© William Ahearn 2007
In the introduction, James Naremore states that Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton’s A Panorama of American Film Noir “occupies a special place [as] the first book ever written about a type of film for which Hollywood had no name.” That may be true. It is also the book that would complicate and confuse any attempt for a workable definition of film noir. There is no doubt that an American definition of film noir would vary from the French version that seems to have gotten lost with the belief that Nino Frank had coined the term. Variance is one thing; creating a definition that makes no sense is a totally different situation.
While I could write reams on this subject, I will, instead, select examples from the book and explore Borde and Chaumeton’s so-called theory. There is no need to delve into the usual academic esoterics or film snob jargon and I’ll use examples of well-known films by movie directors most people would know.
Theories aren’t proven to be viable based on clever constructions; they are proven in their application and the sense they consistently make over numerous examples. There is one other aspect of discussing American films that seems to get lost in evaluating movies made during the studio days. Most people believe that the business of Hollywood is to make movies. It isn’t. The business of Hollywood is to sell tickets. If cowboy movies are selling tickets, they make lots of movies with lots of horses. If musicals are selling tickets, then “everybody’s doing choreography.” During the 1940s and into the 1950s, it was crime films. Many of these films are brilliant. Many of them are dreadful knock-offs. Even fewer – based on the original French definition – are noir.
Tossing the French definition aside for the moment, what definition offered by Borde and Chaumeton could possibly explain the following:
“In fact, ‘Double Indemnity’ . . . scores through its tremendous narrative sureness and through a conclusion that, while moral, is no less logical for all that. Like ‘Laura’ this is a film about criminal psychology that assumes its place in the noir series through the intervention of a generic character.”
(The “generic character[s]” are Waldo Lydecker (Clifton Webb) in “Laura” and Phyllis Detrichson (Barbara Stanwyck) in “Double Indemnity.”)
So while “Laura” and “Double Indemnity” are comparable in some ways to Borde and Chaumeton, apparently “The Postman Always Rings Twice” isn’t.
“On the fringes of authentic film noir,” write Borde and Chaumeton, “Tay Garnett’s ‘The Postman Always Rings Twice’ . . . inaugurates the noirified criminal psychology series of 1946-48.”
While Nino Frank went out of his way to identify “Laura” as a golden age mystery and separate it from the films he was discussing, Borde and Chaumeton write that “Laura” “is in fact situated somewhere between film noir and detective-style intrigue.”
How does “Laura” end up closer to “Double Indemnity” than “The Postman Always Rings Twice” that was written by the same author and is similar in many ways?
According to the theory of Borde and Chaumeton, “The Postman Always Rings Twice” is less noir than “Laura” or “Double Indemnity” because Cora, the femme fatale of the story, is “not at all sinister, [her] aspirations seem perfectly legitimate: to eliminate an aging husband, marry a handsome young man, and get her hands on a little money.”
Borde and Chaumeton consider Cora to be even more evil than Phyllis from “Double Indemnity” and while Cora’s “noirness” is just as pure as Phyllis’ it is “typically everyday.” It is odd that they consider “Double Indemnity” – a film they deem “implausible” and “remote” – to be film noir and “Postman” – a film that covers the same ground – to be on the “fringes” of noir. What makes their definition so completely off the wall is that the French version of “Postman,” “Le Dernier Tourant” was one of the films that formed the definition of film noir in France before the war.
The notion of “criminal psychology” as the basis for film noir seems to be not only gratuitous and vague; it is utterly ridiculous. Consider this take on Alfred Hitchcock’s “Suspicion”:
“We say [Cary Grant is a] killer even though in the final sequence there’s a sudden shift, leading to a happy ending. Yet this ending didn’t exist in Frances Iles’ novel, which had until then been meticulously followed. It’s been tacked on to a rigorous crime story, and we persist in classifying “Suspicion” as a murder film.”
It would be easy to do ten pages on how these guys totally missed the boat on Alfred Hitchcock. Three Hitchcock films “linked to the noir series” are “Notorious,” “Rope” and “The Paradine Case.” How any of these films can be considered noir based on their inherent “criminal psychology” is beyond me.
Borde and Chaumeton make no sense to anyone who has read what are now regarded as the noir writers. James M. Cain, Cornell Woolrich, Dorothy B. Hughes, Horace McCoy, David Goodis, all wrote about common, “everyday” people facing the “destined tragedy” that the French defined as film noir so clearly before the war. “Laura” – or any other Otto Preminger film – does not belong in any conversation about film noir and if Nino Frank got anything right, it was that.
