Andrew Spicer (1)

review of
Andrew Spicer's Film Noir
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - December 11-15, 2018

For the complete review go here: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/1084349-film-noir?chapter=1

If anyone had asked me what "Film Noir" movies are before I read this bk I might've said something like: 'Black & white crime movies from the 1940s & 1950s with dramatic lighting, an emphasis on the psychological, contrasts between poverty & luxury, femme fatales, & brutal men' — but I wdn't've been satisfied w/ my definition. I read this bk not only b/c I like the films but also to access a more articulate & knowledgable POV.

"Any study of film noir, however objective, has to engage with what could be called 'noir myth': that film noir is quintessentially those black and white 1940s films, bathed in deep shadows, which offered a 'dark mirror' to American society and questioned the fundamental optimism of the American dream. There is, as with any myth, a great deal of truth to this image, but film noir needs to be understood as a cultural phenomenon which is much more historically extensive, complex and diverse. Although the present study gives due weight to the range of formal devices that often mark out film noir — its arrested visual and aural style and its complex modes of narration — it argues that film noir cannot be understood simply as a set of textual conventions which reflected a wider social malaise." - p vii

As a side-effect of reading this bk, I started checking movies mentioned out of the public library & have watched generally one movie a day w/ still quite a few to go that I haven't gotten to yet. So far, I've gotten thru:

"Road Ends"
"The Glass Shield"
"In Too Deep"
"Malevolent"
"A Rage in Harlem"
"Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye"
"The House on 92nd Street"
"The Woman in the Window"
"The Dark Corner"
"Pickup on South Street"
"The Chase"
"Kiss of Death"
"Laura"
"Out of the Past"
"The Enforcer"
"Border Incident"
"The Two Mrs. Carrolls"
"Point Blank"
"Klute"
"The Killer Inside Me"
"The Spiral Staircase"
"Odd Man Out"
"Body Heat"
& others..

I wdn't necessarily call all the movies listed above "Noir", I might even exclude the 1st 5, but at least 2 of those 5 are listed in Film Noir. In some cases, reading about the directors got me interested in witnessing non-noir work by them so I got out Anthony Mann's "Winchester '73", a western, too.

After experiencing so many noirs I felt myself beginning to prefer the "American dream" to its "'dark mirror'". Even though I'm probably considerably more critical of societal public relations myths than others, there's only so much despair & torment, even in fictional depictions, that I can take.

Let's get back to figuring out what film noir is:

"The present study, following James Naremore (1998), argues that film noir is an imprecise but necessary cultural category which helps to make sense of a complex phenomenon. As my primary purpose is to give a broad overview, Film Noir is as inclusive as possible, exploring both the 'classical' period (1940-1959) and also neo-noir." - p vii

Despite this inclusivity, "Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye", one I wd've probably included, is missing.

"Clearly groping for the most appropriate label for these films, American reviewers most frequently called them 'psychological thrillers'. a term that the film industry itself employed". - p 1

"The origins of the label 'film noir' have been traced to the French film critic Nino Frank who used the term in response to the release of four crime thrillers — The Maltese Falcon (1941), Murder, My Sweet (UK title: Farewell My Lovely) (1944), Double Indemnity (1944) and Laura (1944) — in Paris in August 1946. Film noir was employed through its analogy with 'série noire', the label given to French translations of American 'hard-boiled' fiction from which several of these films had been adapted." - p 2

Now I feel like we're getting somewhere. What's a literal translation of these 2 French terms?:

film noir = dark movie

'série noire' = 'black sequence'

Even people who're as poorly familiar w/ French as myself will probably immediately notice problems in the translations: Given that "noire" is just the feminine form & that "noir" is the masculine one that means that both can mean either "black" or "dark". However, the blackness & the darkness are more psychological than physical — w/ the meaning of black or dark as a psychological term being dangerous or disturbed — something more implied by than communicated by the translation. Furthermore, "série" is probably meant to mean something closer to the obvious publishing series or genre.

