7.6.09: MURDER, MY SWEET

MURDER, MY SWEET (RKO, 1944)

dir. Edward Dmytryk; starring Dick Powell, Claire Trevor, Anne Shirley

Oy jesus. A brief note. I am fucked on this project. Well, maybe not irrevocably, but I just spent five days in Minnesota to see my newborn baby niece, and well, my plan to still keep watching noirs while there just completely failed. I can't be blamed, little baby girls are the mathematical opposite of noir. They are 1/noir. They are the square root of negative noir. You can't watch noirs when there is a baby related to you that has just barfed all over you but somehow it is funny and adorable. It can't be done.

Anyway, here is the first of a few write-ups from right before the trip, and well I guess I'll be watching like four movies a day for the next couple days.

Murder, My Sweet is a) my first Raymond Chandler/Philip Marlowe film of the month, b) awesome, and c) overwhelming. For the uninitiated, Raymond Chandler was a pulp detective novelist who had a swath of books adapted into films, often and most famously his stories featuring detective Philip Marlowe. Marlowe will turn up at least once more this month when Bogart plays him in The Big Sleep, I can't remember if he pops up in any of the others on my list.

Marlowe stories are pretty much the quintessential noir detective form: defined, distilled, perfected. This jumps us ahead to c) overwhelming. This damn movie is military-grade noir. It's lab-grown, hydroponic noir. This is that shit that your friends tell you “Don't eat the whole thing” but you're all “Damn I can take it I'm no wuss” and you eat the whole thing and then your friends are standing over you in the hospital all “Dogg why did you run into the DMV wearing a cape and motorcycle helmet and nothing else you didn't eat the whole thing did you”

What I'm saying is it's pretty noir.

Now, I'm not saying it's the best noir, or that it's noir-ishness contributes directly to b) awesome. I'm just saying that this is so pure, every noir detective trope and motif and stylistic tic in here. Men lighting cigarettes for men, women drinking booze, flashbacks and backstory, dialogue so thick with double entendre it gets hard to breathe, heavy shadow and light contrast, at one point the shadow Marlowe's name is actually directly cast onto a fedora-wearing brute from his painted office window. You have femme fatales, you have gold-digging femme fatales, you've got hard-assed police who barely tolerate the loose cannon detective, fast patter dialogue, murder, jewels, and three muddled, unrelated (OR ARE THEY???) plotlnes within the first 20 minutes of the film. In one scene, we see a darkened room, and the only way we know someone is in there is by the slowly rising plume of smoke that puffs up from the couch. And even in this hard-boiled cops & robbers story, there is still a psychedelic dream sequence.

What I'm saying is it gets a little claustrophobic.

I will not even pretend to try and summarize the plot. What I will say is, I had totally forgotten that you cannot try and watch a Marlowe movie while also doing other stuff. I was trying to bake a pie and shit during this movie, and I just kept going back and back again because I had no idea what was going on. Of course, this is part of the fun, as even 100% focused attention is going to leave a viewer at the end thinking “buh wuh wait who killed that guy.” The joy is in the twists and turns. You know lovers will betray each other, you know everyone's lying, and you know that you'll be scratching your head at the end. You go along because everyone on screen looks and sounds so good while they're doing it.

I mean, the film is called Murder, My Sweet, for god's sake. This is the one-stop trip for sex and murder, 1944 style. It is awesome, and it is the best single example of stereotypical detective noir I've seen so far this month.

Okay, it's the only example of stereotypical detective noir I've seen so far this month. Shut up.

7.4.09: NOTORIOUS

NOTORIOUS (1946, RKO)

dir. Alfred Hitchcock; starring Ingrid Bergman, Cary Grant, Claude Rains

Before I launch into my little spiel on Notorious, I'd like to take a second to acknowledge the fact that, five days into this project, I am already behind. As it stands, to catch up, I'm going to have to give myself a triple feature tomorrow. We shall see if I hold myself to it. The point is, I suck.

