The Dark Corner (1946)

In an online discussion about Henry Hathaway, on which I held forth, another participant said, somewhat annoyed, "You are not really saying that Hathaway is a better director than Hawks?" (Maybe not those exact words but something like it.) I responded with a "No." because that discussion felt like a distraction at the time. But how does one measure these things? While Howard Hawks made remarkably great films that are better than anything Hathaway ever did, even though Hathaway made many more films in total, that in itself does not prove that Hawks is a better director. There are so many aspects to filmmaking which are unrelated to the art of directing on the set. There are scenes and sequences in Hathaway's oeuvre that are as good as anything Hawks ever made, even though there is no film by Hathaway that is as good as the best of Hawks's films. I have previously discussed, briefly, Hathaway vs. John Huston, which I think are two directors more alike than Hathaway and Hawks, so such comparisons are valid, and I would like to look deeper into comparing Hathaway and Huston at some point. But this article will focus on Hathaway's The Dark Corner (1946). Here is Hathaway's own ad in The Hollywood Reporter.

There are many angles from which to engage with The Dark Corner: its place in relation to Lucille Ball's career; as an example of film noir; its relation to its director and his oeuvre at large; an example of how good even a relatively forgotten film from this period in American cinema can be; as an example of the actors and style of the studio that produced it, 20th Century Fox; as an example of a film from the year 1946, the first year after the war and for that reason alone a year of significance; and so on and so forth. Whichever angle you pursue will to some extent control your analysis and understanding of the film. The Dark Corner is not special in this regard, this is true for most films, but sometimes it is more difficult than other times to choose your angle. Hence this meta discussion.

Something I find puzzling is when people argue over which genre a certain film belongs to, or when people struggle with defining it and are upset by this failure. Some see this as a strength of the film, and others see their failure to label the film with a specific genre as a failure of the film. Yet there are plenty of films, maybe the majority, that cannot be neatly put into a certain genre. That is not particularly interesting, and it is not in itself a sign of superior or inferior quality. It is only normal. Which genre does The Dark Corner belong to? None in particular would be my answer. Some would of course say film noir, but film noir never was a genre. I know that many claim that it was/is, but never without contradicting themselves. Beyond that, genres are too big, amorphous, unstable, subjective, and evolving to be something you can be definitive about in general. Genre definitions are almost always a negotiation between you, the genre in question, and whichever films you want to claim as being of that genre. (I have disucssed this point and other genre-related problems in more detail here.) You might argue about whether The Dark Corner is a thriller, melodrama, film noir, detective story, or whatever, if you find value in doing so, but I prefer not to get engaged. It is worth pointing out however that at the time, 1946, critics and the marketing department usually referred to The Dark Corner as a melodrama.

Discussing it in relationship to Laura (1944) was also common. Many reviews of 1946 made the connection, and this is primarily because of the presence of Clifton Webb in both films and because they are about crime, class, and aestheticism. (Jay Dratler was co-writer on both Laura and The Dark Corner.) It can also be discussed as part of a longer tradition of films, whether noir or not, in which painting/paintings haunt the events that are taking place. In The Dark Corner, the main villain, Hardy Cathcart, has his own art gallery, one of New York's most prominent ones, and it is filled with famous paintings. Below you can see Vermeer's The Girl with a Pearl Earring for example. Hathaway himself was also an art collector, so maybe he used some paintings from his own collection to hang in Cathcart's gallery. The Vermeer however is most likely a replica as the Dutch original has been hanging in a gallery in The Hague since 1902. But it is another painting, which resembles Cathcart's wife, that forms the first clue to his unstable mind. "I found the portrait long before I met Mari. And I worshipped it. When I did meet her, it was as if I'd always known her... and wanted her." he says. And this obsession with his art, and he considers his wife as part of his art collection, is what is the cause of the events and killings that take place in the film.

Clifton Webb plays Cathcart, and he has top billing in the film, but he does not play the lead. Mark Stevens does that, who is forgotten today but he was at the time somebody 20th Century Fox and Darryl F. Zanuck were trying to make into a leading man, a new star for Fox. In this they failed, despite him doing well in The Dark Corner and despite an aggressive marketing campaign. Below is a full-page ad in Variety:

Stevens did some additional films for Fox, such as the relatively successful biopic I Wonder Who's Kissing Her Now (1947), the fine thriller The Street with No Name (1948), and the harrowing drama about mental illness, The Snake Pit (1948). But the last one is Olivia de Havilland's film, and none of the films he made after it are remembered today, and they do not seem to have been especially successful at the time either. I have seen only one of the later films, Target Unknown (1951), directed by George Sherman, and I like it. Stevens later did some TV and directed some films, which I have not seen.

