François Richet and Vincent Cassel

Let’s face it – no one does Real McCoy, well-’ard gangster flicks like we Europeans. Of course, Stateside, you can cite Scorsese’s Goodfellas (1990) or Casino (1995) and, at a pinch, Coppolla’s The Godfather (1972) but sorry, when it comes to what violence, fear of violence and callous characterizations are really all about, we have (among many others) Get Carter (1971). We’ve got The Long Good Friday (1980).

Frankly, you’ve never really had a glass smashed into your face unless you’ve had it this side of the Atlantic, and there is a gritty, seamy, downright dirty side to the 70s gangster look and feel that only European pubs, bars, clubs and strip-joints can effectively convey.

And that’s why we should all be on our knees, to give thanks for Mesrine: L’instinct de mort and the follow-up Mesrine: L’ennemi public n° 1 (released across Europe on 19 November) – both have this dirt in spades. Order has been restored.

Jean-François Richet, whose previous film was the somewhat uninspiring remake Assault on Precinct 13 (2005), from John Carpenter’s 1976 original, has simply outdone himself with this balanced, and, in spite of the grim violence at its core, non-hysterical account of what drives a man to devote his entire existence to the crooked path, and the price that must be paid for taking on the system single-handed.

Although Cassel’s previous form might indicate he could play a hot-blooded, moody but intelligently motivate gangster in his sleep, his turn as Mesrine offers a whole lot more than murder and mayhem by the numbers. Helped enormously by the ensemble cast (Gérard Depardieu makes a welcome return to the classic brutish role that first made him famous, Olivier Gourmet is simply wonderful as Commissaire Broussard, Mesrine’s reluctant nemesis on the ‘right’ side of the law), plus a splendidly tight, acerbic screenplay from Abdel Raouf Dafri, which was in turn adapted from Mesrine’s own ‘novel’, written while in jail, Cassel simply IS Mesrine.

A peerless master of disguise, Mesrine, whose sworn enemies were the banks, became France’s public enemy numero un during the 1970s, but his road into crime began shortly after his return from France’s war against Algeria in 1959 – aged 23, our man comes back with a clean service record, but quickly finds, despite the best efforts of his loving mother and father (Myriam Boyer and Michel Duchaussoy) the straight and narrow of civvy street too restrictive. Gifted with a quick mind and first-class improvisational skills, Mesrine is also a man of his word, no matter what the cost to himself, as he proves when, upon breaking out of the inhumane Saint-Vincent-de-Paul penitentiary (to which he had been sentenced to 15 years) in 1972, he returns two weeks later to break his jail mates free.

The story of the two films charts his nearly two decades of legendary criminal feats (including multiple bank robberies and numerous, increasingly spectacular, prison breaks), finishing on 2 November, 1979, when his story ends, as outlaws’ stories usually do, at the point of a gun. Several guns, in fact…

There are those who may say that the story is romanticized, as much in love with the man at its centre as Mesrine so clearly was with himself. Pooh-pooh to them – what Richet and Cassel achieve is a near-peerless account of a man who became a myth in his won lifetime, let alone nearly 30 years after his death. Make no mistake – in this film, people die and people bleed. In some ways, none more so than Mesrine himself, who was tortured by his notions of neither being a good son, husband, or father. Put it this way – I know who you will be rooting for from start to finish, and it isn’t any of the representatives of the system that the ‘gangster’s gangster’ swore to bring down.

And, to boot, the films are truly thrilling, with Richet proving he is just as adept at the big action scenes as he is with the expository dialogue. Vive Mesrine!

http://efareviews.cineuropa.org

Film, Censorship and Historic Research

The relations between film and culture, or film and ideology, have been found in various ways. One of these is to view film as mirrors of the dominant culture in which they are made. In this aspect movies are attributed documentary qualities, and a reflectionary relationship is created between movies and society. Applying this theory a problem occurs; i.e. both optimistic musicals and film noirs were made in America in the forties. Which of these are the accurate reflection of American society? The conclusion must be that the use of this mirror term or reflection metaphor is just not good enough. It is unsatisfactory because it overlooks the many variables that movie making consists of. To make a movie one has to deal with a system of selection and combination, both different and competing cultural aspects, and industrial and institutional factors have influence on a movie production. A feature film does not reflect the truth; it shows a constructed and narrated world. In order to create this world, it has to regard the conventions, rules, myths and ideologies of the society from which it was born. In addition the medium itself has restrictions.

There are more satisfactory methods to use in the analysis of film and culture. The use of methods from other fields of research have added valuable tools to the field of film research. In general there are two ways of approaching the relation between film and culture; textual and contextual. The textual approach to the film medium concentrates on the film text to read the cultural function of film. This method tends to focus on similarities and typical texts rather then the opposite, and this gives the method structuralist tendencies. It also tends to work by tracing the mythologies and ideologies in the film back to sources within the culture; it is based on the assumption that the film text consists of certain determined rules, and that the culture author this text. An example of this approach is the work of Paul Schrader on film noir, and the way the subject of women in noir has been treated. A contextual approach on the other hand is more interested in the analysis of outside determinants in the film industry, such as cultural, political, institutional and industrial factors. All of these factors are elements that have influence on the production of a movie, and a movie text. In the study of film and culture the best result would perhaps come from combining these two techniques since both deal with themes relevant to these studies.

Film institutions have political interests that determine which films are made, and which films are seen by an audience. One of the reasons for this is found in peoples identification with the nation. Nationalism functions as a tool to value the nation over the individual, so that if one accepts this nationalism one subordinates oneself to the nation. The idea of the nation sets a set of rules of ethics and moral, and thus defines what is American (in this case). If one possesses this identification one can gain political power. In this aspect it becomes important to control the arts, (because art are representations of the nation), so that it have coherence with this idea. Art--in this case movies--can represent different viewpoints on the desirable homogeneous image of the nation state. This multiplicity is of course not wanted, and thus there are tried methods of controlling this.

In America in the forties and fifties, measures taken to prevent un-national activities. Within movie production there was the Production Code and a bit later, HUAC. The Production Code was a set of censorship regulations governing the Hollywood productions. It laid down rules for what the movies were permitted to show. It labeled issues like nudity, the use of drugs, homo sexuality and so on taboo. Still film noir deals with several of these subjects, its messages are hidden within the movies. Sometimes this prohibited material is showed off screen, cast in another form with the message barely concealed, or in other ways disguised. In this manner there existed a Hollywood self censorship. In 1947 the House of Un-American Activities Committee started their investigation of the film industry. This committee won political influence, and the questioning of the status quo was labeled un-American. This was a subject dealt with by the film noirs.

http://www.let.rug.nl/~usa/E/noir/noir09.htm

Film noir and contemporary America

The national identity of a country is based on different myths and ideologies. In the nineteenth century pre-industrialized America, democratic equality was based on the universal ownership of property. At this time America was an agrarian society, and this ideology led-- among other things--to the westward expansion. During the early twentieth century America changed from an agrarian to an industrialized society. In the 1920s, for the first time, more people lived in cities than in the country. Even if the way of living changed and people formerly owned property now received pay-checks, the myths stayed the same. It was only after the Depression that these myths disappeared. Film noir shows a transitional stage in American ideology, when the American identity changes from being pre-industrial to a mass consumer society with an industrialized corporate state. At this point in American history there were no new myths available, and the national identity was in crises. During the war America saw a massive mobilization, and one of the driving powers behind this was the common goal of the nation. The national unity was one of the powers behind this mobilization, the country work as a group instead of as individuals. This prospect of unity disappeared in peacetime, and led to disillusionment in postwar America.

Film noir can be seen as both a screen style, and a perspective on human existence and society. Its narrative structures incorporate a dark world view that is the result of a confrontation with nihilism. The cause of nihilism, in short, appears when peoples ideals are shattered. In the twentieth century tradition could not cope with the social development, and this causes a moral problem (which is easy spotted in film noir).
This is what happened to the American population in the 1940s. Earlier the Americans had been free individuals and masters of their own destiny, but in postwar America people became tied up by an economic and political system out of their control. Fortune seemed to control the field. Nietzsche said that, if a world view one has put down effort to preserve and that one has believed in, is falsified, it will give man the suspicion that all perceptions of the world are false. From this it is not short step to take in order to say that the basis of human existence is irrational and order is an illusion, a thought, or truth, most people are not strong enough to handle. A way to fight the anxiety these thoughts, or knowledge, create is to hide oneself in the quest for material wealth or power.
At this point my thoughts go to the affluent mass consuming society of the United States. Another thought is that maybe the country as a whole, not just its bourgeoisie, tried to fight nihilism with materialism, for the willingness to annihilate the world before giving up its political system must be called nihilism. I think it can be safe to say that film noir is an American attempt to engage this phenomenon.

The themes of film noir touch many aspects of life, but they all revolves around the destined being. The protagonists are hostages of fate and seem partly unfree and powerless. Fate runs the shop, and the heroes of film noir are willing to buy. They act as if they are masters of their own lives, but still let it show that they know they are not. The male hero is disillusioned and alienated from his surroundings.
I think that this is something the audience could relate to in the forties and fifties. The new society of gigantic cooperation's created a feeling of powerlessness among the workers. He who had been his own boss earlier in this own small scale business , now had become one of many pay-check collectors. This alienated mood in film noir can be seen as a reaction to the large, impersonal, dehumanizing cooperation's of the new consumer society. I view the hard-boiled heroes disillusionment as a reaction to contemporary Americas loss of old myths and identity.

