By the time John Dahl had directed his third feature – 1994’s  The Last Seduction – critics had anointed him as a contemporary torch bearer – perhaps the lone, consistent one – of the film noir ethos.  Even today, with his filmography having grown to include the less noir-ish thrillers Unforgettable (1996) and Joy Ride (2001), a tale of card sharks prowling New York’s underground big-money poker circuit in Rounders (1998), and a true story of WW II adventure and valor in The Great Raid (2005), Dahl’s name is still most closely associated with modern day noir thanks to the three indelible thrillers which launched his career:  Kill Me Again (1989), which he co-wrote with David W. Warfield, Red Rock West (1992), on which he collaborated with his brother Rick Dahl, and The Last Seduction, written by Steve Barancik.

Dahl’s working in movies represents a formidable leap from a less than cosmopolitan upbringing in Billings, Montana.  Although he turned out some short films in high school, Dahl was not an avid young cinephile in the Scorsese/Spielberg/Coppola/Lucas mold.  His interests lay primarily in art and music.  Movies, he says on reflection, were something “…very, very far away” from Montana, never an option to consider for one’s future.

Music and art helped carry him through high school, after which he attended the University of Montana where he entertained notions of becoming a commercial artist while indulging his musical interests playing in bands.  By age 21, he sensed neither his penchants for art nor for music were going to put much food on the table, so his interest subsequently turned to film – which some might hardly consider a less quixotic pursuit.

But, again, Dahl was no aspiring cineaste.  His graphic arts sensibility was attracted to the visual qualities of animation, and it was only after he began attending film school at Montana State in Bozeman to study animation that he became interested in feature filmmaking.

Interest grew to passion, and when his class of nine graduated from Montana State, Dahl boldly announced to his professor that he “…was going to L.A. to make movies.”

His professor laughed.

It was no direct route to Los Angeles.  In fact, there was a moment when it was an open question as to whether or not Dahl would continue to pursue film at all.  A friend of his in Washington, D.C. helped him secure work as an assistant director, and “…after about a year of that I knew that wasn’t what I wanted to do.” He spent time in an art department after that, then applied to both the American Film Institute and law school.  In Rounders fashion, Dahl’s future hung on the turn of a card (actually, his applications).  “If the AFI hadn’t taken me, and law school had accepted me, I’d probably be a lawyer somewhere in Montana today,” says Dahl.

Unlike the “film brats” who had come out of NYU and UCLA in the 1960s and 1970s, Dahl didn’t go into the AFI drawing on a long-held interest in and an encyclopedic knowledge of films.  Many of the classic titles the AFI screened hit him fresh.  On the occasion when director Billy Wilder’s malevolent classics Double Indemnity (1944) and Sunset Boulevard (1950) were screened back-to-back, something in the unique stylishness of film noir appealed to the visual artist in Dahl.  Living in the same neighborhood where many scenes from both movies had been shot — “I’d be walking and realize, ‘Hey, this is the street where Fred MacMurray was walking in Double Indemnity!’” – only made what he’d seen in the movies more vivid and concrete for him.  That in mind, when he began musing on what kind of movie he wanted to make, it’s no surprise his thinking drifted toward something noir-ish.

He remembered a bus trip he’d taken from Montana to San Francisco to visit a friend several years before.  The bus had stopped for a few hours in Reno.  Says Dahl:  “Reno struck me as the most decadent, weirdest place I’d ever seen in my life at the time — ” — he was 19 – “ — I couldn’t believe a place like that could really exist.  Years later, when I was heading to L.A. from Montana, I passed through Vegas and that stopover in Reno came back to me.  Remember, this was years ago when Vegas was Vegas.  Now, Vegas is a theme park.”

The refreshed memory of that stretch-your-legs-and-bathroom-break in Reno years before produced Kill Me Again, and then came Red Rock West which Dahl describes as “…kind of an extension of Kill Me Again. All the things I didn’t get to do in Kill Me I put into Red Rock West.”

Despite receiving critical acclaim on the film festival circuit, Red Rock West was years getting into theaters.  When Roger Ebert reviewed the movie after its 1994 theatrical release, he remembered being blown away by the movie years earlier at the Toronto Film Festival.  He speculated – correctly, according to Dahl – the hold-up was a product of the movie’s hard-to-categorize but quintessentially noir-ish story about a drifter (Nicholas Cage) mistaken for a hit man by a local sheriff who wants Cage to kill his wife.

Ten or fifteen years earlier, when the financially desperate studios were almost reckless in their creative daring, Dahl might’ve had an easier time carving out a commercial niche for himself.  By the 1990s, however, the industry had not only grown more creatively conservative, but much of the decision-making had come to be dominated by marketing departments.  “Marketing departments have a big voice,”  he says.

Dahl remembers the gent handling marketing for Red Rock West telling him, “Well, it’s kind of an action movie, Nicholas Cage has a little bit of a reputation for action stories.  You’ve got some action, but not enough.  You’ve got some comedy.  Hmm.  You need to make it more of an action story, or more of a comedy.” It never seemed to occur to them, says Dahl, “to sell it for what it was.  They didn’t know what to do with it, they couldn’t figure it out.”

Still, Red Rock West earned Dahl the widespread attention – and respect – of reviewers, and then The Last Seduction came along and cemented his reputation as a noiriste.

Part of the strength of Dahl’s work may have come from his not having been a lifelong film aficionado.  So many of the neo-noirs that have crossed movie screens over the last 25-30 years – even memorable entries like Lawrence Kasdan’s Body Heat (1981) and Bob Rafelson’s remade The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981) — play like, at best, artful pastiches of the noir classics of the 1940s and 1950s, echoing the oldies rather than establishing their own distinctive voices.  Dahl, on the other hand, was coming to the genre from another place, and didn’t so much feel a need to honor the old tropes as build on them, giving his noirs their own, completely contemporary feel.  In fact, Dahl didn’t even consider The Last Seduction — easily his most recognized work up to that time – a noir.

“When I read the script (for The Last Seduction), I thought it was a black comedy,” says Dahl.  “It didn’t even occur to me that Linda Fiorentino’s character was a femme fatale until after the movie was released and reviewers labeled her one.”

