakes that place their plans at risk and potentially incriminate them. Is it any wonder that — at critical junctions — each of them cracks under pressure? The genius of The Postman Always Rings Twice lies taking two of the most extraordinary creatures to grace the screen — Lana Turner and John Garfield — and letting them play two of the most ordinary of characters. If one of the glories of film is that it makes stars seem at once exceptional and accessible, Postman doubles down on that paradox. As actors, Turner and Garfield have rarely seemed so luminous; as characters, they’ve never seemed so prosaic. The camera regards them like royalty (witness Turner’s entrance, or the pair disrobing for a late-night swim); the script — from James M. Cain’s novel — shows Cora and Frank given to fits of rage and waves of suspicions, viewing themselves (delusionally) as victims of passions beyond their control. The Postman Always Rings Twice, the most starstruck of noirs, takes the genre somewhere it rarely, if ever, goes again; we not only empathize with the killers, but root for them — not because their energies are so engaging, not because their actions are justifiable, but because the disconnect between how the stars are filmed and how the characters behave prompts us to look for virtue where none exists. We see them as forlorn even at their most unfeeling, adrift even at their most destructive. And we’re gratified by how badly they stumble; the mistakes they make along the way — and the bickering and betrayals that ensue — only serve to humanize them. We idolize them for being the most rarified of stars, and we appreciate them for being the most common of killers. The Postman Always Rings Twice is a dazzling conjuring trick; the narrative lurches and dawdles, Cecil Kellaway as the husband is miscast, and you know: none of it matters. (As an aside, Chenal’s 1939 adaptation of Cain’s novel, Le Dernier tournant, had been one of the glories of the French noir movement.) My honorable mention entry: Garfield again, three years earlier, in The Fallen Sparrow (1943). John “Kit” McKittrick spent two years being tortured in a Spanish POW camp before a friend secured his release; having returned to the States, he makes his way to New York City to investigate the “accidental” death of that friend. The murder mystery is merely the hook; the focus is on Kit learning to manage his PTSD (what was then called “combat stress”) before he becomes the next victim. (Garfield does phenomenal work as memories resurface, paralyzing him; at one point his face — held in close up — starts to sweat and spasm, eerily anticipating the symptoms of Guadalcanal Disorder, which wasn’t diagnosed until the following year.) Screenplay by Warren Duff, from the novel by Dorothy B. Hughes — both of whose names will pop up here more than once; cinematography by the great Nicholas Musuraca, who’ll help define the look of noirs for a decade to come.
22. The Accused (1949): A feminist response to the misogyny that overran the film industry in the 1940’s. The premise is pure noir. Loretta Young’s psychology professor is sexually assaulted by a student; in defending herself, she accidentally kills him. And then like so many noir protagonists, she’s left having to cover up her crime — and not merely cover it up, but lend her expertise to the investigation. But here’s the twist: before he died, her student penned a personality profile of his professor that’s likely to expose her: the sexually frustrated female of many a Forties flick (cf. Young’s own The Doctor Takes a Wife), who hides her fear of intimacy behind glasses she doesn’t need. Young realizes that to avoid detection, she’ll need to forge a more outgoing persona, and though it starts out as a ruse, she soon grows comfortable in her own skin. She discovers she enjoys this new game of cat and mouse, toying with witnesses who don’t recognize her because she’s figuratively and literally let down her hair. In time she reclaims the upper hand that women on screen had routinely enjoyed a decade earlier. The Accused is eager to expose how ’40s films have pigeon-holed women, and fittingly, screenwriter Ketti Frings lays the blame squarely at the feet of men. The film’s two male leads — one of whom (Bob Cummings) ultimately wins her — ogle and leer at Young as if it’s something women should not only be used to, but enjoy. (When she dresses up for a dinner date, Cummings notes approvingly that her “brains don’t show.”) It’s hard enough in this environment for a woman to get by. A woman in academia? She hasn’t got a chance. Small wonder that Young has receded into a repressed version of herself; it’s an act of self-preservation. Frings’ screenplay not only explains why so many post-war women on screen have lost their sense of liberation, but makes it clear that no men are going to swoop in and save them; they’ll have to save themselves. Although Frings receives the sole script credit, at least six other writers at Paramount had a hand in it, but it never feels like a hodgepodge; the touchups and rewrites result in energy, bite and an abundance of good lines. Hell, The Accused even manages to make that problematic staple of film noir — “the police will never believe it’s an accident, I’ll have to cover it up” — entirely convincing. Young is vibrant throughout, as she is two years later in my honorable mention entry, Cause for Alarm, in which her infirm and neurotic husband hurls accusations of infidelity and conspiracy at her, then posts them in a letter she struggles to retrieve. One of the best noirs to mine the tensions of suburban living, it’s another of those “everything that can go wrong, does” scenarios that frequent noir, but the misfortunes here don’t feel manufactured. They ring true, because we’ve all dealt with nosy neighbors, small-town bureaucrats and unruly children who turn sidewalks into their personal playgrounds.
21. Force of Evil (1948): “I didn’t have enough strength to resist corruption, but I was strong enough to fight for a piece of it.” And with those words, John Garfield — as high priced New York lawyer Joe Morse — seeks to justify some very bad behavior. Joe has aligned himself with mob boss Ben Tucker in a swindle that will allow them to take over the numbers racket: they’ll finance the 12 biggest banks, plus Joe’s brother Leo’s little one; the rest will go under and be absorbed by a criminal enterprise dubbed The Corporation. The only hitch: Joe’s estranged brother refuses to play ball. Joe sees himself as paying back his brother back for all the years he looked after him when they were young; Leo (played by Thomas Gomez) — who brands his brother “a crook and a cheat and a gangster” — has no interest in aligning with criminals. Although his own numbers bank is very much illegal, Leo describes himself as “honest.” (The brothers share a gift for self delusion.) Leo can’t stop replaying past hostilities, going so far as to liken his brother’s behavior to the story of Cain and Abel. Biblical references pour off the page in Force of Evil; writer/director Abraham Polonsky’s narrative is a parable about capitalism and corruption. He takes advantage of the location shooting common to late-’40s noirs, but he treats the settings impressionistically, mirroring Joe’s mindset. When Joe first goes to see Leo, the steep staircases and imposing shadows expose his anxiety at revisiting the slums where he grew up. When he sets his sights on his brother’s pretty secretary, New York becomes a city so bursting with life, there’s a florist on every corner — but as his dreams run dry, the streets grow solitary, and the Financial District turns into a ghost town. And late in the film, when Joe goes searching for his brother on the banks of the Hudson, the pavement seemingly falls away beneath his feet: a visual manifestation of his emotional spiral. Joe narrates the film, but the camera tells its own story. Given Polonsky’s exposé of the links between big business and organized crime, it’s no wonder he was blacklisted — but star and producer Harry Belafonte insisted he write the screenplay for his 1959 noir Odds Against Tomorrow, my honorable mention entry. Director Robert Wise — like Polonsky in Force of Evil — treats the exterior shots as more than mere “backdrops,” here using infrared film to imbue scenes with a sort of poetic despair. It’s a heist film, and if a key to heists also being noirs is that things go wrong because of character flaws that can’t be overcome, then this is the most powerful example. The film’s title is as bleak as noir gets — suggesting, if not a fatal finish for all involved, then at least a country so mired in ’50s mores and maladies that it has little hope of moving forward. But in Polonsky’s insistence on adding “racism” to the litany of character defects that can bring a man down, it feels like a film very much prepared to kick, scream and protest its way into the ’60s.
20. Tomorrow Is Another Day (1951): In a genre mostly mired in misery, the film’s swoony romanticism is irresistible. Bill was sent away for murder at age 13 and has finally been released 18 years later; he’s still a kid at heart, fascinated by fancy gadgets and fast women. He’s got a man’s urges, but no idea how to express them, let alone finesse them. And Cathy, the big-city blonde who catches his eye, is — to our great surprise — just as uncomfortable in her own skin: seemingly the tart Miss Been-Around of countless noirs, she turns — when times get tough — to a loving brother in suburban New Jersey, and to an upbringing she’s clearly more at home in than the Manhattan dance hall she haunts. Prison has stunted Bill’s growth; life in New York City has ground Cathy down. He’s been in the slammer for 18 years; she’s been in a prison of her own making. (The movie wonders which is worse: to be locked away as a juvenile, or have to make your way as a woman in the big city. You grow up fast or not at all.) On the lam from the law, they enjoy a whirlwind courtship, but you never once roll your eyes at the speed of it: these two scared losers realize they’ve found something special in each other — if not a soulmate, at least a kindred spirit — and they’re not about to let go. For two toughies, they’re both innocents at heart. At the first motel they hit, she dyes her hair brown; she claims she’s doing it because the police won’t be looking for a brunette, but you can tell she’s also looking for a fresh start — and for his approval. Yet even when Bill and Cathy are at their happiest, they’re always running or hiding; they’re forever looking over their shoulder, trying to ensure that the past doesn’t catch up with them: a familiar noir scenario. Tomorrow Is Another Day is one of many noirs graced with a happy ending, but like most of these, it’s merely deceptively happy; Bill and Cathy will have to settle for hope instead of certainty. It’s the rare film where Steve Cochran plays the good guy, and what a good guy he makes: an open-faced heartthrob, equal parts hurt and hunger. And Ruth Roman, opposite him, was never better: her transformation from sex kitten to earth mother is so convincing, it’s a little unnerving. Cochran is back three years later in my honorable mention entry, Private Hell 36 (produced by Ida Lupino's company Filmmakers), playing a dishonorable role more typical for him. In fact, he’s playing the best homme fatale in noir history: a crooked cop who dips into stolen loot, then convinces both his lounge-singer girlfriend (Lupino) and his fellow officer (Howard Duff) to keep quiet about it. Lupino and Duff were married in real life, and Cochran seduces both of them. Name another film fatale who could pull that off.
19. Night Has a Thousand Eyes (1948): Midway through Night Has a Thousand Eyes, Edward G. Robinson describes his ability to see into the future to a room of disbelievers: “Suppose you’re on a train. You look out the window and you see a white farmhouse. In a minute it’s gone and you’re watching cattle in a field, and just ahead, even though you can’t see it yet, is a clump of maple trees. Past, present and future. But to the man on top of the train, they’re all one. With one glance, he can see farmhouse, cattle and trees. Well, occasionally, I’m like that man on top of the train, although I’m sitting inside it.” We in the audience know that Robinson’s gift is real; we’ve watched it destroy his life. We were with him twenty years earlier when he was delighting small-town audiences with a mind-reading act, when these visions first appeared. We saw his agony at witnessing awful events he was powerless to prevent; then his fear that he himself was partly responsible for these misfortunes; and finally his decision to shut himself off from mankind, reasoning that if couldn’t interact with people, he couldn’t unwittingly seal their fates. And we ached as he grew into a lonely, disillusioned recluse. We believe in Robinson, but can he convince others of his gift in time to save the life of the woman whose death he’s foreseen? (It’s the luminous Gail Russell, with those large, sad eyes so appropriate to a woman too willing to accept her fate.) Robinson truly does seem to age 20 years from the flashbacks to the present day. His posture slumps — as if he’s borne the weight of the world on his shoulders — but his delivery grows fiercer and (to onlookers) more deranged; he understands better than anyone that — when it comes to life-and-death matters — time is truly of the essence. A lot of noirs wonder if we’re led by free will or predestination; Cornell Woolrich, who saw more of his novels and short stories turned into noirs than any other author, stands firmly in the latter camp. Characters trapped on a preordained path are, of course, a noir staple; Robinson’s curse is that he sees the preordination and can’t bear the outcome or the guilt. My honorable mention entry is another Woolrich adaptation: a giddier one, Deadline at Dawn (1946), which takes a familiar Woolrich theme — the elusiveness of identity — and dresses it in Clifford Odets’ poetic, metaphor-laden street talk. It’s a hot, muggy summer night in New York City, and the only thing that can enliven people is solving a good old-fashioned murder. As a dead-on-her-feet dance-hall girl, Susan Hayward places her voice so far back in her throat, it’s like her character has lost the spark to speak. It contains my favorite opening line in all of noir, when Lola Lane rises from a drunken sleep to greet an unwelcome visitor at the door: “Why, it’s Sleepy Parsons. Aren’t you dead yet?”
