By Michael Bayer
No matter where and when it was produced, film noir was international.
Noir was born of a collision of continents in the late 1930’s when European – especially German – directors fled the second world war and landed in Hollywood, merging two sets of values and two different visions to create a fundamentally new kind of film: American content in a European form. Since most early noir directors were expatriates, their outsider’s view distorted the American reality, and this distortion accounted for the dramatic stylizations we see in their films.
Originating in the United States, film noir had an indisputably enormous influence on world cinema, inspiring bursts of noir production in non-English speaking markets as diverse as Japan, Spain, and Egypt. After the seismic disruption of the war, most embattled national cinemas were able to rebuild and restart steady film production by the 1950’s, contributing in various measures to the noir cycle before its final breaths in the early 1960’s.
Of course, not everywhere in the world appreciated noir, let alone produced much of it. Despite giving the world Ingmar Bergman, one of the greatest directors in history, the Scandinavians never developed much skill – or interest – in this area (even French critics Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton recognized this void as early as 1955). While noir thrived in Argentina, which served as one of two hubs for the Latin American film industry, we have minimal contribution to the cycle from Brazil, Columbia, and the rest of South America. While Hong Kong dabbled in noir, mainland China lacked the resources and freedom to make it.
Still, film noir flourished well beyond the English-speaking world, and these films are well worth exploring.
The country that invented the name and literally “wrote the book” on film noir holds a special place in its history. Even before French critic Nino Frank’s proclamation of a new style of American crime film in 1946, France had produced a wide variety of influential crime films, especially those released in the 1930’s under the label of French poetic realism, a term coined by critic Jean Paulhan. Associated with the left-wing, socialist Popular Front coalition that attempted resistance to Hitler’s encroachment, poetic realist directors – or shall we say auteurs – like Jean Renoir (La bête humaine, 1938), Julien Duvivier (Pépé le Moko, 1937), and Marcel Carné (Le quai des brumes, 1938) were creating stylized verisimilitude, combining realistic criminal stories with a romantic atmosphere. A softer version of German Expressionism, poetic realism had a significant influence on noir in Hollywood, which by this time was already in proto-development by the likes of Fritz Lang.
While so many Germans fled Europe to work in Hollywood, that was not the case in France. French filmmakers remained distant from Hollywood as observers and critics, although, somewhat miraculously, French directors working for Nazi-controlled Continental Films made several outstanding noirs during the Nazi occupation, including and especially Henri Georges-Clouzot’s early masterpiece, Le corbeau (1943). After the war, Clouzot would go on to direct some of France’s greatest suspense films, most famously Diabolique (1955), earning him comparisons to Hitchcock.
In the late 1940’s and 1950’s, French noir, which was often dismissed by French critics as inferior copies of the American style, combined the romantic styling of pre-war poetic realism with the bleakness of gritty postwar realism. Important directors of this period were Yves Allégret, Jacques Becker, and Henri Decoin, and a common source of material was the crime fiction of Belgian-born George Simenon.
Film noir provided the pretext for auteur-directors to take risks and assert their personal style, which helped prepare the way for the French New Wave, beginning with Louis Malle’s Ascenseur pour l’échafaud in 1958. A diverse cadre of directors, including Gilles Grangier, Henri Verneuil, Claude Chabrol, and Jean-Pierre Melville, emerged to dominate this late phase of semi-experimental French noir well into the 1960’s.
A discussion of French noir would be incomplete without highlighting superstar Jean Gabin, who acted in more of France’s great crime films of the era than anyone else. Compared to Humphrey Bogart by the French, the world-weary yet hopeful Gabin was one of the most natural performers for film noir anywhere in the world. Extremely prolific and energetic in the early days, including a brief, unsatisfying stint in Hollywood, Gabin’s greatest noir role may be his aging gangster Max in Jacques Becker’s brilliant Touchez pas au grisbi (1954).
A strong case could be made for Mexico as the third most important center of film noir after the United States and France. That’s not only because Mexico dominated the Latin American market economically and creatively but because early Hollywood gangster films had a significant impact on the development of the Mexican criminal style on film. Of course, the country also served as the escape plan for American fugitives and dreamers in countless noirs.