If Dahl had first been attracted to noirs by the visual stylishness of the vintage genre classics, what he later found so enticing as a storyteller was the form’s trademark moral ambiguity/ambivalence.  Right and wrong were rarely clear, even less rarely constant.  “We shouldn’t like (Fiorentino’s character),” Dahl says, speaking about The Last Seduction, “but once her husband slaps her, our sympathy tilts toward her.  We keep thinking after that she must redeem herself at some point, but, in the end, a good guy goes to jail and she gets away with (betrayal and murder).”

That kind of moral complexity, says Dahl, is hard to find today in a movie mainstream dominated by big budget action-driven movies targeting a young audience.  “Consumers of movies tend to be teenagers and young adults, and their tastes are driving the movies,” he says, and, as a consequence, “Movies have become more of a thrill ride and a spectacle.  It’s hard to imagine Snakes on a Plane (2006) being made in the 1960s as anything but a low-budget drive-in movie, but it’s the perfect example of what I’m talking about when I say movies today are more about marketing.”

Still, Dahl concedes the major movie companies are in a tough situation.  “There really isn’t a film company anymore,” he says, and points back to the 1960s and 1970s when the major studios began evolving into massive entertainment conglomerates.  “They own music companies, a film studio, theme parks, TV networks, some own magazines and newspapers.” This kind of growth and amalgamation was necessary, says Dahl, for the studios to survive and shield their risks.  These growing entertainment complexes became focused on teens and young adults – a relatively easy market to sell to, he posits — with a fair amount of expendable income.  “They can buy records and lunch boxes and movie tickets.”

Dahl sighs.  “Who was it?  William Goldman who said that in this business nobody knows anything?  Now they know nobody knows anything.  Today, people throw their hands in the air; ‘I don’t know what works!  I’m tired of having the marketing guy yell at me on Monday morning!  Let him run the studio!’”

The end result is a multi-billion dollar a year industry focused on entertainment, managed by a handful of “gatekeepers” – creative executives but particularly marketing chiefs – deciding what’s going to go out into the mass entertainment arena.  “There’s what, eleven major movie companies?” Dahl muses.  “That means eleven people decide what movies are going to get made, there are eleven ‘filters’ on what’s going to go out there.” And, because studio movies have become so costly to make, and because the various arms of these multi-faceted entertainment companies look to feed off a box office success, the risks to studios are greater than ever.  “The necessities of the business have made (movie companies) risk-averse,” judges Dahl.  “By their very nature, they are risk averse.”

It explains movie companies’ reliance – over-reliance, Dahl judges – on the test marketing process.  “Their investment is so great you can understand it,” he says, “but it means anything that remotely makes people uncomfortable is taken out.  You know, some things are supposed to make you uncomfortable.”

And, in today’s cluttered entertainment environment, studios need films with the kind of marketing hooks which can cut through the clutter.  “There’s a lot more demand for people’s attention,” says Dahl.  “There’s a couple of hundred channels of television you can watch, pay-per-view, you can buy a surround sound system for your house, DVDs are great little products with extra bonuses and you can watch DVD films in widescreen, people are plopping down $2-3000 for big screen TVs.”

The choices are endless, says Dahl, which pushes studios to gravitate toward movies whose chief quality is their ability to get attention, like big-budget special effects fests or movies with poke-in-the-eye hooks like Snakes on a Plane.

Dahl hopes the big studio strategy will actually cultivate fertile ground for an alternative:   “I think there’ll be a brand new explosion of independent films in the next few years.  People have been fed a diet of one, big, bloated film after another.  I don’t know that anyone feels any great joy when they leave these films.  When I saw Capote (2005), I thought that was as good a movie as I’d seen in a long time.  Well-written, well-shot, well-acted, well-directed, extremely well-edited, it was a brilliant little film.”

But this kind of filmmaking has to happen outside the major studios.  “The studios don’t know how to make (these kinds of movies),”  says Dahl.  “They couldn’t afford to make them if they wanted to.  Between the insurance, what the unions have done to them in terms of cost, they can’t do it.”

In one of the few instances Dahl’s usual Montana reserve falters, he issues a call-to-arms to filmmakers themselves.  “It’s up to filmmakers to take risks!” he charges, “Sell their stupid big-ass car and make their own movie!  Get your friends, get people you know!” He ponders a cinema counterpart to community theater, something outside the chokehold the major studios have on commercial filmmaking.  “It’s kind of a great time making your own movie like that.  It’s interesting for (filmmakers) to spend their own damn money, it’s a lot more liberating and creative.  There’s an incredible sense of liberation in not having to consider what a studio exec, what those eleven people sitting at the gateway want to see!”

New technologies and venues make it possible, says Dahl.  “You can edit a movie on a laptop and buy a high quality HD camera for $3000.  Somebody has to crack the distribution nut, though.  The studios have this huge distribution machine.  Think of what it takes to manufacture 3,000 prints of a movie, ship them out to thousands of theaters so they’re there when they’re supposed to be, all opening on the same day.  And this massive studio distribution machine is governed by a small number of filters, the people who decide what movies are going to be made.

“The Internet, on the other hand,” he proposes, “is very democratic.  You want something to bring joy to your heart?  MySpace is getting more hits than Google.”  On-line venues can provide an alternative to theatrical distribution, says Dahl.  “The public is going to find a way to find something interesting.”

The trick – and Dahl’s largest, nagging doubt about the future – is in the “something interesting” part.

Dahl frequently speaks to film students.  He’s impressed with their technical expertise – “Their movies look good, they look like movies” – but, in terms of content, he finds what he sees “a little depressing.  I see them imitating.”

He senses little of the artistic aspiration which seemed to mark earlier generations of aspiring filmmakers; the kind of creative ambition which produced a personal and/or personalized kind of commercial filmmaking evidenced among so many of the most memorable movies of the 1960s/1970s.  Rather, says Dahl, so many of the young filmmakers he meets seem to be striving “…to reach that point where somebody gives them $80 million to direct the next superhero epic.  That’s the goal it seems.”

