Film Noir & Pulp Fiction
Noir rules, other fiction drools - James Ellroy
This page is still under construction but I do have a few links, sounds, videos, and some text up. A special thanks to all the links and sites from which I have gotten things.
Noir Sounds:
The Big Sleep1 (213k) - the best line from the movie
The Big Sleep2 (736k) - you go to far
Double Indemnity1 (94k) - discussion of insurance
Double Indemnity2 (58k) - relationship of height and intelligence
In A Lonely Place (113k) - when she kissed me
Key Largo (67k) - worth dying for
Little Caesar (145k) - Is this the end?
Maltese Falcon1 (42k) - Lock the door
Maltese Falcon2 (15k) - This won't do any good
Maltese Falcon3 (103k) - Learn to stutter
Maltese Falcon4 (37k) - Taking the fall
Maltese Falcon5 (22k) - Get in good with your boss
Mildred Pierce (109k) - The right idea
Murder, My Sweet (54k) - The cops are against me
The Petrified Forest (611k) - Maybe we'll decide to get buried here
The Postman Always Rings Twice (118k) - origination of the plan
The Public Enemy (597k) - The men I know
Sunset Boulevard (320k) - wonderfully noirish opening monologue
To Have and Have Not (210k) - whistling speech
White Heat (76k) - Top of the world!
Richard Widmark explains what film noir was (396k)
Noir Music:
Chinatown (585k) - Opening music by Jerry Goldsmith
Noir Movie Posters:
The Asphalt Jungle1 (42k)
The Asphalt Jungle2 (36k)
The Asphalt Jungle3 (44k)
The Big Heat (39k)
The Blue Dahlia (43k)
Chinatown (25k)
Dark Passage (38k)
Dead Reckoning (23k)
Detour (44k)
Double Indemity1 (82k)
Double Indemity2 (41k)
The Glass Key1 (40k)
The Glass Key2 (42k)
Gun Crazy (54k)
This Gun for Hire (46k)
High Sierra1 (20k)
High Sierra2 (40k)
The Killing (56k)
Kiss Me, Deadly (28k)
The Lady from Shangai1 (62k)
The Lady from Shangai2 (58k)
Laura1 (65k)
Laura2 (33k)
The Maltese Falcon1 (28k)
The Maltese Falcon2 (73k)
The Maltese Falcon3 (57k)
Mildred Pierce (21k)
Murder, My Sweet (61k)
The Night of the Hunter (45k)
Out of the Past1 (36k)
Out of the Past2 (32k)
The Petrified Forest (35k)
The Postman Always Rings Twice1 (59k)
The Postman Always Rings Twice2 (38k)
The Public Enemy1 (33k)
The Public Enemy2 (33k)
The Roaring Twenties (51k)
Stranger on the Third Floor (58k)
Taxi Driver (23k)
The Third Man1 (30k)
The Third Man2 (31k)
To Have and To Have Not (29k)
Touch of Evil (34k)
Noir Covers:
Detective Magazine (61.4k)
Detective Tales1 (72.5k)
Detective Tales2 (49.6k)
Detective Tales3 (57.6k)
Dime Detective (75.2k)
Thrilling Detective (65.1k)
Detective Tales1 (72k)
The Maltese Falcon (31.1k)
The Thin Man (41k)
Map of Crimes from Hammett's stories (99k)
Noir Film Clips:
The Asphalt Jungle (small image at 688k)
The Asphalt Jungle (large image at 1.9MB)
Original theatrical trailer to Chinatown (7.2MB)
The French film noir classic Diabolique (small image 566k)
The French film noir classic Diabolique (large image 1MB)
Stanley Kubrick's classic film noir The Killing (small image 1.2MB)
Stanley Kubrick's classic film noir The Killing (large image 2.7MB)
Original theatrical trailer to Little Caesar (5.3MB)
Original theatrical trailer for John Huston's The Maltese Falcon (6.8MB)
Sam Fuller's The Naked Kiss (small image 1.5MB)
Sam Fuller's The Naked Kiss (large image 6.7MB)
Martin Scorese's modern-day noir Taxi Driver (small image 780k)
Martin Scorese's modern-day noir Taxi Driver (large image 1.4MBk)
Noir Movie Scripts:
The classic futuristic noir Blade Runner (197k)
David Lynch's modern-day noir Blue Velvet (164k)
The Coen brothers Academy Award nominated Fargo (140k)
Francis Ford Coppola's Classic The Godfather (131k)
David Lynch's new noir film The Lost Highway (147k)
The overly violent Natural Born Killers (196k)
Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction (301k)
The Coen brothers quirky noir Raising Arizona (157k)
Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs (169k)
The superb Silence of the Lambs (256k)
David Lynch's modern-day noir Wild at Heart (160k)
Noir Links:
Martin's Film Noir page - One of the best film noir page on the web
The Allure of the Macabre - A good starting place, a little hard to get around in though
No Place for a Woman: The Family in Film Noir and Other Essays
Images - In Focus - Neat essay on the best of the best noirs
The History of Crime Movies Quiz - A fun noir game to play
The Film Noir Reader
Raymond Chandler online library
