“Film noir is a language, it’s deep shadows, strong angles, behavior over dialogue…”
-Newton Thomas Sigel, Cinematographer, The Usual Suspects
“Shoot up, shoot down. It’s a way of attacking space because harmonic space is your enemy…”
-Paul Schrader, Screenwriter, Taxi Driver
Film Noir has become an elusive concept for its audience as younger generations move further from the historic era. Fortunately filmmakers since the 1950’s have continued to represent the style using the Noir blueprints in contemporary cinema. Going as far back as Jean Luc Godard’s Breathless, 1960, Roman Polanski’s Chinatown, 1974, Lawrence Kasdan’s Body Heat, 1981, and David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive, 2001, filmmakers contemporized the Noir style as a sub-genre known as Neo-Noir: an ongoing representation and rejuvenation of the cinematic style that originated in the 1940’s. However, as generations move further from the 40’s, the representation aspect is creating a ‘telephone effect’ on our understanding of the original style. This essay is an attempt to create a focused illustration of the significance of Film Noir as a representation of the American psyche during and post World War II, examining what many believe to be the first Film Noir movie, Boris Ingster’s 1940’s Stranger On The Third Floor, as a prophecy for a decade long cinematic style and by doing so I hope to bring clarity to the Film Noir Era.
Boris Ingster’s low budget B-movie Stranger On The Third Floor starts in the bright and bustling boom of what appears to be New York City. It is common to have a nameless city in a film, a technique originating in Noir, as it could stand for all cities and therefore exist as a believable reality in the imaginations of its audience. This was a time when Warner Studios was pumping out Hollywood fairy tales to keep people distracted during the great depression. Although here, we are gliding through a busy sidewalk in the last happy day before a two-decade long night.
Michael Ward, played by John McGuire, meets with Margaret Tallichet’s Jane at a cafe and pitches to her the idea of starting a nuclear family and what is essentially the American dream. He explains he just received a raise for an article he recently wrote on the Joe Briggs murder investigation.
We follow the narrative of the investigation to the police station where officers weigh the likelihood of Briggs committing the crime, having not seen the crime, they can’t know if Briggs actually did it. Ward enters to appear as an eyewitness, establishing him as the lynchpin of the moral dilemma.
In the stuffy courtroom filled with monochrome men, an audience hanging on to every word of Michael Ward’s recollection of the murder, Ward can be taken as a symbol of the psychology of the times, America playing witness to a growing violence in Europe, and it was the following year, after the attack on Pearl Harbour, did it eventually join the second World War.
In Ingster’s Strangers, the jury unanimously finds Briggs guilty of murder in the first degree and he is sentenced to death. It was Michael’s unflinching confidence that wins over the jury, a confidence that is tested throughout the rest of the film as it begins to crumble, and a much more cynical and jaded personality takes its place.
It is historically believed that Boris Ingster’s Strangers On The Third Floor was the beginning of a period of American cinema so psychologically dark and complex, Eddie Muller, Author of Dark City: The Lost World Of Film Noir, calls it The Black Tide, “there was a huge wave of these crime movies, that washed over Hollywood in the post-world war II years,” (Muller, Bringing Darkness To Light).
The studios were looking for B-movies. Cheap, fast and gritty stories similar to the pulp novels to fill the lower bill of a double-bill movie night. Films like Boris Ingster’s Strangers In Love, and also films like Edward Dmytrik’s The Devil’s Command (1941), and Jacques Tourneur’s Cat People (1942) were financed cheap and the filmmakers had free reign. Editor Carol Littleton underlines her theory in the 2006 documentary Bringing Darkness To Light, “in a strange way, [film noir] was a creation of the distribution system in America.”
These highly imaginative styles of cinematography, performance and writing were the product of necessity by directors given little to no budget to produce their films. Their work stayed under the radar with such a small budget so they had free reign to shoot and invent what they wanted. Sharp shadows and unbalanced angles were both a function of style and a means to hide or eliminate unwanted scenery. It was Michael Curtiz, a “forerunner of German Expressionism” that approached the Warner studios with these cinematic sensibilities, examines Novelist James Ellroy,(L.A. Confidential), whose conclusion prophesied a much grander design in the Hollywood system, “these classic gangster films, and classic g-man films at Warner Brothers, it’s a dry run for Noir,” (BDTL).
Comic Novelist Frank Miller, (Sin City, 1991-2000) disassociates Noir from Crime Fiction, saying that Crime Fiction is “realistic; it tends to be the here and now, and it tends to strive to shock you with just how gritty and real it is.” he continues to say that he finds crime fiction very “literal and often quite boring, and generally rather ugly to look at, where as noir is gorgeous, it’s all style, but it’s the emotional realism is what you’re after,” (BDTL).