"flm noir remains a contested term, a point that will be explored in the concluding section of this chapter." - p 4

"in addition to problems about which films constitute the noir 'canon', many of the elements that are used to define film noir — in particular treatment of gender and sexuality, its devices of flashback and voice-over narration, its concentration on abnormal psychological states and its visual style — can all be found in comtemporaneous films that are not classified as noir" - p 25

That last quote is from the concluding section of the chapter. Even w/ this scholarly analysis, I was left w/ a feeling of the amorphousness of the term. As such, perhaps "Film Noir" is useless as anything but a vague category & my initial definition is as good as any other.

The section entitled "CULTURAL INFLUENCES" starts off the "'Hard-Boiled' Crime Fiction" w/ a quote from Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest (1929), possibly my favorite bk by him:

"I first heard Personville called Poisonwille by a red-haired mucker named Hickey Dewey in the Big Ship at Butte. He also called a shirt a shoit. I didn't think anything of what he had done to the city's name. Later I heard men who couldn't manage their r's give it the same pronunciation. I still didn't see anything in it but the meaningless sort of humour that used to make richardsnary the thieves' word for dictionary. A few years later I went to Personville and learned better." - p 5

My meager review of Red Harvest is here: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/386293.Red_Harvest .

"The work of the American 'hard-boiled' writers, such as Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain, was frequently used as the basis for films noirs: almost 20 per cent of noir thrillers produced between 1941 and 1948 were direct adaptations of 'hard-boiled' novels and short stories" - p 5

In William Luhr's bk Raymond Chandler & Film, he lists 10 based on Chandler alone: "The Falcon Takes Over" (1942), "Time to Kill" (1942), "Murder, My Sweet" (1944), "The Big Sleep" (1946), "Lady in the Lake" (1947), '"The Brasher Doubloon" (1947), "Marlowe" (1969), "The Long Goodbye" (1973), "Farewell, My Lovely" (1975), "The Big Sleep" (1978).

Spicer makes the claim that "Pulp fiction's readership was largely the male urban working class who enjoyed the fast-paced violence and eroticism." (p 6) I assume that that claim is based on reliable statistics. It seems that something like that wdn't hold true today. I find it hard to believe that the majority of today's "male urban working class" reads at all. Instead there's TV. I wonder if there're any statistics that "the male urban working class" are now considerably less intelligent & critical as a result.

Film Noir is a conventional academic study. As such, the language is straight-forward functional & not really that interesting to read as writing itself. It breaks the history into periods & types & lists a substantial amt of movies. The indexes & bibliographies at the end, alone, are worth it. I learned from it.

"Lewton's first film Cat People (1942) was a supernatural 'chiller', the third, The Leopard Man (1943), was adapted from Woolrich's Black Alibi in which a deranged serial killer distracts attention by casting suspicion on the activities of an escaped leopard. Perhaps the most atmospheric, subtly suggestive and chilling film was the fourth, The Seventh Victim (1943)." - p 17

"Films noirs are littered with maladjusted veterans, the product of the difficult and traumatic readjustment to peace and civilian life after a period of severe disruption and the dangers, and excitements, of active service. Like other extended conflicts, the Second World War had profound psychological effects upon its combatants, often making their reintegration into civilian society difficult or impossible. The problem of the 'psychoneurotic vet' who had been traumatized by his wartime experiences and whose unpredictable violence, instability and aimlessness made him unsuited for civilian life, was well documented. He often became disillusioned by returning to his mundane prewar occupation after becoming used to both action and command." - p 20

&, of course, this is a problem that's plagued humanity throughout our existence. Take the Vietnam War, the war that was never even declared an official war, & take the Agent Orange casualties that the government didn't even acknowledge until after 13 yrs of lawsuit — or take the problem of soldier addiction to heroin that the US goverment will probably never acknowledge culpability in connection w/ even tho the heroin business was created by them to fund their adjacent secret wars. & that's not even mentioning the millions senselessly murdered or the people subjected to torture — both by the Viet Cong AND by the US. All this hell brought on by human ambition of the most sordid sort. Will humanity ever evolve out of its own shit? I'd like to think it's possible.

