Original subtitles

Dark, isn't it? You'd better get used to it.

For the next hour, this is how the world is going to be.

This is the world of film noir.

It's a dark, American place with a fancy French name,

a place where the sun has died, and people get by with neon,

where the only pleasure to be had is from Bourbon

and the satisfaction of knowing that life is a cheap little game

in which everyone plays dirty.

The funny thing is, you don't need to have seen too many film noirs in order to know the conventions.

They are in our head, somehow.

So, who wrote the rules of noir?

And why, more than 60 years after the genre was founded, do we still love to play by them?

I'm going to say one word at a time.

Most of them won't mean a thing to you.

But I want you to say whatever pops into your head.

Cigarettes.

Rainy streets.

Black.

Mournful.

Peter Lorre.

Shadows.

Robert Mitchum.

Lipstick.

Fate.

Bogart.

Guns.

Film noir wasn't a species of cinema born of a movement or a manifesto.

It wasn't Dogma '95 or the Nouvelle Vague.

It wasn't even a commercial brand name like Hammer Horror or Ealing Comedy.

It grew more obscurely than that, but vigorously.

It bred its own characters. It bred its own grammar and language.

It bred its own dark, sleazy sense of the irredeemable nature of the world.

It worked out its own rules.

And tonight we are going to cast

a little light upon them.

But only a little.

OK.

Get me the stuff on her family, pictures, anything interesting.

- You'll get it. - I'll see ya.

You bring it over, Joe. Come on, let's go.

Oh, by the way. Would you mind telling me her name?

Kathie Moffat.

Thanks.

Now, like any good private investigator knows,

you've got to see who's in the frame before you can work out whodunnit, and why.

So, who populates the darkness of film noir?

It's your sinners.

This is a fallen world we're in.

Goodness here is as rare as natural daylight.

The lawyers are all crooked.

The district attorneys are all bent, and the cops?

Well, you wouldn't trust them to tell you the time.

I get the distinct impression that you don't like me. Would I be wrong?

You could be right, you fat slob.

Ha ha ha! Come back, Sidney,

I want to chastise you!

Now, you might expect a bit of that in any crime movie but in film noir

you can't even trust the figures in the foreground.

Your film noir heroine, she's a predator, even when she's playing the victim.

Her tears are crocodile tears.

Generally, the blonder and brighter she is on the outside,

the badder she is on the inside.

And the hero? Well, he's her lunch.

But here's the twist.

He usually knows it.

Double Indemnity is a noir with greatness carved on its black heart.

This dame has more history than the Smithsonian

and this hero is a dead man walking, past the tinned peaches.

I loved you Walter, and I hated him,

but I wasn't going to do anything about it, not until I met you.

You planned the whole thing.

I only wanted him dead.

And I'm the one that fixed it so he was dead.

Is that what you're telling me?

And nobody's pulling out.

If we went into this together and we are coming out at the end together.

It's straight down the line for both of us. Remember?

Double Indemnity had an enormous impact

on creating the genre because it was such a good film,

and such a high-quality film, and it was so successful,

that it really opened up the floodgates

to a lot of films that came afterwards.

The Postman Always Rings Twice came in on that tide.

Lana Turner is somewhere at the top of these legs.

In the world of film noir,

legs like hers were bound to get tangled up in something.

You dropped this?

Mmm hmm. Thanks.

'The femme fatale is of course the black widow,

'the dark women at the heart of these stories.'

The woman who's incredibly sexy and desirable,

but who you can't trust as far as you would throw her.

You've always got a woman who's a catalyst for all the bad things that happen.

You could really

put the battery cables on there and jack it up,

because you had the visuals

of people like Stanwyck, Jane Greer in Out Of The Past.

These were women you could feel the coldness of a corpse coming off of them.

You touch me, and you won't live till the morning!

They have to be a little bit dirty, they have to be a little bit slutty.

They've been around the block.

Hey, that's nice perfume.

Something new. It attracts mosquitoes and it repels men.

All of that is part of the way that they are troped

as being beautiful, sexy but dangerous.

You're right. I'm lying like mad.

I hate men. I loathe them.

It's probably worth thinking about a character,

say, like Barbara Stanwyck's character in Double Indemnity.

Her introduction is at the top of the stairs, wrapped in a robe.

She's been sunbathing and she's not wearing very much.

And Fred MacMurray, playing Walter Neff, is shot from below, looking up at her.

And even that, in a very unconscious and basic way,

establishes a power relationship there.

She is quite literally superior to him.

Is there anything I can do?

