Sometimes, often films are windows. They hold up their glass lenses, capture the view(s) on celluloid or digital hard drives, and re-present that world up on a big screen for you. Your eyes watch the landscapes and the people or things put in front of it, and you get to see a filtered view of the world around you. But a window is something you look out of, and I don’t think you look out of Brick (2005, Dir. Rian Johnson) no, I think you look into Brick, you walk into and immerse yourself into Brick. In that case window is a bad choice of word.
A better one might be portal.
It’s difficult to put into words why Brick works so well, which is my favourite kind of feeling. It’s difficult, because to really understand it you have to see it and listen to it, film being an audiovisual medium not a written one. Try and write out Brick and you have a beautifully elaborate and winding detective story but with only a pale imitation of its deliriously crisp and sharp visuals. The Californian sun burns brightly over this world, hanging in a clear blue sky which overwhelms my eyes. Maybe Rian Johnson would’ve written something along those lines, but you get to see it instead.
So let’s use these words then, especially since the characters in Brick are so intent on using them. In fact, following along the purest noir fashions, the words flow like a torrent over everything. The words race through the air and through your mind, characters building and tearing down and outwitting each other within a few breaths. It was a bit of a revelation for me to be confronted with a script so dense, even most neo-noirs fail to capture that style of dialogue, much preferring to just regurgitate the 40/50s aesthetic style of the film noir. But that’s my starting point, a script which moves like a locomotion building steam, it’s furnaces getting hotter and hotter under that burning sun.
Unfortunately this is not a book, and a script only goes so far. So the camera picks itself up (with a little help from cinematographer Steve Yedlin I’m sure) and shovels coal into the train’s furnace, with reckless stylistic abandon. In fact all its stylistic elements, its dynamic and absorbing visual composition and it’s eclectic and wild sound design, are engrossing in a way I haven’t experienced in a long long time. The style of this debut is sheer visionary work, the deft handling of so many different elements of film was just a delight in my eyes, no doubt about it. It’s world is so cohesive that after recovering from the jarring shock of the film noir world transplanted onto a high school is gotten over, it descends into a daylight nightmare which captured me, spun me around and dropped me off at the end to some Velvet Underground. It’s a ride I would’ve paid good money to see, and to see again.
But why am I bringing this up now? I’m sure many other film lovers have put forward their views on what makes Brick exceptional, and many more on what makes Brick garbage to them. It’s a film with a bold and out there style, which is always confrontational for critics. But I think for me, it’s a film I really needed to see at this moment in my life. It has been sitting in an unwatched pile for many years of my life, and I can say it has managed to restore some of my faith in cinema. Almost like a state of the nation address, but to me and my obsessive film brain.
See a director or anyone making a film can never truly understand what impact the film will make on its audience, especially as time passes. All the production team can do is build the best film they can and hope it stands up to the winds of time and opinion pieces. But for me, who seems to be quite frustrated with the sometimes anemic and safe mainstream cinema environment, the film is a beacon of light for me. For a film site which was made to talk about films with some depth, especially films which weren’t just the modern slew of rehashes, reboots and relentless adaptations. And Brick is that for me. Brick holds many of the ideas I wanted to grow and explore in my time doing this. It’s vibrant, it’s bold and unafraid to commit to an aesthetic which many would like to declare dated or worse, dead.
Brick is not just a portal into the world of Brendan, underground heroin rings and fast talking smart mouthed criminals. Brick is a portal into the past, it lives in the history of film noir and couldn’t exist without it. And it also a portal into the best kind of future, one where filmmakers take the disparate elements of the world which interest them and mould them into films which breathe life into the real world, filling it with stories that entrance its audience members in a way beyond pure action spectacle.
In short, they make films which are good and cool. It’s a lot to ask apparently, so we all better get started.
