For those of you who may be interested but don't read this
particular paper, below is an essay from today's TIMES on the
Film Forum noir-fest.
I might have a chance to see one or two of these--any strong
opinions or recommendations? Are there any RARA-AVIAN events
set to coincide with it?
Mark Nevins
July 22, 2007 Noir and the City: Dark, Dangerous, Corrupt and
Sexy By TERRENCE RAFFERTY
GUILT, desire, fear, ambition and the bad behavior those
human frailties give rise to are the favored themes of the
sort of film we now call noir. So it's hardly surprising that
a fair number of these pictures are set in New York City,
where guilt, fear, desire, ambition and bad behavior are
pretty much a way of life. Any city will do, of course,
because all cities generate a certain amount of the anxiety
that film noir feeds on. And all cities, somewhere, have
dark, scary streets that can, in noir's violent allegories of
moral ambiguity, stand in for the dimmer, grubbier recesses
of the soul. But New Yorkers pride themselves on having more
of everything than people in other cities do. If noir is the
great urban style of the movies - and it is - then New York
City is surely the noirest place on earth.
As proof Film Forum has put together a series (starting
Friday) it calls N.Y.C. Noir, which features a whopping 47
movies through Sept. 6; they collectively portray this city
as dangerous, corrupt, frazzling, beautiful and dangerously
sexy, and who could argue? It would be as pointless as
arguing with J. J. Hunsecker, the gossip columnist played by
Burt Lancaster in "Sweet Smell of Success" (1957), when after
a late supper at "21" he emerges onto a still-bustling West
52nd Street and whispers - to no one in particular, as if in
prayer - "I love this dirty town."
"Sweet Smell of Success," directed by Alexander Mackendrick
from a witheringly cynical script by Clifford Odets and
Ernest Lehman, is the opening film of the series, and it sets
exactly the right tone, although it's an atypical film noir.
There are no shootings in the film, no elaborate heists, no
chases or desperate races against time, no spectacular
betrayals by femmes fatales; except for a couple of sinister
cops, nobody even wears a hat. The crimes committed in "Sweet
Smell of Success" are of a kind not covered by federal, state
or local statute and are no less shocking for that.
The sleaziness and emotional violence of Hunsecker's campaign
to sabotage his young sister's romance with a jazz musician
are breathtaking. And the way Hunsecker drags the movie's
protagonist, an overeager press agent named Sidney Falco
(Tony Curtis), down into the ethical sewer with him is as
brutal as what Richard Widmark does to the old lady in Henry
Hathaway's "Kiss of Death" (1947). (If you are unaware of
that unfortunate woman's fate, the series provides an
attractive opportunity to find out: "Kiss of Death" shares a
double bill with Samuel Fuller's terrific 1953 Widmark
vehicle "Pickup on South Street" on Aug. 1 and 2.)
It's the nakedness of the newspaperman's exercise of power,
and the inability of the other, less monomaniacal characters
to fight it, that make the picture unmistakably noir, even
without gunplay. A sense of powerlessness - often disguised
by tough-guy bravado - is a common trait in the heroes and
heroines of film noir, and this is a feeling that New Yorkers
know a thing or two about. We know too that the threat of
physical violence is far from the only means the masters of
our fates employ when they want us to know there's no way
out. In this dirty town, where people come to Make It, our
desire to succeed and our terror of failure are usually all
the ammunition the powerful require to keep us right where
they want us.
Not many of the films of noir's classic period - roughly the
mid-'40s to the late '50s - are as unsettling as "Sweet Smell
of Success." Most of them, overwhelmingly, are crime
thrillers, in which the guns, knives, garrotes and blunt
instruments help distance the viewer, to some extent, from
the potentially depression-inducing fatalism of the
worldview.
John Farrow's tense, sprightly "Big Clock" (1948), for
example, depicts a media environment just about as oppressive
as the scummy pond in which Hunsecker swims (and Falco
sinks). But there's a nice lurid murder in it: Earl Janoth,
the boss of what can only be called a magazine empire, kills
his mistress and, observing the venerable corporate tradition
of shifting the blame for a disaster to somebody else, orders
the overworked editor of his Crimeways magazine to find the
mysterious man in whose company the victim was last seen.
This prime suspect, the audience knows, is none other than
the editor (Ray Milland) himself.
The tricky plot (from a superb novel by Kenneth Fearing)
generates plenty of suspense and anxious comedy, which make
tolerable - even enjoyable - the movie's vivid treatment of a
peculiarly New York nightmare: the feeling of being trapped
by a really, really good job.
"The Big Clock" is on the tony end of the noir scale, a
neighborhood also occupied by Otto Preminger's much better
known "Laura" (1944), which is sexier - the cop hero falls in
love with the portrait of an apparent murder victim - but
which has almost no identifiable Gotham atmosphere. Although
it's a wonderfully sleek and inventive picture, practically
the only thing that indicates it's set in New York is the
presence of (yet another) extremely creepy journalist.
In general the noirs that attempt to recreate the city on the
soundstages and back lots of Hollywood tend to concentrate -
as "The Big Clock," "Laura" and Fritz Lang's elegant "Woman
in the Window"
(1944) do - on the interiors, the swanky rooms that swanky
Manhattanites live in; the pitfalls of exterior sets can be
seen with disturbing clarity in the risible "Greenwich
Village" of Lang's 1945
"Scarlet Street." What the studio-bound noirs sacrifice in
authenticity they make up for in a heightened claustrophobia:
a quality so essential to the style that even when the movies
began to be shot primarily on location, the smarter
filmmakers tried to replicate that closed-in feeling by means
of dim, expressionistic lighting, hemming their nervous
characters in with walls of shadows.
"Kiss of Death" does that very effectively, and the less
familiar 1949 low-budget sleeper "The Window" does it yet
better. "The Window" is sort of an earlier, junior version of
Alfred Hitchcock's 1954 classic,
"Rear Window"- also in the series - and like that film is
based on a story by New York's own Cornell Woolrich, who was
pulp fiction's most dedicated and ingenious purveyor of stark
paranoia.
The director of "The Window," Ted Tetzlaff, was once a
cinematographer, and the movie has an extraordinary visual
unity, indoors and out. The simple story concerns an
imaginative boy who witnesses a murder committed by his
upstairs neighbors and can't get anyone to believe him.
Tetzlaff has the wit to give all the picture's settings -
especially the abandoned building where the climactic action
takes place - a uniform dark luster, the look of a playhouse
just after lights-out, when ordinary, familiar objects can
start to appear changed and menacing.
Although film noir is mostly a thoroughly adult kind of
movie, the child's-eye view of "The Window" suggests that the
grown-up noir sensibility may have its roots in the unique
terrors of a lonely city kid, seeing things he can't explain
at all hours of the day and night, hearing ominous noises
from the street even as he's trying to get to sleep - the
messy life of the metropolis always pressing in a little too
closely.
In the later movies in Film Forum's series, like Alan J.
Pakula's
"Klute" (1971) and Martin Scorsese's "Mean Streets" (1973)
and "Taxi Driver" (1976), you can almost feel how profoundly
that childlike horror has been absorbed into the city's
system, how much more noir we've become. Famously nothing
shocks New Yorkers, and that urban sang-froid is precisely
the spirit of N.Y.C. Noir. These ravishing pictures show us
all the dirty things, outside and inside, that we've somehow
learned to love.
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