By Michael Bayer
Film noir is appreciated today as an unusual fusion of artistic and commercial, high culture and low culture, sophistication and grit. But the reality is that Hollywood production – and noir specifically— simply had been mirroring trends in literature at the time.
The distinction between literary and genre fiction had become entrenched ever since the emergence of pulp magazines in the early 20th century had cheapened (literally and figuratively) certain types of fiction, especially mystery and crime. In the 1930’s, English author Graham Greene famously helped reinforce this bifurcation by publishing what he called “entertainments,” presumably his less serious novels. (He later withdrew the distinction.)
Film noir emerged in part because European filmmakers had arrived in superficial Hollywood with a strain of intellectualism just as some American crime fiction was acquiring a literary respectability thanks to writers like Dashiell Hammett, Cornell Woolrich, James M. Cain, and Raymond Chandler. Many scribblers on both sides of the Atlantic were challenging the elitism of film and literary criticism: in his famous essay, “The Simple Act of Murder,” in 1944, noir’s first big year, Chandler wrote, “There are no vital and significant forms of art; there is only art, and precious little of that.”
To a certain extent, film noir was the cinematic adaptation of a literary phenomenon – hardboiled crime fiction – which had loosely evolved from the literary tradition of 19th century Europe and its attendant friction between romance and realism. In Victorian England, the Gothic novel, which had already spawned numerous entertainment genres we enjoy today, had dominated for generations with its dark Romanticism but would soon pass its peak. By the middle of the century, the Russian novel, ultimately perfected by Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, had blended post-Pushkin artistry with a new realism that eschewed thrills and fantasy for down-to-earth struggles. And by the end of the century, the French school of naturalism, which intensified realism to the point of determinism, often among the dregs of society, had taken shape in the works of Émile Zola. It’s notable that Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1866) and Zola’s La Bête Humaine (1890) are each the source of multiple film noir adaptations.
The influence of Gothic fiction is hard to overstate. The Gothic ethos had dominated all of British popular culture for more than a century, so entrenched that it inspired a work of satire – Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey – as early as 1818. A few decades later, American author Edgar Allan Poe, who had capitalized on the market for Gothic and produced some of America’s earliest and greatest horror tales, also invented the literary detective character in amateur sleuth C. Auguste Dupin, who would appear in three Poe stories: “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841), “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” (1842), and “The Purloined Letter” (1844).
The Gothic also had influenced the work of Charles Dickens, whose close friend Wilkie Collins would later publish The Moonstone, widely considered the first mystery novel, in 1868. (Poe had only written short stories.) Along with many other British authors, Dickens and Collins often published their novels as serials in monthly magazines, which compelled the invention of the cliffhanger to keep readers coming back. Collins’ other influential novel, The Woman in White, would be adapted for the screen in 1948.
In 1881, when the popularity of Gothic fiction had begun its decline, the most famous detective in history was born: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes appeared in 56 short stories and four novels, using deductive reasoning skills to assist Scotland Yard with their toughest cases. The fantastic and macabre had officially given way to the rational and clinical.
So, we might say that realism had finally vanquished Romanticism in Europe, creating fertile ground for modernism and its self-conscious break from literary traditions in favor of psychological fragmentation. Probably the clearest link between modernism and film noir was Ernest Hemingway, whose distinctly economic and uniquely masculine style paved the way for the hardboiled school. One might even say that, through such painfully honest and deeply alienated protagonists as Jake Barnes (The Sun Also Rises) and Robert Jordan (For Whom the Bell Tolls), Hemingway invented the noir anti-hero. Indeed, a Hemingway short story was adapted into one of the masterpieces of the noir canon (The Killers, 1946).
While modernism steered the Western literary canon in new directions, the crime fiction genre, still in its relative infancy, was cleaving into distinctly European and American styles.
In Europe, Georges Simenon, the unbelievably prolific and celebrated Belgian crime writer (who did most of his writing in France), published nearly 500 novels under two dozen pen names throughout the century. Many of Simenon’s novels were romans policier, or police procedurals that emphasize character over simple deduction, many featuring his most famous creation, Detective Jules Maigret, while others of his novels were categorized as romans durs, or psychological novels much like the work of Americans James M. Cain and Cornell Woolrich. Many of Simenon’s works were adapted for film, including the noirs The Man from London (1943, 1947), Panique (1947), and The Paris Express (1952).