"As with its use of existentialism, film noir's use of psychoanalysis does not represent a detached and in-depth understanding of psychoanalysis per se, but rather an acute sense of its potential to add depth to the conventions of 'blood melodrama'". - p 23

Indeed. & that's likely to be the case w/ any popular art form. Things are used as allusions, as imagery, as evocations — any actual analytical substance is likely to alienate a mass (v)audience.

"The federal goverment's efforts to regulate the film industry more closely and eliminate its oligopolistic practices culminated in the Supreme Court's ruling against the majors in May 1948, known as the Paramount Decree, because Paramount was the first major named in the case. The ruling ended the practice of block booking and terminated vertical integration: the majors had to separate, 'divorce', their exhibition from their distribution and production arms and were expected gradually to sell off their cinema circuits". - p 32

It seems to me that such "oligopolistic practices" have found their way around the laws by now or the laws have changed. These days, if a theater wants to undergo the very expensive conversion process to become a multiplex & carry the latest digital high-definition streamed product the majors will fund the whole process under the condition that they completely control what's screened — or so I've been told by people connected to a once independent theater that's now under major control.

A little online research revealed that in August, 2018, the Paramount Decree was to be reviewed by the Dept of Justice w/ an eye toward removing it. Alas, I was unable to find whether anything has actually happened w/ that — despite the review taking place 4 mnths ago. Much of what I found in Film Noir aroused my curiousity to do further research.

"Many independent producers turned to film noir as a way of providing cost-effective but sophisticated entertainment. Enterprise Productions, founded by David Lowe, was an idealistic, left-liberal concern that tried to foster a communal ethos and encourage film-makers who were critical of the establishment. It was the home for Robert Rossen's Body and Soul (1947) and Abraham Polonsky's Force of Evil (1948) starring John Garfield and Max Ophuls's Caught (1949), before folding through commerical pressures (Arnold and Miller, 1986, pp.9-12). Diana Productions was more individualistic, formed in 1945 through the coming together of Walter Wanger, already established as an independent producer, one of Hollywood's leading ladies, Joan Bennett, Wagner's wife, and émigré director Fritz Lang". - p 34

Note that Spicer includes the source for his information immediately after its presentation w/in the paragraph rather than necessarily as an endnote (although he does that too). I find that preferable.

It's interesting to me to have the distinctions of censorship articulated:

"Because films were exhibited to such a broad public, including the 'unsophisticated and the impressionable', they were not allowed the same freedom of expression as literature, theatre or the press." - p 36

"The Production Code's three General Principles attempted to ensure that films showed 'correct standards of life', including the injunction that crime must never go unpunished, while its numerous Particular Applications closely regulated the ways in which sex and violence might be depicted. 'Adultery and illicit sex' could not be explicitly treated nor justified, nor could 'lustful embraces' be shown and nudity was expressly forbidden. In addition to proscribing any sympathy for the criminal, the Code also refused to allow the detailed and explicit depiction of criminal methods. In sum, the Code was an attempt to make films promote home and family values and uphold American legal, political and religious institutions and acted as 'a determining force on the construction of narrative and the delineation of character in every studio-produced film after 1931'". - p 37

My, how things have changed.

"These battles over what was permissable raged throughout the immediate post-war period, but became more sporadic in the 1950s, especially after the decision of the Supreme Court in May 1952 that films were a 'significant medium for the communication of ideas' and therefore subject to the same safeguards as the press under the First Amendment to the Constitution which guaranteed freedom." - p 39

"During the 1930s Hollywood films played to an average weekly attendance of between 50 and 60 million. Admissions increased significantly during the war years, rising to a peak of 84 million in 1944. Thereafter there was a significant decline until 1950 when the prewar level of 55 million was reached. Audiences declined more sharply after this point, and, despite a brief upsurge in the mid-1950s, had fallen to 32 million admissions per week by 1959". - p 40

I attribute this, of course, to TV. Obviously, the industry has tried to adapt to present-day circumstances so where are we now?

