The Illusion of Depth

You remember the opening of The Killers ? Burt Lancaster (in his film debut) has been working in a little out-of-the-way filling station, hiding out from a gang of mobsters who want to find him.  One day, the wrong car pulls up at the petrol pump. For Burt Lancaster, that was the end of the story. He knows that he has been found, and he makes a decision to stop running. When the killers inevitably arrive, they find him lying in bed, ready to accept his fate. But not every noir protagonist takes such things lying down. Our next film opens exactly the same way, with a sleepy little town and a filling station attendant with a past. And sure enough, the wrong car pulls in and that filling station attendant realises that his past has caught up with him. But this isn't Burt Lancaster. This is Robert Mitchum. And he's not ready to lie down and die just yet. Last week's film ( Born to Kill ) was directed by Robert Wise, the young (at the time) editor-turned-director whose whose fir...

Do you remember the scene in King Kong (1933) when little Fay Wray was trapped in the hand of the mighty ape? Slowly, he begins to peel away her clothing as she struggles in vain. More curious than lustful, Kong strips away layer after layer of her garments, holding them up to his nose before discarding them and turning back to his little blonde plaything. Fay Wray is of course convinced (as are we, presumably) that she is about to meet A Fate Worse Than Death, but no, Kong halts his exploration before he gets too close to any excessively naughty bits. He does tickle her a couple of times, and he sniffs his fingers, the big pervert. They are then attacked by a Pterodactyl. If you don't recall any of this, it might be because the entire scene was cut by the censors in 1938, and wasn't properly restored until 2005 (along with a few other choice moments). King Kong , like so many other films of the early 30s, had been deemed "objectionable" by the Legion of Decency, and...

The film noir "era" (for want of a better term) was a particularly juicy period in Hollywood's history; not least because it saw the flourishing of an enormous pool of talent - much of it European. But noir also lives in that murky grey area between Right and Wrong, at a time when the Hollywood censorship codes made very little allowance for ambiguity. The Hays Office (and their spiritual soulmates, the Legion of Decency) had very restrictive ideas about morality and ethics, which is one of the reasons why "Noir" protagonists always seem to have the primal forces of Reality itself working against them.  In a very real sense, they inhabit a world that does not permit moral shades of grey. The censorship of films throughout the Hays Office era was fuelled partly by fear . The Powers That Be were terrified that mainstream American society was constantly under threat from The Other, and eternal vigilance was needed to protect us from them . The Stranger , which I sc...

The films I have shown thus far in this season all fit into a bit of a pattern, so it's not hard to understand why critics and audiences were tempted to group them into something of a category. They all deal with individuals who find themselves on the wrong side of the law, usually because of a murder. They are all told in flashback, so the eventual fate of the protagonist is never in question. They usually have some form of voice-over narration, either by the central character, or (in the case of The Killers ) by his friends as they relate their memories of the events. But film noir is not as formalist as all that.  Noir is neither a genre nor a structure, so it doesn't have specific criteria it needs to meet. Sometimes (as with a film like Detour ) noir can deal with the very intimate and private. And sometimes it deals with crime on a much, much larger scale. The Stranger was the third film directed by Orson Welles (or the second-and-a-half, since The Magnificent Ambersons ...