The way women are presented in film noir I find rooted in the fact that in America during World War II women had won access to the economic sphere, which field had formerly been exclusively for men. This creates a problem, not only in the noir world, but also in the real one. The females patriotic duty in the work force, led to a redefinition of their place within culture. A consequence of this was a confusion in regard to the traditional conception of sexual roles and sexual identity, an identity that had been non-practicing during the war because of the separation of the sexes. The female entry to the male dominated world made the American male lose track of his position within a society he formerly controlled. The war dislocated men from their former sense of being the prime movers of culture.

The family, or absence of it, in film noir is valuated with negativity. It is possible to view the family as a metaphor for the larger society, and its negative value as social discontent. In film noirs the rebellion against a traditional valued institution like the family often ends with destruction.

Movements within the medium of film--like the German expressionism--occur as an answer to a national crises. If the noir phenomenon is seen as a movement--and it partly is--so did film noir. In postwar America there are threats like the Red scare, the resent emerged from global war, extended borders, widespread crime and violence, and the possibility of annihilation.
Personally, I would call this a crisis. Film noir tries to deal with this crisis in its own way. It shows the dark and desperate mood of this era, even though some people threw themselves into the materialistic race to forget.
I think the audience of the time were distressed watching noirs, because they could identify with these movies. Still, I do not think that the noirs are not so much rebelling against contemporary America, as trying to get it back together. I do not think that noirs offer alternatives, but that they show what happens if one defies the traditions (i.e. the view of women and family). America at the time was confused and film noirs were merely searching for answers.

http://www.let.rug.nl/~usa/E/noir/noir08.htm

The male protagonist

In film noir the male protagonist is often a detective or an otherwise social alienated individual. Sometimes the male heroes are featured as amnesiacs, a situation that absolutely creates a feeling of social estrangement and disillusionment. These hard-boiled heroes are anti-social loners that are subject to existential angst. The environments they live and work in are dark and scary metropolises, often red-light districts, or otherwise dehumanizing environments, like large desolate office buildings. They are experiencing anonymity through their large scale surroundings. The tough guy is often marked by an excellent gift of verbal wit, even if they are not always given the strongest intellect; this is a heritage from the hard-boiled novels. Their worlds are dominated by crime, corruption and cruelty. The protagonist often gets tangled up in some of these activities himself, in addition to his interest in the erotic. Thus, he lives in a distorting world.

The men are, as well as the women, portrayed as stereotypes. As a result of this they are not allowed to live their lives in alternative ways anymore than women. The patriarchal order that is surrounding them, and that they in addition to women are trying to upheave, represents a certain set of rules they have to follow and live up to. As it seems, the patriarchy is asking for quite a bit. The struggle to keeping women in their place also keeps the men in their places. The men can not show much emotion in order to upheaval their masculinity, (to be emotional is regarded a female virtue), and they have to work alone and be successful in what they do (something Oedipal). They have to seek meaning in activity, not in contemplation which also is regarded a female virtue. Their position within the patriarchal system provides them with purpose in life; to work, provide, protect and serve and protect the patriarchy. The first three virtues must be seen in the context of the family and the masculine.

The existence led by men in film noir is one of toil and loneliness. The actual choices men have in life are either to become a family man, which is the accepted thing to do, or not. Because of the way women are defined in these films, life as a married man would doom him to a domestic life, with a dull domestic woman. There would never be excitement or individual thought. So, the male must do all the thinking, and becomes surrounded by a deading conformity. For the film noir men and women are all the same: they are nobody. This must produce a non-interesting heterosexual relationship. So the reason is clear why the male protagonists becomes obsessed and fascinated with the femme fatale. A life outside this patriarchal determined role is a life of destruction in a closed and claustrophobic world. He is victimized by society, and perhaps also by a woman, and expresses the awareness of the loss of the fixed ties that bind a man to a community. The similarities between different male protagonists in different films are underlined by the mere fact that most noir heroes/actors were cast against type.

The sexuality of the hard-boiled hero is a question often brought up in film noir research. A consequence of the noir females masculine characteristics is that feminine characteristics are attributed to the male. This is why the noir male is humiliated and reduced. Because of an underlying misogynous attitude, females are not suitable objects, except for the women that make the noir male dull, and who offers an existence without emotional and sexual commitment. At the same time as women do not represent a tempting alternative, patriarchy has made homo sexuality taboo. What remains for the male hero is male friendship. (In America male bonding intensified during the war). It's a tough world.

http://www.let.rug.nl/~usa/E/noir/noir07.htm

Women in film noir

Generally in art there are two archetypal female characters; the whore and the Madonna. In film noir we are introduced to both of these women: the dark, sexual and active spider woman and the maternal virgin. To give a meaningful presentation of the women's role in film noir I will first give you a short reminder of how the traditional family was viewed, and which values it represented in the world of movies in the forties and fifties.

The institution of the family reveals significant social values and beliefs. It functions as an ideological cornerstone of our society with its embodiment of traditional values. It represents the framework for reproduction, because marriage is the only institution that legitimates reproduction. Marriage at the same time both legitimates and conceals sexuality. Married couples are the only ones that are allowed to enjoy the erotic, but they are rarely presented as sexual partners or in any other ways erotisized. With breeding follows the upbringing of children which responsibility traditionally is lain on women. From a feminist point of view these practices of oppressing women are seen to be legitimated by this representation of the family institution. This image of the family, where the man is the family's head and ruler, is also a legitimizing model of a hierarchical and authoritarian society. Here the family can be seen as a metaphor of society on a larger scale. Thus the representation of the family institution in movies contributes to legitimize different social values, among other things the value of the family institution as a social unit, the ruler role of the man, the domestic role of women, and the total dependence of children.

In film noir the family relations are not normal. In some ways the noirs are based on the absence of the family. If a family, or more likely family relations are represented they are often broken up, filled with mutual hatred or in other ways perverted. The movies often concern themselves with what the loss of these family values and satisfactions can lead to. Marriages in film noir are often described as boring and sterile or non sexual. Because of this twisted family life, both men and women seek satisfaction outside marriage in film noir. This satisfaction is not only sexual, but also an attempt to reassure and find themselves in this confused and threatening society, an escape from the frustrating routine in an alienated existence. The violation of the marriages and traditional family values often results in destruction for the violators. In this manner both pleasure and death await outside the family institution. The family represents an antithesis to the femme fatale. I think that instead of showing and offering women an alternative to the traditional family life, film noir shows what happens if one chooses to stand outside the traditional values of the patriarchal system.

The dark, strong femme fatale of noir is the main female character in these movies. These women are given not only sexual powers, but also ambitions. They are longing or looking for independence, often economic, and freedom, often from relationships with men. These women that are masters and possessors of their own sexuality represent a danger to the males. She is--because of her ambitions and independence--a threat to the patriarchal system. On account of this she gives the males a feeling of alienation from his environment, and she must be punished for this to restore the patriarchal balance. The femme fatale is promiscuous, exiting, intelligent and narcissist while her opposite is the boring, but stable wife and mother. The virgin is capable of total devotion to the male, something that the sexual woman is not. The former is thus described as the ideal role for women, and it fits in well with patriarchy.

The sexual women's power and strength are visually expressed in the films, both through the iconography of the image, and through the visual style. It is often the woman that dominates and controls the camera, both because of her own strength and because of the male heroes attraction to her. Thus other participants become static within the image. But in the end when she is destroyed, she also loses her physical motion in the picture.
The dress code is also applied as her appearance defines her moral transformation. In Mildred Pierce for instance, she is dressed up in more manly clothes during the film and her own development. These women also use for example cigarettes and guns for phallic symbols, something I view as an extension of their bid for masculine powers. Filmaticly, the woman that represents an alternative to the dark world of film noir is often placed outside this world.

The spider woman uses her sexual powers in the quest for reaching her own ambitions. The mere possession of such ambitions is unheard of for a woman, and represents a danger to the male. She is a dangerous woman and the males own sexuality along with the patriarchal system are threatened. The only way to control her is to destroy her, something that happens in most noirs. Even though she is destroyed, it is her vital, deadly strength we remember.

http://www.let.rug.nl/~usa/E/noir/noir06.htm

The Noir Aesthetics

Even though the "noir style" did not represent something completely new within Hollywood film making I find it necessary to give an introduction to the noir aesthetics, because this is something that the noirs have in common. Even if the stylistics had been used in earlier movies, the combinations of these expressions and techniques was to some extent new in american movies and to the american audience.

One of the techniques used was the low-key lighting which causes the effect of obscuring the action, and deglamourizing the star so that the composition becomes more important than the actor. Earlier American movies had focused on the star. The use of night and shadows emphasizes the cold and the darkness in the noirs. The change of focus from the actors and movement in the image to the compository excitement underline a fatalistic and hopeless mood. This mood is also fortified through a complex narration, often disjuncted and fragmented. To do this flashbacks are often used, which emphasizes the feeling of lost time and despair. According to Paul Schrader time is manipulated because the form stands above the content. In the narration voice-over is also often used , and in connection we sometimes get to see the end of the film in its beginning. This is also an unconventional use of the time notion that call forth a feeling of predestination and irrevocable past.

