Theories of Crime Fiction

Systematic criticism of the crime film was delayed by three obstacles.
Early champions of film art like British documentary filmmaker
and historian Paul Rotha tended to dismiss the established genres of
Hollywood entertainment in favor of more ambitious, individual, original
films that were the very antithesis of the crime film. Even among
genres, the crime film continued to suffer neglect in favor of the western,
which enjoyed a renaissance in the widescreen, Technicolor
incarnations of the 1950s, because so many crime films were routine
B-film “programmers”; Double Indemnity (1944), whose budget and Oscar
attention made it Paramount’s closest criminal analogue to Shane
(1953), was not very close at all. Finally, Alfred Hitchcock’s predominance
in the suspense genre meant that when academic critics considered
the crime film, they turned first to Hitchcock’s films and the
auteurist perspective they encouraged as products of a single director.
For all these reasons, few critics writing in English paid close attention
to the crime film before 1970.
By that time, criticism of the detective story, the first sort of crime
fiction to have encouraged sustained critical analysis, had already
gone through several distinct phases. As early as 1901, G. K. Chesterton
had written in “A Defence of Detective Stories” that such stories
are “the earliest and only form of popular literature in which is expressed
some sense of the poetry of modern life,” the romance of the
modern city evoked so ably by Robert Louis Stevenson but neglected
so completely by most other writers of serious literary pretensions.1
A quarter-century later, after his Father Brown mysteries had captured
the popular imagination, Chesterton added a prophetic dimension
to his analysis of the genre’s appeal: Since a detective story’s
movement from mystery to enlightenment is a prefiguration of the
apocalypse, the moment when every earthly veil will be swept away,
each mystery must be governed by a single unifying concept that
makes its ending “not only the bursting of a bubble but rather the
breaking of a dawn.”2
The greatest influence of Chesterton’s theological analysis of the
detective story’s appeal was indirect. In the opening chapter of Trent’s
Last Case (1913), E. C. Bentley burlesques the millenialism to which his
friend Chesterton had alluded by showing the earth-shattering (yet
ultimately inconsequential) results of the shadowy financier Sigsbee
Manderson’s shooting as the introduction to a case whose twists seem
to mock human reason. The detective-story writers who followed
Bentley, from the Britons Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, and
Margery Allingham to the Americans S. S. Van Dine, Ellery Queen, and
John Dickson Carr, secularized Chesterton’s emphasis on rationality
as a prefiguration of a transcendental apocalypse, trivializing its theological
overtones in the course of producing the influential recipe
for the detective story as a comedy of manners for the characters and
a civilized game of logical inference for the audience, all climaxing with
a “Challenge to the Reader” made explicit in Queen’s first nine novels
(1929–35): an invitation to solve the mystery on the basis of the clues
presented to detective and reader alike. The often highly formulaic
interactions of the stock character types were nothing more than a
pretense for the story’s true action – “a hoodwinking contest,” as
Carr put it – between the enterprising author devising ingenious new
means for murder and methods of concocting alibis and the wary
reader determined to figure out the solution before it was revealed in
the final chapter.3 The principal theories of the formal or Golden Age
detective story, as John Strachey dubbed it,4 took the form of historical
introductions to anthologies of detective short stories or lists of
rules for authors to observe in order to play fair with the reader.5
It was not until the 1940s that criticism of the formal detective story
came to focus on the moral import of these games. Nicholas Blake
added to Chesterton’s analogy between the revelatory denouement
and the apocalypse the proposition that since readers of detective fiction
identify with both detectives and murderers, the stories are folk
myths whose aim is to purge postreligious audiences of guilt by reconciling
“the light and dark sides” of their social attitudes.6W. H. Auden,
agreeing with Blake that the detective stories appeal to their audiences’
“sense of sin,” argued by contrast that “the illusion of being dissociated
from the murderer” in detective fiction, as opposed to the
more literary novels of Dostoyevsky and Raymond Chandler, provides
“the fantasy of being restored to the Garden of Eden” by using “the
magic formula” of “an innocence which is discovered to contain guilt;
then a suspicion of being the guilty other has been expelled, a cure
effected, not by me or my neighbors, but by the miraculous intervention
of a genius from outside who removes guilt by giving knowledge
of guilt.”7
In the meantime, a third phase of detective-story criticism had
begun with Chandler’s influential essay “The Simple Art of Murder”
(1944). Unlike critics who defended the Golden Age formula of baffling
mystery and rational detection as an intellectual game or a morally
purgative ritual, Chandler announced in his frankly challenging opening
sentence: “Fiction in any form has always intended to be realistic.”
Against the “badly-scared champions of the formal or the classic mystery
who think no story is a detective story which does not pose a formal
and exact problem and arrange the clues around it with neat labels
on them,” Chandler defended the hard-boiled private-eye stories
of Dashiell Hammett, and by implication his own work, by arguing that
they “gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons,
not just to provide a corpse; and with the means at hand, not
with hand-wrought duelling pistols, curare, and tropical fish.”8 Chandler’s
passionate partisanship of hard-boiled fiction’s proletarian realism,
ignoring the equally formulaic qualities of his own fiction,9 established
a conflict between realistic and ritualistic impulses – the
tendency toward photographic or psychological realism versus the
tendency toward the revelatory structure of dream, myth, and fairy
tale – that serves as a backdrop for the theories of crime films that begin
to emerge shortly thereafter.

Hollywood Mythmaking
Though neither of them names Paul Rotha directly, Parker Tyler and
Robert Warshow, the first important critics to deal in English with
crime films, both tackle his condescension toward genre films headon.
The two of them, writing soon after Chandler’s “Simple Art of Murder,”
share the same project: to reveal the unconscious collective
myths that play a much larger role than deliberate individual artistry
in shaping Hollywood movies. As Tyler argues in Magic and Myth of the
Movies (1947), “the lack of individual control” over any given Hollywood
project, coupled with “the absence of respect for the original
work” and “the premise that a movie is an ingenious fabrication of theoretically
endless elasticity,” all produce conditions more congenial
to collective myth – “the industrialization of the mechanical worker’s
daylight dream” – than to individual art.10 Tyler and Warshow ignore
the avowed programs of individual filmmakers to examine the unconscious
myths that underlie “what the public wants” – the collective
tastes to which movies appeal.11 Yet their approaches to the crime
film could hardly be more different.
