Trouble, Trenchcoats
& Femmes Fatales
Notes from the Staircase Theatre
Film Noir Retrospective
Feb. 4 - March 19, 2004
Staircase Theatre
27 Dundurn St. N.
(one block north of King)
Hamilton ON L8R 3C9
905 529 3000 phone
905 522 5619 fax
info@staircase.org
www.staircase.org
WHAT IS FILM NOIR?
All Notes by Gord Jackson
The term "film noir" was coined by French critics in the Post World War
II period as a response to what seemed to them a distinctly darkened
tone to the American cinema. Deprived of American films during the war,
they noticed some major tonal shifts from the studio-based movies they'd been used to. Nightmarish stories of tabloid sex and murder, these downbeat sagas of ordinary lives gone hopelessly astray, of evil women casting their net and fatally contaminating the American male represented, to the French a shift in the national psyche. And the noted that those darker films, focused on money, love and individual enterprise lead not to fulfilment and happy endings, but to immorality, crime and death.
The French critics of the day were especially attracted to the B
movie...low budget films noirs made quickly and not always with A casts and directors. Frequently appearing at the bottom of the ubiquitous double bill, these low-budget pot-boilers provided particularly rich grist for the auteur theory mill, another discussion that went hand-in-glove with their notions of film noir. Indeed, it has been said that the French taught Americans how to read aspects of their own popular culture.
Film noir gushed out in full creative force in a comparatively
concentrated period. In Notes on Film Noir (1972), Paul Schrader places its outer limits from John Huston's The Maltese Falcon (1941) to Orson Welles' Touch of Evil (1958). Others insist on more strict definitions, pegging the period from 1941 to 1949. A few even suggest that the true heyday lasted only from Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity (1944) to his Sunset Boulevard (1951).
In our Film Noir Retrospective we are brushing with the broad noir
strokes, going from the German Expressionism of Fritz Lang to the generally accepted conclusion of the classic noir period, Welles' 1958 Touch of Evil.
Index
Murder, My Sweet
Laura
The Maltese Falcon
The Big Sleep
The Hitch Hiker
Kiss Me Deadly
Double Indemnity
The Killers
Gun Crazy
Out of the Past
Sunset Boulevard
Raw Deal
Force of Evil
You Only Live Once
The Big Heat
The Testament of Dr. Mabuse
While the City Sleeps
Citizen Kane
Lady from Shanghai
Touch of Evil
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PRIVATE EYES - LONE WOLVES
The first of three broad phases in film noir, Private Eyes - Lone Wolves, covers the period from 1941 to 1946. It is the world of Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Dick Powell, Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, Graham Greene, Otto Preminger and Billy Wilder. Somewhat retaining the “studio” look, these film noirs were often more engrossing talk than visual action. But what talk, with sources like Chandler, Hammett, Cain and Greene.
| | <Murder, My Sweet (Edward Dmytryk, 1944) 95 minutes. |
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Murder, My Sweet gives us Dick Powell (shedding his song-and-dance-man image) as a pre-Bogart Philip Marlowe, the hard-boiled dick with the penchant for trouble and an eye for the women. Adapted from Raymond Chandler's Farewell My Lovely and directed by Edward Dmytryk, this one has the wise-cracking Marlowe searching for the missing girlfriend of hulking dimwit Mike Mazurki. With the 40's favourites Claire Trevor and Ann Shirley.
"Still packs a wallop," according to Leonard Maltin.
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| <Laura (Otto Preminger and Rouben Mamoulian, 1948) 85 minutes. |
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Lies, illusion, deceit and delusion: they're all in Otto Preminger's classic film noir, Laura. Unlike many noirs in our series, this one is an A, not a B movie, with many established stars from a major studio, Twentieth Century-Fox. A sophisticated, witty mystery, it has necro-romantic detective Dana Andres trying to solve the perplexing puzzle of the gorgeous Gene Tierney's murder while simultaneously falling in love with her portrait. With Clifton Webb, Vincent Price, Judith Anderson and David Raksin's haunting Academy Award winning theme.
"Everybody's favorite chic murder mystery," declared Pauline Kael.
