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       Encyclopedia
       of Film Noir
      GREENWOOD PRESS
Encyclopedia of Film Noir
    Encyclopedia
    of Film Noir
Geoff Mayer and Brian McDonnell
           GREENWOOD PRESS
       Westport, Connecticut • London
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Mayer, Geoff.
  Encyclopedia of film noir / by Geoff Mayer and Brian McDonnell.
    p. cm.
  Includes bibliographical references and index.
  ISBN-13: 978–0–313–33306–4 (alk. paper)
  ISBN-10: 0–313–33306–8 (alk. paper)
 1. Film noir—Encyclopedias. I. McDonnell, Brian. II. Title.
  PN1995.9.F54M39 2007
  791.43'655–dc22          2007003659
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available.
Copyright © 2007 by Geoff Mayer, Brian McDonnell
All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be
reproduced, by any process or technique, without the
express written consent of the publisher.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2007003659
ISBN-13: 978–0–313–33306–4
ISBN-10: 0–313–33306–8
First published in 2007
Greenwood Press, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881
An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc.
www.greenwood.com
Printed in the United States of America
                                 PART I: ESSAYS
Introduction: Readings on Film Noir                             3
   Geoff Mayer
The Hard-Boiled Influence                                      19
  Geoff Mayer
Film Noir and the City                                         47
   Brian McDonnell
McCarthyism, the House Committee on Un-American Activities,
and the Caper Film                                             62
  Geoff Mayer
Film Noir Style                                                70
   Brian McDonnell
viii
                                                         List of Films, Actors, and Directors
                                                                                           ix
              Preface: The Problem
                  of Film Noir
  As a single phenomenon, noir, in my view, never existed. That is why no one has
  been able to define it, and why the contours of the larger noir canon in particular are
  so imprecise.2
Or Alain Silver:
  Questions of phenomenology aside, film history is as clear now about film noir as
  ever: it finds its existence as obvious as Borde and Chaumeton did forty years ago. If
  observers of film noir agree on anything, it is on the boundaries of the classic period
  which began in 1941 with The Maltese Falcon and ends less than a score of years later
  with Touch of Evil.3
Preface
            With the Western, film noir shares the distinction of being an indigenous American
            form. It is a self-contained reflection of American cultural preoccupations in film
            form. In short, it is the unique example of a wholly American film style.4
            If we abandoned the word noir, we would have to find another, no less problematic
            means of organizing what we see.5
xii
                                                                                           Preface
experiences of filmgoers. Many low-budget noir films have disappeared from film
history. Large films like Double Indemnity, for example, benefited from Paramount’s
extensive financial resources and its large network of theatres situated in prime
locations throughout the United States, as well as efficient distribution overseas.
The availability of films such as this, and the frequent scholarly analysis of them for
the past forty years, has resulted in a biased history of film noir. Low budget films,
on the other hand, often had to fend for themselves with little promotion and spo-
radic distribution. This meant that films such as Decoy (Monogram, 1946), Blonde
Ice (Film Classics, 1948), and The Great Flamarion (Republic, 1945), disappeared
under the critical radar and are absent from many studies of film noir. Hence, this
volume not only provides an entry on Double Indemnity but also PRC’s Apology for
Murder (1945), starring Ann Savage, Hugh Beaumont, and Charles D. Hicks, in
the roles played by Barbara Stanwyck, Fred MacMurray, and Edward G. Robinson
in Billy Wilder’s film. Both films were based on the same real-life incident—the
1927 murder of Albert Gray by his wife and her lover—which, in turn, inspired
James M. Cain’s novella. Similarly, less obscure low budget films, such as Detour
(1945), which was filmed in days (as opposed to weeks or months) on a miniscule
budget, and Gun Crazy (1950), which had a slightly higher budget but extensive
distribution problems, are included alongside films produced by the major studios,
as these Poverty Row productions are as important, if not more so, in providing an
authentic representation of film noir in the 1940s and 1950s.
   The Encyclopedia of Film Noir is designed to provide an accessible yet scholarly,
user-friendly but research-informed, comprehensive account of the phenomenon
of film noir—both the classical film noir cycle (approximately 1939–1959) as well
the modern, or neo-noir, period, which constitutes films produced after 1959. The
encyclopedia presents this survey of film noir in two main ways. First, it offers five
substantial overview essays in which the authors investigate significant aspects of
film noir and the various contexts within which it developed. These essays explore
the contested nature of noir, as evidenced above in the radically different position
taken by Neale and Silver; in the vexed question of whether it can considered a film
genre; in its relationship to hard-boiled crime fiction; in its iconic presentation of
the American city; in political and cultural influences associated with the post-
war and Cold War periods (including the activities of the House Committee on
Un-American Activities); and in film noir’s distinctive visual style.
   Thereafter, the encyclopedia presents an alphabetically organized set of detailed
entries on the films together with significant American and British directors and
actors associated with film noir. Each actor or director entry contains a selected film-
ography that is designed to be inclusive, rather than exclusive, and many so-called
borderline noir films are listed alongside more familiar ones. Similarly, each film
entry provides details on cast, characters, and filmmakers together with a contextual
overview and critique of its themes, narrative structure, and relevance.
