Original subtitles

Here's what film noir is to me.

It's a righteous, generically American

film movement that went from 1945 to 1958

and exposited one great theme. And that theme is, you're...

You have just met a woman,

you are inches away from the greatest sex of your life,

but within six weeks of meeting the woman,

you will be framed for a crime you did not commit,

and you will end up in the gas chamber.

And as they strap you in and you're about to breathe the cyanide fumes,

you'll be grateful for the few weeks you had with her,

and grateful for your own death.

I didn't know what I was doing.

I didn't know anything except how much I hated.

But I didn't take anything.

I didn't, Jack.

Won't you believe me?

Baby, I don't care.

In noir, people go to jail.

Good men die. Criminals win.

Evil triumphs over good.

You could almost say that film noir is the son of

German expressionism and American tough guy.

It's a pure genre. It was very, very gut-wrenching,

appealing to your own, kind of, doubts and uncertainties. Late-night stuff.

I can't figure it. What do you see in a guy like me?

I see a guy who's swell.

Who's kind and strong. That's what I see.

There's a certain naiveté.

The characters are very clear what they want.

And we always know that most of them will fail.

Oh, it's gonna be all right, Bill. You wait and see.

Julie.

I won tonight.

I won.

Down these mean streets lurks...

And so on. That's noir.

I'm gonna go home and go to bed where I can't get into trouble.

You think not?

I'll see you all of a sudden, Sammy.

People confuse

crime stories and noir.

But the biggest difference I see is crime fiction tends to be realistic.

It tends to be in the here and now,

and it tends to strive to shock you with just how gritty and real it is.

I find crime stories tend to be very literal,

often quite boring, generally rather ugly to look at.

Whereas noir is gorgeous, it's all style,

but it's the emotional realism is what you're after.

It's not that you're divorcing yourself from reality,

it's just you're saying, "'Reality is my clay. "'

Don't come in.

These are crime films.

You know, they fall under the large umbrella of crime films.

But certainly, the type of subject matter that distinguishes film noir

is this idea of total moral ambiguity

that is inaugurated in The Maltese Falcon.

It's this sense that the hero is not necessarily grounded

in any sense of right or wrong.

And a large part of that has to do with the sense that the whole world

is also one of radical instability.

We didn't exactly believe your story, Miss O'Shaughnessy.

We believed your $200.

You mean that...

I mean you paid us more than if you'd been telling us the truth,

and enough more to make it all right.

There is a real political streak in these movies,

because in the 1930s when Warner Brothers

was cranking out gangster pictures,

they were lessons to the public, like, "'Crime does not pay. "'

Then noir came along after the War and complicated things,

because you were asked to empathize and identify with those criminals

in a way that wasn't really allowed in the 1930s.

Because of the situation at the end of World War ll,

the themes of these movies tend to be dark, cynical,

and pessimistic about human nature.

Film noir, unlike other film,

feels no responsibility to reflect some sort of cinematic morality.

Film noir just is. It doesn't talk down to you,

it doesn't condescend to you.

It says to you, "'This is the way the world is,

"'and this is the way the world is going to come out,

"'and we're not going to pretend that cinema has all of the answers. "'

Aren't you in this deep enough?

If you help them, won't it make it worse for you?

That's the way it's got to be.

I can tell you I know it when I see it.

But I don't know how to define it.

Almost every element that you name

as the definition of a noir film would apply to Casablanca,

but you would not call Casablanca a noir film.

Go ahead and shoot, you'll be doing me a favor.

Film noir is a very elusive thing to define.

It's trench coats, it's intrigue, it's cigarettes,

it's the lying between men about a woman,

it's hidden motives,

it's the psychological turning over of characters.

I think it's a very elusive genre.

You take some horrible sort of satisfaction in seeing people torn apart!

They're headed for it, anyway. You're headed for it.

You're hanging onto something that's gonna smack you.

If I fold now, it smacks you later. If I stick, it smacks you sooner.

But cleaner.

Maybe that's why I'm sticking.

Film noir is not a genre, it's a style.

It crosses many genres.

I know there are people that think that you can have a Western that's a noir.

Or a war picture that's a noir.

Generally, I tend to think that it's a crime thriller.

What designates a film as noir

is when the writer and the director tell the story from the criminal's point of view.

The audience is made to identify with the criminals.

The way I figure, my luck's just gotta turn.

One of these days I'll make a real killing, then I'm gonna head for home.

First thing I do when I get there, I take a bath in the creek,

and get the city dirt off me.

That, to me, is a major distinction.

A picture like On Dangerous Ground is a noir,

because Robert Ryan plays this cop who really has a psychotic streak in him,

and it's told through his eyes. And that's a noir.

For me, film noir is

a historical movement in the history of film.

It began in earnest after World War ll,

it started to decline with the advent of television,

and by the end of the '50s it was over.

You're stubborn, but you're not afraid.

You're an ex-con with a new beef around your neck,

and I could hang you with it.

Hang me, then.

One job like that and I'm your pet rat for the rest of my life.

Film noir is not a genre, but it is in fact

a kind of tone poem for film.

The visual tone as well as the psychology of the film.

If you look at a film noir that's more or less typical,

we could even use The Maltese Falcon.

It has a certain world

that has been established and created by the filmmakers,

where the style and the content are very close together.

In a sense, it represents a world of extremes,

of shadows, of extremes in emotion,

working in the, sort of, the seamy underbelly of San Francisco life,

and the world is his world. He inhabits it, we inhabit it,

and everything about it has to do with the tone and the style of the film

being completely meshed into one.

A genre, like a Western, a gangster,

a space exploration kind of sci-fi film, a zombie film...

These genres will exist in perpetuity

and they will always be reformulated.

Now, at one point they were being made in the film noir way.

Film noir is a language, which is deep shadows,

strong angles, behavior over dialogue,

and as a language, that vocabulary can be used in a film

in which its whole world is

made up of those stylistic elements.

But it can also be used as tools to create

film noir of science fiction, like Blade Runner,

which to me is very much a film noir

piece.

Endless debate about the first film noir. What is it?

Fritz Lang's M, made in 1931,

not made in America but made in Germany

gets a lot of votes. I won't argue the point.

But in the United States there are several films.