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| <The Maltese Falcon (John Huston, 1941) 104 minutes. |
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For some, The Maltese Falcon inaugurated the classic noir period. Starring Humphrey Bogart as Dashiell Hammett's hard-boiled Sam Spade, it's also the directorial debut of John Huston (who also wrote the screenplay.) Spade's partner is murdered and the search for "the stuff that dreams are made of" is on. With Mary Astor as Spade's treacherous client, smooth, suave Sydney Greenstreet as the Fat Man, an oily Peter Lorre the evasive Joel Cairo and Elisha Cook Jr. as the neurotic Wilmer.
"An undisputed classic," declared David Shipman.
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| <The Big Sleep (Howard Hawks, 1946) 114 minutes. |
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Bogie's back, this time as our second Philip Marlowe in an adaptation of Raymond Chandler's first novel, The Big Sleep. With a narrative convolution that, far from being frustrating, is a major source of joy. This one has Marlowe attempting to track down a missing person while also trying to tame a wild, impressionable young girl, (Martha Vickers), maybe make time with her lippy, older sister (Lauren Bacall), stay within the law (as espoused by good cop Regis Toomey) and fathom out whether shady casino owner Eddie Mars really did kill Geiger, the sleazy bookstore proprietor. From a script by William Faulkner, Jules Furthman and Leigh Brackett, the cast includes Dorothy Malone, Bob Steele and Elisha Cook Jr.
"Powerhouse direction, unforgettable dialogue," said Leonard Maltin.
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A REEL CREEP and ANOTHER REEL CREEP
It can be argued that all films noirs contain real creeps, but with Ida
Lupino's The Hitch-Hiker and Robert Aldritch's Kiss Me Deadly we have
real creeps who go beyond the pale.
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| The Hitch Hiker (Ida Lupino, 1953) 71 minutes. |
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Although most films noirs are set in the concrete canyons of the big, impersonal city, The Hitch-Hiker, and Joseph H. Lewis' Gun Crazy (showing in March) are two series exceptions. Set in the wide-open spaces, they are metaphorical mockeries vis-a-vis the state of their main characters. Based upon the true story of a serial killer, The Hitch-Hiker has two buddies (Edmond O'Brien and Frank Lovejoy) going fishing in Mexico. But things go badly awry when they pick up the one-eyed, psychotic fugitive William Talman (pre-Billy Zane's creepy killer in Dead Calm.) The first noir directed by a woman, it is Talman as one of the ugliest of film noir’s creeps who steals the show.
"Lupino -actor and director- helped define the American film noir,"
claims Judith M. Redding and Victoria A. Brownworth in Film Fatales.
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| <Kiss Me Deadly (Robert Aldrich, 1955) 105 minutes. |
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Some claim that film noir came into full flower with Robert Aldrich's rough and tumble Kiss Me Deadly. After picking up a girl (Cloris Leachman) stranded on a back road, creepy, unprincipled Mike Hammer (Ralph Meeker) is run off the road and left slumped over and semi-conscious as the woman is tortured. After she dies, and sensing there's a buck to be made, Hammer noses around and finds the creep who controls the great "what's it," a mysterious box that glows when opened.
"I don't care what you do to me Mike. Just do it fast," shouted the
original movie poster.
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FEMMES FATALES
Film noir is full of those rhinestone maidens with hearts of cast iron that we call Femmes Fatales. And make no mistake about it, Lady Macbeth and Hedda Gabler are just two antecedents of their modern counterparts. Using sex, guile and sometimes intimidation to lure weak men into committing crimes that ultimately destroy them both, they are immoral and unscrupulous in keeping with the degeneracy of the films themselves. However, in selecting five Friday-night screenings to focus on these tarantulas, there is no denying that they overlap into all films, except Ida Lupino's The Hitch-Hiker.
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| <Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder, 1944) 106 minutes. |
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To inaugurate our femmes fatales series, we've chosen one of the screen's most vicious, venomous vipers of all, Barbara Stanwyck's Phyllis Dietrichson, in Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity. Based upon James M. Cain's gut-wrenching novel of the same name, this film sets up Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) for trouble the moment he enters Dietrichson's livingroom that-sets-the-afternoon-sun. Announcing herself from the top of the stairs, her alluring anklet all aglow, she quickly sizes up and entraps the hapless salesman who was only there to sell insurance. With a screenplay by Wilder and Raymond Chandler, and the casting of Edward G. Robinson as the anal attentive-to-detail claims adjuster who doesn't trust Dietrichson, Double Indemnity is one of the darkest noirs of all time.
