Detective stories—especially stories involving hardboiled private detectives—are one of the principal narrative models for film noir. Of the five films initially identified with noir by Frank and Chartier, Otto Preminger’s Laura (1944)is a detective story of sorts, while John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon (1941) and Edward Dmytryk’s Murder, My Sweet (1944) are based, respectively, on classic novels by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, featuring Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe, perhaps America’s two best-known hardboiled detectives. Laura is a much more idiosyncratic detective noir story, partly because it involves a police detective, the upright Mark McPherson (Dana Andrews), rather than a private detective. Otherwise, the on-screen clash between characters played by Clifton Webb and Vincent Price provides campy highlights to an otherwise straightforward whodunit that is nevertheless complicated by the fact that the eponymous Laura (Gene Tierney), supposedly a murder victim, turns up alive halfway through. There is a real murder victim, though, and McPherson manages to solve that case (along the way becoming obsessed with Laura), even if Webb steals the film with his performance. In any case, detective stories have come to be associated strongly with film noir in the popular consciousness, though such stories are probably actually more common in neo-noir films than in the films of the original noir cycle.
Still, many of the most important noir films have involved private detectives, and there are many reasons why detective films (as well as the larger and more general category of crime films) should be so central to such a crucial cultural phenomenon as film noir. For one thing, this focus on crime and detection generates compelling narratives that feature compelling characters. In particular, the private detective is the virtual embodiment of American individualism, a key element of the capitalist or “bourgeois” ideology that has long been crucial to the American national identity. The classic private detective, especially of the hardboiled type, is a lone individual living by his own code of ethics and trying to enact his own vision of justice, even though this vision might not match up with those of the police or of society as a whole. Moreover, as Ernest Mandel has argued, “the evolution of the crime story does indeed reflect, as if in a mirror, the evolution of bourgeois ideology, of social relations in a bourgeois society, perhaps even of the capitalist mode of production itself” (Delightful Murder 134). Moreover, detective and crime stories present extensive opportunities for social critique. For example, they often feature characters who are driven to crime out of desperation because society does not provide appropriate support for the dire situations in which they find themselves. Or, as Mandel puts it, the history of the crime story is essentially the history of capitalist society, a society that “in and of itself breeds crime, originates in crime, and leads to crime” (135).
It is thus perhaps no accident that the film conventionally considered to be the first film noir was a detective film. The Maltese Falcon, based on the 1930 novel of the same title by Hammett, features Humphrey Bogart as tough-talking (and genuinely tough) private eye Sam Spade. Perhaps the first fully noir detective film, it might also be the greatest noir detective film. Bogart, named the greatest American film “legend” of all time in a 1999 poll conducted by the American film institute, owes much of that status to his performances in film noir, and The Maltese Falcon is perhaps his most important noir film—though his own greatest noir performance is probably as a radically alienated screenwriter in In a Lonely Place (1950). Spade, because of his strong (if rather eccentric) sense of right and wrong, stands out here in a world full of corruption, as all the other characters—including femme fatale Brigid O’Shaughnessy (Mary Astor) scramble to achieve their own selfish goals, no matter who gets hurt—or killed. And yet there is a way in which Spade is very much at home in the world of the film, very much able to understand the motivations of the other characters.
Murder, My Sweet, meanwhile,is based on Chandler’s 1940 novel Farewell, My Lovely; it was, in fact, released in the U.K. under that title. In the U.S., however, it was felt that the original title might cause filmgoers to think it was a romantic musical, especially as star Dick Powell was well known for appearing in such musicals. Here, though, the baby-faced Powell delivers a surprisingly effective version of Chandler’s Marlowe, who stands even further apart from the world around him than does Spade in The Maltese Falcon. Marlowe, in fact, observes the events of the film from an oddly distanced, bemused perspective, much less able than Spade had been to understand those around him. Spade always seems one step ahead of the action; Marlowe always seems one step behind, partly because the world in which he finds himself is far more absurd and makes much less sense.
