Out of the Shadows

322 Pages·2011·7.1 MB·English

by  Phillips, Gene D.

Out of the Shadows
Expanding the Canon
of Classic Film Noir
Gene D. Phillips
THE SCARECROW PRESS, INC.
Lanham (cid:129) Toronto (cid:129) Plymouth, UK
2012
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Published by Scarecrow Press, Inc.
A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706
http://www.scarecrowpress.com
Estover Road, Plymouth PL6 7PY, United Kingdom
Copyright © 2012 by Gene D. Phillips
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any
electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems,
without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote
passages in a review.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Phillips, Gene D.
Out of the shadows : expanding the canon of classic film noir / Gene D. Phillips.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Includes filmography.
ISBN 978-0-8108-8189-1 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8108-8190-7 (ebook)
1. Film noir—History and criticism. I. Title.
PN1995.9.F54P475 2012
791.43'655—dc23 2011023510
™
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American
National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library
Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.
Printed in the United States of America
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For
George Cukor
The younger generation of directors still hasn’t
learned some things about filmmaking that
George Cukor forgot in 1941.
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Dashiell Hammett took murder out of the vicar’s rose garden and
dropped it in the alley.
—Raymond Chandler
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CONTENTS
Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .vii
Prologue: Overlooked Noir . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix
PART ONE CITY OF NIGHT: THE ADVENT OF FILM NOIR
CHAPTER ONE Black Mask Brigade: Dashiell Hammett,
Hard-Boiled Fiction, and Film Noir. . . . . . . . . . . . .3
CHAPTER TWO E xploring Film Noir: Stranger on the Third
Floor and Other Films . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .13
PART TWO NIGHTMARE TOWN: DASHIELL HAMMETT’S
FICTION AS FILM NOIR
CHAPTER THREE John Huston: The Maltese Falcon . . . . . . . . . . . .29
CHAPTER FOUR Stuart Heisler: The Glass Key
Edward Buzzell: Song of the Thin Man. . . . . . . . .45
PART THREE D ARKNESS AT NOON: REPRESENTATIVE
NOIR FILMS
CHAPTER FIVE Fritz Lang: Ministry of Fear and Scarlet Street . . . . .69
CHAPTER SIX Alfred Hitchcock: Spellbound and Strangers
on a Train. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .87
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CONTENTS
CHAPTER SEVEN G eorge Cukor: A Double Life
Billy Wilder: Sunset Boulevard. . . . . . . . . . . . . .111
CHAPTER EIGHT Robert Siodmak: The Killers (1946)
Don Siegel: The Killers (1964) . . . . . . . . . . . . . .131
CHAPTER NINE Otto Preminger: Laura and Anatomy of
a Murder. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .151
CHAPTER TEN Fred Zinnemann: Act of Violence
Stanley Kubrick: The Killing. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .177
CHAPTER ELEVEN Orson Welles: The Stranger and Touch
of Evil . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .197
PART FOUR T HE LOWER DEPTHS: THE RISE OF NEO-NOIR
CHAPTER TWELVE D ashiell Hammett and Neo-Noir:
The Dain Curse and Hammett. . . . . . . . . . . . .225
CHAPTER THIRTEEN Anthony Minghella: The
Talented Mr. Ripley
Liliana Cavani: Ripley’s Game. . . . . . . . . . . .247
Afterword by Jim Welsh. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .265
Filmography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .275
Selected Bibliography. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .287
Index. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .295
About the Author . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .307
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
First of all, I am grateful to the filmmakers who discussed their
noir films with me in the course of the long period in which I
was engaged in remote preparation for this study. I interviewed
Fritz Lang, George Cukor, and Billy Wilder in Hollywood; Sir Alfred
Hitchcock, John Huston, and Otto Preminger in New York City; and
Fred Zinnemann and Stanley Kubrick in London. I also talked with Don
Siegel at the Chicago International Film Festival.
In addition, I would also like to single out the following for their as-
sistance: Patricia Hitchcock O’Connell, who played a supporting role in
Strangers on a Train, for examining an early draft of the material on the
film directed by her father; and Garson Kanin and Ruth Gordon, who
wrote the screenplay for Cukor’s A Double Life.
Many institutions and individuals provided me with research materi-
als. I would like specifically to single out the following: the staff of the
Film Study Center of the Museum of Modern Art in New York; the staff
of the Motion Picture Section of the Library of Congress in Washington;
the staff of the National Film Archive of the Library of the British Film
Institute in London; and the staff of the Department of Special Collec-
tions, the Newberry Research Library in Chicago.
Research materials were also provided by the Paramount Collection
of the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts
and Sciences in Hollywood; the Department of Special Collections of the
Research Library of the University of California at Los Angeles; the Billy
Rose Collection of the Theater and Film Collection of the New York
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Public Library at Lincoln Center; the Film Archive of George Eastman
House in Rochester, New York; the Warner Bros. Collection in the Ar-
chive of the Library of the University of Southern California.
As well as the Script Repositories of Columbia Pictures, Metro-
Goldwyn-Mayer, Warner Bros., Paramount, United Artists, Twentieth
Century Fox, and Universal Studios; film historian and documentary
filmmaker Kevin Brownlow, movie critic and film historian Andrew Sar-
ris, film scholar Bernard Dick of Fairleigh Dickinson University; film
historian Charles Higham.
Some materials in this book appeared in a completely different form
in the following publications: “Stanley Kubrick,” in The Movie Makers:
Artists in an Industry (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1973), copyright by Gene
D. Phillips; “Billy Wilder: An Interview,” Literature/Film Quarterly 4,
no. 1 (Winter 1976), 2–12, copyright 1976 by Salisbury University; Exiles
in Hollywood: Major European Film Directors in America (Cranbury, N.J.:
Associated University Presses, 1998), copyright by Associated University
Presses (it includes Billy Wilder); Creatures of Darkness: Raymond Chan-
dler, Detective Fiction, and Film Noir (Lexington: University Press of Ken-
tucky, 2000), copyright 2000 by the University Press of Kentucky. This
material is used with permission.
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PROLOGUE
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OVERLOOKED NOIR
Film historians generally agree that the classic period of film noir
lasted roughly from 1940 to 1960. Specifically, film noir was a cycle
in American cinema that first came into prominence during World
War II, peaked in the 1950s, and began to taper off as a definable trend by
1960. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s the American screen was riddled
with films that reflected the dark underside of American life, writes An-
drew Dickos. The directors of these films “fashioned this noir landscape
in the city and peopled it with troubled and desperate characters.”¹
Over the years a canon of films from the period has emerged that
film historians consider the standard group of films of the classic noir
cycle, ranging from The Naked City (1948), for example, to The Big Combo
(1955)—movies that clearly depicted the haunted world of film noir. Nev-
ertheless, film noir cannot be kept within the narrow limits of the official
canon of films that have been established by film historians—it is too wide
ranging for that.
As Bernard Dick explains, the elements of film noir “are applicable to
a wide range of plots: the whodunit, the old dark house, the cover-up, the
murderous couple, the murderous lover, and so on.”² Consequently, there
is still a number of neglected movies made during the classic noir period
that need to be reevaluated as noir films. “We all agree that there is a core
set of films in the noir canon,” Mark Conrad states. “But the boundary is
so fuzzy that we disagree about whether a great many others . . . belong
there as well.”³ Accordingly, this book is designed to be a mix of major
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