The Film Noir Lost Man
While it is often noted for its strong (and sometimes deadly) women characters, film noir remains a male-dominated genre. The vast majority of film noir protagonists are male, though these protagonists are often a different sort of male than the typical film protagonist. Many of them are more villain than hero; some are downright psychotic. They are often weak, confused, unsteady; they are anything but the strong, capable protagonists that are typical of mainstream classic Hollywood films. They are typically alienated from the society around them, often to the point of suffering extreme psychic damage. Sometimes, they are led to their doom by conniving women—or by perfectly innocent women who just happen inadvertently to bring out the worst in these men. More often, however, the lost men of film noir are led to their doom by the circumstances in which they live, so that their failures can be taken as a criticism of the capitalist system and of the whole concept of the American Dream.
That such characters would arise in a genre rooted in the anxieties of the Depression and World War II should come as no surprise. But, of course, a whole generation of American men in the years after the war were suffering from considerable (often undiagnosed) psychic damage as a result of their traumatic wartime experiences. Meanwhile, the postwar years were filled with a number of anxieties of their own, as American men had to adapt to changing gender roles in the domestic space as well as changing roles in the increasingly corporate public world of the workplace. Any number of American films beyond film noir expressed these anxieties. For example, the embattled state of American manhood in the late 1950s is perhaps best captured in Jack Arnold’s memorable The Incredible Shrinking Man (1957), scripted by Richard Matheson based on Matheson’s 1956 novel, The Shrinking Man. In the film, protagonist Robert Scott Carey (Grant Williams) is accidentally exposed first to a strange, floating, radioactive cloud, then to pesticides, causing him to start to shrink. The film thus reflects contemporary concerns about both radioactive and chemical contamination, but the real focus is on the psychic impact of the shrinkage on Carey, who grows increasingly bitter and withdrawn (even toward his loyal and faithful wife, Louise, played by Randy Stuart) as his decreasing size makes him feel more and more like a freak, unlike anyone else in the world[1].
If Carey thus becomes a marker of the general alienation felt by so many in the 1950s, his predicament also dramatizes a typical 1950s fear of being overwhelmed by forces larger than oneself. The fact that he remains entrapped in his own home gives those forces a particularly domestic twist, especially in the way Carey experiences his decreasing size as a loss of virility. Size does matter, apparently, and much of his resentment toward Louise comes from his realization that, as he gets smaller and smaller, he is increasingly unable to fulfill his conjugal obligations, coming to feel more and more emasculated.
The Incredible Shrinking Man actually has a great deal in common with film noir, anticipating later films—such as Blade Runner (1982)—that would more famously combine science fiction with noir. All boundaries tend to be porous where noir is concerned, and virtually any kind of noir film might potentially contain a lost-man character. I am concerned here, though, with films in which a classic lost man is the principal (typically the point-of-view) character. Of the films originally associated with film noir by Frank and Chartier, two might be considered lost-man films of this type, both directed by Billy Wilder. In Double Indemnity (1944), insurance salesman Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) leads a soulless existence—then thinks he has spotted a chance to achieve wealth, romance, and adventure thanks to meeting Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck). The resulting web of seduction, murder, and deceit makes this film a classic noir films, while making Dietrichson the prototypical femme fatale character and Stanwyck the ultimate femme fatale actress. Co-written by Wilder and hard-boiled legend Raymond Chandler epitomizes film noir as much as any other single film. However, because the character of Dietrichson has played such a crucial role in noir history, Double Indemnity will be considered among the woman-oriented noir films in the third section of this volume[2].
The other Wilder film identified as an original noir film was Lost Weekend (1945), a film that is these days often considered not to be noir at all because its plot differs so substantially from those of most noir films. Lost Weekend also seems a bit outside the noir tradition in that it was accepted so enthusiastically into the Hollywood mainstream, winning the Academy Award for Best Picture, an Oscar for Best Director for Wilder, and an Oscar for Best Actor for Ray Milland. (It won a fourth Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for Wilder and the woman science fiction writer Leigh Brackett.) Here Milland stars as Don Birnam, an alcoholic writer who gradually unravels as a result of his malady. In this sense, it is very much a lost-man noir film, except for the fact that, in the end, Birnam (with the help of a good woman) triumphs over his demons, gives up drinking, and resolves to write a novel about the evils of alcohol. Even this ending, though, cannot obscure the essential darkness of the remainder of the film.