The wide-angle cinematography participated in making the space distorted and the audience disoriented. In film noir we also find a repeated use of an image composition where the lines no longer are horizontal, but vertical and sloping. This gives an unsettling impression. In the noirs the world often seems like a prison, something that these images along with the use of image metaphors like sun blinds help to underline. We also find an extended use of extreme low and high-angle perspectives.

All of these stylistic elements served to disorient the spectators and create a mood of uneasiness, alienation and loneliness in the movies. Thus, the dark and uneasy visual expression of the film noirs emphasize the themes.

http://www.let.rug.nl/~usa/E/noir/noir05.htm

The origins of film noir

The noir films occurred in America during the war, and continued to be made during the forties and fifties, but it did not come out of nothing. The noirs were inspired both by literature and previous film history along with the sociohistory of the period it grew out of. In America in the thirties there was a literary tradition called hard-boiled novels. These were crime novels and so called pulp fiction, and very popular. The American hard-boiled fictions represented a completely different world and a different kind of detective than those found in english and earlier detective stories; both content and style were differentiated. This kind of fiction added a new tradition of realism to the detective fiction. The hero was as much an anti-hero, the action was taken down on the streets, it was violent, and the language was cut short and it was often marked by verbal wit. Instead of upper-class "detectives", we are now introduced to the proletarian tough guy detective that are walking the mean streets, and often he finds himself on the edge of law and crime. Contemporary America is described as an urban and industrialized area where people are in the hands of naturalistic drives. Many of these works were adapted to the screen, such as the works of Hammet, Chandler, Cain and McCoy to mention some, and many of the authors were hired by Hollywood as screenwriters. Obviously this hard-boiled fiction had a considerable influence on the film noirs.

Another thing that influenced the noir was the film traditions of German expressionism of the twenties and French poetic realism of the thirties. The German expressionism was a expressionistic and conventionalized film style, where the aesthetics were marked by distortions and exaggerations. It had a world wide influence and the filmmakers of America sought to integrate this popular stylistic style in their own movies.
The French poetic realism was a film style where poetic conventionalization were combined with realistic topics and milieus. Also the american gangster movies were an inspiration for the film noir. All of these movie styles have in common the description of a dark and fatalistic image of the world. This is something we find in the film noir as well. From these movements the film noir could gather inspiration, and alongside this, Hollywood received quite a lot of �migr�s with roots in these movie milieus in Europe during the prewar years. The �migr�s took jobs in different parts of the american movie industry, both as technicians and as directors. Thus they also made a contribution to the society and heritage that film noir emerged from.

http://www.let.rug.nl/~usa/E/noir/noir04.htm

The problem of film noir

"Film Noir" is a french label on an american film phenomenon. In postwar France they got the opportunity to watch a large amount of american movies made in the forties, at the same time, and thus it became easier for them to discover similarities among these pictures. The french noticed the divergence between this film load and prewar american movies and the connection between these films and the literature called roman noir. This was dark literature, and film noir means black film. The knowledge of this term did not get to be used in the production or among the contemporary american spectators, in fact only french critics used the term in their work until the era of noir was over. Film noir is now a more familiar term and its use is widespread, but still there are ongoing debates concerning its status. Both film critics and historians participate in the discussion on the definition of this film category, and I will give a presentation of various views on the subject.

There are some critics that view film noir as a genre; thus it will rely upon a system of well defined conventions and expectations like other genre defined movies; for instance the Western or the musical. If film noir is referred to as a genre, like Higham and Greeenberg and Paul Kerr do, there is a number of problems that arises. First, genres tend to cross periods instead of being bounded by them and the film noir is generally very closely connected with the 1940s Hollywood. This particular criticism of noir as a genre relies upon whether one regards the more recent films as a continuation of the noir tradition or not. Obviously I do not. Furthermore film noir tends to cross traditional genre boundaries; there are both noir westerns, gangster films and comedies to mention some. The fact that the term film noir was not familiar to the film industry and audience of the 40s and 50s does not necessarily work as an argument against the genre definition of noir, because it is possible to argue that the defining characters of the noir constituted a set of conventions and expectations. Still, apparently the makers of noir did not deliberately set out to actually make noirs. A critique against regarding film noir as a genre is that it will not include all the films that have been seen as noirs. But this may also be a reflection of problems within the methodology of film criticism.

Other critics, like Durgnat and Schrader, avoid these problems by viewing film noir not as a genre, but by emphasizing the stylistic elements. Here, tone and mood are given considerable weight. With this focus on visual style one also runs into problems. This `noir style� is actually not what it seems. Instead of being subversive of the traditional or classical norms of Hollywood style film making, as many critics values it to be, the noir style was a part of the systemization of Hollywood's narrational regulation during the 1940s.

Film noir has also been regarded as a series. In this case the noir is seen as a cycle, and viewed as an aesthetic movement. Here the cycle has been seen as lying within the boundaries of the crime film, but this creates a problem since these borders themselves are difficult to determine.

All of these different views on film noir try to define and capture the essence of noir, and still I find that none of these are sufficient. But at the same time every one of them touches something important or essential about this film term. Maybe it would be best to simply state that all of the above describe some aspects of what one can call the film noir phenomenon. A film phenomenon with both generic, stylistic and cyclic parts.

http://www.let.rug.nl/~usa/E/noir/noir03.htm

Historical main currents

In the 30s America was struggling with Depression. This era of depression led to a widespread unemployment, and was in general a difficult time for the American people. Roosevelt had his New Deal, but the problems would not go away. Furthermore the country led an isolationist politic, had beliefs of lasting world peace and pledged neutrality. Thus they had among other things a very small standing army. Their entrance to the battlefields of World War 2 was about to change the United States forever.

The U.S.A emerged from the war as the one great victor. The war actions had left behind a devastated Europe and a shattered Asia which had led major economic an military losses. America on the other hand had not had warfare on its own territory, and during the war it had managed to leap out of the depression and reach almost full employment for its inhabitants. It was also in possession of the worlds largest military force and the worlds most threatening weapon. In addition the country now had interests and responsibilities all around the world, but especially in democratic Europe. Thus, as the americans emerged from war they were elated and proud, happy with their victory and proud of their military and industrial might. The postwar era presented an unprecedented prosperity to the american people, at a time where the last fifteen years had been filled with deprivation and sacrifice.

The 40s and 50s were an era of economic boom, mainly upheld by military demands during and after WW2, and partly by the American peoples new consumer demands. The earlier fifteen years of saving and sacrifice naturally gave way for increasing consumer demands when the population now lived in increasing prosperity. Most people now wanted new and better things, which they also could afford. The federal government participated in this development by sustaining the military demands to some level, and by the creation of the G.I.Bill of Rights. The government also had campaigns directed to increase and sustain the consume of the people. Among other things advertising was a phenomenon that came to show its full potential during the postwar years. The government was interested in making the public believe that the affluent times were there to stay, and all of the things earlier mentioned along with the successful remains of the New Deals social program helped supporting this belief.

The G.I.Bill was a veteran funding system that led to an increase in both college education and the founding of the suburban homes of the 50s. This was kind of a social revolution with consequences like democratization of the education system and the mere fact that more people got higher educated. The veterans also returned to create a baby boom. After the war there were a high increase in marriages and new house owners, and alongside this the new baby boom came. These new babies contributed to the expanding society and consumers culture with their massive demands for things such as diapers, baby food and schools.

Another new phenomenon in postwar America was the explosion of suburban communities. All in all there was a metropolitan increase and a population decrease in the agrarian areas. For one thing the new affluent populations cry for their own homes created a need for building new houses. The easy answer for the place to build and the way to do it was lying in the suburbs. Alongside this came a demand for cars and highways which went trough an increase. People had a number of reasons for wanting to live in suburbs. They were longing for more spacious homes, greater security, and better education for their children. Some also moved to suburbs because of racial issues. (The suburbs were mainly segregated) All of this could these minor societies provide. The suburban lives encouraged uniformity; all the surroundings were similar, there was a need of a sense of belonging. There were created a conforming culture where social life had a homogenized character. The conformity of suburban lives gave way to a drastic increase in memberships in social institutions, the religious participation was especially renewed. Religion was set in bloom partly because of the Cold War where Communists were seen as anti God. Hence became religion an expression for patriotism. This was underlined by president Eisenhower among others. The American people wished that their own comfortable way of life could be reassured through religion, and so came an upbeat and soothing religious tone to be for sale; the gospel.

In corporate life big business grew bigger, and this had an effect on the working man. He went from being a hard-working individual, advancing by means of his own creativity and ability, to becoming a person within a collective cooperation and achievement.These things had consequences at home. The women were led back to the roles they played before the war. Campaigns were led to lead the women back to the kitchen. They were considered obliged to leave their jobs in the workforce so that the veterans could get "their jobs" back. The most honorable thing women could do were considered to be fostering a family at home.

