William Marling,Ph.D. Professor of English, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH, USA
Hard-Boiled Fiction and Film Noir
Classic Writers
Ross Macdonald (Kenneth Millar)
Development of Hard-Boiled Narrative
Early Female Authors of Hard-Boiled Writing
Chester Himes and Early Afro-American Detectives
Major Works
Red Harvest (1927) by Dashiell Hammett
The Maltese Falcon (1929) by Dashiell Hammett
The Glass Key (1931) by Dashiell Hammett
The Big Sleep (1939) by Raymond Chandler
Farewell, My Lovely (1940) by Raymond Chandler
The Long Goodbye (1953) by Raymond Chandler
The Galton Case (1959) by Ross Macdonald
The Underground Man (1971) by Ross Macdonald
Cotton Comes to Harlem (1965) by Chester Himes
Characteristics of the Genre
Imagery in Hard-Boiled Detective Fiction
Criticism, 1930 to the Present
Detective Fiction in Comics, Radio, and Television
Film Noir
Reactions against Early Crime Movies
More Film Noir (brief takes on The Glass Key (1942), Murder, My Sweet (1944), Farewell, My Lovely (1975), The Big Sleep (1946), The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946, 1981), The Lady in the Lake (1947), The Lady From Shanghai (1949), Criss Cross (1949), D.O.A. ((1950), The Asphalt Jungle (1950), Sunset Boulevard (1950), Kiss Me Deadly (1955), Touch of Evil (1958), Chinatown (1974), Taxi Driver (1976), Body Heat (1981), and The Ususual Suspects (1995).
Film Noir ("dark film") refers to a genre of movies that employ hard-boiled protagonists, urban settings, dark tones, and a sense of despair. Most of these movies date from the period of 1940 to 1960 and share similar techniques and styles.
The term owes to two Frenchmen, Nino Frank and Jean-Pierre Chartier. These critics were prevented by World War II from seeing The Maltese Falcon, Laura, Farewell, My Lovely; Double Indemnity, and The Woman in the Window, all of which appeared on Paris screens in 1946. Frank claimed that these movies were a new genre, distinct from the preceding crime
movies. Chartier found them as dark as the French movies Pepe le Moko (1937) and Quai des Brumes (1938). They both wrote reviews, and Chartier's comment stuck: "Les Americains aussi font les films noirs" ("The Americans are also making dark films"). (Right: Jean Gabin as Pepe, 1936)
When Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton wrote their pioneering Panorama du Film Noir (1955), they referred to the "sources" of film noir in American hard-boiled writers Hammett, Cain, Burnett, and Chandler. 1 In subsequent decades, however, the origins and definition of film noir have been much debated. Movie historians point out that movies are a different medium, influenced by other movies, such as the crime movie genre. The European expressionist movement in art also affected movies, as did technological advances and economic history, such as the Depression.
All scholars agree, however, that by 1945 film noir had its own style and themes, both of which were distinctly American. The concept of film noir employed in this chapter is narrow, excluding most of the crime movies on which film noir is based, as well as thrillers by Alfred Hitchcock and comedies such as The Thin Man series based on Hammett's novels.
Detectives had appeared in silent movies early, but they did not catch on. The first Sherlock Holmes movies appeared in 1903, and there were "Nick Carter" movies made in France from 1909 onward. Police detective "Bulldog Drummond" appeared in movies in 1922, the year that the famous actor John Barrymore first played Holmes. One problem was that the detective story's plot required many sub-titles and more complicated camera-work than melodramas. By contrast, audiences liked melodramas, they were easy to make, and they paid well. In the United States, the plot-driven detective movie soon gave way to farce. The police became the subjects of satire in Max Sennett's enormously popular Keystone Kops comedies. For the ancestors of the hard-boiled film, we must look to a genre known as "crime movies." Film historians usually link crime movies to D. W. Griffith's pioneering "slum melodramas" of the silent era. These were fifteen minute, one-reel movies that helped to make poverty and social reform into issues during the Progressive Era (1890-1915). Griffith shot A Child of the Ghetto and The Lily of the Tenements in 1910 and at least six others in 1911. His most famous was The Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912), which featured pimps, drugs, gangs, and a shoot-out. There were even movies about white slavery, such as Traffic in Souls (1913), and drug addiction: For His Son (1913) and The Devil's Needle (1916).