-Alex
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I recently decided to venture into providing myself with a cinematic education, simply by watching films. Unsure of where to start, I decided to choose the nebula of film noir. I can’t say why I decided to pick this genre, maybe its my overall fondness for the genre, maybe it was because I had just seen Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, maybe it was because it seems to represent the first significant shift in the entire shift American cinema since the introduction of sound. Perhaps a mix of all three, but the legacy of this genre still lives on, permeating like a virulent strain in the collective conscience of the cine-literate, one of the few genres to have given birth to a ‘neo’ form of itself (neo-noir). It’s knowledge imparts itself on two of my favourite works, Blade Runner and the Japanese Anime Cowboy Bebop. Maybe its simply that its sensibilities, its aura and feel, seem to be absolutely essential to the make up of cinema since then.
So I watched these 11 films for research, in no particular order:
-Gilda -The Maltese Falcon
-The Big Sleep -Gun Crazy
– Sweet Smell of Success -Double Indemnity
-The Postman Always Rings Twice – Strangers On A Train
-Sorry, Wrong Number -The Killers
-Touch of Evil
Plus four I did not see specifically for this matter, a while ago:
–The Lady From Shanghai – The Third Man
–Sunset Boulevard – Notorious
So with that, I’m just going to try and expound on what I learned, listened to and felt whilst I immersed myself in film noir.
THE INHABITANTS
It’s tough to describe the archetypes of film noir, simply because the characters that populate them are simply so vast and varied. Take the femme fatale, perhaps the most famous contribution to the canon of cinematic text, the raw, firey seductress who entices, entraps, ensnares the protagonist, induces the burgeoning evil laying in the heart of the man by sheer overwhelming sexual desire. On two occasions in the films I saw, the trope/archetype was used to its fullest extent, in Gun Crazy (see here)and in The Killers (see here). In fact, the prime example of this character is Kitty Collins, Ava Gardner’s character in The Killers.
She’s a temptress, a manipulator, a woman who inflames the passions of the macho men around her, one would perhaps even say caniving, as she ruthlessly manipulates the men around her to find the best deal, and the film condemns and ultimately punishes her, as we watch her plead with her dying husband to falsely absolve her of her crimes so she can get off scott free, and all the characters grinning with perverse enjoyment as she gets her comeuppance, like all woman do in film noir, right, case closed?
Well not really. Most of them are far more complex, and maneuver their ways through the ordeals very differently. I did an earlier post on Gilda and “Sorry, Wrong Number” , but the fate and portrayals of the woman vary wildly. It’s tough to talk about film noir without at least mentioning its internalised misogyny, where female characters are routinely punished or saved, always at the hands of their male perpetrators. But I’d like to put a strike through the idea that because of this, women in these films play second fiddle and are sidelined in favour of the male characters. Honestly the discussions related to the gender politics on this issue are covered in far greater depth elsewhere, and so I’ll move on.
So let’s talk about the men then, always the central characters in these stories. Well the men are the salt of the earth, and they spend their time sparring and fighting with the rich, the crooked and the scum, of all classes. In Sweet Smell of Success, Tony Curtis plays a bottom feeding press agent looking for a good story. In The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep, Humphrey Bogart plays a private eye. In Double Indemnity, Fred McMurray plays an insurance salesman while in The Postman Always Rings Twice, John Garfield is simply a drifter, looking for work. Everyone inhabits the roles of the middlemen, the invisible cogs in the machines of the world, men with desperate ambition or wry, jaded world-weariness. Simply put, they were the birth of the post war man, when propaganda films were no longer need to keep morale up, they spoke of the world-weary, to the world weary.They were not good people, but then they often found themselves entangled in webs of villany and treachery, and were forced from innocuous beginnings (being enraptured by the femme fatale usually) into far darker territory.
But to deny their own natures would be disingenuous to the elements at play. They too, are driven by “vaulting ambition” to shocking, calculated acts of murder.I think perhaps, the only two exceptions to this are Carol Reed’s The Third Man, which is primarily about the search for Harry Lime, and unpicking his unscrupulous web rather than the web of the protagonist, and Gun Crazy, where the man is fully exploited by the woman’s more masculine ambition. If anything, the most brutal example of their own nature is in Sweet Smell of Success, as Sidney Falco (Tony Curtis) engineers the downfall of a musician who is dating his boss’s sister, the boss (J.J Hunsecker) played by the singularly terrifying and malevolent Burt Lancaster, in a role that perhaps shows his greatest acting performance. The men are ruthless, controlling, terrifying and insecure at the same time, occupying a schizophrenic spectrum which turns them into monsters.
