Somewhere in the shadows, Anthony Mann’s “The Great Flamarion” got lost. It doesn’t appear in Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference To The American Style (“Encyclopedic”) or in A Panorama of American Film Noir (“Panorama"). This film is critical to understanding how film noir was left for dead by Hollywood and it is part of a group of films that defined for a brief dark moment the influence of the French film noirs on Hollywood filmmakers.
Between 1944 and 1947, Hollywood released Edgar G Ulmer’s “Detour” (1945), Billy Wilder’s “Double Indemnity” (1944) and “The Lost Weekend” (1945), Anthony Mann’s “The Great Flamarion” (1945), Fritz Lang’s “Scarlet Street” (1945), Lewis Milestone’s “The Strange Loves of Martha Ivers” (1946), Robert Siodmak’s “The Killers” (1946) and Jules Dassin’s “Brute Force” (1947). This list doesn’t pretend to be complete; it merely shows a trend in filmmaking at the time.
While a trend can be detected, that trend tends to be inconsistent. For example, the Hays Office wouldn’t allow the suicide to occur at the end of Fritz Lang’s “Woman In The Window” and did allow the suicide in “Brute Force.” There is also a suicide in Mark Robson’s “The Seventh Victim” that was produced by Val Lewton. Lewton was the liaison between David O Selznick and the Hays Office and while it might be safe to assume that helped his case it actually only shows how the relationship of all the motivating factors were more complex than merely following a list of off-limits subjects. Studio heads, stars, writers, budget considerations, ticket sales and more were part of the mix that affected how strictly Hays Office rules were followed.
The most egregious breaking of the Hays’ rules occurs in “Scarlet Street” – a remake of Jean Renoir’s 1931 “Isn’t Life A Bitch” – where the state executes an innocent man. Even in Mervyn LeRoy’s “They Won’t Forget” – an anti-lynching film from 1937 based on the infamous case of Leo M Frank – Hollywood cut the prosecutors in the movie a whole lot of slack about whether they thought the charged man was guilty. In the Lang film, there is no hand-wringing or slack; it’s just what can happen.
What set these films apart from the “noir” films that would follow is the absolute lack of redemption and the uncompromisingly bleak view of the world in the earlier films. They are films in which crimes occur rather than genre crime films. If there is a vignette that captures the true noir of these films it is in Jules Dassin’s “Brute Force” where an alcoholic prison doctor looks through the barred window to the bodies of the guards and prisoners in the yard below after the failed prison escape and says – to no one in particular – “No one escapes. No one.”
Whether there was an escape for Flamarion or not isn’t something he considers driven as he is by rage, jealousy and revenge. Flamarion (Erich von Stroheim) is a sharpshooter on the vaudeville circuit with an act that includes Connie Wallace (Mary Beth Hughes) and her husband Al (Dan Duryea). The film opens during a performance when gunshots are heard offstage. The theatre is cleared and the police arrive to find Connie Wallace’s body. Flamarion, fatally wounded, falls from the pin rail to a dark corner and is found by a fellow performer and Flamarion relates his tale of woe and betrayal in a flashback before he dies.
It’s a story of sex, manipulation, murder, betrayal and the slow deterioration of a proud and protected man. As with “Brute Force,” hope is not an option and no one escapes once they enter into the lethal relationships depicted in these films.
(There is also a series of films centering on unrepentant female sociopaths that includes John Stahl’s “Leave Her To Heaven” (1945), Edgar G Ulmer’s “The Strange Woman” (1946), Byron Haskin’s “Too Late For Tears” (1949), and Otto Preminger’s “Angel Face” (1952). They will be covered in a future essay.)
There is no hardened frontier that separates these films from those that would follow although events leading up to the House Un-American Activities Committee’s 1947 hearings and implementation of the Hollywood blacklist – or so the story goes – exerted a new influence on the US crime film. The last thing I want to do is to create new assumptions and HUAC may have reflected beliefs already held by some studio executives and others may have felt that patriotism was on the only rational response to the dawning cold war with the USSR and its satellite countries. There’s an ocean of gray between the politics of John Ford and Jules Dassin, for example, and Hollywood at that time was far more political than it is now. So finding a single, overriding event or decision that changed the films isn’t something I can state with any certainty.
There’s a dead giveaway in the opening scene of “Raw Deal” that shows a new twist to the run-of-the-mill cops-and-robbers movie and that is that the flashback narration is by a woman with a spooky Theremin in counterpoint. Whether “Raw Deal” is a “glittering gem” – as the recent review on noiroftheweek.com has it – or as Bosley Crowther pointed out in his New York Times review in 1948 – “a cheerless . . . low-grade, crime-doesn’t-pay movie” – isn’t the issue.
One of the elements that give this film an edge is John Alton’s cinematography. For more background on Alton, go here. That he helped create and was one of the major exponents of the look and feel of cinematography in the 1940s and 1950s is something mentioned all too often by the “noirists.” To relegate Alton to merely being a “noir” cinematographer is to miss the point and miss the other contributions he made to film (the ballet sequence in “An American In Paris” being an obvious example). Gregg Toland and other cinematographers also contributed greatly to the look and feel of the films.
In Panorama, the entire entry for “Raw Deal” reads: “‘Raw Deal’ by Anthony Mann, has an edifying ending, but is worth it for several scenes: a final showdown in a blazing apartment, for example.” The write-up in Encyclopedic is factually wrong on major plot points and so completely distorts the film as to be worthless as an assessment of the film.