18. Dial 1119 (1950): It takes a staple of film, the hostage drama, and put its own spin on it: limiting its length and scope and, in the process, amplifying all of the noir elements. Playing out mostly in a seedy neighborhood bar, it resists the urge to “open itself up.” The claustrophobia is the point. Unlike a lot of hostage dramas, there’s none of that “you can go to work, but if you tell anyone I’m holding your family, I’ll kill them” nonsense that not only defies credulity, but dissipates tension. The hostages have nowhere else to go; they can’t escape to another room — not even a washroom — and get absorbed into a subplot. They can’t even have conversations among themselves. And the short running time works to the film’s advantage; once the hostage crisis begins, Dial 1119 plays out in real time. The unlucky patrons stare at that tacky clock on the wall (with the tall glass and bottle of beer emblazoned on it) and every tick of the minute hand — heading towards 9 PM, when quiet, unhinged Gunther Wyckoff (Marshall Thompson) has threatened to shoot them all — feels like a shock to the heart. We don’t learn much about Gunther until late in the movie, but it seems clear he’s a former soldier with mental health issues, who’ll do anything to get in touch with the psychiatrist who treated him. He’s the classic noir protagonist who hasn’t weathered the war well. And the five people he holds hostage are standard noir protagonists as well; in their own way, they’re as hungry as Gunther — it’s not just literal thirst that’s brought them to this bar. Each of them leading a sad, monotonous life from which they’re desperate for a little escape. They’re recognizable types, but not predictable ones; their quirks feel specific to them. (Virginia Field, as a barfly given to hitting on men — she describes herself as “a cheerer upper” — has a raucous laugh that can be used to amplify or break the mood, as needed.) And when they find themselves trapped with a gunman, they become a different kind of noir protagonist: the one at the wrong place at the wrong time. Dial 1119 was directed by Gerald Mayer (Louis B. Mayer‘s nephew, in his first feature), and whatever he didn’t know about making films, he must’ve picked up from watching them. The sensitive camerawork and tight editing ensure you’re alert to the very things the character themselves are alert to, and the film is awash in detail: the air conditioning that the bar uses to attract customers (“10° cooler inside,” the sign above the front stoop boasts), the novelty of which fascinates Gunther; the large TV positioned high on a corner wall, which forces the hostages to watch newsmen and bystanders trivialize their terror. (One interviewee wonders why the men in the bar don’t just charge the gunman; a TV personality refers to the situation as “the most dramatic spectacle I’ve had the good fortune to witness.”) There are half a dozen Chekhov’s guns — including an actual gun — and they’re all fired. But most impressively, the film achieves that rare and wonderful paradox of seeming so well rehearsed that the action looks spontaneous. None of the characters, mercifully, have those sudden, overwhelming monologues so typical of this genre, where their life stories pour out; they’re simply defined by the small, distinctive ways they respond to stress and struggle to control their terror. My honorable mention entry is another hostage drama, 1955’s Storm Fear. It was Cornell Wilde’s first directorial effort — his own production company financed it — and he hired Horton Foote to script it for himself and wife Jean Wallace. Both Wilde and costar Dan Duryea play characters that run counter to expectation: Duryea is the weak-kneed, handicapped father of a family who’s grown mired in his bitterness; Wilde is his bank-robbing brother, who unleashes terror, adventure and long-buried family secrets. (The role seems designed to let Wilde flex both his acting and bicep muscles.) With a strong supporting cast including Lee Grant (then blacklisted) and Dennis Weaver.
17. This Gun for Hire (1942): It doesn’t know exactly what it is, but it knows exactly what it has: it has fourth-billed Alan Ladd, in a watershed performance that upended the film. As the dailies came in, director Frank Tuttle was so struck by the muted power of Ladd’s performance (as hired killer Philip Raven) — and the unexpected empathy he engendered — that he began to shift the focus of the film in his favor. Albert Maltz and W.R. Burnett neatly transfer Graham Greene’s 1936 novel to the US West Coast and strip it down to its essentials, and it hums along from highlight to highlight. Veronica Lake plays nightclub singer Ellen Graham, charged by the feds with tailing a spy, and it’s fitting that Frank Loesser gives her a lyric about sleight of hand, because nothing in This Gun for Hire is what it seems. A payoff is a setup; an audition is an infiltration. A phone call is an interrogation. Lake disguises herself as Ladd, then Ladd disguises himself as the goon who tried to kill Lake. And all along, Ladd and Lake keep being thrown in each other’s path; she helps him escape capture, and he helps her cheat death. They have very different reasons for wanting to take down the same man, but still, there’s a certain “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” logic that propels both the narrative and their relationship, and indeed, by the end, Raven — who has shut himself off from human contact — comes to value Ellen as his friend. (When he smiles at her in the final scene, it’s like he’s flexing new muscles.) Ellen urges him throughout to look past himself and do something for his country, but the unspoken irony that drives This Gun for Hire is: what has that country done for Raven? Orphaned and abused, sent to reform school and branded a criminal, he was a ready-made assassin long before anyone put a gun in his hand. But still, he comes to believe that even though his fate is sealed, he can do more than just exact vengeance; his life was meaningless, but his death can matter. Although Jean-Pierre Chartier, in reviewing three new-style Hollywood films in 1946, saw only characters “without redemptive qualities,” redemption was in fact a key theme of American noirs, and of all the noirs about unlucky souls in search of salvation, This Gun for Hire — one of the earliest — remains the best. It was Ladd’s first noir; he’s never again as fascinating, but he’s no less commanding — and doubly amusing — in his final noir, my honorable mention entry, Appointment With Danger (1950). It’s one of those mid-century films that starts off with a dreadful paean to a beloved American institution, then — as many mercifully do — exposes the corruption at its core. As detective Al Goddard, Ladd’s in crackerjack form, and he’s aided by a funny, tough script by Richard Breen and Warren Duff and by a dream supporting cast: Paul Stewart as criminal mastermind Earl Boettiger, Jan Sterling as his moll, and Jack Webb and Harry Morgan as his henchmen. Sterling gets one of my favorite exit lines in noir, when she learns Ladd’s operating undercover and decides not to rat him out, then dismisses his efforts to thank her: “Don’t bother. Earl was good to me. I hope he kills you.”
16. You Only Live Once (1937): Moments away from his release from prison, Henry Fonda is already a dead man walking. Noirs are filled with dead men walking; often their stories start at the end and are related in flashback, so we know what’s coming. Here we don’t know, but Fonda’s Eddie Taylor does. He understands full well how the world looks on an ex-con. He’s a three-time offender, and although the public defender has secured him an early release, the warden reminds him that a fourth conviction will mean life. The film has barely started, and we’re already told that Eddie’s number is as good as up. Eddie cautions that he’ll make good “if they’ll let me.“ He’s referring to the trucking company that’s agreed to hire him, but his meaning extends well beyond that. (A convict who promises to look him up when he gets out reminds him that he’s “still one of the boys.” The head of the trucking company — when things get heated — threatens to “put him back in the pen where he belongs.” As the world sees it, once a con, always a con.) The sad irony is that the woman who has been waiting for him — Joan Graham (Sylvia Sidney), the secretary to the public defender — doesn’t know the world nearly as well as he does, or as well as she think she does; she still believes in the power of justice. When another robbery goes down, and Eddie becomes the principal suspect — but protests his innocence — she insists he turn himself in; she’s convinced he’ll be treated fairly. And then he’s tried, convicted and carted off to prison. Director Fritz Lang and screenwriters Gene Towne and C. Graham Baker keep you off balance; as much as you want to believe in Eddie, they keep instilling you with doubts; the force of his innocence doesn’t hit you until he’s already been sentenced to the chair. (Small wonder this film — so soaked in alienation, fatalism and pessimism — was a financial bomb during the Depression.) There are beautifully bleak set pieces: a bank heist in a rainstorm, a jail break on a foggy night, and prison bars that cast shadows that consume the screen. But mostly it’s about a pair of lovers whom society forces to go on the run. If Eddie is a victim of our cavalier disbelief in criminal reform, then Joan is a victim of an ingrained optimism that sets her up to fail: a Pollyanna-ish pursuit for which Lang — then watching his former country ravaged by a madman — had no patience. My honorable mention entry: another film consumed with yellow journalism and mob mentality, Cy Endfield’s stunning The Sound of Fury (1950), with Frank Lovejoy as a man who — unable to support his family by traditional means — takes on petty thefts that soon prove deadly. As the criminal dandy who persuades him to drive a getaway car, Lloyd Bridges serves up perhaps his best screen performance: every line feels like a slippery seduction. A story inspired by the 1933 lynching of two kidnapping suspects, Jo Pagano adapted the screenplay from his own novel, and if anything, it’s a little too faithful; the preachier parts don’t play well on screen. But the sermonizing in the second half is neatly offset by the arrivals of Adele Jergens and Katherine Locke: the latter a newcomer from the Broadway stage who didn’t remain in Hollywood for long, but who — like Beatrice Pearson in Force of Evil — seems far more gifted and distinctive than 90% of the starlets being groomed for success by studio heads.
15. A Woman’s Vengeance (1948): Midway through the film, the town doctor — a man of science — asks Jessica Tandy, “Do you remember in the gospel, men and women who were possessed by devils? I sometimes wonder if that isn’t the only plausible explanation for some of the things we do. Things we know are against our own interests, things that are obviously wrong and idiotic and suicidal, and yet we do them.” Ostensibly, he’s speaking about the way Charles Boyer’s country squire — despite having everything to live for — disposed of his wife in such a cavalier fashion that he’s likely to be convicted and sentenced to death. But he could just as easily be speaking about the woman in front of him, who he suspects knows more about the death of the wife than she’s letting on, but refuses to speak up. Or, you know, he could just be talking about noir in general. A Woman’s Vengeance, with its screenplay by Aldous Huxley, is a film about wasted years and wanton lives. Tandy (in an astounding performance committed to film just before she originated the role of Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire) sees her time running out because she’s 35, and society has deemed a woman of her years no longer desirable. And in fact, her fears are validated when she learns that Boyer — with whom she’s long been infatuated — has been seeking comfort with a woman half her age. In many ways, Boyer seems like a typical noir protagonist: the man whose past actions have put him on a forward path to the gallows. But although all the evidence points against him, the title tells a different story, and we soon come to realize there are four women who were capable of committing the crime, including the victim herself. By the midway point, motive and murderer are revealed, and the rest unfolds as a psychological game of cat-and-mouse, formidably scripted and strikingly played, with irony stacked upon irony. Visually, it’s enhanced by many of the tropes that we’ve come to associate with noir: the subjective camerawork, the tight framing, the chiaroscuro lighting (by one of the masters, Russell Metty), the blinding rain and lightning — all of them indicative of the manias that consume us and the mistakes that can’t be undone. My honorable mention entry — from the same year — features another man on trial for the death of his wife, and another screenplay more ruminative than the norm: An Act of Murder, with Fredric March as an aging and inflexible judge. (He’s been nicknamed Old Man Maxy, for the maximum sentences he imposes for even the most trivial of crimes.) When his wife (March’s real-life spouse Florence Eldridge) is diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor, the judge considers helping her die with dignity — the sort of crime for which, in the courtroom, he would show no leniency. An Act of Murder is one of those films I described in my intro that’s packaged alongside several other dramas — here as “Film Noir: The Dark Side of Cinema” — and as it’s not a film I’d typically think of as noir, I should probably object. But for the woman facing a gruesome fate she’s powerless to prevent (this is no painless Dark Victory-type condition) and the judge forced to relive the damage he’s done during a lifetime on the bench, I’ll allow it. March and Eldridge are spectacular.