These interests converged in 1927, according to movie historian Carlos Clarens, in Underworld (written by Ben Hecht, directed by Josef von Sternberg). Hecht had written for Chicago newspapers during the rise of organized crime, and von Sternberg was a German influenced by the Expressionist movement, who saw Chicago as "a great city in the dead of night." 2 Capitalizing on the Keystone tradition of disdain for police, Hecht wrote a sympathetic male lead named Bull Weed, and von Sternberg played up Weed's existential aloneness by light-and-shadow effects, halos of street-lights, and neon signs, all future traits of film noir. Sound movies – one of the great changes in narrative -- appeared in 1927 with The Jazz Singer. There were several crime movies in the late 1920s, but nothing like the huge success accorded Little Caesar (Dir. Mervyn LeRoy, 1930). Based on W. R. Burnett's novel and starring Edward G. Robinson,
this movie convinced Hollywood that crime movies would pay off. Imitators raced to their studios. The most interesting were Public Enemy (1931), discussed below, and Scarface (1932), boldly modeled on Chicago gangster Al Capone. These movies appeared at a time of technological revolution. Sound required new cameras, new projectors, the sound-proofing of studios and re-wiring of theaters – all huge expenses. Warner Brothers, the pioneer of sound, was losing $300,000 a quarter when it brought out The Jazz Singer. 3 Then it went $5 million in debt betting on the new technology, but in 1929 its profits were an astonishing $14 million.
These films appeared at a time of technological revolution in film. Sound required new cameras, new projectors, the sound-proofing of studios and re-wiring of theaters - all huge expenses. Warner Brothers, the pioneer, was losing $300,000 a quarter when it brought out The Jazz Singer. Then it went $5 million in debt betting on the new technology, but in 1929 its profits were an astonishing $14 million, double those of any other studio. Rivals had to invest huge sums to keep up; soon there were only five major American film producers making seventy percent of all Class A features and collecting seventy percent of all box office receipts.
In 1928 the “Mazda tests” set uniform lighting standards for the industry. These were used to guage film stock for development, like the ASA number on film today. Before the tests, lots of film shot on different days would have different values of light and dark, making it hard to give a consistent “look” to a film. After 1928 the exposure of interior and exterior sets, costumes, and make-up could be planned.
These developments set film-makers to thinking technically. As film scholar Barry Salt has shown, sound recording with only one mike was muddy and disorienting for the audience; it gave way to overhead mikes on booms, and then to multi-point recording. Early techniques in cutting sound film resulted in dead spots; this was eliminated by slight overlaps, giving the impression of seamless sound and leading to a maxim that “sound leads”: for every visual shift, there must be an auditory shift as well, and it came first. Eventually, the concepts of “sound montage” and “sound rhythm” were introduced by Orson Welles.
Crime movies became popular just as the techniques of sound were introduced. In subtle ways these movies became proponents of new technologies. This would also be true of film noir in the Depression and during W.W. II, when economic pressures again bore down and still newer technologies, especially in camera lenses, were adopted. The most important of these would be "deep focus:" new lenses allowed foreground and background to appear in clearer focus than the
human eye permits. Fox movies from 1938 on have greater depth of field and sharper focus, features copied by other studios. Fox cameraman Gregg Toland (right, pointing, with William Wyler) is often cited as the pioneer of depth photography for his work on Orson Welles' Citizen Kane (1941)(Below).
