Noir Novelists in Hollywood: An Overview
Free Seminar with Film Scholar James Naremore
Thursday, April 10, 2008 @ 6:00 p.m.
Chicago Public Library
400 S. State Street
312-747-1194

Scholar and film noir writer, James Naremore, professor emeritus of film studies at Indiana University-Bloomington, and author of More than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts, explores how the work of authors such as Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett and James Cain was adapted by Hollywood. This is a One Book, One Chicago event.

Actor, Charleton Heston, died today. He starred alongside director Orson Welles in the last great noir of the classic cycle: Touch of Evil (1958).  Heston’s first role  was as a crooked gambler in the crime thriller cum noir Dark City (1950).

Night and the city.
The night is tonight, tomorrow night…
or any night.
The city is London.

This anonymous voice-over introduces Jules Dassin’s Night and the City (1950), which has to be one of the great noirs: a near-perfect work.

Dassin crafted a mesmerising study of thwarted ambition and tawdry betrayal into a dark existential journey of the human soul, played out in the dives and night-clubs of post-war London fashioned as the quintessential noir city. This is not a b-movie, the production values are high, and Dassin has total command of his mise-en-scene.

But the achievement is not Dassin’s alone. There is also a literate script by Jo Eisinger, wonderful expressionist photography from Mutts Greenbaum, who cut his teeth in the German silent cinema, and deeply moving portrayals by the major players. Richard Widmark’s performance is frenetic and real, and the soft counterpoint of an achingly elegant turn by Gene Tierney as his girl, transubstantiate Harry’s demise into the stuff of tragedy. Each supporting role is vividly drawn by an excellent ensemble cast.

You know Harry Fabian is doomed from the start: a dreamer of wrong dreams and sympathetically amoral, he is no match for fate and the immoral traffickers of wrestlers and cheap champagne, who plot his destruction. He is a hustler yes, but not in the same league as the big guys, the “businessmen” whose greed has no bounds and whose actions are never tempered by remorse. Harry thinks he knows all the angles, but he is not ruthless enough for that.

Harry. Harry.
You could have
been anything.
Anything.
You had brains…
ambition.
You worked harder
than any 10 men.

But the wrong things.
Always the wrong things.

Blogger cineycrispetas has posted an excellent essay on neo-noir on his Géneros cinematográficos:

What defines then the noir spirit? Could it be the “cynical and the pessimistic tone […] the darker side of human condition, modern fables that highlight the dangers of alienation, the fragmentation of society, the breakdown of human interaction, the debasement of love, the beguiling power of wealth, the corruption of government, and mankind’s inherent propensity for inertia and impotence”… Is noir “spirit” allowed to evolve, mutate as the environment in which it exists changes? It is also entitled to refer and quote to the noir canon since contemporary audiences are not only conscious of the legacy of noir but also amenable to noir references in modern perspectives and environments?

Force of Evil (1948)

With the passing of Jules Dassin, it worth noting that social criticism in early film noir is largely ignored by most contemporary noir pundits and populists.

James Naremore in his 1998 book on film noir, More than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts, mounts a strong argument for the leftist origins of film noir (my emphasis):

…most of the 1940s noir directors — including Orson Welles, John Huston, Edward Dmytryk, Jules Dassin, Joseph Losey, Robert Rossen, Abraham Polonsky, and Nicholas Ray—were members of Hollywood’s committed left-wing community. Among the major crime writers who provided source material for dark thrillers, Dashiell Hammett, Graham Greene, and Eric Ambler were Marxists to one degree or another, and Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain were widely regarded as social realists. Among what Robert Sklar has described as the major “city boy” actors of the period, Bogart and John Garfield, who played veterans of the Lincoln Brigade in Casablanca and The Fallen Sparrow (1943), were icons respectively of liberalism and leftist radicalism. Meanwhile, the credits for noir screenplays usually included such names as Albert Maltz, Howard Kotch, Waldo Salt, and Dalton Trumbo, all of whom were eventually blacklisted, and these screenplays were often based on literature by such politically engaged figures as Kenneth Fearing, Vera Caspary, Daniel Fuchs, and Ira Wolfert.