And that lack of hunger to creatively say something distinctive is something he feels isn’t just confined to fledgling filmmakers.  He sees it throughout the commercial entertainment spectrum; a new across-the-board creative ethic.  “When I was growing up, playing music was an important thing, and there was an artistic thing people were striving for in the 1960s and 1970s.  Now, you have American Idol. In the 1960s, 1970s, the big thing was, ‘I won’t sell out!’ It’s hard to see any of these American Idol kids having that argument.  These young singers, young actors, musicians…it doesn’t feel like there’s an artistic integrity they’re striving for.  How else do you explain the phenomenon of Paris Hilton?”

He sees a similar trend in theater.  He remembers taking his son to a production of the Disney stage show, The Lion King. “It was fun, it was spectacular, but I kept thinking, ‘This is from a movie!’ and I thought that was a little sad.  It’s not exactly Ibsen, is it?  It’s a far cry from A Doll’s House or The Glass Menagerie. American theater history was pretty vibrant up to a certain point.  Theater in the 1940s and 1950s was an elegant art form.  Broadway today is recycling movies as plays.  Broadway today is a joke.”

Not only has the ambition among aspirants changed, but so, too, thinks Dahl, has the creative sensibility.   He remembers one young filmmaker who “…had decided the audience only had a long enough attention span to see an image for four seconds, then it had to change.  I asked him, ‘How’d you come up with that?’  He said, ‘Watch a classic movie like The Rock (1996). (Director) Michael Bay figured out you had to cut all the time.’ I asked him, ‘What year were you born?’ ‘Nineteen eighty-two’ – about when MTV was launched.” Dahl chuckles ruefully:  “A ‘classic’ movie like The Rock.”

Dahl remembers a four-hour compilation reel of movie car chases he put together as research for one of his projects.  When he screened the reel, “You’d be surprised how many people came by and wanted to see that.  I had to make copies for people!”  According to Dahl, by wide consensus the car chase people thought was the best was the one from the 1968 cop thriller Bullitt.  “Which is funny because, by today’s standards, it’s incredibly long, it doesn’t have a lot of cuts, there’s not a lot of damage.  The French Connection (1971) came in a close Number Two.  But the chase from that ‘classic’ The Rock? It made little or no impact.  It seemed forced.”

In Dahl’s opinion, what those chases from earlier movies have going for them is not just the skillful ways they are assembled, but their sense of possibility; that they could happen.  Whereas the chase from The Rock – as with many action sequences in today’s thrillers – is so over-the-top, that sense of impossibility actually undercuts its effectiveness.  “People didn’t care.”

He sighs.  “These young people have never seen Double Indemnity or Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948). They probably think they’re just dusty old pictures.”

Asked what movies he remembers and treasures, he replies, “A Clockwork Orange (1971) was the first time I really watched a move and said, ‘Somebody had to make this thing!  It didn’t just show up in Billings, Montana.’ Billy Wilder’s films, Hitchcock…I thought they were great.  Still do.  In Cold Blood (1967) is a terrific film, The Godfather (1972) of course, The Conversation (1974)…

“I don’t know that people are really interested in taking up the big issues of today.”  But, Dahl says, that’s not something he particularly yearns for.  While that’s all well and good, he looks for the artistic drive to create something still more substantive than topical relevance.  “It’s pretty easy to beat up on George Bush.  Do something different.

“I want a movie to be a timeless piece of material that can be watched now, ten years from now, and still have some resonance; to be lost in time.  I never tried to make a movie that was hip and of the moment.”

Asked to ruminate on the changes in audience tastes and the derivative tendencies of young filmmakers, Dahl is asked if he ever considers the possibility he might be making movies for an audience that no longer exists.

“I’m amazed anybody’s ever seen the movies I’ve made!” he says, sounding earnestly surprised.  “My world revolves around trying to find a movie, make a movie, then go on to the next one.”

- Bill Mesce

There were several genres – some new — which came to be emblematic in one way or another of the new dynamics of postwar Hollywood.  The sudden, surging popularity of science fiction movies testified to the demographic shift of the box office toward young ticket buyers, while the massive sword-and-sandal epics showed a desperate motion picture industry trying to compete with television by overwhelming it.  But no genre is so closely associated with the period, and considered so reflective of the postwar change in the American psyche, as film noir.

Manhattan Melodrama

Prior to World War II, most thrillers tended to be one form or another of crime story, and with some exceptions – Warner Bros.’  string of socially-conscious gangster films, most notably – they tended to be routine (like the myriad formulaic mystery series i.e. Boston Blackie, Charlie Chan, Crime Doctor, etc.), escapist (the bubbly The Thin Man films), and/or simple, melodramatic morality tales (such as the aptly titled Manhattan Melodrama [1934]).  But the global tragedy that was World War II inalterably changed the worldview of thrillers…and of their audience.  French film critics, treated to a postwar backlog of American films, looked at what appeared to them to be a surge in thrillers visually and thematically darker than their pre-war counterparts and dubbed the new thrillers film noir – literally translated, “black film.”

Film noir represented the first, major maturing of the Hollywood thriller, a psychological evolution which went beyond the dramatically simplistic, morally pedantic fare of the pre-war years.  Noir was about the flaws in the character of even the most well-meaning of people (Scarlet Street, 1945), about how tragedy could be visited on the undeserving through a single misstep (Angel Face, 1952) or even chance (D.O.A., 1950).  Noir – understandably in light of the destruction and brutality of the war – showed how thin the line could be between The Good Guys and The Bad Guys (The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, 1946), sometimes to the point where they were interchangeable (Pickup on South Street, 1953), and never guaranteed a happy ending (The Killers, 1946).

Although noir would be most closely identified with urban crime dramas, it was a sensibility and a style which spread throughout the thriller form.  One could find it in hard-edged Westerns like Blood on the Moon (1948) and Winchester ’73 (1950), dark-hearted war films like Attack! (1956), and even gothic horrors like The Body Snatcher (1945) and sci fiers like Donovan’s Brain (1953).