As shown there existed a conforming culture consisting of affluent, consuming and content american people. These people were satisfied with what the new America had to offer, and at ease with their lives such as they were.
But at the same time there were people questioning this contentment. These were americans that expressed a growing sense of unease. They felt that maybe the american society was becoming too conformist and too materialistic. The battle between idealism and materialism had begun.

The same events that had created the earlier mentioned cultural expression, had also created a reaction upon it self. The new situation in which America was placed did not always give people a feeling of ease. The fact that The States now had global influence and responsibilities was reason enough to give some of the american people a scare. Also in postwar America a paranoid feeling developed. As mentioned earlier, the americans view of communists was not very pleasant.Presumably they felt their new interests threatened and as a guardian of democracy there developed what Churchill called "the iron curtain" between east and west. I do not intend to discuss the outbreak of the Cold War, but merely point out that it existed. With McCarthy this Red Scare developed to a countrywide plague. This of course could as easily result in a feeling of suspicion and anxiety as in neglect (as in the cultural expression above). In addition the mere fact that much of the american might and welfare were build on military power contributed to an uneasy feeling amongst a people known to be isolationistic in a country which in prewar times did not go for a big military force, but for lasting peace. Only a short time after World War II America got involved in the Korean war. But the two biggest consequences of The War were that the american people were given insight in the cruel capabilities of humans (i.e. concentration camps) and were given the knowledge of the annihilation powers of their new weapon--the nuclear war heads--at the same time.
All of the above contributed to giving some of the americans a feeling of unease. This is mostly expressed in art works of the time, often as a feeling of alienation and disillusionment. A result of these feelings could easily end with nihilism.

http://www.let.rug.nl/~usa/E/noir/noir02.htm

NO PLACE FOR A WOMAN : THE FAMILY IN FILM NOIR

In a disturbing scene from Dark Passage (1947), a back alley plastic surgeon tells Vincent Parry (Humphrey Bogart), "There's no such thing as courage. There's only fear, the fear of getting hurt and the fear of dying. That's why human beings live so long." He is looking straight at Parry and — through the use of the subjective camera — straight at the audience. His statement is especially striking because it dismisses courage as a myth soon after World War II, rejecting a basic cultural belief that all of America and all of Hollywood had just spent four years trying to build up. Such an attack on society's (and Hollywood's) most cherished values is characteristic of film noir, and perhaps its favorite target is the most fundamental value of all — the family. A short description of film noir In classical Hollywood cinema, as in American culture generally, the family and home life are celebrated as a safe haven from the world outside and a common aspiration of each generation. When we say that a film has a "happy ending," we often mean that the male hero and his female love interest are united in marriage — or seem to be headed in that direction — before the closing credits. Indeed, many of the most popular films of the 1930s and '40s depict the family almost as a cure-all that will save the hero from any trouble, if he or she can only learn to appreciate it. Thus, Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz (1939) runs away from home, but discovers in the end that "There's no place like home"; George Bailey in It's A Wonderful Life (1946) nearly attempts suicide, only to find that friends and family make any crisis worth living through; and even Scarlett O'Hara in Gone With the Wind (1939) comes to value Tara, the family home, above all other things. World War II only intensified American culture's endorsement of society's dominant ideology and the importance of shared values — values that may be said to begin with the "traditional" nuclear family. The urge to affirm marriage and the family, already a popular and therefore profitable formula for filmmakers before the War, became an absolute political and cultural imperative during the War years. As the War came to an end, however, films began to Humphrey Bogart established the archetypal film noir detective-hero. The Maltese Falcon (1941) experiment with alternative formulas and introduced a radically different visual and narrative style. This body of films, which is generally thought to begin with The Maltese Falcon (1941) and end with Touch of Evil (1958), became known as film noir for its dark, disturbing visual style and thematic content. Of course, film noir confronts a range of status quo values and institutions and does not focus exclusively on the family. In many of these films, the criminal justice system is incompetent,1 the white-collar office is dull and dehumanizing,2 the police force is corrupt,3 and even the federal government is threatening and oppressive.4 Yet, like classical Hollywood cinema, film noir often expresses its view of American society through the image of the family generally and specifically woman's place in the family. Dana Polan suggests that in mainstream Hollywood films, "realizing one's place can only mean realizing one's place in the family. . . . Family and public ideology are indeed one."5 Sylvia Harvey elaborates on this viewpoint, tracing the complex connections between the depiction of women, family, and society in film: All movies express social values, or the erosion of these values, through the ways in which they depict both institutions and relations between people. Certain institutions are more revealing of social values and beliefs than others, and the family is perhaps one of the most significant of these institutions. For it is through the particular representations of the family in various movies that we are able to study the process whereby existing social relations are rendered acceptable and valid.6 Harvey emphasizes the special function that women perform in communicating American culture's view of the family: "[T]he representation of women has always been linked to this value-generating nexus of the family. . . . Woman's place in the home determines her position in society, but also serves as a reflection of oppressive social relationships generally."7 In film noir, women serve to express these films' skepticism toward the family and the values that it supports. With few variations, noir films divide women into three categories: the femme fatale, an independent, ambitious woman who feels confined within a marriage or a close male-female relationship and attempts to break free, usually with violent results; the nurturing woman, who is often depicted as dull, featureless, and, in the end, unattainable — a chance at conventional marriage that is denied to the hero; and the "marrying type," a woman who threatens the hero by insisting that he marry her and accept his conventional role as husband and father. Each type of film noir woman functions in a way that undermines society's image of the traditional family. Still, noir films usually stop short of rejecting the family altogether. While criticizing the family and marriage in a fairly overt way, film noir cannot resist the urge to restore or reinforce the family, even if it is only at the last minute. This restoration involves punishing or destroying women (and men) who transgress the boundaries of "normal" family relations or providing a tacked-on "happy ending" in which the hero marries the nurturing woman or even a converted femme fatale who has learned to accept her proper role. In either case, the ending contradicts the content and style of the film itself. Thus, film noir inverts the classical Hollywood formula of wish fulfillment through the family and marriage — where marriage is the "happy ending" that resolves all conflicts — by denying such an ending or by providing a conventional happy ending that draws attention to itself as unrealistic or inappropriate in the context of a particular film. Indeed, either type of noir ending — the denial of marriage or the unrealistic happy ending — can be seen as a critique of classical Hollywood cinema and the traditional values that it reinforces. http://www.filmnoirstudies.com/essays/no_place.asp

"High Heels on Web Pavement: Film Noir"

Femme fatale—is defined as “an irresistibly attractive woman, especially one who leads men into danger or disaster”. To me the most engaging semblance of a “femme fatale” is the stunning image of Lana Turner, as the camera pans from her ankles upward in that breathtaking shot from The Postman Always Rings Twice 1946.

Extremes

The most consistent aspect of film noir, apart from its visual style, is its protagonists. If a usable definition of the noir protagonist is to be formulated, it must encompass its most intrinsic character motif—alienation. The undercurrent that flows through most high noir films is the failure on the part of the male leads to recognize the dishonesty inherent in many of noir’s principal women. This tragic flaw destroys the central male characters in films as diverse as Scarlet Street 1945, The Locket 1947, and Angle Face 1953. It's embodied in the John Dall character in Gun Crazy 1949, whose youthful fascination with fire arms eventually leads him into a relationship with a woman who not only shares his gun craziness but who also introduces him to the parallel worlds of eroticism and violence. A more extreme example of this confusion is exemplified with Dana Andrews in Laura 1944, and Edward G. Robinson in Women in the Window 1944. Robinson and Andrews are fascinated initially not by the flesh and blood women, but merely by paintings—images of them.

The overtly Freudian aspects of such relationships function as a foundation on which to construct a sequence of narrative events that typify the noir vision. Many of these male “victims” are not trapped exclusively by sexual obsessions. Fred MacMurray in Double Indemnity 1944, initially considers whether he is capable of committing murder for a woman. Then he thinks about effecting the perfect crime (his entanglement with Phyllis’ phony insurance claim), “It’s beating the house”, he thinks “sort of like the croupier that bets on the turn of the roulette wheel, when he knows the numbers to play”.

Detour

Edgar Ulmer’s Poverty Row cult-classic, Detour, 1945, is fraught with outrageous coincidences that in most accounts would be far too absurd to confront, but in Ulmer’s skilled hands are accepted as legitimate premises. Tom Neal plays Al Roberts, a disgruntled piano player in a New York night club. When his fiancée walks out on him for stardom in Hollywood, he decides to fellow her, and sets out to hitch hike west to join her. He gets picked up by a oddball character played by Edmond MacDonald who is carrying a large sum of money and happens to be driving all the way to California. MacDonald relates a story to Robert’s about a female hitch hiker he picked up earlier. In a blundering attempt to ravish her, she viciously attacked him, her finger nail marks clearly discernible on his face. As Roberts takes a turn driving, the MacDonald character mysteriously dies. Roberts thinking that the police will not believe his innocence in MacDonald’s bizarre death, hides the body and drives on alone. The next day Roberts picks up Vera, played with absolute aplomb by the very underrated Ann Savage.