Fritz Lang, the other great master of the lost-man film noir, was (like Wilder) an import from the German film industry. In Lang’s The Woman in the Window (1944), mild-mannered psychology professor Richard Wanley (Edward G. Robinson) bemoans the fact that middle age finds him living a stodgy, routine, and increasingly uninteresting life. Then he spots a portrait of a woman in a store window that sends him drifting into fantasy, only later (apparently) to meet the woman who is the subject of the painting. Predictably, especially with his matronly wife and their kids out of town for the summer, Wanley’s meeting with femme fataleAlice Reed (Joan Bennett) leads only to trouble. But the trouble becomes surprisingly intense when Reed’s paramour, millionaire Claude Mazard (Arthur Loft), bursts into her apartment and attacks Wanley, who then kills Mazard in self-defense. Things go from bad to worse, until Wanley finally decides to commit suicide, in an ending made more tragic by the fact that, in an apparent deus ex machina twist, Heidt is shot down by police, seemingly letting Wanley and Reed off the hook, but too late. Never fear, though, Wanley then awakes to find that the whole misadventure was a dream—an ending that was necessitated by the Hollywood Production Code, which sometimes forced film noir to become more complex and clever, but in this case simply imposed a fairly lame ending on what is otherwise a genuinely interesting film noir. In particular, The Woman in the Window indicates the ways in which bourgeois comfort and respectability can lead to a numbing routinization, but can also be taken away in a heartbeat, especially if one breaks even the tiniest rule of bourgeois propriety. The depiction of the professor as out of his element in this world of seductive women and violent men is also a variation on a key noir theme (the ordinary man unable to cope with extraordinary circumstances and thus driven to his doom), though the fact that he seems to act so stupidly when faced with the real world, rather than the theoretical one of his books, is a bit problematic and potentially anti-intellectual.
Very similar themes would be revisited in Lang’s Scarlet Street the very next year, with much the same cast. This time Robinson stars as Chris Cross, a henpecked middle-aged husband and lowly cashier who dreams of being an artist. Bennett returns as Kitty March, a femme fatale who becomes the focus of Cross’s fantasies of escape from the boring routine of his life. Duryea returns as Johnny, her boyfriend, who helps her con Cross into stealing money to rent an apartment for her, with predictably disastrous results. This one ends with another would-be suicide—which couldn’t succeed, due to the Production Code), though what follows is perhaps even darker.
Robinson’s two films with Lang show the way in which the American dream can fail, even for respectable, seemingly ordinary American men. Edgar G. Ulmer’s Detour (1945), on the other hand, focuses on a much more marginal figure. Here, Al Roberts (Tom Neal) is one of life’s outcast losers, excluded from the American dream altogether. Detour is a much more marginal film as well, shot quickly and on a shoestring budget. The result, though, is a noir masterpiece that illustrates much of what has made film noir such an important part of American cinematic history. Though he attempts to achieve his dreams, Roberts is a pessimist who finds it hard to believe that life can bring him anything but misery. As discussed in detail in this section, events of the film tend to suggest that he is right, though they also suggest that capitalism, rather than fate, is the real culprit.
1947 was a good year for lost-man noir, seeing the release of two key examples from the genre. The lost man of Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past is a former private detective (played by Robert Mitchum, one of noir’s biggest stars), so it combines lost-man noir with detective noir. It also features another key example of a femme fatale in Jane Greer’s Kathie Moffatt, who leads the protagonist astray. It thus joins Double Indemnity as an excellent example of a film noir that spans multiple categories. Out of the Past will be discussed in detail in this section. Edmund Goulding’s Nightmare Alley, based on the 1946 novel by William Lindsay Gresham, had to considerable tone down both the politics and the lost man of the novel (played here by A-list star Tyrone Power), but it is still a solid film noir.
André de Toth’s Pitfall (1948) is something like Double Indemnity lite. Here ethically lost insurance man John Forbes (Dick Powell) is ultimately led to kill by his illicit love for a woman, but the killing isn’t really murder (since it is partly a form of self-defense) and the woman involved, Mona Stevens (Lizabeth Scott) is just a lonely girl trying to get ahead and not quite manipulative enough to be a true femme fatale. In fact, the real villain of the piece is a private detective named MacDonald (Raymond Burr), whose (barely encouraged) lust for Stevens and unscrupulous methods in pursuing that lust are the real source of all the film’s trouble. Even MacDonald, though, doesn’t rise to the level of psychopathic evil that is often found in film noir, remaining at the level of mere swarminess. Silver and Ward call Pitfall “the key film noir detailing the fall of the errant husband from bourgeois respectability” (228). This aspect of the film, of course, is a bit clichéd, but the film’s exploration of the emptiness of the American dream is, in fact, quite cogent.