Though significant entries in the genre would come from throughout the industry, no studio would become more identified with American postwar noir as RKO.  The company’s prodigious thriller output from the war years through the 1950s, coupled with a remarkably consistent look and quality, largely defined the genre for American cinema.

RKO had experienced several successes with small-scale thrillers during the war years, particularly with the company’s screen adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s Murder, My Sweet (1944).  After the

Murder, My Sweet

war, the studio applied itself even more industriously to producing a steady stream of similarly economically produced thrillers.  These thrillers would, in fact, be critical to sustaining RKO through its remaining decade as a major studio.

The company’s dedication to the thriller arose from necessity.  Always the most financially strapped of the majors, the studio was one of the first big movie companies to suffer – and suffer egregiously – during the postwar downturn in the industry’s fortunes.  Saddled with heavy debt, constrained by limited resources, its talent roster the thinnest of the majors, the elements which had made noir thrillers choice vehicles under wartime rationing rules – moderate budgets, limited locations, emphasis on mood and plot over action – made them even more attractive during RKO’s postwar struggle to remain afloat.  Crossfire (1947), for example, was shot for a tight $250,000 budget on a brisk three-week schedule.  Production notes list only nine locations, nearly all of which incorporated standing sets.

Throughout the 1940s and into the 1950s, RKO was a virtual noir factory:  The Stranger on the Third Floor (1940), Suspicion (1941), Journey into Fear (1942), The Seventh Victim (1943), Murder, My Sweet, The Woman in the Window (1944), Cornered (1945), Johnny Angel (1945), Nocturne (1946), Notorious (1946), The Spiral Staircase (1946), The Stranger (1946), The Locket (1946), Crossfire, Out of the Past (1947), They Live by Night (1949), The Big Steal (1949), The Set-Up (1949), Where Danger Lives (1950), The Woman on Pier 13

The Hitch-Hiker (1953)

(1950), His Kind of Woman (1951), The Racket (1951), The Narrow Margin (1951), The Prowler (1951), Clash by Night (1952), On Dangerous Ground (1952), Macao (1952), Beware, My Lovely (1952), The Las Vegas Story (1952), The Hitch-Hiker (1953), Angel Face (1953), While the City Sleeps (1956), Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956).  The studio’s interest in thrillers may have been primarily practical, but RKO could not have maintained such an extended commercially successful line of noirs without regularly turning out a popular, quality product.  Despite occasional creative missteps (i.e. The Woman on Pier 13 aka I Married a Communist), the RKO thriller canon is impressively consistent in the high caliber of its execution; a remarkable achievement considering the studio’s limitations.  RKO was singularly fortunate in that among its thin talent ranks it had access to just the right creative personnel for the job at hand.

House cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca was a major contributor to the look of RKO’s thrillers and horror films, and is often considered the “inventor”  of noir’s expressionistic, sparsely-lit visual style, a look frequent RKO noir leading man Robert Mitchum dryly described as “lit by matches.”  In this, Musuraca was abetted by cameramen who periodically worked at the studio and shared his touch with light and shadow:  Gregg Toland (famously responsible for noir-like look of Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane), Russell Metty, and James Wong Howe.  RKO also had an outstanding art department, as well as an editing department served by the likes of Robert Wise and Mark Robson, both of whom would later go on to distinguished directing careers.

RKO also benefited from a liberal attitude toward new directors.  Though a number of the company’s more high-profile thrillers were directed by established talents like Orson Welles (The Stranger), Alfred Hitchcock (Suspicion, Notorious), and, as he entered the closing stage of his career, Fritz Lang (Beyond a Reasonable Doubt, While the City Sleeps), the overall high caliber of RKO’s thrillers was established and sustained by relative directorial novices.  The directorial credits of the studio’s thrillers indeed form an impressive list:  Nicholas Ray (They Live by Night), Edward Dmytryk (Murder, My Sweet, Crossfire), Mark Robson (The Seventh Victim), Richard Fleischer (The Narrow Margin), Joseph Losey (The Prowler), Don Siegel (The Big Steal), Jacques Tourneur (Out of the Past), Robert Wise (The Set-Up), and – one of the few women ever to direct features up to that time — Ida Lupino (The Hitch-Hiker).  Given their creative head, and working with skilled craftsmen like Musuraca, these young, ambitious, and artistically daring directors were responsible for a string of compelling thrillers so consonant in their sensibility and look that they provided RKO with a distinct screen persona – something it had rarely had in the past – and did so at a time when bigger companies were sacrificing their own trademark identities in the pursuit of big budget audience draws.

The last necessary element for the success of RKO’s thrillers was on-screen talent.  RKO had historically suffered a shortage of top-flight box office draws, and that weakness became even more

Robert Mitchum

pronounced in the postwar period.  Many of RKO’s thrillers were carried on the backs of stars whose career peaks were behind them, though they usually rose to the occasion as did one-time musical star Dick Powell as Raymond Chandler’s tough-as-nails private eye Philip Marlowe in Murder, My Sweet, ex-Warner Bros. tough guy George Raft in Johnny Angel, and ex-20th Century Fox leading man Dana Andrews in Beyond a Reasonable Doubt. However, the studio’s noir mainstays through the late 1940s and much of the 1950s were two often underrated actors:  Robert Ryan and Robert Mitchum.

Though Ryan never quite broke through to become a major box office draw, he was a fine actor who always gave an interesting performance.  His emotions were never buried very deeply and he was a more fiery presence on-screen than Mitchum, his eyes quick to flash anger, despair, or glum resignation, his body, when not slumped in defeat, looking coiled and ready to explode.  His range ran from heroes to villains, and sometimes characters which were a bit of both, displaying, so wrote David Thomson in a 1994 Film Comment profile of the actor, a “…grasp of evil (and an) affinity for men who might be heroes if they had less anger, violence, and self-loathing, and more faith in the world.”  His RKO gallery included the venom-spitting bigot of Crossfire, the ranting, self-important gangster of The Racket, the dogged, brutal, life-scarred cop in On Dangerous Ground, the desperate, noble boxer of The Set-Up, and, one of his most interesting RKO portrayals, the handyman of Beware, My Lovely, mild and deferential until something trips in his fractured psyche sending him into an escalating, potentially lethal rage.

