Noir Performances: Acting Degree-Zero

In his Introduction to "More than Night: Film Noir in its Contexts", James Naremore recalls watching noir as an adolescent. Singling out Lizabeth Scott’s “unreal blondeness and husky voice in Dark City” (William Dieterle, 1950). For Marc Vernet, film noir is defined by the familiarity the spectator has with the actors, noting that our attachment is in large part due to the actors and actresses who serve as a “central point of reference,” becoming “a sort of tribe, an extended family all of whose members we know and in the midst of which we are pleased to find ourselves from time to time.”

While one of the least discussed elements, such statements present actors and acting as one of the most memorable, most captivating factors in reading film noir. For Foster Hirsch, the noir actor is significant for what he refers to as his or her “aromatic presence,” for bringing an aroma, a flavor, to the noir landscape that has the ability to both enhance and to taint. Populating the noir universe but rarely taking center stage, the performer is deemed to be supplementary, yet without the noir actor, the noirscape is bland, unscented, and uninteresting. Writing in 1986, Richard de Cordova noted that “the problem of performance in film noir has not been dealt with by anyone in any detail.” More than twenty years later, the topic of acting and performance is still largely absent from noir studies, with only a handful of essays and chapters published on the topic.

The noir actor has been described as “emotionally tight” and “ominously still,” employing an acting style that is “largely beneath-the-surface,” “minimalist, pared down,” and characterized by “immobility and silent invasion.” Hirsch observes the “mask-like faces” of actors commonly associated with noir with their “features frozen not in mid- but pre-expression.” In particular, he describes the “somnambulistic masks” of Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake, whom he classifies as “one step up from pure zombie,” referring to their “post-trauma, dead-end style” as “ideally noir.” Hirsch goes on to argue that Ladd and Lake, along with other key noir performers such as Humphrey Bogart, Robert Mitchum, Barbara Stanwyck, Gloria Grahame, etc., emote within a tense range and thus “remain within noir’s zonal acting restrictions,” suggesting that a constrained or congested performance is part of noir’s generic specificity.

Robert Mitchum, for example, has been described by Mitchell Cohen as “the quintessence of catatonic acting,” and by Hirsch as a “noir sleepwalker... the ultimate somnambulist... frozen-faced, frozen-voiced.” When it has been discussed in any detail, acting in noir has been considered according to lighting contrasts. Foster Hirsch has gone so far as to situate the “acting degree-zero” of the noir actor at one end of a screen performance spectrum with the “spontaneity” of the Method Acting at the opposite end.

Bogart is widely regarded as the prototypical noir actor and quintessential “tough guy,” yet the stone-faced rigidity displayed in The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep that many critics have considered as typically noir is a long way from his physical and verbal eruptions in In a Lonely Place (Nicholas Ray, 1950), The Desperate Hours (William Wyler, 1955), and The Harder They Fall (Mark Robson, 1956). In these later films, Bogart’s performance moves between vulnerability, sentimentality and psychosis, a clear departure from the confident private dick he portrayed in the two 1940s’ films.

In Pitfall (André De Toth, 1948), for example, John Forbes’s (Dick Powell) angst results from his disillusionment with postwar society and discontentment with the apathy in 1950s’ American suburbia. “You are John Forbes, Average American, backbone of the country,” his wife emphatically states to his exhausted husband, portraying his Average American via sleepy, heavy-lidded eyes, a monotone voice, stiff face and lips. In "Pitfall" (1948) directed by André De Toth Powell recreates his screen persona playing a distinctly disreputable businessman who puts his career, his family and eventually his own life on the line after getting a midlife sweet tooth for Lizabeth Scott. 

“Life is often a betrayal. And sometimes you betray yourself too, you know. Let’s have the guts to admit it. There isn’t anybody born here lately who didn’t play dirty sometime, somewhere in his life. So why do you hide it? Truth, honesty, that’s was my key to filmmaking.” -André de Toth, quoted in "A Personal Journey through American Movies with Martin Scorsese" (1995)

In Crime of Passion (Gerd Oswald, 1957), Barbara Stanwyck’s performance moves from lively and animated to fixed and anxious as a result of her metamorphosis from energized career woman to bored housewife. The institutionalization of film noir as a cultural form, as opposed to modernism, already underwrites the ambivalent location of noir as both inside and outside modernism. Naremore notes, “like film noir, modernism is an idea constructed ex post facto by critics, and it refers to a great many artists of different styles, sexes, nationalities, religious persuasions, and political inclinations.”

This enables Paula Rabinowitz to discover unexpected connections between film noir and previous forms of popular art, for instance the photographs of Esther Bubley, made in the early 1940s, which set the tone for a noir sensitivity by depicting the changing situation of lonely but self-sufficient women in World War II America: “This dangerous autonomy, visualized in the snarl that comes invariably at the moment when the female takes control of the man and the situation, indexes the changing position of women accelerated by the Second World War.” -"A Companion to Film Noir" (2013) by Andrew Spicer