Tyler, America’s first metaphysician of the movies, is an antigenre
theorist for whom the narrative films produced by Hollywood studio
constitute their own sovereign genre formed in response to its audience’s
needs and desires. Although most of the films Tyler discusses
represent specimens of popular genres rather than aspirations to individual
artistic achievement, he is less interested in the specificity
of their genre markers than in their contribution to a transgeneric ontology
of cinema. Tyler’s analysis of Double Indemnity, for example,
focuses on the relationship between Walter Neff and his boss Barton
Keyes. The intimacy between the two men, he avers, is from the beginning
an example of the insurance industry’s psychopathology. Insurance
salesmen like Walter make their living by marketing “the myth
. . . that human wisdom has provided a method of safeguarding against
certain consequences of accident or death,” while at the same time
claims adjusters like Keyes, who are “waiting to invalidate this myth,”
serve as “an ethical corrective” to the salesman’s success in selling it.
As the story unfolds, Tyler contends, Keyes appears more and more
clearly as Walter’s “sexual conscience,” the unyielding figure who “presides
over his life as the hidden judge of his sexual claims as well as the
insurance claims of his clients,” and who condemns the “war psychology”
whereby Walter “sells himself the idea of murderous violence as
an aid to moral enthusiasm – in his case an enthusiasm for sex.”12
Turning to Mildred Pierce (1945), Tyler compares it to Citizen Kane
(1941) in compromising its identification of the camera eye with the
“Universal Spectator” by failing to see just what the audience would
most like to know: the identity of Rosebud, or of the person who fired
the fatal shots into Monte Beragon (Zachary Scott). Both films depend
on a single paradox: the substitution of “the rational or mechanical
mystery” of the detective-story formula and the potentially omniscient
camera eye for “the irrational or symbolic mystery of the human
soul” for an audience that subliminally recognizes the incommensurability
of these two sorts of mystery. Hence Mildred Pierce, whose story
proceeds toward a climactic visualization of Monte’s murder that finally
identifies Mildred’s daughter Veda (Ann Blyth) as his actual killer,
works at the same time as “Mildred’s dream of guilt” for having wished
for Monte’s death and created both the conditions under which he
died and the executioner, the double of her younger self and her present
desires, who is “a form of herself . . . [who] for some reason has
taken on her incest crime.”13 As the detective apparatus of the film vindicates
Mildred (Joan Crawford) in order to motivate a happy ending,
her identification with Veda implicates her in Veda’s guilt [Fig. 13]. Tyler’s
own implication is that this paradox, although it emerges with un-
Critical Overview 57
usual clarity in mystery stories, is essential to all the dreams of Hollywood,
essential indeed to the nature of the camera eye of narrative
cinema.14
In “The Gangster as Tragic Hero” (1948), Warshow emphasizes by
contrast the specificity of the gangster genre in posing a resistant alternative
to the prevailing myth of optimism and social happiness that
amounts to an unofficial imperative of democratic cultures. Unlike
“‘happy’” movies like Good News (1947), which “ignores death and suffering,”
and “‘sad’” movies like A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945), which
“uses death and suffering as incidents in the service of a higher optimism,”
gangster films express “that sense of desperation and inevitable
failure which optimism itself helps to create.” The gangster of
Hollywood mythology – a figure much better known to most audiences
than any actual gangsters – expresses the ethos of the city: “not the
real city, but that dangerous and sad city of the imagination which is
so much more important, which is the modern world.” And his “pure
criminality,” which “becomes at once the means to success and the
content of success,” shows, through the rise and fall of his career, his
futile attempt to establish his individual identity in a world whose only
security is to be found in protective social groups, that “there is really
only one possibility: failure. The final meaning of the city is anonymity
and death.” In the end, the gangster dies as the scapegoat of his conflicted
audience, the man who represents both the capitalistic imperative
to rise above others and the democratic imperative to remain
equal to others. Hence “he is under the obligation to succeed,” even
though his audience knows that “success is evil and dangerous, is –
ultimately – impossible.” He does what no other movie hero can do:
allows his audience to accept their failure as a moral choice by disavowing
the corruption implicit in his fatal success.

Genre versus Auteur
Tyler’s and Warshow’s work grows out of a tradition of American journalism
that also produced the criticism of James Agee, Otis Ferguson,
Manny Farber, and Pauline Kael. When film criticism entered American
universities some twenty years later, however, it was not this journalistic
impulse that predominated, but the sort of auteur criticism
typified by Andrew Sarris’s The American Cinema: Directors and Directions,
1929–1968 (1968), with its notoriously precise ranking of directors
from “Pantheon” status down through the ranks to “Strained Seri-
ousness” and “Less than Meets the Eye,” and by François Truffaut’s
book-length interview Le Cinéma selon Hitchcock (1966), translated as
Hitchcock (1967).16 Even though the auteurist championing of popular
filmmakers like Hitchcock, which began with Cahiers du cinéma and
traveled to America through Sarris’s Village Voice reviews and polemical
essays, eventually helped bring crime films to critical attention by
turning critical scrutiny from prestige studio productions like Gone
with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz (both 1939) to B movies like Detour
(1945) and The Big Combo (1955), the immediate effect of auteurism
was to stifle any systematic analysis of popular genres. Not only
was genre study unable to compete successfully with the study of individual
directors, but Hitchcock’s long-standing popular success –
which Sarris and Truffaut urged to academic respectability – acted, as
Charles Derry has observed, to inhibit analysis of the suspense genre,
which was so often identified as that filmmaker’s own exclusive province.
13. Mildred Pierce: The heroine (Joan Crawford) both contrasted and identified
with her villainous daughter (Ann Blyth).