In Ingster’s Strangers, After the trail, Michael Ward finds himself standing alone in the courtroom. He just got off the phone with Jane who is riddled with guilt over the fate of Briggs. As Michael stands in the hollow chamber he hears echoes of Briggs’ plea of innocence. Michael asks himself in a voice over, another technique used frequently in Noir, “What’s the matter with me, I’m getting soft… He did it, of course he did.” The use of the voice over in Ingster’s film allows the audience to play witness to the protagonist’s inner thoughts, his demons, and the clever design in this particular case, his doubts.
Michael makes his way through a bustling crowd, his cynicism growing as he weaves in and around the pedestrian foot traffic. Michael as a character is in character metamorphosis, what BBC host Matthew Sweet of The Rules Of Film Noir recognizes as the “guy who drinks too much, smoke too much, earn too little, and struggle under the weight of their cynicism,” The Film Noir protagonist.
The makers of this new type of detective film seemed to recognize that if they were going to create a new cinematic view of the world, they also would have to create a completely new hero to exist in that world. Yet, they did not all create the same type of hero, nor did the film noir hero remain static during his entire run. Instead, the hard-boiled detective films of the 1940s supplied a surprisingly diverse set of heroes, each offering a variation on the common theme of crime and detection in the dark urban scene.
John J. Blaser and Stephanie L.M. Blaser (2008)
During the Great Depression, a number of writers that were in the peak of their careers, Raymond Chandler (The Big Sleep, 1939), James M. Cain (Double Indemnity, 1943) and the grandfather of Noir Dashiell Hammett- whose Pinkerton National Detective past gave him the experience necessary to create the formula for the hard-boiled protagonist persona as seen in his earliest work Red Harvest, (1929)- were growing pessimistic when their countries response to the depression was joining in the war. Their writing began to represent the jaded cynicism that America was reeling from, and they projected it in men “whose innocence ha[d] become so tarnished as to be no longer visible,” (Lee Horsley, 2002). Film Editor Glenn Erikson explains, “because of the situation at the end of World War Two, the themes of these movies tend to be dark, cynical, and pessimistic about human nature,” (BDTL).
In Ingster’s Stranger’s, we watch as Michael Ward’s cynicism grows out of a guilty anxiety, the aggravating flashbacks about petty squabbles with landlords, into full flown paranoia at the sight of the titular Stranger on the third floor. Michael doesn’t understand why he is afraid of this man, or why he has the agency to chase the Stranger out of the apartment complex, from what he has seen up to this point there is no evidence of a greater threat. Michael struggles to justify his paranoia in his head, and we as an audience are meant to decipher the cryptic character of the Stranger.
Peter Lorre’s impressionistic Stranger is hauntingly familiar in his behavior, and how he looks, to the German silent film character Nosferatu (1922). Lorre, like many immigrants propelled from their homes and countries by the war, headed westward to Hollywood and with them they brought the German Expressionist style that had many advantages in B-movie Hollywood. These sensibilities established the “formal systems for film noir. Lighting schemes, staging, as well as subject matter because German Expressionism was dealing with men who are coming apart,”(Drew Caspar, BDTL). Filmmakers like Edgar G. Ulmer (Detour, 1945), Billy Wilder (Double Indemnity, 1944), and Fritz Lang (Moontide, 1942), brought their abstract and fractured experiences of relocation to a jaded American cinema, “these people saw a lot of death, and they saw the mechanisms of fate, and what people do in times of war that make them inhuman.” George Pelecanos (The Rules Of Film Noir, 2009). It was in 1946, a French critic by the name of Nino Frank who began reviewing these films for their psychological and existential themes, began to label them as Film Noir, meaning quite literally: Black Film.
The term Film Noir has come to represent a lot throughout the years of researching and analyzing the 40’s and 50’s hard boiled American cinematic movement. Many have come to the assumption that it is in fact a film genre when, unlike most genres, film noir can also behave as a convention of style. That is because film noir is product of two factors behaving in film simultaneously. It is both the characteristics of the subject matter, i.e. the storylines of detectives and femme fatales and betrayal that we can deduce as a characteristic of film noir, and also the style in which the subject matter is told/shown, i.e. the seductive way characters talk and behave, the subjective impressionistic reality, and the symbolic visuals. Film noir, unlike racing movies or crime movies that are narratives predicated on the subject of their genre, “film noir,” critic and editor Glenn Erikson offers, “is not a genre, it’s a style that crosses many genres,” (The Rules Of Film Noir, 2009).
In Stranger On the Third Floor Michael Ward meets with Charles Waldron, the District Attorney. In a clever bit of banter the two character’s muse about killing his condescending neighbour Albert Meng (Charles Halton),
Ward: He’s no man, he’s a worm. The kind you ought to jump on with heavy boots.
Waldron: You’ll have to do an awful lot of jumping because the whole place is covered with them.