In France, noir originated as a literary label: roman noir exited the precinct of roman policier to live with civilians and criminals instead. Paris-based publisher Gallimard launched its Série Noire (Black Series) crime fiction imprint in 1945 just after the Nazis had fled and one year before film critic Nino Frank first applied the noir label to a handful of new, American crime films. Attempting to replicate the success of American pulp magazines, founder Marcel Duhamel used Série Noire to popularize noir fiction as a more pessimistic and amoral view of criminal minds, often featuring a common man becoming trapped in a criminal endeavor with tragic consequences. Emerging from this movement was an important literary influence on later film noir: Auguste Le Breton, whose 77 novels were typically set in the criminal underworld and whose film adaptations include Razzia (1955), Rififi (1955), and Speaking of Murder (1957).
The Brits weren’t quite as fascinated with American crime as the French were. Instead, spy fiction was the main draw in the UK between and during the two world wars, the noir-tinged 1930’s intrigues of English novelist Eric Ambler snapped up by Hollywood, resulting in early noirs like Journey Into Fear (1943) and The Mask of Dimitrios (1944). Perhaps the English author most associated with noir, however, is Graham Greene, a former British intelligence officer whose career helped to transform the spy genre by trapping the ordinary layman in webs of espionage, usually by chance: based on his 1943 novel, Ministry of Fear (1944) is a prime example of this impact. Never a fan of Hollywood, Greene nevertheless made an impact on the film noir cycle, his crime-specific work was adapted through the 1940’s in both America and Europe: This Gun for Hire (1941) based on his 1936 novel A Gun for Sale; Brighton Rock (1948) based on the eponymous 1938 novel; and the screenplay for The Third Man (1949), which Greene viewed as a successful effort to blend a thriller and art film.
British crime fiction had little in common with its American counterpart. In England, the period between the two world wars, considered the Golden Age, saw the likes of Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, and Josephine Tey taking their lead from Conan Doyle and churning out relatively non-violent, straightforward whodunits containing formulaic mystery elements, including a tidy cast of suspects, pastoral settings, and a crime solved by the last chapter. (Christie is the best-selling author of all time, but only one film based on her work, 1937’s A Night of Terror qualifies as noir). These works were entertaining and popular perhaps because they were so cozy and morally straightforward.
Something else entirely was happening in America.
The American literary reaction to these “cozy” British mysteries was a shift in the opposite direction, toward hyper-realism, in what is called the hardboiled style. This shift was a primary factor in the emergence of film noir. Hardboiled prose was terse, high-action, and first-person point of view, inviting the reader to experience the protagonist’s cynicism. Frequently a private detective, the hardboiled hero was savvy and resourceful but also emotionally isolated and morally dubious. British detectives conducted their work out of noble duty or for intellectual satisfaction; American detectives did it for the money. British detectives succeeded by completing the jigsaw puzzle; American detectives threw all the pieces in the air.
Remarking on two authors as symbols of their literary cultures, director Billy Wilder once said: “Take two writers: Raymond Chandler and Agatha Christie. Chandler would be unbeatable if he knew how to construct. Great style, very descriptive, but hard to dramatize. Christie constructs like an angel, but her language is flat.”
The hardboiled school was essentially created by a pulp magazine called Black Mask launched in 1920 by journalist and essayist H. L. Mencken to compensate for his financial losses in more prestigious publishing ventures. The magazine published several genres but became most famous for crime, especially for discovering and popularizing the hardboiled school and for introducing the private eye character. There were other crime magazines (Detective Fiction Weekly, Dime Detective, Strange Detective Mysteries) but Black Mask published or serialized the “who’s who” of the genre, including Dashiell Hammett, the “dean of the hardboiled school” who is credited with inventing the tough, American detective character. All four of Hammett’s major novels, beginning with Red Harvest in 1929, were serialized in Black Mask before being published in book form. His most famous novel, The Maltese Falcon (1930), was published in France in the 1930’s and served as a key catalyst for that country’s love affair with all things noir.