Raymond Chandler's Los Angeles - Interesting book site with pictures
Humphrey Bogart tribute
Jim Thompson - Webpage devoted to the author
The Car in the Mexican Quarter by Jim Thompson - Noir story
Brattle Theater in Cambridge, Ma. - Currently running a Film Noir tribute
German Expressionism
This famous scene from The Lady from Shanghai is a fine example of German expressionism's influence on film noir camera work. The hall of mirrors is symbolic for the situation in which Welles finds himself. Nothing is what it appears, everything is an illusion. There are illusions upon illusions, reflections of reflections. Rita Hayworth's character has led Welles in circles throughout the whole movie. As Jim Thompson said "there is only one plot - nothing is as it seems."
This is one of the many famous stair scenes from the noir classic Kiss Me, Deadly. The stairs appear throughout the movie. Numerous people are thrown down them. It is one of the reacurring visual themes of the movie.
Pulp Fiction
Roots of Film Noir in Pulp Fiction
In the mid-forties a new type of film appeared. They were in some cases low budget B-pictures. In other cases they had name stars like Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Richard Widmark, Joan Crawford, Dick Powell, Robert Mitchum, Fred MacMurray, and Lana Turner (a femme fatale in her own life) among others. Some stars, like Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake seemed to have grown up and boomed specifically in this new genre. Other actors like William Bendix made a career as great character actors in these films. These films centralized around a formula similar to this one:
“A seemingly average man leading a straight and narrow life meets by a twist of fate a beautiful, seductive, morally bankrupt woman and in record time falls helplessly entranced by her charm. This clever femme fatale uses her sex appeal as a means to an end, and the end is money by way of murder. The man blinded by lust is unaware of the woman's evil intentions and is soon helplessly drawn into her web of deceit and murder which inevitably leads to his demise.”
This new type of film was dubbed film noir by the French press who first recognized it as a new art form.
Noir, as in black. Black film was a new thing. It was the dark underside of the world, dark, gloomy, and not always fair. It marked a departure from the past of war films. Of course Hollywood had been used as a propaganda agency by the government and most films, Casablanca being one of the best examples, had to have some type of patriotic overtones. Before this time film noirs had just been developing. They were film noirs though. As Marc Vernet points out in his essay “Film Noir: On the Edge of Doom”, “numerous films are swept under the rug in order to attempt to maintain an artificial purity and isolation of film noir.” The first hard-boiled true noir is considered to be the 1941 John Huston classic The Maltese Falcon.
War hits the country and this new thing called noir was stopped in favor of propaganda. But then as the war turns for America and approaches an end, Hollywood changed its shift. An article appeared in Variety:
“Shortage of story materials and writers now has film companies seriously ogling the pulp mag and scripts and scripters. It marks the first time that Hollywood has initiated a concerted drive to replenish its dwindling library supplies and its scripter ranks from the 20c-a-word authors of the weird-snappy-breezy-argosy-spy-crime- detective mag school.”
Even before that report Variety had reported that “many top officials are considering a wide swing to detective and mystery stories.” Film noir was created and took quite a center stage from here until about 1950.
We can see that film noir takes its lead because of its own definition that “the world is a harsh place in which the lone person hasn’t a chance.” This is derived from the disillusionment which many soldiers and people feel after the war ends. As Ronald Reagan says in one of his autobiographies,
“Like most of the soldiers who came back, I expected a world suddenly reformed . . . I discovered that the world was almost the same and perhaps a little worse.”
The noir hero is someone who is “proceeding as if the world makes sense and adds up to something when he knows it really doesn’t.” This is the world we enter into when we enter into noir. But where does noir originate?
