Film Noir and the Possibilities of Hollywood [1st ed.] 9783030370572, 9783030370589

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-xii
Introduction: The Case of the Missing Films (Nathaniel Deyo)....Pages 1-22
Front Matter ....Pages 23-23
The Maltese Falcon, Double Indemnity, Scarlet Street, and Out of the Past: Paradigm Cases (Nathaniel Deyo)....Pages 25-46
The Narrow Margin: Convention as Deception (Nathaniel Deyo)....Pages 47-69
Front Matter ....Pages 71-71
Ministry of Fear: Fritz Lang’s De-suturing Operation (Nathaniel Deyo)....Pages 73-92
The Big Sleep: Howard Hawks’s Hollywood Fantasy (Nathaniel Deyo)....Pages 93-113
Laura: Otto Preminger’s Statement of Purpose (Nathaniel Deyo)....Pages 115-140
Front Matter ....Pages 141-141
Act of Violence: Articulating the Spaces of Modernity (Nathaniel Deyo)....Pages 143-166
Reign of Terror and The Tall Target: Theses on the Philosophy of History (Nathaniel Deyo)....Pages 167-194
Front Matter ....Pages 195-195
Conclusion: Some Reflections on Method (Nathaniel Deyo)....Pages 197-205
Back Matter ....Pages 207-213

Citation preview

PALGRAVE CLOSE READINGS IN FILM AND TELEVISION

Film Noir and the Possibilities of Hollywood Nathaniel Deyo

Palgrave Close Readings in Film and Television Series Editors John Gibbs Department of Film, Theatre & Television University of Reading Reading, UK Doug Pye Department of Film, Theatre & Television University of Reading Reading, UK

Palgrave Close Readings in Film and Television is an innovative new series of research monographs and collections of essays dedicated to extending the methods and subjects of detailed criticism. Volumes in the series  – written from a variety of standpoints and dealing with diverse topics – are unified by attentiveness to the material decisions made by filmmakers and a commitment to develop analysis and reflection from this foundation. Each volume will be committed to the appreciation of new areas and topics in the field, but also to strengthening and developing the conceptual basis and the methodologies of critical analysis itself. The series is based in the belief that, while a scrupulous attention to the texture of film and television programmes requires the focus of concept and theory, the discoveries that such attention produces become vital in questioning and re-formulating theory and concept. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14712

Nathaniel Deyo

Film Noir and the Possibilities of Hollywood

Nathaniel Deyo University of Miami Coral Gables, FL, USA

Palgrave Close Readings in Film and Television ISBN 978-3-030-37057-2    ISBN 978-3-030-37058-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37058-9 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Boris Zhitkov, Getty Images This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgments

I would first like to thank John Gibbs and Douglas Pye for inviting me to submit to the Close Readings series and for their invaluable help shepherding this project toward publication. I would also like to thank everyone who has read bits and pieces of this book over the last six years, including Barbara Mennel, Marsha Bryant, Sylvie Blum-Reid, Anthony Coman, Chris Keathley, and Jimmy Newlin. Special thanks to Robert Ray, whose classes at the University of Florida led me to study film in the first place, and whose friendship and guidance in the ensuing years have been integral to this project’s completion. Thanks to Lucy Fife Donaldson and James McDowell, whose feedback as guest editors of Movie: A Journal of Film Criticism no. 6 was important in the development of an early version of Chap. 5. I am grateful for the help of Lina Aboujieb and Emily Wood at Palgrave Macmillan, whose editorial assistance has helped guide me through the publishing process. Thanks as well to my former colleagues at the University of Florida and current colleagues at the University of Miami who have provided moral support along the way; to my parents, without whom none of this would have been possible; and to Barbara, for everything. For anyone I’ve forgotten, I’m sorry!

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Contents

1 Introduction: The Case of the Missing Films  1 A Certain Tendency in Film Noir Criticism   6 The Hermeneutics of Suspicion  11 Meaning, Use, and Context  14 Looking Ahead  18 References  20 Part I Paradigmatic and Conventional  23 2 The Maltese Falcon, Double Indemnity, Scarlet Street, and Out of the Past: Paradigm Cases 25 The Maltese Falcon (1941)  27 Double Indemnity (1944)  31 Scarlet Street (1945)  36 Out of the Past (1947)  39 Provisional Conclusions  42 References  45 3 The Narrow Margin: Convention as Deception 47 Seeing Aspects, Inner Speech  51 Deception and Suppression  55

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Contents

Stylistic Misdirection  59 Lessons in Perception  63 References  69 Part II Auteurist Noir  71 4 Ministry of Fear: Fritz Lang’s De-suturing Operation 73 An Ordinary Studio Assignment?  74 Disruptive Articulations  77 Gestures of Looking and Paranoid Camera Style  82 Undoing the “System of the Suture”  86 The Ordinary Made Uncanny  90 References  92 5 The Big Sleep: Howard Hawks’s Hollywood Fantasy 93 Adapting The Big Sleep  96 Finely Polished Form  99 At the Acme Bookshop 106 Between Fantasy and Reality 111 References 113 6 Laura: Otto Preminger’s Statement of Purpose115 In the Kitchen 117 Making Coffee 123 In Medium Long Shot 130 The Resistance of the Real 138 References 139 Part III Noir and History 141 7 Act of Violence: Articulating the Spaces of Modernity143 The Opening Sequence 147 City, Country, and Suburb 149 A Horrific Outsider 151

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Dialectics of Shelter and Privilege 152 The Return of the Repressed 157 Conclusion 163 References 166 8 Reign of Terror and The Tall Target: Theses on the Philosophy of History167 The Films 168 Ideology and Historical Fiction 171 Historical Fiction and the Hermeneutic Code 175 Suspense in The Tall Target 176 Visual Excess and Aesthetic Spectacle in Reign of Terror 183 Conclusion: The Ruins of History 191 References 193 Part IV Conclusion 195 9 Conclusion: Some Reflections on Method197 A Brief History of This Book 197 Postcritique and Film Studies 200 References 204 Index207

List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Fig. 2.2 Fig. 3.1 Fig. 3.2 Fig. 3.3 Fig. 3.4 Fig. 4.1 Fig. 4.2 Fig. 5.1 Fig. 5.2 Fig. 5.3 Fig. 6.1

Contrasting demeanors and performance styles in The Maltese Falcon (John Huston 1941) 29 A subjective close-up of Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck) from the perspective of Walter Neff (Fred McMurray) in Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder 1944) 34 A close-up of Ann Sinclair (Jacqueline White), the “good woman” in The Narrow Margin (Richard Fleischer 1952) 48 A close-up of “Mrs. Neall” (Marie Windsor), the “femme fatale” in The Narrow Margin50 Jennings (Paul Maxey) bathed in “sinister” chiaroscuro in The Narrow Margin60 Not even windows are transparent in The Narrow Margin68 A high-angle shot of the street, suggestive of an observing presence in Ministry of Fear (Fritz Lang 1944) 79 Framing that emphasizing off-screen space in Ministry of Fear87 Philip Marlowe (Humphrey Bogart) and Vivian Sternwood Routledge (Lauren Bacall) square off in a balanced composition in The Big Sleep (Howard Hawks 1946) 101 Another balanced composition in The Big Sleep105 The unnamed bookshop proprietress (Dorothy Malone) gazes through a window redolent of the movie screen in The Big Sleep108 Laura (Gene Tierney) showing off her practical knowledge in the kitchen in Laura (Otto Preminger 1944) 116

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List of Figures

Fig. 6.2 Fig. 6.3 Fig. 7.1 Fig. 7.2 Fig. 7.3 Fig. 8.1 Fig. 8.2

Laura looking “posed” in Waldo Lydecker’s (Clifton Webb) flashback in Laura129 The real Laura is contrasted with her painted ideal in Laura135 Frank (Van Heflin) and Edith (Janet Leigh’s) Enley’s suburban home is plunged into threatening darkness in Act of Violence (Fred Zinnemann 1949) 155 The repressed past returns in Act of Violence159 Frank and Edith stand on the border between the “ordinary” world and the noir world in Act of Violence162 Charles (Robert Cummings) and Madelon (Arlene Dahl) bathed in excessive chiaroscuro in Reign of Terror (Anthony Mann 1949) 189 Abraham Lincoln (uncredited) gazes at the Capitol Rotunda, still under construction, at the conclusion of The Tall Target (Anthony Mann 1951) 193

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: The Case of the Missing Films

In the 20th episode of its fourth season (“Shadow Play”), the hit hybrid teen drama/murder mystery series Pretty Little Liars (ABC Family/ Freeform, 2010–2017) paid an extended homage to American film noir. This was not the first time the show, with its convoluted plotlines rife with dual identities, femme fatales, and mysterious conspiracies, had acknowledged its debt to Hollywood thrillers from the 1940s and 1950s, but prior to this episode, those acknowledgments had taken the form of winking allusions and marginal “easter egg” style references. In this episode, however, the homage takes center stage. Shortly after it starts, one of the main characters, Spencer Hastings (Troian Bellisario), stands in the kitchen of her parents’ sprawling suburban McMansion pondering recent developments in the show’s various ongoing mysteries, poring over a recently uncovered diary once kept by another key character. She looks haggard and worn out, a product of insomnia brought on by the character’s spiraling Adderall addiction. As she stands at the sink preparing to take another pill to fuel her investigations through the night, she glances over at the kitchen TV, which is showing the beginning of Richard Fleischer’s 1952 noir The Narrow Margin (a film that we will be returning to in Chap. 3). As she blankly watches the screen, she mutters to herself Raymond Chandler’s famous description of the hard-boiled detective novel: “Down these mean streets must go a man who is not himself mean.” The show continues to cut between the movie playing on the TV and Spencer pouring a glass of water and taking the pill. After a gunman opens fire in the © The Author(s) 2020 N. Deyo, Film Noir and the Possibilities of Hollywood, Palgrave Close Readings in Film and Television, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37058-9_1

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film, there is a flash-cut, and suddenly the “real world” of the show has been drained of color and rendered in the same luminous black and white of the film playing on TV. We see Spencer’s reflection in the window over the kitchen sink and slowly realize that her appearance has been transformed, her mussed hair and modern casual comfort wear replaced by the coiffed, angular, art deco-inspired stylings of the classic femme fatale. What follows is an inspired 30-minute dream/hallucination sequence, a journey into Spencer’s sleep-deprived mind as it recreates the show’s world and characters in the image of films like The Narrow Margin. The men appear in trench coats and fedoras and talk like parodies of Dick Powell and Humphrey Bogart (a sample line of dialogue: “You’re spread so thin I can see right through you”), while the women are all, like Spencer, decked out in the inimitable style of noir heroines played by the likes of Lauren Bacall and Gene Tierney. The mise-en-scène is dominated by thick shadows, gentian blinds, and foggy, rain-slicked streets. In short, all of the tropes and signifiers have come to be popularly associated with film noir. There is even a large painted portrait overhanging a fireplace that evokes the famous painting of the titular character in Otto Preminger’s 1944 Laura (another film we will be returning to later). Outside of a few very specific references like this, however, the episode is mostly a pastiche of what we might call noir “in general,” its tropes and signifiers not pointing to particular films but rather to the whole mode and mood of the genre/ cycle itself. In this way, the episode can be seen as a very recent example of a phenomenon that James Naremore, in his canonical 1998 study of noir More Than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts, termed “the noir mediasphere.” Surveying the pop cultural landscape of the 1980s and 1990s, Naremore notes durability of noir’s hold on the popular imagination, identifying several pieces of “concrete evidence that Hollywood thrillers of the 1940s … [have] spread their aura across different media, becoming valuable as other things besides movies.” Pointing not only to examples from TV and contemporary cinema but also to comic books, art shows, CD-ROMs, advertisements, and “upscale” novels by writers like Don DeLillo and Martin Amis, he observes the ways in which the “dark Hollywood pictures of the 1940s and 1950s provide motifs, plots, images and characters for every sort of artifact” (1998, 255) before concluding the book by predicting that “the dark past” of film noir will “keep returning … long after this commentary has ended and the theatrical motion picture has evolved into some other medium” (277).

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A quick glance around our own even more thoroughly postmodern media culture proves Naremore’s prediction correct. Film noir, or the idea of it, survives not only in TV shows (like Pretty Little Liars) and feature films but also in video games like Rockstar Games’ L.A. Noire (2011), in which players assume the role of a Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) detective and are given the freedom to explore an open-world recreation of postwar Los Angeles while investigating crimes, interrogating suspects, and engaging in car chases and gunfights. The films themselves also continue to exert a great amount of allure and fascination within fan and cinephile communities, with institutions like the Film Noir Foundation dedicated to keeping the memory of noir alive through programs like the Noir Alley series on Turner Classic Movies and a nationwide series of “Noir City” film festivals. These endeavors are accompanied by and promoted through a robust presence on social media, with the official Noir Alley Twitter account boasting over 18,000 followers and hosting popular discussion threads in which fans can engage in communal and participatory viewing practices like live-tweeting the movies or sharing their favorite GIFs and images. And just as our contemporary mediasphere continues to reference and appropriate noir motifs and images, so too does it continue to do so mostly according to the fundamentally postmodern logic of pastiche, or “cultural recycling,” that Naremore identified at work in the 1980s and 1990s, drawing upon theoretical work by critics like Peter Wollen and Fredric Jameson, who posited that one of the key aspects of postmodern culture is the way in which, in Wollen’s words, it “plunders the ‘image-bank and word horde’ of the past for material to quote and re-purpose” (1989, 168). Or, as Jameson puts it, postmodern pastiche is defined by its “imitation of dead styles, speech through all the masks and voices stored up in the imaginary museum of a now global culture” in a process of “random cannibalization” driven by “a whole historically original consumers’ appetite for a world transformed into sheer images of itself” (1991, 18). What this means, in the terms of the noir mediasphere, is that the images are torn free of their original contexts, and what was originally a group of quite different and heterogeneous films becomes flattened into a largely homogenous collection of stereotypical images to be freely raided without much concern for the individual concerns of originals themselves. We can see this process of decontextualization and flattening at work in many of the examples with which we began. Take the Pretty Little Liars episode, for instance. Not only are the majority of its noir references suitably generic that they could have been constructed by someone who had

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never actually seen any actual noir films and whose only exposure to the style was through already existing parodies and pastiches. The same holds true even for media products that would seem to have a clearer or more direct connections to the original films, like TCM’s Noir Alley series and the work of the Film Noir Foundation more generally. While these programs and institutions are doing invaluable work to preserve and promote film history, their public-facing images and marketing materials all participate in the same flattening and decontextualizing logic as most other objects in the noir mediasphere. Even the names they use convey a certain unifying homogenization, suggesting a single and unified fictional world in which all of the various films’ characters co-exist simultaneously, a world in which Humphrey Bogart’s Sam Spade might turn a corner in a rain-­ slicked alley and come face to face with Robert Mitchum’s Jeff Bailey. The individual films, then, become simply illustrations of this more general sense of “noir-ness,” their often quite significant differences papered over or de-emphasized. Another way of putting this would be to say that film noir, in pop culture and the popular imagination more broadly, has become a “myth,” in Roland Barthes’s particular usage of that term. In Mythologies, Barthes explains the ways in which real things in the world (objects, places, etc.) are culturally processed into “concepts” that carry with them a stable set of stereotypical and thoroughly ideological connotations. Writing of the need for neologisms to name and account for these concepts, he points to the difference between the country of China and the stereotypes associated with it in the west as an illustrative example: “China is one thing, the idea of it which a French petit bourgeoisie could have of it not so long ago is another: for this particular mixture of bells, rickshaws, and opium dens, no other word possible but Siniess” ([1957] 2012, 230). The popular conception of noir today functions in almost precisely these terms, calling up a relatively staid and stable set of stereotypical images and connotations. It is, in other words, a reified object available for use and circulation by filmmakers, TV producers, marketing managers, and various other agents of the so-called culture industry whenever they wish to evoke a sense of “timeless cool” or a nostalgia for some imagined past. The movies themselves, as unique individual works of culture, are rendered, like the real country of China for Barthes’s typical “French petit bourgeoisie,” practically beside the point. In describing this process of “cultural recycling,” Naremore directs our attention to a passage in Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel Vineland that

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might serve as an epitaph for the fate of film noir in the popular imaginary. In it, the novel’s protagonist, a teen girl named Prairie who Pynchon describes as “among the first mall rats,” visits Hollywood’s newly built “Noir Center, loosely based on crime movies from around World War II and after, designed to suggest the famous ironwork of the Bradbury Building downtown, where a few of them had been shot.” Pynchon goes on to flex his well-regarded skill with puns as he enumerates the mall’s amenities, which include “an upscale mineral-water boutique called Bubble Indemnity, plus The Lounge Good Buy patio furniture outlet, the Mall Tease Falcon, which sold perfume and cosmetics, and a New York-­ style deli, The Lady ’n’ the Lox.” More importantly, though, he gives voice to Prairie’s own subjective reactions to the mall, rendered in a form of indirect discourse that would also seem to double as authorial editorializing: This was yuppification run to some pitch so desperate that Prairie at least had to hope the whole process was reaching the end of its cycle. She happened to like those old weird-necktie movies in black and white, her grand folks had worked on them, and she personally resented this increasingly dumb attempt to cash in on the pseudoromantic mystique of those particular olden days in this town… (1991, 326)

As we have already seen, the “whole process” turned out to have been nowhere near to reaching its end in 1991, and continues to show no signs of abating in our own historical or cultural moment. Such, then, is the fate of film noir in the popular imagination. But this fate is not really my main concern here. Indeed, as the above references to Naremore and Pynchon show, I am far from the first person to comment upon this particular phenomenon. Rather, I intend this brief sketch to provide a ground and a framework for the real focus of this introduction, which is to suggest that noir has experienced a similar fate in the realms of critical and academic discourse. In what follows, I attempt to diagnose what I see as a certain tendency among scholars and of noir, regardless of their individual theoretical and methodological dispositions, to seek essences and generalizations, to construct all-encompassing “theories” of noir based upon sometimes-quite-partial surveys of the films themselves. While these approaches have produced a wealth of sophisticated insights that academic film studies would be infinitely poorer without, I would like to suggest that they also have the unintended consequence of papering

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over significant differences among and between the actual films under discussion, of flattening the heterogenous body of work we have come to call “film noir” into a single thing, a stable object to be dissected and explained through recourse to the author’s chosen theoretical framework. In response, I suggest an approach based on a return to the films themselves, a practice of close reading that would seek to do nothing more than understand individual films on their own terms. I propose this not as a rejection of or replacement for the synoptic or theoretical approaches that have dominated that study of noir, but rather as a more modest complement.

A Certain Tendency in Film Noir Criticism The history of critical and scholarly writing on film noir can effectively be divided into three phases, each of which corresponding more or less with broader trends and developments within the field of film and media studies. Indeed, it seems a veritable rite of passage for each new school of thought or theoretical practice within the discipline to take its own crack at explaining these strange and beguiling films. These phases are, in brief, as follows: a first phase in which French film critics “discovered” American films of the early 1940s in the immediate postwar years (after having been prevented from seeing them during the war) and sought to give name to the trends and tendencies they noticed. This practice took the form of both the work by critics as Cahiers du cinema that enthusiastically celebrated important noir auteurs and stars like Humphrey Bogart as well as more serious-minded attempts at description, classification, and analysis by Nino Frank (1946), Jean-Pierre Chartier (1946), and the pair of Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton (1955). After a decade and half marked by little in the way of significant critical or scholarly activity on the subject, noir experienced a second rediscovery or revival, this time by American and British writers like Raymond Durgnat (1970), Paul Schraeder (1972), Robert Porfirio (1976), and the pair of Janey Place and Lowell Patterson (1974). Generally speaking, these studies oscillate between impressionistic appraisals of the films as a group, formalistic attempts to develop classificatory schema, thematic analyses that lean heavily on Existentialism, and a crude-by-today’s-standards sociology of noir’s relationship to the postwar cultural milieu. Phase two overlaps historically with the second half of phase one and corresponds with film studies’ entry into academia and its accompanying

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consolidation around a theoretical paradigm informed by the heady mix of Marxism, psychoanalysis, feminism, and semiotics that we today largely designate as capital-T Theory and associate with the British journal Screen. Thanks largely to the pathbreaking contributions of feminist film critics, studies of noir in this period were primarily concerned with its depictions of gender and sexuality, with particular analytical emphasis on the figure of the femme fatale and on the films’ often ambivalent depictions of postwar masculinity (e.g. Kaplan [ed.] [1978] 1998; Krutnik 1991; Doane 1991). At the same time, critics associated with the competing British film journal Movie, such as Andrew Britton, Deborah Thomas, and Michael Walker, were taking up similar questions regarding the sexual and gender politics of noir but doing so in a way that was less reliant on the language of postLacanian psychoanalytical theory. The essays of the latter group, mostly detailed analyses of single films, are collected in The Movie Book of Film Noir (ed. Ian Cameron 1993).1 In the 1980s and early 1990s, Theory’s imperial and unipolar reign over academic film studies began to wane and in its place arose the more fragmented and multipolar version of the discipline that remains with us to this day. In the world of noir criticism, this meant the appearance of studies concerned with Foucauldian “discourse analysis” (e.g. Telotte 1989), cultural studies approaches examining noir’s relationship to the broader experiences of modernity (e.g. Sobchak 1998; Rabinowitz 2002; Dimendberg 2004; Fay and Nieland 2010), historical studies like Naremore’s aforementioned More Than Night and Forster Hirsch’s The Dark Side of the Screen (1981), as well as continuations of the psychoanalytic approach augmented by new developments like Affect Theory and Trauma Studies (e.g. Haacke 2019). The post-Theory period also saw a number of more empirically inclined scholars (e.g. Bordwell et al. 1985; Vernet 1993; Neale 2000) question whether or not “film noir” can even be said to have existed as a real historical phenomenon or if it is merely an ahistorical creation conjured into existence by misguided critics and theorists, presumably including all of those previously mentioned. The above is by no means meant as a comprehensive history of noir criticism, but rather as a thumbnail sketch meant to suggest both the general outline of the history of noir as an idea and the wide variety of critical theories, approaches, and methodologies that have been brought to bear on it as a subject. Regardless of individual theoretical positions and analytical frameworks, however, many of these works demonstrate an abiding drive toward generalization, a tendency to abstract singular and defining characteristics of noir as such from the morass of the films themselves. This

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abiding drive often manifests itself in a number of common rhetorical moves, whose recurrence across this vast and variegated body of criticism and scholarship is worth taking a closer look at. The first of these moves is the simple, sweeping, definitive statement about what noir “is.” Such statements can be found in the earlier treatments of the subject and find perhaps their clearest early expression in both the title and content of the first body chapter of Borde and Chaumeton’s A Panorama of American Film Noir, 1941–1953, “Toward a Definition of Film Noir.” The chapter opens with a description of the authors’ method, which “consists in studying the typical characteristics of films the critics have generally deemed to be noir; then, by comparing these qualities, in seeking a common denominator and defining the single emotional attitude all the works in the series tend to bring into play” ([1955] 2002, 5) and ends with what the authors themselves declare to be an “easy” conclusion: “All the works in this series exhibit a consistence of an emotional sort; namely, the state of tension created in the spectators by the disappearance of their psychological bearings. The vocation of film noir has been to create a specific sense of malaise” (13). Similarly, Paul Schrader, after declaring that he has no interest in “haggl[ing] definitions,” states his intent “to reduce film noir to its primary colors …, those cultural and stylistic elements to which any definition must return” before suggesting that film noir is best defined as the intersection of a set of thematic, historical, and stylistic conditions: “war and post-war disillusionment,” “post-war realism,” “The German Influence,” and “The Hard-boiled Tradition” ([1972] 2016, 90–91). Such sweeping and categorical statements persist even as the analyses themselves become less impressionistic and more theoretically grounded and methodologically rigorous. Thus, Christine Gledhill writes of the “five main structural features of film noir that together produce a specific location for women and somewhat ambiguous ideological effects” and states that “film noir probes the secrets of female sexuality and male desire within patterns of submission and dominance” ([1978] 1998, 28). More recently, Paul Haacke has posited that “the emergence of film noir and its persistent resonance can be understood in relation to what Adorno and Horkheimer call the ‘dialectic of enlightenment’” (2019, 49). In arriving at or supporting these singular, defining statements, many writers often employ what I have characterized above as a “synoptic,” or montage-like, approach to the analysis of the films themselves. In both the early, impressionistic works as well as the later, more theoretically inclined criticism, one will often find paragraphs and passages in which large groups

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of films are dealt with in one swift blow, treated in single phrases or sentences or simply listed without significant distinction. We can see an early example of this sort of thing in Durgnat’s pathbreaking 1970 article, which is filled with taxonomic groupings like the following: The theme of the tramp corrupting the not-always-so-innocent bourgeois is artistically fruitful, with Double Indemnity, The Postman Always Rings Twice, The Woman in the Window, The Woman on the Beach and, a straggler, The [sic] Pushover … The cycle synchronizes with a climax in the perennial theme of Woman: Executioner/Victim, involving such figures as Bette Davis, Barbara Stanwyck, Gene Tierney, Joan Crawford, and Lana Turner. ([1970] 2016, 83)

While Durgnat’s essay is perhaps an extreme example of this practice of condensing a large number of films together—of suggesting, essentially, that they are all simply different versions of the same basic format or template—similar passages can still be found in more recent scholarship as well. Take, for instance, the following passage from Paula Rabinowitz’s 2002 book Black and White and Noir: America’s Pulp Modernism, which also touches on depictions of women and the femme fatale: There comes a moment in many film noirs when the bad girl emerges snarling with anger as she ensnares the dimwitted doomed guy … Jane Greer, dressed like a nun, turns on Robert Mitchum in the final moment of Out of the Past after she kills her gangster lover Kirk Douglas, leaving Mitchum dead and framed for a number of murders. So too Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity sneers at Fred McMurray when he starts getting cold feet about their plans to murder her husband … Gloria Grahame laughs at Jack Palance when he slaps her face in Sudden Fear … Lizabeth Scott in Too Late For Tears reveals her greedy murderous desire for the cash hurled mistakenly into the convertible she and her husband drive … These scenes repeat themselves again and again as if it is not enough that the women’s morbid sexuality already marks them as bad. They must also mutate into animals … The image of the woman turning into a wild beast is code for the impossible: to see the moment of female orgasm. (25)

As in the passage from Durgnat, Rabinowitz effectively reduces seven quite different films (she also mentions Detour, The File on Thelma Jordan, Cat People, and Phantom Lady) into a single, repeated moment. The characters played by Greer, Stanwyck, Grahame, Ann Savage, Simone Simon,

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and Ella Raines are rendered as, in effect, simple variations on the same figure. In both Durgnat’s and Rabinowitz’s analyses, then, differences between the individual films references are elided in the interest of abstracting generalizable tendencies. When works of noir criticism and scholarship conducted in these modes do turn extended attention to close and detailed analyses of individual films, the films discussed are themselves typically framed as being illustrative of some broader trend or tendency within the whole series of films. Two discussions of Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944), a film often identified by critics as the paradigmatic noir (and a film we will return to in the next chapter), will serve as useful examples. The analyses are by J.P. Telotte, from his book Voices in the Dark: The Narrative Patterns of Film Noir (1989), and by Claire Johnston, whose essay on the film appears in the 1978 Women in Film Noir collection. Both essays are model examples of detailed reading and analysis, unfurling theoretically sophisticated interpretations of significant formal and thematic patterns at work in Wilder’s endlessly complicated film. Both texts also, however, seem to display a certain anxiety over what it is they are doing, as if it is not enough to simply analyze the film itself without also making it exemplary, and without thus asserting that what is said about the film is also applicable to noir as a whole. Thus Telotte begins by stating that Double Indemnity’s famous flashback structure should be seen as “a narrative mechanism that would become fundamentally associated with the film noir form” (40) and writes that the film’s use of this device “demonstrates a complex relationship between the narrator and his narrative, between discourse and its subjects, that is crucial to this technique, as well as to the thrust of the film noir” (40). Later, noting the film’s repeated insertion of shots of the dictaphone device into which Walter Neff records his confession/narration, he states that the image is “emblematic of a pervasive inability or unwillingness to speak directly,” which he then identifies as “the very territory of film noir: a narrative world in which individuals constantly lie to or trick each other, where they always find communication difficult or irrelevant” (45). Setting aside minor quibbles whether or not these characteristics can be productively identified with noir as a whole,2 what is most worth noting here is the way in which the generalizing statements are syntactically secondary—perceptive and perspicuous claims about Double Indemnity as a film are immediately enlarged into claims about noir as a whole, but the sentences and assertions they contain would still make perfect sense without the secondary broader and more sweeping claims. We can see a similar

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practice in Johnston’s essay, whose sole reference to noir as a broader field is also subordinated to a more particular claim about Double Indemnity itself: “As an example of the film noir, Double Indemnity poses a social reality constructed by the split, the interface, between the Symbolic and the Imaginary of a particular social order—that of the male universe of the insurance business—an order which activates/reactivates the trouble of castration for the male in patriarchy” ([1978] 1998, 91–92). As with the sentences quoted from Telotte, an observation about a single film is enlarged to apply to all of film noir. There is a rhetorical slippage from the specific to the general, a willful tendency toward abstraction and totalization.

The Hermeneutics of Suspicion Of course, none of the tendencies or patterns discussed above apply exclusively to noir criticism. They are rather the common practices of not only genre criticism as it is normally done but also large swathes of academic cultural analysis more generally. Nearly all the works mentioned above can be easily sorted into what Jameson has called the “semantic” and “syntactic” approaches to genre analysis.3 Semantic analysis, he argues, “aims to describe the essence of meaning of a given genre by way of the reconstruction of an imaginary entity … which is something like the generalizable existential experience behind the individual texts” (1981, 108). In noir criticism, most of the early, pre-1970s works would fall into this category, as would some of the later cultural studies-inflected analyses. The “syntactic” approach, Jameson goes on to say, “condemns the semantic approach as intuitive and impressionistic [and] proposes rather to analyze the structures and mechanisms of a genre … and to determine its laws and limits” (108). In noir criticism, works like Telotte’s and the psychoanalytic approach of Doane, Kaplan, Gledhill, and others are the clear inheritors of this tradition. Indeed, Christine Gledhill describes the underlying project of her own criticism and of “recent Neo-Marxist developments in film theory” in precisely these terms, identifying its goal as “changing the project of criticism from the discovery of meaning to that of uncovering the means of its production” ([1978] 1998, 21). Despite these differences in approach, however, both the semantic and the syntactic schools are basically totalizing in their approach, treating any given individual text not as an aesthetic object in and of itself, but rather, as Jameson says of precursor figures like Vladimir Propp and Northrop Frye, of engaging in a method

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that “amounts to the rewriting of a body of varied texts in the form of a single master narrative” (122). The goal of the analysis in both cases is to plumb beneath a text’s superficial individuality so as to uncover the more generalizable aesthetic/formal conventions or social/cultural forces that have produced it. The preponderance, some might say dominance, of such approaches in the academic humanities has in recent years become a hot topic of meta-­ critical discussion, with prominent literary theorists like Rita Felski, Toril Moi, and others inviting scholars and critics to reassess some aspects of our disciplinary habits and tendencies. Felski’s project, for instance, is to sketch, as the title of her 2015 book puts it, The Limits of Critique. By “critique” she means more or less the same critical philosophy that I have posited underwrites most existing scholarship on film noir. Encompassing a range of theoretical commitments—including ideological criticism, symptomatic reading, discourse analysis, and many others that partake in what she, following Paul Ricour, terms the “hermeneutics of suspicion”— “critique” in general is defined by a fundamental disposition toward the texts and objects of its analysis, one in which texts are to be “deciphered as a symptom, mirror, index, or antithesis of some larger social structure— as if there were an essential system of correspondences knotting a text into an overarching canopy of domination, akin to those medieval cosmologies in which everything is connected to everything else” (11). Felski also provides a way of understanding the particular appeal of film noir for such approaches. In one wide-ranging chapter, she charts the sometimes ambivalent parallels between the “contemporary protocols of suspicious reading” and the depictions of criminal investigations in crime narratives and detective stories. Critics, she writes, “have often shown a soft spot for fictional sleuths of various sorts. From Sherlock Holmes to Sam Spade, criminal investigators have served as figures of fascination and identification, hailed as comrades in arms, alter egos, and kindred spirits” (85). Like the fictional detective who reasons backward from a series of clues in order to reconstruct a crime and identify a guilty party, academic cultural studies critics, in Felski’s rendering, seize upon formal patterns and textual details in order to situate “them within larger structures of meaning” and to “identify their root causes,” root causes which nearly always take the form of “some larger entity targeted by the critic: Victorian society, imperialism, discourse/power, Western metaphysics” (89).

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Because of their often overt depictions of duplicity, hidden agendas, and worlds bathed in paranoia and suspicion, film noir and its literary antecedents exert an abiding allure for critics who see themselves as agents of demystification, even as that demystifying gaze is turned on the supposed ideological complicity of the noir/detective texts themselves. “The text, like the criminal suspect,” Felski writes, “must be interrogated and made to yield its secrets” (101). These interrogations, she goes on to argue, often take the unfortunate form of a rigged game, as the story the critic wishes to tell “dictates what counts as a clue as much as the clues determine the shape of the story.” As a result, a “presumption of a guilty party accompanies or precedes the deciphering of textual details” leading to a foregone conclusion in which the “clues yield up their anticipated meanings, alerting us to the hidden cogs and opaque workings of the social machine” (102). In other words, sound observations of tendencies in a small handful of texts may quickly transform into a top-down critical schema that can be applied to any and all apparently similar texts in order to yield the same interpretive or analytical results. Though she often adopts a combative tone, Felski states that her ultimate goal is not to declare these critical practices invalid or to reject the insights generated by ideological critique throughout the years, but rather to challenge what she sees as the mode’s intellectual hegemony in academic cultural studies and its consequent marginalization of other approaches, the “kudzu-like proliferation of a hyper-critical style of reading that has crowded out alternative forms of intellectual life” (10). What might these alternatives look like? Felski herself suggests a critical program based in Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory that would consider “reading as a coproduction between actors rather than an unraveling of manifest meaning, a form of making rather than unmaking” (13). Toril Moi, working in a vein parallel to Felski’s, suggests finding inspiration in the ordinary language philosophy of Wittgenstein, J.L. Austin, and Stanley Cavell. Moi asserts that Wittgenstein’s philosophy, which “flatly denies that language hides anything” (2017, 36), can be particularly useful for dispelling what she calls “the post-Saussurean assumption that language itself, just by being language, is always hiding something; that words, sentences, utterances themselves always wear masks; that there is always something else beneath or behind our words, a shadow of meanings covered up by the words themselves,” an assumption that she sees as undergirding most work in the academic humanities. In contrast, Wittgenstein’s philosophy, she says, “enables us to look at old questions in fresh ways, to

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raise new questions and escape from the pictures that have held us captive for so long” (34). I want now to follow Moi’s lead on this front, to see the ways in which Wittgenstein’s work might help us not only to understand the patterns and tendencies that we see in much of the existing scholarly and critical work on film noir but also to consider the “old questions” of film noir in fresh, new ways.

Meaning, Use, and Context In taking up Wittgenstein, Moi frames her adoption of his work and ideas as something of a radical move, stating that “his philosophy has yet to be widely disseminated among literary scholars” (Moi 2017, p.  33). The same, of course, cannot be said of film and media studies, which has long boasted a wing of writers and thinkers committed to Wittgensteinian modes of analysis, much of whose work is largely indebted to the aforementioned Stanley Cavell. For the time being, however, I would like to sidestep most of this secondary material and instead return to the primary text of Wittgenstein’s work itself, with particular focus on a small cluster of arguments and observations relevant to our discussion of film noir. Most important here is a lengthy analysis of what he diagnoses as philosophy’s typical “craving for generality,” which is defined as a “tendency to look for something in common to all the entities which we commonly subsume under a general term” (1958, 17). This “craving,” he goes on to assert, has its roots a “preoccupation with the method of science … the method of reducing the explanation of phenomena to the smallest possible number of primitive laws … [and] of unifying the treatment of different topics by using a generalization.” “Philosophers,” he goes on to suggest, “constantly see the method of science before their eyes, and are irresistibly tempted to ask and answer questions the way science does. This tendency is the real source of metaphysics, and leads the philosopher into complete darkness” (1958, 18). We might today think of this in terms of the much-remarked-upon phenomenon called “physics envy.” We can see how such a craving for generality manifests in various ways in film noir criticism and scholarship. Most obviously, we can see it in the early, overtly essentializing work that sought to conclusively define noir formally, thematically, stylistically, or ideologically. But we can also see it as well in the later, more “revisionist” scholarship that at least appears to acknowledge the folly of those earlier essentializing attempts at arriving at a generic definition. Thus, critics of using “film noir” as a generic or

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conceptual designation like David Bordwell, Stephen Neale, and Marc Vernet effectively argue that noir does not exist because they can find no set of truly common features among the films commonly identified as film noir. And we can even see it at work in the most sophisticated of recent discussions, such as those by Dimendberg, Rabinowitz, Sobchak, and Fay/Nieland, which acknowledge the fruitless idealism of seeking a unifying essence within or among the films themselves, but nevertheless seek to delimit “film noir” as stable object of study by rigorously historicizing it, positing that what unifies the films is their relationship to the historical conditions from which they emerged. “Film noir” as an entity is, in this analysis, not a genre or a formal category, but rather an index of, or complex response to, the cultural and material experience(s) of twentieth-­ century modernity. It remains, however, a generalized concept, a fact indicated by the authors’ continued usage of the term in the singular. Is there another way of conceiving of film noir? A way that recognizes the validity of Bordwell’s, Neale’s, and Vernet’s pointed critiques of the whole idea of “film noir” as a category without either (1) re-constituting it around a different generalization or (2) dispensing with the concept altogether? For an answer, we might look to the example Wittgenstein himself uses to demonstrate the folly of seeking essences and craving generality: games. “We are inclined,” he writes in The Blue and Brown Books, “to think there is something in common to all games, say, and that this common property is the justification for applying the general term ‘game’ to the various games; whereas games form a family the member of which have family likenesses … and these likenesses overlap” (1958, 17). He develops this example further in the Philosophical Investigations, where he posits that “the concept of a game is a concept with blurred edges” and discusses the actions one might take if one were tasked with explaining to someone what a game is: I think we’d describe games to him, and we might add to the description: ‘This and similar things are called “games”.’ And do we know anymore ourselves? Is it just that we can’t tell others exactly what a game is? — But this is not ignorance. We don’t know the boundaries because none have been drawn. To repeat, we can draw a boundary — for a special purpose. Does it take this to make the concept usable? Not at all! Except perhaps for that special purpose. ([1953] 2009, 37)

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This passage is useful for our current purposes in a couple of ways. First, it gives us a way of describing what most critics do when they discuss film noir: they draw boundaries, and those boundaries are useful—often very useful—for the special purposes to which they are put. That does not mean, however, that we must take those boundaries as being contiguous with the boundaries of noir “in general.” Second, it provides a philosophical justification for continuing to use the term “film noir” even in the absence of some truly definitive boundary. Third, it helps us begin to answer the question of what a study of noir that took no interest in boundary drawing might look like. It might, for instance, look similar to what both ordinary conversations about and in-depth discussions of individual games look like. When you talk about a football game or a chess match or anything else of the sort, you might typically do so without generalizing your statements to be about the sport or the game in general, to say nothing of the larger overarching category of “games.” Instead, the topics of discussion are often more contextual and local: an appreciation of a particular play, an analysis of why a particular defensive strategy failed or succeeded. Certainly, knowledge about the sport or game’s rules, history, and so on can usefully inform these discussions, providing context and points of comparison, but the thrust of the discussion/analysis will be toward the specific case rather than the general category. If it is true, as Wittgenstein argues, that “the idea that to get clear about the meaning of a general term one had to find the common element in all its applications has … made the philosopher dismiss as irrelevant the concrete cases, which alone could have helped him to understand the usage of the general term” (1958, p. 19), then an alternative approach would begin by directing its focus at precisely those concrete cases. What would this look like in practice for film noir studies? As readers may have presumed from the series under whose imprint this book is appearing, my chosen approach is detailed close reading of individual films of the sort practiced and promoted by writers like Cavell, V.F.  Perkins, George M. Wilson, Andrew Klevan, John Gibbs, and Douglas Pye. The basic parameters of such an approach have been discussed at great length elsewhere,4 as have the parallels between the work of these critics and Wittgenstein’s philosophy, and so I will not rehearse those arguments at any great length here. Instead, I just want to focus on the potential benefits of this close reading approach not only for noir studies but also for

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genre studies more generally. A bottom-up approach that focuses on individual films without either applying to them a pre-established generic definition (i.e. analyzing a given film in terms of how it does or does not conform to the supposed standards/conventions of the genre) or a similarly pre-established ideological framework (i.e. asking how the film/ genre expresses or reflects or mediates external political/social/historical forces) would potentially be more open to surprise and discovery. Freed from the burden of having to make a film speak for a genre as a whole, to say nothing of making it speak for the entirety of the social and political environment in which it first emerged, the critic would be more able to consider the particularity of a given film. Theoretical concepts and broader generic frameworks might still be invoked, but in a more flexible and context-­dependent fashion. For noir studies, such an approach could give us a method for better appreciation of the expressive possibilities of the various tropes, figures, patterns, and tendencies that comprise what we have come to think of as “film noir.” My usage of the term possibilities derives from Andrew Britton’s discussion of studio-era Hollywood in his bracing critique of Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson’s totalizing The Classical Hollywood Cinema. Challenging the view that the classical Hollywood “group style” was set of well-defined rules that filmmakers would simply or mechanically “obey or apply in their own work,” Britton instead suggests that “group styles” operate in a far more dynamic fashion. “The whole problem with group styles,” he writes, is that they are perceived by audiences as a significant means of articulating common social experience: the “rules” becomes rules because they conduce in some way to the exploration of a range of important, and widely shared, assumptions, feelings, and attitudes. This would seem to suggest that such rules leave, and are acknowledged to leave, very considerable leeway, and they are present to those who submit to them less as constraints than as enabling possibilities. ([1989] 2009, 431)

While Britton is writing about the conventions and practices of studio-era tout court, I would argue that his suggestions are equally applicable to individual genres, cycles, and series, including the body of films we call noir. An analytical approach grounded in such an understanding of genre and convention would then principally concern itself with an exploration of the ways in which specific films and specific filmmakers took advantage

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of the possibilities furnished by the various narrative patterns and thematic tropes that we have come in retrospect to designate and generalize as “film noir” in order to pursue their own specific goals. Moreover, such an approach would need to forego, as much as possible, generalizing statements about noir as such, refraining from allowing the analysis of individual cases to expand into more categorial statements. A question might here arise about what to do with the term “noir” now that I have problematized its application in a general and totalizing way. If there is no singular essence of noir, as I am arguing here and throughout this book, if these films share only “family resemblances” rather than some unifying essential aesthetic or cultural characteristic, then of what analytical or critical use could the category itself still be? But of course, even after Wittgenstein showed that there is no single unifying essence shared by all the things we call “games,” he still continued to employ the term itself. Despite its conceptually problematic nature, “film noir” remains a useful designator for the films under discussion here, in no small part because of its accrued cachet and meaning. Like Potter Stewart and obscenity, people know noir when they see it, and so it would seem largely fruitless and self-­ defeating to throw out the term entirely. The solution that I would like to propose is simpler and more pragmatic: a simple switch from thinking about the singular “film noir” to the plural “noir films.” Such a terminological switch retains the usefully evocative term while at the same time pointing toward multiplicity and difference rather than unity or singularity. It is descriptive rather than ascriptive.

Looking Ahead The ensuing pages may be thought of as a collection of investigations conducted in these terms. Chapter 2 is meant to function as a sort of practical counterpart to this more theoretically inclined introduction and as a demonstration of close reading as a means of identifying and articulating the differences between apparently very similar films or moments. In it, I compare four films that have often been held as paradigmatic of film noir—The Maltese Falcon (John Huston 1941), the aforementioned Double Indemnity, Scarlet Street (Fritz Lang 1944), Out of the Past (Jacques Tourneur 1947)—by looking specifically at the scenes in which the main male protagonist first meets the femme fatale in order to show how each film uses the same basic narrative beat for very different reasons. Chapter 3 looks at Richard Fleischer’s relatively low-budget and seemingly

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straightforward The Narrow Margin (1952), showing how the film selfreflexively employs conventional tropes and signifiers in order to call attention to their fundamentally constructed nature. After these examinations of the paradigmatic and the (apparently) conventional, Chaps. 4, 5, and 6 consider noir films by three of Hollywood’s most distinctive auteurs: Fritz Lang (making his second appearance), Howard Hawks, and Otto Preminger, showing how each used the enabling possibilities of the detective/mystery film genre not only to explore their own thematic and formal preoccupations but also to probe the expressive potentialities of Hollywood filmmaking more generally. Finally, Chaps. 7 and 8 center specifically on the issue of films’ relationship to history and politics. Looking first at Fred Zinnemann’s Act of Violence (1949) and then at Anthony Mann’s Reign of Terror (1949) and The Tall Target (1951), I show that the films should be seen as doing more than simply inertly or unconsciously “reflecting” external historical processes. Rather, I will argue that the films under consideration may be seen as using generic patterns to actively wrestle with the questions of how to represent history and its relationship to the present. While certain motifs and concerns reoccur across a number of these chapters, I do not intend for them to be taken together to form a fully complete and unified “vision” or “theory” of noir, for reasons I hope were well-articulated in the preceding pages. Indeed, in some respects the chapters may be seen to function more as a series of semi-autonomous essays than as sequential parts of a single, unfolding argument. At the same time, however, I would like to suggest that there is some unity in this separation, that the centrifugal nature of the book’s construction reflects the varied and variegated nature of the films under discussion. In any case, I would like to see what follows more as an invitation for further work than as a finished or comprehensive analysis. As I said, the book can be understood as a collection of examinations of particular “uses” of many of the tropes, signifiers, stylistic figures, and narrative patterns we have come to collectively identify with film noir. It is by no means, however, an exhaustive catalogue of such uses, if only because such a catalogue would be an impossible and unrealizable undertaking. Instead, I leave it to you, the reader, to pick up where the book leaves off by considering how other studio-era filmmakers have used these tools or by looking at how filmmakers have continued to appropriate and re-use them to this day or by taking up other genres and cycles in the same spirit, and so on. The gift and the curse of the sort of critical program described in these pages is that its work is never truly finished.

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Notes 1. Certainly not all of the essays in this volume are concerned with questions of gender and sexuality, but essays by Britton, Thomas, Walker, and others are enough to make one question E. Ann Kaplan’s assertion that the Movie critics “approaches deliberately avoid ideological, political, or feminist perspectives in favor of addressing matters of style, history, narrative, auteurism” (1998, 4). 2. Only a portion of films thought of as noir employed the flashback/voice-­ over structure. Meanwhile, situations in which characters constantly lie to and deceive one another are by no means exclusive to noir—many 1930s and 1940s screwball comedies, for instance, also center on such matters, though obviously to much different effect. 3. For an analysis of film genre conducted in similar terms, see Rick Altman’s “A Semantic/Syntactic Approach to Film Genre” (Cinema Journal, vol. 23, no. 3 [1984]: 6–18; reprinted in Film/Genre, British Film Institute, 1999). 4. See, for a programmatic overview, Gibbs and Pye’s introduction to Style and Meaning: Studies in the Detailed Analysis of Film (Manchester University Press, 2005).

References Altman, Rick. 1999. Film/Genre. London: British Film Institute. Barthes, Roland. [1957] 2012. Mythologies. Trans. Richard Howard and Annette Lavers. New York: Hill & Wang. Borde, Raymond and Etienne Chaumeton. [1955] 2002. A Panorama of American Film Noir, 1941–1953. Trans. Paul Hammond. San Francisco: City Lights Books. Bordwell, David, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson. 1985. The Classical Hollywood Cinema Film Style & Mode of Production to 1960. New  York: Columbia University Press. Britton, Andrew. [1989] 2009. The Philosophy of the Pigeon Hole: Wisconsin Formalism and the ‘Classical Style’. In Britton on Film, ed. Barry Keith Grant. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Cameron, Ian, ed. 1993. The Book of Film Noir. New York: Continuum. Chartier, Jean-Pierre. [1946] 2016. Americans Also Make Noir Films. In Film Noir Compendium, ed. Alain Silver and James Ursini, 36–40, Milwaukee: Applause Theater and Cinema Books. Dimendberg, Edward. 2004. Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Doane, Mary Ann. 1991. Femmes Fatales: Feminism, Film Theory, Psychoanalysis. New York: Routledge.