Ultimate Femme Fatale

Out of the Past, 1947, while not a perfect example of the best of the noir cycle, contains many of the elements of the genre. It is best remembered as the film that introduced the erotic and lethal Jane Greer. The beautiful dark-haired Bettejane Greer came to Hollywood in 1945, a B player, she appeared in such obscure notables as Dick Tracy 1945, and The Falcon’s Alibi 1946. Out of the Past was one of only three noir films in which she appeared, the others being, They Won’t Believe Me 1947, and again opposite Robert Mitchum in the Big Steal 1949. Greer appeared in nine additional films through 1957. She took a brief hiatus until the mid-1960s, and has appeared off and on since.

Jane Greer was the “real deal”, unlike many of the frivolous noir semi-goddesses (Lauren Becall, Martha Vickers, Jane Russell, or Laraine Day), her sexiness was derived from sheer cunning. She did not rely on the parodistic flirtations so common to the counterfeits of the genre—while entertaining actresses, they lacked the appeal and darkness of the authentic femme fatale. A fine actress, I’ve always wondered why Greer did not become an icon of the genre in the mold of Gloria Grahame or Lizabeth Scott. She possessed the perfect on-screen persona of a post-war desolation angle. When Robert Mitchum firsts encounters her in the Mexican café, in an early scene from Out of the Past, she describes the complete night spot where he might feel more at home, and as she turns to walk away she tells him, “I sometimes go there”. At that moment we sense the hero’s ultimate calamity. Later we witness her brutally kill two men, and as Mitchum watches in terror, we cannot be confident that in the end he will not wind with her, such is the power of her sexuality.

Later Femme Fatales

Robert Siodmak’s, The Killer’s 1946 and Criss Cross 1949 are fine examples of Universal’s contribution to the noir cycle. In both films it’s the deadly female who topples the hero. Another Siodmak offering is the much downplayed, The File on Thelma Jordon 1950. Barbara Stanwyck portrays a different type of femme fatale than her Phyllis Dietrichson character in Double Indemnity, whom Thelma resembles in method and motivation. This time she ensnares Wendell Cory, playing assistant district attorney Cleve Marshall. Marshall is much more innocent that Fred MacMurray’s Walter Neff, who admits trying to beat the house, well before he meets Phyllis. From the beginning Thelma loves her victim, whereas Phyllis was not smitten until the very end in Double Indemnity. Where Phyllis and Walter are chillingly logical in their scheme, Thelma and Cleve are guilt-ridden, and clumsily romantic. In the end Cleve is not completely ostracized, or dead as was his counterpart Walter Neff. He is however, scarred immeasurably—an emotional Sisyphus, he must now forever bear the weight of his misdeeds.

What Happened

The archetypal model of film noir had run its course by the mid-1950s. The requisite entry of that period, at least among most film critics of the day, was Robert Aldrich’s take on Mickey Spillane’s Kiss Me Deadly 1955, by then though Spillane had moved from the hard boiled pulp hero of the post-war years to the new antagonists of cold-war America, the new great fear of the moment—the “Commies”. Kiss Me Deadly was a greater influence on the French “New Wave” movement, than a further definition of film noir.

By the late 1950s and into the 1960s, strong, tough, independent women were being replaced by coadjutors and consorts. “Leading Ladies” who, though portrayed as capable and self-reliant had, however, moved well into the background. A prime example is Doris Day in Pillow Talk 1959. And so to the male protagonists, who were now being portrayed as gallant Don Juan’s or attentive Casanova’s, a fashion that was to reach it zenith with the James Bond films.

To me, the “classic noir period”, spanned the interval just after World War II, until the early 1950s. The central figures portrayed in these films, were too often caught in their double binds, filled with existential bitterness. They were drowning outside of the social mainstream. They came to represent America’s stylized vision of itself, a cultural reflection of the mental dysfunction of a nation in uncertain transition. And often these characters were women, the femme fatales of a film style distinctly original, and wholly American.

¹Alain Silver and Elizabeth Ward, “Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference to the American Style”

http://www.moderntimes.com/palace/film_noir/index.html

Conclusion: What Good Are Crime Films?

Now that this survey of crime subgenres has ended, it is time to
return to the question that haunted its opening chapter: What
is illuminated by considering a given film like The Godfather
(1972) or Murder on the Orient Express (1974) or Fargo (1996) as a
crime film rather than a gangster film or a detective story or a black
comedy? More generally, what is gained by defining the crime film as
a strong genre that not only incorporates but logically underpins such
better-known genres as the gangster film, the private-eye film, the film
noir, and the police film? Discussing crime comedies like Fargo as
crime films that happen to be humorous rather than comedies that
happen to involve crime seeks to expand the range and resonance of
the crime genre at the risk of choosing examples many viewers might
dismiss – and indeed of diluting the genre as a whole. Many viewers,
perhaps most, do experience The Thin Man (1934) or Charade (1963)
or Fargo as crime films with comic relief, but how many viewers, after
all, would categorize Arsenicand Old Lace (1944) or The Trouble with
Harry (1955) or Some Like It Hot (1959) as crime films rather than comedies?
The point of discussing such films as crime films is not to inflate the
importance of one genre at the expense of another but to indicate the
ways in which previous definitions of crime films may have been unwisely
parochial. No extant definition of crime films prescribes solemnity
as a criterion of the genre, yet historians of crime films regularly
ignore crime comedies, presumably on the grounds that they are not
really crime films.1 Such distinctions between more and less real members
of a given genre, however, are as futile as they are inevitable, not
because genre films cannot be consensually categorized, but because
these distinctions ignore the nature and purpose of generic classification
in the first place.

Whatever grounds they take as their basis, all attempts to distinguish
real crime films fromthe less real, like all attempts to distinguish
crime films categorically from members of other genres, assume that
genres are essential and logical, parallel and mutually exclusive, like
Platonic norms. But because generic categories are as culturally constructed
as the works they are intended to categorize, they are always
historically situated, ad hoc, subjective, and inflected by (indeed rooted
in) a particular agenda. This is the real point of Rick Altman’s distinction
between semantic and syntactic genre markers, as he notes
in proposing that “the relationship between the semantic and the syntactic
constitutes the very site of negotiation between Hollywood and
its audience, and thus between ritual and ideological uses of genre.”2
Although Steve Neale aptly notes that many accounts of Hollywood
genres “have been driven by critical and theoretical agendas rather
than by a commitment to detailed empirical analysis and thorough industrial
and historical research,”3 the whole project of genre theory,
from the construction of films as members of a genre to the attempt
to synthesize genres or their rationales in the service of a more general
theory of communications, remains by its very nature agendadriven.
It seems clear, then, that the question of what good is the conceptual
category of crime films is really another, and more illuminating,
way of posing an apparently simpler question: What good are crime
films? The business of this final chapter is to indicate briefly what sort
of cultural work crime films as a genre do for the corporations that
produce them, the viewers that consume them, and the society that
authorizes their currency, and how the answers to those questions are
connected to the questions of what counts as a crime film and why –
why the category might be useful in revealing some of the films’ leading
family connections and motives, which depend on what Altman
has called “the uses to which members of the family are put.”4
The most obvious features crime films of different subgenres share
are a grammar of typological situations and a cast of stock characters.
Whatever their subgenre, most crime films present events, twists, and
revelations that are so formulaic not only in themselves but in their
interrelations that they can truly be called a grammar (or, in Altman’s
terms, a syntax). Part of this consistency, of course, stems from Holly-
wood’s injunction that crime does not pay. Thus gangsters rise only
to fall; an ambitious, well-planned robbery involving a gang of thieves
working closely together will invariably go wrong sooner or later; the
most mysterious crime, whether or not it is presented as a mystery
to the audience, will always be resolved by a close examination of the
evidence, even when that evidence is inconclusive, as in the Claus von
Bülow case; and crooked policemen are inevitably brought down by
the institutional power of the police force, even though that same
force, once it is corrupted, is no match for a single crusading officer.
Crime films are equally consistent in the opportunities they offer criminals:
Unstealable jewels like the Pink Panther, protected by state-ofthe-
art security systems, are nothing more than a trope, an invitation
to theft; informers and undercover police officers are sure to have
their lives threatened, even if they elude these threats; and nervous,
secretive characters who beg for official protection are marked for
death whatever their subgenre.

None of this is surprising or especially illuminating; it is merely an
indication of the extent to which the subject of crime, bracketed by
Hollywood’s official morality and its imperative to sensationalism,
generates a formula that transcends specific subgenres. What is more
revealing is the changing role the stock characters of crime films play
in different subgenres. The no-nonsense cop who plays by the book,
for example, is a staple of the crime film; but he (or, very occasionally,
she) has radically different roles in different subgenres. In private-eye
films like Lady in the Lake (1947) and Chinatown (1974) he is the hero’s
antagonist; in victim films like Fury (1936) and Suspicion (1941) he is
either a menace or a failed protector to the beleaguered hero. In some
police films, like Touch of Evil (1958) and The Untouchables (1987), he
is the hero; in erotic thrillers whose heroes happen to be police officers,
like BasicInstinc t (1992), he is the loose-cannon hero’s conscience
or his nemesis. Lawyers are the heroes as well as the villains
of lawyer films, but in police films and private-eye films their penchant
for legalism always makes them untrustworthy. A Perfect World (1993)
even manages to create an evil victim who is much more dangerous
than the good-hearted fellow-convict who kills him [Fig. 75]. To a remarkable
extent, the subgenres of the crime film are distinguished
from each other not by the stories they tell but by the attitudes they
adopt toward those stories.

