© 2010 William Ahearn
There was a group of younger filmmakers who also gravitated toward the realist movement as a result of “The Joyless Street” and they would play a critical role in what would become Hollywood film noir. Edgar G Ulmer, Curt and Robert Siodmak, Fred Zinneman and Billy Wilder teamed up with cinematographer Eugen Schüfftan (Lang’s “Metropolis” and Abel Gance’s “Napoléon”) to produce “People On Sunday” (“Menschen am Sonntag”) in 1930. There is not a wisp of German expressionism in the film as there isn’t in most of the realist films of that time. Zinneman would also work with Robert Flaherty and would also direct a neo-realist film in Mexico titled “The Wave” in 1935. Billy Wilder’s “Mauvaise Graine” (“The Bad Seed”) produced in France in 1934 also shows no signs of German expressionism as does the films that Robert Siodmak made in France in the 1930s. “Mollenard” (1938) is the only one that I’ve found and its style is consistent – although the content varies – from poetic realism films made in France at that time. The opening scenes of Siodmak’s “The Killers” isn’t inspired by German expressionism; it’s almost a tip of the hat to Marcel Carné’s “Port of Shadows” (1938). Fritz Lang also made a film in France, “Liliom” (1934) and the French poetic realism is readily apparent in his “You Only Live Once” produced in the US in 1937.
The realist movement popped up in any number of places including the Soviet Union with Dziga Vertov’s “Man With A Movie Camera” in 1929 and King Vidor’s “The Crowd” in 1928 in the US. Perhaps the greatest and most criminal omission of the theory of film noir in its current usage is the utter failure to recognize Erich von Stroheim’s “Greed” (1924) as the quintessential Hollywood film noir (one could also add John Huston's “Treasure of Sierra Madre”). What kept “Greed” from even being considered a film noir by the gat and fedora gang are myths that have formed the basis for the current definition of film noir.
(Asia has a long tradition of film noirs and not the least of them is Wu Yonggang’s “The Goddess” released in China in 1934 and starring the ill-fated Ruan Lingyu. That legacy will appear in a future essay.)
While the trembling émigrés coming to America with their fears of war and a background in German expressionism ready to create film noir is an endearing story, the facts are somewhat different. John Alton arrived in the US in the 1920s, as did Jacques Tourneur. Jules Dassin and Anthony Mann were US-born citizens. Cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca (“Stranger On The Third Floor,” “Cat People,” “Out Of The Past”) began work in Hollywood in 1923. Erich von Stroheim was working in Hollywood in 1914. None of the émigrés arriving in the late-1930s or early 1940s (Siodmak, Zinnemann, Wilder, Ulmer, etc) were working in styles derivative of German expressionism and the assertion seems to suggest that these guys hadn’t been to the movies in at least fifteen years. (The last noteworthy films to come out of Germany before the rise of the Nazis were Leontine Sagan’s “Mädchen in Uniform” (1931) and Fritz Lang’s “The Testament of Dr. Mabuse” (1933) and neither had expressionist tendencies.)
The Stranger On The Third Floor