It was the French critic Nino Frank who famously first applied the term ‘film noir’ to the series of hardboiled Hollywood crime pictures that finally appeared in France after the Occupation. He was acting under the influence of the acclaimed, and rightfully famous, Gallimard crime fiction imprint Série noire – the home of translations from authors like Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Jim Thompson and Cornell Woolrich, who were themselves often providing the source material for these distinctive adaptations. Adaptations that would birth enough material for Radiance Films to cap off their debut year with a boxset titled World Noir (Vol. 1).
However, by the late 1950s (at least according to the conventional histories, but we’ll ignore those debates as much as possible here), the “genre” was beginning to decline in the United States, foundering on the rocks of social change and shifting outlooks when the traumas of the Second World War and Korea began to fade into memory. Crime fiction and police procedurals were also finding a natural home on television, and by the time of the release of the first film in this boxset, Dragnet had already been running for six years, The Lineup for three, Lee Marvin’s M Squad had just debuted, and Peter Gunn was about to follow. That isn’t to say great or interesting film noirs were no longer created in their home country (1958 had Touch of Evil and Murder by Contract, while 1959 had The Crimson Kimono and Odds Against Tomorrow), but the number of films, their prominence, and in most cases their budgets, began to fall away.
There was salvation however, as the glory years had fixed a certain vision of America and the pleasures of the cinema in the minds of a cache of young international directors. Many of these film-makers were children who had (as Serge Daney put it), “grown up in the shadow of the camps” or the A-bomb, and were now establishing themselves in decades of upheaval and machination (the Cold War, of course, but also Algeria, the crises in the Eastern bloc and the Central and South Americas, etc, etc). In film noir they found reflections of the amorality and immorality, regret, frustration, corruption, and the call to death and destruction that were inextricable features of the worlds they had known since birth, and the environments in which they discovered themselves and shaped their artistic voices.
The results of these influences and experiences were varied. Jean-Luc Godard presaged the theories of Debord’s “Society of the Spectacle” and Baudrillard’s hyperreality in his studies of the inspiration of American cinema on criminally-minded French youth (1960’s A Bout de Souffle, 1963’s Le Petit Soldat, 1964’s Bande a Part, etc), before moving on to a more rounded political critique of the genre (1966’s Made in U.S.A.). Countryman Jean-Pierre Melville boiled the genre down to its essentialist and existentialist skeleton, while Seijun Suzuki fused lurid pop-art style with the often complex and convoluted story structures of ’40s and ’50s cinema. Jacques Rivette and Claude Chabrol took Langian conspiracism, along with Hitchcockian guilt-transference and doubling, to their extremes respectively, while Kurosawa returned to the genre in films that formed a study of the new affluence of the Japanese upper-classes.
This renewed activity was also a revelation, for within the confines of this always loose genre was found new room for experimentation and radicalism, and an often deeply auteurist vision that combined established Hollywood traditions with the intellectualism and aestheticism of the ‘arthouse’.
Radiance Film’s sumptuous new boxset, World Noir Vol. 1, collects three films from the early days of this period (1957-1959), but they’re certainly not among the most familiar. I Am Waiting (1957), has shown up in Criterion’s Eclipse series (in the Nikkatsu Noir set rather than the one dedicated to its director, Koreyoshi Kurahara), and Witness in the City (1959), was part of an American collection of French noir, but neither of them, nor 1959’s The Facts of Murder, appear to have had an official UK release – at least, not that I could find. They’re each a distinct work, a film that engages with the legacy of Hollywood noir film-making and the contexts and flavours of their own national cinemas.
I won’t dedicate too much time to examining how tightly each film might fit within a genre that’s determined by a spurious set of arguable criteria, as such is the work of historians more so than critics. It suffices to say that Radiance have decided each of these three works deserves to have the term ‘noir’ applied to it and I see little room to productively argue on this point.
Kurahara’s I Am Waiting is perhaps the jewel of the collection, but in many ways it’s also the film that feels most severed from its own country of origin, if only because it’s an obvious melding of American influences with the distinctive atmosphere and lyricism of the ’30 and 40s French poetic realist films of Carné-Prévert – themselves a key stylistic inspiration for what was to emerge in Hollywood.
Real-life power couple Yujiro Ishihara and Mie Kithara star as a boxer-turned-cafe-owner and former opera singer who, after an accident, are reduced to the position of cheap nightclub chartreuse. Both are drawn into the underworld by chance and accident, the former investigating the whereabouts of his brother after a long-awaited invitation to join him in Brazil fails to materialise. The latter when she breaks her contract after fighting off an attempted rape by a gang member.
What registers most in this film is the long, languorous mid-section – a sustained tone poem in wistfulness and disappointment, world-weariness and daydreaming, that foreshadows the early work of Wong Kar-Wai. Fuelled by a director who’s already well aware of the power of music due to his famous love of jazz (explored fully and definitively in films to come), the soundtrack is filled with plaintive tunes that are absent-mindedly whistled, tremblingly played on an accordion, tremulously sung, and delivered through a crackling bar-top radio.
Lost in the same familiar quayside setting from those Carné-Prévert’s, the film laps sweetly and lazily at the docks as the central couple and their elderly doctor-friend discuss old pains, and try and fail to establish new hopes, before rushing forward like a river as Ishihara’s investigation takes him into an urban heartland that’s rapidly decaying and has already been deeply Americanised. To extend a jazz metaphor, Kurahara’s style emerges from the sure melodic statement of a ballad’s chorus to a fiery improvised solo.