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Durgnat, Raymond. [1970] 2016. Paint It Black: The Family Tree of Film Noir. In Film Noir Compendium, ed. Alain Silver and James Ursini, 88–100, Milwaukee: Applause Theater and Cinema Books. Fay, Jennifer, and Justus Nieland. 2010. Film Noir: Hard-Boiled Modernity and the Cultures of Globalization. New York: Routledge. Felski, Rita. 2015. The Limits of Critique. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Frank, Nino. [1946] 2016. A New Kind of Police Drama: The Criminal Adventure. In Film Noir Compendium, ed. Alain Silver and James Ursini, 32–36, Milwaukee: Applause Theater and Cinema Books. Gledhill, Christine. [1978] 1998. Klute 1: A Contemporary Film Noir and Feminist Criticism. In Women in Film Noir, ed. E. Ann Kaplan, 20–35. London: BFI Books. Haacke, Paul. 2019. The Melancholic Voice-Over in Film Noir. Journal of Cinema and Media Studies 58 (2, Winter): 46–70. Hirsch, Forster. 1981. Film Noir: The Dark Side of the Screen. New  York: Da Capo Press. Jameson, Fredric. 1981. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. ———. 1991. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press. Johnston, Claire. [1978] 1998. Double Indemnity. In Women in Film Noir, ed. E. Ann Kaplan, 89–99. London: BFI Publishing. Kaplan, E. Ann. [1978] 1998. Women in Film Noir. London: BFI Publishing. Krutnik, Frank. 1991. In a Lonely Street: Film Noir, Genre, Masculinity. New York: Routledge. Moi, Toril. 2017. Nothing Is Hidden. In Critique and Post-Critique, ed. Rita Felski and Elizabeth Anker, 31–49. Durham: Duke University Press. Naremore, James. 1998. More Than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts. Los Angeles: University of California Press. Neale, Steve. 2000. Genre and Hollywood. New York: Routledge. Place, J.A. and Lowell Peterson [1974] 1996. Some Visual Motifs in Film Noir. In Film Noir Reader, ed. Alain Silver and James Ursini, 65–75. New  York: Limelight Editions. Porfirio, Robert G. [1976] 2016. No Way Out: Existential Motifs in Film Noir. In Film Noir Compendium, ed. Alain Silver and James Ursini, 88–100. Milwaukee: Applause Cinema and Theater Books. Pynchon, Thomas. 1991. Vineland. New York: Penguin Books. Rabinowitz, Paula. 2002. Black & White & Noir. New  York: Columbia University Press. Schraeder, Paul. [1972] 2016. Notes on film noir. In Film Noir Compendium, ed. Alain Silver and James Ursini, 88–100. Milwaukee: Applause Cinema and Theater Books.

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Sobchak, Vivian. [1998] 2016. Lounge Time: Postwar Crises and the Chronotope of Film Noir. In Film Noir Compendium, ed. Alain Silver and James Ursini, 218–248. Milwaukee: Applause Cinema and Theater Books. Telotte, J.P. 1989. Voices in the Dark: The Narrative Patterns of Film Noir. Urbana/Chicago: The University of Illinois Press. Vernet, Marc. 1993. Film Noir on the Edge of Doom. In Shades of Noir: A Reader, ed. Joan Copjec, 1–33. London: Verso Books. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. [1953] 2009. Philosophical Investigations. Trans. P.M.S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte. Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell. ———. 1958. The Blue and Brown Books. New York: Harper Colophon Books. Wollen, Peter. 1989. MTV, and Postmodernism, Too. In Futures for English, ed. Colin MacCabe, 214–220. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

PART I

Paradigmatic and Conventional

CHAPTER 2

The Maltese Falcon, Double Indemnity, Scarlet Street, and Out of the Past: Paradigm Cases

In his book The Danger of Words and Writing on Wittgenstein, M.O’C.  Drury reports the following comment made to him by Wittgenstein in which the philosopher distinguishes his own philosophical project from that of Hegel: Hegel seems to me to be always saying that things that look different are really the same. Whereas my interest is in showing that things which look the same are really different. I was thinking as using as a motto for my book a quotation from King Lear: ‘I’ll show you differences.’ The remark, ‘You’d be surprised’ wouldn’t be a bad motto either.

In the previous chapter, I traced a decidedly Hegelian tendency within much extant scholarship and criticism on film noir. Since this book has been deliberately conceived as a response to just that tendency, I would like to dedicate this first body chapter to a focused and programmatic demonstration of what “showing differences” might look like in the context of film noir criticism, before moving on to the more expansive and free-flowing approach that characterizes the chapters that follow. Where those chapters will dwell at length on individual films, unpacking the various and variable uses their makers have made of noir’s tropes, signifiers, and narrative and stylistic conventions while also considering the significance of such uses for some of film theory’s broader concerns, this chapter’s mode is primarily comparative. In it, I will present brief analyses of © The Author(s) 2020 N. Deyo, Film Noir and the Possibilities of Hollywood, Palgrave Close Readings in Film and Television, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37058-9_2

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four movies that have frequently been held up as definitive, paradigmatic examples of film noir. The goal will be to show how each film uses the same basic conventions and narrative situations in very different ways, to show, that is, that movies that look the same are really quite different. The films under consideration will be The Maltese Falcon (John Houston 1941), Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder 1944), Scarlet Street (Fritz Lang 1945), and Out of the Past (Jacques Tourneur 1947). These films have been taken as paradigmatic of noir because they contain, on average, a high density of those characteristics typically associated with film noir— femme fatales, chiaroscuro lighting, twisty narratives set among the criminal underworld, flashbacks, hard-boiled voice-over narration, private detectives, a cynical or fatalistic worldview, and so on. While only one of the films, Out of the Past, features all of these things, the others feature enough of them that no one who accepts the existence of “film noir” as a category would be likely to challenge their inclusion within the category. What is more, analyses of these films have formed important backbones of many of the most comprehensive works of noir criticism and scholarship. For instance, Hirsch (1981) opens his encyclopedic history of noir with discussions of Double Indemnity and Scarlet Street; Naremore (1998) dedicates significant space to The Maltese Falcon, Double Indemnity, and Out of the Past. Double Indemnity, in particular, appears as a major focus in nearly all the critical works discussed in the opening chapter. To analyze Wilder’s film seems practically to be a rite of passage for anyone endeavoring to write about film noir. Because of their paradigmatic status, because these films have so often been taken as illustrative of, as model stand-ins for, noir in toto, they will provide fertile ground for an analysis predicated on showing how really different they are from one another. In the interests of time and space, and of not allowing the analyses here to grow too unwieldy, I will not be comparing the films as wholes, but rather single key scenes from each. The scenes in question depict the first meeting between the main male protagonist and the femme fatale figure. These scenes provide a useful point of comparison not only because they contain a story beat universal to all four films but also because they could potentially be interpreted in more or less the same way, shown to be doing more or less the same thing. Indeed, the encounter between the protagonist and the femme fatale can easily be read generically in terms of two of the most prominent interpretation schemas that have been traditionally applied to noir, namely its supposed depictions of a universe governed by capricious fate and its treatment

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of women. On the first front, the encounter typically involves a chance meeting that initiates a series of events that lead the protagonist deeper into a tangled and violent underworld and often lead to his spiritual and/ or literal demise (of the films looked at here, only The Maltese Falcon’s Sam Spade escapes more or less unharmed. Double Indemnity’s Walter Neff and Out of the Past’s Jeff Bailey both end up killing the femme fatale before dying themselves, while Scarlet Street’s Chris Cross is left destitute and haunted by a guilty conscious). On the second front, the orchestration of the man’s downfall is in all four films is attributable to the femme fatale, who in their first encounter uses (or appears to use) her seductive charms to lure the man into her world of lies, deception, and violence. Read ideologically, of course, such depictions of women may be said to reflect and/or enact men’s anxiety about women’s independence and sexuality brought on by various social factors present in mid-century American society. While readings of these scenes strictly in such terms would be totally valid, I would like to show how, following the lines of thinking articulated in the previous chapter, the filmmakers use these schemas as enabling possibilities, how they approach this conventional and generic narrative beat from a variety of perspectives and use it to develop attitudes and ideas unique to each individual film.

The Maltese Falcon (1941) Released in 1941, The Maltese Falcon is taken by many critics and scholars to mark the first major film in what would come to be known as the noir cycle. While somewhat more rudimentary in structure than many of the films that would follow, including the four films discussed below, it still possesses an elaborate and twisting plot taken nearly wholesale from the Dashiell Hammett novel upon which it is based. To summarize briefly for any readers unfamiliar with the film, the story follows the private detective Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart) as he attempts to solve the murder of his partner Miles Archer (Jerome Cowan). In the process he becomes entangled in a complex underworld plot involving the titular falcon, a jewel-­ encrusted artifact worth $100,000. He also becomes involved with Brigid O’Shaughnessy (Mary Astor), who had hired Spade and Archer at the beginning of the film using a fake name, Ruth Wonderly, and a fake story about a non-existent missing sister. At the end of the film, we learn that

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Brigid killed Archer as part of her own scheme to get ahold of the falcon and Spade turns her over to the police, despite having fallen for her. The scene that we will be looking at here, the one in which Brigid initially hires Spade and Archer, sets many of these gears in motion while also serving an important function in establishing the film’s tone and overall narrative and thematic point of view (POV). It begins with an initial shot of Spade alone in his office rolling a cigarette, the camera finding him for the first time as it pans down from a tall window opening out onto a view of the Golden Gate Bridge. His secretary, Effie, enters and announces that a potential client (“Miss Wonderly … a real knockout”) has arrived, and Spade tells her to show her in while continuing to direct most of his focus toward his cigarette. Astor’s entrance is shot from over Bogart’s shoulder, meaning our first view of her character aligns more or less with Spade’s. The film cuts to a reverse-angle two-shot as Spade invites “Miss Wonderly” to sit down and he invites her to tell him her story. The film then cuts to another over-the-shoulder shot of Astor as she begins to tell the story. As she tells him about her missing sister, we briefly cut to Spade as he interjects to ask if she has heard anything. The film then cuts to a close-up of Astor as she continues her story in an unbroken monologue. Though it cuts back to Spade twice, first for another interjection and second just to show him listening, the close-up of Astor dominates the sequence. This shot/reverse-shot pattern is broken when we hear a sound off-­ screen. As Miss Wonderly/Brigid looks off-screen, the film cuts to a shot of Archer entering. Spade introduces him and recounts what he has heard of the story so far. As he does so, the film shows us all three characters in long shot, with Miss Wonderly/Brigid looking up at Spade, Spade looking up at Archer as he tells him the story, and Archer leering downward at the potential client. As Spade begins to explain what services they can offer, Archer moves over to sit on Spade’s desk, crossing his legs and continuing to leer. The film then initiates another shot/reverse-shot sequence, alternating between the previous close-up framing of Miss Wonderly/Brigid and a wider two-shot showing both Spade and Archer, who leans over further onto the desk. As the conversation wraps up, Archer volunteers to “look at it [himself],” leaning into the camera and flashing a toothy smile while Spade merely looks at him and smirks. Indeed, Spade’s interest only seems fully piqued when Miss Wonderly/Brigid reaches into her purse to remove two large bills. The detectives say goodbye to their client, with Archer offering his hand and leaning in uncomfortably close as he does so while Spade opens the door for her and offers a more curt and professional handshake.

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The most notable feature of this scene, its key formal and textural element, is the contrast between the performance styles of the three actors and the corresponding differences in the screen personae they project. Bogart, the scene’s anchor, is laconic and taciturn, his delivery clipped and his face betraying little, his screen presence embodying “the triumph of interiorization and ambiguity” that André Bazin once associated with his emergence as a Hollywood star. In contrast, Astor’s performance is overtly theatrical, her lines delivered with the elocutionary precision of a trained stage performer, her manner crisp and proper. Finally, Cowan’s Archer is essentially a comic figure, his broad gestures and generally louche and leering demeanor combining to produce a deliberately overweening presence. In addition to creating a somewhat odd and unstable atmosphere, this tonal mixture has two other significant effects, both of which are important for what the film as a whole is seeking to accomplish (Fig. 2.1).

Fig. 2.1  Contrasting demeanors and performance styles in The Maltese Falcon (John Huston 1941)

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First, the Archer/Spade contrast. There are two important dynamics at work in the dichotomy the scene sets up between the two, one strictly narrative and one more broadly cultural. In terms of narrative purpose, Robert Ray notes how the story must render Archer as “unsavory and expendable” in order to have any hope of building suspense around Spade’s ultimate decision regarding Brigid’s fate (2008, 205). The film accomplishes this, as we have seen, by portraying him as a lecherous and leering creep. Some of its handling of this characterization derives directly from Hammett’s novel, which explicitly describes him as running his “bold and apprising gaze” up and down Brigid/Miss Wonderly’s body. But this characterization does more than simply prime us to not mourn Archer’s death. As Ray goes on to note, the film further emphasizes Archer’s unsavoriness through visual coding: He is also the only character with a mustache. At some point in the late 1930s, somewhere between The Thin Man (1934) and The Maltese Falcon (1941), the pencil mustache shifts from being the signifier of urban sophistication (William Powell) to that of a lounge lizard’s lechery (Jerome Cowan). (206)

Archer is in some sense a holdover, a degenerated epigone of an outdated vision of urban masculinity. In contrast, the Bogart persona feels hip and cool, a more modern masculinity for the dawn of a new decade. As one of the first films in which Bogart was cast as a heroic leading man after a long career playing villainous heavies in gangster movies, The Maltese Falcon had the task of establishing his star persona. Its success at doing so may be gleaned from Bazin’s statement, on the occasion of the actor’s death, that “Bogart is, without a doubt, the actor/myth of the war and post-war period” ([1957] 1985, 99). The myth begins in the film’s opening scene. But presenting Archer as an unsavory creep and giving birth to the Bogart myth are not the only items on the scene’s agenda. It also works to introduce, though only in retrospect, the film’s abiding concern with acts of performance and deception. It accomplishes this by way of Astor’s performance. As noted above, her performance in the scene is defined by its theatricality, a quality underlined by the fact that the film presents her in extended close-ups as she tells the story of her sister’s disappearance. The effect is to suggest that she is delivering a planned and rehearsed monologue for an audition or screen test. It will turn out, of course, that this is exactly what the character was doing. The apparent artifice of Astor’s

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performance in the opening scene, established in contrast with Bogart’s more reserved and “naturalistic” playing style, can thus be seen as an instance of deliberate foreshadowing. Even after this first lie is found out, Brigid will continue to perform, spinning new stories and putting on new masks, dissembling to keep Spade from discovering that she killed Archer. This string of deceptions, initiated in the opening scene, continues until the film’s conclusion, which boasts two climactic revelations, the first regarding Brigid’s guilt and the second regarding the fact that the titular falcon that various characters have been chasing has been, like Brigid herself, a fraud the entire time.

Double Indemnity (1944) Released three years after The Maltese Falcon, Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity has been taken by numerous critics as perhaps the definitive noir film. As we saw in Chap. 1, more than a few theories of noir have been erected on foundational analyses of the film, and its historical significance really cannot be undersold. As Andrew Klevan (2013) has pointed out, however, the film’s perceived paradigmatic nature has often led critics to approach it somewhat schematically and reductively, particularly with regard to Barbara Stanwyck’s Phyllis Dietrichson, who is typically held up as, in Forster Hirsch’s words, “the ultimate femme fatale of the 1940s thriller, a contemporary Circe luring unsuspecting men with her siren’s song” (1981, 4). Even a revisionist work like Julie Grossman’s 2009 Rethinking the Femme Fatale in Film Noir, which sets out to do exactly what its title says, holds up Double Indemnity’s portrayal of Phyllis as a rare depiction of the femme fatale that is truly uncomplicated, a portrait of unalloyed and irredeemable evil, “one of the very few … ‘pure’ ‘femme fatales’” (22). The calculus here seems relatively simple: since Double Indemnity is arguably the definitive film noir, then it must present noir’s tropes in their purest and most unadulterated form. While other, later films might experiment with or subvert conventions, here at ground zero these conventions must function in a relatively more straightforward way. Klevan’s essay on the film effectively and comprehensively challenges these “reductive assessments” through an extensive and detailed analysis and appreciation of Stanwyck’s performance, showing her realization of the Phyllis character to be far more subtle and restrained than most of the traditional accounts of the film allow for. My reading of the film’s depiction of the first meeting between Phyllis and Fred MacMurray’s Walter

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Neff builds on his work, showing that Stanwyck’s performance is not the film’s only element that complicates the standard interpretation. Their first encounter occurs at the start of the lengthy subjective flashback, narrated by Walter, that comprises the majority of the film. Recording a late night confession into the dictaphone of his boss Barton Keyes (Edward G. Robinson), a mortally wounded Walter tells the story of how he one day happened to call on the Dietrichson house. There merely to sell renewals on an auto-insurance policy to Mr. Dietrichson, he instead meets Phyllis, who greets him from the top of the stairs wearing only a towel. The two eventually enter into an illicit affair and scheme to kill Phyllis’s husband in order to cash in on a healthy life insurance plan, which they trick him into signing. Though they successfully pull off the murder, Keyes, the investigator assigned to the case, doggedly pursues the case. Phyllis and Walter both grow paranoid and unstable and in the end fatally shoot each other, with Walter living just long enough to drive to the insurance company offices in order to record his confession. The standard critical line on the film seems to share Walter’s interpretation of his relationship with Phyllis, which he sums up during their final confrontation: “It’s just like the first time I came here, isn’t it? We were talking about automobile insurance, only you were thinking about murder, and I was thinking about that anklet.” He thus presents the situation in black-and-white terms, accusing her of having deliberately seduced him from the start in order to get him to help her murder her husband. In such a view, he is merely an amoral dupe who was powerless against the siren call of sexual gratification, while she is a manipulative sociopath. It is clear, of course, why Walter would want us to take him at his word, as the explanation is both self-flattering and self-justifying, portraying him as a pawn in the true villain’s plan. The question is, does the film’s presentation of their first meeting actually support Walter’s interpretation? At first, the answer seems to be yes. The initial part of the scene is handled, or appears to be handled, quite conventionally, using a shot/ reverse-shot pattern similar to the one we saw in The Maltese Falcon. As Walter forces his way into the house despite the housekeeper Nellie’s protestations that Mr. Dietrichson is not in, Phyllis’s voice calls from off-­ screen, asking Nellie who is at the door. Both Walter and Nellie look up toward the source of the voice, and the film cuts to a reverse angle shot, taken from over Walter’s shoulder, of Phyllis coming to the landing at the top of the stairs. Though she is some distance from the camera, we can still clearly make out that she is wearing only a towel. As she introduces herself,

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she backs away slightly, seemingly surprised that Walter is standing in the foyer rather than outside at the door. The film cuts to a brief medium close-up of Walter as he introduces himself, then to a POV shot of Phyllis, closer in than the initial establishing shot. As Walter explains why he is there off-screen, Stanwyck inches closer to the camera, ultimately coming right up against the landing’s railing. As their conversation continues to play out, with Walter offering a somewhat sheepish double entendre about Phyllis being “fully covered,” we alternate between these two shots. The final shot of the sequence, however, moves us even closer to Phyllis, providing us with the film’s first real close-up of Stanwyck and offering a brief, tantalizing glimpse at her partially exposed body. As I said above, this brief sequence would seem to confirm Walter’s version of events. Phyllis, despite her initial modesty, seems to grow more flirtatious from the moment Walter mentions that he works for the insurance company, suggesting that the wheels in her head are already turning. What is more, the sequence, like its equivalent number in The Maltese Falcon, seems like a perfect demonstration of Laura Mulvey’s proposition that classical narrative cinema is defined by its conflation of the camera’s gaze, the spectator’s gaze, and the male protagonist’s gaze and its concordant anchoring of those gazes to sexualized images of the female body (1975, 17–18). It seems, that is, that the film is inviting us to gaze with Walter at Phyllis, to take pleasure in her appearance as it is put on display and to simultaneously recognize that toxic treachery lurking behind that appearance, as Walter has come to retroactively recognize it. But is it really that simple? Let us consider the structure of the scene again. We begin with an establishing shot that provides a sense of the real and objective distance between Walter and Phyllis. Phyllis’s demeanor in this shot is largely reserved and demure. As the scene progresses, we are given progressively closer images of Phyllis, and as the camera gets closer, her demeanor grows more flirtatious and subjective. Though these shots are coded as aligning with Walter’s POV, we know from the initial establishing shot that he could not possibly see her in such detail. As POV shots, the perspectives they offer are impossible. Two potential ways of interpreting these shots thus present themselves. First, we could simply see them as objective presentations of Phyllis’s demeanor, an instance of a film giving us a better perspective on the action than that available to the characters. On the other hand, we might see these shots as representations of Walter’s subjective view of events, projected retrospectively onto real occurrences to

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which we are not, and will never be, granted unmediated access. A consideration of these two possibilities raises further questions about the status of the film’s images in general: are we to take them as a genuine presentation of the film’s events as they happened or as something more like a recreation of the images and memories dancing through Walter’s dying mind as he narrates into the dictaphone? Such ambiguity is of course necessarily inherent in any flashback-oriented film, and the disjunction between subjective and objective views of events is something that filmmakers working in such modes have often exploited. Double Indemnity, beginning with this scene, exploits this ambiguity in a very particular way, calling attention to these discrepancies without ever providing us with the ability to resolve them, and this contributes to what Klevan detects as the film’s inherent “instability, something profoundly ungraspable at its heart” (2013, 104) (Fig. 2.2).

Fig. 2.2  A subjective close-up of Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck) from the perspective of Walter Neff (Fred McMurray) in Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder 1944)

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While the scene’s construction certainly does not disprove Walter’s interpretation, it does not necessarily verify it either. Instead, it dwells in ambiguity. The presence of such ambiguity from this early moment is significant. It invites us to look skeptically at Walter’s presentation of events, distancing our perspective from his even as he leads us through the story, and prompts us to ponder how much of what we see is a true and accurate depiction of events and how much is the self-justifying projection of a dying man. This is important because the film works at times to raise the question of who was really leading who in the Phyllis/Walter relationship. She would certainly have the most to gain, but the later scene showing them actually hatch the plan shows us that it was Walter who came up with all the details. What is more, the thick ambiguity at play here also complicates attempts to neatly fit the first meeting between the two of them into the schematic interpretations outlined above. Is the scene depicting the machinations of fate, a chance encounter that leads inexorably to death and violence (or “straight down the line,” as Walter says in one of the film’s most famous pieces of dialogue)? Does it show us a weak and gullible man lured into crime by an evil temptress? Perhaps. But we might also see all of this as merely Walter’s own interpretation of a series of events that, again, we are never granted any unmediated access to. In such a case, the film’s treatment of these noir conventions would come to seem far more self-reflexive, as we could see their presence in the story as a construct of Walter’s telling, a set of moral alibis meant to salvage at least a sliver of his reputation in the eyes of his friend and Barton Keyes. As Klevan shows in his detailed appreciation of her performance, one of the dominant characteristics of Stanwyck’s characterization of Phyllis is her opacity. At no point does her performance allow us to penetrate past the surface to really understand what is going on in the character’s head. We could interpret this as reflecting the fact that she remains mostly a mystery to Walter as well. There is a difference, however, in the attitude Walter demonstrates toward this situation and the one we are invited, or allowed, to take. Walter, confronted with the opacity of Phyllis Dietrichson, projects upon her all stereotypes of the conventional hard-boiled temptress. If, as Grossman argues, Phyllis stands as one of the only examples of a “pure” and unfiltered femme fatale, it is perhaps because that is how Walter wants us to see her. But as we have seen, the film also invites us to consider the gap between Walter’s rendering of her and the truly unknowable and unseen-by-us “real” Phyllis. To paraphrase Socrates, neither we nor Walter knows anything, but Walter thinks that he knows something.

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The film offers us the opportunity to be better than him by acknowledging the things that we do not know, but leaves it to us to make the choice.

Scarlet Street (1945) A partial summing up before moving onto our third film. Thus far we have looked at two of the most canonical early noirs and already a number of fine distinctions can be grasped. At the level of POV, The Maltese Falcon employs a third person, “objective” style of presentation that nonetheless aligns viewers’ perspective with that of Bogart’s Sam Spade. On the other hand, Double Indemnity uses a first-person narration style that nonetheless provides just enough of an “objective” foothold to distance one’s own perspective from Walter Neff’s. In terms of their handling of the femme fatale, The Maltese Falcon’s opening scene shows us a woman who seems at first like a proper and sophisticated member of high society only to later reveal her as a criminal seductress, while Double Indemnity’s shows us a woman who seems at first like a criminal seductress only to then complicate the picture by swathing her in layers of opacity and ambiguity. We have already begun to amass a sizable inventory of “family differences.” Fritz Lang’s Scarlet Street (1945) will show us yet another way of approaching the conventional first meeting between noir protagonist and femme fatale. Scarlet Street was Lang’s second noir film starring Edward G. Robinson and Joan Bennet, following the previous year’s The Woman in the Window. In the film, Robinson plays Chris Cross, a pathetic and henpecked bank cashier who dreams of being an artist. The film opens on a banquet convened in his honor by the bank’s owner, J.J. Hogarth (Russell Hicks), as a reward for Chris’s decades of service. As the party breaks up, Chris and the other guests see Hogarth leaves in a limousine accompanied by an attractive younger woman, and Chris later muses to a colleague about how nice it would be to be loved by a younger woman. Later, walking through Greenwich Village, a chance at such love seems to present itself, as he sees a woman (Joan Bennett) being assaulted by a man (Dan Duryea) and intervenes. He and the woman, who introduces herself as Kitty Marsh, have a drink and he develops an infatuation. In an attempt to impress her, he leads her to believe that he is a wealthy painter. We soon learn that the man who was assaulting her was actually her boyfriend, Johnny, and the two of them hatch a plan to use Chris’s infatuation to bilk money from him. Their plan evolves when paintings that

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Chris had given to Kitty catch the eye of an art critic and Johnny convinces Kitty to pose as the artist, selling the paintings for thousands of dollars each and becoming an art world sensation. Kitty manages to continue stringing Chris along, but he eventually realizes the truth of her relationship with Johnny and kills her in a mad rage. He flees the scene, and the murder ends up being pinned on Johnny, who is convicted and sent to the electric chair. Chris does not escape unscathed, however, as Hogarth discovers that he has been embezzling and fires him. At the end of the film, he is mentally broken and homeless while his paintings, still attributed to Kitty, continue to sell for thousands. Adapted from the French novel La Chienne, which had previously been made into a film of the same name by Jean Renoir in 1931, Scarlet Street is a bleak and harrowing film, its relentlessly grim and ironic vision of the world making Double Indemnity’s paranoid and alienating atmosphere look practically sunny in comparison. While the story alone is bleak enough, Lang doubles down on the effect through its presentation, which adopts a cruelly distant and objective perspective on the action. We watch these pathetic creatures do horrible things to one another as if observing animals through a pane of glass. This perspective, this attitude toward the film’s world, is firmly established by the scene in which Chris and Kitty first meet. The sequence begins in practical silence, all other noises drowned out by the sound of a train passing overhead. As Chris walks along the deserted street, something catches his eye and the film cuts to a very distant long shot of Kitty and Johnny arguing. We see him slap her and push her into a light post (the violence is frankly shocking) before the film cuts back to Chris, who briefly registers the shock of what he just witnessed before springing into action, running off-screen toward the camera. Eliding the full extent of his journey across the vast empty space depicted in the initial long shot, the film cuts on action as he runs up to Johnny, who has his back turned and is kicking at Kitty. Chris strikes him with his umbrella and knocks him down, shielding his face with his arm as he does so. The film then cuts to a medium shot of Chris as he slowly lowers his arm and looks down, seeing Kitty for the first time. We cut to a POV shot of Kitty picking herself up off the pavement and the camera lingers on her as the train sounds fade. Bennet plays the moment quite broadly, adjusting her jaw like a silent comedian, before quickly glancing up at Chris, who we see smile sheepishly as we return to the medium shot. We then return to Kitty, who quickly seems to lose

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interest in the man who has just saved her and turns her attention to the fallen Johnny. The camera pulls back as she scrambles to her feet to check on him. Standing over him, she turns to Chris and asks, “Is he hurt?” We return to the medium shot of Chris as he offers to go find a policeman and runs off, despite Kitty’s protestations. As he leaves, the camera significantly stays behind with Kitty and Johnny as she looks down on him with concern as he slowly sits up. Only then do we cut back to Chris, the camera surveying him from a distance as he runs toward a policeman. We do not see their conversation as the film quickly returns to Kitty, who is now alone and looking off-screen left. She turns her head as she hears Chris and the officer approaching, takes one more glance off screen, then turns and waits for them to arrive. When they do, she tells the officer that her assailant ran off, pointing in the opposite direction. He asks for more details, but she is not forthcoming, saying only that he was sticking her up for the money in her purse. The camera holds in long shot as a brief three-way conversation plays out, with Chris chiming in his side of the story, before the cop runs off in the direction Kitty has indicated. After he is out of sight, Kitty quickly gestures for Chris to leave the scene with her rather than waiting for the officer’s return. He tries to protest but is eventually swayed as she changes her approach from forcefully demanding to more sweetly flirtatious, taking him by the arm and asking him to walk her home. This sequence is brief and very economically handled, but it firmly establishes dynamics that will carry throughout the rest of the film while also illustrating how different Lang’s approach is than Huston’s or Wilder’s. Up until this point, we have been mostly aligned with Chris’s perspective. That changes here when he runs off to find the police, leaving Kitty behind. By showing Kitty looking sympathetically at the fallen Johnny and then implying that she helped him escape by sending the police officer in the wrong direction, the film clues us in on her “true nature” long before Chris does, granting us a painfully ironic perspective on his subsequent attempts to woo her. Moreover, the brief cross-cut between Chris running to find a policeman and Kitty checking on Johnny establishes the basically bifurcated narrative structure that will carry through most of the body of the film, as it shuttles between scenes depicting Chris’s home life, work life, and occasional rendezvous with Kitty and scenes depicting Kitty’s abusive and codependent relationship with Johnny. We can compare this to The Maltese Falcon and Double Indemnity, where the vast majority of our knowledge about the film world is either implicitly or explicitly filtered through the consciousness of the lead male character.1

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This adoption of a more objective and omniscient perspective also has ramifications for the film’s treatment of Kitty, and thus also its treatment of the femme fatale archetype. From beginning to end, Kitty is by far the most transparent of the femme fatales discussed in this chapter. Unlike Brigid O’Shaughnessy, who puts up a series of successful facades until her true character and motivations are uncovered, and unlike Phyllis Dietrichson, who remains remote and opaque right up until her death, the full extent of Kitty’s deceitful and manipulative behavior is made clear to the audience from the start. Indeed, much of the film’s cruel irony derives from how willfully blind and oblivious Chris is to patterns of behavior that are staring him directly in the face, his obliviousness underlined by Lang’s tendency in early scenes to show Chris smiling beatifically as Kitty engages in vulgar and bald-faced flattery and manipulation. Paradoxically, however, the clarity and transparency with which the film presents Kitty does not lead to any simple and easy judgments of her character, as it shows these behaviors as being the product of her relationship with Johnny. Neither inviting us to forgive her extremely poor treatment of Chris nor outright condemning it, Lang refuses us the pleasure or catharsis of moral judgment. Though he spent much of his Hollywood career making films built on complex and twisting plots that often deliberately suppressed key information, he presents the world of Scarlet Street with a rare directness, a directness made clear in Chris and Kitty’s first encounter.2

Out of the Past (1947) On the other hand, clarity, directness, and transparency are not words that readily come to mind when thinking about Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past (1947), the last film on this chapter’s agenda. As I noted at the outset, the film contains practically every signifier and convention stereotypically associated with film noir, and because of this it has, like Double Indemnity, often been taken as representative of noir as a whole. And yet, despite this apparent typicality, the film is also a strange and idiosyncratic creation, one clearly stamped by Tourneur’s artistic temperament and formal and thematic predilections. This interplay of convention/typicality and idiosyncrasy can be clearly seen in the first meeting between Robert Mitchum’s lead character Jeff Bailey and Jane Greer’s femme fatale Kathie Moffatt. That meeting occurs much later in the film than the analogous scenes we have been discussing thus far, each of which occurs near the beginning

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of their respective films. Out of the Past, in contrast, features a relatively drawn out preamble, a choice that imbues the film with a slightly unsettled sense of pacing. At the start of the film, Jeff is living under an assumed name (Jeff Markham) and running a gas station in the small desert town of Bridgeport, CA, located in the shadows of the Sierras. One day, a former associate, Joe Stefanos (Paul Valentine), arrives in town and tells him that his former boss, the mobster Whit Sterling (Kirk Douglas), wants to see him. Jeff agrees to the meeting and asks his girlfriend Ann (Virginia Huston) to drive him to Whit’s estate on Lake Tahoe. As they drive, Jeff begins telling the story of his previous entanglement with Whit, and the film shifts into a lengthy flashback. In it, we (along with Ann) learn that Whit had hired Jeff to track down his girlfriend Kathie (Greer), who had shot him and made off with $40,000 of his money. Jeff tracks her to Acapulco, Mexico, where he immediately falls under her spell. The two decided to run off together to elude Whit, but are found by Jeff’s former partner, Fisher (Steve Brodie). During the ensuing confrontation, Kathie shoots Fisher and then flees. In her wake, Jeff finds a bank book containing a notation for a $40,000 deposit, confirming that she had in fact stolen the money from Whit. The sequence depicting Jeff and Kathie’s first encounter begins with a montage summary of Jeff’s journey south through Mexico. As his voice-­ over explains how his search took him from Mexico City to Taxco to Acapulco, the film supplies a series of postcard-quality B-roll shots of Mexican cityscapes and vistas linked together by dissolves, terminating in a long shot of Bailey from the back walking down an alley toward a cantina called La Mar Azul. A reverse shot of him entering the bar and another dissolve bring us to a shot of him sitting at a table, as his voice-over continues, “I sat there in the afternoons and drank beer. I used to sit there half-asleep with the beer and the darkness, only the music from the movie house next door kept jarring me awake. And then I saw her coming out of the sun, and I knew why Whit didn’t care about that 40 grand.” At the line “and then I saw her,” he looks off-screen and the film cuts to a long shot of Kathie, clad in a white dress and large brimmed hat, walking through the doorway and taking a seat at a nearby table. She orders a drink, and we cut back to a shot of Jeff, confirming that the previous shot was from his point of view. A reverse angle cut takes us to a closer shot of Kathie lighting a cigarette, before we return to Jeff who gets up to walk over to the table.

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As he approaches, a local guide appears and urges him to sit down, before launching into a sales pitch for his services. We then cut to a close­up of Kathie, who curtly states that she does not want a guide. We cut to a three-shot, with the camera now positioned behind Kathie, as the guide continues his pitch and Jeff buys something from him to get him to leave. We then give a brief shot/reverse-shot sequence as Jeff essentially monologues to a mostly silent Kathie, who sips her drink and smokes her cigarette. Seemingly unmoved by his feigned pleas for companionship and complaints about how lonely it is to explore Mexico alone, she gets up to leave. As she does so, she off-handedly mentions another cantina down the street that she “sometimes” frequents to sip bourbon and listen to the band play American music, before turning and leaving. We might begin our analysis of the scene with the atmosphere it creates, which is dominated by a feeling of languid dreaminess. In this, the scene marks a departure from what came before. Up until this point, the film has been grounded in a relatively placid realism. Shot on location, the small town of Bridgeport where the film begins, is plausibly concrete, and though populated by somewhat stock character types (the chatty diner waitress, the angelic good girl, the blandly noble sheriff, the conservative and disproving parents), the characters themselves are at least plausible. The framing and staging of these scenes further emphasizes the concreteness of the space, underlining its spatial coherence and unity. The first few scenes of Jeff’s flashback are similarly realistic, featuring a straightforward depiction of his initial conversation with Whit and a geographically accurate description of his itinerary through Mexico. Indeed, the voice-over leading up to Kathie’s introduction seems to go out of its way to ground itself realistically with its incidental inclusion of Taxco as part of Jeff’s itinerary, the mention of the place itself serving as a sort of verbal version of Roland Barthes’s notion of the “reality effect,” a non-­essential detail (he could have just said he went from Mexico City to Acapulco) whose only textual purpose is to signify a sense of realism. Until this point, then, the film has placed us on solid ground. That ground begins to give way at Kathie’s introduction. As Chris Fujiwara notes in his critical biography of Tourneur, a number of ancillary signifiers and visual elements in the scene serve to produce a sense of dawning unreality: “When we first see Kathie, she is surrounded by an aura of illusion, reinforced from several directions: by the sunlight that silhouettes her, by the presence of the cinema across the street, and by the fact that Jeff has just awakened from a doze at his table” (145). In

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addition to this “chain of references to fantasy, dream, and image-production,” the way the scene is shot and edited also contributes to its air of mystery and strangeness. First and foremost, there is the way Kathie’s initial appearance is handled. Cued by Jeff’s line “and then I saw her,” the film cuts to a long shot of the cafe’s doorway with Kathie already present in the center of the frame and walking forward. We do not see her enter from off-frame, as we did with Jeff’s entrance at the beginning of the sequence. The effect is strangely uncanny and only heightened by the ethereal white dress she wears. It is as if she simply materialized out of the air and sunlight. That Tourneur holds the long shot rather than immediately cutting in to a close-up adds to the effect. She is presented as an unearthly, distant creature of fantasy and dreams. Greer’s performance as the scene continues enhances this sphinx-like quality. Her expressions are mostly blank and inscrutable, she speaks very little, and the few lines she does have are delivered with a gnomic, elusive guardedness. She projects an abiding air of unknowability. The presentation of Kathie in these terms, the construction and elaboration of this sense of mystery and inscrutability, can perhaps be understood as the scene’s primary purpose, establishing as it does an aspect of the character, and of the film’s world, that holds until the very end. Even after the film returns us to the present and grants us the opportunity to check the real Kathie against Jeff’s subjective recreation, the film continues to refuse us any real access to the character’s interiority. She remains throughout a mercurial presence, her allegiances fluid and shifting, her motivations hard to pin down, her authenticity or truthfulness at any given moment nearly impossible to verify. The dreamlike quality of her initial appearance knocks the film off of its axis, and it never regains the sturdy and solid uprightness of its opening passages.

Provisional Conclusions Having now assembled these brief interpretive sketches we can now begin the work of setting them side-by-side in order to gain a better sense of the patterns of similarity and difference that define their family resemblance. A typical academic analysis, one conducted according to the rules of the hermeneutics of suspicion, might start by arranging them along a series of continuums, choosing one operative element or formal aspect as an organizing principle. For instance, we might consider the question or role of POV, putting at one end the detached objectivity of Scarlet Street and at

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the other the narrated subjective flashback of Out of the Past. In between would be The Maltese Falcon (“objective” narration but one that clearly and deliberately aligns our perspective with that of Bogart/Spade) and Double Indemnity (subjective narration, but rendered in such a way as to invite a critical perspective). Going further on this track, we could identify a distinct split between the two “subjective” approaches in terms of how they position in the viewer. In Double Indemnity we are granted privileged access to the act of narration in a way no character within the world of the film is. The only witness to Walter’s confession within the world of the film is the dictaphone. In Out of the Past, on the other hand, we hear the story at the same time Ann does, which at least temporarily aligns our perspective on the story with hers. We might then continue by connecting the films’ handling of formal POV to their attitudes toward the people and events they depict and then connect these attitudes to broader cultural forces, such as ideas about masculinity. We could do this by considering the attitudes these films display toward their male leads. Of the four, only The Maltese Falcon provides anything close to a univocally “positive” portrayal. As we saw above, the film goes to great pains to establish the Bogart star persona, contrasting his taciturn cool from the outset with Miles Archer’s pathetic grasping. The film’s admiring and aspirational attitude toward Bogart/Spade rarely wavers—he maintains his cool and competent demeanor, even during the stretches in which the villains temporarily get the upper hand. After Archer’s death, the film continues to emphasize Spade’s strong masculinity by contrasting him with these same villains, all of whom are coded as queer and effeminate. And though he is for a time effective duped by Brigid O’Shaughnessy, he not only eventually figures out the con but emerges triumphant, turning her over to the police to be punished for her transgressions. In all of this, then, the film neatly aligns with the well-­ known model of classical Hollywood cinema advanced by Laura Mulvey in its attitude toward both its protagonist and toward the issues like gender and masculinity more generally. The same, however, cannot be said of the other films in our set. Mitchum’s Jeff Bailey, for instance, derives from same basic archetype as Sam Spade, but here “cool” begins to shade at times into a sort of inert passivity. If Spade is a rational man of action with drive and initiative, Jeff is often content to simply let things happen to him and prone to following the whims of irrational desire, a quality that Kathie and Whit both readily take advantage of. The film is ambivalent in its attitude toward Jeff,

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sympathetic but not hagiographic, and this ambivalence is embedded in the way it uses its flashback structure to split its identification between Jeff, the self-justifying narrator, and Ann, the sympathetic-but-skeptical audience surrogate. Meanwhile, Double Indemnity and Scarlet Street go even further, troubling our identification with Walter and Chris with various forms of ambiguity and irony. In their portrayals of masculinity, both films’ protagonists seem to have more in common with the pathetic and leering Miles Archer than they do with the cool and in control Bogart archetype. Indeed, Scarlet Street in particular locates as the source of Chris’s doomed pursuit of an affair with Kitty because of his desire to be more like his boss, a rich and powerful womanizer seen cavorting with glamorous young women. In contemporary parlance, we might say that the film presents a vision of the potentially fatal effects of toxic masculinity. I could go on, but I want to suspend this hypothetical line of analysis here and take another step back, for an analysis conducted in these terms, though apparently open to variations between and among the movies, still has the ultimate effect of flattening out differences. By reading each film in terms of the same formal or thematic lens—here, masculinity—the lens itself becomes a controlling term, determining what is and is not of relevance in each film. In the process, essential distinctions are lost. What is more, it conflates movies like The Maltese Falcon and Scarlet Street, which really are invested in, respectively, the valorization and the critical investigation of masculinity, with films like Double Indemnity and Out of the Past, in which such matters are at best secondary import. And this same problematic dynamic still obtains when we swap out a cultural studies lens and replace it with something more formalistic, such as a comparative reading of the films’ use of POV structures, conflating genuine experiments in POV like Double Indemnity and Scarlet Street with movies in which POV plays a less deliberately significant role. The point here is that critical programs that seek to read all films of a given historical moment, or genre, or what have you, in the same basic terms necessarily project a degree of uniformity onto often wildly variegated bodies of work. Whether the approach is formalist, historicist, or grounded in cultural studies, a master term or concept is employed that will almost always sit more comfortable on some films than others. Such approaches bring terms of analysis from outside the text to bear, and in the process may distort the interests and the emphases, the aesthetic purpose and project, of the work itself.

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How would a critical method that sought to keep faith with these films’ own interests, that sought to allow the films themselves to set the terms of analysis, approach a comparison of these four films? Perhaps simply by noting the various and quite different uses to which they put the conventional, overdetermined generic trope of the hero’s first meeting with the femme fatale. In The Maltese Falcon, we find a movie using the scene to convince the audience its star performer is worth taking seriously not only as a good guy but as a bona fide leading man. In Double Indemnity, we find a movie using form to give shape to its story’s deep and treacherous ambiguity. In Scarlet Street, by comparison, we find a brutal assertion of objectivity. Lastly, in Out of the Past, we find a movie interested primarily in the establishment of mood and atmosphere. These are four very different uses for the same basic conventional story beat. What single analytical frame or lens could account for them all? Whatever stylistic, thematic, historical, formal, or ideological similarities the movies we have come to call “film noir,” they are also autonomous aesthetic objects with their own goals, purposes, and interests. In the chapters that follow, I attempt, as best I can, to allow the goals, purposes, and interests of the films discussed to guide my reading.

Notes 1. For further analysis of Scarlet Street’s complex and de-centered narrative perspective, see Adrian Martin’s “Guess-Work: Scarlet Street” in Movie: A Journal of Film Criticism, 3, January 2012. 2. For more on Lang’s use of “suppressive narrative” in his American films, see Douglas Pye’s essays “Seeing Glimpses: Fritz Lang’s The Blue Gardenia” (in CineAction 1988) and “The Suppressive Narrative and Film Noir: Beyond a Reasonable Doubt” (in The Book of Film Noir [Cameron 1991]), which are discussed in more detail in the next chapter.

References Bazin, André. [1957] 1985. The Death of Humphrey Bogart. In Cahiers du Cinema: The 1950s, ed. Jim Hillier, 98–104. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Fujiwara, Chris. 1998. Jacques Tourneur: The Cinema of Nightfall. Jefferson: McFarland Press. Grossman, Julie. 2009. Rethinking the Femme Fatale in Film Noir. New  York: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Hirsch, Forster. 1981. Film Noir: The Dark Side of the Screen. New  York: Da Capo Press. Klevan, Andrew. 2013. Barbara Stanwyck. London: British Film Institute. Martin, Adrian. 2012. Guess-Work: Scarlet Street. Movie: A Journal of Film Criticism 3. https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/film/movie/contents/scarlet_st._ final.2.pdf Mulvey, Laura. 1975. Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. Screen 16 (3): 6–18. O’C Drury, M. 1973. The Danger of Words and Writing on Wittgenstein. New York: Humanities Press. Pye, Douglas. 1988. Seeing Glimpses: Fritz Lang’s The Blue Gardenia. CineAction. ———. 1993. The Suppressive Narrative and Film Noir: Beyond a Reasonable Doubt. In The Book of Film Noir, ed. Ian Cameron, 98–110. New  York: Continuum Books. Ray, Robert B. 2008. The ABCs of Classic Hollywood. London: Oxford University Press.

CHAPTER 3

The Narrow Margin: Convention as Deception

A mother, her son, and their nanny sit down for breakfast on a train bound for California. The boy excitedly tells his mother about a “robber” he has encountered on the train, while the nanny calmly explains that he is talking about a passenger who, apparently by accident, stumbled into their cabin the night before. Undeterred, the boy continues to spin an imaginative tale about the robber “sneaking all over the train.” His mother briefly humors him before shifting the conversation to the more practical matter of what he would like for breakfast. As a waiter takes their order, the mother catches a glimpse of a sinister-looking mustachioed man glaring at her through a window in the dining car’s door, and a look of concerned alarm passes across her face (Fig. 3.1). This moment occurs at around the halfway point of Richard Fleischer’s The Narrow Margin (1952). On a first viewing, here is what we would know so far: the movie has begun with Detectives Walter Brown (Charles McGraw) and Gus Forbes (Don Beddoe) of the LAPD arriving by train in Chicago. They are there to pick up the wife of a recently murdered mob boss, identified in the film only as “Mrs. Frankie Neall” (Marie Windsor), and escort her back to the west coast, where she is set to testify before a grand jury about her husband’s activities and associates. Before they can even leave her apartment building, however, a hit man ambushes them and Forbes is mortally wounded. Brown, now working alone, succeeds in getting Mrs. Neall safely aboard the train. Worried that the hit man at the apartment building got a good look at him, he instructs Mrs. Neall to © The Author(s) 2020 N. Deyo, Film Noir and the Possibilities of Hollywood, Palgrave Close Readings in Film and Television, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37058-9_3

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Fig. 3.1  A close-up of Ann Sinclair (Jacqueline White), the “good woman” in The Narrow Margin (Richard Fleischer 1952)

avoid being seen in his presence as he fears that he has been tailed to the train station by other gangsters. His suspicions are confirmed when one of them, Joseph Kemp (David Clarke), the sinister-looking man mentioned above, enters his compartment and begins snooping around under the pretext of looking for a lost bag. Brown instructs Mrs. Neall to lock herself in her compartment as he goes to look around the train. While doing so, he encounters Ann Sinclair (Jacqueline White), the mother from the scene described above, and a suspiciously avuncular fat man (Paul Maxey), who briefly blocks his pursuit of Forbes, and who Brown suspects is working with Kemp. Eventually finding himself trapped between the two in a tight hallway, he ducks into a darkened compartment, where he is mistaken for a robber by Ann’s son, Bobby (though at this point neither he nor we know the two are related, as the boy is sharing a compartment with his nanny and not his mother). Upon a first viewing of The Narrow Margin, then, the scene showing the Sinclairs at breakfast would seem to be playing the role that scenes of ordinary, domestic life play in many noir films. The family would appear to

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represent a group of regular, innocent citizens who, thanks to the vagaries of chance, have become inadvertently caught up in the threatening machinations of the criminal underworld. At the end of the scene, as Kemp and Ann exchange glances, we worry that, having seen her talking to Brown, he has concluded that she is Frankie Neall’s widow. As is so often the case, the scene appears to figure the criminal world as a threat to the ordinary and the domestic. Soon, however, we realize that our initial assumptions about these matters have been completely wrong. Events will soon reveal that Ann Sinclair is, in fact, Frankie Neall’s widow and that Marie Windsor’s character is merely a decoy, an undercover police officer sent to (1) distract the gangsters from the real target and (2) keep an eye on Brown for Internal Affairs in case he is offered a bribe. Upon subsequent viewings, therefore, the scene at breakfast will begin to take on a slightly different cast as we recognize that Ann is far from an innocent bystander. In particular, her glance toward Kemp at the scene’s conclusion, which Fleischer captures in a close-up, will read much differently. What we may initially see as an expression of distressed confusion—“Who is this strange man and why is he looking at me like that?”—becomes, upon later viewings, a clearly defined expression of worry and sensed danger. She knows that assassins may be on her tail and that they may not know what she looks like, and so we can surmise from her look of concern that she (rightly) suspects Kemp to be one of them and fears that he has found her out. Nothing, of course, will have changed about the actual image of her expression from the first viewing to the second. What has changed is how we interpret the glance based upon the knowledge we have of the unfolding situation. On a first viewing, we have no reason to think that Ann Sinclair is the real “Mrs. Neall,” and so nothing would prompt us to read her expression as the sign of recognition of genuine danger. A similar moment occurs earlier in the film when Kemp’s less thuggish associate, Vincent Yost (Peter Brocco), attempts to bribe Brown into giving up Mrs. Neall. As Yost makes his offer—“We want her, you have her. How much?”—the film cuts to Windsor alone in the darkened adjoining compartment. She stands up with frightened start and moves toward the communicating door to hear the conversation more clearly. Fleischer’s camera tracks her movement, ultimately framing her in an extreme close-up as she leans her ear against the door. The camera briefly holds on her face as we hear Yost attempt to persuade Brown off-screen. She initially stares straightforward, her eyes wide with apprehension, before subtly shifting

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her glance to the left, as if a new thought has suddenly crossed her mind. We then return to other compartment, where Brown continues to refuse Yost’s offer and Yost continues to press him, eventually removing his wallet and handing the policeman $5000 in cash as a “sample.” At this point, the camera cuts back to the close-up of Windsor, whose eyes continue to shift around nervously (Fig. 3.2). As with the shot of Ann looking at Kemp, the way we read Windsor’s facial expression changes depending upon our knowledge of her character. During a first viewing, we are likely to take her as simply expressing fear at being discovered by the gangsters. Upon a second viewing, though, her look seems to convey a more complicated attitude. Recalling that she has been tasked by Internal Affairs with monitoring Brown’s behavior, we can see her expression wavering between trepidation (even though she is an imposter, being identified by the gangsters could prove fatal—and it eventually does when they locate and shoot her later in the film) and a “professional” interest in whether or not Brown will accept the bribe. Here, again, nothing about the image or the performer’s expression changes

Fig. 3.2  A close-up of “Mrs. Neall” (Marie Windsor), the “femme fatale” in The Narrow Margin

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from one viewing to the next. Rather, what has changed is what we read into it, and what words we use to describe what we are seeing.