There is good reason to conclude that the first decade of American film noir was largely the product of a socially committed fraction or artistic movement in Hollywood, composed of “Browderite” communists (after Earl Browder, head of the American Communist Party) and “Wallace” Democrats (after Henry Wallace, the radical vice president and potential successor to Franklin Delano Roosevelt). This movement is somewhat downplayed by Borde and Chaumeton, who emphasize the anarchic, antisocial qualities of noir and who initially argued that the form died off with the rise of neorealist policiers in the late 1940s. The Cahiers critics and subsequent American commentators tended to depoliticize noir even further, thereby obscuring the fact that many of the best thrillers of the 1940s and early 1950s were expressions of the Popular Front and the radical elements of the New Deal. A more accurate account would show that although the noir category viewed as a whole has no essential politics, it has formative roots in the left culture of the Roosevelt years—a culture that was repressed, marginalized, and virtually extinguished during the postwar decade, when noir took on increasingly cynical and even right-wing implications. During the 1950s, the congressional hunts for communists in Hollywood were themselves based on a kind of noir scenario and were crucially important to the history of American crime movies, affecting not only their politics and their doom-laden atmosphere, but also their reception by later generations. (pp 104-105)

The Egyptian Theatre and the Film Noir Foundation will present for 3 weeks from April 3 the 10th Annual Hollywood Festival of Film Noir, screening:

DESERT FURY
WICKED WOMAN
STRANGER ON THE THIRD FLOOR
TOMORROW IS ANOTHER DAY
HIGHWAY 301
DEAD RECKONING
SORRY WRONG NUMBER
BOOMERANG
NORA PRENTISS
NIGHT AND THE CITY
CORNERED
TO THE ENDS OF THE EARTH
THE MAN BETWEEN
ONE WAY STREET
HELL’S FIVE HOURS
CRY OF THE HUNTED
LURE OF THE SWAMP
THE RED HOUSE
THE CLAY PIGEON
COUNT THE HOURS
NIGHT HAS A THOUSAND EYES
THE NIGHT HOLDS TERROR
THE FACE BEHIND THE MASK
THE STORY OF MOLLY X

Full program

Richard Widmark in Night and The City (1950)

Jules Dassin, one of the great noir directors, died in Athens overnight.

Born in Middletown, Connecticut in 1911, Dassin’s ground-breaking noirs of the late 1940’s rank among the great films noir:

Brute Force (1947)
The Naked City (1948)
Thieves’ Highway (1949)

A committed leftist, Dassin was blacklisted by the HUAC and left the US before the final cut of Thieves Highway was made. In London he made in 1950 Night and the City, another classic noir starring Richard Widmark, in perhaps his best dramatic role.

In Europe, Dassins’ attempts to work as a director were vengefully thwarted by Hollywood mogules until 1955, when penniless and in despair he was offered Du rififi chez les hommes (1955) ["Rififi"], which he crafted into the greatest french noir of the 50’s. Dassin also played the Italian safe-cracker in the picture. The movie, which featured the legendary 32 minute heist scene filmed in almost total silence, desevedly won him the best director prize at the Cannes Film Festival, where he met his second wife, the Greek actress Melina Mercouri, who died in 1994.

An interesting Salo.com interview with the 89-yo Dassin in August 2000 by Michael Sragow offers some background on Dassin’s attitudes to his early noir work.

Check out my reviews of Thieves’ Highway, Rififi and Night And the City.

His major noir releases are available as Criterion DVDs, and these essays on the Criterion web-site are elegant dissertations on Dassins’ artistry:

Brute Force: Screws and Proles by Michael Atkinson Here we are in the dark territories again, the republic of bitternesses and bile known as noir, squaring our jaws against an amoral universe and roaming the rain-wet, lightless American City as if it were a circle of the inferno where backstabbers, goldbricks, and unfortunates march in closed patterns and puzzle >>>

The Naked City: New York Plays Itself by Luc Sante In 1945 Arthur Fellig, known as Weegee, a canny and gifted tabloid newspaper photographer, did something unprecedented: he assembled some of his best shots, of corpses and fires and arrests and crowds and spectacles, and made them into a book, published in hardcover—this at a time when photography books were still >>>

Night and the City: In the Labyrinth by Paul Arthur Within film noir’s unparalleled roster of resonant titles—Kiss of Death, Out of the Past, Where Danger Lives, to name three—none is more emblematic or iconographically cogent than Night and the City. Juxtaposing two of noir’s essential, virtually ontological qualities, the title of Jules Dassin’s underrated elegy for a self-annihilating hustler reminds >>>

Rififi: Love Made Invisible by Jamie Hook In 1955, Jules Dassin, an American director in exile in Paris, made this flat-out perfect piece of cinema. The film came as a redemption for Dassin: a one-time promising young director cranking out B-movies under an MGM contract (”They were awful. It was just plain unhappiness and embarrassment,” he later said >>>

Thieves Highway: Dangerous Fruit by Michael Sragow Like the movie’s rattletrap trucks lurching down the highway as they carry way-too-heavy loads, the characters in Jules Dassin’s brilliantly volatile Thieves’ Highway struggle under psychological and moral baggage until they can lay their burdens down. Working from a novel and script by A.I. Bezzerides, Dassin made this swift, fluid melodrama >>>