Something unique is perhaps lost in the process, as the city and its characters are less distinctive and the investigation more rote, but vivaciousness and the sense of fragile happiness and tragic suspension that hang like a ghost over the second half of the film carry it through to an affecting conclusion. Not everything works, and there are clumsy moments, crude touches, and awkward transitions in tone and feeling. There’s also, above all else, the vividness that comes from a first-time director establishing a long-held dreamworld in reality, and a humanity that’s instinctively intelligent, tough, and overwhelmingly sensitive.
Edouard Molinaro’s Witness in the City is less daring and strange than I Am Waiting, but it’s nonetheless also a great proletarian thriller in which a man (Lino Ventura), dispatches his wife’s killer (a bourgeois industrialist who was also her lover), in the first act – making the murder look like a suicide-by-hanging. His meticulous planning is disrupted by a prank of fate, as his emergence from the house that was the scene of the crime is witnessed by a young taxi driver who was previously hailed by the suspicious victim. Ventura attempts to track down the driver, eventually following him and his girlfriend (a radio operator at the taxi firm), throughout the city as chance and conscience foil his attempts to either confront or finish off the one man who could see him executed.
The influences are as equally apparent here as they were in Kurahara’s piece, but so too are the film’s contemporary “partners-in-crime”. Louis Malle’s Lift to the Scaffold from the same year is perhaps the obvious comparison, not least because both films feature a score by a collection of French and American jazz musicians. The soundtrack for Witness in the City includes the talents of the sublime Kenny Dorham, Charlie Parker sideman Duke Jordan, and expatriate drummer Kenny Clarke – who also contributed to the famous Miles Davis-led soundtrack on Malle’s film. I also identified something of the spirit of Jacques Becker, not only in the loving attention shown to the rhythms, but also in the details of the lives of Parisian radio-taxi drivers and operators who dominate the second act – Lino Ventura’s lead stalker becoming little more than a face intensely peering-in from the margins.
So in the splendid images of Henri Decae (about to shoot Truffaut’s The Four Hundred Blows and assisted on camera duties by Jean Rabier – the soon-to-be long-time collaborator of another Decae-favouring director, Claude Chabrol), we move from the brooding and determinedly methodical world of Melville (or the nocturnal ghost-city that Simenon sometimes stranded Maigret in), to a tour of everyday Paris, and finally a demonstration of working-class solidarity. The noir is disrupted by anthropology, humour and easy grace as even the taciturn Ventura is revealed to be a truck driver who’s equally fond of and respected by his colleagues, and with whom he shares little jokes and confidences – as if the film cannot bear to return to the upper-class milieu that we glimpsed at its start. Molinaro’s direction is at its best in these sections, his occasional over-flashiness toned down to a forceful simplicity, and Decae manages to find ways to make the action (much of it confined to the view from behind a car windshield or a side window), tense and invigorating through the interlocking contrasts of stillness and movement, clarity and obstruction.
Molinaro made a few more films in the genre, including an adaptation of the aforementioned Simenon, but is best remembered today for his direction of the Oscar-nominated La Cage Aux Folles – which is a long way from the tatty backstreet all-night bistros and grimy nightclub desolations of this film.
It’s the cigar-chewing face of director-star Pietro Germi (again a filmmaker more famous for his comedies), that stares out from behind Wayfarer shades on the front of this boxset, so it’s unfortunate that The Facts of Murder is by some distance the weakest and least memorable of all three films.
Italian genre cinema continues to carry a popularity and cultural cache not otherwise afforded to any other European nation’s equivalent corpus, and it’s perhaps only Japan and Hong Kong that can rival the reams of words produced by the country’s giallos and horrors. The Facts of Murder is a resolutely ropey, nasty, spiteful and cynical little work that undermines and contravenes the warm proletarian roots of the previous films in the collection, and prefigures some of its more famous successors of the same ilk. In The Facts of Murder we’re reminded that although the bourgeois may be compromised, it’s the peasants, the servants and the street-kids that you really need to look out for – they’re the ones who really do the destroying. As if (unintentionally), signalling this rightward-shift actor Franco Fabrizi returns in Germi’s film, and having previously appeared as the eventually heroic taxi-driver and titular ‘witness’ of Molinaro’s movie, he now plays the role of a swindling upper-middle-class ‘doctor’ who acts without morals but no eventual criminal intentions.
This sort of messaging isn’t unusual in mainstream Italian film-making as this conservatism, a melding of class prejudice and misogyny, has always run parallel to films of vibrant popular leftism. There’s something particularly unappealing about Germi’s uncharismatic detective – a smirking void with a hair-trigger temper. His band of comic relief petty officers are all more amused by the murder and the cast of semi-tragic characters who surround it, than they are moved to any real action (see for example the opportunistic exploitation of a frightened closeted homosexual’s home as a base of operations).
There are bright moments, but sequences where the deadpan sense of the grotesque, the liveliness of the Roman milieu, and even the ingenious screw-tightening on the murdered woman’s suspicious husband, are pungent and grimly droll. Sadly, this is mainly a standard procedural centred around an entirely tedious mystery that’s delivered in a flat and literary style.
So we have almost a total success, and one hopes that further volumes follow in this series that will illuminate the sustained mutations of the genre as it continued to flow through the hands of modernists and post-modernists. From the rich history of the golden-age Mexican noir, to Ayala, to Bellocchio, to Corneau, and Tavernier, and on and on. We have learnt, of course, that cinema is histories, and not a history, and in that case Radiance have opened their doors to an important mission with an almost unlimited purview.
If, to quote a recent piece by A. S. Hamrah, “the only worthwhile things are the ones that no-one cares about”, like the unknown cinemas that have as yet refused to be ‘Criterionised’, then we can be excited. Perhaps in a few years film noir as we then understand it will not resemble much at all, and noir as we now know it may be all the better for it.
World Noir Vol. 1 is out now on Radiance Films Blu-Ray