Officially starting in 1936 with the release of Allá en el Rancho Grande, the Golden Age of Mexican Cinema emphasized comedy, horror and musicals, this last genre providing an important bridge to film noir. The most popular musical category was the so-called rumberas film, a uniquely Mexican subgenre centered around nightclub culture and the celebrated figure of a rumba dancer. Nightclubs attracted plenty of bad elements, especially gangsters and prostitutes, so crime stories naturally emerged in such settings. An offshoot category called the cabaretera film focused more dramatically on the crime element – typically, an innocent girl was forced into a criminal life by circumstances beyond her control — and limited the musical numbers. Despite the singing and dancing, these films were harsh, violent, and despairing. Examples include Emilio Fernández’ Salón México (1949) and Victimas del pecado (1951), Alberto Gout’s Aventurera (1950) and Sensualidad (1951), and Tulio Demicheli’s Una golfa (1958).
Woefully unpreserved by Mexican film authorities and undiscovered by most Americans, Mexican noir is uniquely mesmerizing for its strange combination of vibrant excitement and melodrama with bleak settings and brutal circumstances. Along with Fernández, Juan Bustillo Oro and Roberto Gavaldón were most accomplished in noir direction, while superstars like Arturo de Córdova, María Félix, and Dolores del Rio made frequent appearances.
Argentina served as a second Latin American hub for film production. With peak production reaching more than 40 films annually in the early 1940’s, the Argentine industry was less dynamic than Mexico’s but released a wide variety of films from literary adaptations and period dramas to tango musicals and comedies. Argentine film noir tended to be visually dramatic and serious in tone as evident in the country’s Gothic noir masterpiece, Hugo del Carril’s Más allá del olvido (1956). The country’s two most consistently excellent noir directors were Carlos Hugo Christensen, who adapted several works by Cornell Woolrich, and the lesser-known Daniel Tinayre, a uniquely talented crafter of moody crime melodramas.
As the birthplace of the film noir visual style, Germany’s importance to noir is more historical than contemporaneous, but that’s not to say we don’t have a variety of exceptional German noirs to enjoy.
The creative extravaganza that was Weimar Germany, the hyperinflationary period between the wars, invented one of the most dramatic cinemas in history. The loss of the German empire had inspired the nation’s artists to build something new in the Weimar School of Expressionism, a critique of rationalism which encompassed all the arts and attempted to communicate the dislocation and alienation of modern life. This became manifest in film through a distinctive visual style of chiaroscuro dubbed German expressionism, which helped distinguish the period’s extraordinary film industry centered around the famous UFA studios in Berlin.
Inspired in part by the innovative stage productions of theater director Max Reinhardt, German expressionism first made its mark in Robert Weine’s astonishing Cabinet of Dr. Caligari in 1920. Soon after, directors like Fritz Lang, F.W. Murnau, and G.W. Pabst were creating extravagant film epics painted with the expressionist palette, which projects the interiority of characters onto the external environment in the forms of set design, costumes, lighting, and cinematography. Berlin couldn’t compete with Hollywood financially so it competed instead on style. (German directors also experimented with New Objectivity, a style of “street films” in the 1920’s which served as warnings about the temptations of the urban environment, such as crime, prostitution, and general dissolution.)
In the aftermath of World War II, the severely weakened film industry attempted rebirth through a series of so-called “rubble films” (trümmerfilm) about desperate souls wandering, literally or metaphorically, through the wreckage of war, often descending into crime. Two major noirs from this category are Wolfgang Staudte’s Die Mörder sind unter uns (1946) and Peter Lorre’s Der Verlorene (1951). Throughout the 1950’s, German noirs were released with steadily increasing frequency, perhaps peaking with Helmut Käutner’s Schwarzer Kies in 1961. A series of low-budget second features called krimis (kriminalfilm) based exclusively on Edgar Wallace mystery novels became popular in the early 1960’s.
Italy’s most important contribution to film noir was the new, gritty Italian neorealism style which influenced the shifts toward on-location shooting and semi-documentary style in Hollywood crime films. Moviegoers around the world wanted more cinematic realism after the war, and Italy showed the way. Developed by directors like Roberto Rossellini, Vittorio de Sica, and Luchino Visconti, whose Ossessione (1943), an adaptation of James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice, is considered the first Italian neorealist film and the first Italian noir, the style emphasized realism in every aspect of filmmaking. Postwar poverty and desperation were depicted in excruciating detail. On-location shooting with extensive exteriors was the norm. Preferably non-professional actors were cast.
Italy’s major film studio, Cinecittà, had been founded in 1937 by the Mussolini regime to produce fascist propaganda and support the feature film industry. Bombed by the Allied forces during the war and then used as a displaced persons camp for two years, Cinecittà’s unavailability was a key factor that sent directors out onto the streets to shoot their films. They had no choice but to create neorealism.