The insurance ran out on the 15th.

I'd hate to think of you having a smashed fender

while you're not...fully covered.

Perhaps I know what you mean, Mr Neff.

I've just been taking the sun.

No pigeons around, I hope.

Er, now about those policies, Mrs Dietrichson. I hate to take up your time.

That's all right. If you wait till I put something on I'll be right down.

And she comes down the stairs and the camera focuses on her ankle

because Fred MacMurray is focusing on her ankle and her legs.

There's a sense that comes through strongly in Fred MacMurray's voiceover

and he's talking about that anklet, and how he can't get it out of his mind and the legs,

and that suddenly he's not thinking about insurance any more.

He's thinking about Barbara Stanwyck.

That's a honey of an anklet you're wearing, Mrs Dietrichson.

There's a real sense that what power women have is with sexuality and attractiveness.

And if women want to have fantasies of power, and what women don't?

What people don't?

These stories are very much channelling that sense of where you could get your power from.

Your picture don't do you justice, baby.

Why don't you break his head, Jeff?

I was hoping you'd do this.

That's Jane Greer backed up against the curtain.

She can hardly conceal how thrilled she is by the sight of Robert Mitchum

punching the lights out of the blackmailer,

who has come to reveal all the double crosses on her resume.

Out of the Past is Mitchum's greatest turn as a film noir anti-hero.

These are the type of men who populate film noir.

Hello.

You wouldn't want your daughter to marry one,

unless you were happy for her to troll off with one of these losers -

guys who drink too much, smoke too much, earn too little

and struggle under the weight of their cynicism.

GUNSHOT

- That's one, Eddie. - Don't Marlowe, don't!

That's two, Eddie.

Don't shoot, it's me, Marlowe.

'To me, noir is about what's inside the characters.'

Their sense of psychosis, their claustrophobia.

Their desire to escape this world gone wrong that they

find themselves in, particularly after World War II.

Do you know this gentleman?

No.

Did you ever see him before?

- Yes, a few times. - Where?

At the patio apartments. We both live there.

Do you know who he is?

Yes. When I moved in a few days ago, Mr Steele was pointed out to me by the manager.

She was very proud of having a celebrity for a tenant.

Did you see Mr Steele last night?

Yes, as I came home I saw him going into his apartment with a girl.

That girl was Mildred Atkinson.

She was murdered between one and two o'clock this morning.

'In A Lonely Place is a film which isn't trying too hard to be noir, which I like.'

Bogart plays a struggling screenwriter who might or might not be a murderer.

You never know until the end of the film.

And it's his best performance in a very distinguished career.

You know, when you first walked into the police station, I said to myself, "There she is.

The one that's different.

She's not coy or cute or corny.

She's a good guy. I'm glad she's on my side.

She speaks her mind and she knows what she wants.

Thank you, sir. But let me add, I also know what I don't want.

And I don't want to be rushed.

'These people are all trapped in these spaces.'

Whether it is the nightclub that they go to or the apartment house,

you can feel them trying to rip their way out of it, and they can't.

A cancellation on Flight 16 for New York.

I'll stay with you Dix, I promise. I love you, Dix, I'll marry you, I'll go away with you. Take me.

You'd run away the first chance you get.

- Don't act like this, Dix, I can't live with a maniac! - I'll never let you go!

Dix, don't. Don't! Please!

Don't, Dix, please don't!

PHONE RINGS

These people can't connect even though they're in love,

they can't make that final step to hold each other

and hold on to each other and get through to the daylight, you know?

They just can't do it.

And it's the tragedy of the film.

And of course, when we discover that he's not the murderer,

it's too late for him and too late for them.

I lived for you.

How you loved me.

Goodbye, Dix.

In A Lonely Place could be the title of any of these pictures.

Noir men and women never get through to the daylight.

It's impossible to imagine them motoring off into a happy, sunlit ending.

Dirty, double-crossing rat!

In 1940s America, everything was in short supply.

The batteries in these torches, the celluloid running through the camera.

Pearl Harbor saw to that, and as the screenwriters went off to war,

Hollywood found it was also running out of stories that were marketable, modern and cheap.

Film producers had to look beyond the shiny papers and the Book Of the Month Club.

And where they looked was to narratives that were produced

as quickly and efficiently as the films themselves.

The sort of stories that were written on typewriters and printed on yellow paper.

The kind of stories that came off on your fingers as you read them.

This was fiction of a different consistency.

Rough, somehow. And it had a name.

I just found out all over again how big this city is.

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.