One of the main problems with the study of film noir – besides relying on false assumptions as mentioned in Part I – is that advocacy has overwhelmed what little criticism that has been done in regard to the films. Being a entirely revisionist theory to start with – started in the late-1960s to define films from the 1940s – rather than a contemporaneous study as film theory usually develops, the “noirists” were free to pretty much make the theory up as they went along and more often than not they didn’t have the requisite background to sort out ginormous leaps of faith from basic film history.
“This is the day,” says the woman’s voice. “This is the last time I will drive up to these gates. These iron bars keep the man I love locked away from me. Tonight he breaks out of these walls. It’s all set at 11:30.” A Theremin – also used in “Spellbound,” “The Lost Weekend,” “The Spiral Staircase,” and numerous sci-fi and horror films – accentuates her ethereal presence.
Joe Preston – played by Dennis O’Keefe – has taken a fall and gone to prison to protect the gang. He’s attracted the attention of a young women who works in the law office representing Preston and she – Ann played by Marsha Hunt – is working on his parole while Joe is awaiting his escape with the help of his outside squeeze – Pat played by Claire Trevor – not realizing that the sadistic crime boss – Rick Coyle played by Raymond Burr – is behind the escape in order to kill Preston and keep the 50 grand he promised Preston for himself.
Preston escapes and ends up taking Ann and Pat along on the lam. This is classic crime film “good” girl versus “bad” girl material and when push comes to shove when the goons come to kill Preston, it is Ann – the “good” girl – that saves his life by shooting one of the goons. (Encyclopedic describes it as “murder” – and that same claim of murder shows up on the Wikipedia page of the film – but that isn’t what happens. Ann wings Fantail (played by John Ireland) who survives and kidnaps Ann later in the film.)
Instead of making his escape to South America with Pat, Preston goes back to save Ann from the psychotic pyromaniac Coyle, sending a clear message to all the bad girls that good girls are worth the risk. Preston saves Ann and dies in her arms and the “bad” girl laments her lover dying in the arms of another in narration as the Theremin plays along. This is the ideal that epitomizes many of the so-called Hollywood “film noirs” and that is the notion of redemption. In this case, that good women will bring out the good in even borderline bad men. We know that Joe is in the gang and that he is innocent of the charges that sent him to prison and not much else.
The back-story on Joe is that when he was a teenager he saved orphans from a burning building (or something like that) and he tried to be good but he got beat down by growing up in Corkscrew Alley. Ann sees the goodness and knows that it’s still there and she knows she can save Joe because she too came from Corkscrew Alley and she made out all right.
For all the fedoras and gats and dames, it’s clear that this is a film about conformity and redemption through the love of a “good” woman and that aspect is difficult to ignore. Pared down to its core, “Raw Deal” is another message from Hollywood (or the Hays office, etc) that it’s time for all the boys to grow up and marry Jane from next door.
Pat’s lament – and the Theremin – closes the film. “The police picked me up and brought me here,” she says. “There’s my Joe in her arms. A kind of happiness on his face. In my heart I know that this is right for Joe. This is what he wanted.”
Even bad girls recognize the real power of the good girl and while it’s a tad heavy handed in “Raw Deal,” the theme is echoed through many of the Hollywood “film noirs.”
No matter how it’s sliced and diced, redemption is the opposite of noir. That is the blackness that the French critics railed against in the 1930s. The French film noirs lack any redemption and the best one could hope for in those films is survival. In post-1947 Hollywood, “hope” floats all over the place. In films such as Nicholas Ray’s “On Dangerous Ground” (1952), Frank Borzage’s “Moonrise” (1948), Fred Zinneman’s “Act Of Violence” (1948) and many, many others.
While redemption robs many of these films of their “noirness,” not all cases are so clear-cut. As Billy Wilder subverted the rule against suicide in “The Lost Weekend,” other directors found ways to empty the redemption of any real meaning.
Three examples – among probably others – are Roberts Siodmak’s “Christmas Holiday” (1944), and “The File On Thelma Jordan” (1950) and Jacques Tourneur’s “Out Of The Past” (1947). In “The File On Thelma Jordan,” Thelma Jordan (Barbara Stanwyck) kills the real killer and her love interest and co-conspirator – and ultimately herself – yet it does nothing to change the reality of the about-to-be disbarred, and about-to-be divorced, assistant district attorney (Wendell Corey) whose role as a patsy will haunt him forever.
In the Tourneur film – where a “good” girl (Virginia Huston) and a “bad” girl (Jane Greer) vie for the heart of Jeff Baily (Robert Mitchum) who is being pulled back into a former life he seems to want to forget – Baily’s parting gesture pretty much damns the good girl to a loveless marriage to a solid and utterly uninteresting forest ranger who will take her to church every Sunday.
In “Christmas Holiday” – a wonderful odd gem of a flick starring a pre-dance Gene Kelly and Deanna Durbin – a realization occurs at the end and yet the meaning of it isn’t entirely clear. This film may be more French than the films Siodmak actually made in France.
Redemption – vague or otherwise – compromised numerous “film noirs” made during the 1940s and early 1950s and while it was a stiff kick to the guts of the genre (or sensibility or whatever it’s being called now), what followed was a blade straight to the heart.