Noir can be said to come from two places. Its visual style of odd camera angles, deep shadows, and black and white film comes from German Expressionism. Its plot and themes from roman noir, or the classic pulp fiction of the times.
Paul Schrader, screenwriter of Taxi Driver, a modern-day epic noir, describes the relationship between the pulps and the films as follows:
“When the movies of the Forties turned to the American ‘tough’ moral understrata, the ‘hard-boiled’ school was waiting with preset conventions of heroes, minor characters, plots, dialogue and themes. Like the German expatriates, the ’hard-boiled’ writers had a style made to order for film noir; and in turn they influenced noir screenwriting as much as the Germans influenced noir cinematography.”
The pulp fiction is thought by some to be the “immediate source” of film noir. Around 20 percent of the noir films made between 1941 and 1948 are from novels and short stories. How do these two art forms relate though? By examing the style of Dashiel Hammett, James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler, and finally Cornell Woolrich one can see how a verbal art can influence a visual art.
Dashiell Hammett is considered to be one of the first true and ground-breaking hard-boiled fiction writers. His fiction was hard-boiled, terse, sharp, and to the point. It is a very simple writing style. Rarely are there long sentences in his fiction as well other noir fiction. This helps greatly in the transfer from book to movie. “The result is that the books, like films, can be devoured in one sitting.” The dialogue is the key to a lot of the books. The central character, though sometimes written in the third person but more often in the first, is usually the only thing we follow in the movie. When he is knocked out the camera goes out of focus and fades out. The main character is almost always in the scene. In the example of The Maltese Falcon, there are very few scenes that Bogart is not in. He is our center. One scene from the book appears in the movie practically word for word. Bogart, as Sam Spade, talks to Mary Astor, as Brigid O’Shaughnessy, about his personal code. This is one of the key noir aspects. The hero may not live by society’s norms but by his own.
“When a man’s partner is killed . . . he’s supposed to do something about it. It doesn’t make any difference what you think of him. He was your partner and you’re supposed to do something about it . . .”
Cain is different from the other pulp writers in that he considers himself much more of a literary presence. He took himself seriously, never publishing in Black Mask or other pulp magazines like that believing that what he did was true literature. Hollywood producers were wary of this type of writer. They had been hiring many of the literary types as screenwriters in cases which they were not suited for. A fine example is that of William Faulkner being hired as the chief screenwriter for Howard Hawks’ version of The Big Sleep. His and Chandler’s styles only coincide in very limited cases.
But as for Cain, his stories often involve a criminal as their anti-hero, a key facet again in noir. In Cain he is almost always giving the narration. In the end we find out what drastic event has occurred and what has happened to the central character. “Although we don’t know, until the end, where the stories are told, or at precisely what point in time, an aura of doom nonetheless hovers over both narrations.” This voice-over is held true during the film. Both Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice have famous opening dialogues. It is this doom which is so often held in film noir. Examples of this being Laura and The Killers. In Laura we see the detective become obsessed with the victim in death. In The Killers we have the death of “the Swede” in the great opening moments of the movie, probably one of the greatest noir openings. Yet the rest of the movie works in flashbacks to show the story of how “the swede” got to be where he was on that night when he was killed. The central character is one who is dead only minutes after the opening credits end. Doom. It hangs over noir like a San Francisco fog. “Cain is a shrewd American original whose four major novels are striking premonitions of the sensibility that underlies film noir.”
Chandler, one of the great noir novelists, follows Hammett’s tradition and respects him greatly. His hero, Philip Marlowe is a classic. All the novels are written in first person narration. It is almost a stream-of-conciousness style and this appears most of all in Robert Montgomery’s film version of The Lady in the Lake. In the film we have one camera angle, Marlowe’s. We never see Marlowe except in carefully thought out mirror reflections. We see everything from his view in amazing first-person camera work.
Chandler’s Marlowe has that loner quality, staying away from women and most everyone else, prevalent in noir. Chandler gives an excellent description of what the noir private detective should be in his famous essay “The Simple Art of Murder.” This essay works as a perfect model for so many noir protagonists. One can correlate the following passage to almost any noir detective:
“But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero; he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor-by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world. I do not care much about his private life; he is neither a eunuch nor a satyr; I think he might seduce a duchess and I am quite sure he would not spoil a virgin; if he is a man of honor in one thing, he is that in all things. He is a relatively poor man, or he would not be a detective at all. He is a common man or he could not go among common people. He has a sense of character, or he would not know his job. He will take no man's money dishonestly and no man's insolence without a due and dispassionate revenge. He is a lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him. He talks as the man of his age talks-that is, with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness. The story is this man's adventure in search of a hidden truth, and it would be no adventure if it did not happen to a man fit for adventure. He has a range of awareness that startles you, but it belongs to him by right, because it belongs to the world he lives in. If there were enough like him, the world would be a very safe place to live in, without becoming too dull to be worth living in.”