Nothing like soft shoulders to improve my morale.

Pulp Fiction was about tough detectives who got into hot water.

That's how it it got its alternative name - hard-boiled.

It was strong meat and film producers loved its flavour.

That's why the guys who cooked up hard-boiled plots

should get the credit for creating the recipe for film noir.

Guys like Raymond Chandler, who wrote Murder My Sweet

and James M Cain, who wrote about cheap detectives and cheaper crooks,

people who weren't at home in places with a carpet.

I seen your name on the blackboard downstairs.

- Yeah? - I came up to see you.

- You're a private eye, huh? - That's right.

But it was Dashiell Hammett who was the daddy of the genre.

His first book, Red Harvest, was published in 1929.

Everything in there is a blueprint for the entire hard-boiled noir canon that would come later on.

The very first paragraph talks about the fact that this place is called Poisonville,

even though the name of the town is Personville.

And there's that sort of wisecracking attitude, a very clinical look at death.

The book is almost deliriously violent,

without being graphic, but the body count is as high as anything

that's ever been written in the American novel.

Hammett was a Pinkerton man.

He'd been a detective. He'd lived a life.

So what he brought was his life experience to these books,

and he started something which had not been done before.

He said that the system is corrupt, that if you peel back the layers,

there's maggots underneath and they're writhing.

And he was telling people, you're wrong about everything.

Don't go to bed feeling comfortable,

because there's nothing to be comfortable about.

Film makers longed to make pictures that were as tough and sleazy

as the words on Hammett's pages,

but it took time for the censors to be persuaded.

Here's Bogey in a Hammett story, The Maltese Falcon.

It had been filmed twice before but only this version, hatched by John Huston,

captured the cheap and venal nature of its characters.

Effie?

It's me.

Listen, Precious.

Miles has been shot.

Yeah. Dead.

Bogart as Sam Spade is actually the definitive

hard-boiled character transferred from the page to the screen.

It's the most successful effort I can think of.

I wouldn't have told him if I thought he would kill him.

If you thought he wouldn't kill Miles you were right.

He had too many years' experience as a detective

to be caught by a man he was shadowing up a blind alley

with a gun and his overcoat buttoned.

But he'd have gone up there with you, Angel.

He was just dumb enough for that.

That kind of hard-boiled world has become our reality.

Whether it existed or not.

And it's a magnificent creation but it is a creation.

Once Hammett's nasty world had made it to the big screen,

the dark work of other writers was given the green light.

Like Double Indemnity, that hot, filthy novel by James M Cain.

Hold tight to that cheap cigar of yours, Keyes.

I killed Deitrichson. Me, Walter Neff.

The characters speak in what is now - or even then - known as the hard-boiled style.

And there's this flat delivery, very matter of fact and very tough guy.

Everything about the language is going to be tough guy.

Insurance salesman. 35 years old.

Unmarried. No visible scars.

"I killed him for a woman and I killer him for money."

I didn't get the money and... I didn't get the woman.

Pretty, isn't it?

It's that "Pretty, isn't it?" there I think is so characteristic of it,

of this cynicism of the language and the cynicism of all the characters in their relationship to each other.

Sunset Boulevard, like Double Indemnity,

is shaped by noir's debt to pulp fiction.

You're about to hear the voice of the hero.

He's dead, but he still gets to tell us the story of his life,

whispering his nasty little thoughts into your nasty little ear.

Maybe you'd like to hear the facts, the whole truth.

If so, you've come to the right party.

You see, the body of a young man

was found floating in the pool of her mansion

with two shots in his back and one in his stomach.

Nobody important, really.

Just a movie writer with a couple of B pictures to his credit.

The poor dope.

He always wanted a pool.

Well, in the end, he got himself a pool,

only the price turned out to be a little high.

I've always loved narration, because it's kind of intravenous feeding.

You're getting nourishment, but you can't taste it,

because it's slipping into your veins.

Like Mitchum, in Out Of The Past.

Here in this kind of toxic feeding.

He goes to this little bar in Mexico and he says,

"I sat there and I knew she wouldn't come, but I sat there anyway."

'I went to Pablo's that night. I knew I'd go every night until she showed up.

'And I knew she knew it.

'I sat there and drank bourbon, and I shut my eyes

'but I didn't think of a joint on 56th Street.

'I knew where I was and what I was doing.

'I just thought what a sucker I was.'

You know, and he's just sort of accepting his fate of being the hapless lover.

And then eventually she does come, you know.

'And then she walked in out of the moonlight, smiling.'

