WHY WE LOVE NOIR
CYNICAL GUYS, DANGEROUS DAMES AND DIRTY DEEDS—PARADE DIVES DEEP INTO OUR LOVE FOR DARK STORIES, FROM THE MALTESE FALCON AND AGATHA CHRISTIE TO BODY HEAT AND BREAKING BAD.
Eddie Muller likes his coffee the same way he likes his movies: unsweetened and dark.
Muller, 64, the host of Noir Alley on Turner Classic Movies, is taking a wake-up sip of morning joe in his California home. Fans of TCM know him as the host of that network’s weekly series all about film noir, retro-stylish Hollywood crime drama with cynical guys, dangerous dames, risky liaisons and dark, dirty deeds. Viewers tune in each week for his “guided tour through the crime-infested streets of classic cinema.”
Just as with his black coffee, “there isn’t much sweetener in noir, “says Muller, who has written 11 books on the subject, including Eddie Muller’s Noir Bar, with cocktails inspired by noir movies, and his first “kid noir” book, Kitty Feral and the Case of the Marshmallow Monkey (see page 9).
Instead, noir (the French word for “black” or “darkness”) is filled with long shadows, shady characters, gloomy streets, inky nights and dimly lit rooms. Classic 1940s and ’50s noir movies with their stark visual contrasts contained unmistakable metaphors for right (light) and wrong (dark). And characters frequently surrendered to dark desires.
All that darkness, Muller says, represented the disillusionment and disenchantment of Americans who’d lived through the dismal days of the Great Depression, only to transition into another period of bleakness with World War II. Things looked dreary for a lot of people, and movies began to show it. “Noir represented a very crucial moment in history, when America started to lose its innocence,” Muller says.
Most of Hollywood’s biggest stars of the era—humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Robert Mitchum, Barbara Stanwyck, Marilyn Monroe—made noir movies, many of which are considered classics today (See Muller’s Must-watch list, p. 12).
You may have seen some of those films and not known that they were noir, or that this dark genre is alive and well in modern times too, says Muller, who runs the Film Noir Foundation, a nonprofit created to study, explore and preserve noir movies.
Nightcrawler (2014) starring Jake Gyllenhaal and Guillermo del Toro’s Nightmare Alley (2021) with Bradley Cooper were both bleak, new-noir thrillers, he says.
ANTIHEROES True noir movies aren’t about heroes or heroics. “They’re about average people who realize they’re capable of doing something horribly wrong, and they do it anyway,” he says. “The disillusioned antihero is probably the most common protagonist in film noir. They realize the only way they’re going to get something they want is by breaking the law,” like defrauding an insurance company or committing a murder. “It can even be a police officer or someone who starts out on the ‘right’ side of the law, like in Shield For Murder
(1954), Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950) and The Prowler (1951).” In Breaking Bad (20082013), it was “mild high school teacher ends up doing things he never realized he was capable of,” Muller says.
FATE & UNFAIRNESS Noir movies often offer meaty topics to ponder, like “the indifference of fate and the unfairness of the system,“he says. “A guy comes back from the war; he’s broke, he can’t get a job; he falls in with a crook and they rob banks. In the right hands, these turn into very strong social commentaries.”
GOOD GIRLS & FEMMES FATALES “Historically, a lot of people have written—and I think mistakenly—that film noir is misogynistic because it presents a kind of negative view of women as vixens or vipers,” he says. “In truth, the women of noir are surprisingly progressive for their era. They’re often self-sufficient women who are nurses, doctors, fashion designers or magazine editors.” And often, he says, “there is a woman in the movie who’s depicted as the only hope of salvation for the desperate, tempted man. But he always makes the wrong decision and then ends up paying the price.”
Ella Raines, an actress who appeared in dozens of films was one of those noir good girls. “She specialized in playing good, sensible women, not the femme fatale who typically spells doom for men that become involved with her.“
Joan Crawford and Barbara Stanwyck, on the other hand, sometimes played protagonists in lead roles equally capable of making bad decisions—just like noir men. “Stanwyck in Double Indemnity, of course,” says Muller, “but also, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, The Lady Gambles or The File on Thelma Jordan—all movies in which the woman is the desperate one, often leading to her downfall.” More recently, Body Heat (1981) with Kathleen Turner and William Hurt fits the noir profile: Turner’s femme fatale Matty Walker convinces her small-time lawyer lover (Hurt) to kill her husband. Falling into bed with her was just his first mistake.
DEADLY PLOT TWISTS “One of the features of a lot of noir films is complex storytelling,” Muller says. “You get a lot of flashbacks. And generally, it’s tales where the protagonist is doomed and he’s telling you his story, explaining how he came to be on death row, or lying in the gutter as he bleeds out. That’s very noir.”