Lucille Ball, unexpectedly for such a film, plays the female lead in The Dark Corner and she shares the top billing with Webb. This was a challenging time for her, personally and professionally. She was unhappy and stressed over her career, and her relationship with Desi Arnaz was strained, partly because he was away most of the time and partly because he was unfaithful, sleeping around a lot. Professionally, she was at the end of her contract with MGM, and she did not want to renew it. She also fired her agent, Arthur S. Lyons. It seems she was still under contract with MGM when she made The Dark Corner, but 20th Century Fox loaned her. (Some books claim she had already left MGM, but that is wrong.) Fred Kohlmar was the producer of The Dark Corner and as he was an old friend of Ball, he wanted to help her out with a good part while her career was stuck. But she was so fragile, she was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. This led her to forget her lines, and Hathaway was not a person to take that in his stride. Instead, he yelled at her, as was his custom in general during shooting, and this made her even more nervous and the breakdown that had been brewing for some time finally happened. She was bedridden, and although she managed to finish the film, afterwards she spent several weeks recovering in her house, attended to by a doctor. Arnaz was not there, but finally Kurt Frings, the agent for Ball's friends Olivia de Havilland and Edward G. Robinson, intervened to help her get back on her feet. She had begun to stutter due to her psychological illness, but the director for her next film, William A. Seiter, coached her, and helped her regain her strength and ability to speak. This and the experience of making his film, Lover Come Back (1946), managed to restore her confidence. The next year she did another thriller, Lured, directed by Douglas Sirk. Otherwise, it was light comedies that was her thing, and soon she would become the major TV star of the 1950s, and owner of her own production company and television studio. (Different books about Ball give slightly different versions of what exactly happened during 1945 and 1946, so what I have written here is an interpretation.) But despite Ball's problems, they do not show in The Dark Corner. She seems secure of herself, a combination of playfulness and steely resolve when needed. Without her character's forcefulness and imagination, the killer would not have been found. But at the same time, she is not ideal. She rarely registers the gravity of what is happening. Sometimes it seems like she and Stevens are not in the same film.

Webb had a much better time during the film and enjoyed the making of it, and working with Hathaway, even though Webb disliked violence in films. (Light comedy was otherwise his area too.) As is often the case with Hathaway, The Dark Corner is brutal at times. Enough for the Swedish censors to ban it completely.

***

The first 20 minutes are the best part of the film, where we are thrown face to face with four characters: the police detective Reeves, the brute Foss/Stauffer, the P.I. Bradford Galt (Stevens's character), and his secretary Kathleen Stewart (Ball's character). This is a film populated entirely with side characters. No one here is a conventionally speaking star, or leading actor, and it helps to give the film a freshness and unusual ambiance. The film is plotted in such a way that we are as much in the dark as the characters of what is happening, and why, but we have clues. Galt has left California with a stain on his reputation and now wants to be a legitimate P.I. (Private Investigator) in New York. He is so newly established that a man is seen putting up the letters of his name on the office window in the opening scene. Stewart is mainly happy to have a job, although she does also like the look of Galt. Reeves knew Galt in California. Foss/Stauffer has a striking white suit and is harbouring resentment and a chip on his shoulder. Neither he nor Galt has had a pleasant life so far one might assume. 

The neighbourhood and the office spaces are seedy and spartan. We are among the working class, and this first section of the film is taking place in their world. The sound is very good, the street noise always present when we are in Galt's office for example. Hathaway is famous for his series of 1940s true crime films, shot on location when possible, and while The Dark Corner is not based on a true story, the ambition to capture the natural world is still there.

But after about 18 minutes there is an abrupt cut and we are suddenly in a place of opulent wealth and sophistication, a world steeped in decadence. Whereas in the earlier sequence it was either dark or lit up with bare bulbs, now its bright and lit by chandeliers, and the evening gowns and the pearl necklaces are immaculate. No torn stockings here. But while their lives might be easier, they are corrupt and rotten. This is where we first met Cathcart, holding court, and acting like he was Oscar Wilde.

***

The film is full of nice details and amusing side characters such as a cashier at a cinema who listens with a peculiar facial expression, as if she is uncertain whether to be outraged or aroused, when Galt and Stewart talk about her having been to his apartment. All these details enhance the film, give it a richness and an atmosphere beyond what is called for by the plot. And they often feel improvised, something Hathaway thought of spontaneously. The look of the film is rough but elegantly lit, the cinematographer was Joseph MacDonald and I have written more about him here, and Hathaway stages the scenes with straightforward force and clarity.

Another major strength of The Dark Corner is the dialogue, delivered in short sentences and with a trashy poetic quality to it. Clearly inspired by both Hemingway and Chandler, I half expected someone to say, "For sale: baby shoes, never worn." But there are two kinds of dialogue, the arrogant bon mots from Cathcart and the hardboiled agony and threats from Galt and Foss/Stauffer. Cathcart says things like "The enjoyment of art is the only remaining ecstasy that is neither immoral nor illegal." and "How I detest the dawn. The grass always looks like it has been left out all night." while Galt says things like "Why, for six bits you'd hang your mother on a meat hook" or "I'm clean as a peeled egg. No debts, no angry husbands, no payoffs... nothin'." or, the most famous line in the film, "I feel all dead inside. I'm backed up in a dark corner, and I don't know who's hitting me."

It takes about an hour into the film until the plot starts to become clear, and the last 30 minutes is about solving the mystery and tying up loose ends. This last part is a bit too neat and rushed, although the dialogue and style remain as appealing. The last scene though, the coda, is as if from another film. All the darkness and grimness are gone and instead there are jokes and laughter. This is a convention that you can see mostly in serials and TV-series, but some films as well, where the last minute provides comic relief, frequently the main characters having a laugh together. (I mentioned this before when I wrote about another of Hathaway's 1940s thrillers, Johnny Apollo (1940), which has the same kind of last scene.) I do not like it, but it does not diminish all that came before, or the appropriate ending to the criminal investigation. This is a film in which it is the women who make sure crimes are solved and justice is served.