This was a great kind of device for allowing...

real men, masculine men,

men who had fought at war and were now disillusioned,

to show a kind of softer side, without appearing weak.

'I never saw her in the daytime.

'We seemed to live by night.

'What was left of the day went away like a pack of cigarettes you smoked.

'I didn't know where she lived. I never followed her.

'All I ever had to go on was a place and time to see her again.

'I don't know what we were waiting for.

'Maybe we thought the world would end.

'Maybe we thought it was a dream, and we'd wake up with a hangover in Niagara Falls'.

I think there are several reasons why voiceover becomes useful for them.

And eventually, they start playing with it and thinking about the kinds of effects they can create with it.

They use it when detectives are beaten up or drugged,

like in Murder My Sweet.

There's a surprising line for modern viewers,

where Dick Powell says, "I found myself in this crazy coked-up dream".

You think, "Did I hear that right? Did he say what I think he said?"

'Next thing I remember, I was going somewhere.

'It was not my idea.

'The rest of it was a crazy, coked-up dream.

'I had never been there before.'

And so the voiceover again lets the film makes sense of this quite surreal sequence,

and lets them play with that attempt to render a drugged, narcotic interrogation scene.

So they actually begin to use it to experiment with psychological effects - memory, dream, nightmare.

And again, that becomes carried out into other films in that era as well,

but it's really characteristic of film noir.

Pulp fiction knows a lot of nasty tricks.

It puts you inside the head of the hero,

and then hits you with a right hook or a shot of dope.

It distorts time and space, and leaves you reeling.

Many of the people who made these pictures felt just as disoriented.

Film noir grew in the Californian night,

but its vision, like its name, came from Europe.

Want to know two good things Hitler did?

He built the autobahn,

and he created the conditions in which film noir was born.

Granted, he didn't do it for a good reason,

but the tide of darkness that the Nazis unleashed across Europe

propelled some of the most talented film people in the world westward towards Hollywood,

actors, technicians, directors, cameramen,

and they brought with them a sense of the twilight

that had descended across the continent that they had left behind.

The world of film noir was America, all right, but not the one that the natives saw.

They might be the Gestapo

or the secret police of any European state, seduced by fascism.

This film is The Killers, and these guys got the title roles.

Ernest Hemingway supplied the plot, but Robert Siodmak, a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany,

was responsible for making these men look like the sort who were used to knocking on doors at 3am.

The films that these film makers were producing

are absolutely imbued with that sense that they'd actually experienced

what was becoming the war in Europe, and experienced the real terror of the Nazi regime

in a way that their American counterparts absolutely had not.

The reality is that there wouldn't have been film noir

without World War II and an influx, specifically, of German emigres.

Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder, Edgar Ulmer, all of these people AND their technicians, cinematographers,

production designers, there was a mass exodus.

And they imported that technical ability,

but that aesthetic sensibility and sensibility

that had been formed in the '20s and '30s with German Expressionism.

Expressionism was a visual style of skewed angles

and nightmare images that crossed the Atlantic to Hollywood.

But film noir didn't just feel European, it sounded European too.

Franz Waxman and Miklos Rozsa were the men who scored film noir,

but they were also on the run from the men in jackboots.

From the very old heart of music and the old world,

these composers brought this sense of a line going back, I feel,

which isn't about facile statements.

It's actually about a sense of what it really means to be human,

which is that you are, for the most part, groping in a fog.

You are going through shades of grey.

You're not just taking a black or white decision.

And it took European music, really, to make that work.

And in a film like The Killers this is Miklos Rozsa being very clever, because what he's got

is a situation that he'll have had a a thousand times before, which is threat, danger,

two people walking into a bar who are going to shoot somebody else.

Now, he could have gone with ordinary threat music.

But instead of that, what he does is, he plays a sort of bar-room piano.

This piano is doing boogie woogie sort of stuff,

very much of its day,

but modern for the period of the film.

And that piano is never seen, and the musician is never seen.

It's just there. We kind of assume it's in the bar.

But the orchestra begins to creep in behind the piano doing what it's doing,

until the first moment we see the killers,

when absolutely out of time and absolutely out of any key at all, we get ...

HE PLAYS THE KILLERS THEME

And it cuts right across.

But then it's gone and the piano's carrying on,

but the piano is beginning to get more frenetic,

as if the piano has started to be terrified of these men who've just walked into this bar.

It gets faster. It begins to lose the way it was going before,

and begins to become something else, and we have to kind of follow it.

We're being dragged by melodies off somewhere else.