A stock question gangster films raise, for example, is why people become
criminals. These films suggest that the reasons are specifically
Conclusion: What Good Are Crime Films? 291
sociopathic: an alienation from a remote or uncaring society combined
with an overreaching vanity or megalomania. But just as different
westerns adopt very different attitudes to the conflict they all
share between the frontier and the coming of civilization (so that, for
instance, the civilizing rancher heroes of Red River [1948], become the
anticivilizing outlaws of Shane [1953]), police films and lawyer films
tend to peg criminal behavior much more narrowly to greed, films
noirs to sexual victimization by a predatory woman, erotic thrillers
to masculine hysteria. Hence police heroes pursue criminals who deserve
to be caught or killed because they have chosen to be criminals,
but films noirs and erotic thrillers present criminals who cannot help
but kill. Caper films like The Asphalt Jungle (1950) and nihilist neonoirs
like The Grifters (1990) bring the question full circle by suggesting
that the question is beside the point, since there is no reason to
look for an explanation for any particular criminal behavior when society
itself is necessarily criminal.5

Criminal behavior, then, is the fault of a cruelly alienating society,
or of ethnic self-identification, or vaulting personal ambition, conscious
avarice, sexual beguilement, male hysteria, the fatal need for
the company of others – not just a warped society, but the social impulse
as such. In every case, the subject of criminality is used to focus
the problematic relationship between individual and social power and
justice, but each adopts a different point of view that restricts it to telling
only part of the story. To tell the full story, even if it were possible,
would far exceed Hollywood’s recipe for mass entertainment.
The full story, however, continues to haunt the partial story each
subgenre presents, for every film in every crime subgenre is marked
by numberless traces of the alternative crime story it could have
been. A crime comedy like Arsenicand Old Lace, which sets its batty
maiden aunts against their dangerously sociopathic nephew, is filled
with intimations of the serious crime film it could have been, and may
still (but probably will not) turn into. Fargo, going still further, is a
crime comedy whose every sequence toys with the possibility of consequential
terror, even at its most disturbingly amusing. The kidnappers’
trip to Brainerd is filled with jokes that break the tension but
do not prevent them from kidnapping and eventually killing Jean Lundegaard.
What’s more, if every crime comedy is potentially a crime
melodrama, the reverse is equally true. The Godfather, for all its tragic
pretensions, could have been a comedy – a possibility explored intermittently
by GoodFellas (1990) and released full throttle by Jane
Austen’s Mafia! (1998). Indeed, if parodies in general, from Dead Men
Don’t Wear Plaid (1982) to the three Naked Gun films (1988–94) are
considered to release the comedy repressed by their progenitor texts’
self-seriousness, then it is no wonder that crime films have so often
been parodied, since cultural repression is as central to their agenda
as cultural analysis.

In the same way, crime films are haunted by the visual traces and
tones of other crime subgenres. Just as the gold lighting used to invoke
the nostalgic past in The Godfather and The Godfather, Part II
(1974) is invoked by the ubiquitous wood-paneled train interiors in
Murder on the Orient Express, the low-key lighting characteristic of
films noirs haunts private-eye films and police films as well, sometimes
by its presence (Experiment in Terror, 1962), sometimes by its
absence (Chinatown), and the expressionistically cluttered spaces of
Fritz Lang are echoed by Double Indemnity (1944), modulated by Kiss
Me Deadly (1955), or resolutely refused by Fargo. Moreover, Fargo’s
vertiginous comedy serves as a reminder that every crime film is
shadowed by the farce it might have been if the criminals’ petty obses-
Conclusion: What Good Are Crime Films? 293
75. A Perfect World: Escaped convict Butch Haynes (Kevin Costner), a killer
whose rapport with lonely Phillip Perry (T. J. Lowther) brings out his gentler
side.
sions had been considered from a different angle. Every crime film is
informed by an enriching awareness of the alternative subgenres it
invokes, if only by contrast. The crucial importance of the crime-film
genre is that it foregrounds the ambivalence that makes these alternative
ways of seeing bad cops or the past or petty obsession essential
to each subgenre’s and each individual film’s presentation of its stock
elements.

Although each crime subgenre is haunted by implicit possibilities
explicitly realized by other subgenres, these possibilities, helpful as
they are for ad hoc classification, cannot be used to distinguish different
crime subgenres categorically from each other. Even within a
given subgenre, typological figures will assume ambiguities based on
their affinities to other subgenres. In L.A. Confidential (1997) it is obvious
that Ed Exley (Guy Pearce) is the loner cop familiar from hundreds
of earlier movies; but will he turn out to be a vigilante cop like Frank
Bullitt, a crooked cop like Capt. McCluskey in The Godfather, or a suspicious
cop like Det.Williams in Blue Velvet? For most of the film’s running
time, the answer is ambiguous. Even after L.A. Confidential has
run its course, its police hero remains indelibly marked, as each of
his progenitor heroes is marked, by the possibilities of what he might
have been.

Grouping well-established crime genres like the gangster film and
the film noir together under the more comprehensive, albeit synthetic,
genre of the crime film illuminates many of their formulaic family
resemblances; but reversing the procedure and defining these genres
as subsets of a more global crime genre goes further to explain the
abiding source of their power. It is only the crime genre itself, and not
any single subgenre, that accounts for the enabling ambiguity at the
heart of all crime subgenres and every film within them: the easy recognition
of the genre’s formulas coupled with a lingering uncertainty
about their import.

Even films that are not normally considered crime films can benefit
from this enrichment if they are considered hypothetically as crime
films. It is clear from the beginning of Unforgiven (1992) that the retired
gunslinger William Munny (Clint Eastwood) will overcome his reservations
about returning to violent ways and ride out to Big Whiskey
to claim the bounty the local whores have offered for killing the two
cowboys who disfigured one of their number and were let off by Sheriff
Little Bill Daggett (Gene Hackman) with a fine payable to the saloonkeeper
whose place was disturbed. It is equally obvious that the film
will end with a confrontation between Munny and Little Bill that Little
Bill can hardly survive. What remains in doubt until the film’s unsettling
ending, and perhaps beyond, is how viewers will feel about the
climax they have been awaiting for two hours, when an eerily selfcontained
ex-killer who insists that all that is behind him goes up
against a genially crooked sheriff who represents, along with Munny’s
dead wife and the whores’ thirst for vengeance, the closest thing to
moral authority in the film. Unforgiven has rightly been considered
a meditation on the Hollywood western; but like Rancho Notorious
(1952) and The Naked Spur (1953), it is also haunted by its affinities
with contract-killer films like Murder, Inc. (1960), avenger films like
D.O.A. (1950), and vigilante police films like those featuring Clint Eastwood’s
most recognizable hero, Dirty Harry Callahan.

Such exercises reveal not only the elastic boundaries of the crime
film but the ways in which the genre’s cultural work is linked to the
recognition of individual gangster films and police films and crime
comedies as first and foremost crime films; and they help to explain
the rise and fall of the different subgenres within the constant popularity
of the crime genre. Crime films are always likely to be popular in
liberal democracies because such cultures place the debate between
individual liberty and institutional power at the heart of their constitutional
agenda. Indeed, the very idea of a constitution is already a
privileged site for such a debate. Unlike utopian cultures, which would
have no need of crime films, or repressive regimes, which would not
tolerate the antisocial fantasies they license, liberal democracies renegotiate
the relations between individual liberty and institutional
power ceaselessly, in every new political campaign and election, every
law and trial and arrest. Most of these actions, of course, involve competing
institutions – corporations, aspiring beneficiaries of government
funding, ethnic and racial groups, governments – rather than
individuals; but crime films, like elections, personalize this process by
focusing it on a small number of individuals, even (or especially) if
they are set against faceless groups like the police, the law, or the
Mob. The constant ferment liberal democracies prescribe over private
rights and the public weal explains the success of crime stories in
such cultures as England, whose abiding fascination with crime-story
heroes from Richard III to Magwitch, from Sherlock Holmes to Jack the
Ripper, far outpaces the occurrence of actual crimes.
Within this context, however, different crime subgenres flourish or
recede depending on a multitude of factors: studios’ economic imper-
atives; institutional censorship; the power of their nonfictional forbears
(the decline of the Hollywood gangster is mandated by a moratorium
that corresponds to both the enforcement of the Production
Code and the repeal of Prohibition); viewers’ changing attitudes toward
the government and their own majoritarian culture (as the social
conformism of The Desperate Hours [1955] gives way to the antiauthoritarianism
of Bonnie and Clyde [1967] and the brooding nostalgia of
the Godfather films); the shifting attraction to or revulsion from the
power of the law (from the righteous social engineering of To Kill a
Mockingbird [1962] to the cynical distrust of lawyers and all their
works in films based on John Grisham novels); the will to social belonging
or estrangement (from the yearning for trust and acceptance
by the hero of “G” Men [1935] to the impatience with the system in
The French Connection [1971] and the disillusionment with the system
in Serpico [1973]); and disruptions in the social order too deep for government
to cure (the wartime threat of working women in films noirs,
the backlash against women’s broader claims to empowerment in
erotic thrillers). It is no mystery why so many of the staple crime subgenres
often flourish at the same time, as they have during the 1990s,
since their partial, apparently inconsistent views of the conflict are as
logically compatible as the assumption in individual films like Reversal
of Fortune (1990) and A Few Good Men (1992) that lawyers are both
crusading heroes and the scum of the earth.