The scene uses wordplay as a means to get around the Hays Code established in 1930 (the precursor to the MPAA film rating system), that forbid vulgarity, graphic violence and sex in motion pictures. This limitation is famously known for having an opposite and more inspiring effect for Hammett, Chandler, and Cain, in Hollywood during the 40’s and 50’s. These hard boiled rebels began using innuendo to hide their irreverence on the page and understanding the context actors well enough to create the most engaging and discretionary subtextual dialogue ever seen on screen.
In Strangers, Michael remembers earlier in the week to when he brought Jane to his place. The sexual tension between these characters is undeniably present without any literal reference to their attraction. When inside, Jane sits on Michael’s bed and reveals to him a scandalous thought she has had:
Jane: I’ve always wanted to see your room, to know where you sit when you’re tired, and where you sleep. Do you talk in your sleep?
As innocent as it reads, the implication Margaret Tallichet gives to Jane’s character suggests she imagines what it is like to sleep with Michael. Michael responds in kind with his own subtextual joust:
Michael: Darling, your shoes are soaking wet, you’ll catch a cold. Your stockings too. You better take them off, I’ll get you something to dry them with.
The rigid censorship from 1934 to 1954 was considered by Production Code Administration standards as the Breen Era, named after prudish Roman Catholic and head of the PCA, Joseph Breen. Several famous examples of the Breen censorship influencing the creation of Film Noir include, “Alfred Hitchcock’s 1946 film Notorious, where he worked around the rule of three-second-kissing only by having the two actors break off every three seconds,” (McGilligan, p.376), and an article published at the University of Virginia illuminates how Michael Curtiz’ 1942 film Casablanca, was re-written after the Hays office objected to the amorality of the script, and re-edited because of the adulterous behavior between characters Rick and Ilsa, (Alderman Library, Censored Film and Television I).
While the writers of Hollywood were developing the tool of innuendo to work around rigid censorship codes, filmmakers that were now coming back from the war were adopting new techniques of their craft that rebelled against the studios tight budgets. By the 1950’s the war had been over for five years and America had entered the Atomic Age. Filmmakers who had participated in the war effort were shooting on hand-held, black and white, 16mm, Bolex cameras which improved maneuverability and was quickly adopted by the low budget Hollywood community. These improvements meant that they no longer had to build sets, but now filmmakers could bring their lights and cameras outside in the streets. These films are what Matthew Sweet in The Rules of Film Noir calls, “streetsmart” and “immediate” products of their times. The war brought with it the development of profound documentary technology including high speed lenses and faster film stocks. by the end of the war the technology was completely engrained as a standard of Hollywood cinema.
At the midpoint of Boris Ingster’s Strangers, Michael Ward’s premonition of the Albert Meng’s murder serves as a rightful place to conclude. Michael Ward’s nightmarish premonitions demand that he correct the verdict of Joe Briggs before they hang him. The way these dreams are conveyed in the movie, silky montages, fading from one to the next serves as both a device to convey Ward’s premonition as well as a grander premonition of the coming German Expressionist movement in American cinema known as Film Noir. Ward is able to convince the district attorney that the Stranger is the real criminal before the Stranger can seek his next victim, Jane. The film concludes as it had begun, with Michael and Jane together in the daylight, the nightmare is over.
During the advent of Film Noir was the simultaneous advent of the television, a modern little box that could connect you and everyone on your block to regular scheduled programming. It’s popularity ran parallel to Film Noir from the 1940’s to its mass popularity of the color television in 1955, America had begun a psychological shift from punishing itself with brooding jaded cinema to the perpetual euphoric distraction of regular scheduled television. It was with television that color was reintroduced into the American psyche after a two-decade long exploration into darkness. It also concluded a style of filmmaking that can only be remodelled with the attitudes of its contemporary society, therefore rendering it elusive and impossible to adapt completely.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Stranger On The Third Floor. USA: RKO Radio Pictures, 1940. Film.
Film Noir: Bringing Darkness To Light. USA: Warner Home Video, 2006. DVD.
The Rules Of Film Noir. Performed by Matthew Sweet. UK: British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), 2009. Film.
Blaser, John J., and Stephanie L.M. Blaser. "FILM NOIR AND THE HARD-BOILED DETECTIVE HERO." Film Noir Studies. January 1, 2008. Accessed January 1, 2015. http://www.filmnoirstudies.com/essays/detective_hero.asp.
Horsley, Lee. "American Hard-Boiled Crime Fiction, 1920s-1940s." Crime Culture. January 1, 2009. Accessed January 1, 2015. http://www.crimeculture.com/Contents/Hard-Boiled.html.
McGilligan, Patrick. Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light. New York: Harper Perennial, 2004. 376.978-0-06-098827-2, p. 376
"Censored Films and Television I." Censored: Wielding the Red Pen. Virginia: Alderman Library.
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