Film Noir

Alas this week I have not had the time to watch movies outside of class as I would have liked so I will take this post to analyze the film noir we have seen. Certainly it is a genre worthy of reflection and analysis. The films that we watched include Out of the Past, Kiss Me Deadly, and Chinatown.

Here is a quick synopsis of each-
Out of the Past: Jeff Baily is living in the idyllic countryside and has found himself the perfect girlfriend there. However his past catches up to him when Joe says that Whit Sterling wants to see him again. Jeff then recounts to his girl friend how he used to work as a detective for Whit and was sent to find Whit's girlfriend Kathie Moffat but had ended up running off with her. His detective partner found him and Kathie shot him. Jeff then left Kathie and went to live his life out in the country. Whit is angry at this betrayal and forces Jeff to retrieve tax forms held by Whit's accountant who is trying to black mail him. It turns out to be a frame up which Jeff narrowly avoids. Jeff manages to convince Whit to make a deal with him when Joe is killed, but Kathie then murders Whit. Jeff dies when Kathie shoots him when he double crosses her in her attempt to run off with him. If you want a more detailed description of the movie go here.

Kiss Me Deadly: Mick Hammer is a detective specializing in finding out if a spouse is cheating. One day when he is driving home Gabrielle, a woman dressed in a trench coat, steps into the middle of the road and forces him to give her a lift. They are then apprehended, she is killed and Hammer is pushed over a cliff in his car but survives. The puzzle that she presents leads Hammer to investigate her case. He enlists the aide of Velda his partner in the detective business and avoids help from the authority. He meets up with Gabrielle's "roommate" Christina Bailey and realizes that there are a lot of big shots involved with the case and continues to pursue it because he believes that he will make it rich. There are several accidents involved as a mysterious force tries to dissuade Hammer from the case including the murder of his mechanic, two car bombs, and a stalker with a knife. Hammer successfully manages to avoid these pit falls and discovers a key that Gabrielle had hidden away which opened a locker that had a box with an atomic bomb in it. His partner Velda is kidnapped and he leads Christina to the box who then runs away with it. When Hammer goes to the police he learns that Gabrielle's roommate had been dead for days. Hammer goes to save Velda, but Christina shoots the man who paid her to get the box and opens the box. The world then ends.

Chinatown: J. J. Gittes is also a marriage detective. He is hired to find out if Mr Mulwray is cheating on his wife. The pictures he takes then end up in the newspaper and Gittes finds out that the person who hired him was not the real Mrs. Mulwray. To save face Gittes offers to Mrs. Mulwray to find out who set him up. Then Mr Mulwray turns up murdered. Gittes finds out that the water company is dumping water into the ocean when Los Angeles in the middle of a drought. When spying on the water company he is caught and a thug slices open his nose. Gittes keeps prying going to water officials' offices and finds out the company used to be owned by Noah Cross, Evelyn's father. He visits the orange fields where the water was being diverted to (thus causing some run off). He finds that the farmers aren't getting any water and are being forced to sell the land cheap to varies investors. He then talks with Mr Cross and begins to look for Mulwray's mistress. He finds her in Evelyn's house and he suspects that she killed her husband. He confronts her and calls the police in to make her fess up. When she does she says that the girl is both her sister and her daughter because Noah Cross raped her. Noah Cross is the bad guy in charge of buying up all the orange fields. Gittes then tries to get Evelyn and her daughter/sister out of there but there is a big showdown in Chinatown. Evelyn is shot and killed by the police, Cross gets custody of his granddaughter/daughter, and Gittes is sent home traumatized by the injustice caused by meaning well.

Common Elements:
A hard boiled detective as the main character: All three movies' protagonists were detectives. What type of detective varied on how pessimistic the movie was. The least pessimistic Out of the Past, had a typical if lower class and sometimes underhanded detective while Kiss Me Deadly with its paranoia and doomsday prophesy had a "bedroom dick" who would not shy from blackmailing his the spouse caught cheating or seducing the wife to show that she was unfaithful.

Femme fatale: Both Kiss Me Deadly and Out of the Past have a femme fatale character while Chinatown sets up Mrs. Mulwray to be a femme fatale character though in the end her motives are pure. To be honest the femme fatale character in Kiss Me Deadly Catherine Baily is less of the exotic seductress who then wraps the man around her fingers, but more of a woman trying to be independant, but failing. She tries to seduce Hammer, but fails. She tries to take the situation into her own hands and murders her employer, but ends up blowing up the world.

I felt that the best elements of typical film noir dialogue were found in Out of the Past. I found the dialogue with cryptic and often sarcastic remarks such as "it is called earning a living, you may have heard about it somewhere" in the constant battle between Jeff and Whits entertaining. It also helped develop the charactersas they made their mistrust shown in their words instead of faces or attitudes.

Typically film noir is filmed in black and white, but Chinatown was a neo-noir film and was filmed in color. While I find the black and white useful in emphasizing certain aspects of the characters and plot, such as when Kathie's face is shown half in shadow and half in white light when Jeff can't decide if she is good or evil I find the color movie easier to watch and more engaging. The black and white film style also made the movies seem even more bleak and depressive. I found that Polanski was able to achieve some of the affects that the black and white films had by purposly manipulating color. In one of the last scenes of Chinatown Evelyn is shot and great spurts of red blood are running down her face contrasted sharply with the drab setting. In a black and white film this scene could not nearly have been so shocking, the blood would have faded into the background and complex lighting schemes of the typical film noir styled shot. With the color Chinatown was able to achieve a more depressed and pessimistic world view than would have been otherwise possible by shocking the reader with the final scene.