14. The Turning Point (1952): In the late ’40s, the federal government became determined to combat the growing influence of organized crime, and so the five-member Kefauver committee was formed to investigate the issue. The televised hearings in early 1951 were seen by over 30 million Americans; even children were let home early from school to watch. It was inevitable that Hollywood would seek to ape the hearings and their findings, and over the next five years, over a dozen films resulted — the finest of these, by far, being The Turning Point. Here, special prosecutor John Conroy (Edmond O’Brien, in one of his best screen performances) returns to his Midwestern hometown to head up an anti-crime commission. His primary target: mob boss Neil Eichelberger (Ed Begley), who hides his criminal activities behind a legitimate trucking business. John is accompanied by his assistant and girlfriend Amanda (Alexis Smith, in her very best screen performance), a socialite with a social conscience, and challenged and prodded by his boyhood pal Jerry McKibbon (William Holden), a newspaper man who knows all the angles and wonders if his friend has what it takes to take out the mob. There’s a “slow and steady wins the race” aspect to The Turning Point that, on paper, sounds conventional, but that turns out to be subversive. The one who prides himself on being a cynic proves so naïve he gets a friend killed; the one derided as being an innocent does his job in such a plainspoken and thorough manner, he gets results. And the mob boss who thinks he’s in control — who’s convinced he’s untouchable — is the first to crack. German-born director William Dieterle — sadly, not nearly as well remembered as lesser European compatriots — maintains a tight grip on the proceedings (as he had on The Accused), with superb aid from cinematographer Milton Krasner. In the first half, when the committee is controlling the narrative, the film plays as a superbly acted and directed crime drama. But once Eichelberger testifies at the hearings — and his hands start to shake, and his ears start to burn — he realizes he needs to take deadly steps to cover up information that might come to light. The others get caught up in his panic and paranoia, and the film grows darker, more claustrophobic; the camera sweeps and tilts — and what was “merely” a crime drama becomes a noir: a noir filled with formidable set pieces. (It begins with the torching of an apartment complex that leaves blackened corpses in the street and ends with a hired assassin stalking his prey from the catwalk of a boxing arena.) It’s as if the crime boss’s deteriorating mental state induces the noir elements, affirming that noir is — more than anything — a state of mind. My honorable mention entry: another man taking on the mob, this time in Fritz Lang’s The Big Heat (1953). An investigation becomes a vendetta when the gangster Glenn Ford is pursuing makes it personal. As a minx in mink, Gloria Grahame has one of noir’s greatest redemptive journeys — one that takes her from pixilated pixie to avenging angel. If Pitfall is noir’s best look at suburbia in the ’40s, The Big Heat is the most explosive exposé of suburban life in the 1950’s, when even the most secluded of family neighborhoods are no longer safe from the infestation of organized crime. William Boehm based his screenplay on the Saturday Evening Post serial by William P. McGivern, who also penned the novel Odds Against Tomorrow.
13. Nightmare Alley (1947): Can one great star turn rescue a failing film? Of course it can. Tyrone Power is roustabout Stan Carlisle, who insinuates himself into a traveling carnival, then parlays the knowledge he’s obtained into a ticket to the big city. The foreshadowing at the top is a bit much — Stan asks so intently about the carnival’s most grotesque attraction, you can practically see his future laid out before him — but Power knows how to cut through the obviousness. He manages to combine a young man’s natural scorn with a genuine sense of wonder, and it’s that sense of wonder that convinces you that, for all his bravado, he’ll always feel vulnerable — and fall victim — to the hand of fate. Power is aided in the early scenes by two old pros, Joan Blondell and Ian Keith, as carnies Zeena and Pete. They once toured the high-priced nightclub circuit with a mind-reading act, in which he conveyed key information to her through a complex code — but Pete’s drinking has relegated them to seedier surroundings. Blondell has the look of someone whom the years have wizened, but never wised up; she gives Power both an ally and a mark worthy of his talents. The story itself is a strong one, charting Stan’s rise and fall as a mentalist (he hits the road armed with Zeena and Pete’s code), but the second half — in which Stan finds success as a society psychic — feels like one misfire or missed opportunity after another. Screenwriter Jules Furthman doesn’t know where to devote his energies. The wealthy patrons Stan swindles are so wide-eyed, you can’t tell if the intent is satirical. Stan’s plans to create a church in his name feels plot-driven (he seems to be reaching for impossible heights just so he can suffer a devastating fall), and his wife Molly’s religious objections are underwhelming. (Pretty much everything actress Coleen Gray does is underwhelming, and as the psychologist who outsmarts Stan, Helen Walker is worse; it’s hard to believe that a limited actress given to telegraphing her intent could ever pose a threat to Tyrone Power.) Worst of all, Stan’s scheme to rope in a wealthy investor by having Molly pose as the ghost of his late lady love is not merely preposterous, but dismally staged. By this point, Power is left to prop up the film by himself — and he does. It was a film 20th Century Fox didn’t want him to do — fearing it strayed too far from the image fans loved (and indeed, it bombed) — but he persuaded them. He positively bristles as a young man who’s too smart for his own good and knows it, but that hubris only emboldens him more — and ultimately leads to his downfall. My honorable mention entry? Well, instead of one con man, how about four? In Larceny (1948), Dan Duryea heads up a gang that swindles wealthy marks out of their money. Their latest target: war widow Joan Caulfield, whom John Payne is sent to seduce. His biggest obstacle: blonde bombshell Shelley Winters, Duryea’s moll, who’s developed a thing for Payne. When she spots Caulfield’s photo in his pocket, she grabs it, and a heated exchange ensues: “Who’s this?” “My kid sister.” “You’re lying again. If that’s your kid sister, I’m a boa constrictor with high heels.” Every time Winters enters the room, she walks off with the film; it’s the most clear-cut case of larceny on the screen.
12. The Reckless Moment (1949): Lucia Harper (Joan Bennett) leads a comfortable middle-class life in a seaside community some 50 miles outside of Los Angeles. Her husband is forever away on business, but she copes; she’s proud and capable, and her children and father occupy her time. As scripted and played, there’s nothing wrong with Lucia’s life; as filmed, there’s everything wrong with it. As director Max Ophüls and cinematographer Burnett Guffey frame her, she’s continually cramped into tight spaces, or closed off by shutters or imprisoned by banisters. The sense of confinement is palpable. Perhaps her daughter Bea feels constricted, too, and perhaps that’s why she’s taken up with a scoundrel from Los Angeles: an older man who informs Lucia he’s perfectly willing to stop seeing her daughter — for the right price. But when the man comes to see Bea that night, then Lucia herself discovers him dead on their property the next morning, she presumes the worst and disposes of the body far from shore. And all would be well, if a stranger, Martin Donnelly (James Mason), didn’t turn up at Lucia’s home soon after, looking to blackmail her on behalf of his partner, who has incriminating letters that link Bea to the dead man. Like most women in the 1940’s — and for decades after — Lucia has no control over the family funds; she doesn’t even how much ready cash she has. But she’s determined not to alert her husband — what could he do from overseas? And so she struggles to scrape together what she can while keeping up appearances. And to her great surprise, Martin — who you sense has also had his wings clipped (by his ruthless partner) — starts to empathize with her lack of autonomy. At one point he asks if she ever feels trapped, and she insists, no, not at all. But he recognizes it as a lie — and she does, too. His presence puts her life into clearer focus. There’s no privacy in her household; there’s no privacy in her town. She’s known by everyone, which should be comforting, but it’s suffocating. Over time, this blackmailer — who chides her for smoking and goes grocery shopping with her (he even carry the bags) and listens when she speaks — becomes a surrogate husband. (Mason is a genius at showing intimidation give way to intimacy.) And near the end, he makes the sort of sacrifice you’d expect only from a soulmate. The final scene — an overseas call from Lucia’s husband (unseen as ever), with the whole family crowding her and dictating her responses, as the house itself seems to smother her — is brutal. She’s had the truth revealed to her, but remains trapped by her circumstances. My honorable mention entry features another romance between a confined woman and the criminal who liberates her, the undervalued Walk Softly, Stranger (1950), with Joseph Cotten and Alida Valli. She’s a heiress who suffered a skiing accident that left her wheelchair bound — which she sees as punishment for her recklessness. He’s a grifter who tried to make a fresh start, but couldn’t resist one last heist — and now the past is catching up with him. They’re two broken people bonded by mistakes they’ve come to regret, and as always in film noir, there’s no escaping those mistakes. Valli could convey more with a half-smile than most actresses could with pages of dialogue.
11.Thieves’ Highway (1949): Another indictment of capitalism, but this one is as tangy and tasty as the Golden Delicious apples at its core. Former soldier Nick Garcos has returned home to Fresno, his face beaming and his arms full of gifts — but he soon discovers the tragedy that unfolded while he was away. His father, a trucker, hauled a load of tomatoes up to San Francisco and entrusted them to wholesaler Mike Figlia; on his way home, in an incident he can’t remember, his truck ran off the road, crippling him. Nick, determined to do right by his father, heads north in a truck full of apples, bent on revenge. A.I. Bezzerides, adapting his own novel, includes pungent details: the policeman at the market willing to overlook infractions for a sample of the product; the hole-in-the-wall grocery store being run out of business by the crooked wholesalers. The truckers eager to undercut the growers, and the wholesalers eager to undercut the truckers. And director Jules Dassin amplifies the themes with location shooting in orchid fields, along mountainous roads, and at the bustling nighttime marketplace in San Francisco. Richard Conte serves up his best screen performance, his character slowly discarding the rose-colored glasses that “wartime victory” afforded him, and as Figlia, Lee J. Cobb is a cigar-chomping swindler masquerading as a businessman: the sort who tells a guy “I like you” before fleecing him, robbing him or crippling him. And all that said, Thieves’ Highway would be a fairly dry, if picturesque, affair, if not for the inclusion of street prostitute Rica (Valentina Cortese), whom Figlia hires to distract Nick while he robs him blind. Rica and Nick forge a complicated relationship. She comes on strong; he blocks her. She feels wounded; he grows protective. She opens up, and he follows suit. But it’s not just tenderness the pair unleash in each other; it’s sexual appetite. “You know, you’re OK,” he tells her, as they get acquainted in the apartment where she’s offered him rest, “going out of your way to give me your bed.” “Someday I’ll be sleeping with you in your bed,” she responds, and your jaw drops. It’s followed by a mutual seduction over a game of tic-tac-toe — her nails on his bare chest — that’s one of the most erotic scenes in ’40s cinema; how any of this got past the censors is anyone’s guess. The film is marred only by a studio-imposed ending that wraps things up a bit too hastily; it doesn’t do much harm, as it yields the results you want, but the script has been so scrupulous about exposing the corruption that’s infiltrated all facets of American society, it’s a little disconcerting to see everything settled by a well-timed call to the cops. My honorable mention entry, from the same year, is another noir with a social conscience: City Across the River, Maxwell Shane’s look at juvenile delinquency — its causes and its consequences. Based on the Irving Shulman novel The Amboy Dukes, shot on location in Williamsburg and Gerritsen Beach in Brooklyn, it examines how teenage boys growing up in urban squalor feel their choices are so limited — and their futures so bleak — that petty crime and gang affiliation seem like the only path forward. But the polemics never overwhelm the entertainment value. As you take in colloquialisms the kids employ (“Take him away from here before we make him into a hamburger”), the nicknames they reserve for each other, the mimicry of more upstanding characters, the turf wars between gangs, the murder midway through, and the climactic dance at the boy’s club, it start to feel — spookily — like a noir warm-up for West Side Story.