The auteurist impulse remains primary in the first book-length critical
study of the crime film in English, Colin McArthur’s Underworld
U.S.A. (1972). Noting the predominance of thematic and auteurist approaches
in recent film criticism, McArthur defines his own approach
to what he calls “the gangster film/thriller” as a focus on its “iconography,”
the leading visual and semiological codes that link gangster
films like The Public Enemy (1931) and Dillinger (1945) to thrillers like
The Maltese Falcon (1941) and Dead Reckoning (1947) and establish
their world as common and distinctive.18 But after four introductory
chapters (“Genre,” “Iconography,” “Development,” and “Background”)
in which this iconographic approach is intermittently maintained, Mc-
Arthur proceeds to a director-by-director survey of Fritz Lang, John
Huston, Jules Dassin, Robert Siodmak, Elia Kazan, Nicholas Ray, Samuel
Fuller, Don Siegel, and Jean-Pierre Melville in which auteurist concerns
predominate over genre analysis. McArthur concludes his discussion
of Fuller’s Pickup on South Street (1953), House of Bamboo
(1955), The Crimson Kimono (1959), and Underworld U.S.A. (1961) by
urging, in true auteurist fashion, that “with the possible exceptions of
John Ford and Elia Kazan, no Hollywood film-maker has so consistently
explored the American psyche. [Fuller] deserves to be taken seriously.”
19 It was left to other critics to pursue McArthur’s argument
further from its roots in, and its ultimate allegiance to, the careers of
individual filmmakers.

Thematic and Iconographic Analysis
Critics who read French were already familiar with the groundwork for
a thematic approach to the crime genre laid by Raymond Borde and
Étienne Chaumeton in their Panorama du film noir américain (1955).
Noting film noir’s leading points of departure from other films about
violent death – its adoption of the criminal’s point of view and fascination
with the criminal’s psychology, the moral determinism of the
ambiguous and unstable criminal milieu, and the persistent oneirism
that associates realistic individual details with constant suggestions
of symbol, nightmare, and unbridled chaos – Borde and Chaumeton
conclude that the goal of each of these devices is “to make the viewer
coexperience the anguish and insecurity which are the true emotions
of contemporary film noir. All the films of this cycle create a similar
emotional effect: that state of tension instilled in the spectator when the
psychological reference points are removed. The aim of film noir was
to create a specific alienation.”20 Borde and Chaumeton’s distinctions
both focused their study of representative noirs more sharply and
helped give film noir a greater critical impetus than the larger genre
of the crime film from which they wished to distinguish it.21
Fifteen years after Borde and Chaumeton’s pioneering work, Raymond
Durgnat returned to the project of thematic analysis in “Paint
It Black: The Family Tree of the Film Noir.” Despite the essay’s title, it
does not establish a family tree of precedents for or influences on film
noir; instead, it proposes eleven branch topics along which Durgnat
briskly disposes some three hundred films from Easy Street (1917) to
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), this last on the grounds that “film noir
is not a genre . . . and takes us into the realm of classification by motif
and tone” rather than the subject of crime. “Only some crime films are
noir,” Durgnat contends, “and films noirs in other genres include The
Blue Angel, King Kong, High Noon, Stalag 17 . . . and 2001.”22 But Durgnat’s
eleven topics – “crime as social criticism,” “gangsters,” “on the
run,” “private eyes and adventurers,” “middle class murder,” “portraits
and doubles,” “sexual pathology,” “psychopaths,” “hostages to
fortune,” “blacks and reds,” and “guignol, horror, fantasy” – are thematic
rather than motivic or tonal, although a brief analysis of them
reveals that they neither distinguish noirs from non-noirs nor, in their
frequent overlapping and lack of parallelism, provide a systematic
framework for defining film noir. Durgnat’s work was accordingly most
useful in suggesting topics for further research, encouraging discussion
about the categorization of specific films, and provoking an alternative
approach to the crime film. His thematic approach has been
adopted by critics from Robert Porfirio to Glenn Erickson, even when
they take issue with the specific categories Durgnat proposes.23
Restless critics seeking an alternative approach to Durgnat’s thematics
– intermittently promised by McArthur’s description of his emphasis
as iconographic and Durgnat’s description of noir in terms of
motif and tone rather than subject or genre – might have found such
an approach already implicit in Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg’s
discussion, in their Hollywood in the Forties (1968), of “Black Cinema,”
which begins: “A dark street in the early morning hours, splashed with
a sudden downpour. Lamps form haloes in the murk. In a walk-up
room, filled with the intermittent flashing of a neon sign from across
the street, a man is waiting to murder or be murdered.”24 As befits its
context in Higham and Greenberg’s survey of forties films, their discussion
of noir iconography and their perusal of representative noirs
from Shadow of a Doubt (1943) to The Lady from Shanghai (1948) is
evocative rather than systematic.
The first theorist to attempt anything like an iconographic grammar
of film noir is Paul Schrader, not yet a noted screenwriter (Taxi Driver,
1976; Raging Bull, 1980; Bringing Out the Dead, 1999) and director
(Hardcore, 1979; Patty Hearst, 1988; Affliction, 1998). Agreeing with Durgnat
that “film noir is not a genre,” Schrader identifies it instead with
“a specific period in film history, like German Expressionism or the
French New Wave.” According to Schrader, the flowering of noir in the
1940s and early 1950s depends on four leading influences: postwar disillusionment,
the worldwide resurgence of an often harsh realism, the
influence of Germanic expatriate directors and cinematographers, and
the hard-boiled tradition of American writing exemplified by Chandler
as novelist and screenwriter. Schrader divides the development of film
noir into three overlapping phases. The first (1941–6), typified by The
Maltese Falcon and This Gun for Hire (1942), is dominated by “the private
eye and the lone wolf.” The second (1945–9), ushered in by Double
Indemnity and exemplified by The House on 92nd Street (1945) and
The Naked City (1948), is “the post-war realistic period,” focusing on
“the problems of crime in the streets, political corruption and police
routine.” The third (1949–53), represented by Gun Crazy (1949) and
The Big Heat (1953), is marked by the sort of “psychotic action and
suicidal impulse” that eventually produces the deliriously climactic
Kiss Me Deadly (1955), “the masterpiece of film noir,” and “film noir’s
epitaph,” Touch of Evil (1958).25
This historical summary, however, is only a frame for Schrader’s
summary of the mise-en-scène that makes film noir coherent and
memorable: the prevalence of nighttime lighting for interiors and exteriors
alike; the preponderance of oblique angles and skewed lines
over verticals, horizontals, and right angles; the tendency of the lighting
and blocking to give inanimate objects as much emphasis as actors;
the preponderance of portentous compositional tension over
cathartic physical action; the “almost Freudian attachment to water”
(particularly unrealistic in stories set in and around Los Angeles); the
prevalence of romantic voice-over narration – like the memorable line
with which Michael O’Hara (Orson Welles) introduces The Lady from
Shanghai: “When I start out to make a fool of myself, there’s very little
can stop me” – to establish an unquenchable yearning for the past and
a fatalistic frame for the present; and a rigorously confusing use of
flashbacks and time shifts “to reinforce the feelings of hopelessness
and lost time.” These techniques work together, Schrader concludes,
to “emphasize loss, nostalgia, lack of clear priorities, insecurity; then
submerge these self-doubts in mannerism and style. In such a world
style becomes paramount; it is all that separates one from meaninglessness.”