According to David Thomson this is "Among the few films - the very few that have changed the way we measure our own duplicities."
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| <The Killers (Robert Siodmak, 1946) 103 minutes. |
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Based upon Ernest Hemingway's short story, we follow insurance investigator James Riordan (Edmond O'Brien) as he unravels the mystery of why broken-down boxer Swede (Burt Lancaster in his screen debut) allowed two hitmen to murder him in cold blood. Unfolding with similar disconnected flashback techniques as used in Citizen Kane, Riordan unearths Swede's criminal past, learning why he was so crushed after spider-woman Kitty Collins (Ava Gardner) had finished with him.
"Suspense-ridden and exciting," said Manny Farber in The New Republic.
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| <Gun Crazy (Joseph H. Lewis, 1950) 86 minutes. |
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Poor Bart (John Dall.) He's got a thing for guns and, when he sees pistol-packin' carnival queen Laurie Starr (Peggy Cummins) in her form-fitting cowgirl outfit, it's lust at first sight. Starr is a predatory soul mate who, sizing Bart up, immediately invites him to join her on stage in a shooting match. He jumps at the chance. Prowling around like two dogs sniffing out each others' goods, they eagerly hook up in a Bonny and Clyde-like saga across the wide-open spaces. An atypical film noir; Joseph H. Lewis' low budget opus has an audacious visual style that makes it as fresh today as it was when first released.
"Some might call Citizen Kane the great American movie," said Gary
Johnson in 10 Shades of Noir. "I might just opt for Gun Crazy instead."
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| <Out of the Past (Jacques Tourneur, 1947) 97 minutes. |
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A lethal beauty, a doomed loner on the run from his past, shadowy lighting and a complex story of double-crosses and sexual betrayal, Out of the Past is the quintessential noir. Summoned from his near-idyllic life by former associate/racketeer Whit Sterling (Kirk Douglas), Robert Mitchum's ill-fated, existential noir protagonist Jeff Bailey leaves his little hamlet behind for good. When he arrives, he's surprised to see Kathie Moffat (Jane Greer), the woman with whom he'd had an affair at Sterling's expense. Of course the icy, duplicitous femme fatale is another Phyliss Dietrichson.
"Out of the Past is, like Criss Cross, one of the two films that best
evoke a subject central to the genre: the destruction of a basically
good man by a corrupt woman," said Michael Mills.
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| <Sunset Boulevard (Billy Wilder, 1950) 110 minutes. |
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To conclude our look at noir femmes fatales, we focus on Gloria Swanson's waspish, megalomaniacal Norma Desmond in Billy Wilder's toxic take on a crumbling Hollywood: Sunset Boulevard. Holed up in her decaying mansion with sinister butler Max (Erich von Stroheim) and silent movies of her glorious past, Desmond first mistakes hack screenwriter William Holden for somebody else. Nursing hopes of a comeback in Salome, she lures the under-achieving stiff into a scheme to get busy writing.
"Bitter, funny, fascinating," declared Leonard Maltin.
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CORRUPTION/POST WAR REALISTIC
As mentioned earlier, while the first phase of film noir swirls around the private eye and the lone wolf, through the war and
just beyond, the second phase moves us into the post-war realistic period from 1945-1949. (Of course, some dates and
titles overlap.) The problems of crime in the streets, corruption and police routine take centre stage in such titles as Boomerang!, Force of Evil, Raw Deal and The Naked City. We've chosen two titles to illustrate this phase.
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| <Raw Deal (Anthony Mann, 1947) 79 minutes. |
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Joe Sullivan (Dennis O'Keefe) escapes from the state peniteniary and goes after the man who put there, sadistic mob boss/pyromaniac Rick Coyle (Raymond Burr). With the two women who love him (Claire Trevor and Marsha Hunt) along for the ride, he dodges roadblocks, hitmen and police dragnets until he reaches his prey. Directed by Anthony Mann and photographed by John Alton.