The Maltese Falcon and Murder, My Sweet will be discussed in detail in this course. Other especially important noir detective films include The Big Sleep (1946), another classic noir detective film based on a novel by Chandler (the 1939 novel of the same title)[1]. Here, Marlowe navigates a rather absurd Los Angeles landscape amid a famous for its complex, convoluted plot. The Big Sleep is clearly designed as a star vehicle for Bogart, who with this film became associated with the roles of both Spade and Marlowe. Bogart’s Marlowe is a bit tougher than Powell’s had been, but still lacks the rough-edged quality of Bogart’s Spade from The Maltese Falcon. He also here has a tender side, including a subplot (significantly embellished from the novel) involving his relationship with Vivian Sternwood, played by Bogart’s then-new wife, Lauren Bacall. Indeed, much of the marketing for this film attempted to capitalize on the public’s fascination with the glamor couple, who had first been seen on screen together in the 1944 film To Have and Have Not. Possibly Chandler’s raciest novel, this one required considerable modification to get past the Production Code, but director Howard Hawks, one of the Hollywood’s most successful mainstream directors, was a master craftsman who was up to the task. It probably didn’t hurt that he had an all-star team of screenwriters, including the novelist William Faulkner, as well as Leigh Brackett and Jules Furthman (a Hollywood veteran who, among other things, had co-scripted To Have and Have Not, along with Faulkner). And yet, the contrast between the source material of the original novel and the Hollywood craftsmanship of the finished film creates tensions and interesting effects that go beyond the craftsmanship itself.
In 1947, Marlowe returned to the screen in still another incarnation with Robert Montgomery’s adaptation of Chandler’s 1943 novel The Lady in the Lake. Though a generally undistinguished adaptation, this film is notable for being shot from the point of view of Marlowe (played by director Montgomery), thus mimicking Chandler’s habitual first-person style of narration. Thus, except for an occasional insert in which he addresses the audience directly, Marlowe is never seen on screen, except when he is in front of a mirror and can thus see himself. This technique makes Lady in the Lake stand out, though in another way it is simply a specific example of a characteristic it shares with so many noir films—the tendency to put a great deal of emphasis on style.
Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly (1955), vaguely based on Mickey Spillane’s 1952 detective novel Kiss Me, Deadly, updates the noir detective film to include Mike Hammer, the misogynistic, commie-hating protagonist who made Spillane a huge commercial success in the 1950s. Aldrich’s film, however, adds a significant amount of Cold War anxiety to Spillane’s novel, which had been about organized crime, by converting it into an espionage narrative centering on the threat of nuclear catastrophe. At the same time, the film presents Hammer (played by Ralph Meeker) in an extremely unflattering light that emphasizes his violence and brutality. Then the whole thing ends with a bang.
Finally, just to emphasize the versatility of noir detective stories, one might also take note of Fritz Lang’s While the City Sleeps (1956). This film is rather late in the noir cycle, standing apart from high noir in the refinement of its visual style, which lacks the harshness and starkness of so many noirs, while still showing occasional signs of Lang’s Expressionist roots. It is also an unusual noir in that it employs comedy extensively—and even has a comic ending. Otherwise, the film displays a number of crucial noir characteristics, including the dark nature of the troubled serial killer whose murderous attacks on women, motivated by his own gender insecurity, underlie the entire plot. However, the killer (dubbed the “Lipstick Killer” in the media and played by John Drew Barrymore) actually has relatively little screen time, most of which is taken up by said media. In particular, having just inherited his father’s media empire but having no desire to run it, wastrel Walter Kyne (Vincent Price) decides to amuse himself by having the heads of his company’s three major departments compete to see who can identify the killer before the police, the winner to take over the leadership of the company. This contest initiates a competitive scramble in which all involved acquit themselves rather badly—making the key noir point that these respectable media executives are not that morally superior to the serial killer they are chasing. At least the killer has the excuse of being mentally ill, while the executives mostly seem to be just ruthless and ambitious.
Neo-Noir Detective Films
This course will include a detailed discussion of Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974), which features Jack Nicholson as private detective Jake Gittes. Chinatown is a superb film with extremely high production values throughout, but it is perhaps most striking for the highly self-conscious way itplays with the tropes of noir detective films. Its success seemed to announce that neo-noir was a genuine phenomenon, though it was neither the first neo-noir film nor even the first neo-noir detective film. As early as 1966, Jack Smight’s transitional film Harper (based on a novel by the Canadian Ross Macdonald, often compared with Chandler[2]) was moving close to neo-noir territory. Chinatown was also preceded in 1973 by Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye, based on Chandler’s 1953 novel of the same title. The Long Goodbye mimics noir detective films rather playfully (but respectfully), updating the story to the 1970s, though Marlowe himself often seems to think he is still in the 1950s. Written by noir veteran Leigh Brackett, The Long Goodbye is another excellent example of the way neo-noir films often depart significantly from their noir predecessors, but in ways that do not ask us to revise our vision of those predecessors.