10. The Big Combo (1955): Riotously entertaining: the gangster film reimagined as an obsessive duel-to-the-death between like-minded opposites. Cornell Wilde is Police Lieutenant Leonard Diamond, who’s consumed with taking down a syndicate called the Combination, a criminal banking system that engages in money laundering and lending — and he’s chosen to target the man who sees to their finances, one Mr. Brown (Richard Conte). Try as they might, the police can’t make any charges against Mr. Brown stick, but Diamond realizes that if anyone knows anything incriminating, it’s his girlfriend Susan (Wilde’s real-life wife Jean Wallace), so he’s been tailing her for months. And in the process, he’s fallen in love with her. (“What is it about a hoodlum that appeals to certain women?“ he indelicately demands of the showgirl he’s sleeping with. She knows he’s not talking about her.) Mr. Brown isn’t the gruff old-world gangster of countless films. Neat and well groomed (he admits to a fondness for manicures), he’s equally at home indulging in sadism and sarcasm. In his first encounter with Diamond, he nicknames him “Small Change,“ and later psychoanalyzes him: “The only trouble with you is, you'd like to be me. You'd like to have my organization, my influence, my fix.” But if Diamond is secretly thirsting for Mr. Brown’s life, Mr. Brown envies the loyalty Diamond inspires among his colleagues and underlings. The Big Combo is cast with actors who know how to take common types and give them uncommon twists. Their characters don’t so much speak as lecture; their obsessions are so all consuming, they’ve thought through arguments for every occasion. (“You think this is mink, Miss Lowell?” Diamond demands of Susan, imploring her to turn on Mr. Brown: “You think these are the skins of little wild animals sewn together for your pleasure? You're mistaken. These are skins of human beings: people who've been beaten, sold, robbed, doped, murdered by Mr. Brown.”) Philip Yordan gives them some of the best tough talk in noir history, but the actors are careful to play it straight; their line readings — distinctive and emphatic — never lapse into self-indulgence. Director Joseph H. Lewis reserves the excesses for the camera. Of all cinematographers to define the noir look, no one engaged in the hallucinatory contrasts that John Alton did. It might’ve begun as a way of disguising cheap sets and low budgets, but it became his imprint: blacking out backgrounds in inky darkness, as key lights pick out the characters. The final scene, set in an airport hanger draped in black velvet and shrouded in fog — with a revolving light illuminating the actors’ faces, then losing them again — is movie magic. My honorable mention entry is another late-’50s film keeping the noir tradition alive, 1956’s Nightfall: a roundelay for six characters in search of stolen cash, peace of mind, romance and the truth. This story of an innocent man pursued both by criminals and authorities — crime novelist David Goodis’s greatest success — was published in 1947, but it took nearly a decade to reach the screen. Happily, along the way, it acquired the ideal creative team: director Jacques Tourneur, screenwriter Stirling Silliphant, cinematographer Burnett Guffey (who eschewed the high-contrast look of colleagues like Alton and Musuraca in favor of more naturalistic, gritty grays), plus a pitch-perfect cast: Aldo Ray, Anne Bancroft, Brian Keith, Rudy Bond, James Gregory and Jocelyn Brando — all immersed in a flashback-laden tale of urban paranoia. Alternately brutal and poetic, and frequently dazzling.
9. Ride the Pink Horse (1947): It’s fiesta time in the border town of San Pablo, New Mexico, but ex-G.I. Lucky Gagin hasn’t come to celebrate. He’s got a score to settle with the gangster who rubbed out his army buddy. Like many a noir protagonist, Gagin has returned stateside angry and disillusioned, abandoned by a country that didn’t look after its own. An awkward indigenous girl named Pila (Wanda Hendrix) — who’s come to town for the festival wearing her grandmother’s dress, her hair a mess of braids — spots him and latches on; she senses that this odd and angry stranger can offer her adventure and perhaps a sense of belonging that have eluded her. He in turn dubs her “Sitting Bull” and advises her to “go home and play with your buffaloes.” How do you not hate a guy like that? Well, you don’t if it’s Robert Montgomery (who also directed), who’s well aware of his onscreen charm, and who makes it clear why Gagin is so unwilling to engage: tapping into his humanity will only jeopardize his mission. Screenwriters Ben Hecht and Charles Lederer imbue Dorothy B. Hughes’s novel with both a graceful inevitability and a sense of surprise. Gagin is suspicious or disdainful of everyone he meets, but no one is willing to leave him be; they think they can help him, or — in a couple of cases — they think they can use him. Or maybe they’re as lonely as they sense he is. Their constant intrusions keep redirecting the narrative, hastening detours that draw Gagin’s focus and tempt him to open his heart — that thing he fears the most. (There’s nothing more enchanting than Pila showing up late at night at the merry-go-round where Gagin has taken shelter. Although he’s still hiding behind a mask of indifference, he insists she take a spin. Mounting the pink horse, she revels in the ride, but anxious to emulate Gagin’s sense of detachment, struggles to temper her delight.) Cinematographer Russell Metty amplifies the ironies and horrors at the heart of the material. The darkest scenes happen against the most celebratory of backdrops; the most brutal encounter — Gagin’s new pal and protectorate Pancho (Thomas Gomez, Oscar nominated) being beaten up by thugs — plays out before a group of children blithely riding the merry-go-round. The sight of one boy straining to turn his head to watch something no child should be exposed to — as if wittingly scarring himself — is one of the most disturbing in all of noir. My honorable mention entry is another adaptation of a Hughes novel, this one In a Lonely Place (1950), with Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Grahame entering into an affair that’s doomed before it’s even begun. He’s destructive and self-destructive, with colleagues who enable him. She’s attracted to danger and to power — until she loses the nerve to face them. There are a dozen things wrong with this film — most of them in the script: key police interrogation scenes gone missing, weak show business satire, clumsy plot propellants. But Bogart and Grahame make it easy to overlook the failings. These are two adults eager to repeat all the mistakes of the past, while they convince themselves they’re healing and moving on.
8. Alias Nick Beal (1949): “In every man there is an imperfection, a fatal weakness,” Ray Milland intones at both the beginning and the end of the movie. He’s talking about what makes human beings easy prey for the Prince of Darkness, but he might as well be restating the essential premise of film noir. Alias Nick Beal is a Faustian film about a principled DA who compromises his way to the governor’s chambers — and the devil who makes him do it. Nick Beal’s devil doesn’t cast spells to get his way; he merely persuades with common sense, a firm stance and seemingly unlimited funds. As Beal, Milland is dapper and sleek and sinister; in a characterization that, in retrospect, seems decades ahead of its time, he’s the most smooth talking of lobbyists: the force behind every politician too admirable to understand the corrupting nature of compromise, yet too ambitious to resist it. Milland reduces his body language to a minimum, asserting the authority of stillness; the few times he erupts in anger are all the more unsettling. As the seductress dispatched to ensure that rising politician Thomas Mitchell sells his soul, Audrey Totter excels as vixen and victim and everything in between; the film is further buoyed by supporting turns by George Macready (cast against type as a man of the cloth) and, as Mitchell’s wife, Geraldine Wall, in one of her few film roles worthy of her talents. Screenwriter Jonathan Latimer knows just how to work the issues that plague Mitchell’s politician: in particular, the way he comes to accept that the end justifies the means, and the resulting, self-inflicted damage to his soul. It’s a film that’s only grown more nuanced, relevant and persuasive in the last 70 years. Alias Nick Beal asks: if you’re the only candidate actually fighting for the people, do you have a moral obligation to ensure you win? Mitchell’s opponent is out for himself; Mitchell can get elected only if he aligns himself with a shady figure who controls a sizable bloc of votes. Isn’t it worth briefly abandoning his principles? Doesn’t that serve his constituents better than running a noble campaign and losing? Director John Farrow and cinematographer Lionel Lindon work a powerful magic: not just with the standard noir tropes (shadows and fog, tilt angles and forced perspective), but through their use of Beal himself. Beal never enters a room; instead, a door closes, and he’s behind it — or a person steps away, revealing him. Or the camera shifts to one side, and he’s just there — as if evil has been present all along. Farrow knows how to play on your paranoia. Ray Milland also stars in my honorable mention entry — the previous year’s So Evil My Love — as a painter, thief and con artist who persuades his new lady love to ingratiate herself with a former school chum in order to fleece her of her funds. It takes about a half hour for director Lewis Allen to position all the pieces, but once they’re in place, the film proves a propulsive ride that keeps picking up speed. Milland is splendid as ever, but Ann Todd and Geraldine Fitzgerald are even better. It’s a film about the depths to which we’ll descend to hold onto love, and the depths we’ll risk when we realize we’ve lost it.
7. Detective Story (1951): It’s the noir that no one wants to claim. I see folks who worship noir instantly disqualify it, particularly if they prize familiar markers. There are no femme fatales, no complicated mysteries to unravel; it’s not swimming in shadows and rain and fog. But then I see people who look down on noir insist, too, that Detective Story doesn’t qualify, because it’s too good. It’s something loftier: a “character-driven psychological study,” perhaps. (After all, it’s directed by three-time Oscar winner William Wyler and adapted from a stage play by Pulitzer Prize winner Sidney Kingsley.) It couldn’t possibly be noir, because it eschews its worst clichés. And eschew them it does, but it also embraces its boldest themes. Film noir is littered with a litany of sad men unable to escape the pull of the past. Detective James McLeod (Kirk Douglas) was raised by an abusive father who drove his mother to a sanitarium, and McLeod vowed to do better: to hold himself and those he met to a higher standard. But instead he held them to impossible standards, growing intolerant and inflexible. To McLeod, every criminal is a career criminal: “It’s never a first offense — it’s just the first time they got caught.” And when he discovers that his wife has been hiding skeletons of her own, he shows her as little mercy as the lowlifes who pass through his precinct: hurling epithets that you suspect aren’t unlike the ones his father unleashed on his mother. McLeod thought he had learned from the past, but instead, he set himself on a path to repeat it. (A reporter warns him, “You’re digging your own grave — it’s right there in front of you,” but McLeod can't undo decades of conditioning.) “I built my whole life on hating my father,” he laments late in the film: “All the time he was inside me, laughing.” If that’s not noir, what is? Detective Story — which takes place inside the squad room of a New York City police precinct — boasts a large ensemble, and Wyler knows how to vary the vignettes while heightening the feeling of foreboding. (That mounting sense of dread: also pure noir.) Horace McMahon, Joseph Wiseman, Michael Strong and Lee Grant re-create their stage roles, and they’re joined by screen favorites William Bendix, Cathy O’Donnell, George Macready and Gladys George. As Douglas’s wife, Eleanor Parker was deservedly Oscar nominated; Douglas — in one of his greatest performances — was sadly overlooked. My honorable mention entry is about another man forced to confront — and pay the price for — a pattern of behavior: this man charged not with charging criminals but with defending them. In The Tattered Dress (1957), Jeff Chandler is a high-priced New York lawyer who prides himself on winning his cases, by whatever means necessary; summoned to Nevada to defend a wealthy woman of murder, he secures a “not guilty” verdict by putting the town sheriff on the stand and humiliating him. (It’s Jack Carson, sinister and splendid.) When the sheriff subsequently sets him up, Chandler is forced to defend himself not only against a bogus charge, but against conduct that makes a jury of his peers eager to convict him. (His closing argument gets a bit cloying, but given that screenwriter George Zuckerman is hammering the final nail in the coffin of McCarthyism, you give it a pass.) Gail Russell, whose parts had grown spottier because of her drinking, is once again unforgettable, here as a witness for the prosecution; four years later, she’d be found dead in her apartment at the age of 36.