The new technology not only increased expressive possibilities, but also made movie-making cheaper. This was important. During the first part of the Depression (1929-33) movie attendance shrank from eighty million a week to sixty million, movie scholar Tino Balio has pointed out, while production costs more than doubled and revenue from foreign markets collapsed. 4 Thousands of theaters closed and others resorted to offering a Bingo game with the movie. Double features came to the rescue, and by 1947 two-thirds of all theaters offered them. This led to the creation of the "B" unit, which made the second, shorter feature on a shoestring budget. The B unit often worked at night, re-using the feature unit's props, often employing non-union labor. Many film noir directors got started here, and an important one, Edgar G. Ulmer, was legendary for finishing his B movies in six days and nights. Casts were kept small and crowd scenes or car chase sequences were re-cycled from other movies. During World War II, the U. S. government limited the studios' use of film-stock (cellulose was a key ingredient in bombs), so the B units shrank their movies from eighty to sixty minutes. 5 On every front, they turned economic necessity into stylistic virtue, in the process imbuing the B movie with this quality. The four movies discussed below show the steps by which film noir developed from the crime movie to its masterpiece, Double Indemnity.
The Public Enemy (1931) is often considered a crime movie rather than film noir. Directed by William Wellman and starring then little-known James Cagney, this Warner Brothers' follow-up to Little Caesar already employs many of the new techniques and technology, as well as the themes, that will characterize film noir. It opens with a high-angle shot of downtown Chicago in "1909", showing crowds, stockyards, and beer rolling out of breweries in wagons and in the pails of working men – the implication is that all three are equally crude. Then in a "1917" montage viewers meet "good" brother Mike Powers and his fiancée at eye-level in a dolly shot. Finally in a "1920" segment, a crowd mills outside a theatre as Prohibition takes effect; in a series of establishing, medium and close-up shots, the loutish behavior induced by the new law appears. The sum of this resume of history is that the old temperance melodrama (beer is bad) was silly, because Prohibition was clearly worse. But viewers seldom notice that as history progresses in this resume, the techniques and technology get better too: they clarify history for viewers.
The Public Enemy depends on a good brother/bad brother plot and the latter's romantic interest in Jean Harlow, for whom he must overthrow his whining girlfriend. Like many noir protagonists, "bad brother" Tom Powers (Cagney) is a type of prodigal son who personifies greed, lust, and insecurity. He wants Jean Harlow, the femme fatale, and he gets her, but he can't go home again.
Studio back-lots were used to shoot this movie's "Prohibition era" bombings of rival gangs, and the sniper-style execution of Matt Doyle. In the latter Wellman used the camera point-of-view, the framing device of the window, and deep focus (devices typical of film noir) to put his audience in the position of the assassins. The Public Enemy reaches its climax when Cagney, in a studio rainstorm notable for its torrential volume, the water's failure to puddle, and the equidistant raindrops, arrives at his rival's hideout to kill them. By mixing the rain noise, the gunplay, and Cagney'' voice, by employing dramatic lighting, and by using doors, windows, and the camera aperture as framing devices, Wellman created a soundscape and sense of spatial depth far superior to reality. This sequence is a technical tour de force that was not surpassed for years, and it stands in striking cinematic contrast to the movie's opening. Though only exceptional in some scenes, The Public Enemy showed what might be done.
In the same year, the eccentric millionaire Howard Hughes produced Scarface (1931), directed by Howard Hawks. Also set in Chicago, this movie followed the life of Al Capone more closely. Along with Little Caesar and The Public Enemy, Scarface spawned almost fifty imitations over the next decade: some of them were good (The Finger Points, 1931; Beast of the City, 1931, scripted by W.R. Burnett; Hell's Highway, 1932 ), but most were not, and few are available for viewing today.
Reactions Against Crime Movies
A public reaction to real crime welled up just as the Depression was changing not only the economics of movie-going but also of movie-making. Warner Brothers swore off crime movies in May 1931 (only to return a few years later favoring the law side of the conflict). In the early 1930s the "Hays Commission" also became more active. Formed after the rape/murder trial of silent movie star Fatty Arbuckle in the early 1920s and directed by former Postmaster General Will Hays, the commission became a synonym for censorship. When the Catholic bishops of North America threatened to boycott Hollywood movies in 1933, producers put specific Production Codes in place.
Emphasis shifted to the law's side for a while. The G-Men (Warner, 1935) showed the new F.B.I. hunting down desperado John Dillinger. James Cagney (as agent Brick Davis) was now a Phi Beta Kappa from the slums, who had cut his ties to bootlegging. M.G.M. countered with the Crime Does Not Pay series, glorifying the F.B.I. and J. Edgar Hoover. During the Depression, however, many more viewers probably saw Busby Berkeley's musicals (Gold Diggers of 1933 and Gold Diggers of 1935)or Frank Capra's humane dramas and comedies (Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, 1936; and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, 1939). From hard times they sought relief; the movies offered a gamut of stories, most of which posed fewer censorship problems than crime movies.