The Set-Up

Robert Mitchum, in contrast, was RKO’s one bonafide star with marquee value during the postwar years, and became the studio workhorse, carrying the lead in an impressive number of pictures ranging from urban noirs to Westerns to dramas to African adventures to war stories.  He was a different kind of movie actor for a new age:  still, laconic, physically intimidating.  Few actors have mastered the art of simply being on screen as well as Mitchum, and he seemed to understand that, on the big screen, a slight cock of the head, a raised eyebrow, the smallest change of inflection in his voice was all that was needed to convey curiosity, suspicion, bemusement, or threat, and that only the slightest adjustments were required to transform him from hero to heavy.  He exuded a jaded weariness, a sense of having seen and heard more than he wanted to.  That fatalistic, been-there/done-that air served him well across a wide range of RKO thrillers.  In the tongue-in-cheek The Big Steal, he’s a dim GI on the run, falsely accused of a payroll theft, never as clever or self-possessed as he thinks he is; while in Crossfire, as another soldier, he’s a cynical ex-newsman reluctantly drawn into helping solve a hate killing.  He offers a jaded take on a world of random, pointless tragedy, where the invisible motive of the murder at hand – as investigating detective Robert Young speculates – “…is something the killer brought with him”:

Soldier: What’s happened?  Has everything suddenly gone crazy?  I don’t just mean this; I mean everything.  Or is it just me?

Mitchum: No, it’s not just you.  The snakes are loose.  Anybody can get them.  I get them myself.  But they’re friends of mine.

Out of the Past

It was his performance in one of the era’s definitive noirs – Out of the Past – that made him a star and turned him into one of the indelible icons of the genre.  Forever after, Mitchum fans and thriller aficionados would remember him thusly:  a broad-shouldered figure half in shadow, clad in trench coat and snap-brim fedora, a smoldering cigarette dangling from his lips and smoke curling up past sleepy-looking eyes.  As for the movie – which, at the time, was considered little more than “just another private eye movie” — Out of the Past would, in re-evaluation, emerge as a masterwork.

Directed by Jacques Tourneur, and adapted by mystery novelist Daniel Mainwaring from his book Build My Gallows High (with uncredited assists from James M. Cain and Frank Fenton), Out of the Past has Mitchum as Jeff Bailey, a private eye hired by gangster Whit Sterling (Kirk Douglas) to find his mistress Kathie Moffett (Jane Greer) who has shot and robbed Sterling.  Bailey finds her in Mexico, but the two become romantically involved.  The increasingly convoluted plot involves murders, set-ups, betrayals, with a fatalistic Bailey coming to realize that his first missteps have inextricably attached him to Kathie, one of noir’s prototypical toxic femmes fatale. In the downbeat climax, with Sterling dead and after letting Kathie think he’s allowed her to persuade him to run off with her for a second time, Bailey surreptitiously alerts the police.  Before they leave, she frets about the possibility of them both being killed:  “I don’t want to die.” With trademark noir nihilism, Bailey replies, “Neither do I, baby, but if I do…I want to die last.” As they drive into a police roadblock, Kathie, realizing this is Bailey’s doing, shoots him before the car crashes killing her.  Like so many noir heroes, even Jeff Bailey’s pitiable last wish goes unfulfilled.

Both RKO’s noir visual style and thematic sensibility were not confined to its urban thrillers.  Both elements were evident in the studio’s few Westerns (Blood on the Moon) and sci fi releases (The Thing from Another World), but nowhere beyond its classic trench coat noirs was it as obvious as in a string of nine horror titles put out by a “B” unit under producer Val Lewton in the early to mid-1940s.

Lewton’s initial mandate from RKO was to clone the success Universal had had with its long-running string of gothic horrors (beginning with Dracula and Frankenstein, both released in 1931, and running in a long line of sequels and cross-pollinations up through the 1940s).  Lewton, however — a one-time protégé of David O. Selznick — took advantage of RKO’s laissez-faire attitude when it came to creative execution to produce films which were a far cry from the Universal model.  As long as Lewton turned in his films on time, within the small budgets allotted to him, held to tight studio-mandated running times, and produced them under the often misleadingly lurid titles the studio issued, he was given free creative rein and the resulting works were some of the most stylish and intelligent horror films of the period.

Lewton gathered around him an impressive collection of talents who shared his enthusiasm for taking the horror genre beyond its pedestrian norm.  His directors included Robert Wise, Jacques Tourneur (who, shortly after turning out three films for Lewton, would graduate to RKO’s “A” unit and direct the classic noir, Out of the Past), and one-time editor Mark Robson (who, by the mid-1950s, was directing such major releases as The Bridges at Toko-Ri [1954]).  Nichola Musuraca, so instrumental in creating RKO’s trademark noir visual style, was one of Lewton’s regular cinematographers, and the producer craftily enhanced the look of his skimpily-budgeted films by shooting on leftover sets from RKO’s more upscale productions.

As a body, Lewton’s films are literate, intelligent, relying on atmosphere more than shocks for their chills, and character more than monsters.  In fact, though ostensibly horror films, Lewton’s movies rarely called on the supernatural to supply their scares, preferring, instead, to exploit the demons haunting the human psyche.

The Body Snatcher (1945) is often cited as the acme of Lewton’s RKO horror films, and offers the best display of his unit’s strengths.  Directed by Wise, and adapted by Philip MacDonald and Lewton himself from a Robert Louis Stevenson story inspired by the true “Burke and Hare” murders of Victorian-era England, the story concerns the grotesque symbiosis between a brilliant young surgeon (Henry Daniell) frustrated in his work by a lack of legitimately obtained cadavers, and the shady cabman (Boris Karloff) providing him with a steady supply of corpses by increasingly degenerate means.  At heart, neither are evil men, but both are corrupted – and ultimately trapped – by circumstance.  In the noir tradition, theirs is a relationship built on such a corrupt foundation it can only end tragically for all concerned…and it does.