6. I Love Trouble (1948): The most delicious of hard-boiled detective films. Franchot Tone is Stuart Bailey, a gumshoe who keeps finding himself surrounded by stunning women (Janet Blair, Glenda Farrell and Adele Jergens, for starters). Pretty much every time he leaves one, another is waiting for him — and they all know how to toss him a good line. (It’s not just the leads; it’s the bit players too. When he enters a nightclub and asks the hatcheck girl, “Hey, if you wanted to find Mr. Keller, how would you go about it,” her comeback is also a come on: “Well, my way wouldn’t help you.”) Writer Roy Huggins based the screenplay on his own novel; it was his first, and he conceded that he taught himself to write by studying and mimicking Raymond Chandler. And indeed, about a dozen plot points are borrowed from Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely, a fact that has caused some noir experts to decry or underrate the film. But if you’re going to start disqualifying film noirs for being derivative, you’ll end up with about three left. Huggins would go on to a long and successful television career, creating some of the medium’s most popular series (including The Fugitive, Maverick and The Rockford Files — and Bailey himself would reappear as the lead of 76 Sunset Strip), but even at this early stage of his career, he understands how to write for the camera. If stylistically he borrows from Chandler — and he’s very much in command of that sense of menace that links Chandler to the noir tradition (not every hard-boiled detective story, it must be noted, is a noir) — thematically he seems more in debt to Woolrich and Hughes. Issues of identity and duality are very much in play here, as is the impossibility of outrunning the past. As Bailey, Tone has an unruffled intensity that’s undeniably appealing. When he meets up with a woman, you can’t tell if his first instinct is to butt heads or lock lips; maybe he’ll give both tactics a try, sometimes within seconds of each other. It’s a world where every chauffeur is a bodyguard, and every bodyguard a goon. Every doorway is the entrance to a nightclub, and every alleyway is the setting for an ambush. The dialogue is full of great quips, but the zingers aren’t there for their own sake. The film is populated with people who are too smart for their own good, who take risks the rest of us wouldn’t dare — and occasionally, that proves their downfall. I Love Trouble has got my favorite reveal in all of noir, and it’s not even the reveal of the killer (that comes 10 minutes later); it also has my favorite ending line, which is about the end of a line. My honorable mention entry follows another private investigation, this time by an ex-cop struggling to locate his missing son. Guilty Bystander (1950), starring Zachary Scott, serves up one of the seediest, sleaziest visions of New York City ever committed to film; it’s a town of grotesques and lowlifes, huddled in tenements and warehouses. Director Joseph Lerner’s low-budget parameters neatly fit the film’s skid-row setting and alcoholic antihero. The middle section drags a bit, but the actors — all cleverly cast against type (the femme fatale is Kay Medford, who’d achieve her greatest fame as Fanny Brice‘s mother in Funny Girl) — hold your interest. As the film proceeds, you grow not only patient, but charitable.
5. The Set-Up (1949): The opening credits play over a boxing match already in progress, culminating in a KO. We cut to a town square, where a large clock announces it’s 9:05 PM; The Set-Up is 72 minutes long, and we’ll follow the events of the evening in real time. We move towards the façade of an arena, and as the camera pans a parade of paying customers, including a woman who doesn’t know why she let her husband drag her there (“the last time, I had my hands over my eyes the whole time”), we come to rest on two men placing bets. They seem to know the sport well. One notes that boxer Bill “Stoker” Thompson has a match that evening. It’s about the first detail we’ve been offered, so we listen attentively; their only comment about him, laughing, is “is he still alive?” And then the camera crosses the town square to a hotel, and in a room a few stories up, an alarm awakens Stoker in time for his fight. His wife is desperate for him to quit boxing: “How many more beatings do you have to take?” — and when he counters with the memory of a good fight, her recollection of events trumps his: “Two hours after, you still didn’t know who I was.” The aging Stoker — 35, a relic in the world of boxing — is confident that he has a chance against the young kid he’s taking on tonight; he still believes the heavyweight championship is just “one punch away.” But what he doesn’t know is that his manager has made a deal with a local bookie to have Stoker throw the fight — and he’s so certain Stoker will lose that he doesn’t see the point of telling him. The Set-Up doesn’t rely on underscoring to manipulate our responses; there are no flashbacks to Stoker’s early years to explain how he “got here” — a story-telling crutch common to these kinds of films. Director Robert Wise and screenwriter Art Cohn (adapting a poem by Joseph Moncure March) understand the truth behind boxing: the past doesn’t matter. You’re only as good as your next fight. And the fight that plays out in the ring is as savage as any seen on the screen; Wise knows exactly when to focus in and when to cut away — particularly to onlookers with the faces of an angry mob. (“Kill him!” cries the woman who formerly had her hands over her eyes.) The Set-Up is one of the leanest of the great noirs, but its parameters are so clear and assured, you don’t yearn for more; in the richness of detail, in the tight precision of the editing, in the brutality of the match that leaves Stoker beaten and bloodied, you're given everything you need. As the wife, Audrey Totter — captured mostly in silence — is sensational, but it’s Robert Ryan’s movie, and his best screen performance. That obsessive intensity that he carried from film to film could be one-note and limiting; it was too often used as the quality that set him up to lose. Here it’s the quality that allows us to believe he might just win, in a scenario engineered for failure. My honorable mention entry is also from Wise: the 1948 western Blood on the Moon (1948). It’s a redemptive story common to noir, replanted to uncharted territory. There are few wide-open spaces and no high-noon showdowns; much of the action takes place at night — in crowded camps and barrooms — or in wooded areas that barely let in the light. But these — although among the most gorgeous sequences Musuraca ever shot — are merely the visual trappings. Robert Mitchum is a Texas cowhand haunted by his mistakes, summoned west to help his old pal Robert Preston settle a dispute. But when he discovers he’s being used as a hired gun to fleece a local rancher, he realizes that running away from his problems hasn’t allowed him to escape them, and that not choosing a side isn’t the same as remaining neutral. Mitchum and Preston are well-matched, and if a film can only include two women, it can’t do much better than Barbara Bel Geddes and Phyllis Thaxter.
4. Criss Cross (1949): The camera soars over Los Angeles at night, then comes to rest in a crowded parking lot where two adults are necking, their tryst exposed by the headlights of a car. They’re swiftly identified. “Anna,” he pleads, his heart practically thumping out of his chest. “Steve,” she cautions, tempering his impulsiveness. He addresses her, and when she responds, she’s looking straight into the camera, and that tells you all you need to know: it’s his story, and she’s his obsession. No one is a victim in Criss Cross, but my, how everyone acts like one. Steve moans repeatedly that he’s a victim of fate, but it’s all justification for some really awful decisions — and not decisions he’s making with his head. As played by Burt Lancaster, Steve is among the most aggressively self-deluded of noir protagonists. He returns to town after a year away to see his ex-wife Anna; he denies it, but everyone sees though him, even characters who don’t know him well. His mother and his cop friend warn him against taking up again with Anna, and when he won’t listen, they run her out of town. But no sooner does she elope with a gangster than she’s back begging for help from Steve, baring the scars that her husband has left her. But can we believe her? Anna may be a lot of things — and she is indeed a lot of things, a credit to screenwriter Daniel Fuchs and to Yvonne De Carlo’s cunning performance — but one thing she is not is innocent. In her barrettes and print dresses and slacks, she’s like a clever cat clawing its way into the middle class; she seems determinedly in search of that upward mobility that was promised in the years after the war — and started to become a reality by the late ’40s. Anna’s not obvious like some femme fatales; the camera doesn’t imprint her with the mark of a dangerous woman. It imprints her with a mark of a fascinating one: one whose energies you enjoy, whose feistiness you applaud, and whose practicality you admire until — in the final reel, when she makes her intentions clear — you come to despair it. She’s a catalyst who never lets on how much she’s in control. Criss Cross builds to a heist sequence — beautifully shot, like the rest of the film, by director Robert Siodmak and cinematographer Frank Planer — but the heist is just one more painful chapter in a doomed love story. My honorable mention entry is also about a heist, but in this case, it’s the focus of the film. It’s John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle, the model for countless heist films to come, and the rare film that feels more like a noir today than it did originally. In 1950, the film was greeted as a crime drama of nail-biting suspense; now that we know film heists are typically doomed to failure, we focus more on the characters: the obsessions that consume them — and that ultimately do them in. The Asphalt Jungle defines its characters so clearly, in fact, that the various denouements seem today a bit too heavily foreshadowed, and a touch too tidy. But the loss of narrative surprise is offset by the sense of grave regret that runs through the film; it’s to Huston’s credit that the film never buckles under the weight of its characters’ squandered, lost and missed opportunities.
3. The Breaking Point (1950): “You know how it is early in the morning on the water? Everything is quiet except for the sea gulls a long way off, and you feel great. Then you come ashore and it starts, and in no time at all you're up to your ears in trouble. And you don't know where it began.” John Garfield is Harry Morgan, a charter boat captain desperately trying to eke out a living in Southern California. The ocean might be vast, but Harry’s world is not. He and his wife and two young daughters are cramped into a rented bungalow; he’s determined to do right by them — and by his friend and partner, Wesley (Juano Hernández) — but every responsibility has started to feel like an obligation he can’t meet. Ernest Hemingway called this film version of his To Have and Have Not the finest adaptation of any of his novels, and Garfield felt it boasted his best performance. It’s hard to argue with either. Here, the malaise of encroaching middle age meets the disillusion of the postwar era, as Harry wrestles with a simultaneous feeling of isolation and entrapment. How does a former naval officer readjust to life on shore — and to the mundane pressures of supporting a family? A wealthy passenger bails after a trip to Mexico, leaving Harry without the funds to make ends meet; a crooked lawyer proposes a couple of illegal solutions, but how far — and how low — is Harry willing to go? As in all his best films, director Michael Curtiz makes the mundane details of everyday life fresh and surprising; The Breaking Point manages to confound expectations on pretty much every level, scene by scene. Whereas many noirs move inexorably towards a predetermined fate, Harry’s life seems to move in fits and starts — a setback here, a lucky break there — but that somehow only fuels the feeling of futility that’s begun to consume him. Unlike so many noir couples, where a prudish or nagging wife practically invites her husband to consider adultery, Harry and wife Lucy (Phyllis Thaxter) enjoy an active and passionate sex life; not only does he adore her and their children, but she is the one he takes to confiding his troubles to. ("I wake up in the night sweating. I'm in trouble and there's no way out," he confesses as he feels the walls closing in.) But that doesn’t stop him from enjoying the attention of the boozy lady (Patricia Neal) who’s been eyeing him ever since that trip to Mexico — and it doesn’t stop his wife from dying her hair blonde in order to compete with the floozy her husband doesn’t even desire. (Neal, to our delight, approaches her “femme fatale” almost ironically; her character senses that that’s the role society has left her to play, and sadly sees her inability to make headway with Harry as a sign of her fading allure.) There’s one soapy scene around a kitchen table, but the rest is taut, tart and unsentimental, both picturesque and suspenseful, and the final image — a creation of the filmmakers — speaks to the alienation not only at the heart of noir, but at the heart of the country’s social fabric. As the film was nearing completion, the Red Scare flared in Hollywood, and Garfield was named one of the tainted stars; despite glowing reviews, Warner Bros. withdrew their support and let the film die. My honorable mention entry is another exploration of encroaching middle age, and the fear and compromises it invites: Fritz Lang‘s Clash by Night (1952, from the play by Clifford Odets), with Barbara Stanwyck, Robert Ryan and Paul Douglas outstanding as ego, superego and id. Alfred Hayes’ adaptation recasts the play’s Polish family on Staten Island as an Italian family in a California fishing village, and Lang uses the sea air and the surf and the gulls to suggest the wanderlust of youth — and patterns that Stanwyck is determined to break.
