Though there is disagreement concerning which film represents the
first genuine noir, many point to John Huston’s 1941 remake of The
Maltese Falcon as the progenitor of the form. Based on Dashiell
Hammett’s novel, the film starred Humphrey Bogart who had only
recently graduated to genuine star status after years of playing roles
in support of Cagney, Robinson, and George Raft in Warner
Brothers’ series of gangster films.
Bogart played Sam Spade, a tough talking private detective whose investigation of his partner’s murder draws him into the hunt for the objet d’ art of the title. Huston’s mise en scene does not dwell on the odd angles and chiaroscuro that would be characteristic of later noirs, but instead focuses on the characters whose eccentricities would become standards in the genre.
Brigid O’ Shaughnessy (Mary Astor), a calculating and ultimately deadly beauty who lies to and manipulates everyone, including Spade, to get what she wants; and a pair of sexually ambivalent crooks, Gutman (Sydney Greenstreet) and Joel Cairo (Peter Lorre) who are also on the trail of the falcon. The veiled but still obvious homosexuality of the latter characters, as well as that of Gutman’s “gunsel” (a slang expression denoting a young, homosexual killer) symbolized, in those days before Gay Liberation, decadent individuals whose lives were lived in the shadows, hidden from the disapproving eyes of society. Such outsiders were unique in other genres but were rarely unrepresented in noir where they stood for depravity and “the sickest of all noir villains” (Hirsch 159).
The deviant sexuality and/or neurotic and psychotic tendencies of many noir characters is an important substructure of the genre. Villains, and even, in some instances, the heroes of noir struggle to resist their darker, normally repressed impulses. Freudian psychology had a strong impact in this regard, having inspired the creation of characters whose actions are guided by internal forces as much as by external ones (Thomas 87).
In Otto Preminger’s Laura (1944), Dana Andrews is a
detective investigating the murder of a beautiful woman (Gene
Tierney). The characters he encounters as he attempts to unravel
the mystery are eccentrics of whom he does not approve:
a disdainful, bitchy columnist (Clifton Webb), and a prissy playboy
(Vincent Price) who is kept by an older woman (Judith Anderson)
who seems more masculine than the two men combined. As Foster
Hirsch writes, this trio “introduce
homosexual traits on the sly” (121).
Yet even the seemingly “straight” detective reveals a disturbing inclination to necrophilia by becoming hopelessly infatuated with the dead Laura’s portrait.
In I Wake Up Screaming (1941), directed by H. Bruce Humberstone, a psychopathic detective (Laird Cregor) murders the woman whose love is denied him, and frames the man who has won her affections (Victor Mature) for the crime. The cop’s devotion to his victim is such that his home contains a shrine built in her honor.
When women are not being deified by men in noir, they are often brutalized. In 1947’s Kiss of Death, Richard Widmark made a sensational film debut as a more demented than usual psychotic named Tommy Udo, who cackled maniacally as he pushed an old woman in a wheelchair down a flight of stairs to her death. In The Big Heat (1953), Lee Marvin disfigures Gloria Graham by throwing scalding coffee at her face, and in The Street with No Name (1949), a more subdued Widmark merely beats a woman after learning she has tipped off the police about his next robbery. The fact that so much of the violence in noir is committed against women has caused some critics to label the genre misogynistic (Giannetti 92).
BACK TO