You know what doesn't suck? Alfred Hitchcock's Notorious, which I had marked as a film I had not seen before, and then within the first four minutes of watching it, I realized “Oh riiiiight.” Now, this doesn't mean I don't love Notorious; it occurs to me that this movie happens to be forgettable only because it has the unlucky quality of being a Hitchcock. I may be alone on this, but while I think it's a fantastic movie, when your brain is filled with Rear Window, Vertigo, Rope, et. al., Notorious leaves a slightly less indelible impression.

Perhaps part of this is due to the fact that, although Notorious is (rightfully) classified as a noir, it does not look much like one. Not that there aren't dynamic angles, since there are, or that there is no stark interplay between shadow and light, because there is. No, it is because noir is a visual style that is, by definition, is somewhat vague and stretched out, developed by numerous directors and photographers over dozens of works. Notorious draws much more from a singular, focused style: Hitchcock. His meticulous mise-en-scene is here. His intelligent, watchful eye of a camera is here. His striking pushes and pulls are here. The precise shots of the Unica key, the single tear on Bergman's cheek, the date on the wine bottle. Watching this movie, one is seeing a Hitchcock first, and a noir second.

Visual style and my shitty memory notwithstanding, Notorious has some great noir dialogue, since Bergman and Grant are not just the two most beautiful humans to have ever lived, much alone shared a screen, they are also phenomenal together. That being said, and no disrespect to C.G. here (and for a man who plays the lovable but wacky leading man so often, he does a startlingly good job at playing hard boiled here), but looking over my notes, I happen to see that the lady Bergman gets all the best lines:

“The important drinking hasn't started yet.” [For what is noir without the constant inhalation of alcohol?]

“People like you oughta be in bed.” [Drunkenly slurred to a motorcycle cop, both re-affirming the Two Americas of noir and making Bergman beautiful and a badass.]

“That word gives me pain... waving the flag with one hand and picking the pocket with the other.” [Speaking of patriotism; we'll talk about patriotism and capitalism more in other movies, especially Out of the Past and Gilda.]

Grant does, however, participate in one of the film's best back-and-forths, which alludes to the prevailing sense in noir that is the past forever inescapable, that the Thug Come Into Money, he still be a thug, the No-Good Made Good, he still be no good. During a lunch in Rio, well before the real intrigue of the Nazis and mystery and oh who cares Hitchcock practically invented the MacGuffin these two are the real story, Devlin (C. Grant) pokes fun at Huberman's (I. Bergman) newfound teetotaling. She coyly replies,

Huberman: “You don't think a woman can change?”

Devlin: “Change is fun... for a while.”

And certainly, these lovers have a hard time ever trusting each other to move beyond their pasts. Huberman never believes Devlin loves her, that he will always be a dispassionate cop using her as a pawn. Devlin never believes Huberman truly loves him and no one else, that her assignment to act as loving wife to a Nazi sympathizer is just a job to her. One can hardly blame them; their love affair begins with deceit. His coy playboy is a mask for his federal agent with a mission; her irreverent drunk is a mask for her passionate American loyalist. Even once they kiss, he never says “I love you” and Huberman reminds him often that she does not believe he does.

It is, of course, the turmoil in the lovers' relationship that drives the film, but this is not uncommon in any style or genre. What we see here, though, is a common device in noir: they reach the “happy ending” much too soon. They kiss, they are in love, they are in paradise. How tragic for our heroes, then, that we are only 20 minutes into the movie. The goal of the noir is not to work and struggle towards happiness. Noir often struggles towards, and achieves, peace and stability – then destroys it. Even noirs with a happy ending, like this one, show you that we are constantly reaching “happy endings” in our lives, but that these are impermanent and unstable.

The actual ending, of course, is a happy one, all things considered. Also, in the final scene, it is made finally and unavoidably clear that the “plot” of the film, the mystery of war criminals and espionage, is secondary at best. Common film structure (bear with me here as I get obnoxiously Theory for a second) has the “A” plot, the actual events and intrigue that advance the story, and the “B” plot, virtually always the love story. The climax of the film is where both plots reach their culmination/conclusion, almost always with one plot's solution being the last puzzle piece needed to solve the other plot (“Why, my normally-stoic employee, with your uncharacteristic marriage proposal to the woman you've been bantering with for 90 minutes, you've convinced me you've got the values and morals I'm looking for in my next regional manager!” for example). However! By the climactic scene of Notorious, the “A” mystery has essentially been solved, and wasn't that important to the viewer anyway. Instead, the final scene is all about the love between Huberman and Devlin; we are here to see if they finally fall into perfect love. So is the baffling paradox of the noir: the intrigue is so complex, so intricate, but we are really here to see the “B” plot, the interpersonal struggle. And yet, they are classified as noir, as crime, as thriller, almost never as romance. So it goes.