Film Noir Reader proclaimed: "Perhaps the greatest master of noir was Hungarian-born John Alton, an expressionist cinematographer who could relight Times Square at noon if necessary."
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| <Force of Evil (Abraham Polonsky, 1948) 78 minutes. |
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Vividly filmed against the background of New York City's canyons of concrete, John Garfield stars as the "crooked little lawyer" Joe Morse, a guy much too involved in the number racquet for his own good. A man of conscience who vainly tries to hide behind a street-smart sense of Social Darwinism, he learns, only too late, that he's in way over his head.
"Nobody portrayed guilt on the American screen better than John Garfield," said Martin Scorsese.
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FRITZ LANG
No film noir retrospective would be complete without the inclusion of
Fritz Lang. Born December 5, 1890 in Vienna, Austria, he first studied
architecture there in 1908 and then left home in 1910 to study art. He began his career as an artist in 1913 in Paris, returned to Vienna in 1914, joined the army and was wounded in battle. While recuperating, Lang appeared in a local play, leading to an invitation to go to Berlin to work in movies. While there, he started writing scripts and acting in minor films.
He directed his first film, Halbblut (The Half-breed)and a couple of others as well as also being invited to work on The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. However, his Der Herr der Liebe (Master of Love) was so successful that he was required to make a sequel, Harakiri (Madame Butterfly) Lang made his first Dr. Mabuse film, Dr. Mabuse, The Great Gambler in 1922, and followed up with Das Testament de Dr. Mabuse in 1934.
Quickly recognizing that Nazism was a threat to the civilized world, Lang fled to Paris in 1934, smuggling out an uncut Testament print with him. He left behind his money, citizenship and wife, the latter to become a member of the Nazi Party. From Paris, Lang went to the United States and on to a fulfilling career that includes such great noir hits as Ministry of Fear, The Woman in the Window, The Big Heat, While the City Sleeps and Beyond a Reasonable Doubt. He died in his California home on August 2, 1976.
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| <You Only Live Once (Fritz Lang, 1937) 86 minutes. |
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You Only Live Once is Lang at his social commentary best. Henry Fonda is the ex-con trying to go straight and Sylvia Sidney is Jo, the only one who believes in him. A meditation on fate, faith and society as more the problem than the cure, this dark, brooding tale is fully American yet German Expressionism in modified form.
"You Only Live Once was, in my view, a completely American film," Lang
later said.
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| <The Big Heat (Fritz Lang, 1953) 90 minutes. |
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The Big Heat has Glenn Ford as Homicide Sgt. Dave Bannion, both cop and family man, whose world is shattered by the assassination of his wife, blown to bits by a bomb intended for him. He is left with a passion for revenge that morphs into a soul-searching struggle with his lust to commit senseless violence in the name of justice. With everybody's favorite fifties moll Gloria Grahame, plus Jocelyn Brando and Lee Marvin, The Big Heat packs hard-hitting dialogue, a driving narrative and appropriately stark cinematography.
James Monaco declared "The film is as brutal as Lang's M was
frightening."
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| <The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (Fritz Lang, 1933) 120 minutes. |
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(In German with English Subtitles)
Like its predecessor, Dr. Mabuse, The Great Gambler (1922), and its 1960 closer, The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse, Lang's middle entry deals with society and the criminal forces that try to rule it. An anti-Nazi parable, we find that Dr. Baum (Otto Wernicke), director of a mental institution, has come under the evil, hypnotic influence of one of his patients, the enigmatic Dr. Mabuse (Rudolph Klein-Rogge.)
Wrote Lang, prior to the film's New York premiere in 1943, "It was an
allegory to show Hitler's processes and terrorism...I hope to explore
the masked Nazi theory of the necessity to deliberately destroy everything that is precious to a people."
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| <While the City Sleeps (Fritz Lang, 1956) 100 minutes. |
When the owner of The Sentinel, a New York tabloid, dies, his playboy son (Vincent Price) takes over. He gets several executives to compete for an editor-in-chief position, the coveted promotion going to the man who can solve the mystery of the "Lipstick Killer." Another meditation on our interior and exterior struggles, City explores them from the point of view of the killer, his interaction with the police, within individual reporters, to the press corps at large, infighting among themselves to be the first to get "the scoop." As timely as it was nearly fifty years ago, it's a modern story about media ethics and the psychology of a sex crime, told with suspense, pace and social relevance.
