Moi, Noir

 

Picture this: the year is 1940.  You've finagled an invitation to the premiere of radio wunderkind Orson Welles' first film: an adaptation of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness.  You file into Radio City Music Hall in Manhattan and take your seat, eager to see what the man behind the scandalous War of the Worlds has done with - and to - the motion picture,  Suddenly, it's showtime: the lights dim, the curtain rises, and the screen comes alive with...

...nothing. It's pitch black. Then, Welles speaks -- that unmistakable, hypnotic voice. He warns you that this movie will be like nothing you've ever seen or experienced. At last, an image appears: not the river at the heart of Conrad's tale, nor Welles himself in costume as Marlowe, the novel's hero. All you see are bars. Something about the perspective seems...odd.

Suddenly, Welles' face fills the screen behind the bars, looming impossibly large. His monstrous hand reaches in with an olive. His gaze seems to fall from the screen, directly onto you: he's offering you the olive. Then he's commanding you to sing, as if you were...a caged bird. And when you refuse to comply, he draws a gun from off-screen and points it directly at you. You stare down the barrel (it looks as big as a cannon) as Welles counts down from 10. "Three...two...one..." BANG!

Of course, none of this ever happened. But it very nearly did. The scene described above was how Welles planned to introduce audiences to the revolutionary technique with which he hoped to film Conrad's novel: the entire movie would be seen from Marlowe's point of view, the camera moving as if it were the character. In the end, RKO and Welles agreed that the project was too difficult to realize, but it's tantalizing to wonder what impact Heart of Darkness might have had (not least of all on Welles' career) if he had pursued that project to completion, rather than a thinly-veiled portrait of a certain newspaper magnate.

It wasn't until 1947 that Hollywood finally worked up the courage to make a "first-person" film -- and once again the project was driven by an actor making his debut behind the camera: Robert Montgomery. Ironically, his film would follow the exploits of another fictional Marlowe: in this case, Raymond Chandler's detective Philip Marlowe.

The plot of Lady in the Lake is set in motion, amusingly, when a down-on-his-luck Marlowe submits a story to a pulp magazine. The editor, played with wild-eyed gusto by Audrey Totter, recognizes that Marlowe's tale is based on an actual case that he solved, and hires him to find her boss's missing wife. The mystery that unfolds is only slightly easier to follow than that of The Big Sleep, another adaptation featuring Chandler's alter ego.

But for a handful of linking scenes in which Montgomery (as Marlowe) recounts bits of the story from his office, Lady in the Lake is shot exclusively in the first person. Characters address "us" directly (through the camera). When Marlowe regains consciousness after losing a brawl, we share his blurred vision. And in the film's most impressive set piece, we're behind the wheel of Marlowe's careening car as it flips and rolls into a ditch. "Our" hands claw desperately at the dirt as we drag ourselves to a phone booth and call for help...

Montgomery had originally wanted to use the subjective camera technique to film John Galsworthy's novel Escape, but was persuaded by the studio to take on a more contemporary, and bankable, adaptation. Ironically, the second first-person film of 1947 -- Delmer Daves' Dark Passage, adapted from the thriller by David Goodis -- bears close similarities to Galsworthy's work, which follows a convict's flight after he breaks out of prison.

In Dark Passage, Vincent Parry (Humphrey Bogart) escapes from San Quentin, hoping to clear his name for the murder of his estranged wife. He's aided first by a sympathetic socialite (Lauren Bacall), then by a plastic surgeon who alters Parry's face to make him unrecognizable. Unlike Lady in the Lake, Dark Passage uses subjective camerawork only for its first 45 minutes or so; after Parry's bandages come off, Bogart steps in front of the camera (he'd supplied a voice over until that point) and the film proceeds from an "objective" point of view.

But in the time that we share Parry's point of view, we fall off a truck and roll down a hill, climb a fence and hitch a ride, engage in fisticuffs with a nosy driver, snoop around Bacall's boudoir, and hallucinate under the effects of anesthesia. All in all, an eventful 45 minutes!

From a technical standpoint, Lady in the Lake is more ambitious, but Dark Passage is more polished. The latter also benefits from extensive location shooting in and around San Francisco, and a more motivated use of its subjective camera. Still, the limited range of movement available to the bulky cameras of the day makes both films seem rather slow and stiff.

And it's easy enough to catalogue their narrative flaws: Montgomery's linking scenes in Lady in the Lake are too much of a convenience -- so much so that we never even see the lady or the lake of the title! And after painting itself into a narrative corner with a series of unlikely coincidences, Dark Passage tacks on the most ludicrous of happy endings. No, neither film is a masterpiece, to be sure -- but thanks to their revolutionary use of the camera, both have entered the pantheon of noir classics anyway.

So rather than offer yet another critique of these well-known, oft-studied films, I'd like to ask why the two most notable examples of first-person filmmaking -- released in the same year, no less -- are both films noir. What is it about noir that seems to lend itself to the use of the subjective camera?