A final note on the final shot of the film: Claude Rains, the Axis conspirator Alexander Sebastian, walks back to his house where he will surely be killed by his cohorts now that it is all but obvious he has allowed an American agent to discover their plot. Again, noir is not about the violence, but the everpresent looming threat of violence. Violence is momentary and jarring, but passes. The threat can be feared for as long as it is strung out; Hitchcock understood this better than most (see Bomb Theory). In The Public Enemy, we see Tom Powers point a gun at Putty Nose's head, and the camera slides away until we just hear the bang, and thud. Here, the technique of using only the implication of death is taken to a new level. Sebastian walks in, the door closes behind him, and the film is over. We will never see him die. For us, he is forever and ever About To Die. The past is inescapable. The future is uncertain. This is the timeline of noir.

7.1.09: STRANGER ON THE THIRD FLOOR

STRANGER ON THE THIRD FLOOR (1940, RKO)

dir. Boris Ingster; starring John McGuire, Margaret Tallichet, Peter Lorre

Having never heard of the film before, I was surprised to read that Stranger on the Third Floor is, apparently, generally accepted as the first film noir, as it is defined in the classic sense. However, after watching this surprisingly short film, clocking in at only 64 minutes, it’s a pretty compelling argument. The film not only possessed most of the critical elements of noir, but it serves as something of a transition from mainstream American filmmaking of the period into – but, I’m getting ahead of myself.

The movie, as with most noirs, features a plot that is neither particularly interesting nor important, so we won’t spend too much time on that yet. Better to begin with, well, the beginning: the opening shot. After the RKO boilerplate, the first shot is of the entrance to an apartment building, which the camera pauses on for only a moment before swiftly racing up to a third-story window. At this window is the silhouette of a man behind the curtain, and superimposed upon it is the title of the film.

(It is here I will freely admit my sick tendency to over-analyze, to ferret out every possible metaphor and device in the hopes of finding the one legitimate one by pure process of saturation.)

This shot already serves as an in-between place, a transition. It is at once the classic Title Card, a device long since abandoned in our day but for the pastiches and homages, and our first shadow of the film. Man is represented by darkness, before there is a single word of dialogue; darkness smoking a cigarette, no less. Furthermore, in this first shot of the city apartment building, we have already exposed the urban backdrop that serves as the setting for pure noir. The rapid climb to the third floor establishes the vertical topography of the city, cramming everything so tightly together that the only place to grow is up. The vertical shape of the city not only emphasizes the claustrophobia of urban life, but it will aid noir photography as well; this film, as do countless other noirs, will feature harsh, diagonal angles up and down long stairwells. The altitudes of the city afford the noir style extremely exaggerated shots, a device that will eventually be taken to its extreme years later in Hitchcock’s psycho-noir, Vertigo (1958).

But enough about the first three seconds of film. Despite my obsessive over-analysis, the rest of this opening is actually very un-noir. Curly-cue title scripts, pleasant major-key music, and even the smoking silhouette turns to a silhouette of a man typing, and then making a phone call. Low on intrigue, to be sure. As it continues, any real scrap of noir style is all but invisible. Our main characters are sweet, and their banter is pretty weak. Jane is no femme fatale, Mike is a reporter who always has the same thing for breakfast every day at the same diner.

Our next noir element seeps in slowly. While there are many elements of noir storytelling that get used all the time as examples of the typical style (betrayal, complex twists, etc.), one that I rarely hear people talking about is the extensive, almost universal use of backstory. Often, the most important events in a noir are ones that have happened before the film begins. As this month goes on, we will see more and more that the past is viewed as oppressive, irreversible, inescapable. No matter how pure our characters may be, there is something in their past that will catch them and find them out. In Stranger, our placid diner scene already makes reference to Mike being the star witness in a murder trial, the murder of a man named Nick, a murder his fiancée Jane wishes he had never discovered. It will be a little while until we discover the details of this backstory, but there is already a sense that we have arrived in the middle of intrigue. Things are already complicated.