That's what the piano's doing. At this point, it's building up and building up and building up

in the moments in which very tiny movements are happening, head movements.

The music's getting faster and more frenetic until the moment they pull their guns.

We know The Killers theme.

That's the first thing we heard... Bom duh bom bom...

underneath the title sequence.

That's the other thing about film noir.

It promises suspense, and those first few notes in any title sequence, whether it's the "thwack"

at the beginning of On Dangerous Ground...

TITLE MUSIC PLAYS

That's the pay-off to those of us who've seen a poster saying

"Come and have the most suspenseful evening of your life."

European emigres created a new sound and a new look for American cinema, something alien and yet familiar.

Unheimlich, they might have said if they'd read their Freud,

and many of them had.

But their gift was greater

than simply a different way of holding the camera,

or building a musical score.

These guys brought attitude as well as technical expertise.

They knew there were some places in the world where paranoia was a rational response to life.

There's a very dark idea lurking at the heart of their films.

What if American cops and lawyers and officials were much the same

as the ones who had made their lives a misery in Europe?

What if even though the right side had won the war, there was going to be no bright new door,

just more darkness and amorality, but with automatic cars and smoother cigarettes?

Can you hear me, lieutenant?

I just want to ask you one question and then you can go.

What are you looking for? Maybe I can help you.

What about Alicia?

What's your information? Arresting all my friends?

What's behind it?

Mingo, try it.

Aaagh!

It's not an accident that film noir really kicked in after World War II.

There were some proto noirs that were very influential earlier on.

But it got much darker and crazier after the war.

These people saw a lot of death,

and they saw the, um...

the mechanisms of fate,

and what people do in times of war that can make them inhuman.

- Where did you go with Bannion? - Nowhere. Nowhere!

- He dragged me over the Gaiety! - Oh, the Gaiety, the Gaiety.

You pig. You lying pig!

Aaagh!

My face! My face!

There's something very consonant about the way that

the films look and feel,

with this sense of being under a great deal of duress, being in a very dark time.

It's a dark time for the world.

It is a time that is uncovering man's propensity for evil.

Vince threw hot coffee in my face.

I'm going to be scarred.

The whole side of my face will be scarred.

- Where's Stone now? - I don't know.

They made Higgins take me to the doctor.

- Higgins the police commissioner? - Yes.

The doctor put on the bandages.

Can I stay with you?

Please can I stay?

It was a remarkably pessimistic and bitter period for American cinema, which has,

in the course of its history, made money making people feel good.

Yet here we had this very fertile period where

these kinds of gloomy and pessimistic films were actually very commercial,

which is why it was a great period for artists, because it opened up all kinds of venues for expression.

The producers of Gun Crazy were a pair of former racketeers.

They let the director do anything he liked, except spend money.

But look at the result.

Laurie, don't! Come on!

SIRENS WAIL

'Times are changing in film noir, and we can really see it as a transitional genre.'

It's getting us into a more adult sense of people's relationships,

into a more graphic willingness to show violence and evil.

BELL RINGS

And a more complicated moral world, in which the question of how much you are responsible for what you

do and for what other people do is always centre of the story.

"..Office manager of the meat-packing company, and

"William Bechtel, company guard, were killed last Friday when bandits made off with a company payroll".

- Well? - Well?

Two people dead...just so we can live without working.

Why? Why did you do it? Why do you have to murder people?

Why can't you let them live?

Because I had to.

Because I was afraid.

Because they would have killed you. Because you're the only thing I've got in the whole world.

Because I love you.

We're killers.

- You're not. I am. - No, we both are.

We go into a racket like this to get something at the point of a gun.

You have to be ready to kill even before you start a job.

I'm as guilty as you are.

I just let you do my killing for me.

I might as well tell you.

I've done it before.

I killed a man in St Louis too.

It is one of the primary genres in which America is willing to show the American Dream as broken.

Emigre film-makers brought the paranoid darkness of

occupied Europe to the boulevards of Hollywood,

but victory didn't banish those anxieties.

It simply invented new ones.

So if the genre continued to create a picture of an America that was brutal, alienating and corrupt,

it had drawn it from life.

The look of noir suited the atmosphere of suspicion and paranoia that gripped America

just after the war,

a time when many film-makers found themselves hounded for their left-wing political views.

It's a monochrome look, of course.

In the 1940s, colour was for musicals or for

films where chipmunks and bluebirds did the washing up.

Noir renegotiated the relationship between black and white.

It owned monochrome in a way that Kafka owned the letter K.