"Lang makes use of a glass-walled newsroom office 'where all is seen
and nothing is revealed,' " said Time Out.
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ORSON WELLES/MAN-BOY WUNDERKIND
Enfant terrible, George Orson Welles, was born in Kenosha, Wisconsin on
May 6, 1915. His father was an inventor, engineer and businessman whose
plant in Kenosha, Badger-Brass Co., manufactured one of the earliest
auto lights. Welles' mother Batrice was from Springfield, Illinois, born into the well-to-do Ives family that made its fortune in coal. Known in concert circles, and with friends that included Igor Stravinsky and Maurice Ravel (for whom the precocious Orson played the violin at age seven), Welles' mother encouraged his artistic pursuits.
As a teen, Welles acted in Dublin, Ireland and then, in 1937, founded
the Mercury Theatre with producer John Houseman. When RKO enticed him to Hollywood, he tried first to get a film going of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. After the financially-pinched RKO abandoned the idea, he worked on Smiler With the Knife, also abandoned when both Orson and RKO lost interest in it. Welles eventually debuted with the seminal Citizen Kane, a film that seems to have been both blessing and curse, as he never seemed quite able to live up to the reputation he acquired making it. Welles died of a heart attack on October 11, 1985.
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| <Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941) 119 minutes. |
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Citizen Kane follows the rise and fall of ambitious, tempestuous newspaper magnate Charles Foster Kane (Welles) from his early boyhood to his last breath. Bombastic, lonely, frivolous and confused, Kane, like Thomas Hardy's Michael Henchard in The Life and Death of the Mayor of Caterbridge is one of the great tragic figures of all time. Citizen Kane, with its chiaroscuro lighting and expressionistic style, is a pioneering noir, considered by many to be the greatest American film ever made.
Dark and foreboding, when first screened in post-war Paris to an audience of professional filmmakers, film historian Richard Roud noted, "It disturbed their preconception of what America was capable of producing and what cinema was all about." Added Francois Truffaut, "Citizen Kane inspired more filmmakers in my generation than any other film."
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| <Lady From Shanghai (Orson Welles, 1947) 87 minutes. |
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Along with husband Everret Sloane, Rita Hayworth is the glamorous siren who lures Irish sailor Orson Welles into a murderous plot. With lots of in-jokes and gallows humour, this baroque noir ends in a fun-house labyrinth with a justly-famous shattering hall-of-mirrors conclusion. Reality and illusion: do they really become one?
After screening a 155 minute cut of the film, Columbia Pictures kingpin Harry Cohn reputedly said, "I'll give anyone who can tell me what this film is about a thousand bucks." Upset with the running time, lack of clarity and the sight of Hayworth's long, distinctive hair cut and dyed into a platinum blonde feather bob, it's said that Cohn never forgave Welles for any of it. Indeed, the film languished in Columbia's vaults for a year after its completion, the 86 minute release print finally finding its way into theatres as the lower half of a B double bill.
Still, according to Joseph McBride, "The Lady From Shaghai remains Welles's most purely enjoyable film."
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| <Touch of Evil (Orson Welles, 1958) 108 minutes. |
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The great swan song of the classic noir period, Touch of Evil is an audacious and super-stylized noir that paints a world seething in corruption and violence. It starts out on the squalid streets as Mexican detective Mike Vargas (Charlton Heston) and his American wife Janet Leigh walk across the border, until, that is, a bomb explodes and a man is killed. When the corpulent, corrupt American cop Hank Quinlan (Orson Welles) comes to investigate, he sets up a frame to get a Mexican kid for the crime. Cutting against the grain of Vargas morality, it sets up a titanic struggle between the two men, with Leigh a mere pawn in the action. With Joseph Calleia, Akim Tamiroff and memorable cameos from Marlene Dietrich, Mercedes McCambridge, Zsa Zsa Gabor and Joseph Cotton.
"A stunning conclusion to the film noir era," according to 10 Shades of
Noir.
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