7 Philosophical Noirs
7. Out of the Past (1947)
Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer in Out of the Past (1947)
Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past (1947) epitomizes film noir with its fatalistic themes, doomed characters, and dark, smoky atmospheres. The film follows Jeff Bailey (Robert Mitchum), a private eye whose attempts to escape his past inevitably fail, drawing him back into a world he thought he’d left behind. From his fateful encounter with femme fatale Kathie Moffat (Jane Greer) to his dealings with gangster Whit Sterling (Kirk Douglas), Jeff’s choices are constrained by the noir genre’s fatalistic framework.
In this world, decisions are not entirely free and the protagonist’s fate seems sealed from the outset. Jeff attempts to break away from his life as a private investigator, only to be pulled back by forces beyond his control.
He is a character conscious of his place in a dark and deterministic world, and he resigns himself to this inevitability much like one would expect from a tragic hero. Like a Greek tragedy, Out of the Past is a meditation on fate and inevitability, showing how characters are trapped by the very conventions that define them.
(Read full essay on Out of the Past and Fatalatism)
6. The Third Man (1949)
Orson Welles as Harry Lime
The world of Carol Reed’s The Third Man (1949) is morally awry. The camera gaze is askew; civilization is tilted. No wonder. This is post-war Vienna and the horrors of two world wars still loom large. How do things stand? Rather off.
The film’s emotional story revolves around Holly (Joseph Cotton), Anna (Alida Valli), and, of course, the legendary Harry Lime (Orson Welles), a black market trader with little patience for old wives’ morals. Everything is, ultimately, about Harry Lime. Holly goes to Vienna to see him, an old friend; Anna is in love him; the police investigate his death and his criminal activities, which caused the death of many. Regardless of his nastiness, there’s something about Harry Lime which awes people all about town. And when he finally enters the stage, back from the dead, in all of Welles’ sneering pretense, we have one of cinema’s finest moments. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jeJVNQ4ngfo&pp=ygUhdGhlIHRoaXJkIG1hbiBoYXJyeSBsaW1lIGVudHJhbmNl)
Holly’s caught in a moral trap: does he help his Nietzschean friend and laughs with him at the face of horror and death, or does he betray friendship and finger him to the police? No matter what he does, Holly finds out, he’ll never be like Harry Lime. Just as no matter what Harry Lime does, he’ll still have the girl’s love in the end. The Third Man locates morality within the dynamics of human types: doing the right thing, if you’re the wrong type, is not enough.
5. Angel Face (1952)
Devilish Jean Simmons in Angel Face (1950)
Angel Face (1952) gives us a noir version of Ivan Karamazov going to trial. And the verdict is: not guilty. The law does not rescue anything anymore, not even the guilty who seek repentance. The savagery and chaos of lawlessness are once more unleashed, not being opposite to law, as in the West, but getting a push from it now: murder most foul legally validated.
Nothing can placate a rotten spirit: if angel face has won the world, but lost her soul, unable to sleep off patricide, and now seeks desperately to lose that world and win back her soul— it won't do: penitence is not on the table anymore.
Here is a society – post-war America – which has prospered under the rule of law, the state, and other institutions of modern society. It has won two world wars, developed economically and technologically to achieve a degree of wealth until then unparalleled. And yet savagery returns–– with an angel face...
4. The Long Goodbye (1973)
Elliot Gould as Philip Marlowe buying food for his cat at 3 in the morning.
Being self-conscious about something takes the magic out of it. What before seemed epic and tragic – and was epic and tragic –, the manifestation of higher values in conflict: once one knows that it is epic and tragic, it simply becomes... funny. Thus, Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye (1973) is in tune with Hegel’s most formidable insight in his Aesthetics Lectures: comedy comes last.
Only after the tragic heyday of its form, roughly from 1940 to 1960 (Hitchcock’s Psycho, as Eddie Muller classifies), could film noir undo itself in the quixotic antics of Elliot Gould’s Philip Marlowe. The conventions of the genre are trivialized, mocked, repeated to exhaustion, disentangled in their comic absurdity. We can no longer take private eye, noir stories seriously, for we are too conscious about them.
Lost in 1970s L.A., Philip Marlowe does everything wrong here. He lacks principles and hardboiled manners just as he lacks food for his cat at three in the morning. Like Don Quixote, this Marlowe has watched too many detective films: one cannot act like Bogart in The Big Sleep if one is conscious of it. The Long Goodbye, then, the only true noir comedy, paradoxically brings out a rather tragic epistemology. There’s something about knowing things that puts an end to them.
3. The Wrong Man (1956)
Henry Fonda as Manny Balastrero is framed: the nightmare of identity.
What do people see when they look at you? Henry Fonda's character, based on one real and unlucky fellow named Manny Balastrero, is often subjected to this question in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man (1956). Everything surrounding the mysterious dynamics of identity and subjecthood become terrifying through Hitchcock’s lenses as we cinematically experience the ritualized undoing of a man, an innocent man, is wrongly accused of armed robbery.
Again and again people identify Balastrero as the robber, which he is not. Why do these people want to see a robber? Why are people so quick in ascribing guilt? Much like Balzac's Colonel Chabert, Balastrero in Hitchcock's paranoid noir has to work his way out of the procedural labyrinth in order to prove, formally, that he is himself. Merely being himself, concretely and factually, is not enough: only the formality of a juridical and criminal procedure can grant him himself.
2. The Set-Up (1949)
Boxing night in Paradise City in The Set-Up (1949)
Believing is a condition of life. Even if it’s against all the odds. That’s what Robert Wise’s The Set-Up (1949) is all about. How things turn out different? How does something new occur? Are events in the world a mere set of odds and probabilities subjected to calculation to be added up on a "future book"? No matter the answer, one thing is certain: you just have to believe.
If the universe is determined, then human life is determined. And so the losers and dreamers and lowlifes in Paradise City behave like scientists: their subject-matter being, naturally, boxing.
The hero, Bill "Stoker" Thompson, is another one of these losers. He always loses and yet he always thinks he'll win. Nobody else believes it, for they are all Humean creatures of habit. The sun goes down and so does Stoker. After all, things always happen the way they're used to happening. Until one day they don't. What happens when that one-hundred to one odd pays off? It only takes one...
1. Laura (1944)
The idea of Laura in a portrait.
There will never be another Laura. But who was Laura? She's made to become all things to all men: and she doesn't exist beyond that.
That's the tragedy underneath the police procedural of Laura (1944): Laura is a name which might not stand for anything in the end. She’s but an assortment of ideals in search of a fixed reference. This is film noir getting ahead of Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958). Everything which is told and shown of Laura must be taken with a grain of salt: all is relative to who is telling, who is listening and, most importantly, who is dreaming.
The idea of Laura, evoked by the title song and Gene Tierney's exquisite face, is never present; and only in this absence it becomes real and necessary, although never quite there, but simply hinted at, much like a platonic Idea.
Detectives in film noir want the truth: they trail like hound dogs the many stories and facts, seeking the real thing— and then they discover there is no such thing as the real thing, but only versions on top of versions referring ultimately to nothing but a name wrapped in most beautiful attire: and that was Laura, and she was only a dream.
