The moral geometry of noir

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MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Today is Friday, January 16th.

Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day.

Good morning. I’m Myrna Brown.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher.

Coming next on The World and Everything in It: one of America’s great movie styles, film noir.

Now you are likely familiar with the tell-tale signs of film noir: the private eye, the femme fatale, the double-cross, the unsolved crime.

BROWN: Perhaps most well-known is the film The Maltese Falcon, from 85 years ago starring Humphrey Bogart.

AUDIO: You're gonna have to talk to me before you're through, sonny. Some of you will. And you can tell the fat man I said so. 

WORLD film reviewer Max Belz now with a few worthwhile examples of the genre.

MAX BELZ: Film noir is French for “dark film.” Italian movie critic Nino Frank coined the term to describe American crime movies in the 1940s. One notable example is a movie from 1947 called Out of the Past.

CLIP: That Bailey who burns you up, he run the gas station? You know him? I might have, once. If he keeps mooning around Jim’s girl, nobody will know him, and that’ll be too bad.

The movie opens in Bridgeport, California, at the foot of the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Jeff Bailey, played by Robert Mitchum, works at a gas station and we meet him picnicking with his girlfriend next to a sparkling mountain lake.

CLIP: You’ve been a lot of places, haven’t you? One too many. Which did you like the best? This one right here. I bet you say that to all the places.

But a visitor comes to town looking for Jeff and tries to pull him back into his murky past. Jeff’s past invades his present.

CLIP: That guy that showed up today? Yes? Want to take a ride with me up to Lake Tahoe? Now? Yes, now. I want to tell you something. All right, Jeff.

A long flashback reveals that a gangster named Whit Sterling had hired Jeff to find his missing girlfriend, Kathie. Jeff found her in Mexico City and, fatefully, fell in love with her.

CLIP: And then I saw her coming out of the sun, and I knew I didn’t care about that 40 grand.

They try to run away from Whit, but he uses his clout to win Kathie back. 

The timeline of the movie then returns to the present. Whit forces Jeff back into a web of blackmail and betrayal where he finds Kathie again, but this time he’s wary of her. Jeff is groping around in a dark world all alone.

CLIP: So, I just followed that 90 pounds of excess baggage to Mexico City. She had been at the Reform and then gone. I took the bus south like she did.

Jeff wants to start over in this idyllic small town, but unsavory characters from his previous life draw him back into a life of coercion and secrets. He wants to shed it all, but the struggle for survival is real.

CLIP: Find her, Jeff, bring her back. Why me? Well, I know a lot of smart guys and a few honest ones: and you’re both.

Much of the movie hinges on the great performance and loose ease of Robert Mitchum. Heavy lidded, his face shows little, and his attitude is relaxed even as he bears his burdens. As one of the characters notes, “Buddy you look like you’re in trouble because you don’t act like it.”

CLIP: Let’s go down to the bar. You can cool off while we try to impress each other.

The source material for film noir was often the hardboiled crime fiction popular in America at the time. Postwar prosperity is well-documented, but the movies of the 40s carry a heavier weight than the madcap films of the 30s. Perhaps the grave losses from World War II made people more sober.

CLIP: Don’t you see you’ve only me to make deals with now. Well, build my gallows high baby.

The camera in film noir drew on the shadowy photography of earlier German movies. The faces of the characters drift out of and then back into the light. Whole portions of the screen are in darkness. The lighting fits the shifting moral ground the characters travel.

The light can be warm but also foreboding, as it catches the outline of a face or the brim of a hat. It’s not clear right away whether the person means good or harm. Cigarette smoke diffuses the light and even small amounts of light reveal big actions.

The settings are clearly American: people in suburban neighborhoods living normal lives like Fred McMurray’s character, an insurance salesman, in Double Indemnity, another high-water mark of the genre.

CLIP: I killed Dietrichson. Me, Walter Neff, 35 years old, insurance agent, unmarried, no visible scars. Until a little while ago that is.

Or in the lesser known Detour from 1945, the main character Al Roberts assumes the name of a man who mysteriously died.

CLIP: There was no time to lose. Every minute I had to be Charles Haskell was dangerous. Hey, you, this your car? By that time I’d done just what the police’d say I did, even if I didn’t.

Al is down and out, and the rip current of life pulls him under. Again, we have a desperate person exposed to the ugly side of human deception.

CLIP: You know, you’re rather charming yourself, but I’m afraid I don’t quite understand you. Well, if you’d drop this junior league patter, we may get the conversation down where it belongs. You worried about something? I don’t know, should I be? Not if you do what you’re told. That’s why I’m here. I do what I’m told. People trust me. Do you?

By all appearances film noir characters are often ordinary people, but when evil forces emerge, they are lost in a scorched moral landscape. Frequently, as in Out of the Past, the scrambled timeline shows the psychological side because the moral struggle can be expressed inwardly through the voiceover monologue.

CLIP: Now the first thing I want to get off my chest, my name isn’t Bailey; it’s Markham. Markham? Jeff Markham? I should have told you before. I meant to, but I kept putting it off.

Whether it’s greed or murder, film noir thrusts people into moral quandaries. Though the physical reality shows a calm exterior, guilt and temptation course beneath the surface.

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said that “the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.” Film noir is a visual expression of that struggle, making these movies worth revisiting.

I’m Max Belz.

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