There's a small film made at RKO in 1940 called The Stranger on the Third Floor

that really has all the hallmarks of noir,

the visual look, the art direction, the cinematography, what the story is about.

It's complete, self-contained noir. There it is.

He said himself he'd kill Nick if he only had a gun.

When you look at the narrative elements that really define the genre,

I think Detour is possibly not the earliest,

but it's the most stripped-down B- movie film noir I'm aware of,

which I think is actually in a lot of ways more interesting

than the big, polished studio version of it that Citizen Kane was,

however, you know, brilliant that was, and it's a great favorite of mine.

There are some films even in the '30s

that people have said are film noir, because they're very dark gangster films.

A lot of people think Double Indemnity is the first film noir,

and many people think that it didn't happen until Murder, My Sweet.

The papers didn't say much except that he wasn't shot.

- How? - With a sap, only good.

If an elephant had stepped on his head, same effect.

For me, it's a style of the '40s,

a most interesting style

because it introduces more complexity, more ambiguity

into American cinema.

It introduces characters who are not all good or bad.

People who use pretty faces like you use yours don't live very long anyway.

How do you think I should use my face?

You're rolling your own dice, kid.

It had a lot to do with things held over from the Depression

because so many of the stories were based on the works of writers

who were writing at the peak of their powers

during the Great Depression.

And that's when you had Hammett and James M. Cain

and W.R. Burnett started writing these crime pictures,

and Raymond Chandler started writing, and Cornell Woolrich.

And there was a huge wave of these movies.

I call it the "black tide"

that washed over Hollywood in the post-World War ll years.

And it was indicative, I think, of America's loss of innocence.

What do you really think of me?

You impress me as a man who needs a new suit of clothes

or a new love affair,

but he doesn't know which.

Screenwriters were determined to paint almost an anti-myth.

If Hollywood in the Depression was selling the idea of

"Don't worry about it," you know, "We'll get out of it,"

and, "We're eternally optimistic,"

now that World War ll had passed,

and we'd all seen just how bad it could really get,

they were saying, "'Hey, you know, it's time to grow up, "'

and, "'That happily-ever-after thing is an abomination, in a way. "'

And so they created what essentially was an anti-myth

in these crime dramas.

You know, that the world is, at heart, a really nasty, dark, ugly place.

And finally, I guess, American audiences were ready to accept that.

Sounds like a soul in hell.

I think World War ll changed how we saw movies in many ways.

Bogart could not have been a hero before World War ll.

The country was really more sophisticated and willing to accept

a different kind of reality than they had before the War.

Everyone grew up in World War ll.

And it was everything from existentialism to film noir that would really say,

"'There is a dark side out there. "'

Now we start looking at each other again.

We don't know what we're supposed to do.

We don't know what's supposed to happen.

We're too used to fighting.

But we just don't know what to fight.

Between the end of World War ll and the atomic age

and the threat of annihilation,

suddenly you're looking at a world that is not comfortable in any way.

You've fought the great battle for democracy and you've won,

and yet death is hanging over you.

Keeley, what's happened? Has everything suddenly gone crazy?

I don't mean just this, I mean everything, or is it just me?

Oh, it's not just you.

The snakes are loose. Anybody can get them.

I get them myself, but they're friends of mine.

We, culturally, pop-culturally, we always look for a metaphor.

The same way that the Soviet threat was turned into aliens and spaceships,

and flying saucers.

The frustration of returning soldiers,

coming back thinking they'd created a utopia

and finding out it was still the same crappy old world,

translated into this entire genre of a chaotic world

that had to be redressed by these lonely men who would sort things out.

With World War ll, the country was very reluctant to get into the war,

as are most of the heroes in film noir.

They know that they're getting involved in something bad,

but they have to do it for whatever reason.

They're compelled into it, and once there, they learn

that no matter how much they thought they had control over the situation,

they don't. And that everything ended badly, even if you won.

He's just a kid.

Yeah, that's what I said once.

Maybe you'll be lucky.

Maybe they won't send him back to prison.

Maybe he'll get himself killed first.

There is a definite ratcheting up of screen violence

in the American cinema of the '40s.

Filmmakers and writers and cameramen

learning how to negotiate the production code.

At this point, it's been refined to a sort of fine art.

So we do have scenes of strange sadism and cruelty

which are really quite extraordinary.

I've never spoken to anybody who was involved

in the production of one of these films

in the original noir era,

who knew that what they were doing was film noir.

They laugh when you tell that to them now.

We didn't know it was film noir.

I was just shooting a picture with a mood that I thought it needed,

and also would give me time to work with the actors

and less time for lighting and more time for working with the people

so that I could get better work out of them.

And it worked beautifully, and thank God it caught on.

- Sorry, I've already got a fare. - You sure have, two of them.

Yes, sir.

During World War ll, all of the Hollywood studio films

that sort of defined this new style of filmmaking were embargoed

and they didn't see them in France.

So there was a big retrospective of American movies in Paris in 1946.

And they sort of noticed a shift,

a sort of seismic shift in American movies

where they suddenly became much darker.

Where the themes were darker, where the look of the film was darker.

There was shadowy lighting, chiaroscuro lighting.

There was violence. Much more violence than there had ever been.

Psychology, Freudianism, existentialism, all these things

were in these movies and they were shocked to see all this,

and so they began to write about it.

And they described it as film noir, literally "'black film. "'

But the French were actually very amenable to this stuff before then

because they were doing it themselves.

French poetic realism, the films that Jean Gabin made

and Marcel Carné

were all very much leading up to this

and there was a whole series of novels released in France

from the late 1930s, the Serie Noir

which speaks to that idea that there is a noir content,

the type of story you're telling,

and a noir style, the way you're telling the story.

I'll take those for you.

Great themes of film noir.

Institutional corruption, sexual obsession, and lives in great psychological duress.

You take those three elements, man, you can turn out a good crime story.

Lieutenant! Lieutenant!

That guy you saw in my office, he's just passing through.

Shut up. I didn't see anybody. How could I? I wasn't here.

What often drives a film noir is a crime.

And I think, more importantly,

a lot of times it's the aftermath of the crime.

It's the perfect heist that goes wrong.