In fact only the films with Humphrey Bogart, The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep, does our protagonist manage to avoid becoming a monster, or becoming ruthlessly scarred by the events. Yes, in those two films, Bogart is simply such a gigantic figure that his personality fills the space where the character is, and so we watch, smooth talking, confident and secure Bogart maneuver his way throughout labyrinthine stories with all the confidence of someone who knows he can’t fail. In fact, those films essentially become about the mysteries that surround the characters, rather than the characters themselves. He plays both roles with immeasurable dexterity, his wit and his words filling the void where guns and physical violence would fill in today post-Hays Code film time. In fact, I think I experienced the shadow of what men would have felt watching him in the time the films came out, simply because he embodies this style of rough around the edges suaveness that is impossible to replicate, only pay homage to (as Godard did).
THE STYLE
There’s two sections to this, because I feel the second section is worth exploring. The first will be about general stylistic observations of film noir, the second will be about the meshing of auteur directors (Hitchcock, Mackendrick and Welles) bringing their own succinct style to the film noir genre, and how this fusion affects the style.
FILM NOIR IN GENERAL
The aesthetics of film noir are too numerous, intricate and sprawling for me to properly delve into in a professional way, especially since the expertise expounded on this style by numerous writers both online and off. But, I must venture forth.
To understand film noir, you have to understand two things, German Expressionism, and the pulp/crime genre. German expressionism can be summed up by watching Nosferatu (found here), Das Kabinet des Dr. Caligari (found here), and Fritz Lang’s M (found here)and Metropolis. Striking visuals and extensive use of shadows. Well as for the pulp/crime genre, it is the spawn of almost every film noir script. James M. Cain wrote the novels of The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity. Raymond Chandler wrote The Big Sleep (while also putting in screenwriting credits in on Double Indemnity and Strangers On A Train), Patricia Highsmith wrote the novel of Strangers On A Train, Ernest Hemmingway wrote the novel of The Killers, Lucille Fletcher wrote the original play and subsequent screenplay of Sorry, Wrong Number. Graham Greene wrote the original novel in preparation for the screenplay (which he also wrote) for The Third Man.
Yes the tendrils of literature extend far and deep into film noir, and its sprawl pops up in perhaps my favourite part, the writing. Simply put the scripts in this genre are of an impeccable nature, the dialogue forced into a position of great standing, since the Production Code at the time would not allow the kind of on-screen menace and violence that we can expect now. Instead, the writers (and by extension, the characters) are bursting with witty one liners, zingers, restrained devilishness, and a style of rapid back and forth that perhaps has never been equaled, with the absolute pinnacles laying in Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall’s back and forth in The Big Sleep, and the entire script of Sweet Smell of Success, which is easily one of the greatest writing achievements ever put forth on film. Seriously, just look at this scene:
Finally it would leave a gaping hole without talking about film noir being literally that, black film. Not only is it shot in black and white at a time when colour film was feasible (John Dall, star of Gun Crazy is also the star of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope, released around the same time), but also everyone by extension, is shrouded in various shades of grey (literally and metaphorically). The suits, the clothes, the hearts, everything is tainted by darkness. The shadows creep all over the films.
AUTEURS IN FILM NOIR
There are four directors in this selection who exert such an indelible presence over their films in this genre, that the work I believe is ultimately warped and transformed to fit into the style of the director’s vision more closely than the rest. These four directors are:
Alfred Hitchcock – Notorious, Strangers On A Train
Orson Welles – The Lady From Shanghai, Touch of Evil
Billy Wilder – Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard
Alexander Mackendrick – Sweet Smell of Success
Now it is always a double-edged sword talking about auteurs, since it largely disregards every external collaboration and pressure put on the creator(s) of any film, but I’m only using their names as shorthand for any and all the creative visionaries behind each of these films.
Billy Wilder exhibits classic noir. In fact, I’d be hard pressed not to find any element of film noir that isn’t in either/both of those films, and would even go as far as to say they are both quintessentially noir.
