I’m not sure how Noirvember came to be. I could look it up but… nah. Perhaps it’s an outgrowth of our increasing need to define the passage of time by streamer binging. Noirs do feel like a crisp palette cleanser in between Halloween and the tsunami of holidays that dominate the final weeks of the year, though. Noir movies are bleak and untrusting of society, cutting through platitudes, sometimes with platitudes of their own. The cynicism can be a front in itself, of course, an ironic comfort blanket confirming your worst impulses.
The American crime films that compose the bulk of what we typically call noir are the thrillers that were released in the 1940s and ‘50s, during the postwar boom. This was not a conscious “movement” at the time. They were about making do with low budgets and fading stars and sparse production values, and the reward for the best ones was a personality and edge that ages far better than many of their bloated mainstream spectacle counterparts. Stages and costumes and stars and pageantry are expensive but attitude comes cheap and is usually more enjoyable than the expensive stuff anyway.
Noir movies of the 1940s and 50s, which span the genre spectrum of horror and romantic melodrama and crime and even biopic, suggest underground art, burrowing into subterranean anxieties. If I am generally annoyed with “neo”-noirs, i.e. the noirs created by students of movies that are consciously seeking to be noirs, emulating the shadows and sweat and whirring fans and double-crosses, it’s because they can’t be underground art. They can’t be spontaneous. They are museum pieces, and the only way to get around that limiting notion is to build nostalgia into the equation and intentionally undermine, a la Joel and Ethan Coen. More about them in a minute.
The Criterion Channel, always a shrewd curator of American noir, is contributing to Noirvember with an updated version of its celebrated Columbia Noir collection. As Criterion reminds us, Columbia Studios played a big role in the pseudo-genre, allowing directors like Charles Vidor, Samuel Fuller, and Fritz Lang the opportunity to produce mean, idiosyncratic, personally searing B-movies that continue to hit hard. Even Blake Edwards, most famous for “The Pink Panther” and “Victor/Victoria,” has a terrifying little item in this collection, 1962’s “Experiment in Terror.”
Lang and Fuller are among my favorite directors. Lang is the titan of German Expressionism who left his country amid the rise of the Nazi party and re-invented himself as an orchestrator of American thrillers with an anti-fascist slant. Relevant to this Columbia Noir collection are 1953’s extraordinarily intense “The Big Heat,” with the underrated Glenn Ford, Gloria Grahame, and an especially nasty Lee Marvin, and 1954’s “Human Desire,” a remake of Jean Renoir’s “La Bête Humaine” that also features Ford and Grahame.
In these films, Lang trades the ornate gothic style of his expressionist period for a hard and curt collection of images that suggest the perfect visual equivalent to the prose of hard-boiled writers of the time. The only pseudo-modern film that I can think of that comes close to achieving this sort of compressed visual effect is David Cronenberg’s remarkable crime drama “A History of Violence.”
Fuller’s sensibility runs hotter than Lang’s, and his images are grubbier and, in their way, equally ferocious. He was a former reporter who wrote fast, talked big, and fashioned a number of lurid and moving films about topics that American studios could hardly bother to touch at the time. Relevant to this Columbia set is “The Crimson Kimono,” a film partially set in the Little Tokyo district of Los Angeles that pivots in part on the cultural frictions of an interracial relationship.
In terms of race and gender and concerns like mental illness—they are not a part of this set but please see his “Shock Corridor” and “White Dog”–Fuller was ahead of most filmmakers of his time. He saw his characters as people rather than talking points, and his work has vitality that shames the soap box opining of most “issues” movies, past and present alike.
There are several films in this set that I keep meaning to see, such as 1941’s “The Face Behind the Mask,” with Peter Lorre, and 1952’s “Strange Fascination,” one of six pairings of actress Cleo Moore and actor-writer-director Hugo Haas, and horror master Jacques Tourneur’s famously stylish 1956 “Nightfall.” This collection is also accompanied by an introduction by noir experts Imogen Sara Smith and Farran Smith Nehme that promises to pack a book’s worth of context within a few dozen minutes.
The Criterion Collection is also spotlighting several of Joel and Ethan Coen’s films this month, which affords me an excuse to elaborate on that neo-noir comment above. Plainly speaking, when a movie is trying to be like another movie, especially from a differing time, it is limiting itself. I understand that certain styles and fashions are fun, and I understanding longing for aesthetics of the past. I even understand a misfire that’s necessary to reaching your own sensibility as an artist. All that said, karaoke is a limitation that often clouds original responses to one’s own time. Given that nearly everything right now in pop culture is occupied with replicating the highs of something else, well, you can imagine the time I’m often having at the movies.
The Coens’ crime thrillers frequently replicate past eras and genres while building in trap doors that link them to their own era. Take 1990’s “Miller’s Crossing,” which is featured in this set. The intricate plotting suggests Dashiell Hammett’s influential novel “Red Harvest” as transplanted into a 1930s-era gangster movie, but the rich, poignant, and funny dialogue adds contemporary undertones that are underscored by a superb cast that includes Gabriel Byrne, Albert Finney, Jon Polito, Marcia Gay Harden, and most unforgettably John Turturro. Byrne’s efforts to remain loyal to a boss in a ruthless world come to mirror the Coens’ efforts to render a James Cagney-era gangster movie relevant to new audiences. A similar effect happens in the Coens’ 1984 debut, “Blood Simple,” where a typical story of murder, infidelity, and ceiling fans becomes a mordant and stylish comedy of Reagan-era greed.
The Coens have of course produced many comic thrillers that belong to their own time, such as 1997’s “The Big Lebowski,” which turns America’s collective hangover from Desert Storm into an absurdist stoner modernization of “The Big Sleep.” Somehow, they make that idea look effortless, even when the film spins off into the hallucinatory wilderness. It’s a classic now, though I remember when we weren’t sure what the hell to make of it, especially after 1996’s “Fargo,” which for my money is one of the great noirs, period. Its adherence to crime-movie formula is transcended by its understanding of the working class, which is why I’ve never understood criticisms that suggested that all the characters are cartoons. Fun is poked at the Minnesota accents, sure, but those characters are not cartoons, especially the hapless, defeated fool played by William H. Macy, whose desperation cuts even deeper than Turturro’s in “Miller’s Crossing.”
The Coen set includes films that don’t fit into the crime template as well, such as 2009’s “A Serious Man” and 2013’s “Inside Llewyn Davis,” two of their darkest and most moving films, two of their greatest in fact, which are amusing yet riven with death and failure. Maybe they are noirs then, come to think of it.
“Columbia Noir” and “Coen Brothers” are both now available to stream at the Criterion Channel. Check here for full listings.