French director Roger Vadim’s Night Games (1980) is an important neo-noir film made at the beginning of an explosion in neo-noir production in the 1980s—and indeed helping to trigger that explosion. Starring Gene Hackman, this unusually bleak film continues a neo-noir push into more erotic territory and might have been a bit ahead of its time. It was not a commercial or critical success at the time of its initial release, though its reputation has steadily grown over time. Released only a few years after Chinatown, Night Moves makes for an interesting comparison with that film, partly because it (like The Long Goodbye) modernizes its setting to the time of its making, while Chinatown places its action back in the 1930s.
A number of other neo-noir detective films appeared in the 1970s, as well, including direct remakes of several classic noir detective films in the 1970s, beginning with an undistinguished TV film remake of Double Indemnity in 1973. This remake was then followed by remakes of Murder, My Sweet and The Big Sleep in 1975 and 1978, both featuring aging noir star Robert Mitchum (in his sixties by the time of the release of the second of these) in the role of Marlowe.The first of these remakes was entitled Farewell, My Lovely, thus restoring the title of Chandler’s original novel. It was, however, unable to recapture the magic of the original film. Meanwhile, the remake of The Big Sleep oddly shifts the action to London, thus losing the Los Angeles setting that was so crucial to Chandler’s writing[3].
Neo-noir detective films of the 1980s moved in a variety of new directions. For example, Brian DePalma, who made a string of neo-noir films during this period, made another standout in this category in Blow Out (1981), in which a sound effects man from the film industry plays detective—with shocking results. 1984 saw the release of Blood Simple, by Joel and Ethan Coen, featuring a highly quirky detective who isn’t even the central character and announcing what would be an extensive career in noir film by the Coens. In terms of detective films, their most important contribution to neo-noir was The Big Lebowski (1998), which mimics the work of Chandler is a highly postmodern fashion that pushes the boundaries of noir about as much as possible yet shows a film-lover’s respect for the original noir films[4]. Here, laid-back stoner Jeff Lebowski (Jeff Bridges), better known as “The Dude,” fulfills the Marlowe role as he stumbles his way through an investigation that becomes increasingly more complicated—and that made him one of the most beloved film characters of recent decades.
David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986) is also a neo-noir detective story in which an ill-suited non-detective plays the main detective role. Here, young Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan) tries to solve the mystery of Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rosselini), a decidedly unconventional femme fatale. Indeed, many neo-noir films of the 1980s and 1990s featured non-professional detectives attempting to solve mysteries that lure them into decidedly noirish worlds. Meanwhile, many neo-noir detective films of the 1980s replaced private detectives with police detectives or other government operatives. For example, the main detective in William Friedkin’s To Live and Die in L.A. (1985) is a Secret Service agent, in a film that brought new levels of action to noir. And Michael Mann’s Manhunter (1986) features FBI agent Will Graham (William Petersen) but perhaps most memorably introduces film audiences to Hannibal Lecter (here played by Brian Cox). Some of the best neo-noir films of the 1990s were in this vein, as well. For example, the best-known version of the Lecter character made his first appearance in Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs (1991), which moved toward revisionary noir through its use of a female detective in FBI agent Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster). However, this film is so dominated by Anthony Hopkins’ performance as Lecter that Foster’s own impressive performance probably has less impact than it should have. Other neo-noir films of the 1990s—such as David Fincher’s Seven (1995), the Coens’ Fargo (1996), and Curtis Hanson’s L.A. Confidential (1997)—also featured police detectives (and sometimes police villains). These films broke new ground in a number of ways, though they did not ask viewers to change the way they saw the original noir detective films. Fargo, by again featuring a female police detective, probably came the closest in this regard, but even something like Jake Kasdan’s Zero Effect (1998), which spoofed the noir detective genre, did not do so in ways that would be likely to cause viewers to begin to look at the original noir films in new ways.
Revisionary Noir Detective Films
Neo-noir films of this period started to move beyond the original noir cycle in interesting ways, many by challenging viewers to play detective just to try to figure out what was going on in the film. Such films include Bryan Singer’s The Usual Suspects (1995), Alex Proyas’s Dark City (1998), Lynch’s Lost Highway (1996) and Mulholland Drive (2001), Fincher’s Fight Club (1999), and Christopher Nolan’s Memento (2000). In addition, some noir detective films of the 1990s directly took on the original noir cycle in ways that might lead to a revision of our understanding of that cycle, thus anticipating the revisionary noir films of the twenty-first century. One of the most important of these is Carl Franklin’s Devil in a Blue Dress (1995), which, in fact, can already be considered a revisionary noir film in its own right. Based on the 1990 novel by Walter Mosley, his first published book in what would become a distinguished literary career in a number of genres, this film introduced film audiences to African American detective Easy Rawlins (Denzel Washington), who would go on to be featured in fourteen novels and a number of short stories by Mosley. Rawlins owes some of his lineage to the classic noir detectives, but his black cultural perspective places him in a distinctly different milieu that sets his world apart from the worlds of Spade or Marlowe, while also suggesting that the treatment of race (or lack thereof) in the original noir cycle needs to be re-examined.