Hitchcock’s films also exude his influence, providing an almost jarring disconnect from the rest of the canon of largely American influenced film noir, his sensibilities creating the same Hitchcockian style, suspense and latent building of pressure, only exacerbated by characters who are all extremely repressed, the torrents of emotion flowing underneath, only showing in sporadic moments (see the kiss in Notorious, or the fantastical finale of Strangers On A Train). Honestly his films take film noir sensibilities, rather than being film noir. Hitchcock is simply too powerful a force to ever submit to making a generic genre piece.
Likewise with Orson Welles, who’s directorial works in TLFS and Touch Of Evili can only really be described as Wellesian. Heady mixes of cinematic and character bravado are complimented by labyrinthine plots and constant tension, as opposed to suspense.
Finally Mackendrick, who’s film (alongside Welles’ Touch of Evil) was made at the tail end of film noir (Touch Of Evil is the last classically accepted film) and so only shares a tenuous connection to the genre’s staples, the film occupies such an intricate and idiosyncratic space and time, with the lilting and deftly elegant camera work, the blistering script and the phenomenal character work, it helps to mark the film distinctly, a fingerprint over the film which elevates it above genre fare to become something which utilises film noir’s elements and heightens them, elevates them to a film distinct from the trappings of genre.
The reason I wanted to expand on that is to show how film noir was both a genre, and also when utilised by the right people, became spirit like, pervading the senses of a film world without being standard fare (read: hardboiled detective stories and femme fatalies). Strangers On A Train doesn’t even have a femme fatale, neither does Touch of Evil or Sweet Smell of Success.
CONCLUSIONS
So what did I learn from hanging out with film noir? Well I learnt that everyone is a vicious misanthrope. Besides that, I experienced simply an incredible time in motion picture history, the last hurrah of Old Hollywood before it entered the turbulent 60s and 70s. It’s a testament to the studio system, in part because it’s so unlike the studio system’s traditional image, film noir is not opulent, no sweeping epics. It’s about the nitty-gritty, about shady characters and murder mysteries. It’s about lovers who find their connection in their shared selfishness, bitterness, desperate need to escape their circumstances, no matter how seemingly good or bad they are. The love which drives the rich trophy wife of Rita Hayworth in Gilda and Glenn Ford, is the same as the love which drives hopless drifter John Garfield and small town wife Lana Turner in The Postman Always Rings Twice. And all of it is built on the shadows of humanity, the sides we try to keep hidden but motivate us beyond all rationality, our dark desires driving us forth, simply because we’re either in too deep or wish to be there. And simply put, it makes our lives into what the films used to be called, melodramas. Simply put, it adds weight to our wretched lives, as we grasp for things which we think will set us free, only for our own ruinous downfalls to occur because of that very desire.
It’s not nihilism, its tragedy. And it makes for great films, great art.
-Alex
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I’ve been watching a lot of film noir recently, mainly for this blog so I’ll be able to post some bigger piece on its general sensibilities later. But for now, having just come off of seeing this film, I thought I should see what I made of it.
Sorry, WrongNumber (1948) is a Paramount Pictures release, starring Burt Lancaster and Barbara Stanwyck directed by one Anatole Litvak, and captured by cinematographer Sol Polito. I mention the cinematographer, not usually given his fair due, because the film’s cinematography is exquisite. A stylistic trait of the director’s work, it roams and tracks like a wandering bird, underscoring and fleshing out the characters in this work with pure visual language. It wanders over the character’s houses, capturing their interiors, their mental spaces externalised so we can see their lives, their dreams, their fears without so much as a word being spoken regarding this. Sometimes its hard to recognise how much we can take for granted in our processing of visual information, how pictures can become shorthand for what would be lengthy and clunky to explain using written, or even verbal communication.
