Postwar noir, Fatalism, Mob City, L.A. Noir

Although the movement was named by the French, film noir has always been an American genre. But as the 12th San Francisco Film Noir Festival shows, the bitterness of American crime films of the 1940s found some kindred spirits in Europe and in Asia - places that had been ravaged by World War II. "In many cases you are watching bleak, dark, cynical movies made by people working directly in the aftermath of the war," said Noir City director Eddie Muller. "If you think Hollywood noirs are about postwar cynicism and nihilism, wait till you see movies made by the countries that lost the war."

"It's eye-opening. You realize how fortunate America has been in that the war wasn't fought on our soil. When you look at 'Stray Dog' and 'Drunken Angel' (showing Sunday, filmed on the streets of Tokyo by Akira Kurosawa), you're looking at the losers of the war literally living in atomic fallout. Despite its foreign flavor - 16 of the 27 films are in a foreign language with English subtitles - there is an unmistakably American noir angst: gangsters (Britain's "Brighton Rock," starring Richard Attenborough, screening Wednesday), meticulously planned heists (France's "Rififi," Feb. 1), and even the deliciously titled "Never Open That Door" (next Thursday), a 1952 Argentine film based on the work of American crime author Cornell Woolrich ("Rear Window"). Source: www.sfgate.com

"Fatalism in American Film Noir," by University of Chicago professor and Hegel scholar Robert B. Pippin, constitutes (perhaps for the first time) a philosopher’s take on the genre. It centers in particular on agency, i.e., the extent to which all of us (and particularly film noir protagonists) are agents of their own actions. It’s hard to deny that noir protagonists exhibit a certain helplessness—as though their actions, or the motivation to act, are derived from outside themselves, whether the result of fate, obsession, or various socioeconomic factors.

Pippin cites Burt Lancaster in Criss Cross (1949) and The Killers (1946) as demonstrating this passive tendency, immobilized by his belief that he’s been dealt a hand over which he has little, if any, control. It is no coincidence that the question of agency, and film noir, came together at a particular moment in history. According to Pippin, these films show us “what it literally looks like, what it feels like, to live in a world where the experience of our own agency has begun to shift.” Pippin focuses on three works: Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past (1947); Orson Welles’s The Lady From Shanghai (1948); and Fritz Lang’s Scarlet Street (1945).

Pippin points that in Out of the Past, we are shown events and, through flashbacks and a voice-over, we are told about those events. Consequently, there’s a gap between what we see happening and what Jeff Bailey, as he narrates the story in order to explain himself to Ann, maintains is happening.

Jeff is unable to move out of the past (in this case his relationship with femme fatale Kathie) due to his belief that—here Pippin quotes Oedipus—”I suffered those deeds more than I acted them.” Of course, Jeff and fellows like him aren’t thinkers, but improvisers who move from one event to another, trying to create a space for themselves in which to act, only to be stymied by their past. Trapped by what he does and who he is, Jeff seeks to become the agent of his actions, only to meet his death. Any room for self-generated action is limited, though the heroic-existential position is to act despite everything. As Pippin notes: “He ends up an agent, however restricted and compromised, in the only way one can be. He acts like one.” And then he dies.

Analyzing Scarlet Street, Pippin notes how Christopher Cross (Edward G. Robinson) seeks to break out of his own self-inscribed world, even relating it to the film’s final music, which morphs from a Christmas tune to Melancholy Baby—heard earlier when the needle becomes stuck (a metaphor for Chris’s life) to Jingle Bells. It’s as though Lang is counterposing the socioeconomic facts of Chris’s life with the Christian account of fate and redemption. Trapped by class and the limits of their self-understanding, these characters seem to embrace a narrowing of their future course of action.

“I had no choice” is the excuse they seek to employ. But these characters are neither free nor fated. They make choices, even if they are trapped by them. Says Pippin, “The danger of exaggerating our capacity for self-initiated action and so exaggerating both a burden of responsibility and a way of avoiding a good deal of blame is...as great as the danger of throwing up our hands and in a self-undermining way becoming the all-pervasive power of fate.”