By the late 1940s, there was little appetite for the quiet, psychologically textured and moody gothics of Val Lewton.  The young audience dominating the box office preferred more visceral thrills, and, with the exploding popularity of sci fi in the 1950s, wanted them more fantastic as well.

Eventually, the audience tired of the period’s particular brand of noir. After so many fatales, double-crosses, trench coated figures walking down rain-slicked streets at night, the genre had become too familiar, had grown stale and predictable, and the classic brand of postwar noir died out.

But noir had always been about more than certain visual tropes and plot devices.  A particular visual brand of noir might have died with the 1950s, but its world-weary, soul-sick heart continued to find a home in such neo-noirs as Point Blank (1967), Harper (1966), The Conversation (1974), Chinatown (1974), Night Moves (1975), L.A. Confidential (1997), Memento (2000), Syriana (2005), The Departed (2006).

Beyond its shadowy look, noir had, at its core, always been about the capacity for tragic error and outright malevolence in the human heart, and how, despite the best efforts of the best of men, sometimes heartbreak and loss were inevitable, maybe even necessary.  These, sadly, are stories that never go out of date.

- Bill Mesce

It is arguable that women live in a “man’s world”. Women, it might also be argued, possess certain physical attributes of appeal to men that allow them considerable advantage under some circumstances. Such attributes coupled with certain behavioral subtleties often lay bare men’s weaknesses to a point where they seem compelled to act irrationally to gain favor with the object of their passion. Such is the foundation of the femme fatale character of film noir and one of its most enduring characterizations in the film, Double Indemnity. Through the mixed use of mis-en-scene, sensual dialogue and the sort of cinematography meant to excite male passion to a peak, Double Indemnity questions man’s true authority in society.

Phyllis Dietrichson’s look, her speech, her clothing and her placement within the frame of the camera put forward the notion of control through seduction. She is introduced to us, indirectly, by catching the eye of Walter Neff, a smooth-talking, seemingly grounded insurance agent. Billy Wilder describes her, “She is in her early thirties. She holds a large bath-towel around her very appetizing torso, down to about two inches above her knees. She wears no stockings, no nothing. On her feet a pair of high-heeled bedroom slippers with pom-poms. On her left ankle a gold anklet.” (Wilder 12). Neff is consumed by the image at the top of the staircase, the taboo of matrimony fallen by the wayside. She is seen from a low vantage, a particularly alluring near vertical line of sight along her legs with the promise perhaps of more; but, of course, there is, ostensibly, a deeper, somewhat darker implication when one changes the perspective to her rather high vantage. We find her symbolically positioned higher than Neff and, therefore, in a dominant situation. The emotional effect is immediate on him but what is lost is his complete ability to rationalize his circumstances and place them in perspective.

Wilder makes apparent the anklet that graces her left ankle with a tracking close-up of her feet as she walks down the staircase. This becomes even more apparent as a symbol of obsession when the image reappears in Neff’s daydream while at work, “I had a lot of stuff lined up for that Thursday afternoon, including a trip down to Santa Monica to see a couple of live prospects about some group insurance. But I kept thinking about Phyllis Dietrichson and the way that anklet of hers cut into her leg” (Double Indemnity). There is now an indication that Neff is beginning to prioritize elements of his life, subordinating them first and foremost to visions of Dietrichson.

Phyllis, though seemingly seductive, is also portrayed as a chaste middle-aged woman, helpless under her circumstances and requiring the aid of a man. Here is the chivalric mandate in its modern form – a woman in distress and in need of physical intervention. She laments about her husband, “He’s so mean to me...He won’t let me go anywhere. He keeps me shut up. He’s always been mean to me” (Double Indemnity). Likewise, her presentation is reinforced by her dress, which, itself, undergoes a transformation with our realization of her motives. At an early stage of their encounter, she appears dressed in soft colors, “She is wearing a pale blue summer dress” (Wilder 14). As the film progresses and we learn that she wishes her husband murdered, her presentation becomes darker, more foreboding. Neff returns to the Dietrichson home to have Phyllis’ husband sign insurance papers and we see the three of them with Phyllis in the center sporting a black dress. Even more apparent, the rendezvous at the market has Phyllis covered in black costume with dark sunglasses. Such mis-en-scene emphasizes the nature of the femme fatale giving her a transformative power with the ability to play her part in the manner required when required.

The presentation of a femme fatale is perhaps the most apparent aspect of her characterization but her speech and demeanor should also be taken into account. She is acutely aware of her surroundings and the weaknesses of men. The instant when Phyllis realizes that Neff has been overwhelmed, she begins to play her game of ‘hard to get’. The ease with which she is capable of controlling behavior is underlined by the following:

Phyllis: Mr. Neff, why don’t you drop by tomorrow evening about eight-thirty. He’ll be in then.

Neff: Who?

Phyllis: My Husband. You were anxious to talk to him weren’t you?

Neff: Sure, only I’m getting over it a little. If you know what I mean.

Phyllis: There’s a speed limit in this state Mr. Neff. Forty-five miles an hour.

Neff: How fast was I going officer?

Phyllis: I’d say about ninety.

Earlier in the same conversation, Neff comments about her anklet and we are treated to a long image of Phyllis smiling and covering up her ankle. This, of course, only entices Neff further, making him oblivious to any foul intentions. He has been blinded by her suggestive behavior. “Only what I didn’t know then was that I wasn’t playing her. She was playing me – with a deck of marked cards – and the stakes weren’t any blue and yellow chips. They were dynamite” (Double Indemnity). Neff returns to reality when he realizes the consequences of his actions and the means by which he was manipulated, “Only you’re just a little more rotten. You’re rotten clear through. You got me to take care of your husband, and then got Zachette to take care of Lola, and maybe take care of me too…That’s the way you operate isn’t it, baby?” (Double Indemnity). At this point, it is clear to Phyllis that any further attempts to beguile Neff with her physical appeal and tease would be futile and she now resorts to a gun as a means of protection and further manipulation. Her actions capture the negative stereotype of the femme fatale as an emotionless being, self-centered, self-indulgent and without soul.