Unfortunately, The Dark Corner did not do that well at the box office. Hathaway blamed Mark Stevens for this. "Too arrogant. Cocksure." is how he described Stevens. Maybe he was, but it does not mean the film is bad. The Dark Corner is not some forgotten masterpiece, or Hathaway's best or most interesting film, but it holds its own. 

It is revealing to compare The Dark Corner with I Wake Up Screaming (1941), Laura, and The Big Sleep (1946) from the perspective of directing and artistic personality. I Wake Up Screaming and Laura because they are also Fox releases with some similarities in terms of story and themes, and The Big Sleep because it is another noir-release of 1946, about a P.I. getting lost in a convoluted story. Laura and The Big Sleep are the most famous ones, partly because they have star power from their actors. But they are also a lot more controlled by their respective director, Preminger and Hawks, who were also the producers. Because of this the films have more distinct personalities. I Wake Up Screaming, good as it is, feels more like the work of a committee, and its main power comes from Laird Cregar who plays an uncommonly sinister and slippery detective, and from a handful of striking lighting effects by the cinematographer Edward Cronjager. The Dark Corner is somewhere in between it and the other two films. But I might revise my position on I Wake Up Screaming if I study it and its director H. Bruce Humberstone more closely from that angle. As always, further research is warranted.

 

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Ball's psychological comeback, Lover Come Back, was retitled Lucy Goes Wild when it was shown on TV in 1953, to cash in on the popularity of Ball's TV show I Love Lucy. It was later retitled again, as When Lovers Meet, probably due to the release of yet another film called Lover Come Back (1961), this one with Doris Day, Rock Hudson, and Tony Randall.

Regarding I Wake Up Screaming, with its visual style and complex flashback stucture, it is absurd that it has been completely forgotten. Notice the year. It was made and released simultaneously with The Maltese Falcon (1941), yet visually and structurally I Wake Up Screaming is the more striking film. The Maltese Falcon has a much better cast though. (Elisha Cook Jr. is in both films.) Early on Jean Renoir wanted to direct I Wake Up Screaming, after having read the script, but that did not pan out.

Sources:

Lucy & Desi: The Legendary Love Story of Television's Most Famous Couple (1991) by Warren G. Harris.

Lucille: The Life of Lucille Ball (1994) by Kathleen Brady.

Henry Hathaway: A Director's Guild of America Oral History (2001).

Ball of Fire: The Tumultuous Life and Comic Art of Lucille Ball (2003) by Stefan Kanfer.

Sitting Pretty: The Life and Times of Clifton Webb (2010) by Clifton Webb and David L. Smith.

Henry Hathaway: The Lives of a Hollywood Director (2016) by Harold N. Pomainville.

"Becoming Clifton Webb: a Queer Star in Mid-Century Hollywood" by Leonard Leff, Cinema Journal 47, #3 Spring 2008.

I have written a lot about Hathaway during the years. Here are the earlier pieces:

https://fredrikonfilm.blogspot.com/2011/08/henry-hathaway.html

https://fredrikonfilm.blogspot.com/2011/08/henry-hathaway-afterthoughts.html

https://fredrikonfilm.blogspot.com/2012/06/spawn-of-north-henry-hathaway-1938.html

https://fredrikonfilm.blogspot.com/2013/11/souls-at-sea-henry-hathaway-1937.html

https://fredrikonfilm.blogspot.com/2014/11/from-hell-to-texas-1958-on-hathaway-and.html

https://fredrikonfilm.blogspot.com/2018/06/summing-up-hathaway.html

https://fredrikonfilm.blogspot.com/2020/02/hangup-1974.html

 

https://fredrikonfilm.blogspot.com/2020/05/johnny-apollo-1940.html

https://fredrikonfilm.blogspot.com/2020/09/niagara-1953.html

And the one about Joseph MacDonald: https://fredrikonfilm.blogspot.com/2017/02/joseph-macdonald.html

And genre: https://fredrikonfilm.blogspot.com/2020/08/genre.html

Genre

Genres are often perceived to be rigid, predictable, ideologically pernicious, and associated with commercial mainstream. "Put simply, genre movies are those commercial feature films which, through repetition and variation, tell familiar stories with familiar characters in familiar situations." is the opening phrase of Barry Keith Grant's book Film Genre: From Iconography to Ideology, and it is a good example of the conventional wisdom regarding genres.

Yet genres are in reality wonderfully fluid, malleable and flexible, and can contain everything from derivative mainstream sequels to great films at the height of what the art form is capable of. This gap between a perceived idea and the reality is apparent both among scholars and the ordinary viewer. 

The problems with much of genre theory, or discussions of genre in general, are the same as with much else within film studies/criticism: it is rarely based on that complicated reality but on ideal types, and often founded on a lack of awareness of the historical nuances, developments and complexities of the subject being studied. To borrow a quote from Jason Mittell, many "scholars seem content to take genres at face value, using the labels that are culturally commonplace without giving much consideration to the meanings or usefulness of those labels." In this article I want to point out some of the difficulties with genres, and why the ways they are frequently seen and discussed are unsatisfying.

