So What The Hell's A Film Noir?

By Jim Doherty

It's just possible that there were a few of you who were confused by my assertion last time that noir as a name for a particular kind of crime story, stemmed from Serie Noire , the mystery line established by the French publisher Gallimard.

I suspect that many of you thought that a noir novel was a novel that was like what we now call “film noirs.”

In fact, it's just the reverse. Although the term film noir didn't really come into common usage here in the States until the ‘70's, it was first coined by French movie critics in or around 1946. Nino Frank is most often credited as the originator of the term, though Jean-Pierre Chartier is also mentioned by some sources.

The point is, when they coined the term, they were specifically referencing Gallimard's Serie Noire line. What they meant, in essence, was a movie that told a story on film in the same way that the Serie Noire novels told their stories in prose.

So if, using the Serie Noire default definition we developed last time (a noir novel is a crime novel with a dark, sinister atmosphere), it follows that a film noir is a crime movie with a dark, sinister atmosphere.

“Film noir” is a term that is generally understood to mean a black and white crime film, made anywhere from the early 1940's to the late 1950's. Some might cite earlier examples, like the Warner Brothers gangster films of the ‘30's, or later examples, like Richard Brooks's adaptation of Truman Capote's In Cold Blood in 1967, but the ‘40's and ‘50's are generally regarded as the classic “noir cycle.”

And, as with “noir” in prose fiction, “film noir” is a pretty broad term. It's been applied to private eye movies like Murder, My Sweet , gangster dramas like The Asphalt Jungle , social commentaries like Crossfire , police procedurals like The Naked City , romantic suspense films like The Spiral Staircase , melodramas about sexy, double-crossing lovers like Double Indemnity , and cloak-and-dagger films like OSS .

Film noirs tend to have similar visual styles, characterized by dramatic, chiaroscuro lighting, lots of highlighted lights sharply contrasting with heavily darkened shadows. The plots often, but not always, have gritty, urban backgrounds (although some, like On Dangerous Ground , have rural settings).

The funny thing is, precisely because the term didn't come into common usage until the ‘70's, the makers of the classic film noirs didn't know that that was what they were making.

There's a story that Edward Dmytryk, the director who helmed two of the seminal film noirs, Murder, My Sweet and Crossfire , was a guest lecturer at some college film class in the ‘70's or ‘80's. In the late ‘40's, Dmytryk was less famous for the movies he actually made than for being one of the “Hollywood Ten,” a group of directors who were publicly spotlighted because of possible communist sympathies. Dmytryk assumed that the class was going to ask him about the blacklist. Instead one of the students asked him about film noir.

“Film noir?” Dmytryk is supposed to have said. “What's that?”

No one was more surprised than Dmytryk when the crest-fallen student explained that the director was regarded as nothing less than one of the inventors of film noir.

Robert Mitchum, who starred in several film noirs for RKO, a studio particularly identified with the form, said it was all a matter of money. The producers wanted the films to look like “A” productions, but only wanted to spend enough to make a “B” picture. So, while some expensive musical was using all the studio's big lights, the noir directors were lighting their shots with the tips of lit cigarettes and everyone raved about how artful it all was.

What killed the film noir? Simple. Color. There were still lots of great crime movies being made, Bullitt , In the Heat of the Night , Harper , Madigan , Dirty Harry , etc., etc., etc. Movies that certainly would have been film noirs if they'd been made the same way. But virtually everything being released by that time was in color.

To illustrate, take one fairly typical film noir from 1948. The Street with No Name featured Mark Stevens as an undercover FBI agent infiltrating a gangster organization, located in a nondescript Midwestern city, headed by Richard Widmark. It had all the noir visual elements. Eight years later it was remade as House of Bamboo . The undercover cop was now an Army MP investigator played by Robert Stack and the gang leader was played by Robert Ryan. The setting was Japan during the US occupation. Despite the change of setting, the new version followed the original very closely. Sometimes almost shot-for-shot. In fact, the biggest change wasn't the new setting. It was that House of Bamboo was a widescreen, Technicolor epic. Visually, it just wasn't anything like the original. It was a fine film. But it wasn't noir. And, significantly, the director, Samuel Fuller, was quite capable of turning out a gritty black and white crime film using those signature noir visual effects, as he had shown several years earlier in Pickup on South Street and would show several years later with The Crimson Kimono and Underworld USA.

That was what was happening as early as 1956. By the late ‘60's no one was making black and white films anymore. So no one was making film noirs anymore.

Then along came the ‘70's, and the term started getting bandied about, and, before too long, filmmakers started announcing their intentions to make a film noir. That's the first time anyone ever actually declared the specific intention of making a film noir. Nobody during the classic “noir cycle” ever set out to make a film noir. They just tried to make good, gritty, hard-edged, visually interesting crime movies. Film noirs were what happened.

In retrospect.

That's why many of the so-called “neo-noirs” being released these days have such an air of self-consciousness about them. The real film noirs were being made by people who had no idea what the hell a film noir was, and, in consequence, no idea that there was a tradition, or a set of expectations they had to adhere to.

R.I.P. NOTICE

I don't want this column to become a regular venue for obituaries on hard-boiled novelists, but I recently heard on another site that Richard S. Prather, one of the true giants, had passed away at the age of 85.

Except for Mickey Spillane's Mike Hammer novels, Prather's somewhat tongue-in-cheek Shell Scott mysteries were the highest-selling series of private eye stories in print during the '50's. According to 70 Years of Best-Sellers (a history of the world's most popular books put together by Publishers Weekly ), of the 150 top-selling mystery books ever published, 16, more than ten per cent of the entire list, were by Prather. Only Erle Stanley Gardner, who was much more prolific, had more books on the list than Prather.

Total sales of his books exceeded 40 million. Indeed, his Scott series was such a mainstay of his publisher, Fawcett/Gold Medal, that, in 1964, when he left for another publisher, Gold Medal prevailed on John D. MacDonald to create a substitute series character to take up the slack. That new character was Travis McGee. Thus, having created one of the most popular fictional detectives of the '50's, Prather became indirectly responsible for the creation of one of the most popular fictional detectives of the '60's.

Prather also had a connection to Dragnet , the seminal, police procedural radio/TV series created by Jack Webb. Under the pseudonym "David Knight," he wrote Case No. 561 , the first in a series of Dragnet novels published by Pocket Books.

His most recent Scott novel, Shellshock , was published by Tor/Forge in 1987. I believe it was in that same year that he won the "Eye" from the Private Eye Writers of America for Lifetime Achievement.

In interviews given over the last few years, Prather said he was working on his magnum opus, an epic, blockbuster Scott novel, entitled The Death Gods , that would top anything he'd ever done. I hope he managed to finish it, but even if he didn't, the work he leaves behind, more than 30 thoroughly enjoyable novels and four short story collections, all featuring Hollywood 's toughest yet most amiable op, are a fine legacy .

Prather's particular mixture of straightforward, hard-boiled private eye action with screwball comedy might not fly today, but I've never read a Scott novel I didn't enjoy. Though he had four short story collections about Scott, there was one Scott short story that was never collected in a book. It was called “The Bloodshot Eye,” and, if you're interested, and Joe doesn't mind my sending you to another site, you can read it for free here:

http://user.dtcc.edu/~dean/tbe.html

If you've never read a Scott story, imagine Mike Hammer, injected with a happy-go-lucky disposition and a sense of humor, suddenly plucked from the rain-swept concrete canyons of Manhattan and plopped down in the middle of sunny Southern California , and you've got a pretty good idea what Shell Scott is like.

See you next time.