A gun fires of its own accord and a man is shot

and broken-down old harlots who are no good for anything but chasing kids

has to trip over us.

Blind accident. What can you do against blind accidents?

It's seeing how people unravel under pressure.

And a lot of what film noir is arises out of the aftermath of that crime.

Hey, Dix. Dix. Isn't he the one with the reward on him?

Mind your own business.

It's usually involved with some kind of crime,

or some kind of disorder.

And usually film noir doesn't say there's any solution to these problems

and treats these forms of corruption as traps

that the heroes or the protagonists get caught up in.

You know, paraphrasing Alfred Hitchcock,

when he was talking about melodrama,

he said that it was reality with all the boring parts taken out.

Film noir is us, our basic, sexual, greedy,

honorable, and evil natures.

All right, Lacey. Get up.

You slob, you.

I think, for me, film noir is best defined, really,

by the idea of character being defined through action.

You have a set of characters engaged in a complex story

and you are not able to judge these characters until the end.

And then you have to assess them through their actions,

through the "who did what to whom. "

'Cause that's the tension in noir.

We're not always sure who is the bad guy or the bad lady.

- No, I'm going to pick up a cab. - Swell, we'll share one.

I'm afraid not. We go in different directions.

That's where you're wrong.

We're going in the same direction, you and I.

What could be more noir than the anticipation

of the ultimate denouement, which is death?

The traditional noir ending is often grim, isn't it?

It's the bleeding to death in the gutter which is inherited from the gangster film.

Fred MacMurray dropping dead in the office at the end of Double Indemnity.

That's how a proper noir ending is.

Or even just the trap closing in, the police arriving

and taking away the regular guy who's been tempted into crime.

You take him in. I'll book this guy myself.

One of the rules of film noir, one of the unspoken rules,

is the last line of the film.

That the film really is playing until its very last line.

The Killing defines film noir in its last two lines.

The woman turns to Sterling Hayden, the police are coming, he knows he's screwed,

and she says, "Johnny, you've got to run. "

And he just says,

"What's the difference?"

And his delivery, the way in which he delivers it,

and then walks into the arms of the policemen is so fantastic.

It's probably the most brutal vision of noir.

It's the idea of, "Yeah, life is nasty, brutish and short,

"'but also cheap. "'

The biggest challenge facing the writers of these scripts

was that they had to work within the limits of the production code.

So they had to figure out very subtle ways

of conveying all this sexuality and greed

and lust and all this illicit stuff.

We ought to get along fine, I'm a gambler myself.

How high do you like to play?

If I told you, you wouldn't believe me.

You will find in these films, tremendous sexual symbolism.

Cigarettes are used in

many ways that you didn't really understand.

"'Oh, yeah. That's what the cigarette actually represents. "'

You know, trains into tunnels and all those kind of things.

Sexuality in film noir,

it permeates the whole movie from start to finish.

Either through the music,

but certainly through the innuendo and the dialogue.

I need a drink. What do you need, Miss Doyle?

Well, let's say a drink.

Film noir movies are often very sexual.

But they're sexual in a much more dark,

violent, animalistic way

rather than anything that might be called love.

He's kind of exciting and attractive.

- Who's attractive? Who's exciting? - Earl!

The thing that's great about noir is

that this collaboration between the writers

and the directors and the actors

really created a tone for these pictures

and there was no way the production code could fight that.

There's those ways of creating a sexual tension

that has actually nothing to do with a kiss, a hug, an embrace,

but more between what could be and is not quite going to happen.

For another nickel we can have a rumba.

No thanks. Save your money. Hard times are coming.

It's 1945 to 1958.

Sexuality has not been bandied about, dissected, discarded,

re-invented, de-mythologized,

re-re-mythologized and deconstructed

the way it has 50 and 60 years later.

It still had some panache.

It was something that people didn't talk about openly

but did fervently behind closed doors.

But in somewhat less volume than today.

So, it had the odd power of the illicit.

And I will only close with this about sex, the great joke of the 1950s,

"I want to find the guy who invented sex and ask him what he's working on now. "

I think the film noir filmmakers

were really filmmakers for B-films.

And if you look back at the history of Hollywood

in the '40s and '50s, huge numbers of films were being made.

And they were made either with large budgets, A-category films,

or small budgets, and those were the B-films.

I think young filmmakers then, that's how they learned to make movies.

They were shuttled into the low-budget films

and they were given pretty much free reign

because they were made under the radar completely.

But these films were largely made to fill the lower part of a double bill

in order to have a long evening's entertainment at the theater.

So they were, in a strange way, a creation of the distribution system in America.

A lot of these films were made by émigrés who came from Europe.

And I'm thinking of people like Fritz Lang

who, at the height of Ufa, in Germany,

pioneered a lot of the techniques of film noir.

Also, Billy Wilder came from this same, sort of, cooking school of Ufa, so to speak,

and brought all the ingredients to America and used them freely.

Things like the American horror film...

I think, was a big influence on film noir.

I think, for instance, it's a shame

that Val Lewton's movies are never considered as noir,

because basically they get very early in the cycle and do things...

I mean, something like The Seventh Victim, even Cat People

is a very film noir look movie.

And, you know, Jacques Tourneur goes from the Lewton films

to making Out of the Past,

which, if you have to pick one film noir, that's it.

That's got... Every possible aspect of noir is in that picture.

It was a very complex phenomenon, noir, the style.

It had antecedents in German expressionistic film

between 1919 and 1938.

That laid out the formal systems for film noir.

Lighting schemes, staging, as well as subject matter

because German expressionistic film was dealing with

men who were coming apart.

Human beings who were coming apart.

A lot of the people who were the technicians of film noir,

directors, cinematographers, were out of Germany.

And so, they were very influenced by that movement in the 1920s.

The house style that was devised at Warner Brothers,

from the entrance of Michael Curtiz in the late '20s,

a Hungarian Jew

who was trained in the Norway film industry,

and Norway film industry really was the forerunner of German expressionism,

so he knew German expressionism through and through.

He brought this style to Warner Brothers

and it was complemented by the visual designer there, Anton Grot,

again, an Eastern European

who knew German expressionism through and through.

And so you take a look at these classic gangster films

and classic G-men films at Warner Brothers.

It's a dry run for noir.