***

The basic problem is that the common belief that we can easily define and specify genres is wrong. We can not, because, being made up by us, they are subjective. Therefore, there is no consensus about what constitutes a given genre, or which films should be counted as belonging to a given genre. To give a seemingly trivial example: once in a video store I overheard two teenage girls talking in front of the horror section, and one of them said, outraged, "Why is that film in the horror section?!?! It is not a horror film!" Her friend though it was. That is the reality of the situation. As soon as you try to define a genre it slips away, and the arbitrariness of it becomes apparent. Another example: is Fort Apache (John Ford 1948) a western or a war movie? Or does it not belong to a particular genre? Or is it a cavalry film, as a distinct genre that is neither a western nor a war movie. There is no correct answer to these questions, because it entirely depends upon how the person answering it has chosen to define either of those categories. Or compare She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (John Ford 1949) and The Gunfighter (Henry King 1950). They are both routinely referred to as westerns, and that is understandable, but do they have anything in common, whether in terms of narrative, aesthetics, themes, or characters? Is not the only thing they have in common, other than being non-animated, feature-length, fiction films, that they are set some time towards the end of the 19th century? You could make a film on the same script as She Wore a Yellow Ribbon but change the setting to, say British India in the 1920s, or far in the future at some distant planet. It would tell the same story yet not be called a western then.

She Wore a Yellow Ribbon

Thomas Schatz writes about the "deep structure, those rules and conventions which render this film a Western and that film a musical." but I do not believe that such rules and general conventions exist. The reason a musical is called a musical is because the characters sing in it in a context in which people would not sing in the real world. But that is neither a rule nor a convention (any less than being green is a rule or convention for a green apple) but a banal necessity needed for those films to be called musicals. While there are conventions in musicals, as there are in most things in life, there are no uniform conventions for all musicals. Different kinds of musicals have different kinds of conventions, just as musicals from different eras or decades have different conventions, and musicals from different studios have different conventions, musicals from different countries have different conventions, and musicals by different directors or choreographers or actors have different conventions. And there are no rules. Your musical can look, feel or move any which way. It can be upbeat or sad; it can be progressive or reactionary; it can be fast-paced or slow; it can be serious or playful; songs might be integrated or free-standing. Sometimes a film is made as a musical, but then released without the songs, as a non-musical; sometimes a film is written as a musical but the director ignores that, and refuses to do the song and dance numbers, so it ends up as a non-musical. But the only difference is that they have no songs.

Another difficulty is that there are so many films, most of which are forgotten, and for there to be a theory that explains or defines a genre, it must cover the genre in all its historic appearances, all of these forgotten films from past decades. Another complication is that a lot of older films do not belong to genres that we talk of today, or to genres that have been forgotten. If you look at the top-grossing Hollywood films of the 1930s, many of them cannot be categorised by using our contemporary genres. It instead happens that older films are today placed into genres that did not exist back then, when they were considered as part of some other genre, or not of any genre, but instead considered as part of a cycle for example, like the journalist films of the 1930s, or the same decade's prison films. What, by the way, is the difference between a genre and a cycle. Does a cycle become a genre when it has been going on long enough?

A famous conundrum is film noir. As is well-known, it was not something that existed in the 1940s when the films that today are considered film noirs were made, and they were then instead referred to as all kinds of different genres: detective stories, thrillers, melodramas, spy films, action films, and so on. While some French critics began writing about what they called "film noir" in the late 1940s, they were using it in a slightly different way then how it is being done now, and it was not until the early 1970s that all of these films suddenly became film noirs in the modern sense. A pioneer was Paul Schrader and his article "Notes on Film Noir" from 1972, in which he tried to explain what it was, and how it had evolved from 1941 to 1958. But whether there was an evolution of film noir was dependent upon which films he choose to refer to as such. Laura (Otto Preminger 1944) is clearly different from Kiss Me Deadly (Robert Aldrich 1955), but that might as well be because only one of them is a film noir, or neither is. One of the few things that are consistent regarding film noir is the fact that there is no consensus at all about which films qualify as noir. This is not strange though, but, as Steve Neale has pointed out, it is inevitable: "as a concept film noir seeks to homogenize a set of distinct and heterogeneous phenomena; this inevitably generates contradictions, exceptions and anomalies and is doomed, in the end, to incoherence."

What is interesting about film noir is that hundreds of films from the 1940s and 1950s are nowadays included under that term, yet it is not a genre, and few claim that it is. (Schrader emphasised that it is not.) This means that a large bulk of what is now remembered from Hollywood of the 1940s and 1950s are without a proper genre, as they are defined and discussed today.

Given all of this, it is no surprise that almost all attempts to present a coherent theory of a genre or genres are flawed from the beginning. Whoever has developed a theory has chosen to include some films and exclude some others, either out of ignorance or deliberately in order for the theory to work. Many thousands of films have been made that are considered westerns, and you are inevitably going to have to narrow it down a lot, but the 10 or 20 films you have chosen to build your grand theory on are not enough. At best, your theory will be valid for those films, but not for westerns in general. (I say at best, because something like Will Wright's famous and influential Sixguns and Society (1975), does not even work for the small sample he has chosen to focus on.)

An obvious risk is that if the claim about a certain genre is that it is rigid and rule-bound, you can only include films that are rigid and rule-bound, and where does that take us? You may well define westerns as films that always exhibit traits A, B, C, and D, and then criticise westerns for being an inferior genre as it only relies on the traits A, B, C, and D, and make ideological hay out of that, but to what extent we have learned something by this is unclear. The flaw is not in the genre westerns, in all their manifold representations, but in your chosen definitions of it. 

This aspect of definitions is central to genre theory, yet it too often is the case that the person writing about a certain genre is not explaining how they define it but seemingly assumes that we all define things the same way, even though we do not. Some are loose and open in their definitions, and others are very strict and narrow. If your theory requires a narrow understanding of the subject for which you have developed the theory, considering it in some pure state in which it never existed, you are setting yourself up for tautology. 