D.O.A. (1950), directed by the talented noir cinematographer Rudolph Maté, features another bored American male who gets into trouble while in search of adventure—though in this case the trouble actually emanates from his routine work and not from his attempt to escape that work. This film also, as much as any other noir film, illustrates the tendency of many noir protagonists to be doomed, no matter what they do in the present day of the film, possibly for something they did much earlier. The film begins with a frame narrative in which Frank Bigelow (Edmond O’Brien), an accountant in the small California town of Banning, staggers into a Los Angeles police station to announce that he has been murdered. Most of the film is a flashback, detailing the story he then tells the police.
Among the many other “lost-man” noir films, special mention should be reserved for In a Lonely Place (1950), directed by Nicholas Ray, whose Rebel without a Cause (1955) would become one of the great cinematic exploration of 1950s male alienation. Among other things, In a Lonely Place features Humphrey Bogart in what is perhaps his greatest noir performance. Though set within the Hollywood film industry, this genuinely dark postwar film actually contains little overt criticism of the film industry, leaving it for audiences to draw their own conclusions in that regard. Instead, the darkness of this film itself derives almost exclusively from the personal demons of protagonist Dixon Steele (Humphrey Bogart), a bitter and violent screenwriter. Steele’s radical alienation may arise in part from his experiences with the film industry (and with capitalism as a whole), but that possibility is never overtly explored in the film. Instead, we are left to speculate on the causes of his angst, with hints that it might be rooted in his experiences in World War II.
The Neo-Noir Lost Man
Lost men continued to populate noir films in the neo-noir era, especially given the fact that the collapse of the Production Code allowed neo-noir film to feature more extreme characters. Perhaps the clearest example of this phenomenon concerns neo-noir adaptations of the novels of Jim Thompson, who had been the mad genius of lost-man fiction during the time of the original noir cycle. However, his men were so radically estranged (and deranged) that his works simply couldn’t be adapted to film under the terms of the Production Code. The collapse of the Code made it more thinkable to adapt the works of Thompson, though the first neo-noir adaptations of Thompson’s work—Sam Peckinpah’s 1972 adaptation of Thompson’s 1958 novel The Getaway and Burt Kennedy’s 1976 adaptation of Thompson’s 1952 novel The Killer Inside Me—were both considerably bowdlerized in relation to the original novels. There was then some movement toward more faithful adherence to the spirit (if not the details) of Thompson originals in two slightly later French films: Série noire (1979), Alain Courneau’s adaptation of A Hell of a Woman (1954),and Coup de Torchon (1981), Bernard Tavernier’s adaptation of Pop. 1280 (1963). Thompson himself was also the subject of a literary revival in the 1980s and 1990s, a revival partly spurred by the crucial role given Thompson in Geoffrey O’Brien’s excellent survey of pulp crime fiction, Hardboiled America: Lurid Paperbacks and the Masters of Noir (first published in 1981). This revival saw the majority of Thompson’s novels come back into print and led to the publication of two book-length biographies, Michael McCauley’s Jim Thompson: Sleep with the Devil (1991) and Robert Polito’s award-winning Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson (1995). Amid this revival, Hollywood again turned to Thompson with a flurry of film adaptations of his work, beginning with The Kill-Off in 1989 and then two films from 1990, James Foley’s After Dark, My Sweet, and Stephen Frears’ The Grifters (based on Thompson’s 1963 novel). These two films were then followed by a second adaptation of The Getaway (1994) and by Hit Me, a 1996 adaptation of Thompson’s 1954 novel A Swell-Looking Babe[3]. Of all of these neo-noir adaptations of Thompson, The Grifters was probably the most successful as a film, though After Dark, My Sweet was probably the most faithful to Thompson’s original vision. It also features a protagonist who is a classic noir lost man, even if lacks the murderous insanity of the typical Thompson protagonist. That film will be discussed in detail in this class.
Other neo-noir lost men appeared in remakes of classic noir lost-man films, including such examples from the 1980s as Against All Odds (a 1984 remake of Out of the Past) and an updated D.O.A. (1988). Among original lost-man neo-noir films of that decade, Ivan Passer’s Cutter’s Way (1981) stands out as a competent thriller whose lost men are essentially emblems of the lost potential of the failed counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s. Meanwhile, Rutger Hauer’s title character in Robert Harmon’s The Hitcher (1986) is one of the most chillingly deranged villains in all of neo-noir film.
