by George Figgs
Deep in the dark little heart of Hollywood, between the years 1941 and 1946, a steely style of hard edged, mostly B class, Crime Drama was being born. By 1946 the French film critics, calling a Spade a “Spade”, called it as black as it was, Noire.
The first group of films to be thought of in this way were headed up by The Maltese Falcon, 1941, which still stands as a monument to the genre; next, Woman In The Window, Laura, Murder My Sweet, and Double Indemnity all made in 1944, closely followed by Scarlet Street several months later in ‘45. By ‘47 and ‘48 many more had joined the movement, they multiplied exponentially into the late ‘50’s. Eventually films made in the early ‘30’s, as well as the so called “Neo Noir”, from the ‘70’s, were included into the scope of the genre.
Film Noir is a special “dialect” in the language of Cinema. It is an exercise in elegant brutality, a siren’s wail morphs into a saxophone’s moan, but it takes more than exaggerated shadows and dramatic lighting on wet streets to generate authentic Noire. In fact there are so many elements that tie these films together it’s hard to isolate one from the other. The core theme is blind obsession, with the threads of despair, perversion, deceit, lust and greed, woven evenly throughout the canon of films.
There are two key films that have all the elements of Noir flagrantly displayed for our examination: Fritz Lang’s Ensemble Noir double feature, Woman In The Window and Scarlet Street. These two films should be seen as a set, in chronological order. They were made a few months apart, with the same writers, director, cast, crew, and cinematographer Milton Krasner, who shot both films.
The image comes full circle in the closing scene in Scarlet Street, when the portrait of Kitty March (Bennett) is being taken out of that same gallery window, and Chris Cross (Robinson), reduced by fate in to a skid row bum who watches haplessly from the gutter, watching as his painting is being bought by a millionaire.
Scarlet Street was banned by the censors in New York, Milwaukee, and Atlanta as obscene, immoral, inhuman and sacrilegious. The Atlanta censor called it “licentious, profane, obscure and contrary to the good order of the community”! It was based on a French novel called La Chienne (The Bitch). Formed around the ancient theatrical triangle of a trap, set by a pimp, for a “mark” using the femme fatale as bait. It’s the basic structure of both these films as well as most of what is called “Film Noir”.
Noir is a simple “innocent” story that develops into the worst of all possible nightmares. A story where everything and everyone starts out all the way “good”, but ends up going all the way “bad”, right on cue. Woman in the Window follows this epic mold staunchly, but through a more deeply psychological, Gothic labyrinth of Poe-like enigmatic plot twists.
Fritz Lang also uses a strange seemingly Dadaesque device in both films. A sort of anti-distraction trick, being his use of the American Radio as a separate character, even going so far as to make us listen to a complete radio commercial in each film. The other thing that stands out are his deliberate but back-handed blows against Fascism and Racism. Fritz Lang, having recently escaped Hitler, made his first American Hollywood film in 1936, Fury with Spencer Tracy, a film dealing with American lynch mobs, a good indication of his political leanings.