Humphrey Bogart, one scholar has remarked, did not have the luck to star in the early crime movies or he would have been a celebrity sooner. Bogart had first appeared in movies in 1928. Bit it was only with the Broadway production of The Petrified Forest (1934) and his selection to play the same role in the movie (1936) that Bogart began to develop a special persona. The play describes his character as "well built but stoop-shouldered, with a vaguely thoughtful saturnine face. He is unmistakably condemned… the last great apostle of rugged individualism." As another character says, "He ain't a gangster, he's a real old-time desperado. Gangsters is foreign. He's an American." 6 Bogart repeated the role of charismatic angster in Dead End (Director: William Wyler, 1937), in which he befriends the tenement kids of Manhattan, warning them against a life of crime, and again in Angels With Dirty Faces (1938). Meeting Bogart in these roles, audiences were prepared to attribute depth and humanity to his character when he finally appeared in a bigger role in They Drive By Night (Raoul Walsh, 1940). Bogart had been appearing in four or five movies a year, so the public "knew" him when he starred in The Maltese Falcon and High Sierra, both appearing in 1941.
In 1935 even the most technique-conscious of the crime movies lacked the dark scenes and psychological tone that would distinguish film noir. This was largely added by German-speaking directors who emigrated to Hollywood during the rise of Nazism. Their background was dominated by the Expressionist movement in art, which distorted or exaggerated natural shapes and intensified natural colors in order to present them as they would be perceived by a character. Expressionist artists took their cues from the earlier painter Vincent Van Gogh, using heavy lines to define forms, and vivid, often garish colors to treat emotions symbolically. 7 Edvard Munch, Chaim Soutine and Oskar Kokoschka are representative Expressionists.
A major work of Expressionist art was the German movie The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (dir. Robert Wiene, 1919), in which a moving camera shows the point of view of the insane main character. Expressionist movie-makers liked to employ extreme camera angles, tight close-ups, very slow dissolves, fast cutting and fast motion – anything that emphasized subjectivity.
Fritz Lang was the best known of the Expressionists in Germany to come to the U.S. In Europe he had made the masterpieces Metropolis (1927), The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1927) and M (1931). In the U.S. Lang made Fury (1936) and You Only Live Once (1937) in proto-noir style. During the height of film noir he made the classics The Woman in the Window (1945), Scarlet Street (1945), and The Big Heat (1953).
Robert Siodmak was actually born in the U.S. but his family returned to Germany before he was one. There he knew Wilder and Ulmer, showing the influence of Lang by his third movie, Inquest (1931), which was attacked by Hitler's aide Joseph Goebbels. He directed two important noir movies: Phantom Lady (1944, from a novel by Cornell Woolrich ) is the story of a man's paranoid search for a woman who seems not to exist but can save him from execution; Christmas Holiday (1944) suggests incest as the cause of homicidal Gene Kelly's killing of Deanna Durbin before he is killed by police. Siodmak also filmed The Killers (1946), Ernest Hemingway's famous short story. The first ten minutes faithfully follow the author's rendering of two gunman who kill "the Swede" (Burt Lancaster, in his first movie role), but the rest of the movie unearths the unstated reasons for the victim's passive acceptance of death. An insurance investigator (Edmond O'Brien) discovers that there has been a cross and a double-cross, behind which lies a femme fatale (Ava Gardner). A rare conjunction of extraordinary talents, The Killers is told through flashbacks, with heavy shadows, and the most authentically "Hemingway-esque" dialogue in movies.
According to Carlos Clarens, "the fully realized noir look first appears in Murder, My Sweet (1944) directed by Edward Dmytryk and based on Chandler's Farewell, My Lovely." 9 Although the soft-boiled Dick Powell starred as Philip Marlowe, screenwriter John Paxton added opening and closing scenes that permitted flashback and required voice-over narration.