There is another bizarre evaluation by Borde and Chaumeton and that is that they consider Charles Vidor’s “Gilda” “a film apart” within the “noir series.” As “The Big Sleep” became a vehicle for Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, “Gilda” was a vehicle for Rita Hayworth. It was her first starring role and the film featured her singing and dancing as well as her talents as what was then described as a “sex siren.”
Whether or not it’s a good film isn’t at issue here but how Borde and Chaumeton perceive it as film noir. Once again, the “criminal psychology” is the criteria for this classification.
“Charles Vidor,” write Borde and Chaumeton, “has managed to excellently limn the umpteen wrangles of Johnny Ferrell [Glen Ford], torn between Gilda [Rita Hayworth] and her husband, who’s clearly a father substitute for him. In this impressive illustration of the Oedipus complex, the director has laid bare the obscure ties that bind the two men, thus evoking, perhaps without realizing it, the complex behavior of children to their own father, something which remains, whatever one says, one of the least popularized aspects of psychoanalysis.”
And singing and dancing, too. The above is typical of Borde and Chaumeton’s book. In fact, “Gilda” is a prime example of faux noir and there are many others. There was no way that the studios were going to risk Rita Hayworth’s nascent career by having her play a Cora or a Phyllis. At the end of the film, Gilda’s husband is killed but they didn’t do it, the secret Nazi tungsten cartel is broken up, Johnny it turns out is a really nice guy and loves Gilda and Gilda isn’t really a slut, she made believe she was a slut to get attention from Johnny who she loves.
And off they go into the sunset.
That isn’t film noir.
In “D.O.A.,” a film Borde and Chaumeton don’t even mention, Frank Bigelow is poisoned by persons and for reasons unknown. He only has days to find out why. At the end of the film, Frank doesn’t get a song and dance number, doesn’t get the girl, and doesn’t even get an antidote. He gets to drop dead unto the floor of a police station.
That’s film noir. If there was ever a film that incorporated the “fatefulness of destiny [and] the impossibility of redemption” of the original French definition, “D.O.A.” is it.
What is ultimately so sad and disappointing about Borde and Chaumeton’s A Panorama of American Film Noir is that it inspired a field of study based on distortions and inaccuracies. It utterly skewed the possibility of a serious inquiry into a small but influential group of films that began in France before the war and was continued in the US during and after the war and in some cases used the same source material.
Now, everything remotely dark or crime-related is called noir. The distinction between hard-boiled and noir – missed by Nino Frank and other film critics – is made clear by no less an authority than Mickey Spillane.
Mickey Spillane may have been a lot of things but he wasn’t a noir writer and nobody knew it better than he did. Part of the confusion of Spillane being a noir writer comes from the book A Century of Noir: Thirty-Two Classic Crime Stories that Spillane edited with Max Allan Collins. Inside the book – that contains stories by true noir writers such as Dorothy B. Hughes and James M. Cain – is a story by Spillane that is a typical tough guy story.
If you read the introduction to the book, Max Allan Collins notes:
“First of all, you have to understand that Mickey Spillane hates the term noir. He will groan and he will moan and he will downright bitch at me when he sees that this title prevailed for our collection of what used to be called hard-boiled – or sometimes ‘tough guy’ – crime and detective fiction.”
Mickey Spillane knew what he was doing and what he was doing wasn’t noir. Not many others these days seem to have a clue. It’s too bad that the blood that is now all over the floor can’t be put back in the vein and real film noir can’t be studied and discussed in way that Italian Neo-Realism or French New Wave or the British “angry young men” films are studied in cinema courses.
Maybe film noir was destined for a tragic end from the first reel.
Originally published in France in 1955, A Panorama of American Film Noir wasn’t published in the US until 1975 and it is around that time that the term film noir began being used in academic circles. Writing in The New York Times on June 21, 1974, Vincent Canby reviewed Roman Polanski’s “Chinatown.” While he mentions “The Long Goodbye,” “The Maltese Falcon,” and “The Big Sleep,” he never mentions film noir or neo-noir or anything remotely noir. Roger Ebert reviewed “Chinatown” on June 1 of that year for the Chicago Sun-Times and he never mentions noir or neo-noir. In February of 2000, Ebert writing about “Chinatown” wrote, “Like most noir stories, ‘Chinatown’ ends in a flurry of revelation.” Sometime in the late 1980s the term “film noir” entered the non-academic language in the US. (Unfortunately, I haven’t the resources to thoroughly search the databases to find out for certain.)
By that time, the damage had been done.