Mark Bould - Film Noir

SHORT CUTS

INTRODUCTIONS TO FILM STUDIES

OTHER TITLES IN THE SHORT CUTS SERIES

THE HORROR GENRE: FROM BEELZEBUB TO BLAIR WITCH Paul Wells

THE STAR SYSTEM: HOLLYWOODS PRODUCTION OF POPULAR IDENTITIES Paul McDonald

SCIENCE FICTION CINEMA: FROM OUTERSPACE TO CYBERSPACE Geoff King and Tanya Krzywinska

EARLY SOVIET CINEMA: INNOVATION, IDEOLOGY AND PROPAGANDA David Gillespie

READING HOLLYWOOD: SPACES AND MEANINGS IN AMERICAN FILM Deborah Thomas

DISASTER MOVIES: THE CINEMA OF CATASTROPHE Stephen Keane

THE WESTERN GENRE: FROM LORDSBURG TO BIG WHISKEY John Saunders

PSYCHOANALYSIS AND CINEMA: THE PLAY OF SHADOWS Vicky Lebeau

COSTUME AND CINEMA: DRESS CODES IN POPULAR FILM Sarah Street

MISE-EN-SCNE: FILM STYLE AND INTERPRETATION John Gibbs

NEW CHINESE CINEMA: CHALLENGING REPRESENTATIONS Sheila Cornelius with Ian Haydn Smith

SCENARIO: THE CRAFT OF SCREENWRITING Tudor Gates

ANIMATION: GENRE AND AUTHORSHIP Paul Wells

WOMENS CINEMA: THE CONTESTED SCREEN Alison Butler

BRITISH SOCIAL REALISM: FROM DOCUMENTARY TO BRIT GRIT Samantha Lay

FILM EDITING: THE ART OF THE EXPRESSIVE Valerie Orpen

AVANT-GARDE FILM: FORMS, THEMES AND PASSIONS Michael OPray

PRODUCTION DESIGN: ARCHITECTS OF THE SCREEN Jane Barnwell

NEW GERMAN CINEMA: IMAGES OF A GENERATION Julia Knight

EARLY CINEMA: FROM FACTORY GATE TO DREAM FACTORY Simon Popple and Joe Kember

MUSIC IN FILM: SOUNDTRACKS AND SYNERGY Pauline Reay

FEMINIST FILM STUDIES: WRITING THE WOMAN INTO CINEMA Janet McCabe

MELODRAMA: GENRE STYLE SENSIBILITY John Mercer and Martin Shingler

FILM PERFORMANCE: FROM ACHIEVEMENT TO APPRECITATION Andrew Klevan

NEW DIGITAL CINEMA: REINVENTING THE MOVING IMAGE Holly Willis

FILM AND PHILOSOPHY: IMAGES OF WISDOM Adrian Page

THE MUSICAL: RACE, GENDER AND PERFORMANCE Susan Smith

TEEN MOVIES: AMERICAN YOUTH ON SCREEN Timothy Shary

THE NEW HOLLYWOOD: FROM BONNIE AND CLYDE TO STAR WARS Peter Krmer

DOCUMENTARY: THE MARGINS OF REALITY Paul Ward

ITALIAN NEOREALISM: REBUILDING THE CINEMATIC CITY Mark Shiel

FILM NOIR

FROM BERLIN TO SIN CITY

MARK BOULD

WALLFLOWER

LONDON and NEW YORK

CONTENTS

It started out as a kind of joke, and then it wasnt funny anymore because money became involved. Deep down, nothing about money is funny.

Charles Willeford (2000: 3)

With thanks to Susan Alexander, Caroline Bainbridge, Emma Bircham, Anita Biressi, Andrew M. Butler, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr., Graham Fraser, Carl Freedman, Gillian Glitre, Joan Gordon, Veronica Hollinger, Rob Latham, Iris Luppa, China Miville, Heather Nunn, Mike Sanders, Greg Tuck, friends and colleagues at BCUC and Historical Materialism, my family and, above all, Kathrina Glitre their friendship, solicitude and kindnesses made the year before I wrote this book easier to bear. Additional thanks to Iris for helpful comments on Weimar cinema; Carl for his Walter Neff secret; Mike Harrison for Fat Michael Douglas, every womans dream; and Kathrina for making this a better book than it would otherwise have been. Thanks also, of course, to Glenn Ford, Gloria Grahame, Ida Lupino, Robert Mitchum, Dick Powell, Robert Ryan, Barbara Stanwyck, Claire Trevor, Richard Widmark

Determinism argues that the state of a system at one moment gives rise to the state of that system in the following moment. Determinism should not be confused with fate, fatalism, cause-and-effect or predictability. Fate intrudes a metaphysics in which the entire history of a system, from which it is impossible to deviate, is laid down in advance. Fatalism is a resigned belief in this inescapable fate. Cause-and-effect is a narrative technique by which we make sense of the transition of a system from moment to moment. It is always a retrospective and partial account, an abstraction which marginalises or ignores the totality of the system. (It is, nonetheless, a useful tool for modelling the world and for telling it.) Predictability is the inverse of cause-and-effect. The ability to construct retrospective cause-and-effect chains implies that it should be possible to extend their construction into the future; this is an error based on forgetting that cause-and-effect is a retrospective abstraction. A determinist system does not require fate, inevitability, predictability or cause-and-effect. In the non-linear dynamics of complex systems, there is no necessary correspondence of magnitude between a microscopic fluctuation in a system and the macroscopic divergences it can produce in that system. This is not about a small cause having a large effect, but about the initial conditions of the entire system producing unforeseeable conditions in the entire system at a subsequent moment; it is about a sensitive dependence on initial conditions; it is about determinism without predictability. In complex systems, order can emerge from chaos, and chaos often contains deeply-encoded structures of order. (See Earman 1986, Hall 1992, Hayles 1990 and 1991, and Hoefer 2003.)

The point of all this will become clear.

One day in 1993, Emmy Award-winning filmmaker Ara Chekmayan visited a Pennsylvania fleamarket, where he discovered a statuette that looked exactly like the Maltese Falcon. Chekmayan purchased the black bird for $8 and, not long afterward, believing it to be one of two identical props that had been used in the famous 1941 Warner Bros. movie, he offered it up for auction at Christies, who estimated its value at $50,000. Before an auction could take place, however, a Los Angeles collector pointed out that identical copies of the statuette could be purchased at $45 a piece from a book dealer in Long Beach

James Naremore (1998: 254)

James Naremore takes this anecdote to prove that certain 1940s Hollywood thrillers have accumulated sufficient artistic and cultural cachet to become valuable as other things besides movies (1998: 255). Looked at differently, it provides a key to the central problematic of identifying, delineating, defining film noir: this book opens by quoting from another book on film noir which retells a story from People magazine about a man who found one of many copies based on the original (two copies of the) prop of the Maltese Falcon which, diegetically, was a fake in the third film to be based on Dashiell Hammetts 1931 hard-boiled detective novel The Maltese Falcon, itself originally serialised in Black Mask pulp magazine between September 1929 and January 1930. So what exactly was it that Chekmayan thought he had found when he thought he had found (one of) the original Falcon(s)? In this welter of copies of copies in different media and adaptations from one medium to another the notion of an original evanesces. Even Hammett is no guarantor. His cynical deflation of the Grail myth in the modern urban waste land is not the first (his 1931 The Glass Key alludes to T. S. Eliots 1922 The Waste Land), nor is his Sam Spade the original hard-boiled detective (a more likely contender is Carroll John Dalys Terry Mack).