   The selected bibliography has been compiled as a guide to help the reader find
specific books on specialized aspects of film noir. We tried to cater to both the
                                                                                               xiii
Preface
          NOTES
              1. Linda Williams, “Melodrama Revised” in Nick Browne (ed.), Refiguring American
          Film Genres. Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1998, p. 42.
              2. Steve Neale, Genre and Hollywood. London, Routledge, 2000, pp. 173–174.
              3. Alain Silver and James Ursini (eds.), Film Noir Reader. New York, Limelight Edi-
          tion, p. 11.
              4. Alain Silver and Elizabeth Ward, Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference to the Ameri-
          can Style. New York, The Overlook Press, 1992, p. 1.
              5. James Naremore, More Than Night: Film Noir in its Contexts. Los Angeles, University
          of California Press, 1998, p. 276.
              6. See Linda Williams, Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White From Uncle
          Tom to O.J. Simpson. Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2001, p. 15.
              7. See, for example with regard to the British cinema, Robert Murphy, Realism and Tin-
          sel: Cinema and Society in Britain 1939–1949. London, Routledge, 1989; Andrew Spicer,
          Film Noir. Harlow, Pearson Education Limited, 2002; Geoff Mayer, Roy Ward Baker. Man-
          chester, Manchester University Press, 2004.
xiv
part i
Essays
                Introduction:
            Readings on Film Noir
                                  Geoff Mayer
                                                                                       3
Encyclopedia of Film Noir
                 (1946); Cain’s Double Indemnity (1944), Mildred Pierce (1945), and The Postman
                 Always Rings Twice (1946); Burnett’s High Sierra (1941); and Goodis’s Dark Passage
                 (1947). However, it was not as simple as this, and it is not entirely correct, as dis-
                 cussed later, to assume that the dark, nihilistic vision expressed by many of these
                 novelists was merely replicated in the film versions.
                    A significant aspect of the film noir myth is its formal style, especially the chiar-
                 oscuro lighting with its low key and frontal lighting setups that produced dark
                 areas interspersed by extreme brightness. This style, which was largely the result
                 of restricting the use of fill lights, thereby accentuating the harsh effect of the key
                 light, was often associated with the influence of German expressionism on film
                 noir. This visual style, reinforced by the fragmentation of space through set design
                 and camera compositions that produced unstable lines and surfaces, was perceived
                 as suggesting a dislocated world permeated by alienation and human despair.
                    These tendencies found in German expressionism were, it was argued, imported
                 into Hollywood by German émigrés who had fled Germany after Hitler assumed
                 power in 1933. This included directors such as Fritz Lang (The Woman in the
                 Window, 1945), Otto Preminger (Fallen Angel, 1946), Billy Wilder (Double
                 Indemnity, 1944), and Robert Siodmak (Criss Cross, 1949) as well as German-born
                 cinematographers such as Karl Freund, Rudolph Maté, John Alton, and Theodore
                 Sparkuhl. Again, the significance of film noir style and the role of the German
                 émigrés is not as simple as some studies suggest. German expressionism peaked
                 almost 20 years before the proliferation of film noir in Hollywood, and these
                 German émigrés worked on many Hollywood films that had no relevance to film
                 noir. Also, there were many noir films produced in Hollywood in the 1940s that
                 did not have German filmmakers working on them.
4
                                                                                           Introduction
1942 version of The Glass Key, his cynical view of the world provided, at least in
part, the philosophical basis for noir in general and for these two films in particu-
lar. Second, it is also assumed that his so-called noir sensibility is not found in the
1931 version of The Maltese Falcon or the 1935 version of The Glass Key.
   Does this mean that film noir did not begin until 1941? No, but there are sig-
nificant differences between the 1930s and 1940s versions in terms of style, moti-
vation, and the intensity of the despair and psychological turmoil experienced by
protagonists in the 1940s. This delineation between the 1930s and 1940s brings us
back to the question, What is film noir? Silver and Ursini (2004) address this issue
by dividing noir into separate formal, thematic, and philosophical elements. Out of
this, they argue, a movement called “film noir” emerged with the 1941 version of
The Maltese Falcon, as discussed previously. However, as Steve Neale (2000, 173)
argues, as “a single phenomenon, noir . . . never existed.” Many of its so-called
characteristic features, such as the use of voice-over and flashback, the use of high-
contrast lighting and other expressionist elements, the downbeat endings, and
the culture of distrust between men and women, which often manifested itself in
the figure of the femme fatale, are “separable features belonging to separable ten-
dencies and trends that traversed a wide variety of genres and cycles in the 1940s
and early 1950s” (p. 174). Neale (2000, 174) concludes that
  [any] attempt to treat these tendencies and trends as a single phenomenon, to ho-
  mogenise them under a single heading, “film noir,” is therefore bound to lead to in-
  coherence, imprecision, and inconsistency—in the provision of the criteria, in the
  construction of a corpus, or in almost any interpretation of their contemporary socio-
  cultural significance.
                                                                                                     5
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