The cold-heartedness that Phyllis exudes extends to everyone. She is a distinctive and representative figure of film noir. Neff tells her, “You wish it was an accident, and you had that policy. For fifty thousand dollars. Is that it?” She replies, “Perhaps that too” (Double Indemnity). The femme fatale character and the darkness that surrounds such a character underlies the nature of this genre of film. This darkness contained in her persona acts out in a socially reprehensible manner, devoid of morality.

Women have realized their ability to sway the attitudes of men since distant time. Man’s need for such attraction underlies his weakness in coping with women in society. Film noir, in a way, has exaggerated this female ability and created the femme fatale character. Her character is stylized through the use of dress and apparel on screen, the manner in which she is projected, her behavior and her dialogue. It is not meant to depict all women but promotes the notion that there are some of this gender who, by their cunning, are the equal of some of the worst of the male sect. Moreover, it demonstrates the frailty of the male character and man’s tendency towards the irrational in the hopes of fulfilling his passions.

- Daniel Elisevich

Film noir adapted through time has been classified as neo-noir. The modernisms of subsequent generations have not only aided in the transformation of a genre but have launched a new wave of films with utilization of traditional techniques. Rather than mimicking an era, several current neo-noir films have introduced sufficient innovation to justify the creation of a new genre without detracting from its predecessor which also has earned its place in American film history.

- Daniel Elisevich

The debut of a number of distinctive personalities is one of the important features of film noir.  Noir’s main character, for instance, may appropriately be labeled the noir loser.  He is a handsome, middle-aged man who seems to blur the line between protagonist and antagonist.  Billy Wilder has very explicitly introduced such personalities as Walter Neff in Double Indemnity and Joe Gillis in Sunset Boulevard and, as such, defined a key aspect of the genre.  Both are ordinary men who see an opportunity to advance their lives, albeit immorally, only to find themselves victims of fate at the hands of a female counterpart.

In both films, the noir loser compels the audience to sympathize for them.  The films begin with a voice-over narration from both men at the culmination of their demise.  Double Indemnity’s Walter Neff introduces himself in the opening minutes as he confesses his crime: “I killed Dietrichson.  Me, Walter Neff, insurance agent, 35 years old, unmarried…I killed him for money – and a woman – and I didn’t get the money and I didn’t get the woman.” Without delay, we are acquainted with our main character and the storyline.  The remainder of the film is devoted to the sequence of events and circumstances that drove Neff to corruption and misfortune, also revealing the characteristics of the noir loser.

Joe Gillis has a similar introduction as the main character in Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard.  In the opening minutes, we are introduced to Gillis’ floating corpse along with his narrative explaining such an end:  “…the body of a young man was found floating in the pool of her mansion, with two shots in his back and one in his stomach.  Nobody important, really.  Just a movie writer with a couple of b-pictures to his name. ” The introduction intrigues the audience, portraying these characters as ordinary in most respects, yet drawn into circumstances that inextricably lead to their dissolution.

As both narrations begin to unfold, we learn that fate lands both men at the doorstep of a female culprit.  Ironically, before either of them is introduced to either woman, the weather is inviting; the frames are filled with the luminous unclouded skies of California.  Wilder describes this day in the Sunset Boulevard screenplay as a “crisp sunny day.”  In Double Indemnity, Neff reflects upon his initial stroll to the Dietrichson home:  “It was mid-afternoon…I can still remember the smell of honeysuckle all along that block” (Double Indemnity).  In their regular lives, these men were perhaps already enjoying a certain sense of fulfillment and happiness sufficient for their station.  By reaching beyond that station to become someone fundamentally different by design, they would succumb to their fate.

Neff’s female transgressor is a seductive mistress named Phyllis Dietrichson, who is in search of a man that can be manipulated. Neff, in the course of his work renewing an insurance claim, finds himself captivated by the lure of her sexuality and, as though by destiny, finds himself at her disposal.  As an established real estate agent, he had committed himself to his work, attending to his responsibilities diligently. Neff is captivated by her beauty, driving him into a state of immorality. At their initial meeting, Phyllis is presented wearing only a towel over her “appetizing torso,” as Wilder describes it.  Wilder purposely places her behind the vertical bars of a staircase railing, rendering her symbolically impervious.  Seduced as he is, Neff rises to the challenge and submits himself to service her plan to murder her husband and reap the prize of the insurance claim.  Moreover, he is exhilarated by the promise of a new life with such a woman and the substantial monetary reward.  Throughout the unfolding of this tragedy, the audience bears witness to Phyllis’ control of Neff by feigning insecurity and the subtle promise of her sexuality.  Neff’s rather blatant disregard of such manipulation distinguishes him as a noir loser.

In contrast to Neff, Joe Gillis, of Sunset Boulevard, is not captivated by beauty but by the promise of riches.  The wealthy Norma Desmond, an aging, passé movie star, is the source of his downfall.  Again, it is fate that brings Gillis to his benefactor when a flat tire leads him into the rundown garage of her mansion.  Their common interest in the film industry, which, combined with Norma’s dominant behavior, brings about Gillis’ move into her house.  However, like Neff, Gillis perceives himself to be in control of the situation: “I’d dropped the hook, and she’d snapped at it.  Now my car would be safe down below, while I did a patch-up job on the script.  And there would be plenty of money in it.”

Norma, unlike Phyllis, is directly controlling.  She watches Gillis incessantly, with two adjacent holes in her bedroom doors to allow a visual conduit into his space.  He finds himself sneaking out when the two holes darken as she turns off her light, as though her eyes are shutting, giving him a chance to escape: “It made me think of when I was twelve and used to sneak out on the folks to see a gangster picture.”

As Gillis’ stay becomes more comfortable, Norma cunningly spoils him with expensive clothes and accessories in her attempt to detain him. Blinded by the benefits of their relationship and his new artificial status, Gillis abandons his old friends for a commanding aging woman. When he departs the lonely mansion to attend a New Year’s Eve celebration, the contrast from dark to light symbolizes his changing existence.  Gillis selfishly declares to a friend: “[Shall I go]  back to a one-room apartment that I can’t pay for?   I’ve got a good thing here – a long term contract with no options.” Gillis’ weakness is exposed with this inability to assess his circumstances.