No, no, it's all right.

What's the difference? I've seen everything.

Film noir is a wonderful genre for cinematographers,

simply because we can create a light that behaves like its own character.

When I think of noir,

I always think of diagonals,

things not being level, not being straight,

because nothing is quite on the level.

Nothing is what it seems.

There's just a very menacing mood. The camera angles are askew.

You're never quite sure of where you're at in this world.

Shoot up, shoot down.

It's a way of attacking space, because harmonic space is your enemy,

because harmonic space represents a secure world

and you are in an insecure world.

In your classic noir movie, the camera's used in two different ways.

It has to express not just what's happening in the scene,

but it has to express the psychological depth

or problems of the characters in the scene itself.

It's telling the story, but it's also presenting a stylized viewpoint

of abstract concepts.

So a lot of the great moments in film noir,

are not looking straight at somebody but from a weird position

that, as an audience, makes you feel a little uncomfortable, a little nervous

a little tension.

Is that the patrol?

It's the wind in the telephone wires over on the highway.

Relativity is important to me. Going from light to dark, dark to light.

And film noir is... I find it fascinating when I watch it.

I've always considered it this kind of stark, graphic lighting.

There are a lot of graphics in the lighting.

I've always felt it's what you don't see

that's kind of disturbing.

So you don't quite know what's going on.

Not seeing the face is fascinating, too.

Seeing that little bit of shimmer on skin or the way the hat is against the blinds.

You know? It's a more mythic way

of dealing with light and dark, good and evil.

You have to have rain. You have to have smoke.

You have to have dark shadows.

You have to have, maybe, moving light.

You have to have some kind of a light pattern that the characters walk through.

So, maybe it's a fence, maybe it's a window pattern,

maybe it's a shadow of a tree, maybe it's tree branches.

So that's the visual language that we work with when we do film noir.

And I still feel that the black and white noirs are the best.

In color film,

the lighting has never been able to achieve the degree of precision

that you see even in Hollywood B-movies.

- One more job? - No.

- One more job? A big one. - No, I'm afraid.

The originality of film noir is you had these technicians from Germany

who loved to split everything into shadows and fractured light.

The Letter with Bette Davis,

is a beautiful example of a film with the German kind of lighting in it.

Then you had the post-war movement

of getting out of the studio and shooting in the streets.

A lot of the technology which freed the film noir

was actually pioneered during the war.

High speed lenses, fast film,

the mag stock for sound

which liberated the cameras so that you could actually take it on the street.

Lightweight cameras came into existence, hence the hand-held camera.

And so, they were out in the streets

shooting films that were being shot in 10 days,

and still trying to use that kind of lighting.

And it made for a very original and fresh world.

In Nicholas Ray's They Live by Night

it's famous because it was actually the first film

to actually use a helicopter shot to open the picture.

And that sort of innovative camera technique

Nicholas Ray continued to use throughout the film.

Very daring stuff, putting the camera in the back of the car,

things from Farley Granger's perspective.

It's brilliant.

I mean, Nicholas Ray directed that picture like it was

not only the first movie he was going to direct,

but the last movie he was going to direct.

We move fast.

- Can you take it? - Me?

- You. - Sure. I can rip myself up to anything.

You see it in a lot of noir films

where all of a sudden the camera assumes the perspective

of the protagonist and it's a wonderful little gimmick

for making the audience empathize.

The most extreme example being Robert Montgomery's decision

to shoot all of the Lady in the Lake from Philip Marlowe's perspective.

Not that Marlowe is a heavy in that film or a true noir protagonist,

but, I mean, that is a pretty daring thing to do.

Please don't be so difficult to get along with.

- I need help. - Like I need four thumbs.

You never saw the actor who played the lead,

except in the mirror. You only saw what he saw.

Which was me. That was what was so unusual about it.

The setting of where they happen is very important.

Usually urban settings.

That world has to become part of the film noir world.

The tenderloin district or the police precinct district

or the seedy, strange places that you go to, to investigate a crime.

It becomes this very precise and contained film noir world.

You know, you don't see kids in film noir movies,

you don't see a lot of normal things.

There is that whole sense of the whirlpool.

A kind of a Freudian sense of being sucked down

and being lost in the primal mystery.

What's the big idea?

Being trapped is essential

to the whole noir ethos.

You've done something and now you can't get out of it.

Even if it's something that takes place in the great outdoors,

invariably the film will be photographed and edited in such a way

that the protagonist feels completely trapped.

I wanted her to smile, but she wouldn't.

I tried to make her smile.

A lot of the locations and the types of environments

that you're shooting film noirs in

tend to be those which are closing in on the character

as opposed to opening up.

You don't find a lot of film noirs in the desert.

These films didn't cost a great deal of money,

there wasn't a great deal of time to shoot them,

and as a result you tended to minimize set-ups,

and that's why you have a character in the extreme foreground

and a character in the extreme background both facing the camera.

That way you could fit them both in the frame in a stylized and interesting manner

and shoot the entire scene in one set-up.

I think it might come as a surprise to a lot of people to realize

that the producers and directors of these films

were being so creative, visually,

to hide the fact that they had no budgets at all

and the production values were terrible.

So, it's like, "'Yeah. Let's cast a shadow over there

"'because otherwise there's just an empty hole, there's nothing to look at. "'

What could we do to get the attention of the executives,

to show them that we had the talent?

The only thing we could do was work in set-ups

and in camera techniques and camera lighting, 'cause that didn't take any time.

Actually, the lighting we developed, which became later known as film noir lighting

took far less time than classical lighting.

So, you know, you work fast like that you kind of make things up,

and you use techniques like the things that were created

by a cameraman like John Alton were done through necessity.

I think sometimes darkness

is more beautiful than light.

I think everybody has a certain sense, although they're not conscious of it,

of how things change in the dark

and the greatest things in the world happened at night.

The good and the bad happens at night.

The murders and the marriages

and the love scenes, all at night.

I don't know where the influence came from.

I sometimes think it came from the street photographers

that were starting to capture, sort of, life on the streets in the big cities,

and that the filmmakers then sort of used.

They were influenced by that to go out and film on location

and film at night on streets, in rain, and in cars.