That is the noir character. Alone, a loner in a world he knows he can’t fix. Alone in a world that has turned bad, full of betrayal, deceit, dishonesty, crime, and vice. Maybe it always was bad. Yet, he keeps his own personal code of honor. It is the only useless thing left for him to hold onto.
Cornell Woolrich is often one of the neglected noir novelists though probably the most noir of all. He also went by the nom de plume William Irish for his noir novels (before then he had been a Fitzgerald imitator writing jazz-age novels). He is an extremely visual author and is therefore one of the greatest stylistic transfers from book to film style. Woolrich was said to have had a “surveyor’s eye.” His passages greatly reflect this. He contributes to the mise en scene of noir. He creates a visually noir world. “The midnight streets, furnished rooms, low bars, dance halls, precinct offices, rain, heat, shadows, whiskey fumes, and cigarette - all the familiar elements of New York noir’s mise en scene” this is the situation which Woolrich is creating. A classic example of his visual noir style is this excerpt from Deadline at Dawn:
“The street lampposts, few and far apart, would talcum them thinly white for a moment or two like something sifting downward from the punctures of a reversed container, then their figures would darken again, blend into the gloom.”
An intensely visual scene that maintains the dark, black aspect of noir. From The Black Curtain we get the auditory example of shoes hitting pavement, another key element in film.
“[The] slight, soft grate of straining leather made each time - nothing so acute as a squeak - the cushioned thud of their incessant fall upon the pavement. The rhythm of the walk - pat-pat, pat-pat-pat, pat. You hear the sound at night when the streets are still, when someone’s coming toward you in the distance.”
The stories seem to read as if they were a script with lighting and sound direction, even more as if the movie had been watched and then a book had been written from it.
In a description of the film The Black Curtain, David Reid and Jayne L. Walker point out that the “noir style may have been in the obscure director Jack Hively’s eye and is certainly in Sparkuhl’s cinematography, but it is also already indelibly present in Woolrich’s prose.” Continuing onward they discuss another Woolrich classic, The Phantom Lady and show that “the mise en scene of the films most gripping visual and auditory sequences was already scripted, in minute detail, in the novel as it had been in The Black Curtain.” The final examples of Woolrich’s visual style are taken from Frank Krutnik’s book In a Lonely Street: Film Noir, Genre, and Masculinity and are some of the best examples. Krutnik sites the following three, perfectly chosen examples.
“(i) They sat patiently watching the montage of the revue, scene blending into scene with the superimposed effect of motion picture dissolves;
(ii) The bars of light made cicatrices against us . . .;
(iii) The next two hours were a sort of Dante-esque Inferno . . . It was the phantasmagoria or their shadows, looming black, wavering high on the ceiling walls.”
These can all obviously be seen to be visual techniques. Film language is even used in them.
Film noir, the dark film that sends us into a world of disillusionment, a world where some of us might not want to go comes from the literature. The stories are about people trying to find good in a bad world. A world that seems to be so filled with bad. This can visually be seen in the black and white film of film noir. Many people related to these stories. It was a time of expansion too fast for expansion in virtue. It was the dog eat dog world of the growing city. The culture reflected it and so did the literature and the film of the time.
Works Cited
Krutnik, Frank. In a Lonely Street: Film Noir, Genre, and Masculinity. London; Routledge, 1991.
Irish, William. The Best of William Irish. Philadelphia; J.B. Lippincott co., 1944.
Hirsch, Foster. The Dark Side of the Screen: Film Noir. San Diego; A.S. Barnes & Co., Inc., 1981.
Copjec, Joan ed. Shades of Noir. London; Verso, 1993.
http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~nick/e309k/projects/project3/final/Cl ark-Delgado/theallure.html
"And this is the verdict, that the light came into the world, but people perferred darkness to light, because their works were evil." - John 3:19
© 1996 philbert@icanect.net
This page hosted by 
Get your own Free Home Page