Seeing Aspects, Inner Speech We might understand our shifting understanding of these images during repeated viewings of the film as a variation on the perceptual phenomenon that Wittgenstein called the seeing of “aspects.” The most famous example Wittgenstein provides of this experience is the so-called duck-rabbit, a simple line drawing that can be seen as either a duck or a rabbit. Our impression of this image, the aspect that initially strikes us, is heavily influenced by the context in which we are first exposed to it, and by the words we may possess for talking about it. For instance, as Wittgenstein puts it, “I see two pictures, with the duck-rabbit surrounded by rabbits in one, by ducks in the other. I don’t notice that [the duck-rabbits] are the same. Does it follow from this that I see something different in the two cases?” ([1953] 2009, 205). Similarly, if someone were to show us the drawing and say “this is a duck” or “this is a rabbit,” we would likely interpret the image according to the given statement. Finally, if we only possessed knowledge of one of the animals, our experience of the image would be significantly altered. Could we possibly “see” a duck in this drawing if we had never seen a duck before or been taught of their existence? Such hypotheticals clearly suggest the deep, complex entwinement of visual experience and linguistic expression. Theorists of film and photography have long been aware of this entwinement. Practically from the start, the essential ambiguity of any given photographic image, later celebrated by André Bazin, provoked anxiety in those committed to making film and photography mean something, and so they began to search for methods with which to guide audiences to see the “correct” aspects. For Walter Benjamin, committed to finding a properly “political” use for film and photography, written captions were to “become the most important part of the photograph” as only they could provide a bulwark against photography’s tendency to “remain no more than an approximation” ([1931] 2009, 192). Similarly committed to the production of a political cinema, Soviet Montage filmmakers discovered that two or more images, edited together, could function like a language, with various combinations producing clearly defined “statements.” These statements ranged from the relatively simple effects of Lev Kuleshov’s early experiments (shot of a man’s face + shot of a bowl of soup = “the

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man is hungry”) to the more complex, metaphorical articulations found in Sergei Eisenstein’s mid-1920s works. Finally, Boris Eikhenbaum argued that the film audience “reads” these cinematic statements by translating them into what he termed “inner speech,” an actively engaged thought process that “perform[s] the complex mental labour of coupling the frames” (quoted in Willemen 1994, 41). Looked at it in this context, we might understand the two close-ups from The Narrow Margin as sending our “inner speech” down the wrong paths or as intentionally supplying us with incorrect, or at least incomplete, captions. The way in which these moments work to mislead the audience points us in the direction of the film’s overriding narrative and stylistic structure, which is built upon strategies of misdirection. At the level of narrative, we find the series of mistaken identities and deliberate deceptions around which the story’s development continuously turns. In addition to the central Mrs. Neall/Ann Sinclair crisscross, there are also the two instances in which an agent of the law is mistaken for a criminal. First, we have Tommy Sinclair and his overactive imagination mistaking Brown for a “train robber.” This mistaken assumption, which initially seems to function merely as a bit of comic relief, turns out to be a sort of prefiguration for Brown’s own mistaken assumptions regarding the character of Sam Jennings, the fat man played by Paul Maxey mentioned in the plot summary above. Initially suspected by Brown as working with the gangsters, Jennings later reveals himself to be a railroad security agent. But if the film’s strategies of misdirection operated only at the level of narrative, this would hardly distinguish it from any other number of mystery or detective thrillers that we have come to classify as noir films. Such revelations and reversals have functioned as a central element of the genre from The Maltese Falcon onward. The Narrow Margin’s use of misdirections is more complicated, however, in the way in which it also employs stylistic and formal features to purposefully and systematically lead viewers astray. Whereas a film like The Maltese Falcon merely withholds information from the audience by not showing us the face of Miles Archer’s killer, Fleischer’s film deliberately invokes a whole range of well-established generic codes in order to encourage the audience to arrive at conclusions about its characters and narrative that ultimately prove false. Take, for instance, the film’s handling of its two female leads. At first, the characters played by Windsor and White seem to fit neatly into the classic, stereotypical “good woman”/femme fatale dichotomy.1 Comparing each character’s first appearance will provide a good sense of this. The

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decoy Mrs. Neall is introduced first. Having taken a taxi from the train station, Brown and Forbes arrive in a part of town that is, as Brown puts it, “slightly out of the high-rent district.” As they enter the tenement building where “Mrs. Neall” resides, a high-angle shot taken from the top of a flight of stairs gives us a sense of the place. It appears small and cramped (an effect of the framing), and its walls dingy. The banisters surrounding its staircases cast shadows everywhere in a manner that calls to mind the climax of F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu. The music of a distant jazz record fills the air. Already, the signifiers of “seediness” have begun to accumulate. As they climb the stairs and approach Mrs. Neall’s apartment, we realize that the music is coming from inside. They knock, and a cut takes us to a low-angle shot of the other side of the door, where another officer answers. Brown and Forbes enter and the three men huddle together in the middle of a cramped, low-angle shot. They look off-screen toward the source of the music and, after a pause that seems to emphasize their fascination with what they see, an eye-line match supplies us with our first look at “Mrs. Neall.” She sits leaning over a record player, half her face concealed by a swoop of dark curls draping over her right eye. A cigarette dangles precariously from her lips. She is wearing somewhat garish jewelry and a patterned dress with a plunging neckline. As she rises to meet her escorts, she tosses her hair back before confidently striding over to where they stand, the camera panning with her. Before she has even spoken a word, we know (or think we know) who this woman is. Every element of mise-en-scène in this short sequence works to instantly paint (what appears to be) a very clear picture of her character, in both senses of the word. Were you to open an illustrated dictionary of film terms to the entry for femme fatale, you may well find her picture there. Our first impression of Ann Sinclair could not be more different. First, unlike the introduction of Mrs. Neall, the film provides no significant buildup. While dialogue, mise-en-scène, and diegetic music worked together to create anticipation for the introduction of Windsor’s character, White’s is brought into the film in a sudden, incidental manner. We first encounter her in the train’s lounge car as Brown encounters Kemp for the second time, shortly after the gangster has made his presence known by snooping around in Brown’s compartment. She first appears, partly obscured and slightly out of focus, in the background of a shot showing Brown and Kemp crossing paths. A reverse-angle medium shot follows as Brown moves forward, takes a seat at a seemingly random table, and turns

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his head toward the car’s window to watch Kemp’s actions in its reflection. As he does so, the film reframes to follow his movements, revealing an as-­ yet unknown female passenger, who he seems not to have noticed, sitting across from him. After a brief POV shot of the window, the film returns to this establishing shot. A waiter asks Brown if he would like a drink, and Brown, distractedly, points toward the woman and requests “the same as hers,” before returning his gaze to the window. At this point, the film provides us with our first real look at White, cutting to a medium close-up. Apparently taking Brown’s actions as a clumsy attempt at flirtation (another case of initial assumptions proving incorrect), she skeptically looks the detective up and down before pointedly declaring that she will be finishing her drink at another table. She gets up to leave, and we return to the initial camera set-up, while Brown, still staring off-screen at Kemp’s reflection, pays her no attention. A sudden, coincidental jolt causes her to stumble and spill her drink on him, and after helping him clean himself off, he offers to buy her a new drink and she returns to the table. Brown again turns away to look at Kemp’s reflection and begins to nervously break apart his cocktail’s wooden stirrer. As he does so, the film cuts to a reaction shot of Ann looking amused. After the waiter returns with a new drink, she offers a toast, “Here’s to better tracks and steadier nerves.” Brown finally turns his full attention to her, and a short, friendly conversation, handled in typical shot/reverse-shot fashion, follows until Brown suddenly realizes that Kemp has left the car and quickly gets up to follow him, leaving behind money to pay for the drinks. Ann attempts to get him to wait, but to no avail, and the scene ends with her shrugging bemusedly to herself. From the outset we can see a number of contrasts being established between White’s and Windsor’s characters. On the most superficial level, Windsor is brunette, vampish, and caustic, while White is blonde, modest, and kind. In terms of character and behavior, Windsor’s character is coded as sexually aggressive (during their cab ride together to train station, she grabs Brown’s hand as he holds a lit match and uses it to light her own cigarette, a prototypical femme fatale gesture), while White’s is presented as reserved, even prudish (her first impulse when she thinks Brown is trying to pick her up is to immediately extricate herself from the situation). Overall, we are obviously meant to understand that Windsor’s character is a denizen of the criminal underworld, while White’s is a fine, upstanding member of ordinary, polite society.

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But it is not only elements of mise-en-scène that contributes to our initial sense of Mrs. Neall and Ann Sinclair. The way in which Fleischer films the scenes involving the two women also works to guide our responses to the characters. As noted above, the first conversation between Brown and Ann is handled with very traditional shot/reverse-shot editing, and the alternating medium shots that make up the sequence are steady and evenly composed. In contrast, the early conversations between the detective and Mrs. Neall frequently employ many of the “visual motifs” that Lowell Peterson and Janey Place identified as central to noir’s stylistic iconography, including harsher, low-key lighting, “bizarre, off-angle compositions,” and “claustrophobic framing” ([1974] 1996, 65). By the time of The Narrow Margin’s release in 1952, the cycle of films we now think of as “noir” had been reliably humming along for nearly a decade, so such stylistic elements already carried with them strong connotations, further encouraging the film’s audience to view Windsor’s character as “simply” a femme fatale and nothing more.

Deception and Suppression We must, however, differentiate between the functioning of cinematographic elements such as these and the elements of mise-en-scène discussed above. While each works to guide the audience to certain (ultimately wrong) conclusions about the film’s characters and narrative, they belong to wholly different registers of signification. Where aspects such as Windsor’s costuming and performance can be plausibly attributed to some diegetic motivation (i.e. the police higher-ups, not wanting Brown to suspect that she is an undercover officer, asked her to “play up” the vampish-­ ness), the canted camera angles and claustrophobic compositions of the scenes do not seem similarly assignable to a source within the film’s world. They are, rather, extra-diegetic. One could perhaps advance the argument that these devices are meant to convey a sense of Brown’s own perspective on the situation, that the “disturbed” framing of his scenes with Mrs. Neall corresponds with his discomfort around her, while the more placid compositions of the conversations with Ann Sinclair suggests a greater degree of comfort. In such a reading, the cinematography would be seen as producing what George Wilson has called “indirect or reflected subjectivity,” wherein “a certain central character [here Detective Brown] appears in segments throughout the film, and the action is only partially, if at all, seen from his or her physical point of view. Features of the projected

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image or the mise-en-scène are used to depict or symbolize or reflect aspects of the way in which the character perceives and responds to his or her immediate environment” (1988, 87). Taken this way, the film could be seen as, in effect, “translating” Brown’s subjective experience of events into stylistic elements such as framing and blocking. Such interpretations aside, these scenes raise fundamental questions about film style’s ability to purposefully, and systematically, deceive or mislead an audience. Because we, as viewers, know what oblique angles and cramped framing “mean” as a result of both their inherent, unbalanced, aesthetic properties and their conventionalized usage in other films, we may automatically interpret their presence in these scenes straightforwardly, perhaps without even thinking about it. The narrative manipulations being described here bear a certain resemblance to the technique of “suppressive” narration described and analyzed by Douglas Pye in essays on Fritz Lang’s The Blue Gardenia (1953) and Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956). Pye characterizes “suppressive narrative” as any approach that deliberately withholds, through elision, misdirection, or some other technique, important narrative information from the audience, even if (or especially if) that information is known by some number of characters within the fictional universe. As he notes, the most obvious examples of this storytelling technique are murder mystery and detective stories, where the identity of the killer or criminal is held back until the conclusion and the pleasure of the work derives from watching as the detective figure assembles the clues and presents us with the solution (if we have not already inferred it first). In the film versions of these stories, various tricks of camerawork and framing are often employed to conceal the criminal off-screen, even though such techniques violate the implicit promise of classical film narration, or the so-called invisible style to present us with an optimal view of all narrative action. Examples of this include John Houston’s The Maltese Falcon, which significantly presents the murder of Miles Archer from the first-person POV of the killer, and the opening sequence of Lang’s own M, where a series of metonyms are employed to suggest the presence of Peter Lorre’s killer without actually showing him on screen. These films, Pye suggests, can “get away” with such overt manipulations of audience knowledge without being disruptive because of generic conventions and corresponding viewer expectations (we go into a mystery film expecting a mystery), and because we have a clear sense of what information is being withheld, allowing us to hold open a mental slot into

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which the omission, that is, the identity of the killer or the nature of the larger mystery, may be easily filed once it is presented. The Blue Gardenia and Beyond a Reasonable Doubt are trickier, Pye argues, because they do not overtly signal that they are playing these games, instead offering “a deliberately partial but apparently conclusive view of events.” They present their narratives in a seemingly straightforward fashion, inviting viewers to make inferences and draw conclusions about character, motivation, and the “truth” of various actions and narrative situations without even hinting at the fact that there are significant gaps and omissions in the telling. Once these gaps are filled in, via surprise twists or reversals, we in the audience are forced to reckon with the fact that those initial inferences and conclusions have proven to be dead wrong. The shock of this realization can then be exploited for purposeful and critical ends. Lang’s films, Pye argues, use this technique to subject representational conventions, and our all-too-willing belief in their “truth,” to critical scrutiny. Or as George Wilson puts it in a similarly inflected analysis of the earlier You Only Live Once, Lang’s films offer “a simultaneous depiction and demonstration of the fundamental ways in which people fail to grasp the underlying significance of what they see” (1988, 37). Where The Narrow Margin differs from the Lang films analyzed by Pye and Wilson is in the particular ways it misleads and suppresses, and in the particular strategies it uses for inviting the sort of reflective scrutiny that Pye and Wilson describe. At issue here is the way these films handle what Roland Barthes, in S/Z, identifies as a narrative’s “Hermeneutic Code” (1974, 19). As Barthes frames it, the Hermeneutic Code names the process by which a narrative, in any form, first poses and then eventually resolves a series of enigmas (some of The Narrow Margin’s enigmas would include “Will Detective Brown and Mrs. Neall reach California safely?,” “What will happen to Ann Sinclair?,” “Who is the fat man?,” and “Will Detective Brown take a bribe?” Some of these questions, of course, turn out to have surprising answers2). Central to this process are the methods by which a text can delay the supplying of final, conclusive answers to these enigmas, as a text that immediately provided resolution to its enigmas would be a mere anecdote. Barthes provides us a taxonomy of typical delaying tactics. They include the following: • The Snare: “A kind of deliberate evasion of the truth” • The Equivocation: “A mixture of truth and snare which frequently, while focusing on the enigma, helps to thicken it”

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• The Suspended Answer: “An aphasic stoppage of the disclosure” • Jamming: “Acknowledgement of insolubility” • And, finally, the Partial Answer, “which only exacerbates the expectation of truth” (1974, 75) The question, then, is to which category might we assign The Narrow Margin’s use of film noir’s visual motifs to delay recognition of the story’s “truth”? The most obvious answer would be the “snare,” and we can again gain a sense of the film’s uniqueness in these matters if we compare its “snaring” to another more typical example. Consider Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, which boast some of the cleverest “snares” in all of popular literature. Consider, specifically, “Silver Blaze” (1892). A prize thoroughbred, the titular Silver Blaze, has gone missing on the eve of a big race, and its trainer has been found dead in a nearby ravine, his head caved in by some blunt object, and his leg gashed by a small knife found near the body. These clues would seem, at first, to be the signs of a struggle between the trainer and whoever stole the horse. After weighing the evidence, however, Holmes arrives at a different conclusion. Far from an innocent casualty, it turns out that the now-deceased trainer was the guilty party. Having been paid off by the owners of a rival horse, he endeavored to make several small subcutaneous cuts on Silver Blaze’s legs so that the horse would come up lame before the race. The night of his death, he had taken the horse to the ravine so that its struggles would not wake anyone else on the farm. There he lost control of the animal and received a fatal kick to the head, and the knife, which he himself had been holding, grazed his leg as he fell. What is significant here is that all of the story’s “snares”—those details which seemed to suggest an apparently obvious solution to the mystery—are fully explained away at the story’s end. Everything adds up, no detail is left dangling without explanation. Once the “true” sequence of events is revealed, the truth of each “false” lead becomes clear. This is as true of a fully classical example like the Conan Doyle story as it is of the more radically suppressive Lang films analyzed by Pye. The same cannot be said for The Narrow Margin’s deceptive camerawork. Because elements of cinematography exist effectively outside of the world of the film, because they are merely formal effects that guide our response to the images they frame, they contain no “truth” to be revealed once the plot has reached resolution. Upon subsequent viewings, when we know that “Mrs. Neall” is actually an undercover cop and that “Ann

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Sinclair” is the real mob wife, the stylistic devices that seemed initially to confirm otherwise become, in effect, empty signifiers. Or, more precisely, we become aware of them as signifiers, and thus no longer allow them to automatically guide our response. We cease to look through them and instead begin to look at them.

Stylistic Misdirection To get a better sense of this process, wherein an apparently significant stylistic element turns out to be misleading, we might examine another instance in which the film uses style to mislead viewers into making incorrect inferences about a character. Immediately after the scene between Ann and her son with which I began this chapter, Fleischer cuts to the hallway outside the dining car, where Brown is cornered by both the train’s conductor and Sam Jennings, the mysterious fat man who we later learn is a railway police agent. Jennings, whom Brown has seen talking to Kemp, had earlier asked the detective about the supposedly empty compartment adjacent to his own. When Brown declined, suspecting that this question was another ruse to force him into giving up Mrs. Neall, Jennings stated that he would go to the conductor with the matter. The conductor, however, takes Brown’s side. The issue apparently resolved, Jennings disappointingly concedes, and the conductor exits. Brown stays behind for a few moments, making small talk with Jennings and asking if he knows how long it will be until the next stop. Jennings answers and Brown, satisfied, exits the frame by moving toward the camera. Rather than immediately cutting to follow him, the film remains with Jennings, who turns to watch Brown leave with what seems to be a threatening look on his face. Framed in three-quarter profile, he stands almost perfectly still as the train suddenly and unexpectedly enters a tunnel. A loud whistle sounds, the echo of clattering wheels is heard, and bright lights flash ominously across his features (Fig. 3.3). Up until this point, the film has done a great deal to lead us to suspect that Jennings is working with the mob without explicitly telling us that he is. We have seen him talking to Kemp, and his proposition to Brown about the empty cabin certainly seems to hide an ulterior motive. Moreover, we can deduct from the laws of narrative economy that a character who has received as much screen time as Jennings will prove to be significant in some way. And, finally, we know that, in film noir, corpulence often signifies criminality (e.g. Sydney Greenstreet in The Maltese Falcon or Raymond

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Fig. 3.3  Jennings (Paul Maxey) bathed in “sinister” chiaroscuro in The Narrow Margin

Burr in Anthony Mann’s Desperate [1947] and Raw Deal [1948]). The lingering shot of Jennings in the hallway, and the ominous audiovisual effects that accompany it, would seem, at first, to underline and emphasize these suspicious aspects of the character. Indeed, upon a first viewing of the film, this apparent attempt at emphasis can seem laughably overdone. To borrow a phrase from V.F. Perkins, the moment appears to be “straining after expression” ([1972] 1993, 120).3 Throughout Film as Film, Perkins argues that a filmmaker’s ability to impose meaning upon an image, to make filmed objects signify, “is inhibited by his first two requirements: clarity and credibility” (68). A film’s audience, he suggests, “has to know what is happening, of course, but it must be convinced by what it sees” (69). In Perkins’s view, a filmmaker must be loyal to the integrity and coherence of the projected world. This rule applies to both the fictional world’s basic physical properties (spatial coherence, a respect for the general laws of Newtonian mechanics) as well as to the “artistic” organization of the mise-en-scène. Significant effects of lighting, blocking, or color must emerge “naturally”; they

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cannot be imposed by fiat. “What happens on screen,” Perkins writes, “must not emerge as a directorial ‘touch,’ detached from the dramatic situation; otherwise the spectator’s belief in the action will decrease of disappear” (77). For a viewer to care about the events unfolding on screen, that is, they must not feel deliberately manipulated. Perkins himself argues that credibility and significance can be conceived as two opposed poles, and that individual movies might be ranged along a linear axis between them. I would like to suggest, however, that it might be more critically productive to split them into two axes which intersect perpendicularly to create a Cartesian plot comprised of four distinct quadrants: (1) credible/significant, (2) not-credible/significant, (3) credible/ not-significant, and (4) not-credible/not-significant. Of these categories, the final two are of little interpretive interest. Category (3) would simply comprise all moments in traditional narrative films in which the mise-en-­ scène’s only purpose is to successfully approximate what things would look like if the situation depicted were “actually” happening, while Category (4) would include films that strive for this verisimilitude but that, for whatever reason, ring false for the audience. Such feelings of falsity could be created by, among other things, overly rigid or stagey blocking, poor acting, or lighting effects that do not match with a scene’s expected sources of illumination. When we turn to those moments that do strive for some richer symbolic or significant meaning, however, things become slightly more complex, and the balance between the credible and the significant becomes more delicate. Expressive lighting effects of the sort found in The Narrow Margin can prove especially tricky in striking such a balance. As Perkins puts it, Light is less flexible, less readily subject to rapid alteration than composition, which evolves with every movement of object, character, and camera. Within any given setting, we expect the source of illumination – whether it is shown or deduced – to remain constant unless we are given an acceptable reason for a change. ([1972] 1993, 83)

On a first viewing, the flickering lights illuminating Jennings’s face would seem to violate this delicate balance of credibility and significance and fall into Category (2), a striving after significance that pushes too far, imperiling the credibility of the projected world and unintentionally calling our attention to the fact of its fabrication. Though the flickering lights and

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clattering train wheels in Fleischer’s film do have a diegetic provenance, the arrival of the train at a tunnel at just the right moment, timed to perfectly synchronize with Jennings turning his gaze down the hall toward the exiting Detective Brown, seems too pat. Paul Maxey’s performance further adds to the sense of apparently forced significance. His movement as he braces himself against the wall is robotic, unnatural. One gets the sense that he was told to stand there and wait for the lights to stop, even if such an action would make little sense in the dramatic context of the moment. Our reading of the scene changes somewhat upon a second viewing in light of the later revelation that Jennings is, in fact, an agent of the railroad. The flashing lights will have ceased to function as a sign of Jennings’s villainy and will have instead become simply decorative or ornamental. The effect may still seem awkward, forced, not “credible,” but that awkwardness is no longer accompanied by the sense that the filmmakers are trying too hard to force significance into the image. We may, however, feel that we have been tricked, or duped, or lied to. But while the film, both here and in the other moments analyzed above, certainly engages in a fair share of misdirection, can we say that the image here has lied to us? A comparison between the scene and a hypothetical rendering of the same scene in prose might clarify things here. Were one to read a novel of The Narrow Margin that included in its treatment the line, “the fat man was working with the criminals,” that would be an example of a text lying. If, on the other hand, the prose treatment merely described the train entering the tunnel—that is, “Brown walked away down the hall. The fat man turned to watch him go, and as he did so the train passed into a tunnel. The clattering of wheels echoed off the walls and flickering lights filled the cabins”—the passage would lack any of the suggestive character of the filmed event. A prose description would fail to fully convey the connotations of the precise way in which the light flashes over Jennings’s face, connotations which, like the femme fatale/good woman dichotomy and canted angles discussed above, are native to film noir. One solution to the prose writer’s problem in adapting the scene might be to focus the description on Jennings’s face, using adjectives that would work like the film’s flashing lights to confirm the audience’s suspicions: “The stranger watched menacingly as Brown walked away from him.” And yet, this too would fail to have quite the same effect, or work in quite the same way, as the visual treatment. The main problem with this approach is that it would fix the meaning of Jennings’s expression in a way that a

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film image, by itself, would not. Moreover, were one to return to such a passage later, knowing that Jennings is an officer of the law, the “menacingly” would come to seem inexplicable. Seymour Chatman, distinguishing between the “descriptive” capabilities of film and literature, writes that “the film shows only features; it is up to the audience to interpret them – that is, to assign them adjectival names. As Ernest Callenbach puts it, this inconclusiveness ‘is the magic of cinema, its aesthetic “purity” or perhaps its inherent capacity for discretion and indirection’” (1990, 43). The shot of Jennings, along with the shots of Mrs. Neall and Ann Sinclair discussed above, takes full advantage of this “capacity for discretion and indirection.” The film, in these moments, presents us with images, which we, drawing upon both established narrative context as well as our knowledge of established generic tropes, supply the (ultimately incorrect) adjectives for. The film’s narration cannot be blamed for lying to us because it has not, itself, presented any “definitive” description. Unlike a prose phrase like “watched menacingly,” the meanings of cinematic signifiers like flashing lights or canted angles are contingent, indefinite, and shifting.

Lessons in Perception As we have seen, The Narrow Margin is a film that consistently draws upon well-established film noir conventions to mislead its audience into drawing the wrong conclusions about its characters and narrative situation. It is a film, we might say, about the deceptiveness of appearances and the danger of relying too heavily on stereotypes and conventions for an understanding of the world. The film more or less puts this idea front and center in one of its very first scenes. As they take a cab from the train station to Mrs. Neall’s downtown apartment, Forbes asks Brown what he predicts Mrs. Neall will look like. Forbes: Bet you’re wondering the same thing I am, what she looks like. Brown: I don’t have to wonder. I know. Forbes: Well, that’s wonderful, Walter. Nobody’s seen her, but you know what she looks like. What a gift! […] So, what about this dame? Brown: She’s a dish. Forbes: What kind of dish? Brown: Sixty-cent special. Cheap, flashy, strictly poison under the gravy. Forbes: Amazing, and how do you know all this?

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Brown: Well she was married to a hoodlum, wasn’t she? What kind of dame would marry a hood? Forbes: Oh, all kinds … Forbes may be taken here as giving voice to one of the film’s primary theses. The film works to suggest that we in the audience, like Brown, are all too willing to fall back on received expectations when it comes to imagining what a gangster’s wife is “supposed to” look like. But, we might ask, from whence do these expectations arise? Why, that is, do we associate Mrs. Neall’s taste for jazz and oversized jewelry with seediness and deviance? Or, in the other direction, Ann Sinclair’s blonde hair with innocence and purity? Or Jennings’s corpulence with villainy? In S/Z, Barthes analyzed the role played by stereotypes such as these in nearly all works of popular fiction. Such texts, he argues throughout, draw to a degree upon what he terms “cultural codes,” which take the form of passing, implicit “references to a science or a body of language” (1974, 20) collectively possessed by a culture. These “codes of knowledge” and wisdom can take many forms, from references to “traditional human experience” such as the narrator’s claim in the opening sentences of Balzac’s Sarrasine that he “was deep in one of those daydreams which overtake even the shallowest of men, in the midst of the most tumultuous of parties,” to the use of stereotypical descriptors (Balzac: “The Count de Lanty was small, ugly, and pockmarked; dark as a Spaniard, dull as a banker”). These “codes,” with which the author of the classical text can reasonably presume his audience to be readily familiar, may thus be drawn on as a sort of shorthand. Rather than spending time describing in detail the specific character of the Count de Lanty’s dullness, Balzac supplies a simple simile and can count on his reader to do the rest of the work. When we look at things in this context, we can easily see why studio-era Hollywood would make such widespread use of “cultural codes.” Based on an industrial model in which efficiency and rapid production were king, these codes provided filmmakers with effectively “readymade” signifiers that could be plugged in to any film, saving precious time and screenplay pages in the process. The reliance on such stock signifiers may also be seen as a component of the process that Noël Burch, in tracing the evolution of mainstream narrative cinema (or the “Institutional Mode of Representation,” in his parlance), has called the “linearization of the iconographic signifier”—the push to make the meaning of any given cinematic image as clear, legible, and “transparent” as possible (1979, 81). As

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Barthes reminds us, and as his name for them implies, “cultural codes” are not “natural” signifiers, and the meanings that become attached to them do not necessarily result from anything inherent in the objects themselves. Rather, these “citations,” he writes, are extracted from a body of knowledge, from an anonymous Book whose best model is doubtless the School Manual … Although entirely derived from books, these codes, by a swivel characteristic of bourgeois ideology, which turns culture into nature, appear to establish reality, “Life.” “Life,” then, in the classic text, becomes a nauseating mixture of common opinions, a smothering layer of received ideas. (1974, 205–6)

Thus, the relationship between these signifiers and their connotative meanings is formed not by some natural relation between signifier and signified but rather through the repetition of the association across a range of texts. There is nothing inherent in cigarettes or jazz that makes them mean seediness or criminality; there is only the endless succession of seedy and criminal characters that smoke and listen to jazz. This repetition, this “migration” (to use Barthes’s term) of cultural codes from text to text re-­ affirms the semantic relationship, “naturalizing” it and imbuing it the authority of “common knowledge.” Thus, Detective Brown knows, or thinks he knows, what sort of woman Frankie Neall’s widow must be because the culture has educated him accordingly, and Internal Affairs, like a filmmaker constructing a femme fatale, can simply dress their agent according to the established codes and count on Brown, their audience, to fill in the rest of the story. It is within this realm of culturally entrenched signifiers that The Narrow Margin intervenes. While no one should mistake the film for, say, a work of Brechtian subversion or postmodern self-reflexivity, it may surely be seen as toying with many of the tropes and images common to crime and detective films from the period, subtly undermining the process of semantic circulation described by Barthes. We might say that the film’s point is that not all women who would fall for a crime boss are vampish femme fatales, just as not all women who listen to jazz are criminals, and not all gruff men caught patrolling a train’s corridors at night are robbers. The film, which relies so heavily on well-worn character types, becomes, in the end, a strange sort of argument for individuality, with Forbes’s reply to Brown’s rhetorical question about the type of woman who would marry a

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gangster (“oh, all kinds”) standing as its thesis statement. In this world, the “femme fatale” and the “good woman” prove to be utterly meaningless categories, useful only for deceiving those who actually believe in them. A gangster’s wife might be a kind woman and a caring mother, while a police agent may enjoy listening to jazz (at one point we see the fake Mrs. Neall listening to her records while alone in her compartment, suggesting that it was not all an act). The film, in retrospect, encourages us to look again at the images it presents, to scrutinize and ask questions of them, rather than simply accepting our initial impressions as truth. At a theoretical level, what is at stake here is the generally held belief that classical cinema strives after “transparency.” This notion was most forcefully put into circulation by the cine-semioticians at Cahiers du cinema and Screen in the 1970s. Following Barthes’s line of argument from S/Z (along with the earlier Writing Degree Zero [1953]), critics and theorists associated with these journals argued that Hollywood cinema worked tirelessly to conceal the production of meaning, naturalizing its conventions and formal protocols (of editing, of cinematography, of mise-en-­scène) under the aegis of an illusory realism. Such conventions, these critics argued, serve to make the cinematic image “transparent” in two ways: first, by making its contents clearly and instantly “legible” to a viewer and, second, by making the events depicted appear as though occurring “naturally,” as if viewed through an open window, rather than as the result of the material process of filmmaking. Furthermore, it is precisely this apparent, illusory transparency that accounts for the classical cinema’s power as a tool for ideological dissemination. Believing its mode of representation to be entirely natural, this line of thinking goes, the cinema-goer is likely to accept the classical film’s (explicit or implicit) ideological messages without question. While these propositions no doubt hold true for many mainstream films, Screen’s totalizing approach ultimately underrated the potential complexity of studio-era filmmaking, a point that work like Pye’s essays on “suppressive narrative” and Wilson’s aforementioned Narration in Light make abundantly clear. Wilson’s book first considers, and then criticizes, the standard line about the supposed “transparency” of studio-era narrative film. While he concedes that “transparency of the image is something at which classical film narration characteristically aims, and it is an effect that, on the whole, characteristically succeeds,” Wilson goes on to warn critics not to take this “transparency”—or related notions such as “reliability,” “invisibility of editing,” and “explanatory closure”—as a “blueprint for the simple and mechanical operation of the ‘the Hollywood

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narrative product’” (1988, 59). Rather than allowing “transparency” and its related terms to “define a kind of filmic storytelling which is thought to be immediately recognizable, obvious in the intentions it satisfies and the functions it serves,” Wilson encourages us to “rethink, sometimes in a fairly radical way, our ideas of what there might be to see in a film or, more specifically, in a film belonging to one or another apparently well-worn genre” (1988, 61). To buttress his thesis, Wilson provides lengthy analyses of some well-­ known Hollywood films, including Lang’s You Only Live Once (1937) and Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1959), which present “central characters whose perception and comprehension of their personal circumstances are shown to be dim, distorted, and severely restricted in relation to their need to see and understand the situations in which they act.” In presenting these characters’ situations via complicated strategies of narrational POV, he goes on to argue, the films “raise questions about the actual and potential illusions of spectatorship at the cinema” and thus “double back upon the viewers themselves” certain lessons “about perceptual malfunction and misalignment” (191). The Narrow Margin’s shares with these films many of the features Wilson enumerates. Detective Brown is certainly shown to have a “dim and distorted” understanding of his personal (and professional) circumstances, and the film, as we have seen, uses POV strategies to align his basic misapprehension of the situation with ours as viewers. What is more, the film repeatedly returns to a visual motif that functions practically as a symbol for both the “doubling back” process Wilson identifies and for the larger myth of cinematic transparency itself. As Brown traverses the train’s hallways and compartments, Fleischer repeatedly includes and emphasizes the vehicles many windows. Sometimes this involves shooting through the window of a connecting doorway, and sometimes it involves showing characters looking at the reflections of others in exterior windows, as when Brown surreptitiously observes Kemp’s activities in the lounge car. The most baroque instance of this comes the film’s climax, as Brown uses the reflection of a neighboring train to monitor the movements of Densel, who has locked himself in an adjacent compartment with Ann and is threatening to kill her. Fleischer shoots the scene in such a way that three different images (Brown’s reflection, the train outside, and Densel and Ann) are concatenated within a single frame (Fig. 3.4).

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Fig. 3.4  Not even windows are transparent in The Narrow Margin

At the literal level, what these images remind us of is the fact that the transparency of even real windows is less absolute than we might believe. Taken together with the film’s more general investigation of the unreliability of appearances, we might read these images as a small lesson on perception. It is what we ourselves bring to bear on the things and people we see on screen—the accumulated baggage of preconceived notions and reflexive stereotypical beliefs—that often acts as the biggest obstacle to seeing those things clearly. To be sure, many movies rely upon these pre-­ existing ideas, and thus seem to confirm them as true. This, of course, is how ideology generally works. The Narrow Margin calls our attention to this fact. Wittgenstein, in discussing the importance of learning to see the aspects of things, has this to say: “What is the philosophical importance of [experiencing an aspect]? Is it really so much odder than everyday visual experiences? Does it cast an unexpected light on them?” ([1953] 2009, 172). The Narrow Margin casts a similarly unexpected (flickering) light on the “everyday” Hollywood crime thriller.

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Notes 1. For a usefully schematic discussion of this opposition or dichotomy, see Janey Place’s “Women in Film Noir” in Women in Film Noir (ed. E. Ann Kaplan, BFI Books, [1978] 1998, pp. XX–XX). 2. For an extensive discussion of deceptive filmmaking practices and their relationship to Barthes’s theory of narrative, see also Kristin Thompson’s essay on Stage Fright in Breaking the Glass Armor (1988). 3. I credit Robert Ray with encouraging me to think about the moment from this perspective.

References Barthes, Roland. 1974. S/Z: An Essay. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Benjamin, Walter. [1931] 2009. Brief History of Photography. In One-way Street and Other Writings. Trans. J.A. Underwood. New York: Penguin Burch, Noël. 1979. Film’s Institutional Mode of Representation and the Soviet Response. October 11. Chatman, Seymour. 1990. Coming to Terms: The Rhetoric of Narrative in Fiction and Film. Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press. Perkins, V.F. [1972] 1993. Film as Film: Understanding and Judging Movies. New York: Da Capo Press. Place, Janey. [1978] 1998. Women in Film Noir. In Women in Film Noir, ed. E. Ann Kaplan, 47–69. London: British Film Institute. Place, J.A., and Lowell Peterson [1974] 1996. Some Visual Motifs in Film Noir. In Film Noir Reader, ed. Alain Silver and James Ursini, 65–75. New  York: Limelight Editions. Pye, Douglas. 1988. Seeing Glimpses: Fritz Lang’s The Blue Gardenia. CineAction. ———. 1993. The Suppressive Narrative and Film Noir: Beyond a Reasonable Doubt. In The Book of Film Noir, ed. Ian Cameron, 98–110. New  York: Continuum Books. Willemen, Paul. 1994. Looks and Frictions: Essays in Cultural Studies and Film Theory. London: British Film Institute. Wilson, George M. 1988. Narration in Light: Studies in Cinematic Point of View. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. [1953] 2009. Philosophical Investigations. Trans. P.M.S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte. Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell.

PART II

Auteurist Noir

CHAPTER 4

Ministry of Fear: Fritz Lang’s De-suturing Operation

Fritz Lang’s Ministry of Fear begins with a scene of apparent normalcy. Recently released from a two-year sentence in sanitarium for the “mercy killing” of his terminally ill wife, Stephen Neale (Ray Milland) stands at a train ticket window in the small English village of Lembridge. He wishes to purchase a ticket to London where he told the sanitarium’s supervising doctor, he longs to lose himself in the metropolitan masses. As he stands at the ticket window, cheerful music from the nearby village square catches his attention. It turns out to be coming from a village fete. Perhaps drawn in by the incongruousness of such a seemingly innocent event occurring in the midst of wartime deprivation and the cataclysmic destruction wrought by the Blitz or perhaps simply looking to kill some time before the night train arrives, Neale wanders over to explore the festivities. There he finds a standard collection of charity fair activities, including a treasure hunt for children, a weight-guessing contest whose prize is a cake made with real eggs (a rare treat in wartime), and a fortune-teller’s tent. After failing to win the cake with a guess of “three pounds, five ounces,” Neale pays a visit to the fortune-teller. In the dark of the tent, she takes his palm and, after telling him she is legally barred from predicting the future, traces a line and declares, “Well, you have made one woman happy!” Taken aback, Neale quickly withdraws his hand and says, “Forget the past, just tell me the future.” The fortune-­ teller, Mrs. Bellane (an uncredited Aminta Dyne), appears shocked by this, and rather than continuing with the palm-reading, she leans forward to © The Author(s) 2020 N. Deyo, Film Noir and the Possibilities of Hollywood, Palgrave Close Readings in Film and Television, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37058-9_4

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cryptically whisper, “My instructions are these. What you want is the cake. You must give the weight as four pounds, 15 ½ ounces.” Neale, unfazed by this strange turn in the conversation, thanks her for the tip and exits. Back in the fete’s open area, he guesses the weight he was given and is immediately met by a derisive silence from the gathered crowd, with one elderly woman mockingly commenting, “My, anyone could tell that you’re a bachelor.” The woman running the stand, however, quickly interjects and proclaims that Neale has, in fact, guessed correctly. He thanks her for the cake and the crowd stands and watches him in dead silence. Again seemingly unfazed by this odd behavior, Neale makes his way toward the exit. There he crosses paths with a thin blonde man wearing a long dark coat (Dan Duryea), who rushes to the fortune-teller’s tent. Moments later, the women running the weight-guessing contest jog up to Neale and inform him that they have made a mistake: the real weight of the cake is three pounds and two ounces, and the blonde man won it with a guess of three pounds and eight ounces. Much to their dismay, rather than hand the cake over, Neale states that the cake is still his as his original guess was even closer. Before they can offer further protest, he turns and leaves. On the train back to London, he is joined in his compartment by a seemingly friendly blind man who turns out to be neither friendly nor blind, attacking Neale and attempting to flee with the cake while the train is stopped during an air raid, only to be killed by an errant Nazi bomb. Eventually, Neale will learn that both the participants at the fete and the blind man were actually members of a Nazi spy ring and that the cake contained microfilm destined for Germany. As a result, he will be enlisted by the Allies to help defeat the spies, meeting a number of colorful characters along the way, including love interest Carla Hilfe (Marjorie Reynolds).

An Ordinary Studio Assignment? We would seem to have here a typical set-up for a noir-inflected espionage thriller: a depiction of normal, ordinary life disrupted by the unexpected emergence of some dark or criminal force. And yet, even before the odd occurrences begin to accumulate and long before the complete contours of the Nazi plan are revealed, something feels off about the scene. An odd, unsettling quality seems to course just below its surface, presaging the strangeness to come. Tom Gunning, in his 2000 study of Lang’s work, identifies Ministry of Fear’s opening as being “among Lang’s most uncanny sequences” and suggests that “Lang creates a strange atmosphere

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here precisely by stressing the improvised everydayness of this event” (294). To appreciate the achievement of Ministry of Fear will require an understanding of the exact formal procedures Lang uses to create this strange atmosphere and the ways he uses the thriller/espionage milieu for specific aesthetic and thematic purposes, bending the genre to his particular authorial vision. Before we can do that, however, it may first be worth considering the film’s general reputation within the exiting critical literature on Lang. Despite the plaudits he lavishes upon the opening sequence, the above-­ quoted passage represents the only truly substantial discussion of the film in Gunning’s 500-page book. Though it is not the only film he does not analyze in extended detail, its relative absence from the book is telling, and reflective of the wider neglect of the film in critical and academic circles. Though scholars like Reynold Humphries (1989) and Jakob Isak Nielsen (2015) have analyzed it from more academic perspectives, the writing on the film pales in comparison to the voluminous work that has accrued around other Lang noirs like The Woman in the Window (1944) and the previously discussed Scarlet Street (1945). Gunning ultimately declares it a “minor” work, and this judgment is more or less echoed in most of the major studies of Lang. Even the director himself was somewhat dismissive of the film. When asked about it in an interview with Peter Bogdanovich, Lang himself claimed that his work on the film was less an artistic endeavor than a routine assignment ruined by studio interference: I signed a ten-week contract, but when I came back here and saw what they had done with the script, I was terribly shocked and I said, “I want to get out of this contract.” The agent said I couldn’t—maybe he was just too lazy—I don’t know. Anyway, I had signed a contract and I had to fulfill it, that’s all. I saw it recently on television, where it was cut to pieces, and I fell asleep. (1997, 205)

Though somewhat more sympathetic to the film, Lang’s biographer Patrick McGilligan confirms his claim that the production was plagued by an unusual amount of studio involvement by Lang’s standards. According to McGilligan, the film was the brainchild of Seton I. Miller, a screenwriter at Paramount who, in the mid-1940s, began trying his hand at producing. As a screenwriter/producer, Miller blocked Lang from having any input on the script, frustrating the director. Furthermore, McGilligan goes on to

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note that Paramount unilaterally selected the film’s cast and crew without consulting Lang. Milland was tagged for the leading role before Lang was even brought in, and Reynolds was foisted on the director as part of a studio push to make her a star (1997, 305). Nonetheless, McGilligan finds some things to appreciate about Lang’s “compulsory imitation of Hitchcock,” deeming it “an eminently watchable film.” “It has the studio patina,” he writes, “that Hangmen Also Die—and Lang’s weak-budgeted ‘independent’ films—lack. The production is handsome, the scenes atmospheric and beautifully mapped out” (1997, 306). I would suggest that it is precisely the qualities that McGilligan finds praiseworthy—its “studio patina” and eminent “watchability”—that have caused more serious-minded critics like Gunning to pass over the film in relative silence. Though, as Lotte Eisner points out, it is “full of typical Langian concerns” (1986, 239) and its story of a shadowy organization operating secretly amongst polite society places it “directly in the line of Mabuse and Spies,” it superficially feels un-Langian, out of step with much of his other work. This feeling is largely a matter of tone. Where the Mabuse films elevated a simple crime syndicate to the status of metaphysical evil, here the actual world-historical evil of Nazism is represented by a band of bumbling caricatures whose elaborate espionage plot is foiled almost single-handedly by an ordinary citizen. Moreover, in adapting Graham Greene’s novel for the screen, Miller and Paramount excised a number of elements that might have imbued the film with a greater sense of Lang’s signature atmosphere of dread. For instance, the book’s protagonist, Arthur Rowe, poisoned his sick wife without her knowledge and left her to die alone, and the guilt from this act has left him profoundly haunted. In contrast, the film’s Stephen Neale simply purchased the poison but could not go through with the act—it was his wife herself, who, finding the poison hidden in their home, chose to commit suicide. Though by no means removing all darkness from the character’s backstory, this change considerably lightens the burden carried by Neale and makes Eisner’s claim that the film is about “the ambiguity of guilt” (1986, 239) seem a slight overstatement. Milland and Reynolds’s performances in the lead roles further add to the film’s relatively light tone. Though Milland was certainly capable of projecting a deep sense of pathos (as in his Oscar-winning performance in Billy Wilder’s The Lost Weekend, made one year after Ministry of Fear), here he is mostly affable and good-humored, even when confronting murderous Nazi agents. Indeed, in this respect that McGilligan’s remark about

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the film being Lang’s “compulsory imitation of Hitchcock” seems particularly apt, as Milland’s Neale more closely resembles a character like Robert Donat’s Hannay in The 39 Steps (1935)—a similarly affable ordinary citizen who stumbles, by accident, upon a vast international conspiracy and eventually helps foil it—than he does the haunted, pathetic characters played by Henry Fonda, Glen Ford, and Edward G. Robinson who populate so many of Lang’s other American films. Marjorie Reynolds, on the other hand, is given little to work with by the script. Where films like Scarlet Street (1945) and The Blue Gardenia (1953) presented audiences with psychologically complex, fully realized female characters, Reynolds’s Carla Hilfe is little more than a thinly drawn love interest for Neale. Even when she must kill her own brother after he reveals himself as Nazi’s lead spy, the film does little to convey any sense of deep emotional or psychological turmoil. Formally, too, the film seems to resemble in many ways a conventional Hollywood thriller. In his recent essay on the film, Jakob Isak Nielsen writes that “many of the film’s stylistic choices are … in accord with the norms and conventions of the time.” Specifically, Nielsen points to the fact that the film’s typical-for-its-time average shot length of 10 seconds, that “the editing pattern of the film generally respects continuity principles,” and that Lang’s “cinematographic choices” are nearly all submitted to narrative motivation (2015, 432). While Nielsen goes on to note that “the film also houses distinctly Langian idiosyncrasies,” including “popular Lang motifs such as hands and clocks, the use of rhyme and echo” and “a mood of paranoia and claustrophobia,” he never really entertains the possibility that the film is anything but conventional when it comes to the issues of scene construction or découpage. Indeed, for Nielsen, the formal interest of the film arises precisely from the tension between its “Langian idiosyncrasies” and the conventions of classical Hollywood (2015, 433).

Disruptive Articulations But are the film’s editing patterns really all that typical? Close attention to the actual construction of individual scenes reveals something more at work. We might take the scene at the charity fete as a case in point. As noted above, the scene possesses a strange, uncanny quality even before anything outright strange has actually occurred. But what accounts for this quality? None of the elements Nielsen identifies as “Langian idiosyncrasies” are in evidence here. The mise-en-scène is neither nightmarish,

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expressionistic, nor particularly claustrophobic. Though clearly a studio creation, both the town square and the fairgrounds have been constructed with an eye toward verisimilitude, and the extras who move about the area look like average, everyday people. And yet, still, something seems just slightly off, and while watching the sequence it is impossible to shake the sense of a deep disquiet lurking just beneath the scene’s placid surface. The sequence begins with a medium long shot of Neale as he approaches the train station’s ticket window. Finding it closed and no one present, he knocks and an attendant soon arrives and Neale requests a ticket to London. “Yes, sir,” the man replies, “in the blink of an eye.” As he turns to retrieve Neale’s ticket, we hear for the first time the distant strains of music coming from the fair. As if just now hearing them too, Neale turns and looks off-screen. Lang then cuts to a high-angle shot of the fair itself, before returning to a closer medium shot of Neale at the window, still looking off-screen. “What’s happening over there?” he inquires. “That’s our charity fete,” the attendant replies. “The ladies are doing themselves proud tonight,” he continues, as Neale once again turns his gaze toward the edge of the frame, “you might want to have a look at it and spend a schilling or two. It’s well worth it.” After asking if the man will watch his belongings while he is gone, Neale turns to exit, and a dissolve takes us to the gate of the fairgrounds as he approaches. Already we may begin to note a number of curious features in the way Lang has chosen to construct this apparently very simple three-shot sequence. The most obvious is in the relationship between the shots themselves. Convention would lead us to expect that Neale’s glance off-screen in the first shot would be followed by either a direct POV shot or, at the very least, a shot that roughly approximates Neale’s perspective. Instead, Lang supplies a shot utterly detached from Neale’s, or any other character’s POV, one whose third-person objectivity is all the more emphasized by the camera’s distanced, high-angle placement. Such shots, which reduce mise-en-scène to a distantly viewed geometric pattern, are by their very nature somewhat alienating and unsettling, and were, for this very reason, a favorite of Lang’s throughout his career (see, for instance, the opening shot of M). Here, though, the unsettling and alienating effect of the shot is heightened further by its relationship to the two shots sandwiching it. Because Neale’s glance off-screen in the first shot has primed us to expect an eye-line match, the high-angle shot carries with it the connotation of a POV shot, as if we have suddenly come to inhabit the perspective of some unseen alien observer (Fig. 4.1).

