Category Archives: Film Noir

THE SET-UP

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The Set-Up, a classic film noir directed by Robert Wise in 1949, couldn't be more different in many ways from Jacques Tourneur's equally admired classic noir Out Of the Past.  For one thing, The Set-Up doesn't have a femme fatale.  There's no romance, no glamor, no witty hardboiled repartée.  But if you realize that classic film noir is centrally concerned with anxiety and neurosis about manhood, the two films fit neatly together in the noir tradition.

The Set-Up
is about the boxing underworld, the tank-town circuit where
up-and-comers get their chops and has-beens rent themselves out as
human punching bags.  Robert Ryan plays a has-been, a
once-promising fighter who's come to the end of the line.  His métier is perhaps the most iconic arena for displays of traditional virility — his exhaustion a sharp symbol of its decline.


The fans jeer him.  His own manager takes money to get him to take
a dive but doesn't even bother to inform him, so sure is he that his
fighter is going to lose . . . one more time.  Ryan's
long-suffering wife is about to walk out on him, unable any longer to
watch his steady and inexorable collapse.  Ryan's continued belief
in himself as a fighter is presented as the delusion of a punch-drunk
loser.





But Ryan still has one more victory in him, one last assertion of his
potency in the ring.  The victory, however, is no triumph. 
His wife hasn't even come to the arena to watch it.  His corner
men flee before the fight is over.  The manager of the fighter he
was unknowingly paid to lose to sets his thugs on him and beats him up
in an alley, smashing his hand so he can never fight again.



In a powerful sequence just before the assault in the alley, Ryan runs
through the empty arena, past the empty ring, trying to escape. 
His ritual of manhood has become a shadowplay that nobody cares about,
nobody's watching.

The Set-Up
plays out in real time over the course of one night, creating an almost
unendurable suspense.  The four rounds of boxing shown, again in
real time, are the best evocation of a real fight ever put on
film.  The high-speed meta-narrative that always develops in a real fight,
especially a good one, is both complex and legible, and the combat is
convincingly brutal.  (Ryan was a champion fighter at the college
level and knew what he was doing.)



The ending of the film is satisfying because of the heroism involved in
Ryan's last stand — even though it's meaningless in practical
terms.  It's sort of a glorious farewell to his own construction
of himself as a man.  His wife is still there for him, happy that
he's been forced to move on.  But move on to what?



Film noir never had an answer
to that question, and the resulting tension is what has always constituted the
deep subliminal appeal of the genre.  It posed a question that
modern men are still asking themselves.


OUT OF THE PAST

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As opposed to murder mysteries (for example), which are basically
intellectual puzzles organized around a frisson or two, great suspense
thrillers — which include many different kinds of movies, from
Hitchcock to classic film noir — are rarely about their nominal subjects.  Their plots are
constructions designed to investigate and expose various modes of
existential dread which would be too uncomfortable to face directly but
which are thrilling to experience when disguised as mere
amusement.  The process is very similar to what happens in dreams,
in which we find visual and plastic equivalents to inner tensions which
the conscious mind prefers to avoid confronting head-on.

There’s a smooth continuum between the suspense thriller and the horror
film, the latter category being reached when the subject of death,
bodily decay and destruction is foregrounded and taken right up to the
edge of what the mind is willing to process within a work of
entertainment.  (Convention and the age of audience members play
a large part in determining where that edge begins.)

The film noir tradition, which began during and flourished just after WWII, expanded the limits of dread which American movie audiences would accept — and obviously the
horrors of the global conflict played a determining role in this development.  Film noir
reflected a new cynicism about politics, since politicians had failed
to prevent the war, about civilization, which had been exposed as a
veneer beneath which savagery lurked, and about human nature, because
ordinary people did unspeakable things to each other in the course of
the war.

But most of all, film noir, at its heart, reflected a new insecurity about manhood.

Charles Lindbergh, before the war, wrote of his fear that a truly
global conflict would sap the virility of the civilized world and
create a vacuum in which demons would breed.  He wasn’t just
talking about the young men who would be killed but the young men
whose experience of war would exhaust their spirits — leave them unfit
for the business of domestic life, the hard work of peacetime
civilization.

I think this was a profound insight, and helps explain the crisis of
manhood which afflicted 50s America and which came to fruition in the
epidemic of divorce in the 60s, along with a general retreat from male
responsibility to the institutions of marriage and the family.
The greatest generation had given all it had — its reserves of service
and sacrifice were used up.

This also helps explain the disaffection of youth in the 50s and
60s, the nihilism of the Beats, the rebellion of rock and roll, the search
for newer and more authentic male role models like James Dean and Elvis
Presley — all of which culminated in a radical rejection of older male
paradigms in the 60s, in the de-sexing of the male which began with the
adolescent image of the early Beatles and ended with the long-haired
male flower child.

There was much that was positive in this cultural shift, but its root
causes and possible consequences remained largely unexamined, along
with its dark side — which was an increasing fear and hatred of women,
who could not help but represent an accusation aimed at male
uncertainty and insecurity.

It’s curious, I think, in an age which celebrates feminism and the new
sensitivity of males, that our popular culture degrades and commodifies
women to a far greater degree than earlier, frankly patriarchal
societies.  Camille Paglia provided the key to this paradox when
she observed that the status of women today is determined not by a
patriarchy which has gown too powerful but by a patriarchy which has
collapsed, grown unsure of itself.