Going into the twenty-first century, revisionist noir films became more and more common, challenging the norms of the original cycle in new and re-invigorating ways. Among such films, one might place Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller’s Sin City (2005), a comic book adaptation that pushes the envelope of noir violence in exaggerated ways, calling attention to the sanitized and muted representation of violence in the original noir films, suggesting that these films might thus potentially made violence seem more palatable. Sin City is also technically innovative, producing digitized visuals that mimic the appearance of the comic book series on which it is based. It should be noted, though, that Sin City is actually a series of four interconnected short films, only one of which, “The Big Fat Kill,” is a pure detective story.
In 2014 Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice (2014) became the first novel by the esteemed postmodern novelist Thomas Pynchon to be adapted to film. This film, clearly recalling the work of Chandler (perhaps as filtered through The Big Lebowski) this film, is set in the hippie culture of 1970 Los Angeles, which already gives it a distinctly different feel from that of the original noir films, as does its largely comic tone. It will be discussed in detail in this course as an example of a revisionary noir film because of the way it potentially causes us to re-assess the detective films of the original noir cycle. In somewhat the same vein is David Robert Mitchell’s Under the Silver Lake (2018), in which an ordinary guy plays detective as he seeks a mysteriously disappeared woman in some decidedly strange regions of contemporary Los Angeles society, taking him well outside the territory covered by predecessors such as Philip Marlowe.
Partly because neo-noir films had made noir motifs so familiar, such motifs appeared in any number of films of the early twenty-first century in modes that were somewhat decoupled from the original noir cycle, often allowing these motifs to be used in ways that might cause us to revise our assessment of their meaning in the original noir cycle. Other revisionary noir films that are either literally detective films (including police detectives) or function effectively like detective films include Jane Campion’s In the Cut (2003), Rian Johnson’s Brick (2005), Fincher’s Zodiac (2007) and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011), the Coens’ No Country for Old Men (2007), Debra Granik’s Winter’s Bone (2010), Denis Villeneuve’s Prisoners (2013), and Edward Norton’s Motherless Brooklyn (2019). Quentin Tarantino, all of whose work displays strong noir influences, deserves special mention in this group for The Hateful Eight (2015) because it is both a revisionary noir detective film and a revisionary Western[5]. All of these films, though, illustrate the great versatility of noir motifs, which have demonstrated tremendous durability over time, partly because they can be used in so many different ways in so many different kinds of films.
Works Cited
Booker, M. Keith. The Coen Brothers’ America. Rowman and Littlefield, 2019.
Mandel, Ernest. Delightful Murder: A Social History of the Crime Story. University of Minnesota Press, 1984.
Phillips, Gene D. Creatures of Darkness: Raymond Chandler, Detective Fiction, and Film Noir. University Press of Kentucky, 2003.
Notes
[1] Chandler was especially important as a source of material for film noir. Ten films have been adapted directly from his writing, ranging from The Falcon Takes Over (1942), a loose adaptation of Farewell, My Lovely, to the 1998 neo-noir adaptation of Poodle Springs, the novel left unfinished on Chandler’s death but finished by Robert B. Parker for publication in 1989. In addition, a number of television series have been based on Chandler’s writing or characters. Chandler himself also received screenwriting credit on five original noir films released between 1944 and 1951, most notably including Double Indemnity (1944). On Chandler and noir film, see Phillips.
[2] Mandel describes Macdonald as a “follower” of Chandler, calling Macdonald “the most prolific representative of the creators of tough-guy private eyes” (37). Only a handful of film adaptations have been made of Macdonald’s many novels, the best of which are Harper and The Drowning Pool (1975), both featuring Paul Newman as private detective Lew Harper (Lew Archer in Macdonald’s originals).
[3] This shift might have been partly a nod to the fact that Chandler himself lived in England between the ages of 12 and 24. But Chandler was, first and foremost, a Los Angeles writer.
[4] As I note in The Coen Brothers’ America, the Coens’ Miller’s Crossing (1989) is greatly influenced by the work of Hammett, so the Coens have covered both of these major hardboiled fiction writers (50).
[5] One might compare here Villeneuve’s 2017 film Blade Runner 2049, which is both a noir detective film and a science fiction film. However, this sequel to Blade Runner (1982) enters into dialogue more with that predecessor than with previous noir films as a whole. As a result, it should probably be considered a neo-noir film, rather than a revisionary noir.