***

So far I have only spoken of some genres in relation to Hollywood, which is the way it is usually done. But why is that? Brazilian, Chinese, French, German, Japanese, Swedish, Italian cinema, and others, can also be discussed from generic perspectives if one wants to do so, in the same way Hollywood is discussed. That would also add some needed perspectives to the field, because it would give rise to questions like whether for example neorealism is a genre. It is not treated as such, yet it is easier to define and specify than most of the American genres, and the films have recurring tropes and traits. Considering the fact that many critics and historians have referred to various films from other countries than Italy as being neorealist, it would seem that they might be open to calling it a genre. Or is it merely a style? Another Italian kind of film is giallo. Is that a genre? Is it derivative of Hollywood genres or its own homegrown thing? (I need not take that discussion though because Alexia Kannas already has.)

Genre is often said to be the opposite of art, and to exist only in mainstream cinema, but that is to have a very narrow view of art, and also to believe that a lot of literature and music, including Shakespeare and Mozart, is not art. Some of the world's best filmmakers make/made genre films and many of the best films are genre films. It would be a strange art form of its greatest examples were not to be considered art. The claim that genre equals mainstream (as Grant does in the quote above) is also a dead end. To take two obvious example, Andrei Tarkovsky and Stanley Kubrick worked within genres. You might disagree that they made genre films, but then you need to re-define for example war films and science fiction, so that when they make them they are no longer genre films, only when others make them. (Nancy Meyers's The Intern (2015) is a mainstream film yet less of a genre film than Tarkovsky's Solaris (1972).) Another example is Yasujiro Ozu. He is not considered mainstream yet he was working within established genres. Or is Ozu to be considered as an example of mainstream cinema, albeit within the Japanese context?

Considering the inevitability of such questions, I often wonder if we do not needlessly waste a considerable amount of ink and time because of our abstruse need to think of cinema, and most things in life, in crude binary terms, and mistake our subjective idealisations for some larger truth.

***

Genres exist, and they can be interesting to talk about, and production companies, filmmakers, scholars, and the regular viewer, refer to genres on a daily basis. But it is rare for those references to acknowledge the complexity and vagueness of the reality. Genres are hardly what we say they are. This does not matter much when choosing a film at the video store, but scholars and historians should thread more carefully, or else their work risk becoming pointless.

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Schrader's influential article about film noir was published in 1972, which, as it happens, was also the year Thomas Elsaesser's even more influential article "Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family Melodrama" was first published. Just as the contemporary understanding of film noir to a large extent comes from Schrader's article, so a contemporary understanding of melodrama in films comes from Elsaesser, even though he cautious the reader that "what I want to say should at this stage be taken to be provocative rather than proven."

Bibliography:

Elsaesser, Thomas, (1972) "Tales of Sound and Fury: Observations on the Family Melodrama" published in Monogram, No. 4, 1972.

Grant, Barry Keith, (2007) Film Genre: From Iconography to Ideology. (He must like the sentence I quoted because he has opened other books with it too.)

Kannas, Alexia, (2017) “All the colours of the dark: Film genre and the Italian giallo” published in Journal of Italian Cinema & Media Studies, Vol. 5 Issue 2, March 2017.

Mittell, Jason, (2001) "A Cultural Approach to Television Genre Theory" published in Cinema Journal, Vol. 40, No. 3, Spring 2001.

Neale, Steve, (2000) Genre and Hollywood.

Schatz, Thomas, (1981) Hollywood Genres: Formulas, Filmmaking, and The Studio System.

Schrader, Paul, (1972) "Notes on Film Noir" published in Film Comment, Vol. 8, No. 1, Spring 1972.

Wright, Will, (1975) Sixguns and Society - A Structural Study of the Western.

Robert Siodmak

When Robert Siodmak is discussed it is almost always said that he only made film noirs. For some this is a good thing, because they think he perfected that form and was its true master, and for others it is a sign of weakness, that he was not an artist but just a director with a lack of integrity and personal vision. This inability to look beyond noir when it comes to Siodmak does him a disservice however. For one thing he did not just make noirs so the whole argumentation is moot, and second, the two filmmakers closest to Siodmak, Fritz Lang and Alfred Hitchcock, are not referred to as only makers of noir even though their careers are rather similar to Siodmak's, and as varied. There is absolutely no reason why he should be treated differently from them.

He was born in Dresden, Germany, 1900, and made films there and then in France, like Pièges (1939), a thriller about a serial killer with Maurice Chevalier and Erich von Stroheim, before ending up in the US, having to escape the Nazis. He returned to Europe in the mid-1950s where he continued to make films until the late 1960s. (He said that he left Europe to escape the Nazis and the US to escape CinemaScope.) It is the string of films he made between 1944 and 1950, most of them at Universal Studios, that are considered his major achievement, and those are indeed fine films. Siodmak was a master of the unconscious, combining the everyday with surrealism and with his camera prowling around in long takes with great depth of field, looking for that unconscious, or becoming it even. The camera as id. It is typical for Siodmak that when he made Christmas Holiday (1944), a film with Gene Kelly, usually seen singing and dancing, Kelly's character turns out to be a murderer with mother issues. But although his films are filled with dread, always staring at the uncanny and with the ability to be really frightening, they are also full of dark comedy and a certain quirkiness that is reminiscent of Don Siegel. (Siegel was involved in the making of Siodmak's most famous film, The Killers (1946), inspired by Hemingway's short story, and would make his own version, equally good and even more quirky, in 1964. As it happens Andrei Tarkovsky has also made a version of it, in 1965.)