Still, the crime genre, like all popular genres, is not simply parasitic
on political or social history; it has a history of its own that acts as
another engine of change. Each genre has a logic of its own that is constantly
subject to retrospective change by three closely related kinds
of development. The arrival of a new work, if it is accepted as part of
the genre, encourages viewers to reconsider previous members of the
genre in its light, as The Godfather and Chinatown not only extended
the gangster and private-eye genres but spearheaded a critical reassessment
of them, and Psycho (1960) inaugurated a revival of the
horror film by setting a new standard for onscreen violence that was
in turn rapidly outmoded. New developments in contemporary social
history may awaken viewers to a new sense of the parallels or contrasts
between their time and that represented in earlier films, as Bonnie
and Clyde’s use of the Depression as a mirror to the social and institutional
estrangement of America’s youth in the sixties provoked
debates about both the sixties and the thirties, even to a new interest
in the heroes’ Depression chic fashions. In addition, contemporary

arguments by film theorists and analysts can function, as effectively
as new additions to a film genre, as intertexts that cast new light on
old genres, often in unintended ways. Laura Mulvey’s influential “Visual
Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” for example, ends its argument
about the exclusion of female viewers from the movies by expressing
the wish that demystifying this exclusion will lead to a decline in such
sexist commercial cinema that female viewers will greet with no more
than “sentimental regret.”6 In the twenty-five years since Mulvey
wrote, commercial cinema has certainly not changed in the directions
she hoped; but critics seeking to theorize a place for female viewers
and to liberate the repressed female voices of older films have revolutionized
the ways contemporary viewers watch films noirs, reordering
the genre and making it central to an understanding of American
film.

One result of this constant change from different sources is that although
genres like the crime film look stable both from a distance and
at any given moment, they are constantly subject to revisionist debate,
and one viewer’s revisionist update (e.g., Reservoir Dogs, 1992;
Pulp Fiction, 1994) is another viewer’s rejected offense against the
genre, and a third viewer’s classic against which to measure even
more contemporary updates like 2 Days in the Valley (1996) and Suicide
Kings (1998). So it might seem that the crime-film genre is nothing
but a mirage that dissolves on close examination. What all this historical
jostling really indicates, however, is simply that the crime genre,
though as real as each viewer’s opinion and as predictable as viewers’
broad consensus, cannot be defined categorically or ahistorically. It
is whatever studios, filmmakers, and viewers think it is, and over the
years they have felt free to think it was many different things – usually
several things at once.

Such a broad critical categorymight well be further expanded to include
all movies in which crime plays however minor a role. On the
other hand, if crime films are those that use crimes to figure problems
of social justice or institutional power or moral guilt in specifically
legal terms, the crime genre might become more illuminating, as it
would certainly become more powerful, if it were reconfigured as the
injustice genre, the social-disorder genre, the power genre, even the
action genre. Although to do so would risk stretching it to its breaking
point, there would be gains as well as losses in such a procedure.
Alternatively, the crime film could well be organized around different
subgenres this book has neglected. The most obvious of these, the
man-on-the-run story, has been analyzed at length not only by Charles
Derry and Martin Rubin7 but by forty years’ work of commentary on
Alfred Hitchcock. To emphasize the importance of such films fromThe
39 Steps (1935) to The Fugitive (1993) to the crime genre would foreground
questions not only about the fugitive’s and the pursuing system’s
moral complicity but about the range of tactics fugitives employ
to keep one step ahead of the law. To emphasize films about white-
collar criminals, which invert the world of The Asphalt Jungle, would
raise questions about the relation between normal business practices
and criminal practices, and ultimately about the fetishizing of workspace
and the work ethic, whether the heroes are innocents caught in
unethical situations that skirt illegality to a greater or lesser extent (All
My Sons, 1948; Executive Suite, 1954; Patterns, 1956; The Apartment,
1960;Wall Street, 1987 [Fig. 76]; The Hudsucker Proxy, 1993; Disclosure,
1994) or businesspeople whose turn toward literal criminality indicts
their professional milieu metaphorically (The Lavender Hill Mob, 1951;
The Bad Sleep Well, 1960; A Shock to the System, 1990; Glengarry Glen
Ross, 1992; American Psycho, 2000). Films about outlaws – sympathetic
lawbreakers like Robin Hood, Jesse James, and the protagonists of
Thelma & Louise (1991) – provoke debates about the morality of the
established order. Films about prisons like those in The Big House
(1930), 20,000 Years in Sing Sing (1932), and Brute Force (1947) present
them as social microcosms from which escape, the convicts’ one obsession,
is no more possible than from life itself; even when Tom Connors
(Spencer Tracy) does escape from Sing Sing, he is obviously fated
to return. The doomed capers in The Asphalt Jungle and The Killing
(1956), whose gangs are assembled, like pickup ball teams, for the purpose
of pulling off one big job, exchange the romantic fatalism of the
gangster film’s promethean, system-defying individual hero for a cynical
fatalism about social organizations themselves.

All these subgenres focus on contradictions within the social order
the heroes are constrained to serve, imitate, or flee. Linking M (1931),
Gun Crazy (1949), Psycho, Cape Fear (1962/1991) [Fig. 77], Repulsion
300 Crime Films
77. Cape Fear (1991): Robert De Niro’s downscale sociopathology. (De Niro,
Nick Nolte)
(1965), Badlands (1973), The Killer Inside Me (1976), The Shining
(1980), Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1990), The Silence of the Lambs
(1991), Single White Female (1992), Natural Born Killers (1994), Speed
(1994), and To Die For (1995) [Fig. 78] – customarily parceled out
among diverse subgenres – as films about sociopathic or psychopathic
criminals would raise questions about the psychopathology of
crime, its status as a mark of social alienation or of internalized conflicts
typical of an alienating society itself. Finally, giving pride of place
to the subgenre of superheroes and supercriminals from Dr. Mabuse
to Superman, Batman, and Darkman would recast what have most often
been considered action fantasies as allegories that examine the
relations between institutional and physical laws and the limits of the
humanity constructed by earthly powers.
One could go still further by exploring the complementary genres
of espionage and international intrigue, which are clearly related to
crime films.8 Most of the early James Bond films, for instance, involve
some form of international blackmail by terrorists who have stolen
something dangerous or irreplaceably valuable, and much of Bond’s
time in Goldfinger (1964), Thunderball (1965), and Diamonds Are Forever
(1971) is spent in detective work as he tries to figure out just
what SPECTRE or its allies are up to this time. These affinities become
even more pronounced in films like The Parallax View (1974) and Betrayed
(1988), which meld domestic terrorism with undercover detective
work.

Alternative theories of the crime film, then, could readily be constructed
by postulating the primacy of any of these genres. Any film
in which a crime occurs can fairly be considered a crime film; the test
of the classification, as of the resulting definition of the genre, depends
on its usefulness in illuminating individual examples and the relations
among them. More generally, crime films could certainly, as noted earlier,
be redefined as injustice films or social-disorder films or power
films or action films. The best reason to resist any of these labels is
suggested by the last one: Action films all involve the attempt to right
some perceived wrong through physical action, and therefore have a
great deal in common with crime films; but assimilating one category
to the other would achieve only a single purpose – underlining these
similarities, in order, for example, to explore the morality of power exchanges
in mass culture – at the cost of putting one of two enormously
popular genre labels out of business. Studies of the relations between
the two genres, perhaps overlaying one of them hypothetically on the
other, are therefore far more likely, because more useful, than a consensual
redefinition of either one in terms of the other.

In the same way, redefining the crime genre as the injustice genre,
the social-disorder genre, or the power genre would make it virtually
coextensive with what David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin
Thompson have called “classical Hollywood cinema” – fictional narratives
in which an individual or group of people struggle to overcome
obstacles toward a clearly defined goal whose decisive success or failure
marks the end of the story. Hence Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson
argue that the narrative and stylistic deviance of film noir, which
“no more subverts the classical film than crime fiction undercuts the
orthodox novel,” can readily be recuperated within the Hollywood
paradigm.9 Several years earlier, Steve Neale had already argued that
the leading Hollywood genres are all “modes of . . . [a] narrative system”
that “mainstream cinema produces as its commodity.”10 Broadening
the crime genre to the extent of identifying it with this entire
narrative system would indicate the degree to which Hollywood narrative
is rooted in social problems that have specifically illegal manifestations,
but at the cost of erasing the crime film’s distinctiveness
from other Hollywood narratives.