All those elements make the viewers

respond to the story on an instinctual level rather than intellectual level.

The visual style is a little bit more instinctual.

Well, the environment of film noir is the urban world

in mid-20th century America.

It is the depiction of this dark,

seductive fantasy world

that draws people to these movies above and beyond everything else.

It's almost like a fevered dream of that world.

The editing in a film noir,

doesn't have to edit as fast as a lot of other genres.

And that's good, because it gives you time

to sit in this mood and to be a little unsettled

by all the elements, editing being a big one of them.

Editing in noir is amazing

because the stories are so complex sometimes,

that just keeping track of things can be a challenge.

So, in addition to the standard editing devices,

you know, you'll see in noir

a kind of jumpy editing,

sometimes used as a substitute for violence.

Because there really isn't a lot of violence shown in these movies.

People get the mistaken impression that somehow

these are films with a lot of action and a lot of gunplay,

and they really aren't. They're psychological dramas.

And the editing sometimes plays a large part in that,

establishing a violence that they couldn't actually show on the screen at this time.

I think the non-linear aspect

of story-telling in film noir is one of the reasons that I love the genre.

Greater narrative freedoms were allowed the filmmakers.

There was an expectation of peculiar points of view.

Whether it's a dead man narrating the film as in Sunset Blvd.

Or even if you look at some of the Val Lewton films.

These films have always been free to adopt

very peculiar narrative devices in order to play with audience expectation.

Frankie was kidding himself.

He was through.

And when he went, the money would go with him.

Voice-over is an editorial tool that comes from writing, essentially,

where the first person starts to tell his story,

telling you what fate has brought him.

You've got to watch them. You've got to watch them all the time.

Because things happen when you least expect them.

The characters are so hard-bitten.

So, I think sometimes filmmakers add a voice-over

to try to give the audience an in into the character

and the voice-over is always the character in the movie

speaking directly to the audience.

My feet hurt and my mind felt like a plumber's handkerchief.

The office bottle hadn't sparked me up so I'd taken out my little black book

and decided to go grouse-hunting.

The style of that voice-over, I think,

is one of the things that's really characterized the attitude of the films.

The way in which the voice-over is delivered,

the sort of laconic quality to it.

The sort of Raymond Chandler feel of things, I think,

is one of the key defining elements of the genre.

That old black pit opened up again.

Right on schedule.

I didn't expect to hit bottom.

That's all I know.

On account I don't see so well with my eyeballs scorched.

Then there's another more subtle thing about the editing in these films

that I don't think gets discussed enough.

Which is that the films are really very seductive as well,

and they kind of draw you in through this flashback structure, very often,

where it's a more spellbinding way

of cutting a film and it almost gets dreamy.

...but I remember looking up and seeing this girl, Jenny.

Noir didn't invent flashbacks, but noir perfected flashbacks,

as complex and intricate as they could possibly be.

In Out of the Past it's used when

Robert Mitchum is trying to explain his past life to his girlfriend.

It was the bottom of the barrel and I scraped it, but I didn't care.

I had her.

You'll actually see the character speaking. His voice continues

and we go back in time and essentially illustrate what he's saying.

That technique is used a lot.

$400,000.

Only

before he could take it

he had to kill the driver.

Frankie was in jail now.

I think that music in noir plays a much more important role

than in other genres.

In noir, the music has to be another character.

It's sort of this unseen presence that, I think,

can create a mood or remind the audience

that we may be seeing something onscreen,

but there's something else going on.

Film noir has a very special relationship with music.

There are as many different ways of scoring a film noir

almost as there are film noir movies.

There's a lot of interesting layers in film noir scoring,

which is the rain, the darkness, the loneliness,

the fear of something unspecified.

There's always a ticking clock aspect to these films.

And there's sort of a 24-hour period or a week at the most, probably,

and then, you know, these events have to happen.

So the music has to highlight the ticking clock aspect of it.

That's what's interesting, is that you're always trying to throw

an audience's expectations in different directions,

to play those ambiguities. You're never quite sure what anybody's motivation is.

You're never quite sure where the evidence is leading.

I want to go back to Mexico.

I want to walk out of the sun again and find you waiting.

I want to sit in the same moonlight and tell you all the things I never told you

until you don't hate me.

If it's a love story, the love theme also has to have

a sadness and an unresolved quality to it.

The heroine or the hero might die.

So we're never quite sure, you know, what is going to be the end result.

We have to be very careful that

you know, there's nothing sentimental about a film noir score.

I think film noir, in the way it was stylized,

only could help accentuate the sexuality in film.

The music could be very seductive,

and seductive, at this time, in more of a manipulative way

as opposed to just pretty woman walking through the scene.

There's something dark going on, but seductive.

And I think that's the delicious part of film noir

is that they could go a little further with something like music.

There are some fabulous composers.

But as much as noir endeavored to create

this whole new style of storytelling and this new look,

a lot of times, the scores were kind of stuck

in a very traditional, string-heavy arrangement.

Which is really bizarre, because most people, when they think of film noir,

they will say, "Oh, yeah, all those jazz soundtracks

"and the saxophone and all that. " But it's really not there.

I mean, it's really strings.

But it's really fascinating in the public consciousness

that they imagine that they hear brass.

They hear trumpets and saxophones

when it's a very, very rare film that actually has them.

Like, On Dangerous Ground, Bernard Herrmann

did a whole percussive score for that, that's all brass.

And it's fantastic. It's one of the best scores ever for a noir film.

If you just listen to a Miklós Rózsa score

you have an immediate sense

of the sexuality, the sensuality of the film noir

translated into music. It's very, very exciting.

In Decoy, made in 1946,

the music is a very attractive element.

In fact, it is to me one of the key elements in the film.

It immediately tells the audience what's going on.

Very clever.

I'm alive.

Border Incident was, I think, the third movie I ever did.

It was a nice, tough film that Anthony Mann directed

and John Alton photographed and it was...

It really was a pretty relentless film.

And so I was allowed to write a,

by the standards of those years, a fairly modern-sounding score,

which I liked doing,

and it was the first time that I had written anything

that I could more or less approve of when I heard it.

One of the things I really like about film noir scoring

is the amount of silence that one is allowed to leave in the score.

I personally think there's way too much music in modern film.