Schrader’s emphasis on noir as a period and a style rather than a
subject or genre is echoed by Janey Place and Lowell Peterson in
“Some Visual Motifs of Film Noir” (1974), a brief but profusely illustrated
catalog of visual devices that the authors divide into a distinctive
“photographic style: antitraditional lighting and camera” (low-key
lighting; movement of the key light off to the side; night-for-night
shooting; increased depth of field; optical distortions of space and
shape associated with wide-angle lenses) and an equally distinctive
“directorial style: antitraditional mise-en-scène” (irregular or unbalanced
figure placement; claustrophobic frames within the frame; doubling
characters with shadows or reflections or inanimate objects in
order to depersonalize them or suggest their hidden depths; withholding
establishing shots or camera movements that would root the characters
more securely in the frame and the space and world it presents).
27 Place and Peterson make a persuasive case for the decisive
importance of such visual motifs to film noir, not only as signatures of
individual auteurs but as expressions of a particular view of the world

Structuralism and Beyond
By the mid-1970s, film noir had largely displaced the gangster film as
the focus of crime-film criticism. Although most critics agreed that film
noir was not a genre, the project of genre criticism itself was bolstered
by the appearance of Stuart M. Kaminsky’s American Film Genres
(1974) and John G. Cawelti’s Adventure, Mystery, and Romance (1976).
As Tyler and Warshow had reacted against Paul Rotha, both Kaminsky
and Cawelti broke explicitly with the auteurist assumptions that each
work depended on a single authorizing creator and that the critic’s
task was aesthetic evaluation of different works and auteurs. As Kaminsky
put it: “The genre approach need make no popular judgment.
It is an examination of popular forms, an attempt to understand, not to
‘sell’ films or directors.”29 The structuralist move from prescriptive to
descriptive criticism is a reasonable response to a genre whose meaning
is so completely generated by the conventions it shares with other
members of the genre rather than its departures from them that, as
Warshow had observed, “originality is to be welcomed only in the degree
that it intensifies the expected experience without fundamentally
altering it.”30
Structuralism offers the most logical basis for genre criticism because
it focuses on meanings within conventions shared widely
throughout a given genre rather than on the transformation of those
conventions within individual works. Although he never uses the term
structuralism, Cawelti’s bibliographical notes make it clear that his approach
to the formulas of popular fiction owes a foundational debt to
Northrop Frye’s structural study of myths in his Anatomy of Criticism
(1957).31 By replacing auteurist critics’ prescriptive faith in an authorizing
creator, and timeless aesthetic standards with an anthropologist’s
interest in the anonymous productions of a given culture, the
structuralist orientation redirected attention from the unique qualities
of particular artworks to the contours of the popular genres they exemplified.
The first clear example of Frye’s influence in the study of crime films
is James Damico’s 1978 invocation of Frye’s analysis of romance in order
to define film noir as a genre informed by an attitude and intent
expressed through stock characters and a consistent armature of plot.
Bypassing the attempt to seek thematic or stylistic denominators
common to all noirs, Damico proposes “a model which embodies the
‘truest’ or ‘purest’ example of the type” from which more marginal
noirs may be seen to diverge:
A man whose experience of life has left him sanguine and often bitter meets
a not-innocent woman of similar outlook to whom he is sexually and fatally
attracted. Through this attraction . . . the man comes to cheat, attempt to
murder, or actually murder a second man to whom the lover is unhappily
or unwillingly attached (generally he is her husband or lover), an act which
. . . brings about the sometimes metaphoric, but usually literal destruction
of the woman, the man to whom she is attached, and frequently the protagonist
himself.32
The structuralist impulse behind Damico’s model provides a crucial
link between the analysis of film noir and the more general commentaries
on the crime film that lay ahead. Such a link would prove vital
because criticism of the detective film, though nearly as voluminous
throughout the 1970s, was taking a completely different course from
the debate pitting myth against iconography in defining the film noir.
The defining presence of a detective hero had made the detective film
seem less problematic from the beginning. Considering the formulaic
nature of detective fiction, it was eminently predictable that its conventions
would attract the attention of Tzvetan Todorov, the firstgeneration
structuralist most interested in popular forms.
Todorov’s essay “The Typology of Detective Fiction” (1966) postulates
two alternative modes: the detective story of rational deduction
and the Série noire, or thriller, which emphasizes suspense rather than
curiosity and corresponds, as its French label indicates, to the film
noir. Todorov proposes “the suspense novel,” whose “reader is interested
not only by what has happened but also by what will happen
next,” as a hybrid of the detective story and the thriller. The suspense
novel presents a vulnerable detective “integrated into the universe of
the other characters, instead of being an independent observer as the
reader is.” The mortal detective of the suspense novel, who can be
either a fallible professional detective like Sam Spade or an innocent
suspect who turns detective in order to clear his or her name, represents
the genre’s dissatisfactions with the detective formula and the
14. Out of the Past: Antitraditional mise-en-scène expressing a grim, romantically
stylized view of the world. (Jane Greer, Robert Mitchum, Steve Brodie)
endeavor to renew that formula by retaining only its suspense elements.
33 Todorov’s essay remains important today as the first attempt
to theorize a crime genre more comprehensive than the detective story,
the thriller, or the suspense novel by mapping out the transformations
of their shared conventions.34
Although George Grella, writing a few years later, treated the Golden
Age detective novel and the hard-boiled private-eye novel as equally
formulaic in a pair of essays on the myths of Edenic purity and corrupted
romance that underlie the two formulas,35 only three theorists
have reached outside the permutations of the detective-story formula
to the larger structuralist project Todorov outlines: Cawelti, in the
“Notes Toward a Typology of Literary Formulas” that introduces his
discussion of mystery fiction in Adventure, Mystery, and Romance;36
Gary C. Hoppenstand, in the typology of mystery and suspense formulas
that frames his study In Search of the Paper Tiger (1987);37 and
Charles Derry, in his typology of suspense films according to whether
they focus on criminals, detectives, or victims, and the extent to which
they include a strong detective figure as the exemplar of a rational
world order.