Secondly, it’s an incredibly taut slow burner. Like all good thrillers, it works on a level of less is more, meaning that the fairly innocuous nature of what is being revealed only really amps up in the last half an hour, as the vision of our protagonist-cipher finally becomes clear, the mist of all the mysteries dropping like the wool from over our eyes. The layers of dramatic irony (the plot is given away by the poster for chrissakes) only help to heighten the agony, in true Greek theatrical fashion, as our knowledge of the impending events only makes the seconds ticking by more excruciating. And so as it comes to its cathartic, climactic ending, an ending which seems as inevitable as one second ticks to the next, the only feeling left is one of profound agony, of a kind of psychological mourning of how things have happened, and why couldn’t they have changed to allow for a happier outcome. It seems that hindsight only magnifies our pain.
It’s a brutal experience that catharsis. In the film, as we come to understand [spoilers for a nearly 70 year old film] Leona (Stanwyck) comes to realise her husband (Lancaster) has plotted her murder, after being stifled and unconsciously betrayed by her, and having a huge debt to pay off to some offended mafia types after trying to screw them over. As the murderer comes up the stairs, in only a writer’s torment, he hurriedly admits to his crimes, and pleads with her to scream out to try to get help, while she hurriedly confesses and apologises for all of her wrongdoing, her obsessive need to own and control him. Finally, as the police come to arrest Henry, the husband, she is strangled, and the murderer picks up, simply saying “Sorry, wrong number.”
Do you see how explaining something using the word can be so pitiful in comparison to the image? Just watch the scene:
Of course in its own context, without watching the film before, the climax might seem too melodramatic, even hammy some might say. It is after a scene of great loud acting, agonising confessions and shrill terror. In the same way, if you simply plucked the scene in Oedipus Tyrannus where Oedipus tears out his own eyes, and showed that to someone outside of the rest of the story, they too might think it a little melodramatic.
It’s interesting, because only in the context of our lives’ more languid moments, in the moments where fail to pay attention, don’t know the whole story, go forth with actions when we don’t know where the consequences will lead, that we can more expertly make sense of moments like these, when the culmination of our acts forms into a conclusion, the train reaches its last station. Our curiosity can kill us (and the cat), but the recognition of both our ignorance and our curiosity to save us from circumstances we don’t want (Death by strangling for example) is far more of a painful experience. I think that’s perhaps why stories such as these can be so viscerally affecting, why they speak of Aristotle’s catharsis.
Finally the film speaks as a testament to some very basic truths in our digitally enhanced hall of mirrors. The film spends no time enjoying special effects, no ensemble cast or high concept story elements. It contains the holy trinity of any great performative art, good direction, good acting, good script. The direction and technical elements, the editing is tight and subtle, the visual language is complex, intricate and gorgeous without being dense or confusing while no expense is spared on creating a believable visual and auditorial world. Barbara Stanwyck and Burt Lancaster both give impeccable performances here, actors who I will return to later (Stanwyck is much better here than the other film I saw her in, Double Indemnity). The cruelty in both of them envelops them like a swamp, mired in Stanwyck’s inability to cede any ground to Lancaster, while his wish to assert himself goes down the road to hell, along with any other good intentions he might have had.
The script, last of all, just functions in bringing this all to fruition. Starting life as a radio play by one Lucille Fletcher, Orson Welles referred to it as “the greatest single radio script ever written”. And when a work contains such rich thematic meat which you can sink your teeth into, and contains such esteemed elements of pure human experience, pride, arrogance, curiosity, foreboding, terror, horror and dread, well then its no wonder we still love our stories, regardless of how they end. Maybe even because of that, they end.
Stay tuned for a post coming soon about film noir, unless I get sidetracked.
-Alex
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Gilda is a curio. It’s a curio in so many ways, because it doesn’t seem to resemble any of the prototypes we’ve come to know about film noir, even though it is acclaimed that it served as the prototype for that entire genre.
Certainly, Ms. Hayworth plays a femme fatale, but the femme fatale is hollow, only the open and vulnerable heart of a woman spills out. She flourishes in her sexual appeal, but all of it is empty, not even an act, more of a mask which crudely slips off at the slightest moment. Glenn Ford plays the classic, ropey slightly amoral protagonist we have come to expect from the genre, but he if anything, with a separate contextual understand of the film’s original inception and release (1946 was 70 years ago), comes off as the cruelest member of the trio. A man who punishes a woman he is enraptured/repulsed by marrying her and then denying her any contact, with anyone really. I mean that’s grounds for serious psychological trauma.