We try very much with our craft

to make those what we call "'negative space moments "'

where suddenly everything drops out and there's a big question asked.

Why? Why is it silent?

I think it can make it even more powerful

and more scary and much more suspenseful.

I think from my own experience, having edited a film like Body Heat,

I was an admirer of film noir, but really didn't understand

how to use the language until I started working in it.

And I think one of the things that we can exploit tremendously

in modern-day film, is the range of sound that we have

to create a third dimension on the film.

They were used very sparingly in film noir,

and primarily because they didn't have budgets for sound.

So the placement of sound within the dialogue

became a way of evoking the solitude of a character,

or his physical state of mind.

For instance, in Out of the Past,

in the first scenes of this little town,

you have a lot of sounds, the distant rails...

Once in a while, a siren going by of a police car.

A lot of indicators of the life that he left behind in the city.

The idea of the urban environment being somewhat evil

and the salutary effects of the rural quiet life.

And a lot of these meshings of ideas

were actually done in shorthand by use of sound.

And you'll see this in film noir all the time.

The sound effects, that filigree of soundtrack in noir,

the brakes of cars, phones going.

It was a revolution in American filmmaking, this style.

Both in what it said and how it said it.

This is noir.

Men acting bad, women acting bad,

people breaking out of the Hollywood stereotype

and I do think the fun of noir is

the bad guy you root for.

Chiquita?

- What are you doing here? - Get out.

You army men might be accustomed to group showers.

I like mine alone.

What you really need to make something film noir

is the character in the first place,

and the film noir character is a gray character.

That's what's so much fun about film noir,

is that you have flawed characters and sometimes deeply flawed characters,

but as long as they have a code and as long as they're true to themselves,

they can really get away with a lot of behavior

that in a normal film would immediately peg them as a villain.

You make me do it.

Why do you make me do it?

You know you're gonna talk.

I'm gonna make you talk.

Chandler defined it best.

He described the film noir hero as "'a knight in dirty armor. "'

In my own career I've tried to redefine him

as a knight in blood-caked armor.

But he is still a knight,

he just doesn't look like one and he's never rewarded for what he does.

He's this lonely character who's out there and he's just bugged by stuff.

Most Raymond Chandler-derived stories aren't film noir

because Philip Marlowe is untouched by the mystery.

You will help me, won't you?

Is this for love, or are you paying me something in money?

When the femme fatale, the slut, moves in on him,

he turns her down.

Yeah, he won't be a part of the emotional tangle.

It's almost like his case is a film noir, but he isn't.

I don't think you even know which side you're on.

I don't know which side anybody's on. I don't even know who's playing today.

Whereas a true film noir protagonist is drawn into all that.

Look at Out of the Past, which is also a private eye story,

but Robert Mitchum's character in that isn't Philip Marlowe.

He doesn't stay out. Yeah, he succumbs to the temptation

and gets involved with Jane Greer...

- Did you miss me? - No more than I would my eyes.

Where shall we go tonight?

Let's go to my place.

...and therefore is dragged into committing morally appalling acts.

Philip Marlowe doesn't, he's always irreproachable.

The detective figure. The Hercule Poirot, Sherlock Holmes, or whatever.

They come into a situation, see what's wrong,

expose the villain, and sort it out and leave.

The film noir protagonist sort of never really understands.

Yeah, there's a mystery taking place around them,

but they are the victim of it, the subject of it.

They don't usually solve it.

Buddy, you look like you're in trouble.

- Why? - Because you don't act like it.

I think I'm in a frame.

Don't sound like you.

I don't know, all I can see is the frame.

If you've seen enough noir, you start to identify

all the traditional characters that are represented.

There's always the hard-luck loser, there's the schemer,

there is the femme fatale, there is the upstanding good girl.

There is the sleazy nightclub owner

who's always the slickest guy in the story,

and may or may not be shady, you're not always sure.

There's the big capitalist banker, businessman type.

I call them the "'noir apostles. "'

Just politics, baby. Good old dirty politics.

The kind of dialogue that popped through film noir,

it had nuance and it had cleverness and a lot of humor.

If you look at how Chandler was adapted.

The joint looked like trouble, but that didn't bother me.

Nothing bothered me.

The two.20s fell nice and snug against my appendix.

Dick Powell, for instance, in Murder, My Sweet,

was a very nuanced, hilarious fellow, like, you know,

"Come on, you're a big, tough guy. Do something amazing.

"Pull on your pants. "

"Okay, Marlowe," I said to myself, "You're a tough guy.

"You've been sapped twice, choked, beaten silly with a gun,

"shot in the arm until you were as crazy as a couple of waltzing mice.

"Now let's see you do something really tough,

"like putting your pants on. "

It was released as Farewell, My Lovely

in one theater, I think, in Boston. I'm not sure.

And because it had Dick Powell in it, who was known as a singing star

and they thought Farewell, My Lovely with Dick Powell was a musical.

Musicals were out at that time. Nobody wanted to see it.

So we changed the title to Murder, My Sweet

and they knew that that couldn't be a musical.

- You still think Amthor killed him, then? - Who else?

You.

And I tend to think that the acting is a perfect corollary

for the writing style.

I mean, the writers weren't really writing very realistic dialogue.

It's not stuff that you're gonna hear people utter on the street.

You should've told me, Wood. Maybe I would've played it differently.

Maybe she wouldn't have heard my shoes squeaking.

Always a hop, skip and a jump ahead of me.

And the way the dialogue is delivered is perfectly appropriate to that.

You know, like Robert Mitchum is just like...

He's such a natural.

And he can take the most flamboyant line of dialogue

and just toss it off like nobody's business.

I'll give you a ring in about an hour.

That'll give you time to find her and get there.

Give you a little extra time to figure out how you're gonna cross me,

but you won't.

My very first film was called The Last Tycoon.

I got to play Robert Mitchum's daughter.

And I was in the film with Robert De Niro and Jack Nicholson

and there was all these wonderful, famous people in it.

But who was I wanting to be?

I said, "Dang, I wish I was older. "

I wanted to be a notch on Robert Mitchum's belt, you know, so...

I mean, that guy was cool.

He was just one of the coolest actors I'd ever seen.