What is the point in maintaining this distinctiveness if the crime
film’s frontiers are so ragged? The answer is that the genre is not defined
by its borders but by its center, its core appeal to different viewers.
Not everyone laughs at the same things, but nearly everyone recognizes
the importance of laughter in defining comedy.11 In the same
way, though not everyone will agree what counts as a crime film, this
volume’s survey of crime subgenres suggests that most viewers for
any popular genre are responding to an appeal most economically encapsulated
by Poe’s representation of the criminal and the detective
as mirror images of each other: to turn cultural anxiety into mass entertainment.
Although this imperative may sound peculiar, it is behind
all the great Hollywood genres, which gain their power not by ignoring
or escaping from viewers’ problems but by exploring, and usually
attempting to resolve, social and psychological problems that are far
more intransigent outside the movies. The western and the war movie
romanticize problems of masculinity, violence, and national identity
by transplanting them to a mythic past or projecting them onto a geopolitical
canvas that makes them necessary for survival. The domestic
melodrama, like its television cousin, the soap opera, heroically inflates
the problems of family life and the domestic sphere in order to
make the corresponding problems of its homebound target audience
more palatable, even glamorous. Romantic comedies mine the uncertainties
of courtship for laughs; musical comedies show the triumph
of self-created performers over their doubts and inhibitions.
In each case the basic recipe for manufacturing entertainment is the
same. First, anxieties about violence or personal identity or the dignity
of home life are projected onto a typological, and thus reassuringly
familiar, generic canvas, preferably one whose mise-en-scène is comfortably
remote from the audience’s own – as in the western, which
takes place long ago and (for many) far away; or the animated cartoon,
in which unendingly homicidal conflicts are played out against
a drawn background whose two-dimensional unreality and promise of
magical transformations render it doubly reassuring; or the film noir,
which follows the mean streets of a stylishly seedy modern city.
Next, the anxieties that give the genre its cultural currency are simplified
from multifaceted dilemmas into conflictual dualities. Having
transported Dorothy Gale from the intractable problems of the Depression
to the magical land of Oz, her film transforms the sorts of
questions that bedeviled her at home (How can she keep Miss Gulch
from taking Toto away? How can she get the adults in her world to take
her seriously? Where can she find her heart’s desire?) into simpler
choices she can use to define her direction and her goal under the
guidance of the good witch Glinda and the yellow brick road that leads
her to adult surrogates who do take her seriously because she has rescued
them of her own accord. More generally, popular genres reduce
the anxieties they engage by redefining them in terms of dualities that
can be more simply resolved. The passengers in Stagecoach (1939)
cannot defeat the Indians, but the cavalry can; the problems of how
to domesticate romance without killing it are resolved in Hollywood
romantic comedies either by treating marriage as a conclusion that resolves
all problems, preferably by rescuing one of the lovers from an
unsuitable alternative match (It Happened One Night, 1934) or by giving
married couples a chance at a second courtship (The Awful Truth,
1937; The Palm Beach Story, 1942). Musicals from Top Hat (1935) to
The Band Wagon (1953) allow their singing and dancing principals to
overcome their inhibitions and express the emotions that would otherwise
leave them painfully vulnerable through performance. Action
films reduce the complexities of geopolitics to a series of showdowns
between Us and Them.

The genius of these dualities is that they not only give viewers a
strong rooting interest in a radically simplified moral conflict but also
can easily vindicate either party to the conflict by demonizing the other,
and present an unqualified triumph through decisive action. The
hero’s triumph or heroic defeat is a vindication not only of the social
order but also of the audience’s psychic health, a wish-fulfillment fantasy
that manages to celebrate both individualism and social action
even as it valorizes the movies’ tendency to convert social or psychological
stalemates, like Frank Bullitt’s conflicts with politician Walter
Chalmers, into Bullitt’smore thrilling, visually arresting, and easily resolved
car chase through the streets of San Francisco.
All the genres of popular entertainment are celebrations of individual
heroic action as a way of cutting through the complexities of moral
dilemmas; but all genres also acknowledge the limits of this heroic
stance by somehow criticizing or undermining their enabling dualities
as simplistic and individual heroism as an all-purpose recipe for problem
solving. Since, as American classics from The Gold Rush (1925) to
Citizen Kane (1941) to Do the Right Thing (1989) show, the dialectic between
the celebration and the critique of heroism is Hollywood’smost
enduring subject, it is hardly surprising that this dialectic animates
so many Hollywood genres and provides the impetus behind their historical
evolution.

In the case of the crime film, this complication is joined by another
one constitutive of the genre. Although all crime films focus on a heroic
individual, they vary widely not only in their attitudes toward that
individual (as in the criminal heroes of gangster films or the antiheroes
of film noir) but in the character positions they choose to anoint as
heroes. It is rare to see self-professed enemies of love as the heroes
of romantic comedies, or Native Americans cast as the heroes of westerns
like Cheyenne Autumn (1964) or Dances with Wolves (1990) that
question the heroism of ethnic European settlers; yet criminals are as
likely to be the heroes of crime films as detectives or avengers, and
far more likely than victims. The active heroic role is more important
than the nature of the character who fills that role.
This point is driven home with particular emphasis by Traffic
(2000), Steven Soderbergh’s film about the Mexican–American drug
trade, which dramatizes the costs of heroin addiction by following
three separate stories whose characters, though unaware of each other,
repeatedly act out the slippery relationship among the roles of
criminal, victim, and avenger. The Mexican cop (Benicio del Toro) who
goes undercover in the attempt to exploit the rivalry between two
drug cartels relies on his criminal-looking behavior to preserve his life,
and sees his best friend killed when his criminal mask slips; the California
druglord’s wife (Catherine Zeta-Jones) whose husband is arrested
turns into a criminal herself in order to survive [Fig. 79]; and
the American judge (Michael Douglas) who is named to head the Drug
Enforcement Agency has to confront his own daughter’s drug use,
which ends up turning the nation’s top drug cop into a victim and a
would-be avenger himself. Once it has established the importance of
each of these leading characters, the film is able to maintain considerable
sympathy for them through several truly distorting transformations.
In both its synoptic view of the drug trade and its awareness of the
ways the trade changes the behavior and even the moral role of everyone
it touches, Traffic might be nominated as the complete crime film.
But although its view of the heroin trade is more comprehensive than
that of most crime films – though considerably less nuanced than that
of Traffik (1989), Alistair Reid’s BBC miniseries on which it is based –
it is no more complete than that of Scarface (1932) or Fury or The Godfather.
Crime films of every stripe present what might seem to be pat
social conflicts, moral questions sharpened by their parties’ alliance
with legal right and wrong; but their attitude toward that conflict is
sharply ambivalent, if only because they function on behalf of both the
socially repressive agendas of their capitalist distributors and the escapist
fantasies of the mass audience whose patronage they seek. In
their quest to make entertainment out of taboo behavior, they treat
crime as both realistic and ritualistic, a shocking aberration and business
as usual, a vehicle of social idealism and of social critique. But
although the nature of the character who embodies the heroic role the
genre prescribes can vary from one crime film to the next even in the
same multiplex, the genre itself is best defined in terms of a single constitutive
theme: the romance of criminal behavior. This behavior is
most often incarnated in a criminal, of course, whether that criminal
is an outsized gangster like Tony Camonte in Scarface, an unwilling
killer like Al Roberts (Tom Neal) in Detour (1945), or a tragically ailing
paterfamilias like Michael Corleone in The Godfather, Part III (1990).
Even when the crime film focuses on a victim or detective or avenger,
however, those heroes become interesting, admirable, and heroic
precisely to the extent that they begin to act like criminals – unlike
the criminals themselves, who may well end up acting like victims or
moral avengers but who need only act like criminals to hold viewers’
interest. Hence the criminal, more than the victim or the avenger, illustrates
the central function of the crime film: to allow viewers to experience
the vicarious thrills of criminal behavior while leaving them
free to condemn this behavior, whoever is practicing it, as immoral.
The continued fascination of the genre is not that it tirelessly inculcates
either or both of these positions for viewers that already understand
them to a fault, but that it encourages them to experience the
contradictions among these positions and their corollaries in a way
no analysis can capture.

The crime film is therefore well named, because of its three leading
figures – the victim, the criminal, and the avenger – it is the criminal
and the kind of behavior he or she represents that are primary, and
it is only to the extent that other characters are tempted by the criminal’s
example that their films become crime films: films whose specific
cultural task is to examine the price of social repression as imposed
by the institutions of the justice system. Joe Wilson struggles
with himself over whether he should emulate the mob that tried to kill
him in Fury. Double Indemnity’s Walter Neff and BasicInstinc t’s Det.
Nick Curran are drawn into criminal behavior through their involvement
in forbidden romance. J. J. Gittes confronts his own pettiness
and greed in Chinatown, and Jeffrey Beaumont his outlaw sexuality in
Blue Velvet, through their battles with monstrous antagonists; Det. Lt.
Frank Bullitt and Alan Dershowitz confront endless criticisms of their
work; Marge Gunderson restores law and order to Fargo by her failure
to understand the dark humor her story embodies; even Hercule
Poirot, in Murder on the Orient Express, ends by covering up a crime
committed by a group of vigilantes whose cause he feels is just. Each
of these films, like the subgenres they represent, appeals to the audience’s
own antisocial tendencies by cloaking them in the glamour and
mystery of the criminal, reassuring the audience that this fantasy is
only a waking dream, and leaving behind a lingering suggestion that
the duality of right and wrong that supported it may be due for a closer
look next week.

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