In particular, the kind of structural analysis practiced by Todorov
has been much more influential in the criticism of detective fiction
than in the criticism of detective films. Instead, that criticism has been
dominated by quasi-auteurist studies, with the detective standing in
for the director as auteur. It was only a short step from film historian
William K. Everson’s The Bad Guys (1964), a lively categorical survey
of movie villains (“the western outlaws,” “the gangsters and the
hoods,” “the psychos,” and so on) folded into an opulent, oversized
collection of stills, to Everson’s The Detective in Film (1972) – “an affectionate
. . . but certainly not comprehensive, introduction to the
field,” as its author called it – which replaced many of the equivalent
photographs with more detailed historical information about the fictional
heroes Charlie Chan, Dick Tracy, and the FBI, even though its
large format still suggested a coffee-table book.39 The fan’s impulse
toward appreciation that drives Everson also underlies Jon Tuska’s
The Detective in Hollywood (1978), which again surveys the field detective
by detective, from Sherlock Holmes and Philo Vance to the heroes
of Dirty Harry (1971) and Chinatown (1974). Although Tuska writes at
much greater length than Everson, the information he provides – biographies
of detective-story authors, production and economic details
regarding particular films, anecdotes about and interviews with filmmakers
– steers clear of any systematic critical analysis.40 The focus
on typological characters as the genre’s defining center of interest
tends to accept these characters and the formulas they imply on their
own terms, moving toward relative aesthetic judgments rather than
analyzing them as structural or historical functions.
If critical commentary on detective films struggled to find expressive
structures beneath the genre’s recurrent figures, the combination
of structural analysis and social history enabled Jack Shadoian to define
“the gangster/crime genre”41 more broadly yet more precisely
than ever before in Dreams and Dead Ends (1977). Shadoian takes his
cue from both Warshow’s tragic myth and the brief sociological hints
John Baxter had offered in the trenchant Introduction to his 1970 encyclopedia,
The Gangster Film, which emphasized the interaction of
social, criminal, and Hollywood culture rather than the simple reflection
of any one by the other. Since “criminals are the creation of society
rather than rebels against it,” Baxter notes that audiences’ relation
to these urban wolves, whose personal and professional code is often
indistinguishable from that of the paid enforcers of the law, is ambiguous,
informed alike by “menace and glamour.”42 In answer to the question,
“What does the genre do that can’t be done as well elsewhere?”
Shadoian expands this account to define the gangster as “the archetypal
American dreamer” whose dreams rehearse the conflict between
two blankly opposing national ideologies: the vision of a classless
democratic society and the drive to get ahead. Echoing Warshow, Shadoian
assigns central importance to the gangster’s paradoxical drive
for a success that will destroy him as surely as failure. Because neither
gangsters, in their unappeasable thirst for success, nor their films
propose any serious alternative to “the American way of life” whose
shortcomings they dramatize, “they act on behalf of its ideal nature.
If it could only work the way it is supposed to, there would be no problems.”
Hence the alluring, fearsome gangster – incorporating both the
belief in egalitarianism and the possibility of a better life, both audiences’
disillusionment with American society and their ultimate faith
in its principles – is a contested figure on whom different periods can
project their views of social utopia and social critique, from the limitless
aspirations of Little Caesar (1930) to the claustrophobic nightmare
of The Killers (1946), from the “romantic rage of selfhood” in Gun Crazy
and White Heat (both 1949) to the more sentimental humanism of Pick-
up on South Street and 99 River Street (both 1953), before tailing off in
the nonrepresentational postmodernism of Bonnie and Clyde (1967),
Point Blank (1967), and The Godfather (1972).43
Shadoian’s eclectic readings of individual films, freely borrowing
from mise-en-scène criticism, structuralism, and the historical analysis
of gangster myths without committing themselves to any one of
them, are echoed in three other synthetic studies that have become
the standard narrative histories of their subgenres: Eugene Rosow’s
Born to Lose: The Gangster Film in America (1978), Carlos Clarens’s
Crime Movies (1980), and Foster Hirsch’s The Dark Side of the Screen:
Film Noir (1981). Rosow, whose sociologically oriented study devotes
nearly half its length to films before 1930, argues for a close connection
between the genre’s changing appeal and the specific desires and
demands of its changing audience. He is especially acute on the interrelations
between organized crime and the business realities of Hollywood
filmmaking, as in his observation that “success in the movie industry
. . . was achieved in roughly the same way that bootleggers
built and were continuing to build their empires” – that is, by former
outsiders becoming “Robber Barons” through the ruthless enforcement
of their monopolies.44 Clarens, addressing a question much like
Shadoian’s – “What can be said to be the true intent of the crime film?
To awaken in the viewer a civic conscience? To instill an awareness of
a fallible society? To establish distance from a very real problem?” –
defines his field more narrowly, despite his title, by excluding “the psychological
thriller” that “deals with violence in the private sphere”
(e.g., Shadow of a Doubt, Kiss Me Deadly) to produce a field basically
corresponding to the gangster genre; but he surveys this field much
more broadly, providing a comprehensive history studded with brief,
pointed commentaries on hundreds of films.45 Hirsch’s volume is synthetic
in still another sense, drawing on the work of most important
earlier commentators on film noir in chapters that successively consider
its literary and cinematic antecedents, its iconography, its narrative
patterns, its leading performers and directors, and its influence
on other films. Though Hirsch, steering a course between appreciation
and analysis, does not attempt an original reconceptualization of noir,
his frequent asides on such matters as the returning veteran as “the
only character type in noir connected directly to the period” and the
motifs that tie Hitchcock’s films to the noir tradition have made his
volume an oft-quoted guide to its subject.46

Feminist Critique
Even as Rosow, Clarens, and Hirsch were summing up an era in crimefilm
criticism, a new wave of feminist studies was calling into question
that criticism’s methodology. As an earlier generation of critics had rejected
Rotha’s tenets of originality and ambition, the new feminist theory
rejected the content analysis of Molly Haskell, aptly summarized
by Haskell’s 1974 summary of female roles in films noirs: “In the dark
melodramas of the forties, woman came down from her pedestal and
she didn’t stop when she reached the ground.”47 This revolt is fueled
by the double influence of Marxist materialist aesthetics and Jacques
Lacan’s rewriting of Freud. Christine Gledhill explicitly invokes Marx
in turning from the question, “What is this film’s meaning?” (a question
that assumes that meaning is immanent, objective, and readily
available to the disinterested critic, a signifying function free of history
and ideology) to the question, “How is its meaning produced?”