2. The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946): In noir, the sins and pains of our past come back to haunt us. Lots of noirs relate the events of the past anecdotally, or in flashback. Martha Ivers begins there, devoting a full fifteen minutes to a night 18 years earlier, when young Martha rebelled against her tyrannical aunt, struck her, and sent her hurtling down a flight of stairs to her death. There were two witnesses, both her age: tagalong Walter O’Neil, whose father had been ingratiating himself with her aunt, and troublemaker Sam Masterson — whom Martha worshipped — who had been planning to catch the next train out of town, and did. And with that evening out of the way, Robert Rossen’s screenplay picks up in 1946. The night Martha’s aunt died, it turns out, hasn’t haunted Martha and Walter at all — on the contrary, Walter’s father saw that the two of them forged an alliance based on their secret, one that led them all the way to the altar. It’s what came next, when they were adults, when she fingered and he prosecuted an innocent man for the killing, to ensure that the case was closed — that’s what haunts them. Martha and Walter — now Barbara Stanwyck and Kirk Douglas (the latter in a staggeringly good screen debut) — have the most twisted of marriages: her thriving on the power and wealth bestowed upon her by the aunt she detested; him drowning in the guilt of what they’ve done, but dutifully obeying her every desire, because of that childhood need to be liked and loved by the girl who had no use for him. They’ve become the most powerful couple in town — factory owner and DA — and the town has been molded in their image. It’s the corrupt city of so many noirs, where the authorities don’t need a reason to bring a person in, rough them up or run them out of town. Martha and Walter might have continued down their predetermined paths — if only their former school chum Sam (Van Heflin) hadn’t returned to town, the only other person who knows what happened that fateful night. Sam hasn’t led a sheltered life, but he’s a saint next to Martha and Walter, and he has the good fortune his first night back in town to stumble upon one Toni Marachek (Lizabeth Scott), who’s been held for shoplifting and recently released. No one is innocent in this movie, and Martha is heartless — but is she evil? Who can say? The brilliance of The Strange Love of Martha Ivers is that because the first fifteen minutes lay out the backstory so neatly, you think the events that follow will have greater clarity. But they don’t. What happened back then: those are facts. What’s happening now: those are facts. But the 18 years between are related only subjectively, through multiple interpretations; each character clings to an account of the past that might or might not be true — whatever best furthers their agenda. You’re left with no idea if the version of events you’re hearing is a confidence or a con. Martha Ivers explores and exploits all the possible moves and gambles and bluffs; it’s the three-dimensional chess game of film noir. Of all the femme fatales, there’s none greater than Stanwyck here; Martha’s desperation, her conviction, her cunning, her fear, her heartlessness and (most of all) her flexibility make her one of the wickedest women on the screen — and one of the most compelling. My honorable mention entry, from the same year, features another woman whose childhood trauma set her on a troubled course: Laraine Day this time, in The Locket. The flashbacks within flashbacks are a work of art, as a bridegroom-to-be, on his wedding day, receives a visit from a man (Brian Aherne) claiming to be the bride’s first husband. His story incorporates a tale related to him by her ex-lover (Robert Mitchum), whose recollections incorporate her own memories of a childhood trauma. How much is true, and how much can be trusted? And how can one woman — guilty or not — have destroyed so many lives?
1. The Lost Weekend (1945): The first ten minutes alone would’ve secured Ray Milland the Academy Award. As Don Birnam, an alcoholic anxious to assure his brother and girlfriend that he’s on the wagon and on the mend, his nerves are so raw — yet his mind so alert — that it’s hard to keep up with his reactions. The second and third time through, you’re still finding things on his face: means of manipulating moments to his advantage; lies that will get him to that next drink. And when he’s finally left alone in his apartment, he doesn’t just abandon any pretense of respectability; he abandons any pretense of humanity. His limbs slip in and out of rooms, hunting for that elusive stray bottle, and the rest of his body is carried along with them. Writers Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder keep you as alert as Birnam; they put you in his mindset: not thirsty for a drink, but thirsting for detail, for nuance — simultaneously horrified yet titillated by the lengths to which he’ll go, by the depths to which he’ll descend. They plant you squarely in the mind of an alcoholic, where time is measured by the number of rings left by consecutive shot glasses on a bar, or by the number of uncollected milk bottles outside the front door. And when Birnam scours the streets of New York City for a pawn shop open on Yom Kippur, or spends a harrowing night in a drunk tank, or suffers the DTs alone in his apartment, you get inside the soul of a tortured man as few films do, in some of the most haunting examples of German expressionism ever imagined for the American screen. When French critic Jean-Pierre Chartier wrote “Americans Also Make Noir Films” for La Révue du Cinéma in November of 1946, The Lost Weekend was one of three films he praised as being a clear continuation of the French tradition; he lauded its “extreme despair” and “the impressions of insanity — of a selfless void — left by the drama of a young man in the grip of a singular addiction”; to him it was “one of the most depressing films I have ever seen.” (He was also quick to note how director Billy Wilder’s use of on-location shooting for the exterior scenes furthered the practice of “poetic realism” so common to French noir.) A few months earlier, German cultural critic Siegfried Kracauer, in a piece entitled “Hollywood’s Terror Films,” had selected four films — one of them The Lost Weekend — that seemed evocative of a new darkening of Hollywood cinema; in describing the “psychological aberrations” and “all-pervasive fear” that struck and doomed ordinary people, he was very much tying those films to the tenets of French noir. The Lost Weekend was the only film to appear in both Chartier and Kracauer’s essays; it’s also the only noir to have taken the Academy Award for Best Picture (it also won Director, Screenplay and Leading Actor) — yet today many books on noir don’t even mention it. Why? Well, because as noted, the dreaded 1955 A Panorama of American Film Noir — ignoring Chartier’s detailed comparisons to French film noir and misunderstanding his colleague Nino Frank’s use of the term — decided that American noirs were “crime films.” And then as now, an inaccurate assessment — made with authority — can become gospel. Fortunately, film scholars increasingly aware of the misnomers that originated with Panorama seem eager to restore noir to its roots — and The Lost Weekend is slowly reclaiming its place in noir history. In forging a film that feels as relevant (and timeless) as it did in 1945, Brackett and Wilder were both lucky and shrewd. The novel by Charles R. Jackson told of a writer who drank because he couldn’t face his memories of a liaison with a man in college. The gay incident had to go, so Brackett and Wilder made it a case of writer’s block that drives Birnam to drink. But they wisely treat his unfinished novel as a MacGuffin. Instead, they tie his drinking to his sobering quest for direction, for purpose, for achievement — and in doing so, they give the film a universality that the novel lacked. They tie his drinking to the promise he had as a youth that’s lain unfulfilled, to that sense of hope that’s drummed into us at an early age (we live, after all, in “the land of opportunity”) and that — no matter how bad things get, no matter how much we’re beaten down along the way — we can’t seem to abandon. It’s that duality that underscores so much of noir — the way our homebred optimism both buoys and batters us — and it’s never seen more clearly than in The Lost Weekend. Don Birnam is the failed face of the American Dream. He’s been promised success and doesn’t understand why it’s eluded him. And as such, he’s the prototype for all those noir protagonists who are driven by dreams of money or power or fame — or just by the promise of a decent living and a living wage. And even when they realize the deck is stacked against them, they can’t surrender. They can’t quench their thirst. My honorable mention entry: another film about unfulfilled potential, 1951’s Fourteen Hours, with Richard Basehart as a man threatening suicide as he straddles the ledge of a high-rise hotel. It’s a misogynistic movie even for 1951, as Basehart’s mother (Agnes Moorehead) is basically made to blame for everything short of world hunger. But Moorehead is given such a meaty role, she doesn’t seem to mind, and Basehart, the rare actor who could play an enigma without becoming a cipher, is as splendid as ever. Henry Hathaway shot the crowd scenes on location, and it’s probably his finest directorial effort. It’s the sort of noir that The Lost Weekend made possible: no crime, no femme fatale; just New York City, and a man who feels like a failure.
Want more? If so, I serve up The 10 Best Screwball Comedies here, and some of the titles are certain to surprise you. My other essays are all about TV, past and present, but if you take to TV as much as film, there's an index of the more than 100 TV essays I've written; you might see something you like, be it a drama series or a sitcom or one of my “best of” lists. And if your interests are limited to noir, let me recommend two writers whom I greatly admire. Eric Somer at Film Noir Board is terribly astute at analyzing both the themes and the tropes of noir; our opinions as to the “best noirs” don’t match up at all (and there’s no reason they should), but I find his thematic analyses spot on, and the best portent for the future of noir criticism. And Colin McGuigan at Riding the High Country mostly takes on westerns and noirs, his two favorite genres, and you won’t find a more gifted, intuitive and intelligent critic.
This is insane. I don't even know where to begin.
ReplyDeleteI do like to consider myself a film person, but despite a lot of the films I have seen, I do think the numbers are rather low from films of the 30s and 40s. It isn't until the 1950s that I start to have the number rise.
First off - of the 25 Honorable Mentions, I am pretty sure I have only seen two of them: THE ASPHALT JUNGLE and THE BIG HEAT.
Of the actual top 25, I have seen: THE LOST WEEKEND, I LOVE TROUBLE, DETECTIVE STORY, NIGHTMARE ALLEY, YOU ONLY LIVE ONCE, THIS GUN FOR HIRE, and THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE.
I suppose I feel into the trap of thinking LOST WEEKEND was not exactly "noir" because I always so closely associated it with crime...but I had forgotten about Chartier and his praise for "noir" as being something more than just crime. I am amazed that I never really thought more about it...because THE LOST WEEKEND certainly has all of the stylistic elements to make a noir.
I suppose I have seen more noir, but I guess most of them were the obvious bigger name selections that might not have truly been as amazing as people suggested...like THE BIG SLEEP as you cheekily suggested.
It’s not every day I leave you speechless. LOL Yes, “insane” is probably the right word for it. I’m so glad I did it, and I am so glad it is over! Honestly, watching nearly 300 noirs in a six-month period was just insane. And it really would’ve worn me down, if every so often I didn’t stumble upon a film that absolutely revived and energized me again, because it was fairly unknown (to me, at least) and utterly splendid.
DeleteOh, of course you’re a film person. You’re a *much* bigger film person than I am. But I didn’t realize that your own knowledge of film history spikes when we get to the ‘50s. Strangely, I know the ‘30s and ‘40s films the best.
There are definitely a lot of acclaimed noirs that I find (wildly) overrated, that I suspect you do as well. As you can imagine, I’ve gotten my share today of “how could you leave out…” tweets and texts. But as always, I wouldn’t have taken on this essay if I didn’t feel my viewpoint deviated from “popular consensus.”
You know, I didn’t even discuss one of the key elements that so closely ties Lost Weekend to the French noirs, and that’s the ending. This is a BIG SPOILER in case folks haven’t seen it, but of course, at the end, Birnam decides not to kill himself — but tellingly, he doesn’t hand the gun to his girlfriend, so she can go to the pawnshop and reclaim her coat. He pockets it. It’s subtle, and Wilder is careful not to linger on it, but the implication is clear: at some point, he’s going to use that gun. I mean, that is such a bleak ending, and so tied to the tradition of French noir, which frequently ended in suicide.
I didn't see this comment until now!
DeleteBut yeah - I feel like I am FAR less versed in films from the 30s and 40s in comparison to other decades. I certainly never had an issue with B&W films but I suspect a lot of the problem was I often had trouble adjusting to some of the performing styles of pre-method.
I DO, however, have a fascination with the pre-Code era and have seen more from the early 30s. A lot of my favorite films from the 30s are from 1930-1934...except for Renoir's work from the late 30s.
I should revisit THE LOST WEEKEND. I haven't seen it in probably 20 years at this point.
And yes, I do love how you tend to steer from popular consensus. I wouldn't say I adhere to that, but I do feel like I am often in line with what most film snobs say is legit...except for maybe a few random exceptions.
Omigosh, there’s my next deep dive into “film that plays well on the small screen”: pre-code. I’ll look forward to getting to it sometime around 2029. LOL
DeleteBoy, I don’t read a lot of “film experts,” but it seems to me like a lot of your opinions on film are far from the norm. Certainly when you do your “year’s best” essays, you include so few of the nominated movies, and trumpet so many amazing-sounding films that I’ve never even heard of. Now, it may be that a lot of scholars agree with you, but I’d say your opinions are pretty singular. Which is why I love them.
Oh my science Tommy you have outdone yourself. I am tempted to just quote back to you all my favorite lines.
ReplyDeleteI will say I do agree with you -- The Lost Weekend is a masterpiece. I never thought of it as noir, but you have won me over.
I Love Trouble is also a favorite. Glad you ranked it so highly.
I will say that of all the films I have seen on your list, the one that stuck with me the longest was This Gun For Hire. I can't put my finger on why, but it struck a chord with me. I do enjoy Veronica Lake, but I like this movie more than can be explained by my boyhood crush on her...
Again, another stellar outing. Thanks for sharing!