It invited audiences into a realm that seemed to be lit not by the

sun, not even by studio Klieg lamps, but by angle poises and cigarettes.

Neon signs and searchlights.

Who's that?

It isn't...

This is an early, but perfect, example of the style.

And it's an obscurity.

A cheap little B-movie shot in a few days on the RKO back lot.

And its images are straight from the haunted house of German expressionism.

Nosferatu seems to be on an American vacation.

And, he's played by Peter Lorre, who, back in Berlin,

had been expressionism's goggle-eyed poster-boy.

Looking for somebody?

Stranger on The Third Floor is a very interesting

film in terms of the psychology and how psychological it is.

The fact that you've got this beautiful moody,

stark expressionistic style.

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, have you reached a verdict?

- ALL: Guilty! - I'm not guilty! This stranger killed him.

There. There he is.

Why don't you do something? He'll get away. Arrest him.

Michael Ward! Face the court.

It is the judgment of this court that you be taken to the state prison

and be there put to death in the manner prescribed by law.

And may God have mercy on your soul.

The wonderful voiceover narration and the dream sequences and you've got all these,

these oblique lines and barred shadows of entrapment

and all these vivid, wild expressionistic hallucinations that he's having over guilt.

There are many things that are wonderful in film noir and it does stand out as

an interesting early example of film noir.

Wake up!

Why did you do it?

- Speak up! - Why did you kill him? - Come on. - Come clean!

- Confess and we'll go easy on you. - I didn't. - You know you killed him.

- I didn't. I didn't. The stranger did it. The man I saw in the hall. - Where did you hide the gun?

- I never had a gun. - Where did you put the knife? - What knife? - That one.

- You thought we wouldn't find it? - I didn't kill him. I didn't! - Extra, extra! Read all about it!

Light doesn't simply allow you to see what's in the frame, it carves the subject up, like meat on a slab.

It dismembers people.

Some actors hated the way that the shadow slashed their faces.

But this was all part of the agreeable cynicism of noir.

"Let's take these movie stars, these pin-ups and chop them to pieces with chiaroscuro.

"Cut them down to size.

"Reduce them to abstract arrangements of light and shade."

The case started in Los Angeles in a district just off Santa Monica Boulevard.

A secret service agent had arranged a meeting with an underworld informant.

The noir the genre, it was about

characters who were in this grim, greasy dark world.

They lived at night. They were loners.

A sort of fatalism about the lighting that you could have an excuse to be very bold.

It was very elemental.

It's just one character or two characters with one light source.

It's not complicated, film noir. It's not complicated to do.

One of the things is a lot of things are down low and

shadows are being thrown up on the walls and the cameras are low

making people tall as they come forward. They get bigger and more menacing.

You decide for the audience what they're going to see.

You're not going to see any of that or that lovely set or those people.

You're going to look at those little men and that's what I want you to look at. You have no choice.

Noir began as an airless kind of cinema.

A cinema in which the view from the window was always fake.

And all the driving was done on back projected roads.

A cinema that rarely left the sound stage and the back lot.

But that would change.

Noir was about to walk out into the real American night.

We had a whole group of cinematographers

and directors who had been in the war effort shooting films.

REPORTER:'Not a single member of any such patrol ever came back alive.'

They were shooting hand-held black and white 16mm films.

They were shooting whatever they could.

When they came back they started wanting to shoot that way on the streets.

Location filming transformed film noir.

Made it look less like melodrama.

And more like the news.

And by the mid-1950s he was as street-smart and immediate as this.

Hey the late paper just came in, who wants the late paper?

The most impressive scenes to me were the scenes on the streets.

And there's a few of them.

The long tracking shots and using

real locations and real lights

and maybe even using background cars that are actually there.

I'm not sure how they'd have controlled such a huge space.

But he must have been working in incredibly tough conditions to get those scenes.

There's one particular long dialogue scene between

Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis which is quite incredible and the shots are really held for a very long time.

The tracking, the camera would come off from one character to another and the staging is immaculate.

Leave him alone.

Leave him alone.

I love this dirty town.

Sidney, conjugate me a verb, for instance, to promise.

You promised to break up that romance. When?

You want something done JJ but I doubt if you know what's involved.

I'm a schoolboy, teach me.

Why don't you break it up yourself, you could do it in a few minutes flat.

At this late date, you need explanations?

Susie's all I've got.

Now she's growing up I want my relationship with her to remain at least at par.

I don't intend to do anything to antagonise her if I don't have to.

Be warned, son. I'll have to blitz you.