Billy Wilder makes apparent the futility of both men’s objectives through foreshadowing images of fate and entrapment.  First, in reference to Double Indemnity (after Neff and Phyllis finalize their scheme), we find Neff in settings that symbolize confinement. In his apartment, the curtains are always shut, creating a darkened, more claustrophobic environment – an unlikely place to seek comfort. Following his crime, Neff’s boss becomes increasing suspicious of the story being presented: “We know the Dietrichson dame is in on it, and somebody else [...] I’ll be ready for her and that somebody else. They’ll be digging their own graves.” His boss’ investigation drives Neff back to reality. Later, we find him in the dismal, unlit room of Dietrichson’s house, the bright light shining from the moon through the Venetians, epitomizing Neff’s conscience. It is, however, too late for the noir loser, and Neff is driven to the confession of his crime.

As for Gillis, several features of his surroundings also foreshadow his fate. Stepping into Norma’s mansion, he is greeted coldly by Max, the butler. He enters through a door of vertical bars, stepping out of the bright light into the dimly lit mansion, as if being imprisoned.  Walking into Norma’s room, he is again engulfed in shadow.  Similar to Neff, Gillis is placed in the context of a claustrophobic environment.  When Norma tosses him her script, we witness Max shut the curtains in the house, confining Gillis further within the dark foreboding presence of his apparent benefactor. Soon after, Wilder does a long take of a man entering the mansion holding a coffin-an eerily ominous shot of Gillis’ future. Max, the butler, is further evidence of what becomes of Norma’s past relationships: “You sees I was her first husband.”  The loud, abrupt music that follows mimics Gillis’ surprise and the onset of his awakening.  His salvation will come with his abandonment of Norma. Again, however, Gillis, like Neff, comes about this realization too late in the unfolding.

The main characters in both Double Indemnity and Sunset Boulevardfind themselves suffering from the consequences of their actions. Both films lead to their respective beginnings: a point of no return, and reflections upon regrettable decisions.  The creation of thenoir loser portrays the weakness of man. The attraction to material items, social status, and women, as well as their shared inability to distinguish right from wrong, smothers their morals, blurring the border between perpetrator and victim.

- Daniel Elisevich

A term that translates to ‘Black Film’ already sounds interesting. Add to that dramatic, highly stylized cinematography and hard-hitting, gritty writing, and the appeal of film noir is clear. The term is mostly attributed to works such as Double Indemnity, Scarlet Street, and The Maltese Falcon, all major works which helped popularize the genre after its debut in the early 1940s.

Film noir has its origins in literature, birthed in the middle of the 20th century when urban development and social unrest were creating a new world that demanded new literary styles. Coming into prominence at a time of expanding social consciousness in the context of urban life, authors such as Dashiell Hammett found a passion for writing in a ‘hard-boiled,’ street-smart manner.  Hammett’s Two Sharp Knives is such a piece, with its stylized narrative, moody characters and dark setting, later to be enhanced in film by stark black and white imagery.

Two Sharp Knives is written as a first person narrative, putting the reader firmly in the shoes of the protagonist, experiencing his suspense and curiosity first hand.  As in most noirs, the plot revolves around a crime; in this case, a murder.  However, this is no ordinary homicide.  The murder is played off as a suicide, casting suspicion on a suspect perhaps motivated by greed, a repetitive device in noir that plays on moral ambiguities.  Money is often used as a means of clouding characters’ judgment to the point of distorting their reality and their sense of right and wrong.  The noir also typically casts unlikely characters as the antagonist, further complicating the morality. In Hammett’s piece, the villain is revealed to be an officer of the law, inverting the standard crime film trope.

The noir characters, of course, dominate the story.  The narrator, Scott Anderson, is the Chief of Police, a typical personality found in the majority of noirs – laconic and slightly morose.   On the surface, he appears to be a genuinely honest, hardworking cop who believes in justice and fair play.  But towards the end of the story, an exchange occurs which appears to question this assumption.  Anderson says to his partner, “I’m sorry you did it, Wally, I always liked you”.  Wally, the villain, in turn announces, “I know you did . . . I was counting on it”.  Here,  Hammett is implying that our protagonist, despite the veneer of righteousness, was known by his colleague to have the capacity to deviate from his moral imperative.

Another feature of noirs is the appearance of an ordinary man whose life has been drastically changed.  In Two Sharp Knives, this man is Lester Furman, a citizen of note who becomes a murder suspect and is finally himself murdered.  This plot thread is rather cynical and Kafkaesque but again typical of the genre.  Arguably, the most famous noir character is the alluring, apparently vulnerable yet, in the end, manipulative woman: the femme fatale.  In Two Sharp Knives, this is Ethel Furman.  Spell-bound, Wally pursues her, ultimately murdering her husband. Even when his crime is revealed, Wally remains infatuated with Ethel, claiming “I still think she’d marry me if she didn’t know I killed him.”  Physical attraction and overt sexuality factor heavily in the makeup of this story, and noir in general.

Finally, setting plays a particularly important role in noir fiction.  Perhaps moreso than other genres, the setting creates the mood, underscoring the plot and the morality (or lack thereof) of the characters.  It can be likened to pathetic fallacy, a literary device which personifies inanimate objects to the extent that they mirror or reflect human emotions. In Two Sharp Knives, Hammett uses figurative language to paint a dismal scene on the street of a desolate city. It is the world of dark streets, a police station and the “cop car”.   These latter scenes only serve to further deepen the sense of the dark and gritty world of the noir crime-investigator plot.  Language, likewise, situates the story in time and with particular types of people. The use of slang (i.e., “ringer”, “Hanky-Panky”) often orients the reader to a particular decade in the twentieth century, not only servicing the mood but provides some authenticity and, perhaps, intimacy, for the character. The eventual migration of these themes and stylistic devices into cinema gradually gave birth to an entire genre of film, one that remains as fascinating now as during its heyday.

Daniel Elisevich