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Fig. 4.1  A high-angle shot of the street, suggestive of an observing presence in Ministry of Fear (Fritz Lang 1944)

To understand the complexity of what is occurring here, we might think of this moment in terms of what Noël Burch has described as the three possible “attitudes” the camera can adopt toward the events it records: (1) A direct point-of-view look, sharing the gaze of a character within the film. (2) A 3rd person “voyeuristic” look that “make[s] us ‘forget’ its presence.” (3) An “authorial” look that self-reflexively calls attention to the presence of someone behind the camera guiding our perceptions. (1980, 301)

Taken by itself, the high-angle shot of the fairgrounds would seem to be a relatively straightforward example of the second of these “attitudes,” but because the preceding shot has cued us to expect the first type instead, a sort of blurring between Burch’s categories occurs. Moreover, far from making us “forget” the camera’s presence, the sequence’s violation of our

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expectations makes us, for a brief moment at least, aware of the camera in a way we would not have otherwise been. In a sense, this brief three-shot sequence might be seen as sharing a family resemblance with the “false” POV shots systematically employed by Michelangelo Antonioni in films like L’Avventura (1960), in which a character will suddenly walk into the frame of a shot originally cued as coming from their perspective. While the moment from Ministry of Fear is not nearly as ostentatious in its flaunting of convention as Antonioni’s stridently modernist art films, it nonetheless introduces a minor disturbance into the continuity system’s normally smooth articulation of images, while simultaneously suggesting a foreign, observing presence behind the camera. Things become even stranger once we move on to consider the fourth shot in the sequence, depicting Neale’s arrival at the fete. Where the sequence had earlier seemed to imply that the fairgrounds and the train station were in somewhat close proximity, the use of a dissolve here suggests a temporal ellipsis of unknown duration, indicating that Neale has had to do more than simply walk across the street to arrive at his destination. Thus, any surety we might have thought we had about the geographical layout of Lembridge is suddenly scrambled, further disorienting our relationship to the world of the film. Moreover, Lang here subtly introduces a disjunction between what we know and see and what Neale knows and sees. When we could assume that the train station and fairgrounds were located close together, we could take the high-angle shot of the fete as showing us what Neale was looking at when he glanced off-­ screen, even if our perspective differed greatly from his. Now that the dissolve has implied that the fairgrounds and station are, in fact, a considerable distance from one another, we realize that what we saw in the sequence’s second shot was something completely different than what Neale was looking at. Indeed, the object of Neale’s glance will remain for us forever a mystery. Burch, in Theory of Film Practice, draws a distinction between two types of off-screen space, the “concrete” and the “imaginary,” with the former referring to an area of space that we have seen but which is at present out of view, and the latter referring to an area we know to exist, but which has not yet been shown to us (Burch 1973, 21). The typical procedure in classical filmmaking is to consistently convert “imaginary” space to “concrete” space by, for instance, having a character look off-screen and then cutting to what he or she is looking at. The segment from Ministry of Fear under examination appears to follow this basic procedure, only to then

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radically undermine it with the dissolve to the fairground’s entrance. The first shot’s off-screen space, which had seemed to be made concrete, in fact remains fully “imaginary.” The unknown, and unknowable, quality of Lembridge’s layout is further heightened by the fact that the town itself is an invention of the film—an imaginary garden with real Nazis in it, so to speak—preventing us from checking its fictional geography against a map of any kind. Many films, of course, fabricate whole cities out of only a few select spaces. In fact, this was a preferred method of constructing fictional spaces in classical Hollywood, where a series of isolated studio sets were called upon to stand in for an entire world. Take, for instance, the opening scene of Casablanca (Michael Curtiz 1942). As the camera pans down from a shot of the city’s skyline (in reality a matte painting), we are shown a bustling street. At the top of the frame, the street recedes from view, and buildings prevent us from seeing what is going on around corners and down other streets. At no point, though, are we led by the film to wonder about the specifics of what is going on around those corners. Indeed, one of the major goals of classical Hollywood’s formal and narrative protocols was to forestall the asking of questions such as those. The implicit promise of Hollywood-style storytelling was that everything that needed to be seen would be shown (unless, as noted in the previous chapter, generic or narrative demands required withholding certain information), and everything else was of little immediate concern. That is, a film like Casablanca lets us know that a world exists beyond the events it limits itself to showing, but assures us that we need not worry about anything occurring beyond its narrative purview. Neale’s insistent glance off-screen, however, activates the space, piquing our interest in what might be over there.1 Even though we might surmise that nothing of any real significance might occupy it, we still experience the desire to see the space for ourselves. The film’s subsequent refusal to sate that interest and satisfy that desire thus introduces a tangible gap into our experience of the film’s world, one that unsettles, if ever so slightly, our total absorption in its unfolding events. A piece of the world, in effect, is missing. This missing piece, however insignificant it may ultimately be, emphasizes the limitations of the frame, alerting us to everything that is left out, reminding us that the camera can never show everything and that there is always something more beyond the frame’s boundaries.

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This play of on-screen and off-screen space continues as the scene unfolds further. At the fairground’s gate, Neale engages the ticket-seller in a brief conversation, handled in brief reverse-shot sequence. Following this, Lang cuts to a shot taken from inside the fairground to track Neale’s entrance and follow his movements. Immediately upon entering, a child’s ball bounces in from off-screen, accompanied by a girl’s voice urging Neale to “catch it.” He does, and the girl herself soon enters to reclaim the ball. A number of things are worth noting about this small moment. First, for viewers familiar with Lang’s oeuvre, the image of a young girl playing with a ball must immediately call to mind the sequence depicting the killing of young Elsie Beckmann at the beginning of the director’s M (1931), where a shot of the child’s ball rolling unaccompanied from a wooded area metonymically suggested the young girl’s unseen murder. This moment thus not only introduces dark associations with death and violence into the sunny, cheerful fair scene, but it also once again stresses the difference between our perspective and Neale’s—he, no doubt, could see both the ball and the girl ahead of time, while their entrance into the frame takes us completely by surprise.

Gestures of Looking and Paranoid Camera Style In addition to their curious activation of off-screen space, many of the shots discussed above also suggest the presence of an observer watching the action. This is accomplished through deliberate filmmaking choices. First is the framing itself, which is somewhat more distant than is dramatically necessary and thus seems just slightly unnatural. The second is the timing of the cut. Rather than waiting until the end of Neale’s conversation with the ticket-seller and employing a match-on-action as Neale turns to enter the park, Lang cuts to the long shot a beat early, before the ticket-­ seller delivers her final line. The cut thus appears, at first, unmotivated by screen action, rendering the fundamental disjunctive nature of the shot change momentarily visible in a way that Hollywood’s continuity protocols typically sought to avoid. The sense that we are sharing our view of the scene with an observing presence is further emphasized as the film continues. Lang films the entirety of Neale’s short walk through the park toward the weight-­guessing stand in a single tracking shot. Keeping its distance as if not wishing to arouse suspicion, the camera follows his movements intently. As it does so, groups of the fair’s patrons move into and across the frame, entering from

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and exiting in all possible directions, continuously keeping alive our sense of off-screen space and of the limitations of the camera’s situated viewpoint. Occasionally, too, the camera will pass by a figure in the extreme foreground, which briefly occludes its, and our, view of Neale. Lang’s handling of the sequence’s next shot is even more idiosyncratic. Once Neale arrives at the weight-guessing stand, the film cuts to a new set-up, with the camera positioned behind the counter and looking out at Neale. After the woman working at the stand explains the rules to Neale and he agrees to give it a shot, the camera tracks left, reframing Neale in three-quarter profile. After he submits his guess, the camera again pans left, to bring into a view another of the fair’s organizers, standing intently at the edge of the tent. As Neale moves in her direction, the camera once again tracks to follow him. The woman at the side of the tent stops his progress to encourage him to visit the fortune-teller, and another of the fair’s organizers enters from the right side of the screen. He good-naturedly avers he will go see Mrs. Bellane and exits to the left. The camera stays on the two old women for a moment as they praise Neale for being a good sport, before cutting to another relatively distant long shot as he prepares to enter the fortune-teller’s tent. What is strangest about this shot are the two shifts in camera angle that occur while Neale is engaging with the woman running the game, and they are odd because they seem, at first blush, dramatically unnecessary. Indeed, one can easily imagine a version of the scene handled by a single, stationary set-up, with a leftward pan at the end motivated by Neale’s movement away from the tent. The scene at the weight-guessing tent is not the first time Lang has employed oddly timed camera movement in the film. The film’s opening sequence ends with a similarly ostentatious flourish. Neale, having just reached the end of his two-year sentence, is being accompanied to the sanitarium’s gate by his doctor. The shot begins with a high-angle shot, showing the gate, the pair as they approach, and the sidewalk in front. As they approach and a guard opens the gate, the camera slowly tracks down to ground level and in toward Neale as he walks through out toward the street, centering him in the frame. Neale and his doctor say their goodbyes, and Neale takes his leave, exiting at the left of the frame. As with the later shot at the fair, the camera lingers for a moment after he exits as his doctor and the guard watch him go. Then, without warning, it quickly pans to the left, picking Neale up as he walks away and revealing a sign reading LEMBRIDGE ASYLUM, tracking further in, as Neale once again walks out of sight.

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In these and other instances, Lang’s direction consistently codes its shots in terms of what Gilberto Perez has called, with reference to the work of other directors like Robert Flaherty and Jean Renoir, “gestures of looking,” camera techniques that encourage us to “sense a mediating gaze between us and the scene” (1998, 69). The use of this device serves a number of distinct ends in the film. First, and most immediately, the implication that a presence unnoticed by the film’s protagonists is silently observing their actions is quite fitting for a film whose subject is vast international conspiracies and covert spy rings operating in plain sight. Lang returned again and again over the course of his career, from The Spiders (1919) onward, to themes of surveillance and conspiracy, and of the relationship between technology, vision, and knowledge in modern society. While Ministry of Fear is less explicitly interested in the technological dimension of these matters than, for instance, the three Dr. Mabuse films, it still operates well within the bounds of the paranoid conspiracy thriller genre that those films helped define. The camerawork in the opening sequences, then, may at one level simply be understood as a formal cinematographic figure for these themes. As the film progresses, it will seem to provide an on-screen counterpart for the observing presence suggested by the cinematography, a potential source for the camera’s surveilling gaze. After returning to London and beginning his investigation into the strangeness he encountered in Lembridge, Neale meets with Reynolds’s Carla Hilfe and her brother, Willi (Carl Esmond), a pair of Viennese siblings who help run the organization that sponsored the charity fete. He and Willi eventually decide to pay a visit to the fortune-teller, Mrs. Bellane. When they arrive at her parlor, however, Neale is shocked when a woman (Hillary Brooke) much younger, and much comelier, than the one he met at the fair introduces herself as the psychic. She explains that the woman he met at the fete was not a psychic at all, but rather a local dowager who asked if she could fill in when the real Mrs. Bellane was called back to London. This mystery (apparently) cleared up, Mrs. Bellane invites Neale and Willi to participate in the evening’s séance. Just before it begins, the Dan Duryea character that was meant to win the cake appears and is introduced as Mr. Cost. The attendees sit in a circle and link hands and the séance begins. Soon, a woman’s voice begins to echo in the darkness, accusing someone in the room of killing her. Shaken by this for reasons that will become obvious once we learn of what happened to his wife, Neale breaks the circle. Suddenly, a gunshot rings out, and when the lights are turned back on,

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Cost lies dead on the ground. Neale is the chief suspect, but he escapes before the police arrive. Now a fugitive, he continues his investigation on his own. As he does, he begins to notice a stern-looking, well-dressed man (Percy Warren) tailing him on repeated occasions, following and watching as Neale journeys through the bombed-out streets of London. Indeed, the man seems always to know where Neale is or where he is going to be, appearing first when Neale returns to the office of George Rennit, the private detective he had hired to help him, and again, sometime later, in an Underground station where Neale and Carla Hilfe have taken refuge during a Nazi bombing raid. Gaunt and dressed in a black, three-piece suit, the man projects a decidedly sinister aura. As a result of his appearance, combined with the fact that the film has thus far worked to imply that spies are everywhere, we, like Neale, are led to assume that he is working with the Nazis. This assumption will prove to be wrong. After Neale survives the explosion of a Nazi bomb meant to kill him, he awakens in a hospital room to find the man rocking menacingly in a chair by his bedside. After a brief bit of conversation, he reveals himself as Inspector Prentice of Scotland Yard and explains that he has been following Neale as part of an investigation into the murder of George Rennit, whose body had been found bludgeoned to death. Taking the film’s visual presentation of Prentice together with its association of his activity with the paranoid camera style seen throughout the film, we might begin to identify a surprising ambivalence in Ministry of Fear’s seemingly straightforward politics. By leading us to believe, at first, that an officer of Scotland Yard was actually a Nazi spy, the film suggests the existence of certain commonalities between the two sides fighting the war. Indeed, Lang’s treatment of the Prentice character may be seen as a slightly less radical cousin to the famous scene in M that cut between simultaneous meetings of the police force and the criminal underworld to imply an equivalence between the two. While Ministry of Fear by no means goes this far—once Neale has proven both his innocence and the existence of the Nazi cabal to the authorities, they prove understanding and helpful, and Prentice ends up saving Neale and Carla during the film’s climactic rooftop shoot-out—it does point to troubling implications about the world of the film. The parallels, along with the observational style of filming, suggest a world in which wars are fought not by uniformed soldiers on the frontlines but by shadowy espionage networks hiding in plain sight in the heart of ordinary society.2

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Undoing the “System of the Suture” But the use of paranoid, observational camerawork produces effects beyond mere thematic expression. It also works to inflect the film in a decidedly self-reflexive, quasi-Brechtian direction, producing a kind of alienation effect.3 For Brecht, the goal of the alienation effect was to transform the theatrical audience from a mass of passive spectators immersed in the drama’s unfolding action into a body of actively engaged participants who regard that action critically, at a distance. One of Brecht’s preferred methods for achieving this distancing effect was to undercut the audience’s tendency to identify with one or more of the characters in the play, to short-circuit the mechanisms whereby a spectator comes to see the world through the perspective of these characters and to relate to their plight on a direct, personal level. If in the traditional theater the spectator, performer, and role were frequently meant to converge on a single, shared POV, the Brechtian “epic” theater seeks to disrupt this convergence, keeping the audience always at arm’s distance. As we have already seen, the camerawork of Ministry of Fear’s fair scene accomplishes something similar to this, consistently stressing the difference between our perspective on the film’s world and that of Neale’s, between what he sees and knows and what we see and know. Lang maintains this epistemic situation throughout the film, with our knowledge of the film’s world consistently either trailing behind or running ahead of Neale’s. There are, for example, other shots that repeat the general approach we saw in the fair scene, with Neale looking off-screen at something and the film either delaying its revelation to the audience or refraining outright from showing us the object of his gaze. One representative instance comes near the end of the film. After Neale has convinced the authorities that he is neither a madman nor a dangerous criminal, they allow him to assist in their investigation into the Nazi’s spy ring, eventually accompanying Prentice and some other Scotland Yard agents to the shop of a tailor named Travers that they believe to be involved and who ends up being Cost, the man played by Dan Duryea who was supposedly killed at Mrs. Bellane’s séance. Upon entering the tailor’s shop, Neale inquires after Travers and is instructed by an employee to wait in the shop’s fitting area. He complies and takes a seat in leather armchair. Lang then cuts in to a medium shot, framing Neale against an enormous mirror hanging at the back of the room. As the shot continues, Neale briefly glances off-screen to the right,

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before the assistant returns to announce Travers. This shot, among the most remarkable in the entire film, stresses the difference between our perspective and Neale’s in two ways. First, as already noted, we have Neale’s glance off-screen and Lang’s accompanying refusal to show us its object (made stranger here by the lack of any aural cue on the soundtrack to motivate Neale’s head-turn or to hint at what might have caught his attention). Second, and more intriguingly, we have the mirror hanging on the wall behind Neale, whose presence gives us a view of the space “behind” the camera, which Burch identifies as often being the vaguest and least defined of the film frame’s six off-screen segments. In addition to giving us a view of this normally hidden space, the mirror also gives us a sense of what Neale himself is looking at when he turns back toward the camera, but with one crucial difference: our view is reversed (Fig. 4.2). The film also extends this disjunction between our knowledge and Neale’s to larger-scale matters of plotting and character. This is most readily apparent in its handling of the revelation of the specific nature of

Fig. 4.2  Framing that emphasizing off-screen space in Ministry of Fear

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Neale’s crime. While Greene’s novel reveals these details relatively soon after it begins, the film waits until near its final act when Neale explains what happened to Carla during their night together in the underground during a bombing raid. Until that moment all we have to go on is Neale’s bristling whenever the subject of love or marriage is brought up, along with the ghostly whispered accusations at the séance. While we are not likely to suspect Neale of being an outright monster (both because that would go against all Hollywood convention and because Milland’s performance hardly suggests a capacity for true malice), the film’s failure to cast away our suspicions and absolve him of guilt until somewhat late in the proceedings encourages us to regard him with at least a small degree of skepticism. This skepticism again distances us from Neale, further disrupting any easy and unproblematic identification we might have had with the character. This dynamic cuts the other way at times as well, with the audience occasionally learning key information before Neale does. A key example of this occurs during the scene in which he is attacked by the fake blind man in the train car following the fete. As the train leaves the station, the stranger strikes up a conversation with Neale, who eventually offers him a piece of cake, which the man begins to crumble (in search of the microfilm, we will later realize). Lang handles this exchange with a relatively traditional shot/reverse-shot editing pattern, alternating between shots taken from Neale’s perspective and shots taken from perspective of the “blind” man, seemingly showing us what he cannot see. At the sequence’s end, however, he introduces an interesting twist. As Neale puts the cake away and places the box on the seat next to him, he briefly turns away from the blind man. On cue, Lang cuts to the man’s face as his eyes come alive, revealing his ruse to the audience. Having thus briefly shared Neale’s perspective during the shot/reverse-shot exchange, the camera here effectively re-asserts its independence. To get a better sense of what Lang is doing in these scenes, we might compare his approach to POV with that of a film like The 39 Steps, with which, as noted above, Ministry of Fear shares numerous thematic and narrative affinities. Like Ministry of Fear, Hitchcock’s film begins with an ordinary man—Robert Donat’s Hannay—attending a public entertainment event (here a Music Hall variety show) and unwittingly becoming embroiled in an international espionage plot. The film opens with a panning shot of the Music Hall’s marquee, before cutting to the ticket booth, which is approached by a man in a heavy coat whose face we cannot yet see

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as it is cut off by the top of the frame. As he enters the theater, the camera follows his progress with a tracking shot which starts at his feet before panning up, revealing Donat’s face for the first time in profile, as he sidesteps through a row of spectators to claim his seat, before finally settling in behind him, as if taking its own seat. The show begins and Hitchcock supplies a short montage of establishing shots, providing a sense of the theater’s layout and the size of the crowd gathered. Many of these shots seem, like shot of Hannay taking his seat, to originate from the position of a member of the crowd. Once the show’s first act—a routine in which a man going by “Mr. Memory” answers random trivia questions from the audience—begins, Hitchcock alternates between shots of the stage performers and shots of the audience, with Hannay often centered. What is worth noting here is the way Hitchcock works to align our perspective with Hannay, even before we have truly met the character. Though the film attributes comparatively few shots directly to Hannay’s POV here, most of the scene’s “unattributed” shots occupy a perspective comparable to Hannay’s. We may not see exactly what he sees at any given moment, but we can be sure that our views are mostly quite similar. As the film continues, Hitchcock will only strengthen this bond between audience and protagonist, increasingly employing direct POV shots and making sure, throughout, that we experience the film’s unfolding events alongside the character. Hitchcock’s approach to scene construction in The 39 Steps can be seen as an example of what psychoanalytic/semiotic film theorists once christened “the system of the suture.” As first described by Jean-Pierre Oudart and later refined by critics like Daniel Dayan and Stephen Heath, cinematic suturing is the process by which a (classical, narrative) film effectively “seals” the viewer’s imagination into its diegesis, to use Dayan’s phrasing. For theorists of the suture, the shot/reverse-shot figure was fundamental to this process. Dayan, in glossing Oudart’s original theorization, suggests that the process turns on its ability to distract the viewer from noticing the essentially limited view presented by any given cinematic framing. When “the viewer discovers the frame,” Dayan writes, they also discover that the camera is hiding things, and therefore distrusts it and the frame itself, which he now understands to be arbitrary. He wonders why the frame is what it is … He feels dispossessed of what he is prevented from seeing. He discovers that he is only authorized to see what happens to be in the axis of the glance of another spectator, who is ghostly or absent. This ghost, who

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rules over the frame and robs the spectator of his pleasure, Oudart proposes to call “the absent one” (l’absent). (Dayan 1976: 448)

To notice the frame, then, means to recognize the presence of the camera and to become aware of the image’s conditions of production, its existence as the product of labor and intention. The reverse shot, Dayan goes on to argue, stymies this recognition, by showing that the camera is not there, that there is no “absent one,” that the world of the film is unified, and that the views of it that we are shown may be plausibly attributed to the characters who inhabit it. The suturing reverse shot thus works, like the other elements of classical cinema’s continuity system, to conceal the fundamentally fragmentary nature of cinematic articulation, to create the illusion of unity, and to hide the fact that what we are watching is merely a series of fragments filmed and arranged in a purposeful and deliberate manner. Though the Oudart/Dayan argument may rightfully be accused of overreaching in certain respects, as William Rothman (1975) showed in an illuminating challenge to the theory of the suture,4 the notion of the “absent one” provides a useful metaphor for grasping what Lang is up to with the camerawork in Ministry of Fear. If most classical cinema seeks to conceal the frame, Ministry of Fear insists upon it, raising, in the process, questions about the source of the film’s images that the classical system was designed partly to forestall. It thus points us, if only obliquely, to the process of its own making, the conditions of its production and existence, inviting us to regard it as a constructed object.

The Ordinary Made Uncanny Finally, as with The Narrow Margin and its windows that evoke the film screen, Ministry of Fear’s self-reflexive elements find further expression in certain aspects of the mise-en-scène. One scene, in particular, stands out in this regard. After going on the run following Cost’s “murder,” Neale takes refuge in a bookstore owned by a friend of the Hilfes’. Carla visits him frequently, and one evening while she is there, the store owner asks if they would deliver a suitcase full of books to Dr. Forrester, a famed psychiatrist and author of the book, The Psychoanalysis of Nazidom. When Neale and Carla arrive at the given address, however, they find the apartment devoid of any signs of habitation beyond a few pieces of furniture. Its shelves and dressers are completely empty, and when Neale tries to use

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the phone he finds it dead. The suitcase, they soon realize, contains a bomb, and the entire errand was, in fact, a trap laid by the Nazis to kill them. What is most interesting about the scene, however, is the way the empty apartment evokes an “undressed” film set, replete with a non-­ functional prop telephone. Here, then, the material process of Hollywood filmmaking becomes, for a moment, partly visible. Looked at in this way, the scene might also be seen as highlighting certain odd parallels between Neale’s situation and that of the audience watching the film. Throughout his adventure, Neale repeatedly encounters situations that seem to have been staged for him by some mostly unseen power, which are populated by men and women using fake names and playing various roles and which are filled with ordinary and everyday objects (a cake, a suitcase, a pair of scissors) invested with strange and beguiling significance. Is this not, in some ways, an apt description of the movies? In Ministry of Fear, then, we find a case in which a seemingly highly conventional studio film assignment has been transformed into a deeply strange and self-reflexive work, a movie that self-consciously associates the operations of shadowy conspiracies with the making of fictional film worlds. As assembly line espionage thriller becomes the medium through which Lang articulates, yet again, his paranoid vision of the world.

Notes 1. Humphries (1989) identifies the “insistent” off-screen gaze as “central to the Langian textual system” (41), and in addition Ministry of Fear identifies key examples of its functioning in Hangmen Also Die (1943) and The Blue Gardenia (1953). Humphries ultimately relates Lang’s use of this device to the larger theoretical issue of the cinematic “suture,” which will be discussed at some length later in this chapter. 2. In this, this film might be seen as a key thematic predecessor to the cycle of Cold War espionage thrillers which was kicked off 15 years later by North by Northwest and which reached its apotheosis during the Nixon administration with films like Alan Pakula’s The Parallax View (1974) and Sydney Pollack’s Three Days of the Condor (1975). 3. Brecht, it might be noted, was a personal friend of Lang’s and the two collaborated on the story for Hangmen Also Die! (1943), which would remain the playwright’s only Hollywood credit. 4. See Rothman’s “Against the ‘System of the Suture.’” Film Quarterly 29, no. 1 (Autumn): 45–50.

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References Bogdanovich, Peter. 1997. Who the Devil Made It. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Burch, Noël. 1973. Theory of Film Practice. Trans. Helen R. Lane. New York: Praeger. ———. 1980. Carl Th. Dreyer: The Major Phase. In Cinema: A Critical Dictionary: The Major Filmmakers, ed. Richard Roud, vol. 1. New York: Viking. Dayan, Daniel. 1976. The Tutor-Code of Classical Cinema. In Movies and Methods, ed. Bill Nichols, vol. 1, 438–451. Berkeley: University of California Press. Eisner, Lotte. 1986. Fritz Lang. New York: Da Capo Press. Gunning, Tom. 2000. The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity. London: British Film Institute. Humphries, Reynold. 1989. Fritz Lang: Genre and Representation in His American Films. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. McGilligan, Patrick. 1997. Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast. New  York: St. Martin’s Press. Nielsen, Jakob Isak. 2015. Classic(al) Lang: Conflicting Impulses in Ministry of Fear. In A Companion to Fritz Lang, ed. Joe McElhaney, 430–458. Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell. Perez, Gilberto. 1998. The Material Ghost: Films and Their Medium. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Rothman, William. 1975. Against the ‘System of the Suture’. Film Quarterly 29 (1, Autumn): 45–50.

CHAPTER 5

The Big Sleep: Howard Hawks’s Hollywood Fantasy

We begin in the heart of Howard Hawks’s The Big Sleep (1946), on a bustling Los Angeles street.1 Phillip Marlowe (Humphrey Bogart) has been hired by a decaying California oilman named General Sternwood (Charles Waldron) to investigate a man named Arthur Guinn Geiger, who has been blackmailing his youngest daughter, Carmen (a reckless wild child played with amatory verve by Martha Vickers). Geiger, it turns out, is owner and proprietor of a rare books store. Marlowe, suspecting this shop to be a front, tests the woman he finds working there (Sonia Darrin’s Agnes, who will show up again later) by asking about two non-existent books (a “Ben Hur, 1860, third edition, with an erratum on page 166,” and a complete “Chevalier Audubon, 1849”). After confirming her total ignorance in first editions, and observing a furtive middle-aged man buzzed into the store’s back room, Marlowe ambles across the street to the Acme Book Shop and enlists the help of the never-named young woman working there (Dorothy Malone, in one of her first credited appearances) in identifying Geiger. Their conversation quickly turns flirtatious, and the comic nature of the banter almost immediately deflates whatever narrative momentum the mystery plot had been gaining. Proprietress: You begin to interest me—vaguely. Marlowe: Well, I’m a … private dick on a case [she looks him up and down]. Perhaps I’m asking too much? Although it doesn’t seem too much to me, somehow. © The Author(s) 2020 N. Deyo, Film Noir and the Possibilities of Hollywood, Palgrave Close Readings in Film and Television, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37058-9_5

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Proprietress: [smiling] Well, Geiger’s in his early 40s, medium height, fattish, soft all over, Charlie Chan mustache, well-dressed, wears a black hat, effects a knowledge of antiques and hasn’t any … and, oh, yes, I think his left eye is glass. Marlowe: You’d make a good cop This exchange marks the end of the scene in Raymond Chandler’s novel, but Hawks’s film keeps the sequence going. It begins to rain and the proprietress notes, with perceptible suggestiveness, that it will be another hour or so before Geiger leaves his store for the day. Marlowe quickly avers that his car is parked around the corner, but then catches her making eyes at him and, alluding to the “Bottle of pretty good rye” stashed in his pocket, states that he would “Much rather get wet” inside. She closes up, and they move to a desk near the back of the shop, where he gently cajoles her into removing her glasses and letting her hair down. A dissolve, signaling the hour has passed, returns us to the front window, which looks out upon a now-darkened, rain-slicked street. Lowered lighting and romantic strings on the soundtrack (the first instance of music in the sequence) eliminate any doubt about the act that has transpired without gratuitously calling our attention to it. The proprietress observes Geiger exiting his shop and Marlowe leaves her with a conciliatory pat on the arm: “So long, pal.” What are we to make of this remarkable scene? For one, in a film defined in large part by digressive storytelling, it seems the most radically digressive moment of all. Andrew Klevan has written that the whole scene “is like a ‘witty aside’” (2011), and David Thomson, in his BFI (British Film Institute) Classics volume on the film, presents it as Exhibit A in support of his claim that The Big Sleep “is one of the most formally radical pictures ever made in Hollywood.” The scene is “instructive,” he writes, because It could be cut from the picture without any damage …. The Acme scene, the horse-riding conversation, and the screwball telephone conversation with police headquarters could all go without any loss in information or plot recognition. With this exception: without their pleasure, their fun (however queasy we might feel about it), we might be made more aware that we don’t know what the hell the film is about. (1997, 63)

Thomson argues that The Big Sleep gambles with the idea that, in Hollywood filmmaking, narrative coherence is less important than the

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“fun” and “pleasure” of individual scenes and moments. Hawks himself would claim something to the same effect in his late-career interviews with Peter Bogdanovich, compiled in Who the Devil Made It, stating that, “As long as you have a good picture—it doesn’t matter if it isn’t much of a story” (1997, 334). But the explanation that the scene exists merely as a fun diversion seems somehow inadequate. Klevan, quoting Manny Farber, suggests that the scene is “given density by … ‘those tiny, mysterious interactions between the actor and the screen’” (2011). But what is the specific character of this density, and what lies behind the “mystery” of the actors’ gestures? Thomson, elsewhere in his study, writes that “there is not one moment in the movie of The Big Sleep when proceedings get out in the potent open air of southern California” (1997, 10). The claim is true on the merits: made at Warner Brothers’ in the mid-40s, just before the mainstreaming of location shooting, the film is entirely studio-bound. Even the lovely, apparently bustling street crossed by Marlowe on his way to the Acme is a soundstage creation. The world of the film is a fantasy, a dreamlike construction utterly detached from the “reality” of Los Angeles as it actually exists. And yet, I’d like to argue, the scene at the Acme points, if only metonymically, to exactly that other Los Angeles from which the rest of the movie so willfully divorces itself—the Los Angeles where, every day, people get out of bed, go to work, and come home, all without ever encountering blackmail rackets or murder plots or any other kind of underworld activity. Stanley Cavell has suggested that one of film’s principal capabilities as an art is its ability to “juxtapose modes and mood of reality as a whole” and “taunt them with one another” (1978, 7). Thus, for instance, Frank Capra and his cinematographer Joseph Walker’s expressionist lighting in It Happened One Night suggests “the experience of an ecstatic possibility, as of a better world just adjacent to this one, one that this one speaks of in homely symbol, one that we could (in social justice, in romance) as it were, reach out and touch; if only ….” (1985, 137). In The Big Sleep, we find an inverted version of this relationship. Here, the film presents us not with an everyday taunted by the transcendent, but with a dream world that, for a brief moment, seems to make contact with the ordinary. The ramifications of this juxtaposition of modes and moods, however, may only become clear once we consider the scene at the Acme in relation to the film as a whole. Before we can mount that particular critical examination, however, we must know something about how, and why, the film got made at all.

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Adapting The Big Sleep The Big Sleep was conceived in the backseat of a limousine. As Todd McCarthy tells the story, Hawks and Jack Warner were riding back to the studio together following a preview screening of the director’s To Have and Have Not (1944) when the studio chief, wowed by Bogart and Lauren Bacall’s chemistry and certain that the film would be a success, asked Hawks if he had any ideas for an immediate follow-up. Hawks averred that he and William Faulkner (working at Warner Bros. as a screenwriter at the time) had been “kicking around” the idea of adapting The Big Sleep, a property that had intrigued the studio since the book’s initial publication in 1939. Warner, McCarthy writes, “didn’t hesitate to give the go-ahead, feeling that the Hawks-Chandler-Bogart-Bacall combination was as close to a sure thing as he could get” (2000, 379). While an intriguing piece of raw material, the novel would not yield the Bogart/Bacall showcase vehicle Warner wanted without significant changes. The first problem confronting the filmmakers was the storyline. In the novel, the character that would come to be played by Bacall— Vivian, the elder Sternwood daughter—is of secondary importance. She and Marlowe have but one romantic encounter, which he unceremoniously breaks off. Moreover, the novel’s focus is on the mystery itself and not on Marlowe’s romantic dalliances. Solving this problem was a two-­ fold process. For the film’s first cut, Hawks, in collaboration with Faulkner, Jules Furthman, and Leigh Brackett, enlarged Vivian’s role (at the expense of Carmen, who plays a much bigger part in the book) and wrote in the love story, transforming, in the process, their initial meeting into a sexually charged back-and-forth exchange (analyzed in detail below). The filmmakers maintained, however, a focus on the mystery plot. After viewing this cut, Warner demanded substantial changes, feeling that the film had too much plot and too few explosive Bogart/Bacall scenes. Most significantly, a scene in which Marlowe explains the tangled story of blackmail and murder to the District Attorney, revealing in the process who was behind the murder of the Sternwood chauffeur Owen Taylor, was replaced by a scene in which Marlowe meets Vivian at a nightclub and the two engage in a bit of comic flirtation built around horse racing double entendres. The murder of Owen Taylor would remain unexplained. A second problem posed by the novel was the characters themselves, both of whom were tinged by Chandler’s overriding cynicism and thus ill at ease with Hawks’s preference for light-hearted fun. As Robin Wood

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puts it in his book on Hawks’s work, the “atmosphere” in Chandler’s world was simply “too stifling for Hawks to breathe in happily” ([1968] 2006, 186). Thus, both Vivian and Marlowe had to be, in effect, “De-Chandlerized,” their rough edges sanded down to perfect smoothness. For Vivian, this process involved uprooting the character, and her family, from the well-defined, if somewhat over-determined, socio-­ economic position Chandler grants the Sternwoods. During the novel’s initial scene at the family’s mansion, Chandler has Marlowe note two telling details. First, over the main hall’s mantel hangs a portrait “of an officer in full regimentals of about the time of the Mexican war” that Marlowe assumes is a depiction of General Sternwood’s grandfather ([1939] 1988, 4). Second, as he is leaving, he gazes down from the hill upon which the Sternwood house rests and sees “some of the old wooden derricks of the oilfield from which the Sternwoods had made their money” (21). With these two details, Chandler firmly locates the Sternwood’s within a concrete historical and socio-economic context. The oil derricks invoke American industrialism, along with its attendant history of robber barons, environmental destruction, and labor exploitation. On the other hand, the portrait over the mantel, with its intimations of past military glories, suggests a vision of the family’s decline from nobility to decadence. Suffice it to say, such baggage would make Vivian a tough sell as a sympathetic love interest, and so the filmmakers summarily excised both details. In doing so, they effectively mystify the source of the Sternwood’s wealth. In fact, Hawks never even provides an establishing shot of the mansion itself, or any clue to its exact geographic location within Southern California. It may as well be a castle in the sky. Freed from the novel’s concrete contextualizing, and from the snap judgments such context would trigger in audiences, the Vivian character becomes an empty vessel for Bacall to fill with her nascent star persona. Marlowe, too, is similarly stripped of many of the original character’s defining characteristics. Chandler’s Marlowe is, at bottom, a wounded idealist, an errant Romantic who, through the contingency of circumstance, has ended up in a sometimes brutal and always shabby line of work. He’s the sort of character given to making pronouncements like the following, from The Long Goodbye, delivered after a one night tryst with a woman he barely knows: We said goodbye. I watched the cab out of sight. I went back up the steps and into the bedroom and pulled the bed to pieces and remade it. There was

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a long dark hair on one of the pillows. There was a lump of lead in the pit of my stomach. The French have a phrase for it. The bastards have a phrase for everything and they are always right. To say goodbye is to die a little. ([1953] 1988, 365)

Much of Chandler’s handling of the character is predicated upon the interplay between Marlowe’s often-gruff “public” behavior (roughing up thugs, expressing cruel indifference toward the women he encounters) and reflective first-person digressions like the above. The two most straightforward Hollywood adaptations of Chandler’s work—Murder, My Sweet (Edward Dmytryk 1944) and Marlowe (Paul Bogart 1969)—largely retain this characterization.2 Murder, My Sweet casts Dick Powell in the role, and though visibly older, his appearance still carries unmistakable traces of the fresh-faced “juvenile” that sang and danced his way through Busby Berkeley musicals in the early 1930s. His line delivery often shifts between a hard-boiled pastiche and a drawling, Dandy-ish lilt. Slim and upright in posture, Powell has a bearing and demeanor that suggest a classic Gentleman Detective fallen on hard times—something of a slangy, déclassé variation on William Powell’s Nick Charles. Marlowe updates the setting of its story to the brave new world of Nixon-era Southern California, but its Marlowe is still recognizably derived from Chandler’s original conception. Anticipating his performance as Jim Rockford on TV’s The Rockford Files (NBC, 1974–1980), James Garner portrays the character with a mix of affable bemusement and earnest sensitivity. The look of mournful resignation on his face at the film’s conclusion, after having witnessed a sudden murder-suicide brutally tie up the remaining loose ends in his current case, comes closer than any moment in any of the films to capturing the complex pathos of Chandler’s prose. The Bogart-Hawks conception of the character, on the other hand, is a different animal entirely. Though Bogart was capable of playing gruff men with a hidden sentimental or romantic side (as Casablanca (Michael Curtiz 1942), among others, makes evident), this dimension of his star persona is downplayed in the film. As he did with Cary Grant in His Girl Friday (1940), Hawks whittles the Bogart persona down to its most foundational elements, presenting an image of effortless, unflappable cool—an amused stare beneath arched eyebrows, a cigarette dangling nonchalantly between gently pursed lips. This Marlowe glides through his world like a slightly disheveled bon vivant, greeting violence and intrigue with a smirk.

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Nothing in the performance suggests the battered romanticism, or the faint stench of failure, that clings to Chandler’s Marlowe. The aura of effortless cool falters only once, but not to reveal a wounded idealist hiding behind the hard-boiled exterior. At the film’s climax, Marlowe, accompanied by Vivian, contrives to have the gangster Eddie Mars (John Ridgely) gunned down by his own men. Mars is the man ultimately responsible for the film’s many blackmail and extortion rings, and, indirectly, for his henchman Canino’s (Bob Steele) murder of a small-time crook named Harry Jones (Elisha Cook, Jr.), which Marlowe had witnessed helplessly from an adjacent room, an event which spurs an acute desire for vengeance in the detective. As Marlowe reveals his plan to Mars, he seems to be overcome by waves of sadistic glee. Eyes radiating wrath, he details his plan through clenched, bared teeth. His face in this moment recalls a passage from Chandler’s text, but not one having to do with Marlowe. At the novel’s end, Carmen Sternwood, in the grips of a psychotic episode, attempts to kill Marlowe for earlier rebuffing her sexual advances: “The gun pointed at my chest. Her hand seemed to be quite steady. The hissing sound grew louder and her face had the scraped bone look. Aged, deteriorated, become animal. And not a nice animal” ([1939] 1988, 219). In this moment, Bogart’s Marlowe reveals a capacity for violence utterly foreign to the other iterations of the character, a capacity that seems, in the scale of its fury, to be practically inhuman. He is like a wrathful god, meting out divine judgment.

Finely Polished Form This process of effectively de-coupling the film’s characters from their literary antecedents, along with having Bogart and Bacall play them as more or less direct continuations of their roles in To Have and Have Not, has a profound impact on the finished film’s texture. Because its narrative line has been so systematically attenuated to make room for more Bogart and Bacall “set pieces,” individual scenes throughout the film often feel less like moments in a developing story, featuring characters with pasts and futures, than like autonomous episodes cut off from any external or ongoing reality. Illustrative of this tendency is the first encounter between Marlowe and Vivian. Immediately following Marlowe’s initial meeting with General Sternwood, the butler, Norris, informs him that “Mrs. Routledge”3 would like to see him. As he enters her room, the camera frames him in a medium long shot, tracking his movement to the left

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across the expansive, luxurious space of the room, until he and the camera find Vivian mixing a drink at a small liquor table near the window, her back turned. Hawks holds the shot for a beat, just long enough for us to get a sense of the characters’ relative positions. As Marlowe introduces himself, Hawks inserts a medium shot of Bacall who, continuing to pour her drink, turns her head slightly to size the detective up, turns back to finish pouring, and sets the bottle down before finally turning and walking toward him, the camera following in a right-ward track and coming to rest on a balanced two-shot. Vivian immediately begins tossing well-aimed, playful barbs: “So you’re a private detective. I didn’t know they existed, except in books. Or else were greasy little men snooping around hotel corridors. My, you’re a mess.” Marlowe replies, and Hawks cuts to a second, closer two-shot, taken from a slightly more oblique angle than the first, then quickly follows with a close-up insert of Vivian as she begins to inquire about her father’s reasons for wanting to hire Marlowe. As they talk, Hawks holds this shot, allowing Marlowe to offer a reply from off-screen, before cutting back to the previous shot, as Marlowe begins needling her about offering him a drink. As Vivian becomes increasingly frustrated, the film cuts on a perfect axial match to a shot giving Bacall center stage to deliver an exasperated “help yourself!” and theatrically point her thumb over her shoulder, directing Marlowe to the bar. She then walks past him and the camera follows, maintaining the balanced two-shot even as they reverse screen positions. It would be difficult to overstate the elegance of this re-framing, which also suggestively brings Vivian’s bed into view in the background, simultaneously underlining the dialogue’s flirtatious undercurrent and pointing to Vivian’s relative lack of independence. While her father conducts his meetings in a lavish greenhouse, and Marlowe will conduct his in his private office, Vivian has only her bedroom (Fig. 5.1). Perhaps wishing to maintain her facade of cool detachment, Vivian soon turns and walks toward the room’s opposite window, the camera following and reframing her in a long shot. After a quick insert of Marlowe tugging his ear and walking in her direction, Hawks returns to that set-up, giving us a shot that effectively mirrors the scene’s initial blocking, with Marlowe in the foreground and Vivian looking at him from near a window. As they continue to talk, he employs a series of reverse-angle medium shots, before returning to a slightly closer long shot of Vivian, who, having had her fill of Marlowe’s insouciance slams her drink down on the windowsill in frustration. Regaining her composure, she walks toward the

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Fig. 5.1  Philip Marlowe (Humphrey Bogart) and Vivian Sternwood Routledge (Lauren Bacall) square off in a balanced composition in The Big Sleep (Howard Hawks 1946)

camera, as Hawks once again reframes into a balanced two-shot. As they talk, Vivian walks away from Marlowe and toward the camera, turning her head over one shoulder to continue speaking with him. Bacall’s movements in this moment are deliberate and stiff, conveying a performed aloofness on Vivian’s part. The film cuts to a second close-up of Vivian and, as with the first, holds it while Marlowe offers a reply from off-screen. We then return to the two-shot, the conversation winds down, and Marlowe exits, the camera following him on the way out in a tracking movement that rhymes with the one which opened the scene. Writing about this scene, David Thomson highlights the obvious artifice of its dialogue, suggesting that it is “only plausible if we see Marlowe and Vivian as a fond couple who make an aphrodisiac show of hostility in which she gives him the very lob he can smash” (1981, 122). Indeed, here and throughout the film, the dialogue between the two has the distinct character of a well-rehearsed routine, with some scenes (such as their

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improvisatory, collaborative prank phone call to the police) feeling practically like sketches from a comedy show. Adding to this impression of artifice are the performances, with Bacall’s deliberately theatrical gestures and line readings perfectly playing off the practiced nonchalance of Bogart’s. The scene conveys an unshakable sense that these two already know each other and well. This sense is further heightened by the scene’s formal construction, which demonstrates a thoroughly planned design. Built around matching elements in both its mise-en-scène and cinematography (two windows, two-shot/reverse-shot sequences, two close-ups of Bacall, and the rhyming tracking shots which enclose the sequence), the scene is almost perfectly balanced in its construction and elaboration. The compositions of each individual frame are similarly balanced, most noticeably in the scene’s numerous re-framings. As Bogart and Bacall move around and past each other, circling and sizing one another up, the compositions never become imbalanced. The blocking has the thorough, worked out precision of a well-choreographed pas de deux. The editing, too, with its alternation between establishing two-shots and shot/countershot sequences has a rhythmic, musical quality. The precision and balance of the découpage here suggest a degree of planning, and an eye for aesthetics, that would seem to challenge the generally held perception that Hawks’s approach to directing was largely loose and pragmatic. In order to see just how much Hawks’s treatment of the scene exceeds mere pragmatism, one need only compare it to Michael Winner’s handling of the same material in his 1978 adaptation of the novel. Moving the story to London, Winner’s film transforms the Sternwood home from the California mansion of the original to a sprawling manor house. Vivian’s room is cavernous, high-ceilinged, and ostentatiously appointed. As the sequence unfolds, Vivian sits perched on the arm of a sofa while Marlowe stands perfectly still. Their conversation is handled with a series of alternating close-ups and medium shots, with establishing shots inserted occasionally throughout. The film cuts on almost every line of dialogue, an approach that results in the scene containing an astonishing 33 shots over the course of its 1:46 runtime. The rapidity of the editing prevents a consistent mood from developing, leaving the scene lifeless and inert. The blocking and mise-en-scène further exacerbate its lifelessness. The scale of the room, and the distance Vivian keeps between herself and Marlowe, seem designed to communicate an icy aloofness, yet the various establishing shots interspersed throughout the sequence display

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oddly cramped framing. Taken from over the actors’ shoulders, rather than from a more objective position perpendicular to the action, they compress the image horizontally, producing the (one suspects unintended) effect of distorting space and partially de-emphasizing the distance between the two. This comparison strikingly illuminates the deliberateness lurking behind Hawks’s apparently loose and functional approach, highlighting the purposeful expressiveness of his framing, blocking, and cutting. These elements combine in The Big Sleep to suggest a world subject to an extreme degree of organization, a world in which people seem to move as if participating in a well-rehearsed dance, even in moments of apparent conflict. Such an approach is apparent throughout the film, as in a number of shots in which Bacall is framed perfectly by some element of the background décor. Small touches like this contribute significantly to the feeling that we are observing a world absolutely in sync with itself. Perhaps no single scene better exemplifies that rigor of Hawks’ design than the one in which Marlowe goes to confront the small-time criminal Joe Brody (Louis Jean Heydt), who has come into the possession of nude photographs of Carmen that were originally taken by the now deceased Arthur Gwynn Geiger, and is using them to continue Geiger’s blackmail scheme against the Sternwoods. After a brief exterior shot of Brody’s apartment building (the Randall Arms) in which Marlowe pulls up in his car and spies Vivian arriving, the sequence begins with Marlowe ringing Brody’s door and portraying himself as a potential partner in crime (“You’ve got Geiger’s stuff and I’ve got his sucker list. Don’t you think we ought to talk things over?”). Brody lets him in and Marlowe walks past him into the apartment, while Brody, trailing behind, surreptitiously pulls a gun from his pocket. The film captures their movement in a single shot, which first tracks with them into the room, and then, having found a centered position, pans gently to the left just as Marlowe pivots to see Brody pointing the gun at him. The resulting composition is a well-balanced tableau, practically painterly in its precise geometric arrangement. The actors stand equidistant from the frame’s edges, with rhyming elements of décor (a flower pot and a lamp) flanking them and a curtained doorway in the background between them. The barrel of Brody’s gun lines up almost perfectly with the edge of the background doorframe, while Marlowe’s hat fits neatly in its upper corner. A short shot/reverse-shot sequence follows, before the film presents a closer version of the original establishing shot, with the actors clearly

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having been re-positioned—sacrificing strict continuity—to retain the original composition’s balance in spite of the tighter framing. They are closer together, and the opening of the curtain is now directly between them. Marlowe, having inferred that they were hiding in the back room, calls on both Agnes and Vivian to come out from behind the curtain. Vivian and Marlowe almost instantly get into a spat (she says she doesn’t need or want his help), and Brody’s attempts to take control fall on deaf ears, despite his brandished pistol. Marlowe takes Vivian by the arm and leads her to the couch, as Hawks and Hickox once again expertly recompose on the fly, settling on a new composition in which Bacall is perfectly centered between the seated Bogart and the still standing Heydt. The film then cuts to a reverse angle, bringing Agnes back into the picture, using the now-centered Bacall as a visual anchor to keep continuity. Following another short shot/reverse-shot sequence, Hawks provides the scene’s third perfectly balanced group shot. As Marlowe presses Brody for more information about the Geiger/Carmen situation he stands up from the coach and walks forward, stepping into yet another geometrically precise composition. Bacall is once again perfectly centered between the two men, and is framed from behind by the apartment’s window, the curtains of which bisect the frame. Marlowe finally talks Brody into handing over the pictures of Carmen, but as he walks toward the desk, the doorbell buzzes. Producing a second gun and handing it to Agnes to keep watch on Marlowe and Vivian, Brody moves to the door to answer it. When he does, Carmen enters, pointing a gun of her own, and backs him into the sitting area. Marlowe, taking advantage of the distraction, grabs the gun from Agnes’s hand, while Brody attempts to disarm Carmen by tripping her. Carmen crawls forward to reclaim her gun, but Marlowe beats her to it and kicks it to himself, before turning the gun he stole from Agnes on Brody, preventing him from drawing his own. This action unfolds quickly, but with the precise choreography of a dance. Bogart’s movements, in particular, are as elegant and exact as a practiced pirouette (Fig. 5.2). Now in the driver’s seat, Marlowe takes the photographs from Brody and sends Carmen home with Vivian. After they leave, the three remaining characters settle back into the sitting area as Marlowe attempts to tie up some loose ends. Hawks stages this dialogue in yet another expertly composed group shot. The frame is divided roughly according to the rule of thirds, with Brody standing near a side bar, Agnes sitting on the coffee table, and Marlowe perched on the arm of the couch. As the conversation unfolds, Brody eventually moves to an armchair, while Marlowe gets up

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Fig. 5.2  Another balanced composition in The Big Sleep

and walks over to his desk, which allows Hawks to again demonstrate his mastery of reframing, as the three eventually settle into a perfectly arranged composition, the tops of their heads forming a descending line of perspective that terminates at the bulb of a lamp in the background. Marlowe, as he finally begins piecing the puzzle together, starts to pace around the room. As he does so, Hawks uses a few subtle camera movements (a dolly in, a few slight pans) to ensure that the tripartite screen division remains intact. Bogart occasionally steps between Darrin and Heydt, creating an overlap in their blocking, but this arrangement is always only temporary, as he eventually moves back to his own designated third of the screen. At last, the door buzzes again. Brody gets up to answer, only to be greeted by two bullets to the midsection. Marlowe then runs into the hall to pursue the gunman, bringing the apartment sequence to a close. All told, the scene contains the entrances and exits of four characters, multiple pulled guns, a scuffle, and the consistent movement of characters around and within the space of the apartment. Yet, despite all this activity, Hawks

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never allows a hint of true chaos or disorder to disturb the austere elegance of his compositions. The scene, like the film that contains it, seems less a realistic depiction of human struggle and conflict than a pulpy re-­ imagining of Keats’s Grecian Urn, its characters like “marble men and maidens” preserved in artful composition, fated to flirt with and shoot at one another for eternity in Hawks’s perfectly polished urban pastoral.

