How Film Noir's Immorality Saved America

(In a Lonely Place, Dir. Nicholas Ray, 1950)  

There’s a famous anecdote about the classic film noir ‘The Big Sleep’. In the film, a chauffeur is killed without any real reason. No one knows why this chauffeur had to be eliminated; not the director, Howard Hawks, not the writers, not the actors and not even the original author of the novel, Raymond Chandler. Realising this made me wonder why I’d never questioned it before, I’ve seen the film multiple times and yet had never had any reason to question this man’s death, and I think the answer is pretty simple: I never cared. Not as in I didn’t care about the film, I love the film, but the film never wanted me to care about that man’s death because it wasn’t important.

Film noir is built on violence. Meaningless, painless, glamorous violence. It’s odd, then, to say that this genre is a cornerstone of the American psyche. That film noir is a representation of one of the most formative periods in modern America: the World Wars. The harsh brutality of war isn’t seen in film noir of course, but the fervent nihilism of the soldiers who had been through hell is the underlying theme in every film noir. A film such as Billy Wilder’s ‘Double Indemnity’ is the height of chic cruelty, with the protagonist, Fred Macmurray, being lured into a hypersexual murder plot by the femme fatale, Barbara Stanwyck. Although eventually things turn sour for the couple it is difficult to deny the level at which the lovers’ mission is revelled in by Wilder. He went as far as to remove the original ending involving Macmurray’s character being gassed for his crimes; the normal punishment for a crime of such severity. He didn’t want the viewer to feel criticised for enjoying the couple’s murderous escapades, it wouldn’t be right. This was during the second World War after all. Now wasn’t the time to criticise someone for killing, now was the time to utilise America’s cold heart 

This was a painful time for America. They had been through multiple wars and were now being given the chance to see their own broken selves being reflected on the screen through these painfully apathetic antiheroes. America had seen its friends and family die and had seen even more fall at their own hands; they were numb. The moment Sam Spade first arrived on cinema screens rolling a cigarette and looking underwhelmed and yet totally engaged, the way only Bogart ever could, was the moment the American public felt as though their nihilism was justified in the face of all that was happening around them. They hadn’t even joined WWII by this point. The confusion and guilt felt after the war continued to grow in the same way that film noir did in popularity. It turns out that misery not only loves company, but also loves being told misery is right. Spade was everything that the American people were, entirely disenfranchised and fighting for what was right, even if he wasn’t always doing the right thing to get there. 

Time passed and the war was seeming further and further in the past, allowing for films such as Charles Laughton’s dark and borderline horror film noir ‘The Night of the Hunter’. This was a turning point, a precursor to the dark and sometimes dangerously nihilistic neo-noir that would be spearheaded by films like Arthur Penn’s ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ or Polanski’s masterpiece ‘Chinatown’. ‘Night of the Hunter’ was a representation of how far America had come in around ten years since the war. Its disturbing, predatory Harry Powell was a money hungry, possibly child murdering antagonist for the ages and the film’s unrelenting tone was the sign that America’s dark soul still permeated into the media it created, but with the advent of the western it was clear that America wasn’t willing to air out its dirty laundry anymore. The film noir was dying, forgotten despite all the good it did, but it would only be a few years later that it would metamorphose into neo noir as America dealt with Vietnam. The anti heroes got darker and the violence got more bloody. America was airing out its laundry again. 

French film critic Nino Frank once said about ‘The Maltese Falcon’: “It reveals a third dimension, in which the magnitude of a man’s moral decrepitude is mirrored darkly on the surface of the cinema”, I think this is why film noir has such an enduring legacy, because it reveals the pain and anguish under the surface of America.