If Hammett was Plato, Raymond Chandler was his pupil Aristotle. Like Hammett, he lamented the lack of realism in British mysteries, criticizing Christie, Sayers, and others for mischaracterizing, over-simplifying, and even romanticizing the act of murder. Offering praise for his predecessor, he said Hammett “took murder out of the Venetian vase and dropped it into the alley.” Chandler viewed modern culture as cheap and disposable but had high literary ambitions for himself, drawing often embittered characters who were, as Andrew Dickos put it, “forced to face previously obscured passions.” He also invented criminal Los Angeles, his famous Philip Marlowe private eye character weathered and hardened by Southern California’s sand and shore.
In the 1950’s, Mickey Spillane singlehandedly launched the paperback market with his manly, womanizing private eye Mike Hammer. As opposed to the romantic undertone of Chandler’s work, Spillane took hardboiled to an almost psychotic degree, and American readers devoured it; Spillane’s books set sales records beyond just the crime category. Other big names in hardboiled included Ross MacDonald and Horace McCoy.
This new breed of crime novel made a lot of money, which, of course, put it on Hollywood’s radar early on. In addition to The Maltese Falcon (1941), Hollywood released film adaptations of Hammett’s The Glass Key (1942), Chandler’s Murder, My Sweet (1944) and The Big Sleep (1946), and, later, Spillaine’s Kiss Me Deadly (1955), among many others. In Hollywood’s zeal to replicate the financial returns of the books, these hardboiled detectives became a defining feature of the new noir phenomenon. In fact, French critics Borde and Chaumeton, in their breakthrough A Panorama of Film Noir (1955), described this early stage of film noir as “a total submission of the cinema to literature,” that is until noir took on a cinematic life of its own.
If the hardboiled novel was the American version of France’s roman policier, then the American psychological crime novel was the French roman noir, and the king of this category was undoubtedly Cornell Woolrich. Dubbed “the Poe of the 20th century” by his biographer Francis Nevins, Woolrich was a sort of poet in the shadows of war, a stylist who could penetrate the deepest fears of the human psyche and establish a mood of dread from the first sentence. A lonely, homosexual alcoholic with an amputated leg and emaciated body, Woolrich’s own life was a constant low-grade nightmare, which may explain his uncanny ability to paint human desperation. Given his mastery of doom, it’s not surprising that he’s the most adapted author of the film noir cycle, and nobody else even comes close. Just a few of the two dozen classic noirs based on his fiction are Phantom Lady (1944), The Window (1949), No Man of Her Own (1950), and Rear Window (1956).
Woolrich’s plots emphasized chance and coincidence, common elements of psychological crime also evident in the accidental meetings that ignited the plots of two of James M. Cain’s master works, The Postman Always Rings Twice (1934) and Double Indemnity (1943). Having written his greatest work in the 1930’s and 40’s, Cain eschewed labels but is widely seen as the progenitor of what many have called noir fiction. Often projecting hardboiled thoughts and dialogue, Cain’s typical characters were ordinary people drawn into terrifying traps, often fueled by lust, and his subject matter (adultery, homosexuality, prostitution) was edgy for American readers at the time. His female characters tended to be unusually independent, or at least sought to be; in fact, Mildred Pierce (1941), brought to life on screen in 1945, features what may be the most complicated, self-possessed feminist heroine in all of noir.
While hardboiled detective stories emphasized external dangers germane to the plot, psychological crime was more focused on the characters’ internal conflicts. The source of suspense wasn’t a monster or a murderer but the longings, memories, and demons inside the human mind. Indeed, psychological suspense can often be more grueling and threatening than standard crime fiction because we fear not only the evil villain, but the evil inside ourselves. The brilliant David Goodis and raw-nerved Jim Thompson also contributed brilliant work to this subgenre.
Before film noir gained respect as a distinctive cinema style, most critics called these films melodramas. Looking back, that label was nothing short of ridiculous. Traditional melodrama relies on the clear polarization of good and evil, an observable moral code that requires little reflection from the audience. Viewers (or readers) are informed who is the hero and who is the villain, what acts are good and what acts are evil. While melodrama might have pleased audiences seeking escapism during the Great Depression and the war, it had little to do with actual human nature.
Film noir shook up all these audience expectations. Its literary influences – realism, naturalism, surrealism, and the hardboiled style – had converged on the silver screen as an extraordinary new ethos.
The classic tale of crime and detection had been transformed: crimes were no longer neatly dealt with, and order was no longer neatly restored. The new American crime fiction was distinguished by a worldview that assumed order never existed in the first place, and never will.
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