At the Acme Bookshop Returning to the scene at the Acme, we might immediately note a number of formal features distinguishing it from the rest of the film. First, its compositions are altogether more casual and relaxed than those we saw in the two sequences discussed above. In two-shots, the actors are often just slightly off-center, and the mise-en-scène simply feels more natural. Items of décor do not feel as though they were strategically placed for maximum compositional balance, as with the lamps and potted plants in Joe Brody’s apartment or the twin windows in Vivian’s room. The editing, too, is more reactive, following the action rather than imposing a rhythmic pattern onto it. Everything about the sequence feels less meticulous, less “worked-up” than most of the rest of the film. It contains a whiff—if only a whiff—of genuine spontaneity and surprise largely missing elsewhere. No doubt, the scene was just as planned out as everything else, but its design is less obvious, less consciously expressed in painterly compositions or geometric blocking. Its joints are less concealed, its surfaces just slightly less smooth. Heightening the scene’s faint sense of genuine spontaneity are the performances, which differ in tone and texture from everything else in the film. With Bogart, this difference mostly results from the scene giving him the opportunity to express genuine, rather than mock, surprise. When the proprietress removes her glasses, Marlowe is distractedly looking down at the desk and saying something to himself, enabling the audience to see her new look before Marlowe. As he raises his head, he lets out a “hello” whose tone and delivery suggest the pleasant shock that occurs when things go better than one ever hoped they could. The plot of The Big Sleep provides many twists and unexpected turns, but throughout them all, Marlowe keeps his head while everyone else is losing theirs. Murder, deception, and betrayal—none of these seem to faze him. Dorothy Malone with her hair down, though, leaves him momentarily speechless.

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But what ultimately carries this scene, investing it with a weight exceeding mere Hawksian “fun,” is Malone, who effectively sketches a life in less than 20 lines of dialogue. Clearly conveying that she is not of Marlowe’s and the Sternwood’s world, her come-ons hover between confidence and reticence. She has mastered the body language of flirtation, but the gestures themselves (the bit lower-lip and the arched eyebrows) seem held in inverted commas—knowingness masking the uncertainty and felt danger of genuine frisson. In a movie dominated by a sense of intoxicating mystery, she provides a puzzle of her own. Unnamed and never seen again, we are left asking ourselves, “Just who is this woman?” Here’s what we might infer from the evidence. She is reasonably well-­ educated (she demonstrably knows more about old books than the similarly aged Agnes, and her judgment of Geiger as someone who “affects a knowledge of antiques but hasn’t any” suggests the sort of knowing insolence possessed only by the young and intelligent); she is romantically unattached; and she has a sharp eye for small details (“You’d make a good cop”). We might further infer that while her job may provide some degree of intellectual fulfillment, she ultimately finds it a less-than-stimulating way to spend her days and, as a result, spends a non-negligible amount of time watching the world go by outside the shop’s window (how else would she know so much about Geiger’s appearance and daily routine?). Finally, we might assert that the readiness with which she engages Marlowe in flirtation indicates that she knows his type and has previously thought (or fantasized) about what she might do should someone like him come sauntering in on a slow day. Smart, with a keen visual sense, employed and in possession of disposable income with no family to support, bored by the deadening routines of daily life and in search of some temporary excitement: she is, in short, just the sort of person who might go to see a Howard Hawks movie on her day off. It should come as no surprise, then, that the scene ends with her watching Bogart walk away in the rain through a window that is unmistakably redolent of a movie screen. The camera’s position at this moment is important. Gerald Mast, in his 1984 study of Hawks, argues that The Big Sleep represents an interesting, subtle experiment in the manipulation of cinematic point of view. Although Hawks forgoes voice-­ over narration and rarely employs direct point of view shots, Mast argues that the director effectively maintains the novel’s first-person perspective. “Hawks,” he writes, “chooses to confine the audience’s knowledge of events to Marlowe’s own knowledge …. Marlowe is—or might

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be—present in every single scene and shot in the film” (1984, 279). Here, significantly, Hawks breaks this pattern and, for the first and only time, aligns our perspective with that of someone looking at Marlowe, rather than with the detective himself. The film is inviting us, for however a brief a moment, to sympathize with and see the world from the perspective of the proprietress (Fig. 5.3). This moment most draws our attention to the distance between the world the proprietress lives in and the world of romantic fantasy Marlowe takes with him when he leaves. The window is both a screen and a barrier, allowing one last glimpse at another world before it disappears from sight. She may wish to live the fantasy forever, but she can’t. Why? What makes her unfit for permanent residence in Marlowe’s and the Sternwood’s world? Malone’s performance provides the answer. Her flirtations and come-ons have a distinctly performative air. If Bacall’s Vivian is simply the embodiment of Hollywood’s ideas about glamour and seduction, then

Fig. 5.3  The unnamed bookshop proprietress (Dorothy Malone) gazes through a window redolent of the movie screen in The Big Sleep

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Malone may be understood as playing a character that has taken these ideas and used them to fashion a mask. She is not a femme fatale or a Hollywood siren, but rather an ordinary woman who is playing at being such an archetype. The mask, however, occasionally slips. For instance, note the way she looks at Marlowe, after taking her glasses off and before he notices, and breaking out in a beaming smile once he signals his approval. Her face here first expresses an earnest excitement, and bated expectancy, wholly out of keeping with the icy cool that permeates so much of the film’s atmosphere. The smile, meanwhile, suggests both that she has impressed herself with the success of her own performance, and that she is taking genuine pleasure in being admired. Hawks’s choice to frame her in a more or less objective medium shot, instead of cutting in for a more suggestive close-up or employing an eroticizing effect like soft focus, emphasizes the complexity of her emotional response rather than simply highlighting her newfound sultriness. We are reminded, again, that we are watching an ordinary woman play at Hollywood glamour rather than transform into its embodiment. The mask slips definitively at the scene’s conclusion, and the result is an astonishingly delicate moment. After the fade back to the front window, Malone enters the frame first, peers over the curtain, and then turns back to the camera as Marlowe follows. The smile is gone, replaced by a look of mild resignation. “I hate to break it to you,” she says, her voice more matter-of-fact than before, “but that’s Geiger’s car over there.” As Marlowe approaches the window, she watches him and her face conveys the dawning realization that this is, indeed, the end of the affair. Marlowe begins to say his goodbye with a “Well, thanks,” and the proprietress’s face brightens briefly. He turns to leave and she reaches out to grab his arm fondly, but her hand slips off. He’s practically out the door already when, her voice betraying an eager (too eager) hopefulness, she attempts to initiate another flirtatious volley: “If you ever want to buy a book?” Her serve, however, sails harmlessly into the net. “Ben Hur, 1860?” Marlowe responds dispassionately and with a hint of regret. “With duplications …” she begins to reply, but her voice trails off into a meek “So long,” as the hopeful smile fades from her face. Marlowe pats her shoulder once more and leaves, his playful but empty “So long, pal” providing only cold comfort. He exits and her hand, the same hand that had reached out and missed Marlowe’s arm and that, until now, had been suspended at waist height, drops in disappointment. She turns to the window, Hawks stays

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with her for a single beat—just long enough for us to register her disappointment—and then, as if offering his own “So long, pal,” cuts to the front of Geiger’s store. The story must continue. Critics have noted the importance of body language and gestures in Hawks’s work, including Jacques Rivette ([1953] 1985) and Joe McElhaney (2007). In line with this general tendency, the role of gesture proves vital in the Acme scene. More specifically, it is the proprietress’s gestures in the scene’s concluding moments (the missed tug at Marlowe’s arm, the eager smile, the dejected dropping of the arm) that mark her as unfit for permanent residence in the world of the film. In a fictional universe dominated by characters that seem at times to move with the confidence and precision of a dance troupe performing well-known routines, her awkwardness in this moment stands out. She is halting and hesitant in her movements, entirely lacking in Vivian’s breezy gracefulness. Her body language betrays her, signaling the sea of emotions (regret, disappointment, longing) roiling beneath the easy-going, flirtatious façade. She is, at last, simply too human to fit in The Big Sleep’s land of gods and monsters, so the film, like Marlowe, must leave her behind. In his book on the film, Thomson rates the scene as being “among the most beautiful and treacherous things in The Big Sleep” (1981, 124). But treacherous for whom? In Thomson’s view, it is we in the audience who risk being too easily seduced by its easy-going charms. These charms, Thomson argues, mask a sinister, chauvinist, and adolescent view of the world. “The Big Sleep,” he writes, “is a seemingly infinite realization of male fantasies. I say infinite because the film encourages the feeling that it might go on forever. Moreover, the authority and ease of the style cloak the automatic chauvinism of the attitude” (1981, 125). The scene, for him, is a trap, slyly cajoling us into sanctioning Marlowe’s behavior and the—frankly misogynist—ideology that he sees underwriting it: Womanhood is rated in the sequence as the meek imprint of a man’s dream about spectacles and hairstyles, about the facile availability of afternoon romances, and the complacency that ‘So long, pal’ is an adequate exit line […]. The Big Sleep is so witty and cool that it seems ponderous to disapprove of its ethics. Thus there is the temptation to share in its treatment of the proprietress as just another element in the camp panorama. (1981, 125)

Sustaining this position, however, requires the suppression of both the sequence’s numerous cues that we are meant to empathize with the

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proprietress, as well as the emotional particularities of Malone’s performance outlined above. Of the scene’s conclusion, Thomson writes “She does nothing to protest, to ask what now, what next, what about me? What did this mean? She has behaved like a placid whore, an available young bitch. And Marlowe has sought no more” (1997, 62). This comment strikes me as a profound mischaracterization of what happens. The proprietress may not scream in protest, or demand answers to the questions Thomson claims she never raises, but no one paying anything like close attention to Malone’s performance could possibly construe her as conveying happy acceptance. That the scene is uncontestably troubling from the perspective of gender politics makes the complex earnestness of this performance all the more affecting. The painful impact of acting in accord with male desire is written all over her face and in her gestures.

Between Fantasy and Reality In his essay “The Thought of Movies,” Cavell posits that “if it is part of the grain of film to magnify the feeling or meaning of a moment, it is equally part of it to counter this tendency …. It is as if an inherent concealment of significance, as much as its revelation, were part of the governing force of what we mean by film acting and film directing and film viewing” ([1983] 2005, 94). Hawks neither overtly conceals nor overtly highlights the proprietress’s disappointment. Her bodily gestures and facial expressions are there for anyone to see, but they are not called attention to. Just as Hawks earlier refused the expected “erotic” close-up after she let her hair down, here he refrains from cutting in to emphasize her dismay. Cavell goes on to suggest that “to fail to guess the unseen from the seen, to fail to trace the implications of things—that is, to fail the perception that there is something to be guessed and traced, right or wrong—requires that we persistently coarsen and stupefy ourselves” ([1983] 2005, 96). Marlowe may callously ignore the proprietress’ silent distress, but that doesn’t mean that we must as well. What is finally put in danger by the scene is not the audience’s moral rectitude or ability to recognize the casual chauvinism of male fantasy. Rather, it is the integrity of that fantasy itself that the scene very nearly shatters. Like a parlor trick, The Big Sleep only works if it can keep the audience from asking too many questions (“Who killed Owen Taylor?”). So long as the machinery hums along with balance and precision, so long as the actors hit their marks and the elegant compositions continue to

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assure us, as Thomson puts it, “that the whole thing is a game, an artifice” (1997, 64) we are not likely to question the ethics of the enterprise. But the moment something like real, unguarded feeling enters the picture, things begin to break down. We might now return to Cavell’s argument about film’s ability to “taunt” fact and fantasy with one another, its “unaided perfect power to juxtapose fantasy and reality” (1988, 188) and, at last, adjudicate The Big Sleep’s contribution to the history of films that take advantage of this power, that test its limits. Among the films cited by Cavell are Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), which shows the way a fantasy, believed in too fully, might fatally mangle one’s relationship with the world, and Luis Buñuel’s Belle de Jour (1967), which pictures fantasy as a place of escape and rejuvenation. Unlike these films, The Big Sleep does not explicitly thematize the relationship between fantasy and reality, but the Acme scene proves no less instructive on the topic as a result. We may take it, at last, as a parable about the very conditions of existence for fantasies like The Big Sleep and Hawks’s work more generally, about their necessary remove from the world of ordinary and everyday life. Such fantasies can only sustain themselves in the absence of human voices that might wake it.

Notes 1. A version of this chapter appeared as “Only in Dreams: The Big Sleep and Hollywood Fantasy” in Movie: A Journal of Film Criticism 6 (2015). 2. I am leaving aside both 1947’s Lady in the Lake (Robert Montgomery), the two mid-1970s Chandler adaptions starring Robert Mitchum, and Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye (1973, with Elliot Gould) from this comparison The reason for excluding the former, a failed experiment in point of view filmmaking in which the camera is meant to “stand in” for Marlowe, should be clear. As for the 1970s films, the 60-year-old Mitchum’s characterization is simply too far afield of both the books’ and the other adaptations, to be of any genuine comparative interest, while Altman’s film is less an adaptation than a work of postmodern pastiche. 3. The fate of Mr. Routledge, Vivian’s first husband, is one of the film’s unanswered questions. In the novel, she is married to Rusty Reagan (who becomes “Sean” in the film), a former confidant of the General who has recently gone missing. Regan’s disappearance heavily in both versions of the story.

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References Bogdanovich, Peter. 1997. Who the Devil Made It. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Cavell, Stanley. [1978] 2005. What Becomes of Things on Film? In Cavell on Film, ed. William Rothman, 87–107. Albany: State University of New York Press. ———. [1983] 2005. The Thought of Movies. In Cavell on Film, ed. William Rothman, 87–107. Albany: State University of New York Press. ———. [1985] 2005. A Capra Moment. In Cavell on Film, ed. William Rothman, 135–145. Albany: State University of New York Press. Chandler, Raymond. [1939] 1992. The Big Sleep. New York: Vintage. ———. [1953] 1988. The Long Goodbye. New York: Vintage. Klevan, Andrew. 2011. Expressing the In-Between. LOLA, Issue 1. http://www. lolajournal.com/1/in_between.html Mast, Gerald. 1984. Howard Hawks: Storyteller. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McCarthy, Todd. 2000. Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood. New  York: Grove Press. McElhaney, Joe. 2007. Howard Hawks: American Gesture. Journal of Film and Video 58 (1–2): 31–45. Rivette, Jacques. [1953] 1985. The Genius of Howard Hawks. In Chaiers du Cinéma: The 1950s, ed. Jim Hillier, 126–132. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Thomson, David. 1981. At the Acme Book Shop. Sight and Sound 50 (2): 122–125. ———. 1997. The Big Sleep. London: British Film Institute. Wood, Robin. [1968] 2006. Howard Hawks. Detroit: Wayne State University Press.

CHAPTER 6

Laura: Otto Preminger’s Statement of Purpose

It is Tuesday morning in Manhattan. Laura Hunt (Gene Tierney), having returned from a weekend in the country the night before to find herself believed murdered, opens the door to her apartment and welcomes in the detective working the case, Mark McPherson (Dana Andrews). Upon her return home the previous night, she had found McPherson fast asleep in her sitting room, her shock at the discovery of a stranger sleeping in her home having been quickly overtaken by his shock at the intrusion of an apparent ghost. After the confusion had been (partially) cleared up, and a brief informal interview regarding her whereabouts over the weekend conducted, McPherson had instructed her to stay put overnight (an order she went on to disobey, sneaking out to see her fiancé, Shelby Carpenter [Vincent Price], a person of interest in the case), promising to return in the morning to continue the investigation. He arrives carrying a bag of groceries. “What’s that?” she asks innocently, acknowledging the bag. “Breakfast,” he responds, somewhat coldly. “You didn’t buy any when you went out last night.” Having caught her off guard by showing that he knows about her movements the night before, he turns and walks into the kitchen. After pausing for a moment to re-gather herself, Laura follows. In the kitchen, McPherson, stone-faced, offers to make bacon and eggs if Laura will make some coffee. “Suppose you set the table while I get breakfast,” she responds with fresh confidence. Moving past him, she begins filling a carafe with water and asks, somewhat playfully, “Do you always sound like this in the morning?” “You didn’t tell me you could © The Author(s) 2020 N. Deyo, Film Noir and the Possibilities of Hollywood, Palgrave Close Readings in Film and Television, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37058-9_6

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cook,” he responds, a hint of good humor in his voice. “My mother would always listen sympathetically to my dreams of a career…,” she says as she finishes filling the carafe. Confidently turning on her heel and striding toward the stove, she follows this set-up with its punchline: “and then teach me another recipe.” As she lights a burner on the stove the kitchen’s service door opens, and her maid, Bessie, enters. Upon seeing Laura, whom she still believes to be dead, she lets out a shriek and begins sobbing uncontrollably. McPherson and Laura console her, explain the situation, and then, as a means of calming her down and assuring her that nothing supernatural has occurred, ask her to take care of the breakfast preparation, with Laura soothingly inquiring, “Would a ghost ask for eggs?” (Fig. 6.1). This brief domestic interlude occurs more than two-thirds of the way through Otto Preminger’s Laura (1944) and would seem, at a glance, to be the very definition of incidental—a bit of breath-catching before the

Fig. 6.1  Laura (Gene Tierney) showing off her practical knowledge in the kitchen in Laura (Otto Preminger 1944)

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plot picks back up for the final act’s sequence of melodramatic confrontations and revelations, in which we learn who was actually killed in Laura’s apartment (an acquaintance of hers named Diane Redfern, with whom Shelby had been having an affair) as well as who committed the murder (Waldo Lydecker [Clifton Webb], Laura’s mentor and a well-known gossip columnist and radio host). The scene could have proceeded directly from McPherson’s arrival to the arrival of Bessie and the story would seemingly not have suffered any impact, one way or another. Film criticism seems to have taken the scene’s apparently inessential quality at face value, as the moment has received scant attention in any of the existing critical writing on the film. Stanley Cavell, however, has repeatedly insisted on the importance, and the significance, of such forgotten, seemingly secondary moments. Such moments, for him, are wont to contain multitudes. In his essay “A Capra Moment” ([1985] 2005), he demonstrates a procedure for “reading” such moments, for excavating the complex meanings often nestled within their apparent ordinariness. Taking a simple shot of Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert walking down a road in It Happened One Night (1934) as his starting point, he breaks his description of the shot into a set of constitutive phrases (“On the road/walking/together/away from us”) and then takes each up, in turn, as the subject of detailed analysis. In tribute to Cavell’s work, I have chosen to structure this chapter similarly and have settled on the following tripartite description of my own chosen moment: “In the kitchen/making coffee/held in medium-long shot.”

In the Kitchen In her 2000 book Reading Hollywood, Deborah Thomas argues that spaces occupy a privileged role in the construction of meaning in classic Hollywood films. Drawing on a wide variety of examples, she demonstrates how Hollywood films often generate meaning by stretching their action across a series of semantically charged spaces, often joined together in large-scale systems to articulate the various binary oppositions that often form the core of Hollywood films’ thematic content. John Ford’s My Darling Clementine (1946), for instance, maps the Hollywood western’s fundamental underlying conflicts—order versus freedom, society versus the individual—onto a geographic opposition between the open, unsettled west and the civilized urban environment “back east.” Noir films on the other hand, often (though of course not always) contrasted a

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hellish, crime-ridden inner city with the “safety” of leafy suburbs and small towns.1 In Laura, however, we find a very different configuration of space. The first thing we might note about Laura’s treatment of space is its almost total exclusion of the imagery typically associated with the “noir city.” Though set in New York, the film deliberately restricts its presentation to a very narrow slice of metropolitan life. Nowhere in this New York do we find speakeasies, cheap hotels, or dingy tenement houses. Instead, Preminger focuses entirely on the city’s economic elite, and outside of a small handful of scenes, his camera largely remains within the lavishly appointed penthouse apartments this social set calls home. As a result, the film’s version of New York comes to feel remarkably small. Indeed, in both its dramatis personae (a relatively tight-knit, practically incestuous social circle) and its basic narrative structure (in which a series of small betrayals and infidelities leads to an explosion of violence), the film resembles a small town melodrama that has been relocated to Manhattan. Because of this spatial constriction, the meaning of the film’s spaces rests not in large-scale distinctions between diametrically opposed locations, but rather in small distinctions among various areas and rooms within the film’s primarily domestic settings. We might begin unpacking the kitchen scene, then, by taking inventory of some ways in which the kitchen itself fits within the film’s overarching system of spaces. The first, and most obvious, thing to point to here would be the fact that this moment is the only time in the film that Preminger actually shows us the kitchen, though he alludes to its presence on two other occasions. The first of these comes three scenes prior to this one, during the second day of McPherson’s investigation. Having just finished interviewing Bessie about the murder in Laura’s apartment, McPherson greets the arrival of Shelby Carpenter, Waldo Lydecker, and Ann Treadwell (Judith Anderson), Laura’s aunt. As the group arrives, we glimpse Bessie disappear behind the kitchen doors to fetch some ice and highball glasses, in response to McPherson’s request, but the camera does not follow her. She soon returns to the drawing room, entering from off-screen, before exiting the frame again to return to the kitchen. The scene thus “activates” the kitchen as a significant off-screen space, while at the same time suggesting that the actions occurring within it at this time are not important enough to warrant showing, unlike those that occur during the later scene between McPherson and Laura. The second time the kitchen is alluded to is near the end of the film, when Waldo, recently revealed to us as the mystery killer, sneaks into

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Laura’s apartment in order to “correct” his earlier mistake of shooting Diane Redfern. Preminger cuts from a shot of Laura, preparing for bed while listening absent-mindedly to Waldo’s radio show (revealed to be a prerecording at the end of the broadcast) to a shot of the kitchen door, bathed in shadow, as Waldo slowly creeps through it and into the apartment’s foyer. Since we have already been made aware of the service door’s presence at the back of the kitchen, Preminger can refrain from showing Waldo actually making his way through the room on his way to Laura’s chambers. Ultimately, the fact that Laura’s kitchen appears only once isolates it as something of a unique space, and thereby suggests that the apparently incidental action that unfolds within it during this, its lone appearance, might be worthy of our attention. Adding to the kitchen’s uniqueness is its mise-en-scène, which differs greatly from that of the film’s other spaces. To understand the significance behind these differences, we will need to pay specific attention to an element of film expression that has, until very recently, received little sustained attention from theorists or critics of the cinema: texture.2 Laura’s kitchen is sleek, clean, and functional. Its surfaces are mostly plain white, with some polished chrome (pots and pans on the counter; the ventilation fan on the stove) and reflective glass (the cabinet doors), whose accents add a “modern” flair. Precise geometry and right angles dominate the room’s décor, with both the light fixtures and the refrigerator bearing the unmistakable stamp of Art Deco’s influence. Moreover, the room is somewhat small, cramped even, suggesting that its purpose is primarily functional rather than decorative—the sort of kitchen prevalent in the early part of the twentieth century, before the postwar domestic revolution had radically re-organized the American home and transformed the kitchen into a center of social activity. Somewhat paradoxically, the small size also imbues this cold and functional space with a sense of intimacy much greater than many of the film’s other, larger spaces. The kitchen, then, stands in almost total visual opposition to the rest of Laura’s apartment, with its cavernously high ceilings and extravagant decor. If the kitchen suggests cool modernity, the rest of Laura’s apartment recalls nothing so much as the elaborately decorated late-nineteenth-century “phantasmagoric” interiors identified by Walter Benjamin as one of the primary material sources of the rise of the detective story.3 Preminger further accentuates the difference between these spaces in the way he handles the transition between them.

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The scene fades in on a long shot of the door as Laura enters the frame to answer it. The distant framing emphasizes the apartment’s furnishings, foregrounding a side-table covered in all manner of “antique” and “exotic” looking decorative items, including a Grecian vase and an ornate glass lamp. As Laura greets McPherson, the camera tracks in to frame the characters in a two-shot, before panning to the right as they make their way toward the kitchen entrance, which briefly brings Laura’s enormous antique grandfather clock into view. The two disappear into a short communicating passage (the exact size of which we are never allowed to see), and Preminger cuts on action as they enter the kitchen. The use of a somewhat hard cut here—rather than, say, a continuous tracking shot—to take us from one room to the next underlines the clash between their differing decors, drawing a stark comparison between them. Furthermore, though obeying all continuity principles, the cut itself is somewhat jarring, due in no small part to a strange overlap in the action depicted “across” the match: the first shot ends with McPherson completing his turn into the kitchen while the second begins with him still in the short hallway. While filmmakers often use such overlaps to maintain a sense of continuity across shots, the overlap here is just slightly too long to pass completely without notice. Whether intentional or not, this slight hiccup in continuity seems to elongate the distance between the two rooms, suggesting their near-­ complete removal from one another. Were the opposition between these two spaces merely visual in character, all of this would be of little interpretive interest, but the mise-en-scène here serves an important expressive function as well by giving us insight into the dynamics of Laura and Waldo Lydecker’s relationship. The presence of the clock is key here, as we learn early in the film that it was a gift from Waldo, and will come to learn that the shotgun used to kill Diane Redfern is hidden in a secret compartment at its base. The clock’s presence in Laura’s apartment (emphasized throughout by its persistent background ticking) signals Waldo’s decisive influence over Laura’s life, his wish to mold her in his own image.4 We might infer, too, that the ornamental décor of her apartment in general owes more to Waldo’s taste and influence than to any of Laura’s own preferences. From the start, the film associates his character with just the sort of antique and rococo objects that fill Laura’s parlors. The film’s opening shot, in fact, is of a glass case filled with such collectibles in Waldo’s own apartment, with his own, matching grandfather clock visible behind it.

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Waldo sees himself as Laura’s tutor, responsible for transforming her, Pygmalion-like, from an ordinary and roughly hewn upstart into a glamourous sociality. Over the course of the first two-thirds of the film, this “transformed” Laura is the only version of the character we are meet. We are left, more or less, to take Waldo at his word when he tells us that she was a perfect vision of the feminine ideal. When the real Laura turns up, however, we quickly realize that the “perfect” Laura was mere fiction and that she in fact remains much more ordinary then Waldo’s descriptions have let on.5 Nowhere is Laura’s ordinariness made more apparent than in the kitchen scene, which takes place in the one room in her apartment free from Waldo’s influence. Thomas, in her discussion of space and meaning in Hollywood film, argues that films made in a melodramatic mode (a category into which Laura fits, if somewhat uncomfortably) often turn on a distinction between “public” and “private” spaces, and on the different types of “performances” that occur within those spaces. For Thomas, the key dilemmas in this films turn on whether characters “are putting on a face and taking on a role for the benefit of others, or are revealing something like an ‘authentic’ self that lies beneath the surface presentation” (2001, 40). While Thomas goes on to argue that many melodramas work to undermine and eventually liquidate this opposition as a way of suggesting “that their characters are constituted by their roles and that there is no further ‘authentic’ self to be found,” Laura ultimately holds on to the distinction between artifice and authenticity. I would argue, in fact, that the film’s thematic architecture rests upon it. In any case, Laura’s kitchen, with its small size, focus on functionality, and lack of ostentatious décor, is certainly coded as a “private” space, and Laura certainly seems to be at her most “authentic” during her brief time inhabiting it. Tierney’s performance is key here. Her gestures are both precise and breezy, as she strides from sink to stove with her head aloft, turns the stove burner on with a practiced casualness, and tosses off the bon mot about her mother with cool confidence. The reserved aloofness that characterizes her performance in many of the film’s other scenes is nowhere to be found here. Her clothing, too, emphasizes her “fit” with this particular space. Just as the room is adorned with Art Deco accents, Tierney’s tightly curled hair, loose fitting blouse, and billowy pajama pants embody the aesthetic ethos of Art Deco. Further emphasizing the “authenticity” of this moment is the dialogue, which fills in crucial aspects of Laura’s character. In a remarkable bit of

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semantic condensation, the audience is able to infer from one line—“My mother would always listen sympathetically to my dreams of a career … and then taught me another recipe”—a number of things about Laura’s background, class origins, and general attitude toward the world. The use of “dreams” rather than “goals” or “ambitions” to refer to her youthful professional aims suggests that her job on Madison Avenue was anything but preordained, that she comes from a family that saw a career in the big city as a silly adolescent fantasy rather than a genuine career option. The implied provincialism of her upbringing is further emphasized by the remark about her mother’s focus on what we might call “domestic education,” which points to a home life marked by staunch, “traditional” values, values that Laura herself, we can infer, has decisively rejected (“I never have been, and I never will be, bound by anything I don’t do of my own free will,” she will later declare to McPherson). The scene thus establishes a complicated, ambivalent relationship between Laura and her upbringing—though stifling, it left her with a certain set of practical skills that set her apart from the “helpless” children of privilege one might expect to find among the Park Avenue social set. More importantly, however, the scene effectively replaces the flat, idealized version of “Laura” we’ve been given by the film thus far with well-rounded character in possession of a complex inner life and a rounded personality. Furthermore, we might compare the way in which Laura handles a private, everyday activity like making coffee with the film’s depictions of Waldo in similar situations. First, during the film’s opening scene, we, along with McPherson, are given a glimpse of Waldo’s morning routine. As the detective paces around examining the columnist’s collection of antiques, Waldo’s voice calls from off-screen and beckons McPherson to enter the bathroom, where he is taking his morning bath. Significantly, the door to the bathroom is half-open, immediately suggesting a porous relationship between the “public” and “private” spaces in Waldo’s life. Preminger handles McPherson’s entrance into the bathroom in a long shot, giving us a chance to see the room’s ornate and elaborate furnishings, including two chairs that sit facing the bathtub—an indication that Waldo frequently holds court here. As McPherson introduces himself, a hard left pan (perhaps the most ostentatious camera movement in the entire film) reveals Waldo sitting half-submerged in an enormous marble bathtub. In front of him is a typewriter on a swiveling shelf and behind him rests a telephone on a second, similar shelf. The mise-en-scène thus works to suggest that this most

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private of rooms is in fact the epicenter of Waldo’s public life, the place in which he receives guests, writes his column, and makes important phone calls. His private life has been put on display, turned into a performance for (what he imagines to be) an adoring public. This desire to transform the private into (semi) public performance is confirmed later, during a flashback sequence in which Waldo details for McPherson the history of his relationship with Laura. After telling of how they first met and of how he subsequently helped her “rise to the top of her profession,” he provides some details of their shared private life, stating that “on Tuesday and Friday nights we stayed home, dining quietly, listening to my records. I read my articles to her; the way she listened was more eloquent than speech. These were the best nights.” These words are accompanied by a string of images that will be discussed at more length below. What’s important for our current discussion is the shot of Waldo and Laura making dinner. Two things are worth noting here. The first is that, despite the fact that Laura is the ostensible subject of this flashback, Waldo is the one centered in the frame. Moreover, Preminger has framed and blocked the shot so that Waldo is facing outwards, toward the audience, rather than toward his dining companion. Second, the location of this dinner preparation is not the kitchen, but rather the dining room. In nearly every respect, then, we find here, as in the earlier bathroom scene, an emphasis on display and performance. Preminger’s framing and mise-en-scène in both moments work to suggest a certain theatricality in Waldo’s performance of ordinary routines. The film thus establishes a clear contrast between these two ways of being in the world, between Waldo’s theatricality and melodrama and Laura’s ordinariness, and judges the latter to be morally preferable to the latter. But this contrast is not only significant within the world of this particular film, but also as an allegory of larger questions of film history and film aesthetics. In order to begin mapping the coordinates of this allegory we must turn to the second part of the initial description of the scene.

Making Coffee Eight years after Laura’s release and half a world away, we find another instance of a film depicting a woman making coffee one morning, one that has received quite a lot more critical attention than our moment from Laura. I am speaking, of course, of the scene depicting the young maid’s

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morning routing in Vittorio De Sica and Cesare Zavattini’s Umberto D., a scene that famously sent André Bazin into ecstatic reverie: We see how the grinding of the coffee is divided in turn into a series of independent movements: for example when she shuts the door with the tip of her outstretched foot. As it goes in on her the camera follows the movement of her leg so that the image finally concentrates on her toes feeling the surface of the door. Have I already said that it is Zavattini’s dream to make a whole film out of 90 minutes of the life of a man to whom nothing happens? … De Sica and Zavattini are concerned to make cinema the asymptote of reality—but in order that it should ultimately be life itself that becomes spectacle, in order that life might in this perfect mirror be visible poetry, be the self into which film finally changes it. (2011, 117)

Gilles Deleuze saw the scene as a key example of the so-called time-image, writing about it at length in a passage that seems to deliberately echo Bazin’s own critical appreciation: [T]he young maid going into the kitchen, making a series of mechanical, weary gestures, cleaning for a bit, driving the ants away from a water fountain, picking up the coffee grinder, stretching out her foot to close the door with her toe. And her eyes meet her pregnant woman’s belly, and it is as though all the misery in the world were going to be born. This is how, in the course of an ordinary or everyday situation … what has suddenly been brought about is a pure optical situation to which the little maid has no response or reaction. (1989, 1–2)

And for Andrew Klevan, who cites both Bazin and Deleuze, the scene is perhaps the ultimate example of narrative filmmaking’s potential to produce “undramatic moments.” The scene’s “interest,” he writes, “lies in the apparent innocuous use of objects,” and its “significance … is disclosed by the non-energetic arrangement of body, environment, and object” (Klevan 1999, 47). For each of these critics, the moment from Umberto D. represents a limit case of a certain type of cinematic expression. For Bazin, in particular, it stood as a monumental achievement of the sort of cinematic realism he held so dear, a moment that harnessed the camera’s capacity to automatically record “life” as it really happens. Moreover, it represented for him a forceful counter to those forms of “expressionistic” cinema that seek

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to impose significance, to force purposeful and definitive meaning, onto the filmic image. But why this moment? What is it about a simple depiction of a young woman making coffee that so struck these critics’ fancies? Why this scene and not one of the other innumerable depictions of ordinary life in Neorealism? In a 2001 article, Lesley Stern identifies “the accoutrements of coffee making” as part of a series of objects that seem, in her words, “cinematically destined,” a series which also includes “telephones, typewriters, bank notes, guns, dark glasses … rain drops and tear drops, leaves blowing in the wind, kettles, cigarettes” (335). We might trace the roots of the idea that film possesses a natural capacity to, in Stern’s words, “materializ[e] these objects” and “invest them with pathos” and “render them as moving” to Walter Benjamin’s observation about film and photography’s capacity to render visible an “optical unconscious”: Even if one has a general knowledge of the way people walk, one knows nothing of a person’s posture during the fractional second of a stride. The act of reaching for a lighter or a spoon is familiar routine, yet we hardly know what really goes on between hand and metal, not to mention how this fluctuates with our moods. Here the camera intervenes with the resources of its lowerings and liftings, its interruptions and isolations, its extensions and accelerations, its enlargements and reductions. (Benjamin 1969, 237)

In many respects, the process of making coffee—with its series of routinized movements performed half-unconsciously in the drowsy haze of the early morning—is a perfect candidate for the application of the camera’s power to intervene. It is not hard to see why critics committed to an understanding of the cinema as a principally “revelatory” medium would fixate upon a scene like Umberto D.’s. What can Umberto D., André Bazin, and theories of the film camera’s revelatory capabilities teach us about a murder mystery made by Otto Preminger at 20th Century Fox in 1944? Preminger has often been heralded as among the most “Bazinian” of Hollywood directors, with many of his champions (including V.F. Perkins, Christian Keathley, and his biographer Chris Fujiwara) focusing their accolades on his supposed “objectivity” as a filmmaker, his preference for long takes that force a viewer to pass his or her own judgments upon the films’ characters without undue guidance. Perkins, in an introduction to a special issue of Movie on the director’s work, puts the case most forcefully. He writes that Preminger’s “aim

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is to present characters, actions, and issues clearly and without prejudice,” that “he is concerned to show events, not demonstrate his feelings about them,” that “he rejects every stylistic, emotional or narrative distortion,” and that in his films “action and character cannot be falsified or exaggerated in order to emphasize a theme” (Perkins 1972, 43). Such laurels, though, tend to accrue most voluminously around Preminger’s later work, and in particularly around movies like Anatomy of a Murder (1959) and Advise & Consent (1962)—films that deliberately set out to explore the moral ambiguity that haunts America’s legal and political institutions. Though it boasts a notable degree of stylistic continuity with the films that would follow (more on that below), a studio-bound melodrama like Laura, with its apparently clear delineation between “good” and “evil” characters, would seem much more straightforward, and much less “philosophical,” than Preminger’s idea-rich masterpieces of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Moreover, it would seem to be as far from Neorealism, aesthetically and ideologically speaking, as a film could possibly be. Indeed, Preminger’s treatment of the maid Bessie supplies a particularly poignant example of the stark differences between Hollywood and neorealism. Earlier in the film, before Laura’s return, a scene occurs in which Bessie, having been questioned by McPherson, goes to the kitchen upon his request to fetch some drink glasses. She disappears off-screen, and her actions in the kitchen are never shown. Similarly, once Laura hands off the breakfast-making responsibility, the scene in the kitchen simply ends, and an ellipsis carries us to a slightly later point in the morning. These moments reveal where neorealism departs from classical filmmaking’s conceptions of what matters. Neorealism, that is, was concerned precisely with what Hollywood films left out. Looked at from a slightly different perspective, though, Laura might be seen as articulating, semi-allegorically, the representational logic Perkins identified in Preminger’s later work even if it doesn’t itself fully embody it. We might, in fact, take the film as an attempt, if only a partial one, to articulate a “theory” of film and its representational possibilities that bears a striking family resemblance to Bazin’s theory of the medium’s “ontology,” its umbilical connection to the real. As we saw above, Laura’s narrative dramatizes a conflict analogous to the clash between imposed meaning and the obstinate recalcitrance of reality central to Bazin’s aesthetic program. Here, though, this takes the form of the male characters’ desire wish to transform a real woman into a fantasy object. In “The Evolution of the Language of Cinema,” Bazin famously drew a distinction

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between those filmmakers who put their “faith” in the “image,” and those who put theirs in reality ([1968] 2004, 40). Translating Laura’s plot into these terms, we might say that it depicts a group of men who become so infatuated with the “image” of Laura that they ignore, denigrate, or, in Waldo’s case, seek to destroy the “reality.” By making the source of Waldo’s murderous rage his frustration at Laura’s refusal to “live up to” his idealized image of her, the film effectively casts the wish to mold a recalcitrant reality according to one’s own desires as a fundamentally pathological urge. The only way to make the world itself comport with one’s fantasies of it, the film suggests, is to render it lifeless. Of course, if that were the full extent of the parallels between Preminger’s film and Bazin’s theory, this would be a tenuous argument indeed. Everything said above about the film’s depiction of the baleful effects of male fantasy could just as readily be said about, say, Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock 1958), and yet that film could hardly be construed as a brief in favor of Bazinian realism. In Laura, however, this investigation into the damaging forces of desire sits alongside an implicit consideration of the film’s place within a broader media landscape. In The Cinema Dreams Its Rivals, Paul Young identifies a number of movies that he classifies as “media fantasy films”—works that “express anxiety about new media’s competition with the cinema … in ways that speak less to economic competition than to the qualities of ‘film’ as a medium in comparison to its newer rivals” (2006, xxii). Such a model proves productive for thinking about Laura, as the film conjures not one “rival” form of art or media, but three: advertising, painting, and the radio. Moreover, it associates all three with the deceptive manipulation of reality—and with the character of Waldo Lydecker. In doing so, the movie mounts an implicit argument for film’s unique ability to represent the world truthfully. The critiques of advertising and painting are readily apparent. The film presents the former as trafficking in outright lies, with Waldo at one point endorsing an ink pen without ever having written with it. The latter, meanwhile, in the form of the famous portrait of Laura that hangs over her mantle, is criticized for its capacity to overly “idealize” the world; the Laura presented there is the “fantasy” Laura presented to us by Waldo. In fact, the painting itself, as a prop, stands as a sort of objective correlative for everything being discussed here. According to Chris Fujiwara, after taking over the film from Rueben Mamoulian, the director “scrapped some of [the original] sets, and in doing so, got rid of the portrait of Laura that had been commissioned by Azadia Newman, Mamoulian’s wife.

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Preminger substituted a photograph of Tierney by studio photographer Frank Polony, enlarged and brushed with paint” (Fujiwara 2008, 43). The film’s central image of fantastic falsity is thus itself a photograph that has been subjected to “artistic” alterations. It is radio, though, that comes in for the most sustained critique. The film refers to the medium explicitly only once, at its climax. As Laura prepares for bed, she turns on the radio in her room, and Waldo’s voice begins to fill the air. As she listens, believing his vocal presence on the radio confirms his physical presence elsewhere, Preminger cuts to Waldo, who has snuck into the apartment, as he retrieves the shotgun used to kill Diane Redfern from a grandfather clock in the apartment’s main hall. Sneaking silently toward the bedroom, his own detached voice continuing to issue from the radio and dominate the film’s soundtrack, he arrives at the bedroom just in time for his voice to be replaced by that of an announcer, who reveals that what we’d just been listening to had been recorded in advance. The film thus plays upon the fact that radio, with its inherent promise of “live-ness” can effectively “fake” the actual presence of a speaker on the other end, which Waldo has here used to his advantage. Because a broadcast itself carries no signs of its true provenance, a pre-­ recorded event and a live transmission can only be distinguished via the “external” marker of a tacked on announcement (which itself may be taped or live). This, of course, is in great contrast to film, a medium that, as Cavell has emphasized throughout his work, always calls attention to its distance from us, its presence as an absence. Where the radio offers the implicit promise that the voice you hear emanates from somewhere in your world, a film can only ever offer a view (or a series of views) onto another world, a world viewed. Preminger’s handling of this sequence works retroactively to associate the radio medium with a number of earlier scenes. As the climax unfolds, Waldo’s radio broadcast comes to occupy the aural space of a voice-over narration, recalling prior instances of the film that made use of Waldo’s voice-over in more traditional ways, the most substantial example of which occurs during the flashback sequence mentioned above. The prominence of Waldo’s narration waxes and wanes over the course of the sequence and is foregrounded most completely as he describes Laura’s supposed transformation and their life “together.” We might consider, for a moment, the relationship between word and image in this brief segment. Taken by themselves, the brief shots that accompany Waldo’s narration are incredibly “thin”—overly posed, artificial, and lacking any real visual density.

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Fig. 6.2  Laura looking “posed” in Waldo Lydecker’s (Clifton Webb) flashback in Laura

They serve merely as illustrations of the narration and are more or less devoid of any significant content beyond that. What we have here, then, is an example of a mode of cinematic narration wholly dependent upon the imposition of a verbal meaning external to the images themselves (Fig. 6.2). A contrasting mode of narration is offered by the flashback’s conclusion. As Waldo tells McPherson about his final phone conversation with Laura, Preminger includes a shot of Laura on the other end of the line. During an initial viewing, the shot seems hardly notable. Repeated viewings, however, reveal an important detail: the outfit Laura is wearing is the same as the one she is wearing when she returns home to find McPherson asleep in her living room. Waldo, of course, could not have actually known this. We might thus take the shot’s inclusion to be Preminger’s way of asserting his camera’s independence from Waldo’s point of view—or from any rooted, subjective point of view, for that matter. Rather, what we have

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here is a mode of narration predicated on the camera’s ability simply to record and present things as they are, free of imposed meaning or explanations. The moment in the kitchen, then, with its apparent insignificance combined with the concrete specificity of Tierney’s performance (the confidence in her voice, the way she strides across the room) may be seen as belonging to this second mode of presentation. Having now broached the topic of modes of presentation and narration we might now shift our analysis away from the semi-abstract concerns of ontology and medium specificity and toward more concrete matters of style and form by turning our attention to the third and final item in our initial agenda.

