It’s tempting to think we might have seen and done with film-noir. One term bandied about is Chiaroscuro, a word to describe those blacker than blacks and whiter than whites. Or ‘femme fatale’, the deadly women with Jennifer Rabbit sized swinging hips. We shouldn’t fool ourselves in thinking we know the hard-boiled detective just because we know his name. It’s like only half-remembering a picture-book.
‘Neo-Noir’ (Reservoir Dogs, Memento, Blue Velvet) certainly owes a great deal to the violent crime films of the 40s. The pseudo-philosophy babble of the Joker in The Dark Knightresembles closely the amorality offered by Orson Welles in The Third Man (1949). Atop a ferris wheel, Welles gives us an anarchic vision, offering his friend a hypothetical 20,000 dollars for every person he would kill: ‘Look down there. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever … Or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare’. Yet our familiarity with noir’s obvious descendants can make us seek out the stereotypes and prevent our discovering more surprising films.
Parodies can grant us something of a side-ways perspective. Beat the Devil (1953) is director John Huston’s camp reworking of some of his earlier films like The Maltese Falcon(1941). The actors can’t take their roles seriously, as if film noir had already hardened into a cliché. Wide-eyed Jennifer Jones, sick of her dull husband, implausibly suggests to Bogart that ‘you could have him done away with’ or later, utters the unintentionally laughable: ‘I think you’re doctors, evil ones I mean’. Leaning in for the kiss, Bogart and Jones suppress a giggle just as the camera fades. It’s only a short step from here to Leslie Nielsen accident prone detective Frank Drebin of The Naked Gun, who spoofs the smart-talk of noir films. Without a badge, Drebin worries: ‘Just think; next time I shoot someone, I could be arrested.’
The only way to really discover noir is to go back and watch a medley of the films. The Maltese Falcon is one of the most entertaining. Sam Spade churns out one-liners faster than a bag of fortune-cookies: ‘I don’t mind a reasonable amount of trouble’, ‘When you’re slapped, you’ll take it and like it’. Noir can be funnier than we expect. It can also be more brutal than Tarantino’s colorful homages, riddled with wanderers, addicts and implausibly violent veterans. Detour (1945), ends with Tom Neal tugging on a telephone cable winding under a locked door, inadvertently strangling a drunken Ann Savage to death.
Instead of referring to the manual, you’d be wise to follow Philip Marlowe of The Big Sleep (1946) and throw away the book which gives us ‘diagrams on page 47 of how to be a detective in 10 easy lessons’. Instead, pursue the Marlowe of Murder my Sweet into a drug induced nightmare, into the dark heart of the hard-boiled genre: ‘I dived in. It had no bottom.’