which changes “the project of criticism from the discovery of meaning
to that of uncovering the means of its production” – explaining why a
genre or formula that has currency in a particular historical moment
authorizes some meanings but not others. By changing the feminist
critic’s question from “Does this image of woman please me or not, do
I identify with it or not?” to “What is being said about women here, who
is speaking, for whom?” Gledhill and other feminists redirect the focus
of genre theory from the content of stories, images, and conventions
to the ideological conditions under which they were produced.48
Feminism’s historical project is joined most decisively to Lacan’s
psychoanalytic theory in Laura Mulvey’s influential “Visual Pleasure
and Narrative Cinema” (1975). Asking how viewers can derive pleasure
from potentially castrating images of women, Mulvey theorizes
that movies address the fears of castration that images of women,
who lack phalluses, arouse in (presumably male) viewers by allowing
audiences the scopophilic pleasures of voyeurism and the narcissistic
pleasures of identification with the human figures shown onscreen.
Traditional narrative cinema, Mulvey argues, resolves the paradox between
these two kinds of pleasure (looking at an image as object, looking
at an image as representing a potentially engaging subjectivity) by
casting woman as the object of a gaze that is “pleasurable in form” but
“threatening in content.” Patriarchal cinema neutralizes the potentially
castrating power of women’s images by fetishizing them, displacing
their bodies or breaking them photographically into individually nonthreatening
pieces (as in Morocco, 1930), or making them the subjects
of investigations directed by the male gaze (as in Vertigo, 1958) in order
to reserve for men alone the position of active agents capable of
demystifying and possessing potentially threatening women.49
Although Mulvey’s theory, like Gledhill’s, is intended to apply to all
commercial films, it has particular applications to film noir, which assigns
a central role to erotically charged images of powerful, fearsome
women. Instead of joining Haskell in condemning these images as degrading,
more recent feminists have used them to interrogate the allegedly
invisible signifying practices of Hollywood cinema by unmasking
its patriarchal agenda. Claire Johnston, identifying claims adjuster
Keyes as the “signifier of the patriarchal order,” sees Double Indemnity
as a displaced oedipal drama in which Walter Neff kills Dietrichson,
a negative father-surrogate, in order to take his place as head of his
family and achieve at the same time the secure position of Keyes as
the positive father.50 Sylvia Harvey characterizes film noir as marked
by “the strange and compelling absence of ‘normal’ family relations,”
which “encourage[s] the consideration of alternative institutions for
the reproduction of social life.”51 Pam Cook, following Parker Tyler, argues
in more general terms that Mildred’s brutal assimilation to the
patriarchal order in Mildred Pierce through the loss of her daughter
and the deauthorizing of her narrative voice is one more example of
the ways in which “the system which gives men and women their
place in society must be reconstructed by a more explicit work of repression”
exemplified by the film’s narrative and visual systems.52
The resulting critique has been developed in two leading directions.
In attempting to make room for women in film noir, Elizabeth Cowie
has challenged “the tendency to characterize film noir as always a
masculine film form” by valorizing the female unwilling killer of The
Accused (1948), the obsessional heroine of Possessed (1947), and the
fatally smitten heroine of The Damned Don’t Cry (1950).53 More often,
feminist critics have sought to make room for female audiences by
unmasking patriarchal motives behind noir conventions, even at the
price of arguing that noir heroines onscreen are mere functions of
male desire. Mary Ann Doane defines the femmes fatales who descend
from Brigid O’Shaughnessy (Mary Astor), the treacherous client who
nearly undermines Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart) in his manly resolve
in The Maltese Falcon, as “an articulation of fears surrounding
the loss of stability and centrality of the [male] self. . . . The power ac-
corded to the femme fatale is a function of fears linked to the notions
of uncontrollable drives, the fading of subjectivity, and the loss of conscious
agency.”54 James F. Maxfield is still more explicit: “The internal
conflicts of the male protagonists are ultimately more important than
external conflicts with other characters – even with the fatal woman.
. . . The women are merely catalysts; in the end it is the men who are
destructive to themselves”55 [Fig. 15]. And Richard Dyer contends that
“film noir is characterized by a certain anxiety over the existence and
definition of masculinity and normality” – an anxiety that, since it cannot
be expressed directly (for such a direct expression would admit
the existence of the very problem it is the films’ work to obscure), is
marked by the threatening predominance of nonmasculine images to
indicate the boundaries of categories that cannot be constructed in
positive terms.

15. The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946): Is the hero destroyed by the
femme fatale, or by his own weakness? (John Garfield, Hume Cronyn, Lana
Turner)
As the feminist critique of Hollywood patriarchy has continued, it
has been supplemented by the project Dyer suggests: an analysis of
Hollywood images of masculinity. Frank Krutnik’s In a Lonely Street
(1991) explores the ways in which the conventions of film noir (a genre
Krutnik restricts to “‘tough’ thrillers” of the 1940s) amount to a definition
and defense of masculinity by allowing the hard-boiled hero
to grapple with “the dangers represented by the feminine – not just
women in themselves but also any non-‘tough’ potentiality of his own
identity as a man.” More generally, Krutnik maintains, the work of the
“tough” thriller is to elaborate and resolve contradictions between the
whole range of male desire and those desires admitted by a patriarchal
culture of the period. A common though often unwilling way
“tough” thrillers expressed this tension was to follow the normal Hollywood
tendency toward heterosexual romance, since “the grafting
of the love story onto the ‘hard-boiled’ detective story meant that the
films had to confront . . . the question of how heterosexuality could
possibly be accommodated within the parameters of such an obsessively
phallocentric fantasy, without causing it to collapse.”57 The result
was not only films like Dead Reckoning, in which the hero’s love
for the heroine is thwarted by his determination to avenge the dead
buddy she killed, but films like The Big Sleep (1946), in which the hero
is paired with a heroine who, though she first seems as devious as any
femme fatale, miraculously turns out to be worthy of his trust and
love, thus vindicating both his tough, wary professionalism and his
openness to love against all odds.