In Medium Long Shot As noted above, Preminger has often been praised for employing a style whose hallmarks (long takes, composition in depth, and avoidance of expressive or analytical editing) are analogous to Bazin’s preferred aesthetic. During its first two-thirds, Laura more or less comports with these general protocols—though its somewhat small-ish sets limit the extent to which deep focus might be fully employed, particularly in comparison to Preminger’s later work. Its average shot length is 21  seconds, roughly double the period’s “normal” average shot length (ASL), and conversations among characters are typically handled in lengthy medium-long group shots, rather than with the more standard establishing shot/breakdown approach. When cutting does occur in these scenes, it is typically among different medium and medium-long shots, rather than alternating close-ups. Furthermore, the editing is almost always used for functional, rather than expressive, purposes. For an example of this approach, take McPherson’s interview with Bessie. The scene begins with a medium long shot of McPherson seated on Laura’s desk and placing a call to a local liquor store to ask about a mysterious bottle of whiskey found in the apartment. Preminger holds this shot for the duration of the call, before the entrance of a second officer, announcing Bessie’s arrival, motivates a slight leftward pan. As Bessie enters and walks to the desk, the camera pans back to the right, before coming to rest on a medium-long two-shot. Preminger holds this shot as the maid admonishes the detective for going through Laura’s private things, including her diary, refraining from cutting to inserts emphasizing either her anger or his bemused response. McPherson eventually stands and walks toward the fireplace at the back of the frame, and, after a beat,

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Bessie follows him. An unobtrusive match-on-action (the first cut of the scene) takes us to a medium two-shot whose framing is slightly tighter than the first shot at the desk. The two face each other, with McPherson turned slightly away from the camera and Bessie in full profile. Bessie proclaims her absolute innocence and delivers a short soliloquy about her devotion to Laura. Despite the tense, emotional tenor of this moment, Preminger again refrains from cutting in to show either character’s expression, even though both actors’ faces are somewhat obscured (Andrews’s by the oblique blocking, Dorothy Adams’s by the shadows created by her hat). After she has said her piece, McPherson turns and walks back toward the desk and the camera follows. He removes the mysterious whiskey bottle from the desk and asks about it, prompting Bessie to walk over to him. Bessie eventually reveals that she had found the bottle, along with two used glasses, near “Laura’s” body and had moved them to prevent people from “getting wrong ideas” about the deceased. As she says this, Preminger cuts to a second medium shot from a slightly different angle. This cut is the only one in the scene not motivated by character movement, and its purpose, unlike the others, does seem somewhat expressive, in the sense that it works to underline Bessie’s revelation. As far as “emphatic” editing goes, however, this instance is still remarkably restrained. Preminger also holds the shot until McPherson ends the conversation, thereby dissipating the impact of the initial cut. All told, the conversation runs nearly three minutes and is handled in only four shots, for an ASL of 22.5 seconds (just slightly longer than that of the film as a whole). This general approach to découpage dominates until Laura makes her surprise reappearance. Her initial entrance into the film, as McPherson sleeps soundly beneath her portrait, is presented in a long shot that embodies Preminger’s typically cold, distant, and objective approach to cinematography and mise-en-scène. As soon as Laura wakes McPherson, however, Preminger’s approach changes drastically. He abandons the “intra-sequence” cutting (to borrow a phrase from Brian Henderson6) of earlier scenes and instead opts for a more traditional approach, with establishing shots and alternating close-ups. The conversation begins with a medium-long two-shot, with the camera favoring, though not in exact accordance with, McPherson’s point of view, and Laura (the real Laura) standing next to the portrait above the mantle. As Laura threatens to call the police, Preminger cuts in to a close-up of her, before quickly cutting to a reverse shot of McPherson, and then back to Laura. McPherson

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assures Laura that he is the police, and Preminger returns to the initial establishing set-up to show him removing his badge from his pocket before once again cutting back to a brief close-up of Laura as she asks, “What’s this all about?” A brief two-shot follows as McPherson asks Laura where she’s been, and we return again to the close-up as she explains that she’d gone to the country for the weekend. Preminger returns to the two-­ shot before tracking with McPherson as he walks to a side-table and retrieves a newspaper that, presumably, contains a story about the murder, which he hands to Laura. Preminger refrains from cutting to an insert shot of the headline, leaving us to focus our attention solely on Laura’s reaction to what she sees. She sits down in shock, and the camera subtly tracks in just as McPherson inches closer to Laura, the movement of camera and performer perfectly in sync. Eventually he suggests she change out of her wet clothes (it had been raining that evening), and as she gets up to do so the camera briefly stays behind with McPherson, tracking into a close-up before slowly dissolving to Laura’s bedroom door. She exits carrying a dress found hanging in her closet, declares it to have been Diane Redfern’s, and notes that it wasn’t hanging there when she left for the weekend. Informing McPherson that Diane had been one of her agency’s models, and she’d been “just about my size,” she shows him an advertisement featuring the model. Preminger cuts to an insert of the magazine as McPherson coolly deadpans “she was beautiful, wasn’t she?” A slightly low-angled two-shot follows, as Laura begins to put the pieces together. McPherson then takes the magazine from her and walks over to her desk (the same desk at which he conducted his interview with Bessie), the camera following and reframing them in a two-shot, with McPherson standing to the left and Laura seated to the right. Preminger handles the ensuing conversation with a seven-shot shot/reverse shot sequence that alternates between shallow-focus close-ups of Laura and a less shallowly focused medium profile shots of McPherson. Part-way through the sequence, McPherson moves away from the desk and over to the fireplace, just as he had done during his interview with Bessie. He asks Laura a question about her upcoming nuptials with Shelby Carpenter, and Preminger cuts briefly to the close-up for her response, before returning to McPherson and panning with him as moves back into the desk, bringing Laura back into view for a re-establishing two-shot. The interview turns confrontational as McPherson accuses Laura of knowing that Carpenter had a key to the apartment, and she quickly stands up and angrily responds that she “knows nothing of the sort,” with the

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camera tracking in to underline the moment. Preminger then cuts to a shot of Laura taken from over McPherson’s shoulder as she begins to divulge the details of the Carpenter/Diane Redfern relationship. She turns and walks to the other side of the desk, putting distance between herself and McPherson, and the camera follows in a reframing action that causes the detective to briefly slide out of the frame. He then moves to the opposite side of the desk, leaning over it aggressively as he presses her about how much she actually “loves” the philandering Carpenter. A last, brief shot/reverse-shot sequence follows (four shots), where Laura is once again shot in shallower focus than McPherson. Finally, a tracking shot follows the two back into the parlor as McPherson prepares to take his leave, instructing Laura that she is not to leave the apartment or use the telephone. Just before leaving, he asks her whether or not she still plans to marry Carpenter, and she tells him she does not. He wishes her goodnight and exits the frame. The camera stays with Laura. The sound of a door closing is heard off-screen (an echo of the way Laura’s initial entrance had been handled), and she immediately turns and walks to the phone, the camera following. She moves to pick up the receiver, but then hesitates, and Preminger cuts to her building’s basement, where another detective is working a phone tap, moving us to the next scene. All told, this scene runs for five minutes and is composed of 26 shots, which works out to an ASL of 11.5 seconds, nearly half that of the film as a whole, and much closer to the period’s typical average. The question, then, is how we might account for this sudden change in découpage. A skeptical critic might suggest that this is merely an instance of the industry’s more formulaic protocols overwhelming the director’s preferred style: since Gene Tierney is the star of the film, she is given star close-ups, regardless of whether or not those close-ups fit with the rest of the film’s formal construction. One might then add as a corollary to this explanation that the handling of the sequence is a perfect example of Hollywood’s typical handling of conventionally attractive actresses. In such a reading, the close-ups of Tierney could be taken as an example of the sort of fetishizing objectification that Laura Mulvey identified as lying at the heart of Hollywood’s “visual pleasure.” They could be seen as belonging to the representational tradition that once led Mary Ann Doane to declare that “at moments it seems as though all the fetishism of the cinema were condensed in the image of the face, the female face in particular” (1991, 47). In fact, Kristin Thompson, a critic who typically poses her own work in opposition to the high theory of scholars such as Mulvey and Doane, has

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mounted just such an argument regarding the gender politics of the film’s treatment of Laura. Drawing on the work of both Mulvey and the art historian John Berger, Thompson writes that “Laura, a film about a man who falls in love with a portrait …. offers Gene Tierney as an object of contemplation for the cinema spectator” and that “the character Laura is almost perfectly designed to fit the role of the passive visual object” (Thompson 1988, 183–4). While I would agree with Thompson’s claim that the film “raises [the treatment of the woman as a visual object to be possessed by a male spectator] to the level of the subject matter itself,” I would disagree with her conclusion that the film lacks a critical dimension in this regard, or that its presentation of Laura as an “object of contemplation” is at all simple or straightforward. What Thompson’s analysis does not fully consider—somewhat surprisingly, given her commitment to formalism—is the placement of these objectifying images of Laura within the film’s overall visual pattern, or their relationship to the film’s other shots. Here, then, we return again to the question of the film’s découpage and of the effect and purpose of the somewhat jarring shift from the more “objective” long-take approach to the close-up heavy style for the film’s final third. In a 2012 essay on the director’s 1958 melodrama Bonjour Tristesse, Christian Keathley argues that Preminger’s general avoidance of close-ups or reverse angle cutting means that, when he wishes, he can deploy these techniques in a richer and more expressive manner than could a filmmaker who relies on them for every conversation between characters. Preminger’s infrequent close-ups carry weight, that is, because of their infrequency, which renders them visible to the audience in a way they would not be in a movie that employed them in a more perfunctory way. To put it bluntly: context matters. We might view the use of close-ups in Laura’s introductory scene in a similar way. Consider, for instance, the way Preminger moves us into the sequence. First, we have the initial shot of her arrival, taken, as we have already seen, from an unusually long distance as if to underline its objectivity, its detachment from any subjective point of view. Second, we have the establishing two-shot of Laura and McPherson, with Laura standing next to her own portrait, and the contrast between the real and the ideal could not be any starker. Laura herself is dressed fashionably, to be sure, but her appearance is somewhat disheveled and she is soppy from the rain—she is hardly an image of impossible feminine glamour (see Fig. 6.3) It is only then, after these two more or less “objective” shots, which stress

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Fig. 6.3  The real Laura is contrasted with her painted ideal in Laura

Laura’s more ordinary qualities, that we are finally given the awaited star close-up in radiant soft focus. Preminger, however, is quick to follow this with a reverse-angle shot of McPherson, deliberately associating the close­up with his subjective perspective. The return, shortly thereafter, to the two-shot serves to re-emphasize the contrast between the real Laura and her painted counterpart. The alternation between the longer establishing shots and the shallow-focus close-ups might be seen, like the similar alternation found in Double Indemnity discussed in Chap. 2, as serving a comparative purpose, contrasting McPherson’s view of Laura—informed as it is by his infatuation with the idea of her—with the objective “fact” of her actual existence. The close-up would then be seen as figuring the attempted imposition of the ideal/fantasy version of Laura, as represented by the portrait, onto the reality of Laura herself. Laura and McPherson’s eventual coming together will turn on whether he is able to disentangle fantasy and reality. His ability to do so is tested in the scene in which he, apparently suspecting that Laura killed Diane

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Redfern in a jealous rage, arrests her and brings her to the police station for questioning. Thompson identifies the interrogation scene that follows as marking Laura’s ultimate submission to McPherson’s brand of rugged male dominance, but a closer look reveals something more complex at work.7 At the start of the scene, McPherson leads Laura into the interrogation room and instructs her to sit down. In front of her stand two large lamps. McPherson climbs onto the table from the opposite side and switches them on, bathing Laura’s face in light. To emphasize the effect, Preminger cuts into a close-up, and as the two exchange words he again, as in their first meeting the night before, employs reverse-angle editing. Here, though, the device takes on a more sinister air, with McPherson’s elevated position and badgering tone, the camera’s tight framing, and the almost blindingly bright lights combining to produce a feeling of cruel entrapment. What’s more, the lights themselves visually evoke—or perhaps parody—the very three-point lighting apparatus responsible for the look of Hollywood’s glamorous close-ups. In fact, if it were uprooted from its narrative context, the image of Tierney’s illuminated face resembles nothing so much as a still taken during a screen test. Here, then, we find the formal process we identified earlier, whereby the soft-focus close­up was made to represent forceful imposition of male desire onto a resistant female subject, echoed within the film’s mise-en-scène itself. Thompson, at one point, avers, “We may actually find [Laura’s] submission to [McPherson] unpleasant, but probably only if we are aware of the film’s strategies of exploitation of her” (Thompson 1988, 194). Such a statement implies that Preminger wishes to conceal these “strategies” from the audience. The interrogation scene, however, would seem to be deliberately calling our attention to them. In any case, Laura, understandably bothered by the lights, eventually asks McPherson to turn them off, and it is here that the scene’s psychological and emotional complexity begins to reveal itself. Following Laura’s request, Preminger cuts to the reverse shot of McPherson, whose face betrays, through pursed lips, a certain degree of sympathy, perhaps even minor regret, as he reaches over and switches off the lamps. Laura, her face now half shrouded in shadow, looks up and offers an acerbic “thanks” before coolly re-affirming her absolute innocence. McPherson, apparently provoked by this assertion, climbs down off the table and aggressively circles around to Laura, tossing aside a chair in frustration as he does so. Bearing down on her, he continues the questioning as Laura, without ever really losing her composure, parries his questions and allegations.

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McPherson circles back to the other side of the table, again pausing briefly to cast frustratedly a chair aside. Two aspects of the way this moment plays out challenge Thompson’s reading. First, McPherson’s difficulties with the room’s furniture—captured by Preminger’s unforgivingly objective camera, which relentlessly pursues him around the room—work to undercut any notion that he is in total control of either the situation or his own emotions. Second, Laura’s steely reserve in the face of his aggressive, badgering approach conveys something other than mere willful “submission.” Eventually, McPherson begins to ask her about her relationship with Shelby Carpenter, specifically about her decision to reconcile with him after telling McPherson that she had decided to break off the engagement during her weekend in the country. She reveals that Carpenter had, in fact, convinced her to pretend to remain together so as to ward off suspicion of guilt in the murder. After Laura supplies a justification for her actions (“He’d gotten himself into an awfully suspicious position, and he’s just the sort of person people are willing to believe the worst about”), McPherson comes to the heart of the matter and asks her if she’s still in love with Carpenter and she admits, as if coming to the realization on the spot, that she doesn’t “think she ever could have been.” Having got the information he was looking for, McPherson reveals that the whole “arrest” had been a ruse and Laura, understandably taken aback, stands up and sternly admonishes him as Preminger holds on a two-shot in profile, suggesting that the two are now again on more or less equal ground. As her eyes bore into him, he attempts to explain himself, saying that he “was 99% sure” she was innocent, but “had to get rid of that 1% doubt.” Unimpressed by this justification, she asks if there couldn’t have been some “easier way of making sure.” McPherson’s gruff exterior breaks, he sheepishly looks away (her eyes continue to glare) and, in a conciliatory tone, concedes that he had “reached the point where [he] needed official surroundings.” And it is only after this confession, this admission of doubt and fallibility accompanied by body language that suggests a plea for forgiveness, that Laura, too, begins to soften. A small smile breaks across her face and, as he looks back up at her, Preminger cuts into a brief close-up (the first such POV shot since their first encounter) as she relents, saying “then it was all worth it, Mark.” Thus, far from being depicted as cowing to McPherson’s blustery shows of aggression and dominance, Laura is in fact presented as only “coming around” when McPherson—recognizing the obvious dishonesty and, indeed, cruelty of his actions—comes to her

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with his head bowed in a plea for forgiveness. The framing and composition further stress the pair’s equality in this crucial moment, which marks the beginning of what Waldo, in a subsequent scene, will derisively refer to as their “disgustingly earthy relationship.”

The Resistance of the Real But of course we, the audience, will not be granted access to that relationship’s later developments. We will not see Laura and McPherson involved in the day-to-day routines that define ordinary domestic life. The film has no room, that is, for extended depictions of what Cavell calls the “willing repetition of days, willingness for the everyday” (1988, 178), or for the life in which “nothing happens” that the neorealist paragon Cesare Zavattini dreamt of bringing to the screen (1978, 67). This brings us to a final point about the relationship between Hollywood filmmaking and representations of the ordinary, one that Laura dramatizes. While at the levels of plot and theme, the film is on the side of the ordinary, and opposed to aestheticism and the forced imposition of meaning, it can only visually depict this ordinary in fleeting moments like the coffee-making scene. The rest is all glamour, fantasy, and murderous intrigue—the stuff Hollywood dreams are made of. Early in the film, McPherson asks Waldo about a misrepresentation of a murder that Waldo had included in a column written two years ago, and Waldo’s response may be taken as an effective summary of his basic worldview: McPherson: Two years ago, in your October column, you started out to write a book review, but at the bottom of the column, you switched over to the Harrington murder case. Lydecker: Are the processes of the creative mind now under the jurisdictions of the police? McPherson: You said Harrington was rubbed out with a shotgun loaded with buckshot, the way Laura Hunt was murdered night before last. Lydecker: Did I? McPherson: Yeah. But really he was killed with a sash weight. Lydecker: How ordinary. My version was obviously superior. I never bother with details, you know.

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Preminger may intend us to take this as another indication of Waldo’s decadence. His film, however, shares more with Waldo’s view of things than it might wish to let on. In some respects, Laura can be found guilty of the charges of “sweetening” reality that Zavattini leveled against the American cinema tout court. In other respects, though, we can sense within it a faint but palpable desire for a new approach to seeing, and filming, the world.

Notes 1. The next chapter will consider a paradigmatic instance of this dichotomy in Fred Zinnemann’s Act of Violence. 2. Lucy Fife Donaldson, in her 2014 book Texture in Film, has done a great deal to introduce this useful critical concept into the lexicon of film analysis, and much of the following discussion is indebted to her work. At the conclusion of her study, Donaldson suggests that the most important aspect of an analysis of a given film’s texture is not our ability “to distinguish exactly which element of a film’s construction is responsible for [that] texture,” but rather “what is most significant is the interrelationship of elements.” Effective criticism, then, must “consider the fine detail, its structuring and place in the fabric” (Donaldson 2014, 168). 3. See the section titled “Partially Furnished Ten-Room Apartment” in Benjamin’s One Way Street ([1928] 2009, 50). 4. As Christian Keathley has argued, the clock may be seen as something of an objective correlative for Waldo’s personality: “Waldo, like the clock, holds himself rigidly, royally, proudly erect, in complete control of his body at all times” (2005, 167). 5. This was a point of complaint for Thomas M. Pryor, who reviewed the film for the New York Times in 1944: “Gene Tierney simply doesn’t measure up to the word-portrait of her character. Pretty, indeed, but hardly the type of girl we had expected to meet.” 6. See the chapter “The Long Take” in Henderson’s Critique of Film Theory for an extended discussion of these concepts. 7. Significantly, Thompson’s analysis of the scene restricts itself almost entirely to a bare summary of action, paying little attention to specific matters of form and style.

References Bazin, André. [1968] 2004. What Is Cinema? Vol. 1. Berkeley: University of California Press. ———. 2011. Umberto D: A Great Work. In Bert Cardullo, ed. André Bazin and Italian Neorealism, 111–117. New York: Continuum.

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Benjamin, Walter. [1928] 2009. One-Way Street. In One-Way Street and Other Writings. Trans. J.A. Underwood. New York: Penguin. ———. 1969. Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books. Cavell, Stanley. [1985] 2005. A Capra Moment. In Cavell on Film, ed. William Rothman, 135–145. Albany: State University of New York Press. Deleuze, Gilles. 1989. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. London: The Athlone Press. Donaldson, Lucy Fife. 2014. Texture in Film. New York/London: Palgrave Macmillian. Fujiwara, Chris. 2008. The World and Its Double: The Life and Work of Otto Preminger. New York: Faber and Faber. Keathley, Christian. 2012. Bonjour Tristesse and the Expressive Potential of Découpage. Movie: A Journal of Film Criticism, No. 3. http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/film/movie/contents/bonjour_tristesse_final.pdf Klevan, Andrew. 1999. Disclosure of the Everyday: Undramatic Achievement in Narrative Film. London: Flicks Books. Perkins, V.F. 1972. Why Preminger? In The Movie Reader, ed. Ian Cameron. New Yorl: Praeger. 43–44. Pryor, Thomas M. 1944. Movie Review: Laura. The New York Times, October 12. Stern, Lesley. 2001. Paths that Wind Through the Thicket of Things. Critical Inquiry 28 (1): 317–354. Thomas, Deborah. 2001. Reading Hollywood: Spaces and Meaning in American Film. London: Wallflower. Thompson, Kristin. 1988. Breaking the Glass Armor: Neoformalist Film Analysis. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

PART III

Noir and History

CHAPTER 7

Act of Violence: Articulating the Spaces of Modernity

Edward Dimendberg’s Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity (2004) features one of the few extended analyses of Fred Zinnemann’s 1949 film Act of Violence that I am aware of in scholarly criticism. This is a shame because, as Dimendberg’s work suggests, and as I hope to go on to show in even more detail here, the film is an impressive and complex achievement. I begin with Dimendberg not only because his work on the film precedes mine, but also because his analysis, while sharp and perspicuous in many important ways, can help serve as a useful illustration of what Rita Felski has termed the “limits of critique” or the blind spots that can arise through the application of critical methods built upon a “hermeneutics of suspicion” whose goal is to decode and uncover latent or implicit ideological content in apparently naïve texts. I discussed Felski’s argument in more general terms in the introduction, but I think these ideas are worth returning to here, both because of the strength of Dimendberg’s work (indeed, I consider the book to be among the best written on the subject of film noir in the last two decades) and because Act of Violence is a particular useful case for examining the ways in which a Hollywood genre film could be used to address those vast conglomerations of forces that we call “history” and “politics” in ways more sophisticated and purposeful than is sometimes recognized by critical scholarship of the type Dimendberg practices and Felski analyzes. As Felski argues, for many practitioners of “critique,” the relationship between text and context is effectively conceived of as a one way street, © The Author(s) 2020 N. Deyo, Film Noir and the Possibilities of Hollywood, Palgrave Close Readings in Film and Television, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37058-9_7

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whereby the text is seen as a (often unwitting or unthinking) transmitter of a society’s dominant ideologies or a reflection of broader impersonal historical processes, which are concealed or hidden in some way within the text’s manifest narrative content and formal design. The task of the critic, in such a view, is to plumb these depths and ferret out this repressed historical or ideological content, laying its baleful machinations bare for discerning readers to see. In Dimendberg’s work, the historical content in question is the shifting and changing urban landscapes of the postwar years and the cultural and political attitudes associated with these changes. Noir films, with their frequent use of real cityscapes as shooting locations, come to stand as privileged barometers for ascertaining these changes, a record of popular attitudes and sentiments as well as a visual index of actual urban spaces in various states of decay, flux, and redevelopment. One such urban space that Dimendberg dedicates particular attention to is Los Angeles’s old Bunker Hill neighborhood. Once an exclusive and affluent residential area, the neighborhood was one of the first casualties of suburbanization and white flight and, by the late 1940s, had become a symbol of criminality and seediness. Such associations made it a prime location for noir filmmakers, and Dimendberg expertly and thoroughly catalogues the various views of the neighborhood provided by a number of different films, including Act of Violence. Before getting into the particulars of his analysis (and my response), though, it will be helpful to sketch the film’s plot. Act of Violence opens on a darkened street in New York City. We follow an unnamed man (Robert Ryan) who walks with a limp as he approaches a tenement house, climbs the stairs, enters an apartment, and retrieves a gun from a dresser. This brief, silent cold opening is followed by the appearance of the title and opening credits on-screen, accompanied by a swelling orchestral score. We then see the man board a bus bound for Los Angeles and, after a brief travel montage sequence, arrive in the very different environs of sunny Santa Lisa, CA, a fictional stand-in for suburban west-side communities like Santa Monica. Once there, Ryan’s character, who we soon learn is named Joe Parkson, begins asking around about Frank Enley (Van Heflin), a local real estate developer and pillar of the community who has a beautiful wife, Edith (Janet Leigh, in one of her earliest roles), a young son, and a nice house on a leafy street. Parkson arrives at the house shortly after Frank has left on a fishing trip. He enquires with Edith about Frank’s whereabouts, but is combative and unforthcoming when she presses him about who he is or what he wants

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with her husband. He leaves and tracks Frank to a mountain lake, where he rents a canoe and surreptitiously sneaks up on his quarry, hiding his canoe behind a rock outcropping and drawing the revolver we saw him retrieve in the film’s opening. He is prevented from doing anything with it, however, as Frank rows away from him to return to shore. At the pier, the dock’s proprietor tells Frank that a limping man had come looking for him and, clearly agitated, Frank declares that he must immediately return home. Back in Santa Lisa, Edith tells Frank about her encounter with Parkson and he immediately begins showing signs of panic. Later that night she confronts him and demands an explanation, and he tells her that the two men had served together in the war and that Parkson is now attempting to carry out a vendetta, though he does not say why. The next morning, Edith awakens to find a note from Frank saying that he left early for a builder’s convention in downtown Los Angeles. Later that day, Parkson returns to the house and forces his way inside, threatening Edith and demanding to know where Frank went. Understandably disturbed by these recent events, she travels to the convention and confronts Frank a second time, pleading for him to tell her everything. He then reveals that during the war he and Parkson had been held together in a prisoner-of-war (P.O.W.) camp, where Frank had learned that Parkson and other prisoners were planning an escape. Concerned that the tunnel would be discovered and the prisoners punished, and plied by the promise of food from the Nazi guards, Frank divulged the plan to the camp’s authorities, thinking they would reward his honesty by merely destroying the tunnel. Instead, they allowed the men to begin their escape before massacring them as they came through the tunnel. Parkson survived and swore revenge on Frank for his betrayal. Soon after this revelation, Parkson tracks Frank down and confronts him, but Frank is able to escape and flees into the streets of Los Angeles, ending up in a Bunker Hill diver bar. There he meets Mary Astor’s Pat, who takes him back to her apartment. Finding her a sympathetic ear, Frank divulges his whole story and she suggests that she might be able to help him, taking him to another bar and introducing him to a hitman, who agrees to kill Parkson. Back at Pat’s apartment, Frank awakens from a drunken stupor and, realizing what he’s done, flees back to the streets in terror. He eventually makes his way to the train station where the hit is supposed to occur, but is unable to warn Parkson in time. Instead, he leaps in front of the bullet, which fatally wounds him. Parkson shares a moment with the dead man and seems to grant him a measure of forgiveness and redemption.

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As noted, Dimendberg’s analysis centers on the sequence set in and around Bunker Hill, with the greatest amount of attention focusing on the scene in which Frank flees from Pat’s apartment to try and save Parkson. The scene includes a moment depicting Frank making his way on foot through the Third Street Tunnel, which runs beneath the neighborhood. Zinnemann provides a close-up of Enley’s distraught face as the soundtrack fills with an aural collage of both the hitman’s voice as well as flashbacks to his time in the Nazi P.O.W. camp. We hear him trying to warn Joe as well as the shouting voices of the guards and the sounds of gunfire from the massacre itself. The scene is punctuated by a sudden cut to a long shot, as Frank begins screaming “Joe, don’t do it!” and runs toward the camera. Dimendberg discusses this moment as an instance of both temporal and spatial “slippage.” His analysis, which is complex and nuanced, is worth quoting at length: [Enley’s] anguished attempt to undo the past and prevent the violent murder of Parkson in the present registers three distinct spatiotemporal settings: the German camp, the film’s diegetic world of postwar Los Angeles, and the neighborhood of Bunker Hill, which would soon undergo urban redevelopment. Together with such temporal slippage, widely encountered in film noir, one recognizes in this scene a no less profound slippage between the tunnel of the prisoner-of-war camp and that under Bunker Hill. Enley’s scream alludes to multiple spatial traumas of modernity, the “unhomely” condition of the postwar metropolis in which space acquires a complex layering of temporalities and resonances of the past erupt with explosive force. Once again, it is the activity of walking through the city … that proposes postwar urban redevelopment as a latent content of the film. (2004, 160)

There is much to ponder here, but I want to begin with the culminating point, Dimendberg’s suggestion that urban redevelopment is “a latent content of the film.” As Felski points out, the rhetoric of latency is common among practitioners of “critique.” Its usage, derived from Freudian psychoanalysis, suggests a text not fully aware of what it is doing, not fully in control of its own semantic production. In this particular instance, its usage suggests that Act of Violence is not overtly concerned with issues like “postwar urban redevelopment”—that, as a conventional mainstream Hollywood film, it almost by its very nature could not overtly be concerned with such issues—and that such issues’ presence in the text can

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only be glimpsed through its aporias and caesuras, and only by skilled critics equipped with the necessary analytical instruments. The potential risk of such an approach, with its exclusive focus on moments of rupture in which the machinery of ideological repression breaks down and grants the sharp-eyed viewer a glimpse at deep hidden structures and latent historical content is that its usage may blind us to more intentional, deliberate, or carefully planned patterns of meaning and significance. In the case of Act of Violence, the fact that one of the main characters is a suburban residential land developer, and that one of its key scenes takes place at a builders convention in downtown Los Angeles, might tell us that questions of postwar redevelopment—and of place, space, and human geography more generally—are more firmly on its thematic agenda than the rhetoric of “latent content” would suggest. The following pages will argue that this is indeed the case and that the film primarily engages with these larger-scale historical, cultural, and political issues by way of complex articulations of cinematic space. These articulations include both the deliberate construction of spatiotemporal palimpsests of the type Dimendberg identifies in the Bunker Hill sequence as well as a more general elaboration of spatial networks and on-screen/off-screen dynamics.

The Opening Sequence We can begin with the beginning, which like the opening of many Hollywood films is strongly declarative in both formal and thematic terms.1 The opening sequence establishes a series of significant spatial and thematic dynamics. Take the opening shot. The film begins with a street-­ level shot looking up at the New York skyline. After a “Metro-Goldwyn presents” title card appears and fades out, the camera pans slight down and to the left to reveal Parkson limping across the street toward a row of apartment buildings, which he enters. Already our attention is being called to the relationship between on-screen and off-screen space. That Parkson is in mid-stride when the camera finds him indicates that we are starting in media res, and that some significant and impelling event has occurred prior to and outside of our initial view of the world. This emphasis on the extension of time and space beyond the camera’s frame continues as the sequence progresses. As Parkson boards the bus bound for Los Angeles, the film marks his journey with series of short tableau shots at various points along the route. We see the bus pass through an industrial district,

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rolling plains at night, and a sun-bleached desert dotted with Joshua trees, before arriving at midday on a suburban California street lined with palm trees. The initial effect of this sequence is two-fold, at once emphasizing the great distance between the two American coasts via synecdochal images of the diverse and varied landscapes that separate them, but also stressing the continuity of all these different spaces, their co-existence within a single contiguous world. Even as the narrative focus telescopes to Southern California, these other spaces remain activated within our awareness of off-screen space, embedding the film’s events and settings within a larger geographical context. The play between on-screen and off-screen continues. We view Parkson disembark from the bus in a long shot, the camera positioned across the street. It holds there as he is presented from crossing by a police officer to make way for the Fourth of July parade, which just so happens to be occurring at exactly this time. Seeing an opening between the marching band and a group of men in suits and Shriner hats, Parkson crosses. As he arrives on the sidewalk nearer to the camera, he turns to his right and the camera follows him panning left, revealing in the process that all along it has been inside a hotel lobby, filming Parkson through a window. The pan picks up Parkson again as he enters the building, then tracks backward as he approaches the desk and inquires about renting a room. This shot continues to emphasize the significant extension of space beyond the frame and adds a suggestion that any given view of a place or space is at best partial. A similar effect is achieved in the sequence’s next segment, which introduces us to Frank Enley. After Parkson is shown his room, he consults the phone book and looks up Enley’s name. A dissolve overlays his deliberate circling of the name and address with a close-up of Enley’s smiling face. As an off-screen voice heaps praise upon him and his accomplishments, the camera pulls back to reveal him surrounded by an adoring crowd, there to celebrate him for the construction of the partially built housing tract that serves as the scene’s backdrop. While this reveal is not shocking or surprising (we can surmise the nature of Enley’s surroundings from what is being said off-screen), it once again repeats the motif of spatial and visual embedding that we have been tracking across this opening sequence. Enley is embedded within Santa Lisa, which is embedded within a much larger world. Nearly every aesthetic and formal choice made in the course of assembling this four-minute opening sequence seems to have been designed to speak to that fact.

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City, Country, and Suburb One way we might begin to understand the significance of the opening sequence and the choices enumerated above is to consider them in light of the discussion of cinematic “worldhood” developed by V.F. Perkins in his 2005 essay, “Where Is the World?: The Horizon of Events in Movie Fiction.” The essay raises a number of suggestive and intriguing claims about the construction and elaboration of fictional worlds in narrative cinema, placing a particular emphasis on the relationship between the series of views of those worlds that we are offered by the camera and the (unseen) larger contexts in which we must situate those views. As Perkins puts it, “We are offered an assembly of bits and pieces from which to compose a world. Fragmentary representation yields an imagined solidity and extensiveness” (26). Our ability to compose this world, to imagine these fragmentary representations cohering into solidity, rests upon the film’s handling of the dynamic between what we see and what we don’t, between on-camera and off-camera space. The “framed image” that we see and the “boundless fictional world” that we don’t must be made to “create and account for one another” (20). Because this basic dynamic is a necessary condition for the proper functioning of a narrative film, an enterprising filmmaker can “[turn] this condition to an advantage” and exploit it for considerable and significant effect. This is what Zinnemann does in Act of Violence. As we have already seen, the film’s opening sequence pointedly exploits and dramatizes the on-screen/off-screen dynamic in a number of ways. In Perkins’s language, we might say that it is deliberately calling our attention to the fact that “within the larger world, the isolation of any one space or community and its value system is always far from complete. There are always Elsewheres…” (33). It is in the precise nature of those “Elsewheres,” and their relationship(s) with the film’s central location, the suburban space of Santa Lisa, that the film’s engagement with, and commentary upon, postwar patterns of redevelopment and the ideology of the suburbs can be located. For the “Elsewheres” that form the two poles of Parkson’s opening journey are not merely neutral locations separated by geography, but rather highly coded spaces whose difference from one another is as much a product of politics and history as it is of sheer physical distance. As Dimendberg himself notes, before his analysis shifts into the register of latent meanings and repressed content, the opening quite deliberately invokes and underlines the well-worn cultural opposition between big city

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and small town, presenting with “an almost crystalline structuralist logic …. the oppositions of … the vertical and darkly forbidding cityscape of New York and the sunny sprawl of Southern California” (160). The symbolic opposition between an urban core and the outlying territories, between city and country, has of course been a long-standing trope in modern western art and culture. In Hollywood, we can see clear examples of the opposition and its typical inflections and connotations (the city as a dangerous den of sin and crime and inequity; the countryside as a pastoral utopia) as far back as the silent age, with F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise (1927) standing as perhaps the most fully realized and schematic example. In noir films, with their frequent disposition toward urban stories and depictions of seedy criminal milieu, the opposition often comes very much to the fore. Indeed, a couple of the films we have already considered in this book make clear and significant use of the opposition, with Out of the Past overtly building it into its depictions of Bridgeport and San Francisco, and Laura implicitly calling upon it to “ground” the character of Laura Hunt herself by giving her a backstory involving a small town mid-western upbringing. Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), whose protagonist is like Frank Enley a developer of postwar tract housing, also made memorable use of the opposition, filling its “Potterville” sequence with noir signifiers in order to emphasize its difference from the traditional small town idyll of Bedford Falls. In Act of Violence, we find a slightly different version of this opposition, one that carries with it a slightly different set of socio-cultural associations. Bridgeport and Bedford Falls are all small towns in the most classical and traditional sense, autonomous and independent communities located a significant geographical remove from any major urban center. Santa Lisa, on the other hand, occupies the different category of the postwar suburb. The historical and political significance of such communities has been well-documented and we lack the space for a full recapitulation here. Instead, we might note some key characteristics that are most relevant to Act of Violence’s formal and thematic project. In contrast with the more “organic” community of the traditional and provincial small towns, many suburbs were planned communities constructed by Frank Enley’s real world analogues as places of retreat and refuge from the big city. Formed by white flight and exclusionary housing and real estate practices like redlining, suburbs were conceived as middle class utopias, free of the supposed clutter and grit and grime of the older urban cores while still being near enough to reap the economic benefits of proximity to a large

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population center. The “big city/small town” opposition, along with its attendant cultural codes, was thus part and parcel of the suburbs ideological conception of itself. For its residents and for the men like Frank Enley who planned and built them, suburban communities like the fictional Santa Lisa were envisioned as fortresses of security and solitude.

A Horrific Outsider It is this sense of security and solitude that Parkson’s arrival disrupts. Emphatically associated with the “Elsewhere” of the big city, with its dilapidated tenement homes and criminal violence, Parkson is figured from the outset as a dangerous interloper. To adopt Raymond Chandler’s description of Moose Malloy in Murder, My Sweet, he is as conspicuous in Santa Lisa as “a tarantula on a slice of angel food cake.” Zinnemann works deliberately to create a sense of unease around Parkson’s very presence, and to underline his difference from the community he seems to have decided to invade and terrorize. From the moment he steps off the bus, the mise-en-scène marks him as a practically uncanny presence. As Dimendberg notes, the film quite deliberately has him cross the street at a perpendicular angle to the men marching in the Memorial Day parade, his movement along the frame’s z-axis cutting against the composition’s dominant horizontal lines of movement. Beyond this scene, formal and aesthetic elements continue to emphasize Parkson’s uncanny and disturbing presence. His pronounced limp, for instance, visually marks him as different and distinct from the “fit and healthy” residents of Santa Lisa, and the film’s sonic design effectively emphasizes the noise his bad leg makes as it drags on the ground, producing an incessant, ominous, and unsettling effect. This unsettling effect is (perhaps unintentionally) heightened by the difference between the relatively slight degree with which Robert Ryan actually drags his leg and the severity and intensity of the noise conveyed on the soundtrack. Sound and foley work are further used to highlight Parkson’s disturbing presence in the placid and pastoral environments in and around Santa Lisa during the scene in which he tracks Enley on his fishing trip. Dark clouds greet his arrival as he enquires after Enley and rents a boat to pursue Enley out on the lake. The boat he rents turns out to have one rusty, squeaky oar lock. The ugly, unpleasant sound it makes each time Parkson rows, repeated and emphasized on the soundtrack, serves as a sort of extension and continuation of the sound produced by his dragging leg on land. Set against the

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tranquil sounds of the lake, the rusty oar lock suggests that the force of Parkson’s malevolence is capable of radiating outward from his body, infecting or deforming the objects he comes into contact with. In these early scenes, with their vision of an uncanny and threatening outsider arriving without warning or invitation to disturb the peaceful tranquility of a leafy affluent suburb, Act of Violence seems to anticipate the horror/slasher film cycle initiated by John Carpenter’s Halloween in 1978. Indeed, Ryan’s largely implacable and affectless demeanor in these scenes, along with the relentlessness with which he pursues his quarry, brings to mind both Halloween’s Michael Myers and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s performance in James Cameron’s The Terminator (1984), itself a clear descendent of Carpenter’s film.2 As Robin Wood points out in his definitive essay on the genre, the American horror film historically has had at its heart a certain “simple and obvious basic formula …: normality is threatened by [a] Monster” ([1979] 2004, 117). What’s more, Wood goes on to suggest, the notion of “normality” is itself in these films reliably formulaic, consisting of “the heterosexual monogamous couple, the family, and the social institutions (police, church, armed forces) that support and defend them” (118). We have already seen how the characterization of Parkson in these early sequences is suitably “monstrous,” and if we return to the film’s opening sequence in light of Wood’s comments, we clearly see the film’s attempts to code Santa Lisa, and Enley’s life there, in precisely the terms of this “boringly constant” normality. He is initially shown to us with his daughter sitting happily on his shoulders, as he delivers a brief speech to the crowd gathered to commemorate his status as both a war hero and a pillar of the community. As he does so, the film cuts to a reaction shot of Leigh’s Edith looking on with doe-eyed reverence, and of course the whole scene is set within the context of the larger, suitably joyous Memorial Day celebration. We thus have, in one single and economic sequence, beatific images of the family, heterosexual monogamy, and “the social institutions …. that support and defend them.” Indeed, one might be hard pressed to find a more economical distillation of the pattern is Wood has identified in American horror cinema.

Dialectics of Shelter and Privilege But Act of Violence’s family resemblance to later American horror films goes beyond a reliance on Wood’s “simple and obvious formula.” Its early sequences also call to mind a generic tendency that Fredric Jameson

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identified in 1980s films like Blue Velvet (David Lynch, 1986) and Something Wild (Jonathan Demme, 1986) as a revival of the “gothic.” Jameson’s remarks on this matter touch on a number of topics relevant to the current discussion and can help clarify the specific role played by the suburbs as a setting in both Act of Violence and in the 1970s and 1980s horror films to which it seems, in this light, a distant and (and largely forgotten) ancestor. “Gothics,” he writes, are … a class fantasy (or nightmare) in which the dialectic of shelter and privilege is exercised: your privileges seal you off from other people, but by that same token they constitute a protective wall through which you cannot see, and behind which therefore all kinds of envious forces may be imagined in the process of assembling, plotting, preparing to give assault. (1991, 289)

In Act of Violence, we can see this “dialectic of shelter and privilege” most clearly in the scene following Enley’s return home from his fishing trip. A dissolve takes us from the lake back to Santa Lisa, where Enley is packing up the garage and bidding his neighbor and fishing companion farewell. His demeanor is reserved and slightly troubled, clearly shaken by having learned from the dock proprietor that a mysterious man had tracked him to the lake. Evening is setting, and the soundtrack swells with slightly ominous strings as he enters through the back door into his kitchen, which is now bathed in dark shadows. Edith greets him as he walks into the living room with a cheery demeanor and a kiss on the cheek, but the mood of this greeting is undercut by framing and lighting, as Zinnemann shoots the interaction in a long shot that emphasizes the size of the room as well as the play of shadows on the wall. An uneasy dissonance is created by the apparent homeliness of the interaction butting against the cavernous and faintly foreboding mise-en-scène. Zinnemann prolongs and deepens this mood as the scene progresses. As Enley puts his fishing gear away in the closet, he asks his wife if anyone has been around asking after him. She initially off-handedly says no, before suddenly remembering Parkson’s visit. As she says, “no, wait a minute!” off-screen, Zinnemann shows us Enley as he stands with some resignation, his worst fears apparently confirmed, and his entire upper body disappears into deep shadows that totally obscure his face. Their conversation continues and Edith describes the visitor as being “mostly average, he was just lame” and asks if Frank knows anyone like that. “I guess he’ll be back if it’s anything important” she continues, still off-screen, before apparently turning on a hallway light

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that suddenly and surprisingly illuminates Enley’s unsettled face and gives the impression of nothing so much as a search beam or an interrogation light. He quickly turns off the light and assuming a more performatively gentle and comforting tone insists they eat dinner in the kitchen. As Edith moves into the kitchen and continues talking about her day, the camera remains behind with Frank, who moves with considerable deliberateness toward the window whose curtains he draws shut before proceeding to the door, which, after a quick check outside, he locks before drawing down another curtain. This moment captures certain aspects of exactly that dialectic of shelter and privilege that Jameson identified as central to the gothic: this action, meant to erect a protective barrier between the house’s interior and a perceived threat coming from outside serves only to plunge the house further into threatening and ominous darkness, rendered here in inky black and white chiaroscuro. The film then cuts to the kitchen, now plunged even deeper in shadow than in its previous appearance (even though barely more than a few minutes has passed in story time). As Edith, hunched over the stove, cheerfully asks if Frank would like a tomato omelet, Frank moves around the room, continuing on his quest to draw shut each and every curtain in the house, closing off the (very many) portals of entry into this supposedly secure domestic space. The phone rings and Frank insists on ignoring it, grabbing Edith as she goes to pick it up and asserting that he just wants to spend a quiet night in his own home, undisturbed by the outside world. Edith relents, though she clearly registers, for the first time, that something is off (Fig. 7.1). Another dissolve signals another brief ellipsis, and we resume action with the Enleys still in the kitchen as Frank finishes his dinner and Edith begins cleaning the dishes, her face now obscured by shadows. Suddenly the doorbell rings, betokening the potential arrival of Jameson’s “envious forces … imagined in the process of assembling, plotting, preparing to assault” (1991, 289). At least that’s what Frank seems to be imagining, as he leaps to his feet, and turns off all the lights. This action understandably disturbs Edith, who begins to shout before Frank forcefully shushes her. The soundtrack goes almost completely silent except for the faint sound of water trickling from the faucet. The Enleys move carefully through the oppressive darkness when suddenly the doorbell rings again, its insistence transforming an everyday noise into something ominous and threatening. As the camera holds on Frank and Edith, both frozen in fearful silence, we can faintly perceive the unmistakable sound of Parkson’s lame foot

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Fig. 7.1  Frank (Van Heflin) and Edith (Janet Leigh’s) Enley’s suburban home is plunged into threatening darkness in Act of Violence (Fred Zinnemann 1949)

dragging across the ground outside as it circles around toward the back kitchen door. The camera slowly pans over to a close-up on the doorknob, which begins to turn forcefully but to no avail, Frank’s security measures having proven successful for the time being. The sound of Parkson’s dragging foot continues to trace around the house, and the Enleys move to the front window. Frank carefully peers through the curtains, and as he does so the film cuts to a point of view shot showing Parkson crossing the street to a car parked along the curb. The leafy residential street lit only by a single streetlight, bathing it in a chiaroscuro that matches then darkness of the Enley home’s interior. The idealized space of the earlier sequences has been transformed into a nightmarish landscape. The handling of this scene represents, as I said above, a near-perfect encapsulation of the dynamic described by Jameson. The Enleys’ suburban home becomes here both a means of guarding against terror and, paradoxically, a source of terror itself, its mise-en-scène repeatedly

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stressing the fact that the barriers Frank erects to protect himself (the locked doors, the pulled shades) “constitute a protective wall through which [he] cannot see” and whose very opacity serves only to heighten the Enleys’ feelings of fear and anxiety, feelings that we as viewers come to share thanks to the film’s use of restricted point of view. When he pulls the shades in the kitchen, the framing centers the now-obstructed window, the blank expanse of the fabric filling the screen and allowing the imagination to project any number of fearful visions beyond it. Similarly, the sound of Parkson’s dragging foot, which the film has already imbued with an ominous and threatening character, here becomes truly monstrous and uncanny. Emanating from outside the frame and encircling the Enley home, it fills the otherwise silent soundtrack with a horrible and threatening insistence. This scene articulates a further dimension of this “dialectic of shelter and privilege” as well, one not directly touched upon in Jameson’s analysis: the role of space, distance, and separation. The flight of affluent white families from urban centers and the creation of the suburbs was driven, at least in part, by certain anxieties stoked by life in crowded cities. These anxieties derived, in Dimendberg’s words, from “the agoraphobic sensation of being overwhelmed by space, fears of constriction, or the fear of losing one’s way in the metropolis” (2004, 172). In contrast to the high rises or tenements or row houses of the old urban cores, the suburbs, with their single-family tract homes, private yards, and quiet, tree-lined streets offered the privileged pleasures of relative isolation and personal space. And yet, as this sequence dramatizes, the very privacy sought as a refuge from the dangers of the crowded city was capable, in a dialectical twist, of posing its own sorts of dangers. As we have seen, the staging of the scene emphasizes the cavernous quality of the Enleys’ rambling mid-century home, isolating them in pools of light within the house’s dark, sepulchral expanse. This treatment visually figures the quite real predicament they find themselves in. Alone in a large house, separated from their neighbors by yards and fences, down a residential street far from public or communal spaces, they are, essentially, sitting ducks. This basic predicament, this particular aspect of the “dialectic of shelter and privilege,” would be exploited in a more sustained fashion by Carpenter’s aforementioned Halloween and its epigones. However, unlike the later films, which focus almost exclusively on suburban settings, Act of Violence places this dialectic, as we have seen, within a larger and more deliberately articulated spatial system built in part on the opposition between urban and domestic spaces, between

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the crime and danger of the city and the safety and security of the small town. The sequence we have been looking at destabilizes this binary not only because in it danger “invades” the suburbs, but because Parkson’s presence reveals certain dangers inherent in the suburban landscape itself—indeed, dangers which would not have been present, or not present in the same way, in the older, more densely populated urban neighborhoods.