Billy Wilder was the most important of the émigré directors of film noir. An Austrian by way of Paris and Berlin (where he worked with Siodmak), he arrived in Hollywood in 1933. He teamed up with veteran Charles Brackett to form the highest paid screenwriter duo in Hollywood. After a series of hits between 1939 and 1941, they got artistic control, with Wilder directing. He made two war movies, then Double Indemnity (1944), the greatest film noir. Disgusted by the book, Brackett begged off this project, but he returned for the equally dark The Lost Weekend (1945), a realistic account of alcoholism. After a final triumph, Sunset Boulevard (1950), Brackett could no longer stand to work with Wilder, and the team broke up.
Masterpieces – High Sierra (1941)
Made in 1940 but not released until 1941, High Sierra, directed by Raoul Walsh, is a stunning example of top talent working with the new technological possibilities and distilling from them the essential film noir themes. W. R. Burnett (author of Little Caesar) teamed with John Huston to write the script from Burnett's novel of 1940. They preserved the plot and most of the dialogue verbatim, but they cut the protagonist's socialist lectures about how the country had been corrupted. The era when a member of the Dillinger gang (Humphrey Bogart as Roy Earle) could appear conventionally heroic was over. This is, as Clarens writes, the essential "twilight of the gangster" picture. 10
Under the opening credits appear the Sierra Nevada, rugged and untamable. Then a montage of increasingly tighter shots shows the power of nature's opponent, mankind, as figured by government, prison and a governor's pardon. Accompanied by music rather than voice-over, this framing information prepares us to meet Roy Earle, "a wayward farm boy who joined up with the Dillinger gang." 11 But Dillinger epitomized the Depression, which was almost over in 1940, so Earle finds himself part legend, part irrelevancy. On his release from prison, he goes to commune with nature in the local park. Then he begins a trip to California, land of the future, and a new narrative about nature takes shape. Stopping at the old family farm in Indiana, he finds the catfish no longer bite at the fishing hole, and the farmers are hayseeds. This "old nature" becomes a threat to Earle and he flees. The landscape changes as Earle crosses the country from lush Indiana to Mojave desert, emphasizing nature's harshness.
When Bogart arrives at the Sierras, even Walsh's best shots of the mountains seem bland, and we see that they were a cinematic as well as a larger technological problem. The Sierra resisted the infusion of production values that could be added by technique on a set. This problem Walsh solved for most of the movie by treating his landscape like an interior; when Bogart and his young collaborators are planning and botching the resort holdup, they pass most of their time inside cabins, and when Walsh used outside locations, he treated them like complex interiors.
Against this technology, Walsh posed the moral ambiguity of Roy Earle, who befriends a sweet, club-footed girl (Joan Leslie) for whom he plans to finance an operation. But his real soulmate is Marie (Ida Lupino), the gun-moll who sticks by him, but whom Earle never appreciates. This romantic triangle only exists because Earle is willing to sacrifice himself for the "old values."
Only in the final scenes did Walsh use the dark scenes typical of film noir. Here his fatalistic rendering of technology becomes unmistakable. A montage of shots depicts the communications and police grid closing down on Bogie, whom we now understand to embody an archaic notion of nature's goodness and nobility, like the park that initially delighted him. Walsh worked hard to subsume the Sierra to technique in a celebrated car chase (a double 360 degree shot following Earle, then the police, as they drive up a hair-pin curve in a mountain road), but the swirling dust only emphasizes his battle for control. When Earle reaches the "Road Closed" sign and scrambles up the cliff with a machine gun, we understand that nature is no refuge; there are no "Earle family farms," there is no longer a frontier or pastoral ideal. The technological matrix that traps Earle is constituted by police lines, the radio reporter, the searchlight and the report of an airplane coming to bomb him. Earle may be living a romantic narrative of alienation, but the Average Folks in this movie, who have turned out to see him die, live a narrative of technological improvement, against which Earle rebels.
The Maltese Falcon was shot almost exclusively on sets, which permitted a high degree of control and technique. John Huston's first solo effort as director (and Humphrey Bogart's first starring role) was a model of planning and economy, with every shot predetermined. Recognizing that little needed to be done to Hammett's novel to turn it into a screenplay, Huston changed only the exterior scenes and added telephone calls and
spinning tires as transitions between interior sets.
