I was just going to post a defense of another of my orphans,
T-Men, but I might as well put it into a larger context with some notes I've been working on about the relationship of noir and realism.
I have been thinking a lot this year about the relationship between film noir and the idea of “realism” (broadly defined), largely due to an encounter with Foster Hirsch’s great study of noir
The Dark Side of the Screen and my ongoing obsession with the writings and films of Thom Andersen, who half-jokingly coined the term "film gris" to describe some social realist noirs mostly written by blacklisted screenwriters.
While I’m not sure how interesting this will turn out to be, I thought that I would try to develop some of these thoughts here in case anyone finds this to be a productive framework to engage with some of these films.
Newsreel Aesthetics
Hirsch’s most interesting argument in
Dark Side of the Screen is that film noir not only draws on the aesthetics of German expressionism, but also forms of realism (this seems particularly notable given that expressionism is an intensely anti-realist aesthetic, something that goes back to film studies 101 with Kracauer).
He calls this the newsreel-like “documentary flavor” of some noirs, especially those shot on location, including films like
The House on 92nd Street and
Call Northside 777. Not only do these films depart from the aesthetics of expressionism, but this aesthetic shift to realism has narrative consequences: “instead of probing neurotic characters, the realistic policiers emphasized the process of detection” (67). While Hirsch doesn’t develop this argument, there are political consequences as well: instead of highlighting the neuroses of society, they focus on the police who uphold law and order. This makes sense when we consider the political purpose of the newsreel itself.
The most interesting films of this cycle are the ones that combine the expressionist and neorealist forms, like the films of Anthony Mann. These films highlight the tension between Expressionism and the newsreel, using the former to undermine the stability (aesthetic and political) of the latter.
For example,
T-Men:
While essentially a propagandistic celebration of the treasury department’s ingenuity, Mann and cinematographer John Alton shroud the world in an expressionistic darkness that serves to undercut the documentary portion’s appeal to stable government authority. The realist newsreel components—flat stable lighting, an awkward opening speech by a treasury agent reading from prepared marks, and the constant voiceovers assuring the audience that the T-men are always one step ahead of the crooks—suggest stability, authority, and faith in order. But the more properly cinematic segments unveil a shadowy world in which undercover agents are murdered because they happen to run into an acquaintance; a world of brutal murders in steam baths, gangsters stabbed with ice picks, and millionaire criminals roaming free. Like horror films in which normality is restored in the final reel, Mann’s cinema lingers so effectively on disruptions to that normality that its ultimate restoration rings hollow. It is the inky black void at the center of postwar America that we remember, not the assurances of law and order.
Neorealism
My main issue with Hirsch’s argument is that he seems to collapse the newsreel-style aesthetic and neorealism together, whereas I think these need to be treated separately, especially if we are asking the kinds of political questions that most interest me. (It is also worth pointing out, as many critics have, that neorealism is not nearly as “realist”—in terms of documentary style—as it is often considered to be.)
I’d like to develop some of these issues through a reading of Visconti’s
Obsession, in which both noir and neorealism exist in embryonic form. While Hirsch talks about this film in the same section as the newsreel ones, it is different because it has more in common with the psychosexual dynamics that would come to characterize mainline American noir than the newsreel police procedural strain.
It is also decidedly different from both the novel and the later American version of
Postman.
(Some spoilers ahead, although I can’t imagine that anyone who is actually reading this doesn’t know the plot of
Postman.)
By slowing down and focusing on the rhythms of the character’s lives, Visconti de-emphasizes the action of the plot. Even the way the murder occurs makes it seem as though it just “happens” without the direct intervention of the couple. Above all, though, it is the way that fate seems to continually catch up to Gino. He has successfully escaped from Giovanna’s temptation, only to run into her and her husband and get sucked back into the murder plot. Later in the film, when he hides out with the prostitute, it is as though he is just passively waiting for his fate.
The most interesting change that Visconti makes to the novel is the addition of the traveling performer, who represents a genuine alternative to Gino’s fate. He is clearly gay, suggesting that homosexuality is the one way to escape from Giovanna. Since the murder is Oedipal in that Gino kills the father figure in order to take his place, Visconti suggests that homosexuality is outside of the psycho-sexual structure that dooms Gino. Secondly, the traveling performer is outside the rigid class system of the gas station, in which the proletarian Gino must kill the bourgeois owner, only to eventually be killed by the (fascist) class forces aligned against him. So Visconti is distinguishing between two kinds of transgressive sexual desire: those that take place within the existing order (Gino’s murder, which functions both within the dominant psychosexual paradigm as well as the class system), and the action to leave this system, suggesting the potential for a kind of gay communist utopia.