- JJ, I don't think you've got the cards to blitz me. - I don't.

- Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think so. - I'll listen for one more minute.

About a year ago I did you a certain favour.

It was a thing, well I never did such a dirty thing in my life.

All right, all right, it's forgotten. Forget it.

Which brings us up to five weeks ago.

Sidney, I've got a nasty little problem here.

Do so and so and I'll appreciate it.

Did I say no, was I fussy? Look, I'm the first to admit it didn't gel as fast as we'd like.

But why all of a sudden can't I get you on the phone?

- And why am I frozen out of the column? - You finished?

Staging, lighting, and the whole mood of the piece feels real but

it's also got that very kind of biting quality that noir has.

The opening of Kiss Me Deadly is, I think,

certainly the greatest opening in film noir but one of the greatest openings of all times.

It starts off these legs running. It's all about feet really.

Starts on Cloris Leachman's feet running down this highway at night.

- Then you see a full figure and it cuts back to her feet and tracking, tracking. - Oh. Ugh. Uh.

And she's trying to hitch a ride.

Trying to stop to get a lift and Ralph Meeker turns up in a sports car.

And there's this wonderful wonderful interchange between them in the car

which ends with, basically played in two shots.

There's a front two shot which is under-lit by the dashboard

and the two heads are lower than the bottom of the 133 frame.

There's an enormous amount of black in the top of frame.

And then that cuts with the view over their heads where they are at the bottom of the

fame also but you see the road going away and the windscreen just lit by their headlights.

It's so minimal because you've just got this -

boosted headlights right in the road and that's it.

And it goes on like this.

And it ends where she says, "Remember me."

I got your name from the registration certificate.

Mr Hammer.

Get me to that bus stop and forget you ever saw me.

- If we don't make that bus stop... - We will.

If we don't...

remember me.

Noir created a visual world in which the forces of darkness had more screen time than their rivals.

But there were limits on the kinds of wickedness it was allowed to represent.

So the guys who wrote the dialogue had to work hard to make sure

the audience understood how lost and dirty its characters were.

But without antagonising the cinema's moral policeman.

Everybody likes sex and mayhem and murder.

Especially you, madam.

The film noir revelled in all of them.

But the party had to be held under certain conditions.

Since 1934 the haze code had taken a squeegee to the dirty surfaces of

Hollywood, expunging all those bare nipples and low morals.

Those rules stayed intact in wartime.

But like a lot of rules during the war they were bent, completely bent.

So screenwriter's filled their work with sexual innuendos that

looked innocuous on the page but sounded dead dirty in the playing.

You should tell me what's engraved on that anklet.

Just my name.

As for instance... Phyllis.

Melissa.

- I think I like that. - But you're not sure.

I'd have to drive it around the block a couple of times.

Mr Nev, why don't you drop by tomorrow evening around 8:30?

- He'll be in then. - Who?

My husband. You were anxious to talk to him, weren't you?

I was, but I'm getting over the idea, if you know what I mean.

There's a speed limit in this state, Mr Nev, 45 miles an hour.

- How fast was I going, officer? - I'd say around 90.

Suppose you get down off your motorcycle and give me a ticket.

Suppose I'll let you off with a warning this time.

- Suppose it doesn't take. - Suppose I have to whack you over the knuckles.

Suppose I burst out crying and put my head on your shoulder.

Suppose you try putting it on my husband's shoulder.

That tears it.

8:30 tomorrow evening then.

That's what I suggested.

You'll be here too? I guess so, I usually am.

- Same chair, same perfume, same anklet. - I wonder if I know what you mean.

I wonder if you wonder.

For me, one of the most characteristic aspects of film noir

and my personal favourite part of film noir is the innuendo.

The use of innuendo and euphemism and the way that it talks about sex without talking about sex.

One of the best examples of that I think is in the Big Sleep.

'One of the things that's important to remember about the Big Sleep is

'that Bogarde and Bacall had this very racy off-screen romance, quite scandalous.

'So they were maybe the Brad and Angelina of their day.'

- Hello. - Well. - I'm late, I'm sorry.

- How are you today? - Better than last night.

I can agree on that.

- Lomax. - Good afternoon, Mrs Rutledge. - Got a table for us? - Certainly, this way please.

It's a film where their famous screen chemistry really ignites.

The director, Howard Hawks was at some pains to make

sure that that screen chemistry was as torrid as it could be.

And there are a couple of fabulously sexy scenes between Bogarde and Bacall.

Particularly a scene that even modern ears that are unaccustomed to the idioms and

the slang of the 1940s won't have any trouble picking up the meaning of this particular exchange.