Moving into the 1990s, the three central criminals of Carl Franklin’s One False Move (1992) represent the key noir trope of soulless criminals on the run, wreaking havoc while the cops close in. Paul Schrader’s Affliction (1997) is neo-noir at its most bleak. It nominally features a police investigation, but the real focus is on the character (and the existential angst) of the film’s central cop, Nick Nolte’s Wade Whitehouse, whose descent from a position of respect to the role of unhinged killer is the real topic of the film—and the real aspect of the film that takes it into noir territory. And, of course, Bryan Singer’s 1995 neo-noir hit The Usual Suspects is a particularly interesting case of a noir lost man because it revolves around one ““Keyser Söze,” who might not even exist. Then again, “Söze” might just be an alias for Kevin Spacey’s Verbal Kint, whose overtly unreliable narration provides most of the plot of the film—which thus might not have ever happened, throwing pretty much everything about this film into doubt.
The neo-noir period of lost-man film was then topped off by the Coen Brothers’ The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001), perhaps the most extensive attempt to make a neo-noir film that looks and feels exactly like an original noir film, yet still adds additional updating touches. Heavily influenced by Double Indemnity, this film features Billy Bob Thornton as protagonist Ed Crane. Crane is a barber whose profession is typical of the pointlessness of all of his life: he keeps cutting hair, but the hair keeps growing back, and he ultimately gets nowhere. Indeed, as the very title of the film makes clear, Crane is a classic lost-man character, emotionally dead and completely alienated from the world around him, feeling that his life is pointless and empty.
While The Man Who Wasn’t There might well be the quintessential neo-noir lost-man film, such films continued to be made well into the twenty-first century. One example that is worthy of note is David Cronenberg’s A History of Violence (2005), in which a former gangster (played by Viggo Mortensen) has settled down into a peaceful small-town life, only to have his violent past come back to haunt him, somewhat in the mode of Out of the Past. Based on a 1997 graphic novel written by John Wagner and drawn by Vince Locke, Cronenberg’s film eschews the gritty, noirish black-and-white art of the original, opting for a more straightforward realistic style. It also tones down the horrifying violence of the graphic novel, which keeps it in neo-noir territory, while a more faithful adaptation would have probably pushed it into the realm of the neo-noir.
Having noted that A History of Violence qualifies as neo-noir, it should probably also be recalled that I noted in the introduction to the volume that another graphic novel adaptation from 2005, Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller’s Sin City (2005) is clearly a revisionary noir. In this sense, one might also mention Sam Mendes’ 2002 graphic novel adaptation Road to Perdition, which opts for a realistic visual style and tones down the violence of the original comic, thus keeping the film within the realm of neo-noir. Other comic adaptations that might be considered neo-noir lost-man films include From Hell (2001) and V for Vendetta (2006).
The Revisionary Noir Lost Man
A number of key revisionary noir films featuring lost men have been remakes of earlier noir or neo-noir novel adaptations that went beyond the original film and captured more of the spirit of the novel in portraying the travails of lost men. Examples of such remakes include Michael Winterbottom’s The Killer Inside Me (2010), which goes well beyond the 1976 neo-noir adaptation to capture more of the dark spirit of Jim Thompson’s 1952 novel. Meanwhile, Guillermo del Toro’s 2021 remake of Nightmare Alley, the original 1947 film noir adaptation of that novel, captured considerably more of the texture of the original novel. The remade The Killer Inside Me will be discussed in detail in this section.
Noir film in the early twenty-first century has been marked by considerable variety, as noir motifs have been used to enrich any number of films, including some that go well beyond the narrative models that were typical of the original noir cycle. For example, Dan Gilroy’s Nightcrawler (2014) features Jake Gyllenhaal as Lou Bloom, a petty criminal with big ambitions, just looking for the proper gimmick that will help him strike it rich. He finds something that works when he hits on the idea of shooting video of crime and accident scenes, then selling the video to the news department of a local TV station. Predictably, the unscrupulous Bloom pushes things too far, leading to the death of his assistant in a shutout between police and drug dealers that has been set up by Bloom himself. The truly lost Bloom feels absolutely no remorse, however, and ends the film expanding his highly successful operation with new employees. Meanwhile, his unethical, sensational approach seems to infect the TV news department as well, suggesting that his attitude is typical of a media environment that is willing to trade ethics for spectacle (and thus higher ratings). The original noir cycle occasionally veered into media critique—as in Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole (1951), about an unscrupulous newspaper reporter—but never to the extent seen in this film (though the cinematography of nighttime Los Angeles in this film is often classic noir).