It is particularly appropriate to compare Siodmak with Fritz Lang, and to notice the differences. Lang's style is cleaner, clearer, more geometrical, whereas Siodmak's is more baroque. In Lang's films it is usually society as a whole that is the threat, with conspiracies and dark forces at work everywhere. With Siodmak the threat does not lie out there but within ourselves. We bring ourselves down, with our homicidal tendencies and our passions, as in the excellent The Killers and Criss Cross (1949).

The world is fractured and unstable. And look at that menacing cat. (From The Killers.)

Some other highlights among his 1940s films are The Suspect (1944), a drama set in England at the turn of the century where a nice old man murders his wife, and The Spiral Staircase (1945), a gothic horror film that also takes place at the turn of the century. (There is no point in calling either of them noir.) A good but lesser film is The Dark Mirror (1946), a psychological melodrama with the interesting twist that the unconscious has become embodied, as it is about twin sisters, one good and one evil, both played by Olivia de Havilland. The File on Thelma Jordon (1950) is uneven, but part of it is among Siodmak's best work, not least the opening sequence, and Barbara Stanwyck and Wendell Corey are great.

The Dark Mirror

I have seen very few of Siodmak's films before and after his time in Hollywood, they are not easy to come by, except People on Sunday (1930). It is a collaboration between him, Fred Zinnemann, Billy Wilder and Edgar G. Ulmer, and very good, a city symphony film and a documentary of how people in Berlin spend their weekends. But there is a lot more to discover. The bottom line though is that Siodmak was an artist with a very particular way of seeing the world, and he expressed that vision in a number of different films. 

Now, have a look at a sequence from Phantom Lady (1944), a quintessential Siodmak and one of his most bizarre. Maybe even his best.

and a still from the amazing stalking sequence

On film history, and the art of studying it

I recently said that there is a difference between taught film history and actual film history. By this I meant that film history as it is presented in books, essays and lectures is more often than not a romantic effort to simplify something that is very complex and often beyond our reach. Film is not that old as an art form, but it is old enough to hold more films, movements, people and happenings than is possible for us to remember and evaluate. Most of it is forgotten, as all the unwarranted claims that has been made about Citizen Kane (1941) makes perfectly clear. Any film history book or film history course should be based on this humbleness, and acknowledge that what we think we know is not enough, and neither is it necessarily correct.

I think this is partly the reason why so much of taught film history is either wrong or at least highly questionable. Even though it is often very difficult to say what is right, it is often rather clear what is wrong, and where taught film history is problematic and when films, people, movements and eras are misunderstood, misconstrued or decontextualised. It can be the French New Wave, the Hollywood studio system, Rashomon (1951), neorealism, Citizen Kane, Jaws (1975), Westerns, audience demographics and so on and so forth. I want to mention some concrete examples today.

Beside the lack of awareness of the full spectrum of actual film history there are also the persistent efforts to make film history consist of clear demarcations. It is often argued that "Film noir was a genre that lasted between 1941 and 1958." or "The first film of the French New Wave was Le Beau Serge (1958)" or "The first film of the French New Wave was The 400 Blows (1959)." As if. Film history is not that neat. It is a process, with no definitive firsts and no definitive lasts. We can talk about something called the French New Wave without having to claim that one film was "the first". (Beside the two mentioned above there is also Louis Malle's Elevator to the Gallows (1958).) Taught film history is often exclusive (trying to exclude what is not considered part of a movement or a genre, often for spurious reasons), when it would be more accurate to be inclusive (to show how everything is interconnected). Nothing is gained by reducing film noir to films made from The Maltese Falcon (1941) to Touch Of Evil (1958). I would not call it a genre either.

So that is one weakness of taught film history, the problematic and unnecessary habit of tidying up things, and compartmentalising it. This is linked to the widespread idea of film history as a series of revolutions. First came "cinema of attractions", then came Griffith, then came sound, then came deep focus, then came neorealism and so on and so forth, and one leading to another, the one being an improvement upon what came before. This is film history as if based on Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, but this is not how cinema, or the arts, work. It is much more fluid, and simultaneous. Deep focus was almost always there, and neorealism was not new, it has been a tradition of filmmaking since the early days of cinema. There is very little that is new, and it does not matter whether something is new or not. The cult of the new, which I blogged about last year, has always seemed to me to be very shallow, as if something is not worthwhile if it is not new.

Sometimes the whole premise is wrong, or something has been simplified to such an extent that it stops having any bearing on anything real. One example would be a common argument which goes like this: "Ingmar Bergman was an auteur because he was his own man, whereas Hollywood filmmakers did work in a studio system." Only Bergman did also work in a studio system, with a producer breathing down his neck. He did not become independent until the late 1960s. Of course, he had a lot of freedom within the studio, at least after Smiles of a Summer Night (1955) won the Grand Prix in Cannes, but that is not what makes him different from Hollywood directors, it is what makes him similar to Hollywood directors, including the bit about becoming independent.