The Return of the Repressed Beyond what we have already seen of its initial depictions of Parkson and its practically gothic treatment of suburban space, Act of Violence shares yet another narrative trope with the horror film. Like in many of those films, we eventually learn that “the call is coming from inside the house,” and that the origins of the villain’s malice lie not in some pure and arbitrary malevolence but can rather be traced back to some secret or crime buried in the putative victims’ past. It is soon after the scene we have just been looking at that we, along with Janet Leigh’s Edith, begin to learn of the true nature of the history between Parkson and Frank. This knowledge is delivered in two phases: first in the form of a guarded and partial revelation, then in a full-blown confession. Both scenes are worth considering at some length for the ways in which they add new wrinkles to the spatial system(s) we have been analyzing thus far. Frank’s first, partial, confession occurs shortly after the police (finally) show up and ask Parkson to drive away, which we witness from the Enleys’ perspective as they look down through an upstairs window. Frank tells Edith to go to bed before going downstairs to the dining room, sitting down at the table, and pouring himself a drink. The camera regards him from a distance and the space is still cloaked in shadows, as if dark forces still linger even though Parkson has left the scene. The camera cuts to a medium long shot of Frank, illuminated in ghostly fashion by the overhead lamp, as Edith’s voice is heard from off-screen. She enters the frame, and after retrieving an ashtray for Frank, who has taken out a pack of cigarettes, and begins to inquire about the family’s recent and apparently very sudden cross-country relocation, asking if it was on account of Parkson. As she continues to plead with him for the truth, he sits impassively smoking. Without saying a word, he rises from his chair and moves toward the cabinet behind the table, from which he removes a file folder and places it on the table. The camera captures this moment in one unbroken shot, first

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tracking out as he rises from the table, then pushing back in to center the file folder and Leigh’s reaction, cutting Frank out of the shot. This framing invests the object with a great sense of meaning and mystery before we even learn what it contains. Frank removes a photograph and shows it to Edith as the film cuts to her POV, showing us an image of the two men embracing with Parkson’s name written on it. The two of them then have a brief exchange that serves as useful if somewhat clumsy bit of exposition, as she recognizes Parkson’s name from the letters Frank sent home during the war and avers, “I think I know now. He was with you all the time you were flying …. and a year in the prison camp. Was that it? Was that what did it to him, the strain you went through?” This moment, of course, is the first time we learn that Frank and Parkson were in a prison camp together, and while he does not reveal the full extent of what went on there in this scene, his evasiveness as Edith continues to question clearly suggests that he has not quite told the whole story, leaving this history between the two men shrouded in a continuing sense of mystery. As Edith begins to panic, grabbing the phone to call the police, Frank stops her and ominously states, “You don’t know what made him the way he is. I do,” as the scene comes to a close (Fig. 7.2). All told, this is a relatively simple and straightforward scene, built largely around expository dialogue. It gains significance, however, from the way it associates this exposition and the revelation that Frank and Parkson were in a prison camp together with Frank’s retrieval of the file folder containing his war documents. While it is narratively justified by Frank showing Edith the photo and asking her if that was the man who came to the house, there was no pressing requirement to stage the scene in exactly that manner. Indeed, Frank already earlier alluded to Parkson was “a guy that I knew in the army,” even before having Edith identify him in the photo, so it’s not as though he needed the man’s identify confirmed. The scene at the dinner table could thus have involved nothing more complicated than Frank telling Edith Parkson’s name and then having the exposition play out in the same fashion. The choice to not only include the file folder, but invest it with prominence through its handling and framing must thus be seen as a deliberate and significant choice. Indeed, its significance is multifold. On the one hand, it provides a handy visualization for Enley’s ultimately failed attempts to flee, forget, and bury the guilt and trauma of his prison camp experience. Speaking in Freudian terms, we might call it a symbol of failed repression, with the troubling

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Fig. 7.2  The repressed past returns in Act of Violence

object/memory not obliterated entirely but rather tucked just out of sight, not even stashed in an attic or garage but rather right in the heart of the home. Meanwhile, this physical and spatial manifestation of Frank’s buried history also introduces a new twist on the dialectic of shelter and privilege that we examined earlier. Here it is no longer a matter of evil forces that might be amassing outside the walls of the comfortable suburban home, but rather the dark secrets that might be hidden within them. With this dynamic in mind, we can turn our attention to the later scene that completes the revelation of Enley’s history with Parkson. The set-up for the scene is as follows: the morning after the scenes discussed above, Edith awakens to find a note from Frank saying he left early for a Builder’s Convention in downtown Los Angeles. Later that morning, Parkson appears in their backyard. After a more extended confrontation than their first meeting, Edith implores, “Why don’t you leave us alone? He didn’t do anything to you!” to which Parkson responds by telling her that Frank had been a “stool pigeon for the Nazis” and frames his quest not as one of

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vengeance but of justice. Shaken, Edith breaks down in tears and demands he leave the home, before steeling herself and making arrangements with a neighbor woman to watch their son so that she can follow Frank to Los Angeles and get to the bottom of what’s going on. A dissolve brings us to the Builders and Contractors Convention, housed in a bustling hotel and soundtracked by brass fanfare. The camera finds Edith making her way through the lobby and encountering the source of the music, a group of clearly inebriated middle-aged men marching around with cigars in their mouths and highball glasses in their hands, a parody of the Memorial Day parade we glimpsed during the film’s opening sequence (and perhaps a truer embodiment of the values of the suburban middle classes). Fighting her way against the flow of the crowd, not unlike Parkson in that opening sequence, she finds Frank loitering alone in a second floor lobby area. Sensing that something is wrong, he takes her by the arm out through an exit door that opens onto an external staircase, and in the background we can glimpse an image of the surrounding urban environment. The lighting here returns to a shadowy mood, with chiaroscuro effects, and the stylistic dimensions of the imagery as a whole become more pronouncedly expressionistic. As Edith begins telling him about Parkson’s accusations, Frank turns away and walk towards the back of the frame. The camera remains stationary, eventually framing him in a long shot from behind, his back turned and face hidden from us. He then turns around and walks back toward the camera, his face vanishing into the shadows as he does so. His face finally becomes visible once again as he turns his head into the light and says, “I told you he was crazy. Well, he’s not.” Here again, as in the earlier kitchen table scene, we find formal elects working to visualize mental processes, as the lighting and mise-en-­ scène in this moment can be seen as dramatizing, in a brief and elegant manner, the buried and repressed secrets of Frank’s past “coming to light.” He remains, however, somewhat reluctant to go into details, turning to once again walk away from Edith, his back to the camera, which stays perfectly still. As she begins to press him, Frank moves further away and down the staircase, our view of him becoming again distant and obstructed by shadow, until he sits down on the staircase and Edith joins him, the camera cutting to a reverse angle position showing both of their faces clearly, and the buildings of downtown Los Angeles looming behind them. Frank begins telling the complete story, before standing up and moving back to the landing near the exit door while Edith remains on the stairs. The two

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now spatially separated, the balance of Frank’s confession is handled through more traditional shot/reverse-shot cutting (a technique employed infrequently in the film), as we alternate between Frank telling the story and reaction shots of a distraught Edith looking on. After the story is over, Edith gets up and rejoins Frank, the camera now again framing them together. She tries to comfort him by saying it was just “a mistake,” and that people would believe Frank’s version of events over Parkson’s, if it ever went public. Unmoved, Frank once again moves away from her and back part way down the stairs. As he reaches the climax of his confession, “Do I have to spell it out for you? Do I have to paint you a picture? I was an informer!” he stands framed against the urban backdrop. Edith breaks down crying and Frank eventually tells her to go home. She gets up and leaves without a word, as the camera briefly remains behind with Frank, now alone on the fire escape staring out into the city. We then cut back to the lobby, as the camera, in a solitary, passive, and indifferent seeming long shot watches Edith flee through the crowd and out the door (Fig. 7.3). We can connect this scene to the others we have been looking at, as well as to the spatial systems and other patterns that undergird them: the city/ small town (or suburb) opposition on the one hand, the dialectic of interior and exterior on the other. Indeed, the scene can be viewed as something like a mesh-point where these patterns overlap in significant ways. Working backward, we can first connect it to the dinner table scene analyzed above, since the two form a natural narrative complement, with this scene completing Frank’s confession to Edith as he allows the repressed truth of his experience to finally come to light. In that scene, Zinnemann used Frank’s retrieval and presentation of his old war file to dramatize/ visualize the workings of this process and to suggest that dark secrets might reside in the heart of an apparently idealized domestic space. The question we might ask, then, is to what extent is physical space and mise-­ en-­scène being used similarly in this scene? To answer, we must consider the full context of the setting. Such a consideration brings us back to the city/small town opposition, since the scene effective draws those two supposedly distinct milieus together through the staging of a builders and contractors convention, a celebration of the planners and architects behind suburbanization and postwar development, within the “decaying” urban core of downtown Los Angeles. That Frank’s confession is staged upon what is, effectively, a boundary or passage between these two worlds

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Fig. 7.3  Frank and Edith stand on the border between the “ordinary” world and the noir world in Act of Violence

invites us to bring these semes together, to map the city/suburb dynamic back onto the dinner table scene, or vice versa. If we were to do so, we might draw parallels between, on the one hand, the convention hotel with the idealized domestic space of the suburban home and, on the other, the cityscape itself with Enley’s war file. In such a reading, the film might be seen as reconfiguring the city/suburb dichotomy into something more complex than a simple binary opposition, something more dialectical in nature: the city as the suburb’s own repressed or forgotten history, something deliberately placed out of sight and out of mind but whose presence still haunts the margins of the suburb’s idealized (and illusory) domestic bliss.

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Conclusion From the scene of Frank’s confession onward, the narrative itself undergoes something of a dialectical reconfiguration, in terms of both milieu and characterization. Shortly after the confession scene, Parkson finally succeeds in catching up with Frank, finding him drunk at a celebration in the convention hotel’s bar. As Parkson stalks him through the crowd of revelers, Enley is able to get the drop on him and catch him with a sucker-­ punch, taking him off his feet and buying enough time for an escape. We then cut to an exterior shot of Enley feeling away from the hotel down a dark street, followed by a brief montage of similar shots charting his progress deeper into downtown Los Angeles, many of which are filmed in relative longshot, emphasizing the surroundings and implicitly calling our attention to the use of real locations rather than stage-bound studio sets. From the deep shadows and jazz music that fill the hotel bar onward, this sequence thus marks a decisive shift in the film’s milieu from the domestic haven of Santa Lisa to what Vivian Sobchak ([1998] 2016) has identified as noir films’ more typical “chronotrope”—seedy dive bars, deserted urban streets, dilapidated tenement buildings, a world in which stable domestic spaces have been replaced by anonymous and poorly looked after rooms graced by transient drifters and existentially dislocated wanderers. Befitting this shift in scenery, Heflin’s performance as Enley also becomes more stereotypically noir-esque, fully shedding the good-natured sturdiness that marked his early scenes and instead conveying outward and visible signs of a desperate unraveling.3 This unraveling can be seen in his first encounter with the Mary Astor character, Pat, who will eventually take him in and introduce him to the hitman he will hire to kill Parkson. Their first meeting occurs in dive bar, the Columbus Inn, which Enley stumbles into at the end of his long flight into the city. It’s closing time and a crowd of drunks making their way to the exit as he enters, signaling that the hour is late and placing us firmly in Edward Hopper territory. Zinnemann presents the initial portion of the scene in a deep focus long shot, with Astor sitting at the bar in the frame’s lower left corner. Enley is centered, but quite deep back in the frame. He moves slowly, practically zombie-like toward the bar, where he collapses with his head in his hands. “We’re closed, Jack” the bartender says brusquely and off-handedly as he goes about the business of cleaning up behind the bar. Enley dejectedly moves down the bar closer to both the camera and to Astor and pleads, “But I’ve got money.” The bartender rebuffs him again and he crumbles

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defeated into a slouching seat at the bar. The film cuts to a closer reverse angle shot, giving us a better look at both Heflin and Astor’s Pat, as the latter takes a sympathetic interest in the former’s plight and asks the bartender to pour him a shot. During all this, Enley barely responds to what’s going on around him, his eyes cast dejectedly downward and away from the camera as we see the toll the night has taken on him. He is sweaty and disheveled, a hollowed-out husk. As the drinks are poured, the film cuts back to the initial long shot and Enley gets up without a word and begins methodically moving toward the exit, as if barely in control of his own actions and movement. Pat, concerned, gets up and follows him out. Outside, she asks his name, to which he mumbles, “Frank” while barely making eye contact. She takes him by the arm and leads him away around a corner. If, as Sobchak asserts, the exemplary spaces of film noir are “denuded boardinghouse bedrooms” and other similarly depersonalized and anonymous spaces ([1998] 2016, 226), then Heflin’s acting here might be seen as the performative equivalent of such spaces, conveying a sense of Enley as a shell of a man who seems to be holding on to his sense of self by the thinnest of threads. In contrast, as this transformation, the film has also been working to soften our perceptions of Parkson, to imbue the character with a greater sense of traditional normalcy (by the standards of postwar white American culture) as it denudes Enley of his. It accomplishes this task principally by way of the sudden appearance of his girlfriend, Ann (Phyllis Thaxter), who finds him at his Santa Lisa hotel just as he is preparing to leave for Los Angeles to confront Enley. As they initially cross paths in the hotel lobby, her demeanor is upbeat and cheery, a strange and unexpected contrast with everything we know, or think we know, about Parkson’s character. Upon seeing him, she lets out an excited “Joe!” and runs to meet him before noting his rushed demeanor and launching into a brief monologue that seems more fit for a Hawksian comedy than a dour psychological thriller about war trauma and repressed guilt, “Well you could be more enthusiastic. Do I really look that bad? I haven’t seen a mirror since I got off the plane.” As the scene progresses and she begins to realize the mission that he is on, she shifts into the role of a desperate and pleading partner, one redolent of Grace Kelly’s character in Zinnemann’s later High Noon (1952). The scene thus effectively recasts Parkson as a noble and purpose-driven agent of justice, utterly inverting

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our initial perceptions of him as a malevolent sociopath. Just as the film has complicated (if not deconstructed) the ideological opposition of city and suburb by way of suggesting their dialectical interrelationships, so too does it complicate the initial and apparently clear-cut split between the freakish and violent outcast Joe Parkson and the sturdy community pillar and family man Frank Enley. All of these various strands finally come together in climactic fashion in the scene singled out by Dimendberg, Enley’s anguished breakdown as he makes his solitary way through the Third Street tunnel. If the film began by contrasting the images of the urban and suburban, the noir hellscape and domestic idyll, it has built to a climax in which such easy oppositions collapse in on each other. The film thus suggests that the idyllic postwar suburb is not only inextricably caught up within vast network of other places and spaces, but also the product of various repressed histories of violence, from the processes of postwar redevelopment that hollowed-­out urban cores like Los Angeles’s to the brutality of World War II, here rendered obliquely through the terrified screams of Enley’s subjective auditory flashback. This political or historical “content” is presented not by way of jeremiad or overt thematization, but it is also not “buried” or “latent.” Rather, it is developed through the elaboration and unfolding of a dynamic, coherent fictional world, through careful patterns of cutting, framing, and staging, and through dynamic, context-bound invocations of select generic tropes. It is weaved into the very fabric of the film itself.

Notes 1. For a more detailed and extended analysis of the significance of beginnings in narrative cinema, see Douglas Pye’s “Movies and Tone” in Close-Up 02 (2007, Wallflower Press). 2. Certain shots in Zinnemann’s film even provide uncanny anticipatory echoes of specific shots in the later films, with Parkson’s initial arrival at the Enley house’s front door mirroring the scene in which Schwarzenegger’s arrives at the home of a woman he intends to kill, and his emergence from the bushes surrounding the house in a later scene calling to mind Michael Myers’s iconic first appearance in Halloween. 3. Indeed, his performance in these scenes recalls nothing quite so much as Tom Neal’s turn as the desperate and pathetic Al Roberts in Edgar G. Ulmer’s Detour (1945).

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References Dimendberg, Edward. 2004. Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Felski, Rita. 2015. The Limits of Critique. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Jameson, Fredric. 1991. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press.. Perkins, V.F. 2005. Where Is the World? The Horizon of Events in Movie Fiction. In Style and Meaning: Studies in the Detailed Analysis of Film, ed. John Gibbs and Douglas Pye, 16–42. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Pye, Douglas. 2007. Movies and Tone. In Close-Up 02, ed. John Gibbs and Douglas Pye. New York: Wallflower Books. Sobchak, Vivian. [1998] 2016. Lounge Time: Postwar Crises and the Chronotope of Film Noir. In Film Noir Compendium, ed. Alain Silver and James Ursini, 218–248. Milwaukee: Applause Cinema and Theater. Wood, Robin. [1979] 2004. Introduction to the American Horror Film. In Planks of Reason: Essays on the Horror Film (Revised Edition), ed. Barry Keith Grant and Christopher Sharrett, 107–142. Lanham: The Scarecrow Press.

CHAPTER 8

Reign of Terror and The Tall Target: Theses on the Philosophy of History

Much criticism and scholarship on noir over the past several decades has set out to demystify. In response to the early, and indeed sometimes breathless, paeans to these films by both American and European critics, which held them up as something new, unique, and subversive, academic theorists from the 1970s onward have seemed to say, “Actually, no…” Such revisions, as I detailed at some length in this book’s introductory chapter, took both a political form—critiques showing that supposedly progressive or at least subversive noirs were in fact just as conservative, reactionary, or ideologically complicit as any other garden variety Hollywood product—and a more strictly formalist/historical one, in the shape of work by scholars like David Bordwell, who endeavored to show that noir, far from being a significant anomaly or subversive mutation, was in fact just a minor variation on business-as-usual for the “classical Hollywood cinema.” Or, to use Bordwell’s own terminology, the goal was to show that noir existed firmly within Hollywood’s typical “bounds of difference” (Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson 1985, 70). While I hope that the preceding chapters have shown that such “bounds,” such that they exist(ed), were much more elastic and far less defined than totalizing modes of analysis tend to allow for, I would like to conclude the body of this study by considering two films that strike me as being genuinely strange in ways that exceed even most extreme or outré moments of the films heretofore discussed. I speak of Anthony Mann’s two experiments in applying noir aesthetics and storytelling procedures to © The Author(s) 2020 N. Deyo, Film Noir and the Possibilities of Hollywood, Palgrave Close Readings in Film and Television, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37058-9_8

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the historical drama/“costume picture” genre, 1949’s Reign of Terror (aka The Black Book) and 1951’s The Tall Target. In his own response to Bordwell’s attempts at defining film noir out of existence, Andrew Britton, in the essay that inspired this book’s title, identifies Reign of Terror as a significant example of a film that stands as an implicit challenge or rebuke to the positivist classificatory procedures inherent in Bordwell’s project. From the point of view of the Bordwell approach, Britton notes, Reign of Terror appears “stubbornly equivocal: it purports to be a ‘historical film,’ but at the same time, it flaunts its perverse knowledge of the narrative structures and visual styles” ([1989] 2009, 448). From Britton’s perspective, in contrast, such examples of “textual miscegenation” may be seen as demonstrating, in a particularly extreme form, the studio system’s inherently and authentically radical and explosive potential (“rather like holding a fireworks display in a gunpowder plant” [457]) and as highlighting the fact that “the studio system mark[ed] the last point at which it was historically possible for a bourgeois art form to be rigorously and systematically conventional while at the same time subverting, and throwing into confusion, all existing cultural boundaries and proprieties and the ideologies of culture guaranteed by them” (456). By openly flaunting their boundary crossing, their “perverse knowledge” of other genres and forms, Mann’s two “historical noirs” may be seen as particularly privileged examples of this aspect of studio filmmaking. The question before us, then, is what exactly are the particular results of this particular experimental admixture? What happens when postwar Hollywood’s most contemporary stylistic and narrative procedures are brought to bear on the often backward-­ looking material of the costume drama? What vision of the world, of history and politics, do they offer?

The Films But first, summaries and background on the films themselves. As Leger Grindon explains in a detailed history of the film’s production, Reign of Terror began as an attempt on the part of poverty row studio Eagle-Lion to break into prestigious “A”-quality filmmaking with a historical epic about the French Revolution, bringing in producer Walter Wanger to oversee the project. The studio’s inherent financial limitations eventually caught up to the production, however, and what was once envisioned as a top-line feature starring the likes of Victor Mature and Joan Crawford was reconfigured by Mann, cinematographer John Alton, screenwriter

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Philip Yorda, and producer (and former set designer) William Cameron Menzies into a more modest “programmer” in the expressionistic action/ thriller style that was the studio’s, and Mann’s, bread and butter at the time (Grindon 1994, 71–72). And so dreams of Joan Crawford and Victor Mature gave way to the reality of Arlene Dahl and Robert Cummins. The resulting film portrays a highly abridged and altered version of the end of Maximilien Robespierre’s (played by Richard Basehart) titular Reign of Terror and the events of the Thermidorian Reaction. It centers on the exploits of the fictional Charles D’Aubingy (Cummins), a patriot brought to Paris by François Barras (Richard Hart) and others who seek to stop Robespierre from becoming dictator. Impersonating an infamous prosecutor for Strasbourg, D’Aubingy is able to pierce the Jacobins’ inner circle and, with the help of others, including the love interest/femme fatale figure Madelon (Dahl), locate Robespierre’s secret “black book,” which contains the names of everyone he plans to denounce and send to the guillotine. Once the list becomes public, the National Convention rises up and overthrows Robespierre. Meanwhile D’Aubingy and Madelon flee the chaos of the counter-revolution together. In a brief epilogue, Fouché, a former ally of Robespierre’s who switched sides as the tides turned, encounters an anonymous soldier in the streets whose face we never see and who, after a short conversation, introduces himself to Fouché as “Bonaparte, Napoleon Bonaparte.” Made two years later, shortly after Mann had made the jump from poverty row to major studio directing, The Tall Target takes a similarly capricious approach to the historical record, inserting a fictional protagonist into the reconstruction of a real historical event. Here, the historical event is the so-called Baltimore plot, a conspiracy to assassinate Abraham Lincoln on the eve of his first inauguration that led the president, under the guidance of Allan Pinkerton, to sneak through Baltimore unannounced on an earlier train than the one he was scheduled to be riding upon. The film itself centers on the efforts of New York Police Department Sergeant John Kennedy (Dick Powell, effectively reprising his version of Philip Marlowe from Murder, My Sweet [Edward Dmytryk 1944]), who becomes aware of the plot and sets out to thwart it, in spite of the disbelief expressed by his superiors in the police department, who demand he turn in his badge at the start of the film for insubordination. He boards a train bound for Baltimore and has a series of run-ins with various players in the murder plot, including the would-be assassin himself, a southern West  Point

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graduate named Lance Beaufort (Marshall Thompson), and Adolphe Menjou’s Col. Caleb Jeffers, whose role as the plot’s ringleader is revealed in a second act twist. Beaufort’s sister, Ginny (Paula Raymond) and her personal slave Rachel (Ruby Dee) also play key roles, with Rachel providing Kennedy with important information that helps him crack the case. After besting Beaufort in hand-to-hand combat and throwing him from the train, Kennedy learns that Lincoln himself had been secreted aboard train during a stopover in Philadelphia. A short epilogue, similar in tone to Reign of Terror’s, takes us to Lincoln’s private compartment and ends with the president mournfully musing about the shamefulness of a president sneaking into his own inauguration “like a thief in the night.” The film ends as the camera looks out the train’s window at the Capitol Rotunda, then still under construction. The relative strangeness of these films may be sensed in some degree from these plot summaries alone. Where many Hollywood historical dramas were sweeping epics or generational chronicles, these movies are both streamlined thrillers in the crime film mold. That the films really were genuinely strange by the standards of their period is confirmed by the fact that the studios’ marketing arms appear not to have known what to do with them. In his recounting of the film’s rocky production history, Grindon charts the progressive removal of all references to the French Revolution from the advertising for Reign of Terror. In pre-release publicity material, he shows, the film’s setting and context were clearly articulated and emphasized. By the time of its initial release in Los Angeles, however, the ads in the Los Angeles Times indicate a shift toward a portrayal of the film as a more generic historical melodrama, with no specific references to France or the Revolution. By the time of the film’s fall release in New  York, Grindon goes on to show, the title has been changed to more generic and historically non-specific The Black Book and its newspaper and magazine advertisements were practically indistinguishable from any other contemporary “B” thriller (1994, 7–78). The posters and print ads for The Tall Target similarly elide any reference to the period setting or to Lincoln (save for the cryptic tagline: “You’ll never see the target till the very end!”) and greatly overstate the relatively minor role played by Paula Raymond (the second tagline: “A Girl Whose Hands Were Never Meant to Hold a Gun!”). Even its trailer, in which one might expect a fuller or more accurate preview of plot and setting, effectively portrays the film as a contemporary detective thriller, emphasizing Powell’s role as the lone, hard-boiled hero but foregoing any reference to the actual circumstances

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of that hard-boiled heroism. When confronted with these strange admixtures of historical content and contemporary thriller/noir aesthetics and narrative form, Hollywood chose to sell them exclusively as examples of the latter.

Ideology and Historical Fiction To return to the questions posed above, we might now consider the results of this tricky and strange admixture in order to see just how and to what extent it proves “explosive,” as Britton suggests. An ideological analysis of the films’ narratives, however, suggests somewhat dim prospects on this front. If looked as straightforward allegories or attempts to comment upon contemporary politics by way of historical recreation, the films appear highly conventional, seeming to conform in many respects with the general understanding that historical fiction, at least in its mainstream varieties, is a broadly conservative genre. In many respects, even, their apparent ideological or political point of view bears a strong resemblance to that expressed in the novels of Sir Walter Scott. Georg Lukács’s pathbreaking analysis of those novels proves quite relevant here, particularly his description of Scott’s typical protagonists and their relationship to the political forces and struggles the novels chronicle. Scott, Lukács writes, seeks the “middle way” between the extremes and endeavors to demonstrate artistically the historical reality of this way …. The hero of a Scott novel is always a more or less mediocre, average English gentleman. He generally possesses a certain, though never outstanding, degree of practical intelligence, a certain moral fortitude and decency which even rises to a capacity for self-sacrifice, but which never grows into sweeping human passion, is never the enraptured devotion to a great cause. ([1937] 1981, 32)

At the level of both narrative and characterization, Reign of Terror and The Tall Target each fit comfortably into this basic paradigm, with both featuring, as we have seen, an average and commonsensical protagonist facing off with demagogues and extremists. Of the two, Reign of Terror’s apparent politics are the more straightforward and schematic. As Grindon notes, the film’s portrayal of Robespierre and Saint-Just as maniacs and would-be tyrants is well in line with “the transformation of revolutionary leaders into in bloodthirsty monsters that pervades popular culture” (1994, 5). Such a depiction can be seen from

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the film’s very first moments, in which a newsreel style prologue introduces viewers to the key historical players in the saga. The six figures it introduces (Robespierre, Saint-Just, Fouché, Barras, Tallien, and Danton) are effectively split into two camps, one good and one evil. Barras and Tallien are both simply described as “honest men” while Danton is identified as “savior of France.” Meanwhile, Robespierre is described as a “fanatic” with a “twisted mind” and Saint-Just, most lurid of all, is tagged as a “connoisseur of roses and blood.” In neither case is any mention made of belief or ideology. Rather, in the traditional style of melodrama, ideological disputes are transformed into a set of personal virtues (honesty and patriotism) or vices (fanaticism and bloodlust). Perhaps most telling of all, however, is the description of Fouché as a consummate “politician” who is “always on both sides, never in the middle.” Such a description clearly codes “the middle” as a preferred place to be, and faults Fouché for cynically playing both sides rather than seeking a true course of moderation. As if to underline this point, in a later scene, the hero D’Aubingy is asked what side of the struggle he is on and he responds “it looks like …. I’m in the middle.” The film’s conclusion further cements its rejection of, in Lukács’s words, “enraptured devotion to a great cause” in favor of simple “moral fortitude and decency” by having D’Aubingy, his task completed, choose to leave Paris with Madelon rather than stick around for Robespierre’s overthrow and the ensuing riotous violence. The Tall Target’s apparent ideological vision is similarly moderate/conservative and invested in the valorization of moral fortitude and practical intelligence over passionate political commitment, though it does wade more into specifics than does the earlier film, presumably because the Civil War and its attendant concerns hit much closer to home for both the filmmakers and their audience than the more distant events of the French Revolution. Moreover, its politics would surely scan as more broadly progressive to contemporary viewers, as its villains are traitorous slaveowners rather than radical Jacobins. Indeed, the film’s general portrayal of supposedly genteel southerners as murderous psychopaths can seem at times like a rejection of Hollywood’s romanticizing of such figures from Birth of a Nation (D.W.  Griffith 1915) to Gone with the Wind (Victor Fleming 1939). In particular, Marshall Thompson’s portrayal of the would-be assassin Lance Beaufort registers as a parody of the Ashley Wilkes-style Confederate archetype. Similarly, though its portrayal of Ruby Dee’s Rachel seems initially to fall into the retrograde trope of the willing slave who unconditionally loves her masters, the film eventually complicates this

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portrayal by having her betray Beaufort in order to help Sergeant Kennedy and by giving her a stirring monologue in which she openly rebukes the institution slavery, declaring that “freedom isn’t something you should be able to give me …. Freedom is something I should have been born with.” These apparently progressive gestures, however, are ultimately subsumed by a broader ideological ambivalence. This ambivalence can be seen in numerous small ways, such as the film’s portrayal of the lone character who gives voice to the abolitionist position as a batty, nosy, and overbearing old woman (played by character actress Florence Bates in a manner overtly redolent of her performance as Joan Fontaine’s initial employer in Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940)). More pointedly, however, it is embodied in Powell’s Sergeant Kennedy, who even more than Reign of Terror’s D’Aubingy stands as an exemplar of the character type described by Lukács. No moment better encapsulates the ethos of this character— and by extension, presumably, the ethos of the entire film—than the speech he gives explaining his dedication to saving Lincoln’s life, which occurs just prior to Rachel’s stirring rebuke of the institution of slavery. “I’m no Republican or abolitionist,” Powell intones in a reverent whisper. “But I guarded Mr. Lincoln while he was campaigning in New  York. I helped him open a window. He held a door for me. I found a parcel for him …. I was only with him for 48 hours, but when he left, he shook my hand and thanked me and wished me well. I was never so taken with a human man.” As in the roll call that opens Reign of Terror, the greatness of a grand world-historical figure is here rendered in starkly personal and individualistic terms. Lincoln was a great man and worth saving, Kennedy’s speech implies, not because of his political commitments but because he was good and honest. In terms of the broader allegorical significance of these narratives, we can identify both specific and more general reference points. In his discussion of Reign of Terror, Grindon points to two potential “inspirations” for the film’s political/historical allegory, suggesting that it might be read as either an expression of “anxiety over the growing concentration of authoritarian power” in the growth of the Cold War national security state and the expansion of executive power by the Truman administration, or as a reaction to the anti-communist hysteria that gripped Hollywood in the 1940s and 1950s, with Robespierre’s “black book” standing as an allusion to the Hollywood blacklist and his unilateral tribunals of accused traitors functioning as a stand-in for the House Un-American Activities Committ ee (HUAC) hearings (Grindon 1994, 88–90). Beyond these immediate

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reference points, though, both Reign of Terror and The Tall Target can quite easily be read as expressions of the broader ethos of Cold War anti-­ communist liberalism’s more reactionary elements, with its celebrations of “common sense” individualism as the only true and virtuous path for human civilization and its concomitant hostility toward institutions, government power, or anything else that could be abusively tagged as “totalitarianism.” Grindon cites a letter from Walter Wanger to Max Youngstein in which he gives voice to precisely this worldview and suggests that Reign of Terror be explicitly marketed as “political” in exactly this fashion: I think the best way to make a lot of dough with this … would be to go all out and maybe have some of the ads warn the public that we will be going through a REIGN OF TERROR in this country if we don’t watch out and that there is a REIGN OF TERROR all over the world. Let this be hailed as the Motion Picture Industry’s effort to stop all kinds of totalitarianism. (qtd. in Grindon 1994, 90)

Wanger here demonstrates a clear and perspicuous understanding of the film’s overt politics and ideology, as well as the relationship between this ideology and the logic of American capitalism (“the best way to make a lot of dough with this”). In a final analysis, both The Tall Target and Reign of Terror appear from the perspective of traditional ideological critique as not only emblematic of the conservatism typical of Hollywood historical drama more generally, but also as illuminating early examples of the sort of genuinely reactionary narratives that would become more and more prevalent as the Cold War progressed. In fact, a lineage might be traced from The Tall Target to the likes of Dirty Harry (Don Siegel 1971), Lethal Weapon (Richard Donner 1987) and other similarly reactionary films. Early in the film, Kennedy approaches his superiors with information about the plot against Lincoln. After they laugh him off and warn him off investigating further, he relinquishes his badge and service revolver in anger, establishing himself in the process as an early precursor to Harry Callahan, Martin Riggs, and all the other “loose cannon” heroes and renegade cops who spent the 1970s and 1980s dealing out extra-juridical violence to crooks and criminals in power fantasies designed to appeal to the “law and order” impulses of the so-­ called silent majority.

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Historical Fiction and the Hermeneutic Code The preceding analysis applies principally to what we might call, following the literary critic Helen Vendler, the films’ “paraphrasable content.” For Vendler, writing in the context of an analysis of Shakespeare’s sonnets, such “paraphrasable prepositional content is merely the jumping off point for [a work’s] real work,” which is formal and aesthetic (1999, xiii). While I do not share Vendler’s corollary belief that “any set of remarks about a [work] which would be equally true of its paraphrasable content” should not be regarded as genuine criticism (I surely would not have spent as much time and space articulating the above ideological analysis if I did not think such an activity worthwhile), her polemic is a useful injunction to always be mindful of the formal problems or aesthetic complexities that may arise in the moment-by-moment articulation of even the most apparently blatant ideological narratives. In Reign of Terror and The Tall Target, the formal problem that produces the greatest level of interest and complexity is born from that marriage of historical content and noir/thriller form discussed at this chapter’s outset. More specifically, it has to do with the functioning of the what Roland Barthes, in S/Z, calls narrative’s “hermeneutic code,” or the systematic raising and answering of questions (“enigmas” in Barthes’s terminology) that drives stories forward and promotes audience engagement (1974, 19). The construction and elaboration of such questions poses a particular problem for any historical narrative due to the fact that most audience members are likely to possess a degree of foreknowledge regarding any plot developments that rest upon actual historical events. Many historical narratives skirt, or even exploit, this situation by investing their energy into showing how fictional characters are affected by well-known historical events or catastrophes, often using the audience’s foreknowledge of what is to come as a means of increasing, rather than dispelling, dramatic tension and uncertainty. Gone with the Wind, for instance, derives no small amount of its power from the fact that we as viewers know that Sherman will burn Atlanta and the South will lose the war. Thus, we watch intently to see what will become of Scarlett O’Hara in the aftermath of these events. The hermeneutic enigmas posed by a film such as this, then, are primarily character based, and historical inevitability is a feature, rather than a bug, of their narrative design. Because they are working in a far more plot-oriented, rather than character-­oriented, generic mode, Reign of Terror and The Tall Target

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cannot really function in this way. Unlike more character-oriented forms of melodrama, mystery/thriller films are typically organized around more plot-oriented enigmas (“who is the killer?” being the chief example). In such a situation, the inevitability inherent to stories derived from history could potentially pose a much greater problem than it does in a film like Gone with the Wind, especially in situations where key narrative questions concern well-known facts of history. Such is the case with both Reign of Terror and The Tall Target, in which the answers to the films’ foundational narrative question—namely, “Will Charles stop Robespierre from becoming dictator?” and “Will Kennedy prevent Lincoln’s assassination?”—are known from the outset. The mixture of the suspense thriller and historical drama genres in these films would thus seem, in the abstract, fatal for the type of engagement and interest Hollywood films typically seek to generate. And yet, both films manage to overcome the dissipation of drama and suspense that one would expect in these situations in order to construct dynamic and engaging viewing experiences. The question, then, is how? To answer, we will need to turn to detailed close reading of the films themselves. Though made later, The Tall Target proves slightly more straightforward in its selection of formal strategies, and so we will begin with it before considering Reign of Terror.

Suspense in The Tall Target The Tall Target employs a number of interrelated strategies for building suspense and engagement. The first of these is the use of a deadline-­ oriented plot structure, or what is often and more colloquially known as a “ticking time bomb” scenario. Such a structure is, of course, quite common to the thriller genre, as it immediately supplies the action with a palpable sense of urgency. The film introduces this motif from the very outset, and a detailed analysis of its opening sequences will provide us with a sense of the various means and devices through which the film establishes and underscores its concern for deadlines. The opening scene, set at the train station an hour before departure, depicts a conversation between the train’s conductor, Gannon, and a station agent, Crowley, in which the station agent relays to the conductor orders from the US government decreeing that all trains should run on reduced speed out of caution due to “civil unrest.” After Crowley complains that they can thank the “radical Republicans” for the delay, Gannon responds, “Republicans or secessionists, my aim is to bring the Flyer into Washington Depot at 9:00 AM, if

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the lord is willing” before dismissively dropping the orders to run with caution out of the train window. In addition to giving early voice to the political ambivalence described and analyzed above, this brief and seemingly incidental conversation between two minor characters helps to establish the film’s tightly compressed timeframe, identifying both a geographic and temporal endpoint: Washington, DC, less than 12 hours later (Crowley mentions in passing that the orders to slow down arrived at 9:15 pm, giving us a rough sense of what time it is as the film opens). We have not yet been introduced to the main characters or learned that a plot to assassinate the president is afoot and already we are being given a clear sense that, in this film, time will be of the essence. As the scene unfolds and we begin to learn more of the plot’s details the film continues to emphasize the centrality of time and deadlines. After the opening conversation, Crowley heads back to the platform, where he encounters Inspector Riley (Regis Toomey), who explains that he is there to see off his friend, whose ticket and baggage he has. Crowley responds that the gates open in 15 minutes (another deadline) and says that he’ll let Riley wait on the train before asking what the passenger’s name is. As Riley answers “His name’s Kennedy, John Kennedy” the film dissolves to a new location, a police office in which we find Powell pacing back and forth and checking his watch. A door in the background reads “Simon G. Stroud: Supt of Police” and an officer sits posted in front of it. Beyond the door we can hear a group of men laughing. As the dissolve completes the following exchange occurs: Kennedy: Officer: Kennedy: Officer:

How much longer? Listen, Kennedy, I told him you were waiting. Well tell him again, my train leaves in an hour. He said he’ll call you, he’s busy now

Dissatisfied with this non-answer and tired of waiting, Kennedy blows past the officer and into the office. There, he finds a group of men gathered around the Superintendents desk, including Menjou’s Col. Jeffers. Kennedy confronts the superintendent over a report he has recently filed, which the commanding officer refers to simply as “hogwash.” The film then cuts to a medium close-up of Kennedy as he responds to this dismissal, passionately pleading for the department to take the report seriously: “For the last time, will you take action Mr. Stroud? If you don’t there will be a shooting in Baltimore tomorrow that will blow this country

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apart.” As the conversation continues among the men, we learn that Kennedy has uncovered the plot to assassinate Lincoln the following day during his scheduled speech in Baltimore. The men still laugh off his pleas as “hogwash,” and Kennedy declares his intent to go over the superintendents head to warn authorities in Baltimore itself, eventually leading to him turning in his badge in disgust and storming out. Having thus signaled the stakes in play and provided us with a rough sketch of Kennedy’s character as a dedicated “man of action” type while also further underscoring the urgency of the situation, the film then returns to the train station for the final segment of this opening sequence. As the scene begins, the camera focuses on a newspaper seller in the middle of the station shouting about the election of Jefferson Davis as a military marching band, led by Col. Jeffers, passes through. The combined noise of shouts and fanfare, on top of the normal crowd chatter, produces an anxious cacophony. The camera picks up on Kennedy as he approaches a telegraph station and writes a message to Lincoln requesting an urgent meeting in Philadelphia. He then makes his way toward the train as the boarding procedure begins. He asks after Riley and is told that he will find him waiting on board. When he gets on the train however, Riley is nowhere to be found, and the agents then inform him that if he doesn’t have a ticket he won’t be allowed on the train, regardless of whether or not Riley turns up. He exits the train, desperately calls for Riley, and then makes his way to the ticket counter as the “all aboard!” call is announced and repeated by the Public Address announcer. At the ticket counter, he finds a mob of people and only one window still selling tickets. Encountering a number of characters bickering over who will get the last ticket, including the as-yet-unnamed Ginny Beaufort, Kennedy eventually forces his way to the front of the line and attempts to claim the last ticket by identifying himself as a member of the NYPD. When his authority is challenged, however, he realizes that he no longer has his badge and the ticket agent denies his request. The camera then cuts to the train itself, as its whistle blows and its wheels begin to turn. It then cuts back to Kennedy, who pushes his way through the gate and hops aboard the train just as it departs the platform. This scene is formally significant for a number of reasons, as not only does it continue to build on the deadline motif through Kennedy’s time-­ sensitive telegraph to Lincoln and his rushed and hurried attempts to board the train, but it also illustrates the other strategies the film uses to build suspense and dramatic tension and the ways in which these more

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local strategies feed off of the broader deadline structure. First, in cutting from Kennedy’s futile efforts to buy a ticket to the train itself preparing to leave the station the film effectively creates a physical, symbolic representation of that structure in the form of the train itself, whose implacable forward movement comes, at various points, to embody the apparently heedless motion of the assassination plot. Second, it effectively strands Kennedy in a seemingly hopeless situation as a lone voice of reason coming up against other individuals and institutional representatives who either ignore his pleas or declare him a liar, creating a sense of tension and frustration for viewers. This latter strategy was of course a preferred narrative approach of Alfred Hitchcock’s, and in many respects The Tall Target’s early sections seem to be following in the tracks laid down by paranoid thrillers like The 39 Steps (1935) and The Lady Vanishes (1938). Indeed, a scene near the end of the film in which Jeffers attempts to communicate with Beaufort by writing a message on the train’s window would seem to declare the film’s debt to Hitchcock’s similarly train-bound 1938 film, which also  features a significant message written in the dirt on a window. These strategies continue working to build tension and suspense as the film progresses. Another key scene occurs shortly after Kennedy sneaks aboard the train. He returns to his assigned berth and asks a woman and her son who are sitting nearby if they have seen Riley. After receiving no useful information, he gets up to search the train. The film cuts between his progress through the cars and insert shots of the train’s exterior as it chugs along, again emphasizing its implacable forward movement. He eventually makes his way to a cargo car near the front of the train. The space is lit only by a single swinging light, and the chiaroscuro effect this light produces combines with the extreme low angle from which Kennedy’s entrance into the car is shot to produce the most aesthetically noir-like moment of the film thus far, suggesting that something is truly amiss and that danger is afoot. He spots something on the ground, and the camera pans downward to follow him as he bends down to investigate, revealing the object in question to be Riley’s eyeglasses, which are noticeably broken. The deep shadows that bathe the screen in this moment seem to confirm the man’s fate even before Kennedy exits the car and finds his body sprawled unceremoniously on an exterior ledge. As he bends down to confirm that it’s really his friend, the film quickly cuts from a close-up of Riley, his face lifeless and bloodied, to a close-up of Kennedy looking distraught, to a wide shot of the train bathed in darkness as it blows its

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whistle and rounds a bend, then back to the ledge as Riley’s body is thrown suddenly from the train by the momentum of the turn, then to a vaguely low angle shot of the train’s windows as they pass by, and finally back to Kennedy bracing himself against a handrail and gazing around in baffled helplessness. The train’s inevitable forward momentum, which we have already identified as a physical manifestation of the film’s structural emphasis on deadlines, here takes on an even more sinister cast, being the force that removes Riley’s body from the train and leaves Kennedy alone and without any evidence to support his claims that a violent conspiracy is in progress on board. After this, Kennedy heads back into the car and pauses for a moment, standing in near total silence and regarding Riley’s broken glasses, then exits back into the passenger cars. As he moves through the first car of private compartments, Mann cloaks the whole shot in deep dark shadows, emphasizing a sense of desperate isolation. As Powell moves towards the camera, a door creaks open behind him and the film cuts to a close-up of a woman we had earlier seen talking with Crowley about her request for total privacy. While we will later learn that she is a part of the team working to assist Lincoln in his secret journey, at this point she is more or less a total mystery to us. Hearing her movements, Kennedy turns around and knocks on her door and asks if she heard a struggler. She is implacable in response, saying she heard nothing and reiterating her desire not to be disturbed before wishing him “good night” and curtly slamming the door in his face. The film then cuts to a lounge car as Kennedy rejoins the populated section of the train. Here we overhear snippets of a conversation between a number of characters, including the abolitionist played by Florence Bates, about recent national events, including the secession of Texas. Kennedy himself says nothing, and after pausing for a moment continues his walk back through the train, entering another darkened hallway where he encounters Col. Jeffers, standing in the door of his private compartment. The two exchange pleasantries, and Jeffers mentions that he is going to Baltimore, which piques Kennedy’s interest (or suspicion) but not enough to provoke further comment, and he eventually bids Jeffers adieu to continue back to his own seat. There, much to his and our surprise, he encounters a large man sitting in his seat and wearing the coat he had left there when he went off to investigate the train. He confronts the man, and Crowley comes by to settle the dispute. The mystery man then claims to be John Kennedy and presents Crowley with the ticket that Riley

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had been holding, calling Kennedy crazy when he protests. When Kennedy attempts to plead his case by asking Crowley to recall that they had met earlier and that Kennedy had asked about Riley, the conductor is unsympathetic and tells Kennedy he’ll have to leave the train at the next station if he cannot present a ticket. Kennedy is able to remain on board only through the eventual intervention of Jeffers, who happens to have been forced to purchase an extra ticket in order to secure a private cabin. This sequence represents probably the peak of the film’s Hitchcock mimicry, recalling those sequences in films like The Lady Vanishes and the later North by Northwest (1959) in which the hero is left alone and isolated in the midst of a mysterious conspiracy, their pleas to authority figures falling on deaf ears and leading to accusations of lying or insanity. It also serves as an effective illustration of the way the film works to re-orient the Hermeneutic Code away from the plot’s big question (will Lincoln survive?) and toward smaller, more localized enigmas such as “how many people on the train are part of the conspiracy?” and, more centrally, “how will Kennedy get out of this situation?” From this point onward, the film’s basic structuring principle becomes the construction of increasingly complicated and threatening challenges and difficulties for Kennedy to overcome, and its pleasure largely derives from seeing (1) how he is able to escape and (2) how each apparent escape leads inexorably into another even more perilous situation. The result of this approach is that the film, like many thrillers, effectively consists of a series of semi-self-contained set-­pieces. We can get a sense of the way these set-pieces themselves are constructed and how they interact with one another by considering the film’s next major sequence. After being given a ticket by Jeffers, Kennedy resumes his investigations on the train. This leads to him discovering a suitcase of guns belonging to Beaufort and meeting Rachel, who assures him that she and the Beaufort siblings are going all the way to Atlanta rather than stopping in Baltimore (her later discovery that this is not actually so will prove central to solving the case). After this interaction, he resumes his movements through the train, pausing for a moment to attempt to steal a pistol from a sleeping man’s pocket, as his own gun has been taken by the impostor Kennedy. After he is thwarted in this by the man’s movements, he gets up and begins walking down the aisle again. As he does so, the camera pushes in for an expressive and evocative low angle close-up that tracks him as he moves. The train’s whistle blows, and Kennedy’s face suddenly registers alarm. The camera then pans slowly down and around his body, revealing a pistol

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held by his impostor pressed firmly into his spine. The train pulls in for a brief stopover in New Brunswick and the killer says, forebodingly, “This is where we get off.” He walks Kennedy over to the side of the train facing away from the station, Kennedy asks if he can smoke a cigar before the execution and the man allows it, saying he’s “waiting for the whistle,” affirming the film’s association between the train’s forward progress, the resumption of which is signaled by the whistle, with death. Kennedy, however, is able to catch the man with his guard down and sucker punch him, causing him to drop his gun. The two exchange blows, before going to the ground in order to wrestle over the weapon. The fight is filmed in practical silence, with only occasional grunts and the ambient noise of the idling train engine on the soundtrack, and assembled out of a series of brief, quickly edited shots, cutting between close-ups of their hands struggling over the gun, and wider shots of their bodies as they jockey for position. The film then cuts to a close-up of the train’s whistle as it begins to blow as the camera then pans down to the station, where Crowley begins calling the passengers back and announcing the train’s imminent departure. What then follows is a rapid but complex cross-cutting sequence that is perhaps best conveyed via a schematic shot breakdown rather than a lengthy prose description: Shot 1: Close-up of Kennedy and his assailant under the train. Kennedy is on top of the man, whose head is pressed against the track, and shouts ‘Who’s giving you orders?! Who is it?! Talk!’ Shot 2: Insert shot of the engine cabin as the engineers prepare for departure. Shot 3: Close-up of the trains wheel beginning to turn; camera pans to reveal Kennedy and his impostor, who begins to shout ‘No!’ Shot 4: Cut to Jeffers standing on the station platform. He is joined by Crowley, and both men hear the shouts from the other side of the train. Shot 5: Cut back to the set-up from Shot 3, the impostor continues to beg for his life as the wheel continues to move toward his head. He is able to get the upper hand, rolling Kennedy onto his back. Off-screen we hear a voice yell, ‘Hold the train!’ Shot 6: Return to set-up from Shot 2 as the engineers pull the brake Shot 7: Close-up of the two men continuing to struggle as the wheel comes to a stop

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Shot 8: POV shot from Crowley’s perspective as he looks toward the locomotive, then looks under the train to see the source of the noise. Shot 9: Low angle shot from under the train. Jeffers enters, facing the camera, and draws his gun. Shot 10: Return to set-up from Shot 7; the two men continue to struggle as the image fills with steam, obscuring who is who. Shot 11: Return to set-up from Shot 9 as Jeffers squints into the fog and fires Shot 12: Return to the men struggling as the figure on top goes limp. We cannot see which man it is. Shot 13: Wide shot of the train, as Jeffers, Crowley, and others rush around to the other side Shot 14: Cut in to a closer group shot, as it is revealed that Kennedy has survived. At less than a minute long, the sequence has an ASL of around four seconds, and its rapid cross-cutting between the different elements of the unfolding action helps build suspense and create a sense of chaotic uncertainty. Indeed, even though the rules of Hollywood filmmaking tell us that the protagonist would not be dispatched less than a third of the way through the film, the scene’s construction works to create a great deal of uncertainty about Kennedy’s fate, once again re-directing our emotional and intellectual investment as viewers away from the sweeping concerns of historical fiction and toward the more immediate thrills typical of the thriller.