I’m so glad you enjoyed, Bob, and thank you for saying I've outdone myself. I've certainly outdone myself in word count. LOL
DeleteI had last seen The Lost Weekend right at the start of the pandemic. I knew it was going to be in my top 5, but when I rewatched it this past spring, it was clear it was going to be #1. It is, as you say, a masterpiece.
Honestly, I found nothing in this essay harder to explain than what makes This Gun for Hire so magical — so I fully get what you’re saying about it striking a chord. There’s something about it that goes beyond just the scripting and the performances and the cinematography. I’ve seen the movie at least three times over the years, once as recently as February, but when I was in the final stages of polishing this essay, I felt the need to watch it again, to try to get to the heart of what was so persuasive about it. And honestly, I still feel like I barely scratched the surface…
These lists are fun to make and read. You put in alot of work, meaning, take my cmts with a grain of salt. I really like the Thieves-Hwy, I-Love-Trouble ("Boots"), The-Set-Up & The-Breaking-Point inclusions, Trouble the sleeper i discovered last year. If you've not seen yet, keep an eye out for these beauties: Fallen-Angel, I-Became-a-Criminal (UK), Bob-le-flambeur (FR), Stray-Dog (JP), Knife-in-the-Water (POL), Murder-My-Sweet, The-Glass-Key, Hell-Drivers (UK) and of course, Chinatown.
ReplyDeleteNo need to take with a grain of salt: believe me, I always welcome and enjoy comments. And especially enjoy suggestions. I did six months of noir binging -- sometimes four per day -- but I’m sure I missed literally hundreds of titles. I decided to restrict myself to American noirs, just to keep this essay more manageable, but when I resume with foreign films, I definitely will start with your list. FYI, The Glass Key is one I also love.
DeleteAnother great essay, Tommy — especially knowing that noir isn’t a genre you’ve studied for decades (like screwball). You definitely did, as you call it, a deep dive, but I love, like always, that you’re not afraid to be subjective (for example, the way you view noir through feminist eyes). I also confess that it’s very nice to see a list that doesn’t count down to Double Indemnity. I would place it higher than you, but I find it more a seminal film than an all-time great one. (I’ve always felt MacMurray was unconvincing. Every time I hear talk about him being “cast against type,” I think, that’s not necessarily a good thing. But then, I’n the one who finds him unconvincing even in parts of Remember the Night.)
ReplyDeleteI know most the titles on your list, and have special fondness for all the Garfields — although I would have included Body and Soul. (For me, he’s the ultimate noir protagonist. I think he was a noir protagonist as far back as Four Daughters.) I was also pleased to see little known things that I love like The Locket, Cause for Alarm and Dial 1119 (which I just saw on TCM.) I don’t share your affection for This Turning Point (as expose films go, I prefer Kansas City Confidential), although the way you see it is fascinating. I’ll have to think about what other titles would be on my own list, but definitely a couple of traditional titles like Shadow of a Doubt, The Killers and Murder My Sweet, plus some favorites like Rogue Cop, No Man of Her Own and Somewhere in the Night.
Forgot to ask you: Sunset Boulevard. Not a noir, or not a favorite?
DeleteInteresting what you say about MacMurray. He’s definitely one of the reasons neither Philip and I respond to Double Indemnity the way most people do. (Philip and I have always been amused by the fact that neither of us responds to Double Indemnity nor Bringing the Baby, which I suspect most people would name the #1 films in their respective genres.) I do think Remember the Night stretches him (I’ve always imagined Sturges wrote it with Fredric March and Carole Lombard in mind), but I think he manages nicely. Leiden maintains he trimmed and shaped the role to better suit MacMurray; I can’t imagine what MacMurray would’ve done with Sturges’s original draft.
DeleteRogue Cop was on my list for quite a while, and only dropped off after my final rewatch. (Taylor’s High Wall was on for a while, too.) And I definitely have great affection for Somewhere in the Night. Ooh, Sunset Boulevard. Well, it was on my list until nearly the end. I actually wrote it up — it was the honorable mention to Turning Point (both of them starring William Holden). But as I was proofing, I thought, wow, this is lousy – and I realized, as often happens with me, that if I’m writing in bland, generic terms, it’s because I have no real passion for my subject matter — which meant I was forcing it. I realized I was putting Sunset Boulevard on the list because I recognize it’s a quality piece of work (and perhaps because I subconsciously felt there should be more known titles) — but in truth, it’s really just not among my top 50. Although I think noir can accommodate a whole lot of styles and genres, I’m not sure it’s terribly comfortable with satire — and that said, yes, I do think Sunset Boulevard is a noir, just a little overlong and overemphatic for my tastes (and the cutaways back to “showbiz folk at Schwab’s“ always feel to me about as sophisticated as the ice cream parlor scene in Good News).
And by the way, I really need to give Kansas City Confidential another try. I'm embarrassed to say I started it twice and never got through it. But both times, I had just come off another “innocent man gets framed” film, and I just wasn’t up for another. But I am game to try again.
DeleteWhat, no Out of the Past? I wonder if it's a little too obvious for you; you tend to favour stuff that's not quite so 'brazen' about what it is, I think. And I have to say I personally find The Lost Weekend unbearably dismal - by which I don't mean it's a bad film, just awfully depressing. But I have only seen it once, many years ago...
ReplyDeleteI love that we've known each other for so long that you can psychoanalyze what I respond to and what I don't. LOL I'm not saying that as a dig -- I think it's kind of cool, and you may well be right. But that said, my biggest objection to 'Out of the Past' is simply that I don't think Greer is very good (or very talented, for that matter). And because I don't find her particularly persuasive, the story doesn't hold together for me.
DeleteAnd it's funny: I guess 'Lost Weekend' is indeed "awfully depressing," but mostly I find it absorbing. Which is something I don't find 'Out of the Past.'
Ah, I'm so fixated on Rhonda Fleming's appearances that I didn't even think about Greer's possible shortcomings...I will watch her like a hawk next time around!
DeleteOnce you’ve done your hawk-watching, let me know what you think. It might just be me (and Philip), but I felt Greer was weak, and as I put it earlier, dulled the edge of a potentially sharp noir — much like Victor Mature in Kiss of Death, Gene Tierney in Where the Sidewalk Ends, Stephen McNally in Woman in Hiding, Edmond O’Brien in about half of his noirs (including what I suspect is a favorite of yours, White Heat), and Evelyn Keyes in pretty much *all* of hers. (99 River Street would have been on my list if I didn’t feel that — as ever — Keyes wasn’t quite up to snuff.)
DeleteSee, I really enjoy watching Mature, but that probably just confirms that I have no taste! And of course you're right about White Heat (for Mayo), but I do feel it's overrated.
DeleteI know what you mean about Edmond O’Brien. I confess, I sort of love The Killers despite him. Sometimes he rose to the occasion, but a lot of times he didn’t. But I have to stand up for Gene Tierney. Her talents were limited, but when she was used as an object of obsessive, I think she was very good. I’m very fond of Where the Sidewalks Ends. Identity, duality, obsession — it’s got a lot of the themes you mention.
Delete*obsession *Sidewalk Gah!!!! For what it’s worth, I think Jane Greer is another limited talent, but I think she works in Out of the Past for what she’s given to do. And Mitchum is so career-defining, I don’t really watch her anyway.
DeleteOK, I’ll indulge in the question of whether something is or isn’t a noir. White Heat? Anyone?
DeleteGangster movie. I think.
DeleteI will confess to you, Clark groaned when we saw the title of your latest entry. Neither one of us are noir fans. But I read it first, then forced him to read – and we were both glad we did. That said, Tommy, I have no idea what noir experts are going to make of this – and I imagine some might liken it to heresy. You leave off so many famous titles. (It’s, to my mind, much more nonconformist than your screwball piece.) But it’s those famous titles that have never interested me and Clark. I think, like you, our impression of film noir was influenced by a handful of films. I remember being l told at UCLA what I “had to like“ — the suggestion being that if I didn’t swoon over “The Maltese Falcon,” I didn’t understand the genre. I think I came to believe that most noirs were of the type you described, where evil women bring down foolish man. I suspect it was mesmerizing in the ‘40s, but seems trite today (as your friend TJ says above, a little too obvious). So I was pleased to see the variety of noirs you included – and quite a few caught my eye – especially the ones centered around women. Something like Reckless Moment feels right up my alley, and I’m going to start there. (Ophuls directing a noir: oh, my!) And Night Has 1000 Stars seem enticing, too. Interesting that I’m drawn to ones starring Edward G Robinson and Joan Bennett, as their joint noirs do nothing for me (which is odd because I’m quite fond of Renoir’s La Chienne, which was the basis for Scarlett Street – have you seen it?). Anyway, a delight to read, and great food for thought, but if the noir experts come for you, you’re welcome to take shelter with us. lol
ReplyDeleteJerry, it’s always great to hear from you. I’m delighted that my essay steered you towards some films — hopefully ones you enjoy. I hadn’t realized until Donna mentioned it (above) how much my feminist stance dictates my viewing preferences, but of course, it makes total sense. I had a whole paragraph about noir being a misogynistic genre, but it got left on the editing room floor. (I had *so* many paragraphs that got left on the editing room floor!) But man, it was hard to find films that featured women who weren’t either evil or victimized. I had very little affection for the “women in peril” subgenre; after a while, it felt like every big female star in Hollywood — from Hepburn to Colbert to Stanwyck — had to do at least one film where they were victimized by a man. I have no doubt that that’s part of why ‘The Accused’ struck me so highly — because although at the top it seems to be reinforcing unfortunate ‘40s stereotypes, it not only ends up explaining them away, but addressing them. Let me know what you think of the films you watch. I confess, I know very little French cinema of the ‘30s. After six months of American noirs, it’s back to TV for me for a while, but as the man wrote: well, maybe next year. :)
DeleteHello Mr. Krasker, and greetings from Portugal. I would like to second the suggestion above for Bob le flambeur. I find French noir more interesting than American noir, and I would like to know if you agree. Please also consider La Rue sans nom, Le Quai des brumes, and Le Jour se lève. Le Jour se lève is my personal favorite. Also Muerte de un ciclista from Spain. Thank you. Romer
ReplyDeleteHi Romer, I don’t know any of the titles you mentioned. I confess, this latest deep dive into American film noir made me very eager to explore French noir (and Spanish noir and of course more UK noir), but for the time being, I’m going to get back to TV. I have a backlog of TV shows I’m anxious to write about. But I so appreciate the suggestions, and I will definitely get to them and report back.
DeleteWhat an interesting essay! I've only seen about eighteen of these, which isn't a lot considering I taught a course on Film Noir a couple of years ago. But ... where's Stranger on the Third Floor? Double Indemnity? The Maltese Falcon? Detour? The Third Man? Brighton Rock? Scarlet Street? Kiss Me Deadly? Out of the Past? I realise two of these are British, but I rank all of these very highly indeed.
ReplyDeleteI’m so delighted you found your way here, and truly, honored to have my essay read by someone who's actually *taught* noir. I’m not surprised that some of your favorite titles are missing. I rarely take on a subject unless I feel I have something to say, perhaps in a way that hasn’t quite been said before. I’m often drawn to topics where I feel my tastes differ from “popular consensus.” (I always feel it would be pointless to write the same essay that’s already been written a hundred times or more, by folks far more literate than me.) With noir, I knew certain noirs that were considered classics weren’t among my favorites, so that got me interested in doing a “deep dive” into the subject (I ended up watching over 250 titles) and seeing what emerged. And I realized my final list was atypical, but I hoped I’d be able to verbalize why I found these particular films so wonderful and fascinating.
DeleteWith regard to the titles you mention, the two UK films definitely would have been in my top 25. And none of the others are films I strongly dislike: I just wouldn’t put them in my top 50. There are performances I find forced or lacking (MacMurray in Double Indemnity, Greer in Out of the Past), or plot points I find unconvincing (the “the police will never believe it’s an accident” trope used in Detour, which I think is perilously hard to pull off well; some late-stage maneuvering in Scarlet Street with Kitty posing as the painter that I think strains credulity), and those factors knock the films down a few notches in my estimation. I suspect all the films you mention would be in my top 100, but interestingly, ahead of them, I probably would have put The Chase, Crime Wave, High Wall, Rogue Cop, Body and Soul, Union Station, Act of Violence and The Killing. So many great noirs to choose from!