Demystifications
The project of “making visible the invisible” that Annette Kuhn had
claimed for feminist criticism – that is, disclosing unconscious, patriarchal,
political, or otherwise unacknowledged motives that have
shaped filmmaking practices – has had a much wider effect on film
studies, and on studies of the crime film in particular.58 By the time
Carl Richardson made the Chandleresque announcement in Autopsy
(1992) that film noir must balance its dark lack of sentimentality by
incorporating “a greater element of realism” from which it departed
at its peril, his forthright evaluations already seemed a rearguard action
as quaintly dated as the mission of Chandler’s knight of the mean
streets. Richardson claimed categorically that “external reality [despite
the psychologistic or deconstructive claims of Sigmund Freud,
Jacques Lacan, Christian Metz, Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes, and
Jean-François Lyotard] is indifferent to minds that aspire to know it”
and “unmoved by the incantations of the psychology-driven shamans
who seek to master it.” Hence Richardson, borrowing his critical
framework from contemporary reviewers rather than “the biased perspective
of post-1960s scholars, historians, and essayists,” dismissed
Touch of Evil, for example, because it “did not accurately reflect reality.”

Richardson’s assumptions, which would have represented critical
consensus of the detective film through most of its history, were far
less representative of contemporaneous analysis of noir than J. P. Telotte’s
premise that noir is driven by “a compelling urge to understand,
formulate, and articulate the human situation at a time when our old
formulations, as well as the means of expression underlying them, no
longer seemed adequate.” Whether he is describing The Killers and
Sorry, Wrong Number (1948), which “use so many subjective viewpoints
that they ultimately seem to abandon all notion of an objective
vantage or the possibility of ever synthesizing their multiple perspectives,”
or arguing that the despairing critique of the alienating force of
contemporary culture in noirs from The Big Sleep to Kiss Me Deadly
shows “how fundamentally our communications, even the movies
themselves, carry a certain estranging force, one that renders all discourse
precarious and every effort at human communication a risky
wager against misunderstanding and alienation,” it is clear that his notions
of reality, textuality, and communication are far more tentative
than Richardson’s.
For Telotte, film noir, by focusing on the problems of communication
and narration, renders its own narrational strategies problematic
at the same time it is dramatizing a world of annihilating isolation:
“Film noir advances a sort of ideological criticism in itself, laying bare
the systematic contradictions that our films usually cover up. In this
way, it reverses how ideological structures like the genre film usually
work, by embracing rather than disguising paradoxes, even talking
about them structurally and thematically.”61 Other theorists, especially
those writing under the aegis of poststructuralism, have made similar
attempts to open new spaces in film noir by disrupting its transparent-
seeming codes of narration and representation. Joan Copjec
argues for a further problematizing of noir narration. Following Pascal
Bonitzer’s observation that the omnipotent voice of the archcriminal
Dr. Soberin (Albert Dekker), in Kiss Me Deadly, falls silent in death al-
most as soon as it is assigned to an onscreen body, she concludes that
“however contiguous it is with the diegetic space, the space of the
voice-over is nevertheless radically heterogeneous to it.” Riven by
such irreconcilable divisions, film noir offers a critique of the “fetishization
of private jouissance” created by displacing a social order
based on oedipally regulated desire with a new order based on the unending
drive for immediate pleasure. These films trace the “mortal
consequences for society” when “we no longer attempt to safeguard
the ‘empty’ private space . . . but to dwell in this space exclusively.”62
Marc Vernet similarly argues that “film noir . . . was meaningful only
for French spectators cut off from the American cinema during the
summer of 1946” in order to deconstruct the notion of film noir as an
enduring critical category: “As an object or corpus of films, film noir
does not belong to the history of cinema; it belongs as a notion to the
history of film criticism.”63 And James Naremore, acting as a cultural
historian rather than as a deconstructionist, has urged that noir is an
“an antigenre” with a particular political agenda – to reveal “the dark
side of savage capitalism” – more fairly associated with a literary sensibility,
or “a nostalgia for something that never quite existed,” than
a corpus or genre of films.
Naremore’s project, in fact, is to valorize noir by demystifying it,
showing the political and economic processes that link it to a much
broader series of movements than cinema itself can accommodate:
high modernism, political progressivism, reactions against the postwar
blacklisting of suspected subversives, the fetishism of Hollywood
images and genres, and a commodified past available for sale in the
form of the overvalued Maltese Falcon from the 1941 film, a figure
“originally intended to represent a worthless imitation . . . transformed
into ‘the stuff that dreams are made of,’ if only because Humphrey
Bogart touched it.” It is a project thrown into particularly high
relief by the contrary tendency of several recent histories, like Douglas
Brode’s Money, Women, and Guns (1995) and Marilyn Yaquinto’s
Pump ’Em Full of Lead (1998), to follow the conventions of detectivefilm
criticism in accepting their genres on their own terms and remain
close to the language of their original reviewers in analyzing them.65
Naremore, by contrast, echoes Paul Kerr’s suggestion nearly twenty
years earlier, based on Kerr’s analysis of film-industry practices, that
noir was an “‘oppositional’ cinematic mode” whose battery of “realist
devices” marked “an attempt to hold in balance traditional generic elements
with unorthodox aesthetic practices which constantly under-
mine them” as part of a “negotiation of an ‘oppositional space’ within
and against realist cinematic practice.”66
In this project Naremore is joined by Jonathan Munby, who finds in
the gangster film an oppositional analogue to film noir. Extending Naremore’s
argument beyond noir to theorize a continuing “legacy of dissidence”
linking the 1930s gangster film with the noir tradition, Munby
argues that the crime films that constitute “the transatlantic prehistory
of film noir is constructed out of definitively discontinuous film
forms,” and that “the 1940s crime film cycle [therefore] represents not
so much disengagement from the system as the continuity of discontinuity
– the endurance of a dissenting tradition.”67 Both Naremore
and Munby seek to broaden Kerr’s economically based analysis by a
broader appeal to the context of cultural studies, whose movement
away from categorical generalizations toward political and economic
revisions of film history seems likely to set the agenda for crime-film
criticism for the foreseeable future.