In this sense,
Obsession seems to me a good deal more radical than the later neorealist films like
Bicycle Thieves, which just tend to depict social reality without any sense of how it could be changed. This is perhaps because of its crime narrative content: Thom Andersen argues that noir’s depiction of social content has an advantage over neorealism in that it lacks the latter’s sense of political paralysis. Its characters weren’t just observers; they could be doers as well, even if such doing often led to their demise.
Film Gris
Which leads me to the third conjunction of noir and realism, the cycle that Thom Andersen calls “film gris,” which he develops through an analysis of blacklisted writers and directors in his essays "Red Hollywood," and “The Time of the Toad” and the indispensable film
Red Hollywood.
Here is Andersen on how these films differ from traditional noir:
[T]hese films belong to a tradition of critical social realism, and they replaced the psychological deliriums of film noir with a concrete depiction of material conditions…Like the protagonists of film noir, the anti-heroes of film gris may ask themselves, what have I done? Or, how did I get here? But the answers they might find implicate society at large, not just a single evil woman or a small cast of killers.
Nicholas Ray’s
Knock on Any Door (1949) is the thesis film of the genre: it uses a
Mildred Pierce structure to show the social determinants of a crime.
I want to tackle the two Polonsky/Garfield collaborations from the 40s:
Body and Soul and
Force of Evil. Both films require the same reading strategy: the critique of capitalism is not found in the ostensible lead (Garfield in both), but in a secondary character whose death is through no fault of his own, but rather the material conditions of existence.
(Some spoilers ahead)
Body and Soul
There are at least two stories about capitalism being told here. The most obvious one is the story of the poor but honorable kid who gets corrupted by money and greed, throwing away his family, friends, and true love (Peg) in favor of fancy nightclubs, upscale commodities, and the attentions of Alice, a nightclub singer whose interest in Charley is mostly monetary. This is Hollywood’s standard approach to class issues: let the audience vicariously enjoy the conspicuous consumption and fantasies of wealth for an hour or so, but leave them with the idea that they are really better off being poor and happy than rich and miserable.
Hollywood films get away with this because they are able to end at the moment of victory: Charley does the right thing and walks out of the ring poor and happy. But what happens now?
It is now that we enter the territory of film gris:
If the first story the film is telling about capitalism is the one with the happy ending, the real one is found in the story of Ben. Ben was in the same position as Charley: a champion who became more profitable as a loser than a winner. Ben has nothing, so he is forced to fight one last time despite the fact that there is a good chance he will die because of his cerebral hemorrhage. While he survives the fight, he dies on the eve of Charley’s final bout. The film is about how people become commodities; how the body itself becomes a commodity. When a commodity is used up, it is thrown away. Charley is able to save his soul in the final fight, but there is no telling what will happen to his body. After all, Ben too saved his soul, but it did his body no good.
Force of Evil
In addition to being another masterpiece of the Hollywood left,
Force of Evil is probably the greatest study of alienation in all of 40s cinema.
It not only incorporates the classic noir opposition between German expressionism and the 30s crime novel, but also elements of postwar art cinema (the ending in particular, in which John Garfield becomes a wandering Antonioni-style protagonist), allowing it to approach the concept of alienation from at least three different directions: 1) the psychological alienation of Expressionism; 2) the economic alienation of capitalism; and 3) the urban alienation of postwar art cinema.
From the lens of film gris, the second is the most important. This is a film obsessed with economic processes: the process of the numbers racket, the process of building a monopoly, and the process of orchestrating an economic collapse.
It is steadfast in its refusal to separate capitalism from criminality: when Leo’s wife tries to remind him that he is a businessman, not a crook, Leo replies: “A lot you know. Real estate business... living from mortgage to mortgage... stealing credit like a thief. And the garage - that was a business! Three cents overcharge on every gallon of gas: two cents for the chauffeur and a penny for me. Penny for one thief, two cents for the other. Well, Joe's here now - I won't have to steal pennies anymore. I'll have big crooks to steal dollars for me!”
The plot plays out like a materialist tragedy, with none of the characters able to extricate themselves from their impending doom. The difference between a movie like
Force of Evil and, say,
Detour (another masterpiece of existential despair and absurd fate), is that this doom is explicitly tied to the machine of monopoly capitalism started by the combo.