"Movie theater attendance in the US and Canada in 2017 fell to its lowest point since at least 1992, Bloomberg reports. Box Office Mojo estimates around 1.24 billion tickets were sold, a drop off of 5.8 percent from the previous year. Even with higher ticket prices, domestic revenue also dropped 2.7 percent from last year, from $11.4 billion to $11.1 billion." - https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/3/16844662/movie-theater-attendance-2017-low-net...

"The graph shows a steady percentage below 10% of the U.S. population that averaged going to the movies weekly since around 1964. But before that point in time, there was still a good amount of people going to the movies. In 1930, more than 65% of the population went to the movies weekly. That means that for every 5 people you knew, 3 of them went to the movies weekly. Can you even imagine that?" - https://www.cinemablend.com/new/Long-Term-Movie-Attendance-Graph-Really-Really-D...

"More than two-thirds (71%) of the U.S./Canada population – or 246 million people – went to the cinema at least once in 2016, a two percent increase from 2015. Frequent moviegoers – individuals who go to the cinema once a month or more – continue to drive the movie industry, accounting for 48 percent of all tickets sold in the United States and Canada." - https://www.mpaa.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/MPAA-Theatrical-Market-Statistic...

As a moviemaker & as a person who appreciates movie theaters, I'm rooting for movie attendance to continue to be strong. Unfortunately, the kind of movies I like the most, the kind I make ( http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/tENTMoviesIndexanchored2.html ) seem to have fewer screening opportunities than ever.

"Richard Maltby has argued that even if censorship regulations were loosening, there was a postwar 'climate of concern' about the effects of Hollywood films on audiences (Maltby, 1993, pp.39-48). Films noirs were often attacked in some quarters for their 'absolute lack of moral energy, their listless, fatalistic despair' (quoted in ibid., p.41). As discussed in Chapter 1, such films were deemed to be irresponsible and pernicious by a section of the intelligentsia. These anxious liberals deprecated film noir as 'a low-status product, playing predominantly to the bottom end of the urban market which reformers, liberal or otherwise, always worried about most' (ibid., p. 46). Film noir, even if not named as such, was being polemically interpreted as the symptom of a sick society by an intelligentsia that was hostile to 'subversive' popular culture." - p 42

Even though Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye isn't in Spicer's bk, my review of the bk version of it in relation to its movie adaption is relevant:

""Budlong, a skinny sickly sodomist, turned on his side facing me and said in a ruttish voice: 'I had another dream about you last night, sugar.'

""It will be your last, you Caresser of Calves, I thought. 'Was it as nice as the others?' I asked.

""'Nicer . . .' he said.

""'You're sweet. I adore you,' I said, feeling a fine fast exhiliration that today was the day that I was going to kill him, that I was finally going to kill him" - p 5

"That's not in the movie. It cd be these days. In the movie, Holiday, the woman who's arranged for her brother to escape from prison w/ the narrator's help, covers their escape wearing men's clothes & shooting a rifle. In the bk, it's a machine gun. That's much more the weapon of a killer. In the movie Holiday is more of an innocent trying to free a brother that she thinks is innocent. In the bk:

""'That was pretty good,' I said. 'Wearing a man's suit . . .'

""She smiled at me, unbuckling her trousers but not unbuttoning the fly, slipping them off, arching her shoulders against the back seat to raise her buttocks out of the way. Her legs were slim and white. I could see the skin in the minutest detail, the pigments and pores and numberless valley-cracks that criss-crossed above her knees, forming patterns that were as lovely and intricate as snow crsytals. And there was something else I saw too out of the corner of my left eye, and I tried not to look, not because I didn't want to, not because of modesty, but only because when you had waited as long as I had to see one of these you want it to reveal itself at full length, sostenuto. I tried not to look, but I did look and there it was, the Atlantis, the Route to Cathay, the Seven Cities of Cibola . . ." - p 23

"In other words, her cunt. On the narrator's 1st trip to Holiday's apartment:

For the complete review go here: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/1084349-film-noir?chapter=1… (altro)