I absolutely love the acting in these films

because many times there's not a lot of dialogue in these films.

There are more sort of brooding characters

that are very angst-ridden.

More is said by an actor glancing

or lighting a cigarette or walking down a street

and contemplating the predicament they're in.

You just sit and stay inside yourself.

You wait for me to talk.

I like that.

I never found out much listening to myself.

Acting in a film noir, something that I notice, perhaps,

is that it's slightly over the top in modern standards,

but is perfectly suitable for that particular style.

You actually need it to be over the top. It's a little pushed at you.

You're not talking about a sack of gum drops that's gonna be smashed.

You're talking about a dame's life.

Well, I think, first of all, I think it was invented

by people like Robert Mitchum and Kirk Douglas.

I don't think there was such a thing as film noir

until those guys actually showed up onscreen

and had the personas that they had and the movies that they made.

- Well, the last guy in the world. - I hate surprises, myself.

You want to just shut the door and forget it?

No, no. Come on in.

When I'd see him onscreen

I kind of could see that they weren't acting so much

as they were being themselves,

they were presenting the character through their own personality.

They were them in the situation.

And that's what clicked in my head,

and I realized how simple it really was

and so I tried to approach it from that way.

I was just getting ready to take my tie off,

wondering whether I should hang myself with it.

We'd not only be rolling in dough

but marrying into this crowd will fix it so as I can...

So as I can spit in anybody's eye.

In Born to Kill, Lawrence Tierney had a look about him that was really tough

and there was some kind of power that he exuded.

It was clearly a negative power,

but there was something that came across on the screen

that clearly was seductive to women.

And in the way that it was written, you could understand

that someone would fall for this bad guy, for this outlaw,

for this somebody who kind of knows what he wants

and will do anything to get it.

You're strength, excitement

and depravity.

There's a kind of corruptness inside of you, Sam.

That'd drive most women off if they understood like you do.

- Yes. - But not you. You have guts.

Elisha Cook Jr.

He was a very good...

You know, he was a terrific film noir actor.

Honest, Sam.

You go nuts about nothing. Nothing at all. You gotta watch that.

You can't just go around killing people whenever the notion strikes you.

- It's not feasible. - Why isn't it?

All right, Sam. All right, it is.

- He was cutting in on me. - With her?

That was a big worry, I'll bet.

He was like the kind of guy people would pick on.

Come on, this will put you in solid with your boss.

How's about one for me?

There's a very imaginative and clever use of sexuality in the films.

Nothing ever gets too explicit or too outrageous,

but the morality of the films is extraordinarily questionable

and daring.

I won't let Bernie break your neck.

And if I don't?

You'll make me talk.

You'll squeeze it out of me with those big strong arms.

Won't you?

That's right, sister.

A lot of times, there were downtrodden detectives

trying to make good on the trail of some poor guy

who got sucked in to the femme fatale's web.

The web of this gorgeous woman who is, in fact, a criminal.

Seems to me that since I've known you, you've become lovelier.

More mentally assured.

But it also seems to me that when I first knew you

you had a heart.

The femme fatale was really born as a result of women

taking over so many of the roles of men during World War ll.

And when the men came back,

among all the other dislocations that they experienced,

one was, all of a sudden women with this whole new role.

Women working, women being outside the house.

In a lot of ways, film noir was sort of male filmmakers'revenge

on women for having done that.

At the same time, it really represents a lot of

mankind's conflicted role with womankind

which is why the femme fatale

has her web on the one hand, but is always sort of beautiful

and mysterious and sexy and attractive, on the other hand.

"If I should die before I live. "

That's a nice title.

"By Philip Marlowe. "

As a result of the war, women were given, I think, some broader characters to play.

They didn't have to be quite as cardboard.

And the opportunities for women have improved for the characters,

that you can have women who are as tough and as difficult

and as ruinous as some men have been portrayed.

And you're not through. You're in the middle.

Deep. Over your head.

No matter what you do now, you're still part of everything that's happened.

But it's misleading to think that noir

has this misogynistic view of women.

If you look very closely at these films

they're just chock full of upstanding, forthright women

who are gonna rescue the poor chump

who doesn't know, you know, the hell he's getting into.

And I just think that that's as revolutionary a thing for these films

as their depiction of the evil woman.

But maybe it'll teach you not to overplay a good hand.

Now, she doesn't like you. She hates men.

I hate their women, too. Especially the big-league blondes.

Beautiful expensive babes who know what they've got.

And inside, blue steel. Cold!

Cold like that, only not that clingy.

But a femme fatale is somebody who comes into the office one day

with a problem

that must somehow be solved by the hero,

even though he's not dead sure what that problem is

and he's pretty sure he's being lied to.

But it's fun finding out what the problem is.

- What about this dame, Mr. Crystal Ball? - A dish.

What kind of a dish?

Sixty-cent special. Cheap, flashy, strictly poison under the gravy.

Amazing, and how do you know all this?

Well, she was married to a hoodlum, wasn't she?

What kind of a dame would marry a hood?

All kinds.

Marie Windsor, she was a perfect...

She was the heroine,

the villainess, or whatever it was, of a couple of them,

because there was a thing about her. It was a thing about some of those actors.

They were wonderful.

My taste doesn't usually run to cops,

but you might not be such dull company at that.

The femme fatale

is the one-in-a-million kind of woman

who has a magical power over men

and is utterly and completely evil.

- You didn't have to kill him. - Yes, I did.

You wouldn't have killed him.

He'd have been against us. Gone to Whit.

The part was beautifully written. It's this terrific role.

Jacques Tourneur, the director,

said to me when I first met him,

"'Do you know the word impassive?" Impassive.

That's what I want. Impassive.

No big eyes.

"Well, it's gonna be hard. But, okay, I'll try. "

He said, "'First half, good girl. Last half, bad girl. "'

Simple. That's what he wanted. That's what I gave him.

And it was so easy.

You know, you're a curious man.

You're gonna make every guy you meet a little bit curious.

The femme fatale is where women get to be completely the equal of men.

They are equally tempted, equally compromised, and equally guilty.

And that's kind of a new thing for Hollywood at this point.

I mean, they were very independent women.

They knew what they wanted and they knew how to get it.

