Like stand-up comedy, film noir was developed and perfected in America and Jews played a vital role. One might argue that stand-up as an artform was in some way inspired by the tendency for Jewish people to be rounded up and slaughtered every few hundred years and thus an ability to joke became something of a necessity. Film noir has its origins within one particular period of slaughter, the Second World War, and was born in part from an influx of European Jews to Hollywood.
We are coming to the end of Noirvember (November to the uninitiated), the month in which many of us feel compelled to celebrate all things film noir, largely by watching noir films. Noir refers to a particular kind of Hollywood crime drama, produced primarily between the early 1940s and late 1950s, that expertly combined high art with low. Jewish emigres like Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder and Otto Preminger brought with them to America a German expressionist style which somehow combined perfectly with the hardboiled tone of novelists like Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett and James M. Cain.
The result was a cycle of films with titles containing words like “Big”, “City”, “Dark” and “Night” that incorporated femme fatales, dramatic shadows and rain-soaked streets. It is a genre without equal developed by Jews who, as is so often the case, had to adapt to survive.
Like Seinfeld or Succession, noir films tend not to age, because of their cynical depiction of a world populated almost exclusively by self-serving and venal characters largely concerned with sex and money. One might argue they don’t seem dated because of how closely that resembles the actual world we inhabit. In many films of the 1940s and 1950s, the female characters are mere ciphers with little to no agency whereas femme fatales tend to call the shots in every sense. The women of noir are painted just as cynically as the men and the result is they have the everlasting appeal of Elaine in Seinfeld.
Billy Wilder
Wilder, perhaps the greatest and most versatile filmmaker of Hollywood’s Golden Age, set the standard with Double Indemnity in 1944. The screenplay, based on a Cain novella, was co-written by the director and Chandler and thus three of noir’s most important figures were brought together like some kind of Paramount Pictures supergroup. The result was like one of those immortal Beatles albums, an early great that remains the gold standard against which emulators must be judged.
The hardboiled crime fiction that inspired noir was, like much comedy of the silent era, born out of the Great Depression. People were scrabbling around for work and there was a desperation that made criminality almost an inevitability at times. Noir films rarely present heroes in any traditional sense, just the occasional cynical, wisecracking detective whose interest in a case is determined largely by the fee. Lust is the most common motivator and the world-weary outlook is best summed up by Walter Neff at the end of Double Indemnity: “I killed him for money – and a woman – and I didn’t get the money and I didn’t get the woman.”
Stanley Kubrick
The sense of dread and criminality unpunished that pervades these movies was undoubtedly, in part, a result of the Holocaust. Many of those involved, in front of and behind the camera, had fled the Nazis but left behind family members who perished in the camps. There is a gloomy fatalism that runs through noir that is rarely seen outside of a Thomas Hardy novel. Even the Hays Code, Hollywood’s moral guide at the time, did little to dispel the sense that people are awful and the universe is cruel and arbitrary. With six million Jews senselessly murdered in the preceding years, how could these artists have any other view of the world?
All of this might give the sense that noirs are formulaic and yet there are few genres with such versatility. Kiss Me Deadly has a science fiction undertone, Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing is a heist picture that would inspire Reservoir Dogs while Leave Her to Heaven, one of the darkest noirs in existence, was shot, almost oxymoronically, in glorious Technicolor.
Fritz Lang
The level of thought and craft that seems to have been devoted to these low budget genre films is nothing less than inspiring. The neon street signs juxtaposed with chiaroscuro lighting helps create a mise-en-scène that is instantly identifiable. It should perhaps come as no surprise that many of cinema’s greatest writers, directors, actors and cinematographers started their careers in film noir. To this day, there is debate about what exactly constitutes a noir film but I am inclined to quote Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s infamous assessment of pornography: “I know it when I see it.”
The Killing
The days are getting shorter and the season of goodwill is fast approaching. Before long, it’ll be time to put the Baileys on ice and Mariah on the stereo in the misguided belief that love, actually, is all around. Noirvember is the yin to the Christmas yang, a month dedicated to the futility of life. Perhaps paradoxically, many of us consider these films comfort viewing and there is unquestionably something reassuring about the familiar tropes. There will be ample time for It’s A Wonderful Life next month but now is the moment to indulge in a genre that argues, like most history books, quite the opposite.