Visual Excess and Aesthetic Spectacle in Reign of Terror Reign of Terror uses many of these same strategies. From the outset it, like The Tall Target, clearly establishes a deadline structure, as the opening voiceover ominously intones that “in 48 hours, France will have a dictatorship!” as the film shows us long shots of a lone figure riding across the countryside on horseback accompanied by pounding, dramatic orchestral music, immediately conjuring a well-codified image of the rescuing hero riding to save the day (one may think of the chase/rescue scenes featured in so many of Griffith’s films). The pressure of time is further underlined by the overall construction of this opening sequence. Following the

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voiceover sequence, the rider (who we soon introduced to as Charles D’Aubingy) arrives at what appears to be a rural prison, where he meets with the Marquis de Lafayette, an exiled army general held as a political prisoner by the Austrians. D’Aubingy tells Lafayette of Robespierre’s efforts to curb or destroy the “liberties we fought for in the revolution” and avers that Robespierre is “demanding dictatorship.” Lafayette tells Charles he is the only man who can stop Robespierre, and gives him a ring, instructing him to rendezvous with an associate in Strasbourg. The film then immediately cuts to a new location, a lonely and dilapidated windmill, as Charles approaches on horseback, eliding whatever was left of Charles and Lafayette’s conversation. As he enters the windmill, a hand bearing a knife appears from off-screen as its owner asks, “who are you?” Charles holds the ring up, and the knife-wielder leans into the frame to examine it before exclaiming, “From the Marquis de Lafayette? You have come just in time. The plans are all set.” Immediately following this, the film dissolves back to the external shot of the windmill, the exciting music from the opening resumes, and Charles rides off-screen to the right of the frame. As he does so, the film dissolves to a shot of Robespierre denouncing Danton at the assembly, with Basehart’s face occupying the left-half of the screen in profile. The effect is obviously to suggest, through spatial orientation and juxtaposition, that Charles is riding toward a conflict with Robespierre, thus underlining from the very outset the endpoint toward which the film will be progressing. As can be seen just from this brief description, this sequence employs a number of strategies, both overt and expository (the “48  hours” pronouncement, the man in the windmill’s statement that Charles has come “just in time”) as well as formal and stylistic (the use of elision and ellipsis, the concluding flourish just described) to ratchet up dramatic tension and imbue the film with a sense of urgency from its very first moments. It quickens the pulse and puts you on the edge of your seat even if, in the back of your mind, you know for a fact already that Robespierre will be thwarted. Also like The Tall Target, the film constructs a number of stand-alone suspense set-pieces that work to re-direct our attention away from “big picture” historical questions to more immediate and localized concerns. These sequences almost all turn on the question of whether or not Charles, under disguise as Duval, the Prosecutor of Strasbourg, will be found out as he moves among the circles of power in Paris. Though it is established that neither Robespierre nor Saint-Just not anyone else in their inner circle actually knows what the prosecutor looks like, the film works to construct

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scenarios in which the knowledge of Charles’s true identity threatens to come to light. The film begins employing this technique from the moment Charles kills the real Duval in his room at an Inn outside of Paris. Soon after we see the killing, Madelon (though we do not yet know her name) arrives at the Inn and asks to see Duval. Bathed in darkness, and thus unaware that they know each other, the two have a tense conversation as they attempt to suss out who the other is working for. When Charles finally reveals that he is an agent of Barras and the anti-Robespierre faction, Madelon, who we see secretly holding a knife, reveals that she is there to provide him with the details of his mission in Paris (shades, here, of the espionage thriller). He then finally lights a candle and the two recognize each other, have a briefly fraught exchange about their history together, and then she leaves. As she is going, she passes Fouché, who is climbing the stairs with the Inn’s proprietor. As they open the door and the proprietor begins to announces that Duval escort has arrived, there is an orchestral sting and the man’s voice trails off after seeing Charles in the room. “You look so different, Mr. Duval,” he says, as the film cuts to Duval for an agonizing few seconds of silence as he picks up his wig and moves toward the two men. “Different?” he asks forcefully and confidently, casting a glance at Fouché, whose face is foregrounded in profile, before continuing, “Why should the appearance of a public prosecutor interest you so much, citizen? You haven’t, by chance, a guilty conscience?” Flustered, and attempting to save face, the man exclaims that it must have been the wig, and then leaves Fouché and “Duval” to their business. As in The Tall Target, the pleasure and interest of such moments derives from the construction of close calls, of seeing how the protagonist can escape from situations that at first appear hopeless. And, as in the later film, Reign of Terror proceeds in part by raising the level of danger in each ensuing set piece and constructing ever-more-elaborate situations for its hero to navigate. In addition to these strategies, however, Reign of Terror also invites audience interest in a manner using a technique largely absent from The Tall Target: through pure visual spectacle. As with Mann’s other collaborations with John Alton at Eagle-Lion, Reign of Terror explores the outer limits of what we know think of as noir stylistics, with baroque framings and lighting set-ups that at times evoke the work of earlier expressionist filmmakers like Josef Von Sternberg. As Laura Mulvey tells us, Von Sternberg was purported to have claimed that he wished his films could be “projected upside down” so that, in Mulvey’s words, “story and character

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involvement would not interfere with the spectator’s undiluted appreciation of the screen image” (1973, 14). We can see in much of Mann’s work with Alton, but especially in Reign of Terror, a similar aesthetic and formal logic, a logic in which “the pictorial space enclosed by the frame is paramount rather than narrative or identification processes” (14). Under such a logic, the operations of the Hermeneutic Code are re-routed, no longer raising questions about events represented in the narrative but rather about the means of representation itself—we no longer ask “what will happen next?” or “will the hero prevail?” but rather “what strange images might the next scene show us?” Another way of framing an aesthetic logic such as this is in terms of what Kristin Thompson calls “cinematic excess.” As she states, “Excess implies a gap or lag in motivation. Even though the presence of a device may not be arbitrary, its motivation can never completely control our perception of the film as a material object …. At that point where motivation fails, excess begins” (1986, 134). In other words, a device (be it lighting, framing, editing, performance, or whatever) becomes excessive in its use the moment at which its presence on-screen outruns any narrative or thematic motivation. Or put differently: if, as Adrian Martin has proposed, a “classical” style is defined by an “organic, coherent, meaningful, controlled art” (2014, 22), then excessive moments are those in which this “aesthetic economy” begins to break down and style takes on a life of its own, with proportion, balance, and control falling by the wayside. We can see such a process in action if we return to the one of the sequences we have already been examining from Reign of Terror, Charles’s killing of the real Duval and his subsequent rendezvous with Madelon before he travels to Paris. First, the killing. The sequence begins with the real Duval (Charles Gordon) being shown to his room by the innkeeper (Dan Seymour). His entrance is framed as a low angle long shot, one that distinctly emphasizes the deep shadows and small pocket of light in the darkened room. This shot holds for a few moments as Duval regards himself in in mirror placed near the front of the frame. The film then cuts to a reverse shot, showing Duval from the back and his reflection in the mirror, again taken from a noticeably odd low angle. As he continues to gaze at his reflection, making a move to fix his hair, the camera beings to track in slowly and a hand suddenly emerges from the bottom of the frame, reaching into the shot. Duval turns around and his face contorts in fear as the hand grasps him by the throat and forces him down onto the vanity, knocking the mirror

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askance. The camera holds on this shot as we hear the muffled sounds of a struggle and can see Duval’s hand flailing helplessly in the mirror. The assailant’s hand once again appears in the frame, this time grasping a knife, which it then brings down on the prone Duval, disappearing out of the frame as we see Duval’s reflection go limp and fall out of sight. Finally, the hand appears for a third time, reaching up to put out a candle sitting on the vanity, as the film cuts to Madelon knocking at the Inn’s front door to be admitted in. This brief sequence, though short, effectively encapsulates the film’s preference for excessive effect. Indeed, not only does the handling of the real Duval’s killing exceed narrative motivation, it in fact serves to cut against the story’s apparent intended message. First, the use of the quasi-­ first person POV approach which keeps the killer, who we soon learn is Charles, off-screen does not seem in any way immediately justified by narrative necessity or presentation exigency: we can easily guess the assailant’s identity, so there doesn’t seem to be a pressing need to use a camera trick like this to hide it, and the killing could have easily been presented with the same level of excitement from the sequence’s initial camera set-up. What’s more, this approach carries with it a set of associations or connotations that seem quite ill-fitting in this context, as the use of a first-person POV to depict an act of murder is of course a technique typically reserved for concealing the identity of a villainous character, employed in The Maltese Falcon and later profitably exploited by 1970s/1980s horror and slasher films. Now one might contend that such connotations might be intentional, that they might be meant to introduce a sort of moral shading into the film, suggesting that in a period of violence and chaos like the Terror even good and noble men must occasionally become monsters or villains in pursuit of the greater good. Nothing in the rest of the film, however, bears out such a reading. As we have already seen, the opening sequences clearly code Charles as a valiant hero riding to save the day, and this more or less one-dimensionally heroic portrayal is consistent throughout the rest of the film. The depiction of his killing of Duval is effective principally as a moment of visual excitement constituted in excess of narrative and thematic necessity. This highly stylized and aestheticized approach continues in a different key after Madelon is shown to the room. As she climbs the stairs, her figure is cloaked in deep shadows, which are made more obscuring by the fact that she is wearing an elaborate veil. She knocks on the door and the film cuts to a shot inside the room of Charles finishing getting dressed in

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Duval’s clothes. The room is still cloaked in darkness and he stands illuminated in silhouette by the light of the window. Before answering, he closes the window, causing the blinds to cast further shadows on the walls of the room. At the door he asks “who’s there?” and Madelon’s voice answers, “a visitor from Paris.” He opens the door but hides behind it as she enters the room filmed in profile, the light and shadow from the window playing through and across the veil covering her face. The camera holds this framing for a moment as Charles closed the door before cutting to a medium close-up two-shot in which the shadows make it impossible to see either of their faces. “It’s dark in here,” she remarks, calling our attention to the filmmaker’s lighting choices, and Charles responds, “I can hear in the dark, so speak.” She says she has a message to read and needs light, and asks him to light the candle on the bureau. We return to the initial profile shot as he moves closer to her and asks if she can just give him the message. She responds, her voice still in a low whisper, by once again asking him to light the candle. Charles, growing worried, asks, “Why are you so anxious for a light in the room? Don’t you recognize the voice of Duval?” to which she responds, “I’ve never met you before.” As the camera continues to hold on this long shot, the two characters trade lines, each trying to get a sense of the others’ motive and purpose, with Charles asking if she suspects he is not Duval and Madelon responding with mock naïveté, “Who else could you be?” Finally, Charles asks who sent her, Robespierre or Barras, and the camera returns to the frontal framing. “A dangerous question to answer in the dark,” she answers, while slowly removing a dagger from her cloak. She demands that he answer the question first, and the camera cuts into a closer view, one in which his face is partially illuminated but hers is still shrouded in darkness and obscured by the veil. “Barras,” he finally intones, and she asks, “what happened to the real Duval?” Before answering, he moves closer to the camera, bringing his face parallel to hers and plunging it fully into darkness. As the conversation continues and she asks for more details she turns to face him, putting both of them in profile and obscuring both faces in inky black shadows. As she finally begins to relay the message, her eyes and earring occasionally catch the light, providing briefly luminous flashes in the darkness (Fig. 8.1). Having finally arrived at the same page, Charles offers to light the candle. The camera cuts to a close up of his hands in the darkness fumbling with a match, before the wick catches and the room illuminates. At this point, we realize we have been looking at a reflection of his hands in the mirror on the bureau and that the camera has returned to the set-up

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Fig. 8.1  Charles (Robert Cummings) and Madelon (Arlene Dahl) bathed in excessive chiaroscuro in Reign of Terror (Anthony Mann 1949)

employed for depicting Duval’s murder. He pushes the mirror back to an upright position and Madelon’s reflection comes into view as she, in accordance with the mirror’s upward movement simultaneously raises her veil. The film cuts on action to a close up of her face as a look of recognition dawns and she exclaims, smiling, “Charles!” We then cut to what appears to be a standard reverse angle close up of Charles, the shot holds for a few beats of silence before he says, “You’re looking very well, Madelon” before cutting back to the initial set-up, revealing that he is still looking into the mirror and has been speaking to her reflection. He turns toward her, and a rack focus brings his face into clear view while rendering the reflection in the mirror a smeared blur. As the conversation continues, she moves closer, bringing both of them once again into profile. The framing effectively doubles the image of Madelon, simultaneously providing us both with a relatively clearly focused, though still shadowy, view of her face in the foreground and the still-blurred but better illuminated

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reflection in the mirror. The remainder of the conversation then plays out through a slightly more traditional editing pattern, cutting between alternating close-ups and this initial establishing shot. As she leaves, on somewhat uncertain terms owing to what we learn to have been a somewhat fraught history between them, we cut back to the initial framing with which this whole sequence began, the low angle corner shot previously used in showing the real Duval’s entrance into the room. As with the depiction of the murder, there is some level of narrative and thematic motivation for the stylistic devices prominently employed here. As the summary makes clear, Charles has deliberately kept the room pitch dark to do as much as he can to conceal his identity until he can tell if Madelon is here to see him or to see the real Duval. This also has the secondary effect of allowing the film to delay the reveal that Charles and Madelon not only already know each other but were once romantically involved, which allows for the scene’s dynamics to twist part way through so as to maintain and heighten our engagement in interest just as its initial source of tension is resolved. The existence of such motivations prevents the scene’s stylization from seeming forced or arbitrary, but it is difficult not to have one’s attention drawn away from the content of the conversation and toward the visual spectacle of Alton and Mann’s arresting play with light and shadow, particularly during those moments in which the two performers are shot in close-up profile, their faces almost totally obscured in shadow, the image itself practically dissolving into pure abstraction. That the dialogue overtly refers to the utter darkness in the room only further serves to re-direct our focus from the action represented to the means of representation. The same is true for the concluding shots and their clever use of the mirror’s reflections. To be sure, one can easily imagine these images carrying with them a great degree of thematic and symbolic significance and motivation. The splitting of Madelon’s image in two could be used to suggest that the character is “two-faced,” or to foreshadow an eventual betrayal of Charles on her part. The rest of the film, however, does not develop or exploit such suggestions, leaving the use of the mirror in this sequence as a largely decorative touch rather than retroactively imbuing it with overt symbolic weightiness. In his analysis of the film, Grindon remarks upon its use of noir stylistics in contrast with the more typical style of Hollywood historical films, writing that

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Historical films generally present panoramic landscapes, exotic locales, surging crowds—spectacles that express forces working in history. Hence the tendency is toward long shots and epic scope. Reign of Terror prefers n ­ arrow, dim studio streets, constricting enclosures such as the prison cell, the night carriage, or Robespierre’s chamber beneath the bakery. (1994, 84)

To Grindon’s astute observation, I would add that Reign of Terror not only substitutes a different, more noir-ish milieu for the historical film’s usual battlefields, manor houses, and panoramic landscapes, but also that it substitutes one form  of stylistic spectacle for another. Despite being filmed in a cramped and constricting enclosure, the sequences discussed above are no less visually arresting than the grand spectacles of big budget Hollywood historical films. As for the significance of this substitution, Grindon argues that it communicates a “bleak historical attitude,” that its images of claustrophobic interiors “skeptically suggests that the essential political struggles take place underground, among conspirators, in back rooms. Popular forces, political principles, and economic relations exert little interest. The underlying causes of history are submerged and largely inaccessible” (1994, 84). While I think Grindon’s reading here is accurate in describing certain aspects of what we might call Reign of Terror’s philosophy of history, I would propose that it does not quite go far enough. To gain a firmer sense of the effects produced by Reign of Terror and The Tall Target’s intermingling of the formal and stylistic strategies enumerated here and the historical content of their narratives, we must turn our attention to their strange and beguiling epilogues.

Conclusion: The Ruins of History To briefly sum up: in the previous two sections, we surveyed strategies employed by Mann and his collaborators for overcoming formal problems posed by the decision to create suspense/thriller films based on historical events. These strategies include an emphatic use of explicitly articulated deadlines, the construction of elaborate action and suspense set-pieces, and, in Reign of Terror, the creation of baroque, visually arresting images whose interest exceeds narrative and thematic motivation. As mentioned at various points above, each of these strategies effectively functions by re-directing audience engagement or involvement away from the historical questions posed by the films’ narrative content, instead re-focusing it on the immediate experience of the individual scenes or sequences

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themselves. In each, the narrative’s historical perspective, so to speak, is thus simply bracketed for large portions of the runtime. For the most part, it would seem that history as such is pretty much beside the point for these supposedly “historical” dramas. In both films, however, this disposition undergoes a radical shift as the end credits begin approaching. As noted in the brief plot summaries above, both film end with structurally consonant epilogues, jettisoning the main protagonists and drawing our attention back to the real history that the preceding action has encouraged us to forget or ignore. What’s more, the scenes themselves convey a pessimistic view of history, one that undercuts the satisfying triumph of the protagonists’ victory over the films’ villains and evildoers. The appearance of Napoleon at the end of Reign of Terror reminds us that the defeat of the would-be dictator Robespierre would soon be followed by the ascent of a far more ambitious autocrat, while The Tall Target’s version of Lincoln ends the film by declaring himself a coward, and we as viewers are left to remember the fact that though the Confederate plotters on the train have been defeated, the Confederacy itself would soon start a war that would claim over 600,000 American lives, and to recall that though he survived this attempt on his life, a set of plotters similar to those defeated in the film by Powell’s Sgt. Kennedy would succeed where the likes of Beaufort and Jeffers failed (Fig. 8.2). The dynamic here is not dissimilar to the one analyzed by Thomas Elsaesser in his work on the Hollywood family melodrama. Those films, Elsaesser contends, often employed a strategy he refers to as “dramatic discontinuity,” which typically involved “letting the emotions rise and then bringing them down with a thump.” He goes on to argue that …the strategy of building up a climax so as to throttle it the more abruptly is a form of dramatic reversal by which Hollywood directors have consistently criticized the streak of incurably naive and emotional idealism in the American psyche, first by showing it to be indistinguishable from the grossest kind of illusion and self-delusion, then by forcing a confrontation when it is most wounded and contradictory. ([1972] 1985, 181–2)

Looked at in these terms, we can gain a sense of the particular effects achieved by Reign of Terror and The Tall Target’s downbeat epilogues. Having been drawn in by the pressing immediacy of the films’ various spectacles and the aesthetic and formal pleasures of film noir and the suspense/thriller, having grown invested in the individual trials and triumphs

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Fig. 8.2  Abraham Lincoln (uncredited) gazes at the Capitol Rotunda, still under construction, at the conclusion of The Tall Target (Anthony Mann 1951)

of Charles D’Aubingy and John Kennedy, the viewer is suddenly confronted with the stark realities of a history in which the minor triumphs of the individual are dwarfed by the larger forces of war and violence. We are left, like Walter Benjamin’s angel of history, to gawk dumbly at the catastrophe of history as it piles “wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it at the front of [our] feet” ([1950] 2007, 257). Such were the possibilities of Hollywood that a pair of noir-inflected thrillers might have been made to give expression to such a vision.

References Barthes, Roland. 1974. S/Z: An Essay. Trans. Richard Howard. New  York: Hill & Wang. Benjamin, Walter. [1950] 2007. Theses on the Philosophy of History. In Illuminations, ed. Harry Zohn and Hannah Arendt, 253–265. New  York: Schocken Books.

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Bordwell, David, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson. 1985. The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style & Mode of Production to 1960. New  York: Columbia University Press. Britton, Andrew. [1989] 2009. The Philosophy of the Pigeon Hole: Wisconsin Formalism and the ‘Classical Style’. In Britton on Film, ed. Barry Keith Grant. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Elsaesser, Thomas. [1972] 1985. Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family Melodrama. In Movies and Methods, ed. Bill Nichols, vol. II, 165–190. Los Angeles: University of California Press. Grindon, Leger. 1994. Shadows of the Past: Studies in the Historical Fiction Film. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Lukács, Georg. [1937] 1981. The Historical Novel. Trans. Hannah Arendt and Stanley Mitchell. New York: Penguin Books. Martin, Adrian. 2014. Mise en Scène and Film Style: From Classical Hollywood to New Media Art. New York/London: Palgrave Macmillan. Mulvey, Laura. 1975. Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. Screen 16 (3): 6–18. Thompson, Kristin. 1986. The Concept of Cinematic Excess. In Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology, ed. Philip Rosen, 130–143. New  York: Columbia University Press. Vendler, Helen. 1999. The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

PART IV

Conclusion

CHAPTER 9

Conclusion: Some Reflections on Method

A Brief History of This Book At various points in this book, I have discussed moments of self-reflexivity in some of the films I have analyzed, moments in which the filmmakers appear to be commenting upon their own practices as a way of illuminating the limits and possibilities of filmmaking in the Hollywood studio era. I would like to conclude with a self-reflexive moment of my own by using this conclusion as a space to reflect upon this book’s own conditions of production. In doing so, I hope to address questions of method and approach in film studies and explore how this project might be seen as presenting both a traditional critical/analytical argument as well as a demonstration of a certain way of working with the cinema as an object of scholarly inquiry. In other words, I would like to shift my focus from writing about the possibilities of Hollywood to writing about the possibilities of writing about Hollywood. My original conception for the project that would eventually become this book looked very different from the thing you are currently holding in your hands or reading off a screen. Back then, the project was to be an exploration of depictions of ordinary, everyday life in films. My interest in such depictions grew directly out of my encounter with the work of Stanley Cavell, and through it an encounter with his own chief influences— Emerson, Thoreau, and Wittgenstein. Cavell’s interest in the ordinary derives primarily from a desire to found a philosophical system on “an © The Author(s) 2020 N. Deyo, Film Noir and the Possibilities of Hollywood, Palgrave Close Readings in Film and Television, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37058-9_9

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intimacy with existence” and lived experience as a means of staging a “recovery from skepticism” (1988, 4) For him, this means following Wittgenstein in abandoning the abstractions and generalities of metaphysics, which he sees as symptomatic of an intellectual “condition of boredom,” a “false or fantastic excitement” driven by an “intellectually fatal” lack of interest in the concrete experience of the everyday (1988, 7). For Cavell, philosophy should endeavor, in William Wordsworth’s words, to “make the incidents of common life interesting” and to prompt its readers to become interested in, to take an interest in, their own experience. Cavell’s dedication to the ordinary also underwrites his interest in film as an object of study. In an argument redolent of André Bazin and Walter Benjamin, he suggests that film is drawn the “physiognomy of the ordinary,” to depictions of everyday activity, and that it possesses the ability, unique among the arts, to render visible the “density of significance passing by … in our lives” (2005, 206). Because of this, he argues, film can alert us to “the ways in which we miss our lives” and illuminate “the absolutely obvious, to which, at every moment, we are oblivious” (2005, 206). Inspired by the suggestiveness of these remarks, I turned my attention to a genre largely neglected in Cavell’s own writing on the movies: film noir. The noir cycle, as noted several times in the body chapters above, has an interesting relationship with depictions of the ordinary and the everyday. Though seemingly primarily concerned with explorations of criminal deviance and the urban underworld, many individual noirs, I hoped to show, use scenes of “normal” domestic life as a point of contrast, often portraying the noir world as a threat to the safety and stability of ordinary life. I had a sense, then, that, for noir, the ordinary is often simultaneously a structural necessity and a secondary concern. The films themselves often seem to grow bored of domesticity and one can sense, in certain scenes, a restless desire to get back to the seedier noir world. Noir itself, that is, seems often to mirror the disregard for the ordinary that Cavell sees as haunting so much of western philosophy. Having chosen my object of study and developed some ideas about the project’s “big picture” argument, I set to work watching the movies, searching out depictions of the ordinary and uneventful that struck me most forcefully. Once I discovered these moments, however, the question became what to do with them. Emerson, in a passage frequently cited by Cavell, discusses the relationship between intuition and knowledge, claiming that “primary wisdom” is “Intuition” while “all later teachings are tuitions.” Glossing this comment, Cavell suggests that “the occurrence to

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us of intuition places a demand upon us, namely for tuition; call this wording, the willingness to subject oneself to words, to make oneself intelligible” (2003, 4–5). With my selection of moments, I had what amounted to a set of intuitions demanding a set of “later teachings,” or “tuitions,” to make them intelligible. But what form, I was left to ask, should these tuitions take? It was at this point that my commitments began to shift slightly. Having spent so much time turning over individual moments and individual scenes in my head, I developed an abiding wish to preserve some sense of the individuality of the films under discussion and to prevent the project’s focus on the everyday from freezing into a universalizing thematic concern. I resisted the urge to read the moments as merely exemplary or reflective of broader cultural and social trends, such as the reorganization of daily life in the postwar west analyzed by sociologists like Michel de Certeau and Henri Lefebvre. Rather, I sought to use the moments as windows into the films themselves, employing the procedures of detailed, style-based analysis to situate the depictions of the ordinary within the film’s overarching formal and narrative structures. I did this with no clear argument in mind. It was only much later that I realized that there might be unity in the chapters’ seeming separateness and that the book could stand as an explicit rejoinder to the sort of universalizing or generalizing analysis that I had (intuitively) sought to avoid. The method described here shares certain core features with what has come to be known in recent years as “cinephile criticism,” a movement in film studies that seeks both to restore respect for unreconstructed cinephilia in the academy, where it had long been derided as naive, and to derive from the experience of cinephilia a method for doing academic analysis. A key figure in this movement has been Christian Keathley, whose 2006 book Cinephilia and History, or The Wind in the Trees represents one of its major declarations of purpose. Less a study of the idea or experience of cinephilia itself than an exploration of how it has been, or might be, put into practice by critics and scholars, the book works both as an intellectual history of a certain strain of film criticism and as a provocative call for new approaches to the task of writing and thinking critically about films. For Keathley, “cinephilia” refers to something more complex, and narrower in scope, than the simple “love of cinema” that its Greek-derived nomenclature suggests. Rather, the true cinephile is a person drawn not just to movies in general, but to specific, typically “fleeting or evanescent”

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moments. He himself defines this “element of …. spectatorial experience” as: The fetishizing of fragments of film, either individual shots or marginal (often unintentional) details in the image, especially those that appear only for a moment …. Whether it is the gesture of a hand, the odd rhythm of a horse’s gait, or the sudden change in expression on a face, these moments are experienced by the cinephile who beholds them as nothing less than an epiphany, a revelation. (2006, 7)

The overarching goal of Keathley’s project is to remobilize and reintegrate the experience of these moments into contemporary film studies without—and this is the tricky part—destroying their fugitive, revelatory power. These moments, Keathley suggests might, if we let them, provide new paths of entry into both individual films as well as film history more generally. Cavell himself had anticipated such an approach in his essay “A Capra Moment” (1985) (mentioned briefly in Chap. 6). The essay begins by considering a brief shot from Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night showing Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert walking away from the camera on a country road. It is “a moment,” he writes, “whose apparent commonplaces or evanescence found no place in [the] long, difficult chapter on the film” in his 1981 book Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (1985, 136). Subjecting it here to detailed analysis—giving tuition to his initial intuition—he discovers the moment to be exemplary of what he sees as the film’s deep-rooted affinity with the American transcendentalism, revealing new connections between Capra’s vision of America and that of Whitman and Emerson, and between Hollywood cinema and the literary tradition of the United States. Even a film’s most apparently commonplace and incidental shots or sequences, “A Capra Moment” suggests, might contain multitudes.

Postcritique and Film Studies We can now return to critical territory first surveyed in this book’s introduction, as the approach described above—derived from Cavell, Keathley, and others—aligns with the program laid out by Rita Felski (2015) under the banner of “postcritique” and “postcritical reading.” Felski’s theoretical elaboration of this reading practice, and its potential role in the

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academic study of arts and culture, is richly multifaceted, drawing equally upon the Actor-Network Theory of Bruno Latour and new trends in contemporary French literary criticism. Rather than recapitulate all of that here, I want merely to highlight what I see as the most salient points of contact between Felski’s polemic and the working method I have sketched thus far. In doing so, I endeavor to draw a critical constellation of sorts— one that connects the scattered remarks of Cavell and others to more recent debates about the academic study of art and culture, and one that I hope will help emphasize the currency of my own project while pointing ahead to future lines of questioning and critical inquiry. First, both Felski and Cavell call for an abandonment of high-mindedness in academic criticism, associating it with an attitude of mandarin distrust for the cultural texts and objects subjected to analysis. Such high-mindedness often manifests itself as a belief that the critic knows more than the object of their study, with contemporary scholars frequently projecting, in Felski’s words, “the ethos of the vanguard—those anointed few who, by dint of their intellectual far-sightedness, political convictions, or artistic sensibility, propel themselves out of the swirling mists of confusion and bad faith in which others are immersed.” In response to this posturing, she offers a simple, bluntly rhetorical question: “Why … are we so sure that we know more than the texts that precede us?” (Felski 2015, 159). Felski’s critique echoes Cavell’s assessment of established film studies practices. In a 2005 published conversation with Andrew Klevan, Cavell suggests that such practices often lead to a form of critical condescension, a mode of analysis that “thinks it is better, higher-minded (which is what condescending says) than the objects of its attention” (Cavell and Klevan 2005, 179). As an example of how such condescension can inflect even the sharpest and most astute theoretical analysis, he cites Laura Mulvey’s seminal “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” arguing that the essay’s “indiscriminateness” ultimately worked to hinder the development of critical understanding about film, and Hollywood films in particular, by failing to adequately distinguish between those films that do in fact “contain the kind of poison [Mulvey] detects” and those that “are at least as opposed to that poison as she is” (178). What would a criticism that does away with such high-mindedness, one that seeks to consciously avoid the trap of condescension, look like? For many of the critics cited here, it would at least partly involve a more overt acknowledgment of the critic’s own personal and subjective entanglements with and attachments to the objects of their attention. The

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foregrounding of such entanglements and attachments is of course at the very heart of Keathley’s project of building a scholarly practice on the foundation of cinephilia, and both Cavell and Felski emphasize this dimension as well. As “A Capra Moment” illustrates, Cavell frequently goes to great lengths in his writing to narrate his own thinking as an ongoing process of discovery and realization, a process that often centers on frequent returns to certain specific moments in certain privileged texts. As he puts it in the conversation with Klevan, “A moment you care about, however apparently trivial, can be productive …. It is always important that one is drawn, that a memory keeps returning. I’m inclined to say further that there is always a reason” (Cavell and Klevan 2005, 181). Felski— working, as always, in a less gnomic and more polemic register—echoes this sentiment, arguing that any postcritical framework worthy of the name would need to “more fully acknowledge the coimplication and entanglement of text and critic” (2015, 152), be alert to “those moments when the impact of a text is unforeseen, when it impinges on us in ways we cannot predict or prepare for” (167), and recognize that engaging with aesthetic objects “is not just a cognitive activity but an embodied mode of attentiveness that involves us in acts of sensing, perceiving, feeling, registering, and engaging” (176), one in which “textual details vibrate and resonate with special force when they hook up with our passions and predilections, our affectively soaked histories and memories” (178). Implicit in these statements is the idea that these personal, passionate, affective, and emotional resonances are always there in the relationship between critic and object, but frequently go unmentioned and unacknowledged, buried beneath scholarly attitudes of detached objectivity. If physicists do not take the time to narrate their attachments to and involvements with quarks and anti-matter, why should scholars of film and literature? Sometimes this disavowal of attachment is even made overt, as in Christian Metz’s (in)famous claim that “[t]o be a theoretician of the cinema, one should ideally no longer love the cinema and yet still love it: have loved it a lot and only have detached oneself from it by taking it up again from the other end, taking it as the target for the very same scopic drive that had made one love it” (1982, 15). But as Cavell and Felski show, such deliberate disavowals can often lead to the limiting high-mindedness and condescension they detect in so much criticism, prematurely foreclosing possibilities of understanding that take root in “those moments when the impact of a text is unforeseen, when it impinges on us in ways we cannot predict of prepare for” (Felski 2015, 167). To access these moments, and

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the knowledge and understanding they might contain, require acknowledging them, of making the process of working through them part of the critical project. It was out of an attempt to keep faith with such an approach that I began this conclusion by narrating my own process of arriving at the readings presented in the preceding chapters. My goal has been to make more overt than is usual in academic criticism the consciousness that lies behind the words on the pages you presently hold in your hands. I suspect that even more interesting stories than my own lie behind other works in film studies and in the academic study of culture at large, and I believe, with Cavell, Felski, Keathley, Klevan, and others, that the field would be immeasurably enriched by making space for such stories within our scholarship. Finally, the approach described here, with its abandonment of high-­ mindedness and its acknowledgment of the sometimes messy and unpredictable entanglement of critic and text, allows for—indeed, welcomes, and even courts—the possibility of surprise, turning critical analysis and interpretation into a process of discovery. For Felski, the practice of postcriticism means articulating an interpretive program “that leaves room for the aleatory and the unexpected, the chancy and the contingent” (2015, 152). Furthermore, it works to cultivate something like a dialogue or a relationship of exchange between critic and text, one that gives the latter, in Cavell’s words “a say in its own interpretation” and that is open to letting the movies “teach us how to look at them and think about them” (1981, 25). This book, I hope, has shown how productive such an approach might be for discovering new wonders in old texts. Indeed, I believe noir films provide an especially useful test case for the practice(s) of postcritique and “postcritical reading” precisely because of the attention they have long drawn from more traditional modes of academic analysis. The stunning achievements and successes of the vast and voluminous body of criticism that I reviewed in Chap. 1 potentially threatens to occlude our access to the films themselves, freezing them as known quantities fully defined by a set of totally known and legible historical, cultural, and aesthetic parameters. If we are to keep our responses to these movies (and, by extension, the responses of our readers and our students) from becoming completely habituated and determined in advance, then something may be needed to break the spell. Reflecting on “A Capra Moment” in his conversation interview with Klevan, Cavell offers some productive guidance on this point. “It can be the smallest detail,” he avers, “but if the compass needle just jogs, and you

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walk just a bit out of the way, everything can come out fresh, one’s relation to the familiar is enlivened, the hard surface is broken” (2005, 185). As Robert Ray (2013) has pointed out, Cavell’s language here, with its evocation of the experience wandering in the wilderness, derives from Henry David Thoreau, who frequently argued for the value of getting lost, if only temporarily (2013, 178). “In our most trivial walks,” Thoreau writes in Walden, we are constantly, though unconsciously, steering like pilots by certain well-­ known beacons and headlands, and if we go beyond our usual course we still carry in our minds the bearing of some neighboring cape; and not till we are completely lost, or turned around—for a man needs only to be turned around once with his eyes shut in this world to be lost—do we appreciate the vastness and strangeness of Nature. ([1854] 1992, 115)

The approach described in this chapter and practiced throughout the preceding pages provides an analogous experience for the film scholar, a means of re-activating, of making new, even the most apparently well-­ trodden and familiar films and genres—a means, in short, of appreciating the vastness and strangeness of the cinema.

References Cavell, Stanley. 1981. Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. ———. [1985] 2005. A Capra Moment. In Cavell on Film, ed. William Rothman, 135–145. Albany: State University of New York Press. ———. 1988. In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 2003. Disowning Knowledge in Seven Plays of Shakespeare. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cavell, Stanley, and Andrew Klevan. 2005. What Becomes of Thinking on Film? In Film as Philosophy: Essays in Cinema After Wittgenstein and Cavell, ed. Rupert Read and Jerry Goodenough, 167–209. London/New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Felski, Rita. 2015. The Limits of Critique. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Keathley, Christian. 2006. Cinephilia and History, or The Wind in the Trees. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Metz, Christian. 1982. The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

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Ray, Robert B. 2013. Cavell, Thoreau, and the Movies. In Stanley Cavell, Literature and Film: The Idea of America, ed. Andrew Taylor and Áine Kelly, 169–185. London: Routledge. Thoreau, Henry David. [1854] 1992. Walden and Resistance to Civil Government (Norton Critical Edition), ed. William Rossi. New York: W.W. Norton.

Index1

A Academic film studies, 5, 7 Act of Violence (Zinnemann, 1949) city/small town opposition in, 150, 151, 161, 165 comparisons to horror films, 152, 153 depiction of the suburbs, 151–157 and “latent” content, 146, 147, 149, 165 use of expressive lighting in, 153–155 use of noir imagery and conventions, 163, 164 use of off-screen space in, 147–149 Adams, Dorothy, 131 Advise & Consent (Preminger, 1962), 126 Alton, John, 168, 185, 186, 190 Amis, Martin, 2 Anatomy of a Murder (Preminger, 1959), 126 Anderson, Judith, 118 Andrews, Dana, 115, 131

Anti-communism, 173, 174 Antonioni, Michelangelo, 80 Astor, Mary, 27–30, 145, 163, 164 Austin, J.L., 13 B Bacall, Lauren, 2, 96, 97, 99–104, 108 Barthes, Ronald, 4, 41, 57, 64–66, 69n2, 175 on “cultural codes” (S/Z), 64, 65 on the “Hermeneutic Code” (S/Z), 57, 175 Mythologies, 4 on the “reality effect”, 41 Basehart, Richard, 169, 184 Bazin, André, 29, 30, 124–127, 130, 198 on ambiguity and photographic images, 51 on Humphrey Bogart, 30 on neorealism, 125

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

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INDEX

Beddoe, Don, 47 Belle de Jour (Buñuel, 1967), 112 Bellisario, Troian, 1 Benjamin, Walter, 51, 119, 125, 198 on history, 193 on the “optical unconscious”, 125 Bennett, Joan, 36 Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (Lang, 1956), 45n2, 56, 57 The Big Sleep (Hawks, 1944) attitude toward women, 110 comparison to 1978 version, 102, 103 form and style of, 99–106 process of adapting for the screen, 96–99 role of gesture in, 110, 111 The Big Sleep (novel), 96, 97, 99, 102, 107 The Big Sleep (Winner, 1978), 102 The Black Book (Mann, 1949), see Reign of Terror (Mann, 1949) The Blue Gardenia (Lang, 1953), 56, 57, 77, 91n1 Bogart, Humphrey, 2, 6, 43, 44, 96 in The Big Sleep, 93, 96, 98, 99, 101, 102, 104–107 in The Maltese Falcon, 27, 29, 30, 43 star-persona of, 30, 43, 97, 98 Bogdanovich, Peter, 75, 95 Bordwell, David, 7, 15, 167, 168 Brackett, Leigh, 96 Brecht, Bertolt, 86, 91n3 Britton, Andrew, 7, 17, 20n1, 168, 171 Buñuel, Luis, 112 Burch, Noël, 64, 79, 80, 87 C Capra, Frank, 95, 150, 200 Carpenter, John, 152, 156

Casablanca (Curtiz, 1942), 81, 98 Cat People (Tourneur, 1942), 9 Cavell, Stanley, 13, 14, 16, 95, 111, 112, 117, 128, 138, 197, 198, 200–204 on apparently insignificant moments, 117 on fantasy and reality in film, 111, 112 on the ordinary, 138, 197, 198 Chandler, Raymond, 1, 94, 96–99, 112n2, 151 Chartier, Jean-Pierre, 6 Chatman, Seymour, 63 Cinematography, 55, 58, 66, 84, 102, 131 Cinephile/cinephilia, 3, 199, 200, 202 Classical Hollywood, 43, 77, 81, 167 Close reading, 6, 16, 18, 176 Cook, Jr., Elisha, 99 Crawford, Joan, 9, 168, 169 Cultural studies, 7, 11–13, 44 Cummins, Robert, 169 D Dahl, Arlene, 169, 189 Dayan, Daniel, 89, 90 De Certeau, Michel, 199 De Sica, Vittorio, 124 Découpage, 77, 102, 131, 133, 134 Dee, Ruby, 170, 172 Deleuze, Gilles, 124 Delillo, Don, 2 Demme, Jonathan, 153 Desperate (Mann, 1947), 60 Detour (Ulmer, 1945), 9, 165n3 Dimendberg, Edward, 7, 15, 143, 144, 146, 147, 149, 151, 156, 165 Dirty Harry (Siegel, 1971), 174 Doane, Mary Ann, 7, 11, 133

 INDEX 

Donat, Robert, 77, 88, 89 Double Indemnity (Wilder, 1944), 9–11, 18, 25–45, 135 Douglas, Kirk, 9, 40 Durgnat, Raymond, 6, 9, 10 Duryea, Dan, 36, 74, 84, 86 E Editing, 55, 66, 77, 88, 102, 106, 130, 131, 136, 186, 190 Eikhenbaum, Boris, 52 Eisner, Lotte, 76 Elsaesser, Thomas, 192 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 197, 198, 200 Existentialism, 6 Expressionism, 185 F Faulkner, William, 96 Fay, Jennifer, 7, 15 Felski, Rita, 12, 13, 143, 146, 200–203 Feminism, 7 Femme fatale, 1, 2, 7, 9, 18, 26, 27, 31, 35, 36, 39, 45, 50, 52–55, 62, 65, 66, 109, 169 File on Thelma Jordan (Siodmak, 1950), 9 Film noir depictions of the ordinary in, 74, 125, 197–199 in film studies, 7–11, 168 in popular culture, 2–6 theories of, 5, 19, 31 Film Noir Foundation, 3, 4 Flashback structure, 10, 44 Fleischer, Richard, 1, 18, 47–49, 52, 55, 59, 62, 67 Ford, John, 117

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Framing, 28, 41, 49, 53, 55, 56, 82, 86, 87, 89, 103, 104, 120, 123, 131, 136, 138, 153, 156, 158, 160, 161, 165, 185, 186, 188–190 Frank, Nino, 6 Frye, Northrop, 11 Fujiwara, Chris, 41, 125, 127 Furthman, Jules, 96 G Garner, James, 98 Generalization/generality, 5, 7, 14, 15 Genre criticism, 11 Gledhill, Christine, 8, 11 Gone with the Wind (Flemming, 1939), 172, 175, 176 Grahame, Gloria, 9 Greer, Jane, 9, 39, 40, 42 Grindon, Leger, 168–171, 173, 174, 190, 191 Grossman, Julie, 31, 35 Gunning, Tom, 74–76 H Haacke, Paul, 7, 8 Halloween (Carpenter, 1978), 152, 156, 165n2 Heath, Stephen, 89 Heflin, Van, 144, 155, 163, 164 Hegel, G.W.F., 25 Hermeneutics of suspicion (Ricoeur), 11–14, 42, 143 Heydt, Louis Jean, 103–105 Hicox, Sidney, 104 High Noon (Zinnemann, 1952), 164 Hirsch, Forster, 7, 26, 31 Historical fiction, 171–176, 183 Hitchcock, Alfred, 67, 76, 77, 88, 89, 112, 127, 173, 179, 181

210 

INDEX

HUAC, see Anti-communism Huston, Virginia, 38, 40 I It Happened one Night (Capra, 1942), 95, 117, 200 It’s a Wonderful Life (Capra, 1946), 150 J Jameson, Fredric, 3, 11, 152, 154–156 and genre criticism, 11 on the gothic, 153, 154 Johnston, Claire, 10, 11 K Kaplan, E. Ann, 7, 11, 20n1 Keathley, Christian, 125, 134, 139n4, 199, 200, 202, 203 Kelly, Grace, 164 Klevan, Andrew, 16, 31, 34, 35, 94, 95, 124, 201–203 Krutnik, Frank, 7 Kuleshov, Lev, 51 L La Chienne (Renoir, 1931), 37 The Lady Vanishes (Hitchcock, 1935), 179, 181 Lang, Fritz, 18, 19, 26, 36–39, 56–58, 67, 73–91, 91n1, 91n3 L.A. Noire (Rockstar Games), 3 Latour, Bruno, 13, 201 Laura (Preminger, 1944), 115–139 comparisons to neorealism, 125, 126 decoupage of, 131, 133, 134

depiction of the ordinary in, 122, 125, 127, 138 gender politics of, 134 as “media fantasy film” (Young), 127 mise-en-scene of, 119, 120, 122, 131, 136 treatment of space in, 118 Lefebvre, Henri, 199 Leigh, Janet, 144, 155, 157, 158 Lethal Weapon (Donner, 1987), 174 Lighting, 26, 40, 55, 60, 61, 94, 95, 136, 153, 160, 185, 186, 188 Los Angeles, 3, 93, 95, 144–147, 159–161, 163–165, 170 The Lost Weekend (Wilder, 1945), 76 Lukács, Georg, 171–173 Lynch, David, 153 M M (Lang, 1931), 56, 78, 82, 85 Mabuse series (Lang), 76 Malone, Dorothy, 93, 106–109, 111 The Maltese Falcon (Huston, 1941), 18, 25–45, 52, 56, 59, 187 Mann, Anthony, 60, 167–169, 180, 185, 186, 189–191, 193 Marlowe (Bogart, 1969), 98 Marlowe, Philip (character), 93–111, 112n2, 169 Martin, Adrian, 186 Marxism, 7 Masculinity, 7, 30, 43, 44 Mast, Gerald, 107 Mature, Victor, 168, 169 Maxey, Paul, 48, 52, 60, 62 McGilligan, Patrick, 75, 76 McGraw, Charles, 47 McMurray, Fred, 9, 34 Menjou, Adolphe, 170, 177 Menzies, William Cameron, 169

 INDEX 

Milland, Ray, 73, 76, 77, 88 Ministry of Fear (Graham Greene novel), 73–91, 91n1 Ministry of Fear (Lang, 1944), 73–91 camerawork in, 84, 86, 90 critical reputation of, 75 editing patterns in, 77, 88 production of, 75, 76, 90 and the system of the suture, 86–90 use of off-screen space, 80–83, 87 Mise-en-scene, 2, 53, 55, 56, 60, 61, 66, 77, 78, 90, 102, 106, 119, 120, 122, 123, 131, 136, 151, 153, 155, 160 Mitchum, Robert, 4, 9, 39, 43, 112n2 Modernity, 7, 15, 119, 143–165 Moi, Toril, 12–14 Montage, 40, 89, 144, 163 Movie (journal), 7, 20n1, 125 Mulvey, Laura, 33, 43, 133, 134, 185, 201 Murder, My Sweet (Dmytryk, 1944), 98, 151, 169 Murnau, F.W., 53, 150 N Naremore, James, 2–5, 7, 26 The Narrow Margin (Fleischer, 1952), 1, 2, 19, 47–68, 90 deception and misdirection in, 52, 56, 59–63 and “suppressive narrative” (Pye), 56, 66 use of conventional noir tropes in, 56 Neorealism, 125, 126 Nieland, Justus, 7, 15 Nielsen, Jakob Isak, 75, 77 North by Northwest (Hitchcock, 1959), 67, 91n2, 181 Nosferatu (Murnau, 1922), 53

211

O Off-screen space, 80–83, 87, 147, 148 Oudart, Jean-Pierre, 89, 90 Out of the Past (Tourneur, 1947), 9, 18, 25–45, 150 P Palance, Jack, 9 A Panorama of American Film Noir (Borde & Chaumeton), 8 Patriarchy, 11 Perez, Gilberto, 84 Performance, 29–32, 35, 42, 55, 62, 76, 88, 98, 99, 102, 106, 108, 109, 111, 121, 123, 130, 152, 163, 165n3, 173, 186 Perkins, V.F., 16, 60, 61, 125, 126, 149 on the construction of cinematic worlds, 149 on credibility and significance, 61 Otto Preminger, 125 Phantom Lady (Siodmak, 1944), 9 Place, Janey (J.A), 6, 55 and Lowell Peterson, 6 Point of view (POV), 28, 33, 36, 37, 40, 42–44, 54–56, 67, 78–80, 86, 88, 89, 107, 112n2, 129, 131, 134, 137, 155, 156, 158, 168, 171, 187 Postmodernism, 3 Powell, Dick, 2, 98, 169, 170, 173, 177, 180, 192 Powell, William, 30, 98 Pretty Little Liars, 1, 3 Price, Vincent, 115 Propp, Vladimir, 11 Psychoanalysis, 7, 146 Pye, Douglas, 16, 20n4, 56–58, 66 Pynchon, Thomas, 4, 5

212 

INDEX

R Rabinowitz, Paula, 7, 9, 10, 15 Raines, Ella, 10 Raw Deal (Mann, 1948), 60 Ray, Robert, 30, 69n3, 204 Raymond, Paula, 170 Reign of Terror (Mann, 1949), 19, 167–193 apparent politics of, 171 deadline-oriented structure of, 191 excess in, 183–191 production history, 170 suspense-building strategies in, 178, 179 visual style and spectacle in, 183–191 Renoir, Jean, 37, 84 Reynolds, Marjorie, 74, 76, 77, 84 Ridgely, John, 99 Robinson, Edward G., 32, 36, 77 The Rockford Files (NBC, 1974-1980), 98 Rothman, William, 90 Ryan, Robert, 144, 151, 152 S Savage, Ann, 9 Scarlet Street (Lang, 1945), 18, 25–45, 75, 77 Schrader, Paul, 8 Scott, Lizbeth, 9 Screen (journal), 7, 66 Self-reflexive, 35, 86, 90, 91, 197 Seymour, Dan, 186 Sherlock Holmes (Conan Doyle), 12, 58 Sobchak, Vivian, 7, 15, 163, 164 Something Wild (Demme, 1986), 153 Stanwyck, Barbara, 9, 31–35 Steele, Bob, 99 Stern, Lesley, 125 Sunrise (Murnau, 1927), 150

T The Tall Target (Mann, 1951), 19, 167–193 apparent politics of, 172 comparison to Hitchcock, 179 deadline-oriented structure of, 176 marketing of, 170 Telotte, J.P., 7, 10, 11 The Terminator (Cameron, 1984), 152 Thaxter, Phyllis, 164 The 39 Steps (Hitchcock, 1935), 77, 88, 89, 179 Thomas, Deborah, 7, 117, 121 Thompson, Kristin, 134, 136, 137, 139n7, 186 on cinematic excess, 186 on Laura (Preminger, 1944), 133, 134 Thompson, Marshall, 170, 172 Thomson, David, 94, 95, 101, 110–112 Thoreau, Henry David, 197, 204 Tierney, Gene, 2, 9, 115, 116, 121, 128, 130, 133, 134, 136, 139n5 To Have and Have Not (Hawks, 1944), 96, 99 Totalization, 11 See also Generalization/generality Tourneur, Jacques, 18, 26, 39, 41, 42 Turner Classic Movies (TCM), 3, 4 20th Century Fox, 125 U Umberto D. (De Sica, 1952), 124, 125 V Valentine, Paul, 40 Vendler, Helen, 175 Vernet, Marc, 7, 15 Vertigo (Hitchcock, 1958), 112, 127

 INDEX 

Vickers, Martha, 93 Von Sternberg, Josef, 185 W Walker, Joseph, 95 Walker, Michael, 7 Wanger, Walter, 168, 174 Warner, Jack, 96 Warner Brothers, 95 Webb, Clifton, 117, 129 White, Jacqueline, 48, 52–54 Wilder, Billy, 10, 26, 31, 34, 38, 76 Wilson, George M., 16, 55, 57, 66, 67 Windsor, Marie, 47, 49, 50, 52–55 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 13–16, 18, 25, 51, 68, 197, 198 on aspects, 51, 68 on the “craving for generality, 14 on “family resemblances, 18

213

on showing differences and his difference, 25 Wollen, Peter, 3 The Woman in the Window (Lang, 1944), 9, 36, 75 Women in Film Noir (ed. Kaplan), 10 Wood, Robin, 96, 152 Y Yorda, Phillip, 169 You Only Live Once (Lang, 1937), 57, 67 Z Zavattini, Cesare, 124, 138, 139 Zinnemann, Fred, 19, 139n1, 143, 146, 149, 151, 153, 155, 161, 163, 164, 165n2