To some extent these errors are due to poor research, or complete lack of research. Instead much writing is based on myths, preconceptions and prejudices. In another earlier blog post I suggested that a concept made famous by the German sociologist Max Weber, Gedankenbilder or Ideal Types, is useful in understanding our perception of film history. In that previous post I explained Gedankenbilder as "an abstract model of something, say a phenomenon that we are studying, but a model which doesn't necessarily exist in reality, it is only a reference point." In our case a model of a genre, a filmmaker, an era, a movement or whatever it might be. This model, this ideal image, is then taken to be true, even though there might not be a single film that is actually like this image. When somebody thinks of a film noir, the film in their head probably has a voice-over narration and shadowy, expressionistic lightning, and while it is true that many film noirs have these traits, many do not, whereas many films not considered film noir do have these traits. The problem is not that there are ideal types, but that it seems to be so very hard to forget that it is only that, an ideal type. (I will discuss the special case of neorealism in a later post.)

Another reason is most likely the combination of ideology and romanticism that is often involved. Many scholars seem to have a romantic vision of neorealism or the various New Waves of the 1960s and 1970s that cloud their judgements, and so they sometimes attribute things to them which are not there, or is there but is not as revolutionary as they claim. A certain elitist view of cinema also plays a part, with American cinema bad and European cinema good (or vice-versa), even though many, if not most, of the differences are more perceptual than real. Sometimes the prejudices are against "old" cinema in general (and here old can mean anything from before World War Two to anything before Quentin Tarantino).

Of course sometimes things are deliberately exaggerated to simplify for argument's sake. But too often the exaggerations and simplifications distorts reality to the point that the argument becomes baseless and often it is also the case that the scholar does not know any better, partly because there are too many films that should be watched and too little time, but perhaps also due to a lack of interest in watching films. I often get the feeling that many scholars prefer to read books by other scholars instead of watching the actual films themselves, so if one person makes a mistake or says things that are not correct, then that gets repeated over and over again. The same phenomenon as when critics only quote from press releases, without acknowledging that they are quoting from a press release, and if there was a mistake in that press release it is repeated in every newspaper and magazine. This can be down to laziness or lack of time but the outcome is still the same.

In John Ford's sad and magnificent The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) the famous quote is "This is the West sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend." That sadly, but not magnificently, is also the unspoken truth about too much of the world of cinema studies, whether in lecture halls, books or journals.

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For those who would like to read a book which is a perfect example of all the things I have mentioned here as flawed and problematic, then this one will suffice.

There is apparently no consensus as how to write film noir in plural. Films noirs, film noirs and films noir have all been suggested.

Thoughts on cinema and radiation and the disasters in Japan

Our fear of nuclear power seems to go deep. Or rather, our fear of radiation. It is sometimes irrational, and often based on misconceptions and misunderstandings. But it is there, and even though there has been only one horrible accident, Chernobyl, the fear of another like it is often on people's minds when nuclear power is discussed. The shock of Chernobyl has perhaps forever altered our perception of nuclear power in general, at least among those that were old enough at the time to see the news flashes. (For a recent assessment of Chernobyl, see the website of UNSCEAR (United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation) here.)

Films have long been expressing our fears of both the bomb and nuclear power. New York Times had an article yesterday about the Japanese films about the monster Godzilla, and the message of those films. The first of those films, Godzilla (Gojira) came out 1954, and dealt both with the atomic bomb released over Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but also the nuclear tests at the Bikini atoll that the Americans made in the 1940s and 1950s (that's where the name of the bathing costume comes from). It's a surprisingly powerful film, and much different from the American version from 1998. But all over the world, films were made about this fear. Bergman's The Seventh Seal (Det sjunde inseglet 1957) has sometimes been seen as an allegory about the fear of the bomb. More directly outspoken is his later film Winter Light (Nattvardsgasterna 1962). In France, Alain Renais made Hiroshima mon amour in 1959. In the US all sorts of films, but primarily horror films and film noirs, were made with an atomic subtext. Even before Godzilla came out, Gordon Douglas directed the low key and eerie horror film Them!, about ants that had been exposed to the fallout of a nuclear test in New Mexico, and grown extraordinary large. What's remarkable about it is how realistic it is, in its settings and tone, and that it has a Foucault-like view of those that society lock up as criminals and mentally unsound (or crazy).

Another example is the nihilistic noir Kiss Me Deadly (1955), with an apocalyptic ending. Pay particular attention to the sound effects. The radiating light in the box sounds like a monster, it's definitely something that is alive:

On the Beach (1959), set in Australia, about a group of people waiting for the nuclear cloud that has killed the rest of the world, is another example. A later example, and more fitting for the present crisis, is The China Syndrome (1979) about an accident at a nuclear power station. Here Jack Lemmon is playing the manager of the station, desperately trying to control a potential meltdown. The strange thing about the film is that it was released just days before the real accident at Three Mile Island power station, near Harrisburg, until now the world's second most dangerous nuclear accident.

But to return to Japan. In 1989, Shohei Imamura made Black Rain (Kuroi Ame), about the after effects of the bombings of Hiroshima. The following year Akira Kurosawa wrestled with his own fears of radiation, and nuclear power. In one of his 'dreams' from his late film Dreams (Yume 1990), Mount Fuji turns red, after a nuclear accident. It's yet another apocalyptic imagining of the horrible effects:

With the increasing fears of a disaster in Japan, the ghost of accidents past are back to haunt the world. Although scientists assures us that it won't be as bad as Chernobyl, even in a worst-case scenario, that is not much of a consolation since even something half as bad would be unspeakable enough. What would that do to Japan? A headline in a newspaper the other day said "Japan is fighting for its life", and even though it first sounded very much exaggerated, now I'm not so sure anymore. Japan will eventually prevail, but at what cost? Whatever happens at Fukushima now, the combination of the earthquakes, the tsunami, and the complete breakdown of so many nuclear power plants is enough to make the most resilient country go down on its knees. I hope that all of those that I have met there are safe.