While the novel evokes San Francisco, the movie's setting is minor; as Bruce Crowther notes, the novel could have taken place in any harbor city. 12 But a technological conception of San Francisco becomes important in the movie. The movie opens with a wide shot of the Bay Bridge, which appears nowhere in the book and was only completed after Hammett wrote his novel. A montage of San Francisco scenes follows, then the bridge again and a reverse zoom that leaves us in the offices of Spade and Archer, who are thus connected to this icon, which remains visible in their windows during most office scenes. The opening of the novel gives viewers a different kind of architecture – that of Sam Spade's "bony" V-shaped jaw, nostrils, nose and eyebrows, which make an Art Moderne design.
The shots of the bridge were an allusion to new bridges in general, specifically the Golden Gate Bridge. Completed only four years before the movie, that famous bridge celebrates a particular kind of technology. Like Hoover Dam and the California Aqueduct, all massive and geographically transforming, it is located in California and viewed popularly as part of the New Deal remedy for the Depression.
Following Brigid's visit to Spade's office, Huston created a celebrated sequence. A telephone rings in a darkened room and Spade, answering but never visible, hears of his partner's death. His responses seem like a "voice over" (when someone not present explains a scene to the audience), but since he is present, the technique suggets that he is somehow absent. The camera remains focussed on the base of the phone, behind which a curtain blows languidly over a window opening on city lights and night sounds. In the novel Hammett communicated the same sense of Spade's ambiguous feelings about his partner in a famous passage detailing his technique for rolling a cigarette. Huston took Hammett's hint, making technique stand as a metaphor for character.
Spade takes a cab to Stockton and Bush Streets, where Archer's body lies at the bottom of a slope. By alternating high angle shots (down on Archer) with low angle shots (Spade looking up to where Archer was shot), Huston establishes the urban equivalent of the Western's box canyon. On three sides buildings rise up, while the far end is enclosed by a hill, trees, and distant buildings. The setting is surprising, initially because of the trees and natural elements, but also because of Spade's unease in nature. Hammett's novel described police hunting under a billboard at this scene.
Huston shot most of the middle of the movie on beautifully lighted sets that could have served any musical. The scenes between Bogart and Mary Astor (Brigid O'Shaughnessy) employ conventional camera angles and three-point lighting. What is unusual is the number of telephone calls (a dozen) and the tightly framed shots of this object. Telephones not only deliver more information than in the novel, but become transitions to cut from scene to scene. They are used figuratively: because a call is made, something happens.
In the movie's final scenes at Spade's apartment, Huston laid great emphasis on Gutman as the symbolic father, eliminating the novel's sexually abused daughter. Forced to choose either Cairo or Wilmer as fall guy, Gutman tells Spade that he "feels toward Wilmer exactly as if he were my own son." Hammett had elected the homosexual Wilmer as the scapegoat, but Huston cast aside sexuality and even kinship as motivations. Gutman says to Wilmer, "I couldn't be fonder of you if you were my own son. But if you lose a son it's possible to get another.
There's only one Maltese falcon." His other "son," Cairo, rages at Gutman for being an "imbecile" and "incompetent" when the falcon turns out to be a fake. Our sympathy must rest with Spade, but he is hardly a romantic. Contrast his performance here with that in High Sierra: he resists the allure of travel, a beautiful woman, quick gains, and phony philanthropy, to conserve society as it is. He shows the enormous cost of just getting through life with some honesty and integrity.
The only problem with the novel as a movie script would seem to be the question of Spade's honesty with Brigid, hidden by the third person "objective" point of view in the novel, as Robert Edenbaum pointed out. Huston took much of Spade's "objective" complexity and transferred it through technique to the camera. Film scholar David Bordwell points out that Huston abandoned Spade's point-of-view early by showing the death of Miles Archer, but "declines to show the killer (we see only a gloved hand)." 13
The movie knows whodunit, suggesting that whatever off-screen force affects him affects us too. It accomplishes this by misdirection. The opening titles that scroll over the falcon suggest that its value is established fact, but in the novel the tale of pedigree is delayed until later. The novel's statuette is unseen until finally unwrapped, and it dupes the crooks, not Spade. The movie's statue, coming first, dupes us too.