I like you. I told you that before.

I like hearing you say it.

But you didn't do much about it.

- Well, neither did you. - Well.

Speaking of horses.

I like to play them myself.

But I like to see them work out a little first.

See if they are front runners or come from behind.

Find out what their whole card is.

What makes them run.

- Find out mine? - I think so.

Go ahead.

I'd say you don't like to be rated, you like to get out in front.

Open up a lead, take a little breather in the back stretch and then come home free.

You don't like to be rated yourself.

I haven't met anyone yet that could do it. Any suggestions?

Well, I can't tell until I've seen you over a distance of ground.

You've got a touch of class but, I don't know, how far you can go.

A lot depends on who's in the saddle.

Go ahead Marlow, I like the way you work.

In case you don't know it, you're doing all right.

There's one thing I can't figure out.

- What makes me run? - Uh-huh.

I'll give you a little hint, sugar won't work, it's been tried.

I think film noir is entirely for grown-ups and it's entirely for that generation of

twentysomethings, thirtysomethings, who weren't necessarily in a nuclear family who were

young free and single and wanted their entertainment -

raw, adult, mature, raunchy and they gave it to them.

# They once had a shooting up in the Klondike

# When they got Dan McGrew

# Folks were putting the blame on

# The lady known as Lou

# That's the story that went around

# But here's the real low-down

# Put the blame on Mame boys

# Put the blame on Mame

# Mame did a dance called the hoochy-coo

# That's the thing that slew MaGrew

# Put the blame on Mame boys

# Put the blame

# On Mame. #

On paper this probably looked like a musical interlude.

On the screen, it's Rita Hayworth doing stuff

that would have had half the audience slack-jawed with desire.

More, more, more.

But as well as sex, violence had to be smuggled past the censor.

Directors like Billy Wilder would very effectively use off-screen

space, particularly during this period of production code censorship.

In this way, the audience's imagination can run wild with what's going on.

But you're actually conforming to the constraints of the production code.

You're not showing any violence, it's all done off screen.

Remember what the doctor said, if you get careless you might end up with a shorter leg.

So what, I could break the other one and match them up again.

Makes you feel pretty good to get away from me, doesn't it?

It's only for four days, I'll be back Monday at the latest.

The fact that when the murder is done you don't actually see the violence on the screen.

You see just this tight shot of Phyllis's face as Neff is

murdering her husband.

This is not the right street.

Why did you turn here?

What are you doing that for?

What are you honking the horn for?

'Not only is that quite specifically effective in terms'

of revealing her character, the sort of very cold face with that sort of

mild gleam, the smile that you see in the corner of her mouth, just barely, just ever-so-slightly,

she's just really glad that this guy's been knocked off, basically.

As time moved on, the camera found itself increasingly free

to look upon violence without averting its gaze.

You don't need to know a secret code to work out what's happening here.

A touch of evil is so odd in its gallery grotesques, the close-ups,

the Dutch tilts, the extremely fatalistic dialogue.

How could you arrest me here, this is my country.

This is where you're going to die.

That wasn't no miss-fire, that was just to turn you around. I don't want to shoot you in the back.

Unless you'd rather try to run for it.

These characters are after some kind of warped version of the American Dream.

When you think that you, that you are entitled to anything that you want and there are no costs to it.

And a sense of disappointment and even resentment that you don't have what you've been promised.

The last film you can really call a film noir is Touch of Evil and that's 58.

Then that's pretty much the end of it.

What does it matter what you say about people?

Goodbye, Janet.

Adios.

Film noir is a kind of cinema that we now recognise as soon as we see its stars in its shadows.

A cinema shaped by its hard-boiled literary sources.

By that atmosphere of anxiety imported from the police states of Europe by the dark imagery.

The compromised finger marked nature of its characters.

But like the people who walked its dark spaces, film noir was doomed.

It was too pessimistic to survive the American Fifties which put their faith in big fridges and Cadilacs,

audiences got hooked on TV and technicolour and wanted to be told that things were OK again.

And though people stopped making noirs, their images are so powerful

that they've burned themselves on to our collective memory.

We remember the paranoia, we remember the sex, we remember the

darkness, and we remember the world in which these stories took place.

In film noir life seems to get cheaper by the minute.

It's every man and woman for themselves.

That's horrifying.

It's intoxicating too.

Maybe a little part of us believes that's how the world really is.

And that's why we can't tear our eyes from the shadows and why,

more than half a century later, we keep on scaring into the dark.

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