While he didn’t necessarily subscribe to neorealist dogma, the inexplicably under-appreciated Pietro Germi is perhaps the most consistent Italian contributor to the classic noir era. Both actor and director, Germi’s films, such as Gioventù perduta (1948) and La città si difende (1951), typically set criminal drama among the urban working classes of a desperate, postwar Italian landscape. Director Giuseppe De Santis illuminated a similar postwar malaise but generally focused on populations outside the major cities, such as an Emilia-Romagna peasant co-op in Caccia tragica (1947) or Po Valley migrant farm workers in Riso amaro (1949).
Toward the tail end of the film noir cycle, a new Italian genre called giallo (named for the yellow color of cheap paperbacks) combined a criminal plot, usually involving a black-gloved serial killer, with a horror atmosphere, slasher-type violence, and eroticism. The first giallo was also the only one shot in black and white: Mario Bava’s extremely entertaining La ragazza che sapeva troppo (1963).
As we move beyond continental Europe, contributions to the film noir cycle become sparser until we arrive in Japan. For the most part, noir output was directly correlated with the economic strength and creative freedom of a nation’s film industry. An exception is India, which boasted a massive, thriving film sector with reasonable creative license, but the cultural appetite demanded vibrant musicals and comedies; there was very little room for dark and dreary crime films.
The Soviet Union was generally incompatible with film noir. Despite a few noir-tinged police procedurals like Delo N. 306 (1956) and Delo Pyostrykh (1958), Soviet cinema was restricted to the official art style of socialist realism, which required films to celebrate Soviet ideals of collectivism and optimism while restricting negativity. While creative possibilities opened up slightly after the Khrushchev Thaw in the late 1950’s, noir still would never be a natural fit. The situation was similar in China. The Japanese occupation during the second world war brought film production to a halt, with some filmmakers fleeing to Hong Kong to continue working. After the communist revolution of 1949, censorship soared: any films reflecting negatively on national pride or policy, or agitating others to commit crimes, were banned. Not an environment conducive to film noir.
In some countries, key directors stand out for their noir sensibilities, including in places where many Americans may be surprised to learn a modern, liberal cinema existed. For example, in Turkey, Memduh Ün developed a reputation for crime, including Bire on vardi (1963), his adaptation of Cornell Woolrich’s novel, Deadline at Dawn (1944). In Egypt, Kamal El Sheikh blended high melodrama (and strange editing and scoring decisions) with film noir storylines involving gangsters, identity complexes, and stolen inheritances, such as El-Lailah el-Akhirah (1963), which stars Faten Hamama as a woman who wakes up one morning to find herself married to her brother-in-law. In Iran, the brilliant, over-the-top Samuel Khachikian directed extremely expressionistic films that took noir tropes to the limit, often blending in horror atmospheres as in Delhoreh (1962).
For all intents and purposes, however, eastern noir begins and ends in Japan, and one could argue the spine of Japanese noir was the unprecedented 16-film relationship between Akira Kurosawa, one of the most lauded directors in cinema history, and superstar tough guy Toshirō Mifune over the course of 17 years. (Four films in the Heart of Noir collection are fruits of this partnership.) From 1948’s Yoidore tenshi to 1963’s Tengoku to jigoku, one of Japan’s great noir masterpieces, Kurosawa and Mifune created a string of suspense thrillers which captured Japan’s unique flavor of postwar anxiety, often exposing the corruption that bubbles up from class divides. Postwar Japan was a depressing place, often portrayed as little more than desperate souls wandering a bombed-out terrain, selling their bodies or drugs to survive, as in Masaki Kobayashi’s Kuroi kawa (1957).
The liveliest Japanese noirs typically hailed from the yakuza (gangster) genre. Emerging in the 1950’s, yakuza films often portrayed organized crime as a modernized yet distorted form of the samurai moral code (a subgenre called ninkyo eiga even featured honorable, kimono-clad yakuza from earlier Japanese historical periods). These powerful criminals often intersected with Japan, Inc., the dynamic burst of corporate capitalism in the decades following the war.
Borrowing heavily from American noir, the Nikkatsu studio was most associated with the modern yakuza, releasing impeccably crafted films like Ore wa matteru ze (1957), Sabita naifu (1958), and Kenjû zankoku monogatari (1964). Sometimes considered part of the loosely defined Japanese New Wave, the wild stylings of Nikkatsu directors Seijun Suzuki (‘Jûsangô taihisen’ yori: Sono gosôsha o nerae, 1960) and Shōhei Imamura (Buta to gunkan, 1961) combined fast-paced, even frenetic action with bouts of black comedy.
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