You know, the guy has to pick up a gun, but the woman doesn't need a gun.

She knows exactly what weapons she has to wield.

You ought to have killed me for what I did a moment ago.

- There's time. - No. You won't.

So, all these actresses were, of course, dying to play the femme fatale

in these movies because they were the most memorable characters.

Many of the leading actresses of the era

in terms of popularity and compensation

were not the ones you would associate with beauty contests.

They were paid to portray a certain type of woman.

They were paid to look good, but also I think

they had to perform in a way

that both male and female moviegoers could relate to.

It goes from

actresses as well-known as Ava Gardner

and Rita Hayworth to

obscure, wonderful performances like Jean Gillie

in a B-film called Decoy, which is so over the top.

I mean, it's just astounding.

I'm really happy to see that film kind of being resurrected

'cause it's a jaw-dropper.

I don't think we have femme fatales in movies today.

I think it's one of the things that I think is a big loss.

Because a femme fatale is a woman who makes men go bad.

And that is very interesting.

It always fascinates an audience.

It's a unique kind of woman.

Shoot, do you hear me?

All right.

Claire Trevor is one of my favorite actresses in film noir.

She's in two of my favorite films.

She's in Key Largo and she's in Born to Kill.

I think you've got a secret of some kind, haven't you?

One of the films that people don't think about very often, that's really underrated

is Born to Kill, directed by Robert Wise.

And Claire Trevor is a terrific actress and she was terrific in this kind of film.

She really gives a very believable performance

of someone who stands and says,

"'I can have everything that's easy. I can have everything that's comfortable.

"'And why is it there's something about this darkness, about this unknown

"'that's magnetic, that's pulling me back?"'

And in the end, believing that she could toy with this and land on her feet.

Says as her last words,

"'You know, this time, I'm not gonna land on my feet. "'

And all these lives are destroyed.

Come on out of there!

It's me, Sam, remember? Tonight's our night.

We still have time for a few kisses before the police get me.

The ultimate triumph of the hero against the femme fatale

is when she loses her control, when her lies no longer work.

Stop, you're killing him!

Jerry, stop it!

Barbara Stanwyck, because she was sort of slightly tomboyish

and not extremely beautiful. I mean, I wanted to be like Gilda

and Rita Hayworth, you know, but I...

That just seemed so unattainable,

but Barbara Stanwyck, she just was

just a tough cookie and I just always responded to her.

Confidence. I want a man to give me confidence.

Somebody to fight off the blizzards and the floods,

somebody to beat off the world when it tries to swallow you up.

Me and my ideas.

Are you?

- Am I what? - Glad you're home.

Home is where you come when you run out of places.

The star of film noir is fate.

Just doesn't get a screen credit.

Fate isn't just a character in noir.

It's the way the plot works.

There's always this idea that in a sense

the audience is somewhat aware of where things are heading

the way the characters aren't necessarily.

But there's always a feeling, I think, with the best film noir

that things are going to end badly,

and I think that fate does hang heavy over the characters.

Psychological frailty is fate,

and film noir is nothing but psychological frailty.

The difference between the '30s, early '40s gangster movie,

the Jimmy Cagney classic and the film noir,

is really generational.

If you think about the '30s movies of Edward G. Robinson

in Little Caesar, he had no decision,

it was not some great moral question that came to mind.

He was either gonna kill that guy and take over the racket, or get killed.

Film noir, I know people might not think this, but they're much subtler.

There are choices to make.

And the key is the choice you make takes you down that road.

But it was your decision to get in the car.

It's your decision whether or not to go with Barbara Stanwyck

and get involved with killing her husband.

Your fate is not dictated to you as it is in the '30s

and early '40s gangster movie.

Your fate is in your hands by your decision,

and that's what makes it noir.

All these elements come together to create this vortex of doom

that we're drawn into.

Oh, Dr. Craig, you've come to see Miss Shelby off.

No.

I've come to take her with me.

The tombstone of film noir was

and intentionally so, was Touch Of Evil.

It was like the official end

where it'd taken all these film noir devices right to their extreme.

But the real end of it came with television

and the '50s family that television came to glorify.

And then at the end of the classic noir era,

law and order came back in in a very heavy-handed way,

not coincidently coincides with the witch-hunt.

The Communist witch-hunt in Hollywood.

And they said, "'Look, you can't depict these characters

"'having valid sociological reasons for what they do.

"They're just crazy. "

Then Warner Brothers put out White Heat with Jimmy Cagney

and it's just, the guy is a psycho.

- How you doing, partner? - It's stuffy in here. I need some air.

Oh, stuffy, huh? I'll give it a little air.

Any movement in art comes out of the times in which it's made.

So it's interesting, I think, that as it faded off,

it was in the '70s that it came back.

Late '60s and '70s, which I think is sort of because of Vietnam,

has got the audience in a mindset where they were into the film noir again.

What's the matter, Corporal?

I'm all right.

Chinatown paid off the promise of all those detective novels,

all the detective movies based on those novels.

Film noir is still hard to do and it's particularly hard to do in color.

A great example of it is Memento,

which is Chris Nolan's film that plays backward.

All the films I've made have been strongly influenced by

watching these films and other thrillers.

And I've tried in my films to follow that same pattern.

I think the best noirs are films that don't try to be.

They sort of wake up and find themselves there.

And now there are many films that are paying homage

to these incredibly wonderful films.

Sin City would be one. Usual Suspects would be another.

There are many.

Doesn't look so good for Mr. Lacy.

When film noir shows up

in the popular sense,

always is associated with a society

that's a little more cynical and a little bit more

paranoid and suspicious.

If it's making a rebound now, it might again be

because that factor makes people more open to cynicism

and makes the people making the movies more interested in exploring

that part of themselves.

- Don't just... - Don't what?

- I don't wanna die. - Neither do I, baby.

But if I have to, I'm gonna die last.

Young filmmakers, when they're first starting out.

Before they become encumbered

by the things that they think give them freedom.

Before they have big budgets and before they have long schedules,

what they are left with is the tools to make a film noir.

And from that they have the influence of filmmakers

like Fritz Lang, John Houston, Michael Curtiz, Orson Wells

who all made these great films.

Come on, Boss, let's finish it the way we started it.

On the level.

English