It was definitely an odd experience trying to decipher the morality of the film, because unlike its successors, which did not preach or moralise, which consigned themselves to futile nihilism often and nothing more, Gilda has two curious points. The first is that Glenn Ford’s personality is quite reprehensible. Not in a vaguely amoral way, in “I’ll take things any way they come”, but at least for me, in quite a visceral gut wrenching way. I rarely find myself disjointed out of a film by its lack of internal consistency, but I did feel a little shifted out by this. The second is its swerving ending, where the characters actually forgive each other, Gilda and Johnny end up heading out of the casino arm in arm, not covered in each others’ blood.
The first is a bit harder to pin down. Why did I feel thrown by Johnny’s actions? Well it’s difficult for me to judge, as I can’t tell how normal it was perceived during the time. For me though, the problem lies mainly in Johnny’s reactions. They just seem incredibly harsh. Blisteringly harsh actually. He begins the film chums with the curiously distant Ballin Mundson, a casino owner who does nothing to engender such friendship from Johnny. In fact Mundson is so far removed from everything and everyone, it doesn’t really feel justified why Johnny is so attracted to him. It might engender the same love you have for a statue, or a great work of art, but Mundson is openly neutral to coldly hostile, that it’s any wonder why Johnny even sticks around, and this is the wellspring of my narrative qualms. The film assumes the back story of Johnny despising Gilda, but without explaining to the audience the reasons for his hatred, it becomes harder and harder to justify in spite of his dogged loyalness to Mundson, a man who returns every friendly gesture with spite or spit, and why he increasingly feels disdain for Gilda, as he continually is forced into embarrassment by having to fetch Gilda from the arms of suave courtiers back to Mundson.
When Johnny finally betrays his friend, kissing his old flame, he experiences none of the guilt or wretchedness one might feel in such an act, instead he suppresses his own feelings and projects his anger and perhaps his self loathing onto her, the cruel vile temptress who is responsible for his friend’s apparent suicide. Why though, why on Earth, does he do this to her? Rita Hayworth’s femme fatale is so unreasonable a figure to project such a violent hate. She does not betray him, only entices him because she loves him so. She has no ulterior motives, no political allegiances or subterfuges planned, she simply loves him obsessively, self destructively even. And he does nothing but spit and spite.
In fact Johnny’s treatment of her is downright the denial of all responsibilities of loving someone. The template of the seductress, ready to be punished for her sinfulness, is awkward and stilted here, because it’s so unjustified. Mundson doesn’t respect her, only as property. Johnny hates her, and doesn’t respect her, but hate loves her because of some curiosity in the past.
The sexism/misogyny (two different words which both apply here, am not confusing the two) of film noir has been talked about endlessly so the natural assumption is to assume the writer simply projected his insecurities and themes he wanted to impress of what he thought about women. But what kind of mindset would a writer have to have to construct such a turn of events? The second half of the film languishes in the act of imprisonment Johnny imposes on her, utilising montages and over head narration which helps to drag out the acute details of how she is punished by the imprisonment, just in case you missed it by the acting.
This all leaves me with a gap of confusion.The femme fatale is an archetype which can trace its roots long before Rita Hayworth, but nevertheless the image of Gilda in her black dress has endured as a symbol of such raw sexuality, of feminine allure and seduction. In the wikipedia entry for Femme Fatale , Gilda is described as a “narcissistic wife who manipulates her husband.” How can Gilda be summed up in that way? She entices Johnny, but Johnny is not a robot. Johnny is enticed by her, otherwise he wouldn’t have been with her, or ended up with her. So who’s manipulating who here? When Gilda’s only crime is loving Johnny and being restless? Perhaps that is why Johnny’s punishment, at least to me seemed so cruel.
Any who I didn’t like Johnny, and I liked Gilda (both the film and the character). It’s an exploration of hate and love and adoration and destruction, and how they all blend together. I don’t have much else to say about the film, so I’ll end it with an absolutely stunning and elegant use of framing, which tells us all we need to know about the triumvirate of lovers.
-Alex
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Film Pravda 