I love this list and to say that I was pleasantly surprised by the final choice is an understatement. Yet, though I would have picked a different film, I found the analyses and presentations on each film superb and I am glad to see the final film raised to that pedestal. It's a movie I saw many decades ago, maybe about the same time I started my own decades long attachment to that demon rum, and its many variants. These days, decades again after having given up that part of my life, that film still remains at the top of my list of films about drinking, and all that goes along with it. Again, I am thoroughly impressed by the list, by the writing, the analyses and I look forward to reading more from this writer. If there's anything I have learned from reading about movies is that there is always a new and different way to look at lists and the films they constitute, at what makes a genre film, what does not, and reiterates what for me is a simple dictum: love of film, means love of pretty much all film(s).
ReplyDeleteThank you so much for this extraordinarily kind note. And I’m so happy to hear that you found the analyses and presentation rewarding. I am not a film scholar — not by any means — but I am definitely, as you put it, a lover of films. If you perused the site at all, or even glanced at the blog title, you of course saw that I mostly write about television. In fact, that’s all I wrote about for 10 years. But the truth is, vintage film is very much a part of my “daily TV viewing,” and it seemed foolish not to write about that too. (I remember back when there were revival houses where you could catch old films, or you could count on a college campus to stage a retrospective, but those days are long gone.) So it’s been a great pleasure, the last six months, to celebrate vintage films: first, with my screwball comedy essay, and now with noir. I confess, noir was not a topic I knew well; I had merely dabbled in it, so it was a lot of fun — and also, I admit, a lot of effort — to get to know it better, and to see how my opinions differed from the “status quo.” I had only seen The Lost Weekend once before, right at the start of the pandemic, and it left a huge impression on me. I knew it would be in my top 10, but when I re-watched it a few months ago, I realized that it was shooting right to the top of the list. In terms of subject matter — not just alcoholism and all that comes with it, of course, but in its exploration of a man tortured by his inability to live up to his own and society's expectations — I don’t think I’ve seen anything quite like it.
DeleteAnyway, thank you so much again for your kind words!
What a stunning article, Tommy! It clearly took a lot of determination, as well as your customary skill and perceptiveness, to get this researched and written. I don't feel as qualified (relatively speaking) to respond in detail. I've seen at most 20 (probably fewer) of these 50 titles, but this gives me a great list for future viewing. Thank you for that. Of the titles you list, especially vivid memories for me are In a Lonely Place (maybe Bogart's all-time best, and I'd probably place the movie overall higher than you did) and Force of Evil, which has (not that this is germane to your points) a really fine David Raksin score.
ReplyDeleteI have a question about a practical matter. You mention that you binged on noirs for 6 months, as many as 4 a day. How did you manage access during that time to all the titles you wanted to see? I can't imagine that you own DVDs (or even self-made recordings) of all the ones you wanted, and the channels and streaming services, voluminous though they are, don't have instantly available *every* older title that one might want to see. I can't imagine how you did it.
Jon, truly, it always puts a smile on my face to see you “show up“ here. It’s funny: you say you’ve only seen maybe 20 of these 50. When I started, I had seen exactly five! Screwball was such a different experience; I knew maybe half the titles going in. Here it was about absorbing a whole freaking genre, a much larger one, and it probably wasn’t until I had watched 100 or so films that I realized there was an essay there — because I knew I had films I wanted to talk about that seemed undervalued, and films I *didn’t* want to talk about that seemed overpraised. (Obviously, if I had just been parroting the same old titles, I wouldn’t have bothered.) I will freely confess that sometimes my opinion changed on second viewing (I made a point of watching films I liked at least twice) — not dramatically, but notably. I initially had “In a Lonely Place“ much higher (I do think it’s Bogart’s best performance), but the second time I watched, some issues with the script — and some of Ray’s directorial choices — annoyed me. It probably sits just outside my top 25, but if I watched it again, who knows: I might be so blown away again by the lead performances that it would bounce back.
DeleteIt’s amazing what’s out there now. I think I should be ashamed of the fact that I watched some illegal downloads, since I spend half my life, it seems, trying to take down illegal downloads of our albums. But it seems that pretty much anything that’s ever played on TCM or AMC or Fox Movies ends up somewhere online now. I also, of course, found a lot streaming on Amazon Prime, and there were certain titles that weren’t stream-able that I purchased on DVD. If you’re curious about a film, and can’t find it, just send me an email, and I’ll let you know how I located it. There was only one film I was dying to see that I could not find. It was Outside the Wall, starring Richard Basehart, and it looked intriguing, but it was only available in a Blu-ray collection, and I don’t have a Blu-ray player. So I had to let that one go. But otherwise, between streams and private collectors and DVDs, I found pretty much everything I wanted.
Oh, and I forgot to say: in retrospect, I wish I had mentioned more of the composers. I got so wrapped up in trying to credit the writers and directors and cinematographers (and keeping each paragraph between 500 and 600 words), but let’s face it: some of these films wouldn’t be nearly as wonderful as they are without the extraordinary scores that accompany them. Miklós Rózsa’s scores for The Lost Weekend and The Strange Love of Martha Ivers are two of my favorites, as is Franz Waxman’s for Alias Nick Beal. And I think because a lot of noir scores are so strong, that makes it all the more effective when certain films — like The Turning Point and The Set-Up — eschew musical scores altogether.
DeleteThe reason I made sure to watch Force of Evil when it turned up on TCM was that it got a lot of mention in a book about the history of film scores that I once used in teaching a one-student grad course in advanced orchestration (he had a special interest in soundtracks). Raksin's score was much discussed, and several cues from the score shown in musical notation; so I had to track down the real thing when I got a chance.
DeleteI'm tempted to make a spreadsheet of your titles so I can see who provided the music for all of them, Part of me tells me "life's too short," and another part wants to do it anyway. We'll see who wins....
In fact it didn't take me long to go ahead and do it. Of the 50 titles, the champ repeat composer is Miklós Rózsa, with 5 titles. There are 4 each for studio workhorses Roy Webb, Victor Young,* and Alfred Newman. Then 3 instances of dispensing with a score. After that, a lot of two-fers, namely Dimitri Tiomkin, Hugo Friedhofer, André Previn, Daniele Amfitheatrof, Leith Stevens, George Duning, Frank Skinner, and David Raksin. And the singletons I won't enumerate.
Delete(*I haven't seen So Evil My Love. The online authorities I've seen credit its score to both William Alwyn and Victor Young. How did that work out? Are they credited jointly onscreen? Are their contributions distinguishable? -- e.g. are there two different kinds of music heard at different points? Or, perhaps, is this one of those instances of a movie getting one score in the UK and a different one in the US? That seems a possibility, as Alwyn was a classical composure of some stature (he also did a lot of film scores), based in the UK. And Young was a "somebody" too, so it's hard to imagine one being subjugated to the other. But I really don't know at all.)
I was hoping you would do that! :)
DeleteInterestingly, here’s how the credits break down for So Evil My Love. There is a title card reserved specifically for the music department. It lists William Alwyn as having composed the music, then lists the conductor, the London Philharmonia and the leader. Then on the *next* title card, it lists “additional music“ by Victor Young, performed by the “Paramount Symphony Orchestra.” (And then the obligatory Edith Head credit is directly below. LOL) So I have no idea. Did the Paramount executives see the final cut and insist some of the music be changed? Did the Hays Office insist upon a different ending for the US release, and new music needed to be written? No idea.
There are also films — like Turning Point — where no composer is credited, but there’s obviously music over the title sequence. In the case of Turning Point, IMDb says it’s Rózsa, and my presumption is that it was lifted from some other film. (Otherwise, why not properly credit him?) That seems to happen a lot, both with films that don’t have underscoring and with films too low budget to afford to bring in an orchestra.
BTW, as our minds think alike, I did a quick spreadsheet of my own as I was putting together my final list; I was curious how the list broke down by studio. Paramount had by far the most titles. I remember a Pauline Kael essay where she mentions a friend (this must’ve been in the ‘50s) saying that Paramount had never made a great movie. She noted that, of course, she could’ve mentioned things like Easy Living and Midnight, but she knew what her friend was saying: that Paramount didn’t turn out “prestige pictures” the way a studio like MGM routinely did. (Am I remembering correctly that after winning the first Best Picture Oscar for Wings, Paramount didn’t win again until its back-to-back trophies for Going My Way and Lost Weekend?) But I note that of my top screwball comedies *and* my top film noirs, Paramount is the clear winner. Whatever it is they did, it certainly worked for me.
DeleteOn the So Evil My Love question, I've done what I should have done earlier: pulled Gergely Hubai's invaluable "Torn Music: Rejected Film Scores" off the shelf. It doesn't have a chapter on the movie, but it has a quick mention on page 8: "Paramount continued to use staff composers to alter other composers' film scores even after World War II, when the studio had half of William Alwyn's music for the 1948 British drama So Evil My Love rewritten by Victor Young." I don't suppose we're intended to take "half" as an exact measure, but evidently the replacement was substantial -- enough so to merit this mention, at the end of the discussion of Union Pacific.
DeleteI was especially interested in this example, as I'm very much a fan of Alwyn's music; I like what I know of his orchestral and chamber works, plus his scores for (to name the ones I've seen most recently) Odd Man Out, Green for Danger, The Fallen Idol, The Card, and The Crimson Pirate.
Fascinating! I’m embarrassed to say I don’t know the Hubai book at all.
DeleteI discovered the Hubai book at the university library, and later decided I wanted my own copy. It's great for looking up specific cases, and also for browsing for fun. He describes what happened with 300 movies (a page or two each), plus other mentions in passing. And he encompasses a broad variety of situations: total replacement, partial replacement, collaboration (willing or not), different scores in different countries, replacement for video release, and more. The book's title, of course, alludes to the Torn Curtain incident.
DeleteI am glad you put 3 John Garfield movies in the top 25. To me he is the ultimate noir actor! Body and Soul for me should be on the list and is much better then the Set Up. Garfield does not take a back seat to no actor! All time great!
ReplyDeleteIs this Dennis, from the Facebook noir page? I’m so glad you found your way here. Donna (above) also said she felt Garfield was the ultimate noir protagonist, and I can’t say I disagree. Obviously, I have three of his movies in my top 25 and four in my top 50, more than any other actor — and although I don’t love Body and Soul quite as much as many, it just barely missed my list. He was an astounding actor — and made for noir.
DeleteYes this is Dennis. Great list and commentary. As you can tell I am very passionate about John Garfield’s acting! No one is like him. Flat out the. Best noir actor ever. His movies prove it,
DeleteFor me..I was intrigued to see that Lucille Ball did a few film noirs..1947's Lured was a standout..mixing witty banter with film noir....and Niagara starring Marilyn Monroe was a nicely done film noir..in color with her as the antagonist
ReplyDeleteJayson, I’m so sorry to take so long in chiming in. Blogger has not been notifying me about comments, so I only see them now when I review the entire blog. I’m so embarrassed to say: I overlooked “Lured” when I did my film noir watch. No idea how: I watched 280 of them, but missed that one! LOL I see that the Criterion Channel is offering it now, and I’m going to make a point of watching tonight.
DeleteOkay I know it's last year's post, but I just watched The Breaking Point on Movies Channel for the first time, and was blown away. I won't go into detail, that's your job, but that final end shot of the little kid by himself was kind of astonishing.
ReplyDeleteMan, Jonathan, I am so sorry for taking six months to respond. Blogger used to alert me when new comments came in; now they don’t. So I have to remember to click on the “Comments” button occasionally to see what has come in, and I never remember. So glad you got to see The Breaking Point, and so glad you felt as I do. And yes, that last shot: a killer. The film is mysteriously underrated; I’m not sure why, after all these years, it hasn’t broken through as I might’ve expected.
Delete