GREAT WRITING Many of the greatest noir films are based on or inspired by novels from writers, including Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, Mickey Spillane, Dennis Lehane and Patricia Highsmith.
THE MALTESE FALCON (1941) Based on a novel by Dashiell Hammett, this story centers on a San Francisco private detective, Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart), who takes on a case that involves him with a trio of criminals, a gorgeous liar and a quest for an elusive statue, the Maltese Falcon. “It’s the movie that sort of set everything in motion,” Muller says. “Bogart created the noir persona in that film. And he made the antihero, in his character of Sam Spade, hugely popular with American audiences. That opened the door for more of these films.”
DOUBLE INDEMNITY (1944) In this film based on a novel by James M. Cain and directed by Billy Wilder, an insurance salesman (Fred Macmurray) and a provocative housewife (Barbara
Stanwyck) conspire to murder her husband in this tense crime thriller, which was nominated for seven Oscars. “This was the movie that really kick-started the noir movement in Hollywood,” says Muller, “because it’s a great film that also featured two hugely popular stars planning on murder—which was not a common thing in Hollywood at that time.”
OUT OF THE PAST (1947) A former private investigator (Robert Mitchum) escapes his troubled life to run a gas station in a small town, but his past catches up to him in this classic drenched in noir—a complex, fatalistic storyline, dark shadows and a classic femme fatale (Jane Greer). “It’s a very shadowy movie and it covers a lot of ground. It’s the realization of the complete noir vision, everything you want in a noir film; the ultimate noir,” says Muller. In 1987, Mitchum guest-hosted Saturday Night Live and Greer appeared with him in a parody—called “Out of Gas”—of their ‘40s collaboration.
THE KILLERS (1946) Based on a story by Ernest Hemingway, Burt Lancaster made his film debut as a man murdered by hitmen, leading to a trail that connects—in flashbacks, of course—to a beautiful, deadly woman (Ava Gardner) in this film promoted on the poster as “Tense! Taut! Terrific!” Muller agrees, calling it “the story of a doomed man who didn’t run from fate,” one of the benchmarks of a noir protagonist. “And then the flashbacks—why he accepted his fate of being killed by these two assassins. A fabulous movie.” The film was so popular, cinemas in New York City stayed open around the clock to meet the demand for tickets.
CRISS CROSS (1949) Filmed in black and white around Los Angeles, this film—about an armored truck driver
(Burt Lancaster) conspiring with his ex-wife (Yvonne de Carlo) to have his own truck robbed on a route—was later remade in 1995 and titled The
Underneath. But Muller extolls the original. “It’s by the same director of
The Killers and it’s very, very similar,” he says. “But in some ways, I think it even perfected what The Killers set out to do.” It marked the film debut of
Tony Curtis, who plays an uncredited extra in a scene.
SUNSET BOULEVARD (1950) “It’s not commonly thought of as noir,” says Muller, “but it is pretty noir, and it’s fabulous.” Set in the era of silent films, Sunset Boulevard—named after the street that runs through the heart of Hollywood—has dark lighting, a murder that unfolds in flashbacks, a classic femme fatale (Gloria Swanson) and a cynical view of the world as greedy and opportunistic. It was nominated for 11 Oscars, and Swanson went down in cinematic history for her indelible performance as Norma Desmond, a delusional former screen star dreaming of making a triumphant comeback. “I’m ready for my close-up!” Norma exclaims as she stalks toward a camera at the end. Swanson’s character was based on several real-life starlets from Hollywood’s past, including silent film actresses Clara Bow and Mary Pickford.
KISS ME DEADLY (1955) Cloris Leachman made her film-acting debut in this crime drama as a doomed hitchhiker who pulls detective Mike Hammer (Ralph Meeker) into a deadly web of intrigue revolving around a mysterious box. “It’s the perfect Cold-war, Atomic-age noir,” says Muller. “In the book by Mickey Spillane, the ‘Macguffin’ (a plot object that drives a movie and its characters forward—while being relatively unimportant itself)—the box—was drugs. But in the movie, it’s plutonium, being used to create a bomb. So, it would make a good double bill with Oppenheimer.” Leachman would go on to win an Oscar in 1972 for The Last Picture Show.
TOUCH OF EVIL (1958) Orson Welles (of The War of the Worlds and Citizen Kane fame) both directed and starred in this highly atmospheric tale of murder, kidnapping and corruption in a Mexican border town. “Welles created much of the cinematic grammar that became familiar in film noir,” says Muller. “He did it in Citizen Kane, which isn’t film noir, but it feels like film noir. And in Touch of Evil (with Janet Leigh), he’s applying all that cinematic genius to a totally film noir story.” It was filmed on location in Venice, Calif., standing in for Tijuana.