Personal Books and Reference Books
Two sorts of study remain outside the line of development this chapter
traces: belletristic personal, sometimes biographical, essays on
crime films, and reference guides giving information about individual
films or filmmakers. Although the two kinds of writing, which respectively
reflect the anti-intentionalism of film-noir criticism and the intentionalism
of detective-film criticism, may seem poles apart, several
volumes show both impulses in full flower. Two books devoted primarily
to crime fiction, for example, incorporate extensive entries on
crime films as well: Chris Steinbrunner and Otto Penzler’s Encyclopedia
of Mystery and Detection (1976) and its unofficial successor, William
L. DeAndrea’s Encyclopedia Mysteriosa (1994), both of them especially
thorough in treating film adaptations of famous fictional detectives
from Sherlock Holmes to Horace Rumpole, and both of them, especially
DeAndrea’s, shot through with the personalities of their creators.68
An even more eccentric reference is John Baxter’s The Gangster Film
(1970), devoted mostly to alphabetical listings, most of them only a
sentence or two in length, of performers and filmmakers. The listings
have long since been superseded by later, more comprehensive references,
but Baxter’s brief Introduction, cited earlier, remains important.
The essays in The Big Book of Noir (1998), edited by Ed Gorman, Lee
Server, and Martin H. Greenberg, range in their topics from cinema to
literature to comic books to radio and television, and their approach
ranges from productions notes to interviews to essays in interpretation
and appreciation to lists of favorite films, making this volume the
most eclectic of all reference books on noir.69
Other essayists on the crime film take pains to dissociate themselves
from academic criticism or indeed any pretense to objectivity.
In introducing The Devil Thumbs a Ride and Other Unforgettable Films
(1988), a series of a hundred alphabetically organized essays, all originally
written for Mystery Scene magazine, Barry Gifford acknowledges
that he guarantees “only the veracity of the impression” each film
made on him.70 The poet Nicholas Christopher provides an equally
personal traversal of film noir in Somewhere in the Night (1997).71 Still
more recently, Eddie Muller’s impressionistic, supercharged Dark City
(1998) declares its independence from the academy in its opening dialogue,
a parody of The Asphalt Jungle (1950):
– Dix, what happened to the Professor? . . .
– I killed him! I couldn’t stand it anymore! I couldn’t take another
minute of his blather about Judeo-Christian patriarchal structures
and structuro-semiological judgments. My head was going
to explode!
– My God, Dix – what did you do?
– Let’s just say I deconstructed him.72
Other references seek greater balance or objectivity either by enlisting
many contributors or by sticking closely to the data. Two examples
of the first sort are among the essential references in the field.
Its international scope and wide array of alphabetical entries on leading
topics, writers, films, and filmmakers make The BFI Companion to
Crime (1997), written by nine contributors and edited by Phil Hardy,
the most comprehensive in scope, if not always in achievement, of all
references on the crime film. More specialized, but equally useful within
its field, is Alain Silver and Elizabeth Ward’s Film Noir: An Encyclopedic
Reference to the American Style, first published in 1979 and twice
revised since.73 Originally the work of twenty authors, the book is divided
into some three hundred entries on individual films (a list that
grows in its third edition to five hundred), each entry giving cast and
production credits, a synopsis of the plot, and a brief critical commentary.
The volume is lavishly illustrated with dozens of oversized stills.
The editors’ appendix on the relations between noir and the gangster
film, the western, the period film, and the comedy is especially valuable,
as are their indexes of noir directors, writers, cinematographers,
composers, producers, and performers, and the supplementary essays
added to each of the later editions.
Spencer Selby’s Dark City: The Film Noir (1984), adopts a two-part
structure that echoes Silver and Ward even as it marks a distance from
their work. The first half of Selby’s book, a series of summaries and
interpretations of twenty-five key noirs, reads like an encyclopedia of
analytical commentary; the second half, a more briefly annotated filmography
of nearly five hundred more, reads more like a dictionary.
Joseph J. Cocchiarelli reverses this procedure in his Screen Sleuths
(1992), a filmography of some two hundred thrillers of varying stripes,
followed by more detailed essays on a dozen of them. Robert Ottoson
buttresses his 1981 analytical filmography of some two hundred films
in A Reference Guide to the American Film Noir: 1940–1958 by citing
hundreds of contemporary reviews.
James Robert Parish and Michael R. Pitts have produced not only a
two-volume alphabetical reference on gangster films, The Great Gangster
Pictures (1976, 1987), but a companion volume cataloging The
Great Detective Pictures (1990) whose organization is similar but whose
scope is even more sweeping. Pitts’s three volumes on Famous Movie
Detectives (1979–2001), following the auteurist pattern of detectivemovie
criticism, are organized around the fictional sleuths whose incarnations
they trace, with individual chapters summarizing the literary
and cinematic careers of detectives from Father Brown to Perry
Mason. A more substantial work devoted to performers rather than
fictional characters is Karen Burroughs Hannsberry’s Femme Noir:
Bad Girls of Film (1998), which collects forty-nine substantial essays
on leading ladies of the genre, each combining historical background,
a summary of noir appearances and contemporary reviews, a noir filmography,
and a list of references.
Finally, Larry Langman’s and Daniel Finn’s three volumes listing cast
and production credits and summaries for over four thousand crime
films from the 1890s through 1959 provide a salutary reminder of just
how fragmented criticism of the crime film remains even at its most
systematic: The Library of Congress has cataloged two of their works,
A Guide to American Silent Crime Films (1994) and A Guide to American
Crime Films of the Forties and Fifties (1995) under criticism of the detective
and mystery film, with cross-references to gangster and police
films and, in the case of the later volume, prison films, but the third,
A Guide to American Crime Films of the Thirties (1995) under criticism
of gangster films, with none of these cross-references.76 Even at their
most apparently cut-and-dried, analyses of crime films, like the films
themselves, continue to resist any single synthesis or systematic overview.

Crime Films/Thomas Leitch/ http://www.cambridge.org