Later, we see the aforementioned trial, in which a young man, Joe Briggs, is being tried for the murder of Nick, who we learn was the prior owner of Mike and Jane’s usual diner. The boy is pitiful, wide open eyes, slack jawed with terror and weakness. He is no murderer, but we watch as he is strung up by Mike’s well-meaning but circumstantial witness account. It is interesting to see that we begin in a courtroom, a place generally accepted as the end of a crime. In another form, the courtroom is where all story points and characters may be gathered together to form a complete picture, to suss out who is right and who is wrong, and to end the movie justly. This, quite simply, is not that. The courtroom is our beginning, not our conclusion. The law is not a force to tie up a complicated story; the law is what complicates a simple life. It is here in the house of law that all terrors and paranoias of the film begin.

Certainly, as we watch the scene, it is clear that this is not a court we should expect to heal and cure. The judge is not paying attention. A juror falls asleep. The public defender barely tries. If there is safety and security in the world of noir, it is not to be found in the laws of man. This begins to settle on the mind of Mike Ward as he watches Briggs, sentenced to death, get dragged away as he screams out to Mike for help. As his cries fade away, Mike’s eyes (and ours) are dragged up to the shadowy figure of blind Justice that looms above, terrifying chords sounding as we zoom in on her scales.

In the scenes that follow, shadows begin to seep into the film. Mike and Jane talk on the phone about the trauma of the trial, each shrouded in darkness. As Mike leaves his courtroom news office for the night, he passes by the empty courtroom, where Justice once again towers over everything, exaggerated shadows harshly thrown, as Briggs’ screams of innocence echo once more. This shot triggers, 16 and a half minutes in, the first appearance of the inner monologue, another classic noir device. The monologue runs as Mike walks through the city streets on his way home, running over the trial in his mind. It is here we see that the noir is not the detective story. We do not care about clues and evidence and procedure. It is about the inner life, the endless doubts and cynicisms and questions that rattle inside a man’s mind. He arrives home, head full of thoughts, to find a strange, quiet man sitting on the front steps to his boarding house.

Now. Let’s talk about Peter Lorre.

He is a man that defines the unsettling, unnerving Other of the noir. The way he does not quite touch his hat when he greets Mike on the stoop. The way he does not quite smile. The way he does not quite focus his eyes on anything. He cannot be pinned down. He does not even speak. Why is he there? Who is he? There can be no answers to these questions now. He scares us and we do not know why. And, as if he is the literal signifier of noir, some insubstantial angel of the shadows, once he arrives, the movie is no longer a transitional piece. It is no longer a mainstream story with hints of cynicism. We are in noir. Mike walks up the stairs to his third-story room, commenting on “what a gloomy dump” it is, wishing they’d put in a bigger lamp. He passes by his snoring, obnoxious neighbor, Meng, about whom we are soon treated to more backstory flashbacks.

When Mike sees the stranger disappear into Meng’s apartment, he hides in the shadows to watch. Soon, the door opens, and the stranger’s hand slowly creeps out. It is so stylized, neither literal and realistic nor 40’s Hollywood approximation of literal and realistic. This is something alien. His shadow is cast on the wall. All is sharp light and engulfing darkness, a world of contrast. Mike chases him down the stairs, asking him all the questions we are. There is no response. Suddenly, the stranger whirls around and glares up at him, up at us. It is malice, untempered by motive or narrative. It is no surprise that Mike stops dead in his tracks, horrified. Once out the door, the stranger has disappeared.

Mike goes back to his room, but he is infected now. Once Peter Lorre enters your story, you cannot go back to a Hollywood romance. He presses himself against the wall in a contorted pose, the stylized expressions of noir having taken over. It is hard not to see why critics of the time derided this film as derivative of German contemporaries, but it is a beautiful synthesis of the Hollywood straightman and the alien angles of expressionism.