Film noir is the place to begin a study of this whole, strange phenomenon.  Look at a film like Out Of the Past, one of the classics of the tradition.  On one level it’s a crime
thriller, an exposé of social corruption, an exercise in cynicism about
everything.  But this level is superficial.  At the heart
of its tension is a vision of things gone horribly wrong between the
sexes — the dream of a lost romantic paradise, the fear that real
partnership and co-operation were no longer options, the nightmare of a
fraudulent and impossible romantic redemption.


At the center of most great filmsin the noir tradition is the femme fatale
— a tough, independent, alluring figure who’s dangerous precisely
because she exploits the impotence of her male counterpoint.  The
collapsed male projects, as he always must, his own inner chaos onto
the female who exposes his weakness, his existential nullity in a
culture that no longer knows what it means to be a man.

Check out the image below, where Robert Mitchum holds on to his
inadequate cigarette-phallus and Jane Greer seems to ask, “Is that it
— is that all you’ve got?”:

Cigarettes are almost always more than cigarettes in film noir.
The tough guys always reach for them when they’re trying to be hard and
cool — and when a woman smokes a cigarette, she’s usually getting
ready to un-man somebody.

The femme fatale of the film noir tradition is the mother of our modern world.  It has no father.

WRONG MAN, RIGHT MUSIC

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The 20th-Century notion of “absolute music” tended to
capture the imaginations of composers who wanted to be
thought “modern”.  They generally abandoned the emotional, descriptive
and/or
narrative ambitions of 19th-Century program music in favor of a more
severe system of abstraction.  This marked the end of concert music as
a popular art form but not the end of program music, which went on its
merry way in movies, where it continued to enthrall a large public.

Of course, people didn't pay as much conscious
attention to this music as they used to in the concert hall, but they
could have, with profit.  To prove this assertion all you have to do is
listen to the many classic film scores now available on CD — the
original tracks recorded for the films or later re-recordings of the
scores.  Many of them are magnificent pieces of music in their own
right.  It helps to have the “program” in mind, a memory of the films
this music supported, but it's not absolutely necessary with the very
best scores — like those of Bernard Herrmann, for example.

Hermann didn't specialize in creating memorable
melodies but he was a master
at using the colors of an orchestra to evoke mood and he had a great
and subtle understanding of the dramatic uses of rhythm.  All of his
Hitchcock scores are brilliant, even the less famous of them like the
score he did for The Wrong Man.  Edgy, dark, minimalist, jazz-inflected, it
perfectly mirrors the bleak and jagged realism of Hitchcock's 50s-era
New York
City, its dehumanizing institutions and its spiritual
chaos.  But it has a lyrical core,
too, that echoes the protagonist's yearning for deliverance.

It's not absolute music, to be sure — but it's
absolutely wonderful.

SHADOW OF A DOUBT

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Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow Of A Doubt, from 1942, is a kind of proto-film-noir.  It shares the dark view of human nature and the deeply skeptical vision of “respectable” society that would inform the post-WWII film noir.  WWII was just getting under way for America when the film was made, but much of the rest of the world had already been at war for three years by then, and clearly the global conflagration was beginning to create a deep anxiety in the psyches of sensitive, thoughtful artists like Hitchcock and Thornton Wilder, who co-wrote the screenplay.

At the beginning of the century America had participated in a “war to end all wars” and now the continents were aflame again.  There seemed to be some intrinsic, irrepressible evil in the nature of human beings, or in the organization of their societies, which led to wholesale destruction at regular intervals, despite the best efforts of mankind’s intellect and collective goodwill.

The fragility of human institutions, especially the family, was acutely sensed.  Shadow Of A Doubt was pre-noir in that it didn’t concentrate on the world’s corruption or on the impotence of manhood, personified in the devouring femme fatale, but rather on the human being’s inward capacity for evil, which seemed to erupt without reason or warning.  “The world needs watching,” says the young hero at the film’s end — meaning, mankind needs watching.  There was still, in 1942, a faith in the idea that watching might do some good.  At the core of the post-war film noir was a sense that such a faith was delusional.

The magnificent irony at the heart of Shadow Of A Doubt is that the threatened family is presented at the beginning of the film as a trap, a web of annoyance and boredom.  The glamor of the unconventional, rootless, iconoclastic Uncle Charley is presented as a deliverance from the suffocating everyday reality of family and small-town life.

But as our suspicions of Uncle Charley grow, we begin to treasure the ordinary goodness of the family he seems to be rescuing from its rut.  Only in the light of their fragility can we appreciate family and community for the treasures they are, the bulwarks they are against the world’s insidious darkness.


It’s easy to see how this related to the mood of the nation, and the world, when the film was made — but its resonance has if anything grown deeper as the post-war era has played out, with the family and community in deeper and deeper jeopardy, threatened now in “advanced” societies not by external violence but from within.  Wilder and Hitchcock are still reminding us how truly naked and vulnerable we are in the face of the world’s horrors — still reminding us that those horrors originate in the human heart, and that our few defenses against them are both frail and inexpressibly sweet.

Shadow Of A Doubt was Hitchcock’s favorite film — he certainly never made a greater one.