Pippin concludes with a brief look at Double Indemnity (1944), in which egoist/predator Phyllis Dietrichson conspires with easy-going nihilist Walter Neff. But Pippin notes that it’s Barton Keyes who, as arbiter, defines the boundaries separating accident, fate, and intentionality. As a Socratic figure, Keyes doesn’t condemn Neff, but recognizes that he’s trapped. Since it’s Keyes’ job to realize such things, he, according to Pippin, must bear the burden of the narrative. In the closing moments of Double Indemnity, Phyllis suffers her fate because she finally acts as a free agent, choosing not to shoot Neff a second time, which leads to her death. Despite the fact that noir is often couched in nihilistic terms, there’s actually something heartening in reading an author who suggests that shared knowledge might ultimately lead to self-knowledge, and that ethics matter whether we are free agents or not. —Woody Haut for 'Noir City' magazine vol. 8 No. 2 (Fall 2013)

Based in 1940s Los Angeles, where a battle is raging between the gangs and the police, the story centres on Jon Bernthal's detective Joe Teague. Bernthal fits the bill as the mysterious lead who keeps his cards so close to his chest, we're still not entirely sure where he sits in the crime divide. Noir-lovers will get a thrill from Mob City, but it currently feels like it's lacking ambition when compared to its contemporary rivals. Source: www.digitalspy.co.uk

Los Angeles was "Mob City" in the 1940s, as the title of a new TV miniseries puts it. The second pair of episodes of the TNT crime show air tonight, continuing to track the real-life era of Bugsy Siegel, Mickey Cohen, and a deeply corrupt LAPD. "Mob City" is based on the 2010 book "L.A. Noir: The Struggle for the Soul of America's Most Seductive City" by John Buntin. I reached Buntin in Nashville, where he lives with his family, and asked him to describe how organized crime and corruption came to dominate the City of Angels. Source: www.csmonitor.com

Siegel had never built a large establishment before, and it showed. The original budget for the new casino was $1.2 million. Siegel spent a million on plumbing alone. By the time the Flamingo opened on December 26, 1946, Siegel and his investors—who included the top leadership of the Syndicate—had plowed more than $5 million into the project. Rumors of outrageously expensive design changes started to spread. Some Syndicate chieftains became concerned that Bugsy’s new girlfriend, Mob moll Virginia Hill was stashing their money in Swiss bank accounts. Bugsy knew the boys could get tough. When he flew into Los Angeles early on the morning of June 20, 1947, violence was on his mind. After catching a few hours of sleep at the Beverly Hills mansion that Virginia Hill was renting (from Rudolph Valentino’s former manager), Bugsy headed over to associate Al Smiley’s apartment, where he met with Mickey Cohen.

On a typical workday, some 260,000 cars jammed downtown Los Angeles, making the intersection of Adams and Figueroa on the edge of downtown the busiest in the world, with more than double the traffic of its nearest rival, Forty-second Street and Fifth Avenue in New York City. Los Angeles also had one of the most extensive streetcar networks in the country. Together, the intraurban Yellow and interurban Red lines provided service over more than a thousand miles of rail and transported an average of 520,000 people into the downtown area every day. Total number of passenger trips in 1924: 110,000,000. “All of the talk was ‘boom,’ ‘dollars,’ ‘greatest in the world,’ ‘sure to double in price,’” marveled the author Hamlin Garland, who visited L.A. in 1923. High in the Hollywood Hills, a giant sign, each letter fifty feet tall and covered with four thousand lightbulbs, promoted one of Harry Chandler’s new developments, “Hollywoodland!” The “-land” later fell over, and the sign became the new city’s most distinctive symbol. -"L.A. Noir: The Struggle for the Soul of America's Most Seductive City" by John Buntin