Particularly notable among recent examples of revisionary lost-man noir is Lynne Ramsay’s You Were Never Really Here (2017), which could have easily been called The Man Who Wasn’t There had that title not already been taken. But Ramsay’s film is a far more radical exploration of the theme than the Coens’ film had been, moving into revisionary noir territory in the depth of its exploration of its central character. Here, Joaquin Phoenix delivers an outstanding noir performance as “Joe,” a man so damaged by a lifetime of trauma that he hardly has any selfhood left. “I’m just a hired gun,” as he says at one point, and he is indeed essentially reduced to his function in that capacity (though he tends to prefer the brutality of a ball peen hammer as a killing weapon). Joe does have some personal connection to his aging (and also damaged) mother, perhaps because of their shared trauma at the hands of Joe’s abusive father in Joe’s childhood. Joe now specializes in rescuing young girls who have been the victims of sex trafficking, but his attempt to rescue the daughter of a New York state senator leads him into a powerful political conspiracy that drives the plot of the film. He rescues the girl, but almost everyone he knows (including his mother) is killed in the process, leaving us to wonder exactly where Joe (and the girl, whose only remaining parent is also killed) will go from there. (One might compare here Fincher’s 2023 Netflix film The Killer, which also features a professional killer, but one who is motivated primarily by money and who is explored in far less interesting ways, keeping the film in the realm of neo-noir.)
Among other standout examples of revisionary noir films about lost men are two films that, at first, seem to belong to other genres. Andrew Dominik’s 2012 Killing Them Softly is, on the surface, a gangster film involving two Mafia hit men. But both Brad Pitt’s Jackie Cogan and James Gandolfini’s Mickey also qualify as lost men. The once-formidable Mickey has broken down into almost complete dysfunctionality by the time of the action of the film, while Jackie, though still a competent hit man, has descended into total cynicism. In fact, almost everyone in this film is cynical or broken, or both, though placing the action in the midst of the 2008 financial crisis suggests that there might be systemic reasons why the characters would be in this condition. As Cogan puts it, in a classic noir expression of cynicism about the American dream, ““I’m living in America, and in America you’re on your own. America’s not a country. It’s just a business.” In a somewhat similar multigeneric vein, S. Craig Zahler’s brutal Dragged Across Concrete (2018) is a combination heist film and cop buddy film, but its central character, Mel Gibson’s Detective Brett Ridgeman, clearly qualifies as a lost man. Ridgeman has not advanced in his career (largely due to his own questionable behavior), but he clearly blames the system for his loss of advancement and for his inability to provide for his wife and daughter in the way he feels he should. As a result, he resorts to a life of robbing criminals, rather than arresting them, with deadly results for himself (while one of his criminal targets ends up living in luxury, proving that crime can pay, after all).
Finally, the third film to be discussed in detail among the revisionary noir films in this section is Uncut Gems (2019), directed by Josh and Benny Safdie. Here, protagonist Howard Ratner (Adam Sandler) is a New York jewelry who travels in some decidedly questionable company, mostly because of his gambling addiction. He conceives a plan to make a big score in the gem business that will solve his ever-pressing money problems, but (being a noir lost man) all of his best-laid plans of course go astray—with tragic results. Ratner is a particularly interesting lost man, while this film’s inside look at the New York jewel business gives us an especially vivid milieu. However, what really pushes this film into the realm of revisionary noir is the overt Jewishness of the cultural world in which Ratner lives, something that is unprecedented in noir film, a fact that in itself calls attention to the substantial contributions made to noir film by Jewish filmmakers and performers, contributions that have hitherto been significantly underappreciated.
Works Cited
Bould, Mark. Film Noir: From Berlin to Sin City. Wallflower, 2005.
Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique. W. W. Norton, 2013 (originally published in 1963).
McCauley, Michael J. Jim Thompson: Sleep with the Devil. Mysterious, 1991.
O’Brien, Geoffrey. Hardboiled America: Lurid Paperbacks and the Masters of Noir. 1981. Expanded edition, Da Capo Press, 1997.
Polito, Robert. Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson. Vintage-Random House, 1995.
Notes
[1] It should be noted that Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963), one of the key manifestos of the women’s movement of the 1960s, actually began as an article in McCall’s magazine in 1957, the same year as the release of The Incredible Shrinking Man. Clearly, by 1957, the groundwork for the women’s movement was already being laid, and American women were becoming less and less willing blindly to enact the stereotypes of proper feminine behavior being providing them by “role models” such as television’s June Cleaver, Donna Reed, and Harriet Nelson.For their own part, American men, already beleaguered by the increasing pressures of corporate culture in the workplace, typically saw the rising women’s movement more as a threat than as an opportunity.
[2] Because of the investigations performed by Barton Keyes (Edward G. Robinson), Double Indemnity could also be considered a detective noir, illustrating how many noir categories it spans.
[3] During this period, there was also a film adaptation of a short story by Thompson, entitled This World, Then the Fireworks (1997).