For the love of film (noir)

I was going to write about Max Weber, but then I remembered the blogathon on film noir, so Weber will just have to wait. Since film noir is an old favourite topic of mine, the temptation to write something is overpowering. But have you heard about the blogathon? It has even made it to the editorial pages of the gray lady. The initiative comes from the Film Noir Foundation with the aim of raising money to help locate and restore prints of film noir that are endangered. Ferdy on Film and The Self-Styled Siren are actively running the thing, so you can click yourself over there and learn more.

At Stockholm University I've once wrote a dissertation about film noir, covering some 50 films, and the choice was natural since I've been a fan since my mid-teens, and some of my favourite films can be classified as film noir, although some because they are film noir, and some regardless of being film noir.

Film noir is often called a genre but I would disagree with that because noir is too transgressive. You can have gangster noir, science fiction noir, western noir, detective noir and so on. If a film cannot be called a noir because it is set in space or in the wild west, than does this mean that a noir has to be set in the city? Clearly not since several noirs are set in the countryside. No, it can't be space-specific either.

And it's not a style, because if it was, plenty of films by Michael Curtiz would qualify, despite being far from noir, whereas The Big Sleep (1946) would not necessarily be called a noir, with its lack of shadows and spiderwebs. Neither has it got a flashback structure or a voice-over. It, and many other noirs, lack a lot of the stylistic and narrative devices that are often associated with noir, indeed seen as essential to it. In some ways The Big Sleep does look even less as a noir than other films directed by Howard Hawks.

It does however have a certain sensibility, which it doesn't share with other films by Hawks, a sense of dread and doom, of life hanging in the balance. And for me this is one key to film noir. This sensibility, a combination of the above and a certain detached cynicism about the ways of the world. It's an existentialism the comes out of the city and has then spread out, a sentiment saying that the end is near, nobody is innocent and nothing really matters, accept perhaps a man's honour. That is why Robert Siodmak and Fritz Lang are such great makers of noir, because for them it comes naturally, those themes and sensibilities were there with them even before there was such a thing as film noir. And since it is this sensibility that makes film noir what it is, you can have film noirs set in space or at a ranch, or at a battle field. There should be some sense of a compatible visual style, compatible with the themes, but that is a given since most films try to have such compatibility any way. A question is whether film noir works in colour, and arguably it does, in such a late example as Chinatown (1974).

But although I've mentioned Siodmak and Lang, film noir isn't about authorship, it is about a time and a place in history, primarily the 1940s and early 1950s, with some distinct examples both before and after. Of course the scources are from earlier years, the hardboiled detective novels from the 1920s and 1930s, by the likes of Dashiell Hammet, Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain and Horace McCoy, and British writers such as Graham Greene and Eric Ambler.

Because it's a question of sensibilities and general atmosphere, a film is either noir or it isn't, it can't be partly noir. If a few scenes have a noir-ish look, in the conventional sense of stark contrasts between light and dark, and elaborate plays with shadows, that's not enough, or if some scenes are sinister and fatalistic, that's not enough either. For it to be a proper noir, the above mentioned ingredients must be ever present, from beginning to end. When we watch a film noir we are entering a special mindset, with its own rules (not narrative rules, but behaviour rules), and there is no escaping them. Even those noirs that end happily, can only be happy in the fleeting moment.

Film noir is not an entirely American affair, there's a whole bunch of British noirs, and some sprinkled out in other countries as well. Bergman's High Tension aka This Can't Happen Here (Sånt händer inte här) is definitely on noir territory.

But definitions are tricky, and although I took a line of dialogue from The Maltese Falcon and put it on the front page of my dissertation, I'm not 100% sure it is a noir, although arguing that it isn't will only complicate things, since it was one of the first films singled out by the French in the post-war era as being an example of the new style of American filmmaking that they had detected. But on the other hand they did also include Lost Weekend (1945), another great film, but one I would say with much more confidence that it is not a proper noir, even though the cinematography by John F. Seitz is spectacularly expressionistic. But more quintessential examples are Double Indemnity (1944) and D.O.A. (1950). Out of the Past (1947) is another strong example. It has a companion piece in The Big Steal (1949), with the same duo, Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer, in the lead, and the same scriptwriter, Daniel Mainwaring, but that is arguably not a noir, in that it is too playful and bright. That might be partly due to the different sensibilities of the directors, with Jacques Tourneur being a somber shadowmaker, whereas Don Siegel is more of an individualist and free-wheeling anarchist to really accept the sense of inevitability in proper noir. (Daniel Mainwaring on the other hand is a key noir-player, with several important screen writing credits, sometimes under the name Geoffrey Homes.)

In the end there will always be film noirs to argue over, as to whether they are or not, and it isn't important. What's important are the films, and there are plenty of them to go around. Perhaps the best definition of film noir comes towards the end of Chinatown. In the film, Chinatown is not so much a place as a state of mind, and when Jake Gittes (the main character, played by Jack Nicholson) is bewildered, angry and sad his partner says "Forget it Jake, it's Chinatown". You could easily exchange "Chinatown" with the words "film noir".