Paranoia takes over. Meng is not snoring. Is he dead? Mike cannot investigate, they will think he has done it. Fingerprints! Motives! More memories take over, all the times he threatened Meng, how many people knew he hated Meng. He remembers a night in the diner, Meng passing through while Mike eats a late dinner with a colleague. Mike asks his coworker, “Did you ever want to kill a man?” His friend deadpans back a line that could very well be the slogan for all noirs everywhere:

“My son, there's murder in every intelligent man's heart."

So there is.

As the camera angles twist and tilt more and more, Mike’s paranoia sends him into a dream, full of oppressive close-ups, shrieks and swirls, flames, phantom voices. He is found out, he is arrested, he is convicted! His prison bench sits in a room without ceiling or walls, just a void with shadows behind and shadows below, his terror reduced to the merest suggestions and shapes of his unjust punishment. In the dreamcourt, the statue of Justice is back, a pure shadow now, silhouetted above the court. As Mike screams to the sleeping jury and the hard-hearted judge, the same sinister stranger crawls over endless rows of chairs, creeping closer and closer. The judge sentences him to death, and as Mike watches, the judge transforms into an enormous statue of Justice, her scales unbalanced, her sword become a scythe. In noir, there is no glory in justice, nor in crime. There is no solution, no escape, no sympathy. The shadows are not something to hide in, they are something to consume a sane man’s mind. Even the sweet-hearted Briggs is back in the dream, his face twisted in rage, screaming “Ok kid, go and die!”

Mike wakes, and discovers that Meng is indeed dead. After a moment of panic, he is persuaded by Jane to go to the forces of law, to tell the pure truth and trust in the objective nature of the law. Is this a noir? Of course it is. Of course he is arrested for this offering of trust. Jane trawls the city, searching for the stranger, the man the police will not hunt down now that they have a suspect, a man who might not have committed the crime, but who may as well have. Jane, in her most noir act, immerses herself in the city, but to no avail. It is purely by accident that, while drinking coffee at the diner, the stranger appears in her life, first as only a hand and, for the first time in 55 minutes, a voice appearing from off-screen. He order two raw hamburgers, his voice as soft, unfocused, and unsettling as everything else about him.

Jane follows him out, strikes up a conversation, persuades him to “walk her home.” He displays sudden bursts of speed and anger to contrast his slow, unfocused stupor. He is not just one kind of terrifying, that would make him too easy to define, to pin down. He can be all of our nightmares. When Jane brings up the murders, he whirls on her, asking if “they” sent her to take him back to “the people who lock you up… they put you in a shirt with long sleeves and they pour ice water on you.” Nick, the dead diner owner, and Meng, he says they wanted to send him back. He had to kill him. We see here that there is no great reveal, no clues that lead to a perfect solution. There is no calculated revenge to be exacted here, and no revealing monologue of meticulous planning. The killings are the result of pure madness, simple insanity. How can we convince ourselves not to be terrified of this? What artificial constructs of law or logic can we invent to protect ourselves from this idea? We are naked and alone, no one will help Jane and answer our screams. Interestingly, even as he attacks Jane, we never see the knife the stranger uses. Noir is not occupied so much with violence, but with the ever-present threat of violence. We cannot shield ourselves from even the thought of death.

In the end, the stranger is killed by a truck, unable to stop in time as he runs out in front of it while in pursuit of Jane. His death is as meaningless and random as his crimes. We get the sense that this was our only chance of ending his terror, that no purposeful plot concocted by sane men could have stopped him. Our only chance was, well, chance. This is not justice. With his dying breath, the stranger confesses to the crimes, but with his last words, dispels any hopes of this being a pat, perfect ending. He looks up with those unfocused eyes, and says,

“I’m not going back.”

And he isn’t. His specter of fear has been let out of its cage, and there is no way to see the city as a safe place again. Sure, the movie can tack on its seventy-second ending, with the happy couple going off to get married, the free Briggs giving them a free taxi ride to City Hall. But this is a lie. Noir is here. No one is safe. Peter Lorre is not going back.

Subsequent write-ups will most likely not be anywhere near this long. But we’ll see