Double Indemnity is regarded by most as film noir's masterpiece. As a conjunction of eccentric talents, it is probably unrivalled: James M. Cain's novel as scripted by Raymond Chandler, who said that Cain was "every kind of writer I detest, a faux naif, a Proust in greasy overalls, a dirty little boy with a piece of chalk" and directed by Billy Wilder, who called Chandler "a virtuoso alcoholic." 14 But Wilder's casting -- he hounded Fred MacMurray, who had never played any but personable roles, until he consented to play Walter Huff -- and his outsider's eye for the unique in California settings, combined in a work of genius. It is a distinctly Los Angeles movie and one that exhibits the genre's central motifs.
The opening shot shows a car running a red light – a metaphor for all that follows – and the rest of the night-time urban montage leaves no doubt where we are. Only five minutes into the movie does Wilder allow the sunny Hollywood hills of Cain's first page to appear. The outside of the Nirdlinger house is as Cain described it, but inside it is cool and gothic, rather than the tacky Tijuana decor that Cain satirized. The initial meeting between Walter Huff and femme fatale Phyllis Nirdlinger lasts much longer than in the novel, and when MacMurray departs he stops first at a drive-in, where he orders a beer, and then at a bowling alley to "roll a few lines and calm my nerves." These scenes are not in the novel (Cain sent Huff to his office) but are brilliant additions, expanding on a minor theme in Cain, the extent to which Huff is a consumer. For Wilder (and Chandler), California was the epitome of marketing; Huff lives in a consumer setting that has anticipated even his leisure needs. For Cain, on the other hand, a good "California setting" was a nationally-known oddity, such as a moonrise over the Pacific. Wilder discarded such scenes, indeed he dispensed with nature altogether. He substituted a super-market, where MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck meet
repeatedly to discuss their crime amid pyramids of cans and boxes of baby-food. Murder, the movie suggests, is a series of marketing decisions combined with lucky breaks, such as whether your product appears at eye-level. A passing patron, in fact, complains to MacMurray about her difficulty in reaching what she assumes is his line of baby food.
Wilder also discarded Cain's ending (Huff and Phyllis commit suicide on a cruise ship) and made the technological theme overt: first he filmed MacMurray dying in the Folsom gas chamber, a set that cost Paramount $150,000 and took five days of shooting. Then he decided to make the same statement less emphatically: Huff completes his confessional Dictaphone roll just as his boss and pursuer, Keyes, walks in. Keyes allows Huff to flee, predicting that he "won't make it as far as the door," where indeed the salesman collapses. Wilder, following the predictive, statistical portrait of life underlying Cain's novel, simply extends the novel's underlying theme of technological determinism.
Most earlier film noir offered some way out of technological determinism. Double Indemnity does not. Instead of man creating himself from/against a landscape, technology composes or reduces character on the field of its possibilities.
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1 Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton, Panorama du Film Noir Americain (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1955), 17-18. 2 Von Sternberg in Carlos Clarens, Crime Movies (New York: Da Capo Press, 1997), 32. 3 Figures from Marling, The Roman Noir (Athens: U. Georgia P. 1995) 248. 4 Tino Balio, The American Film Industry ( Madison: U. of Wisconsin Press, 1976), 215-16. 5 Marling, 251 6 Details on Bogart in Clarens, 142. 7 Expressionism defined in Randon House Dictionary of theEnglish Language, Second Unabridged Edition (New York: Random, 1987), 683. 8 Expressionist painters from Colliers Encyclopedia (New York: Macmillan, 1992), vol. 9, 507. 9 Clarens, 195. 10 Clarens, 168. 11 Ibid. 12 Bruce Crowther, Film Noir: Reflections in a Dark Mirror (New York: Ungar, 1989), 28. 13 David Bordwell, Narration in Fiction Film (Madison: U. of Wisconsin P., 1985), 40. 14 Chandler, Selected Letters, 23.
