Noir is premised on the audience's need to see failure risked, courted, and sometimes won; the American Dream becomes a nightmare, one strangely more seductive and euphoric than the optimism it repudiates. "He'd had everything", the novelist and screenwriter Jim Thompson remarks of a character in "The Killer Inside Me" (1952), "and somehow nothing was better".
Noir provided losing with a mystique.
But cynicism is not all noir's protagonists offer. Many of them are in the grip of an intoxicating metaphysics of utterness that creates signature moments of total theatrics. A suicidal Burt Lancaster, dressed in pants and an undershirt, abandoned by Ava Gardner in Siodmak's "The Killers" (1946), smashes a chair through the window of his Atlantic City hotel room and starts to jump, all in one seamless rush of magnificent, amour fou movement. A cleaning lady stops him, saying, "You'll never see the face of God!", an intervention, though it only postpones his destruction, he will never forget -he makes her, years later, the sole beneficiary of his life-insurance policy.
In Fritz Lang's "Clash by Night" (1952), Robert Ryan, wary to the point of paranoia and transparently defenseless, his face beautiful, frightening, and worn with the wrong kind of waiting, begs Barbara Stanwyck, "Help me -I'm dying of loneliness", Ryan, one of the finest actors of his day, was noir's theologian, mixing purity and guilt into lethal new combinations, poisons he administered, despite the corpses often mounting around him, solely to himself. The protagonists of this vein of noir were among those Amiri Baraka would describe a few years later as "the last romantics of our age". They may not believe in the American pieties, but they believe in something. "So you're unhappy", the tough-minded moll played by Mary Astor tells a distraught Van Heflin in Fred Zinnemann's "Act of Violence" (1949), "Relax. No law says you got to be happy". In noir, and only in noir, it's possible to be both archetypically American and irremediably unhappy"
-Ann Douglas for "Vanity Fair" Magazine, March 2007.
Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck in "Double Indemnity" (1944). "It was a hot afternoon, and I can still remember the smell of honeysuckle all along that street. How could I have known that murder can sometimes smell like honeysuckle? Maybe you would have known, Keyes, the minute she mentioned accident insurance, but I didn't. I felt like a million."
"They've committed a murder and it's not like taking a trolley ride together where they can get off at different stops. They're stuck with each other and they've got to ride all the way to the end of the line and it's a one-way trip and the last stop is the cemetery." -Barton Keyes ("Double Indemnity", by Billy Wilder).
Humphrey Bogart and Mary Astor in "The Maltese Falcon" (1941, by John Huston).
Sam Spade: "All we've got is that maybe you love me and maybe I love you."
Brigid O'Shaughnessy: "You know whether you love me or not."
Sam Spade: "Maybe I do. I'll have some rotten nights after I've sent you over, but that'll pass."
Joe Pantoliano and Jennifer Tilly in "Bound" (1996, by Andy & Larry Wachowski).
Violet: "Caesar, I'm leaving."
Caesar: "What? Oh, come on, I didn't use one of the good towels."
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