Despite plots that are often tinged with fatalism, the overriding philosophy of noir is essentially existential. The main character might seem a victim of circumstance or coincidence -- noir teems with chance encounters, unfortunate timing, and just plain bad luck -- but if the Hand of Fate has been set in motion, it's inevitably the result of the protagonist's own actions. He might be like the main character of Woman in the Window, or D.O.A., who strayed but momentarily from the straight-and-narrow -- and paid a high price. Or perhaps he deserves what he gets, like Sidney Falco in The Sweet Smell of Success or Mike Hammer in Kiss Me Deadly. Or he could be a decent sort, like Marlowe, who chose a path that skirts the seamy side of life. In the end it doesn't matter: whether they merely dipped a toe into that dark river or dove in head first, all noir protagonists make a conscious choice -- and misjudge the undercurrents...

To be successful, film noir demands the viewer's absolute identification with the protagonist. That's why it's so rare for any film noir to feature even a single scene in which the main character does not appear. Also, consider how many films noir employ extensive, first-person voiceovers -- usually with a self-abnegating, or at least world-weary, tone. It's the aural equivalent of the subjective camera. Even when we're not seeing directly through the protagnoist's eyes, he still acts as a proxy -- or at least a filter. So it's a small step (so to speak) from following closely in a character's footsteps to actually walking a mile in his shoes...

There's an undeniable element of masochism in noir; it's a cinema of suffering. A quick survey of both classic and recent films noir provides ample proof: In D.O.A., after a single hedonistic night, a straightlaced businessman discovers he's been fatally poisoned, and has only hours to live. Sunset Boulevard is narrated from beyond the grave by a lying, cheating screenwriter who's been murdered by the aging actress who kept him. They say short-term memory is the first thing to go; in Memento it's followed closely by the main character's sense of morality. Lee Marvin learns the hard way that there's no honor among thieves when his partner in crime shoots him and leaves him for dead in Point Blank. L.A. Confidential has no fewer than three protagonists -- all of them cops corrupt in one way or another -- and each one ends up riddled with bullets. And in the ultimate example, our "hero" and narrator in Double Indemnity is executed in the gas chamber (the scene was in fact shot, but cut prior to the film's release).

Philip Marlowe seems to get the stuffing beat out of him in all of his cases, and Lady in the Lake is no exception. Though the advertising for the film made boasts like, "You solve the mystery! You kiss the dame!" the real set pieces are invariably tortuous. "You are drugged and beaten bloody!" "You crawl concussed from a flaming car wreck!" The same goes for Dark Passage. There's no vicarious thrill in living Parry's life; the things we experience through his eyes are things we'd desperately want to avoid in reality.

Indeed, when "we" (as Parry) are shown compassion -- by the cab driver, for instance, who directs us to the underground plastic surgeon -- the director chooses to break from the subjective approach and shows Parry on screen, though his face is obscured by shadow. The film all but insists that there's no pleasure to be found in experiencing kindness firsthand.

The first person technique, therefore, is simply a way to make suffering more intense -- to block the viewer's final escape route out of the nightmare on-screen: "Thank God this isn't happening to me..." Lady in the Lake and Dark Passage aren't even the hardest-boiled films noir. They seem rather tame, even stately, compared to later, Code-bending noirs like The Sweet Smell of Success -- or even earlier films like I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang, clearly a precursor to noir. Even so, Lady in the Lake and Dark Passage offer so many grim thrills, it's hard to believe the studios even billed them as "entertainments."

*

Orson Welles' Touch of Evil is often touted as noir's swansong. But you could claim the same of Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, also released in 1958; it's certainly noir in spirit, if not in appearance. Like Dark Passage, it put San Francisco's steep, winding streets to good use. And Vertigo also made use of the subjective camera -- subtly and sporadically to be sure, but without it Vertigo would have none of its impact.

Of course, everyone is familiar with the famous "dolly in/zoom out" technique used to convey Scottie's (Jimmy Stewart) fear of heights. But many viewers don't realize that Hitchcock peppered the film with P.O.V. shots, to make the audience feel complicit in Scottie's obsession with Madeleine: when she's staring at the painting at the Legion of Honor...or contemplating suicide beneath the Golden Gate Bridge...or in her hotel room bathed in green neon. Hitchcock even went so far as to place the camera behind the wheel of Scottie's car as he follows Madeleine around the city. Leave it to Hitchcock to resurrect -- without fanfare -- a technique that had been abandoned ten years earlier, condemned as a "gimmick."

But despite Vertigo's subtlety and technical virtuosity, Hitchcock still used the first-person technique mainly to put the audience through a cinematic wringer. Scottie is by far his most tormented protagonist, and Vertigo culminates in one of Hitchcock's most shocking, abrupt, and downbeat endings. Hitchcock continued to employ the subjective camera in later films like Psycho and Frenzy, but often replaced the protagonist's viewpoint with that of the antagonist, usually a murderer - trading masochism for sadism, in a sense.

Though he never got to film his Heart of Darkness, Welles' proposed introduction to first-person cinema was a prophetic one. For all their visual inventiveness, Lady in the Lake and Dark Passage both suffer from "caged bird" syndrome: the technique is ultimately more limiting than liberating; the viewer is trapped rather than transformed. That's not to say the films are entirely unsuccessful, or aren't enjoyable. But given the ease and mobility of digital video, and its growing acceptance as a viable cinematic format, it will be interesting to see if a new generation of filmmakers can tackle the challenges -- both technical and creative -- that Montgomery and Daves faced back in 1947.