NOIR TO THE RESCUE

by Melodie Johnson Howe

Last week I left out the most important element in my column. Hollywood turned Mildred Pierce into a noir mystery, which the book was not. This is why the film worked so beautifully. Monte Beragon (Zackary Scott) wasn’t just a once wealthy man, a user and a predator, he was also a dead man. Dead from the very beginning of the film in that wonderfully black and white shaded scene when he falls on the floor from a gunshot and gasps, “Mildred . . . ”

What might be considered a soap opera or a “woman’s movie” was framed by murder and the detection of that murder. That’s why Mildred Pierce worked.

When Billy Wilder first screened Sunset Boulevard for an audience his movie received nothing but howls and derisive laughter. The cards they filled out afterwards were devastatingly awful. The reason for this was the opening of the film. Wilder had the dead Joe Gillis (William Holden) sitting up on a slab in the morgue and telling his story to the other corpses laid out on their gurneys. The audience thought it was hoot and not in a good way.

So what did Billy Wilder do? He didn’t give up the idea of having a dead man narrate his film, but he cloaked it in mystery instead of bad satire. He put William Holden floating face down in a swimming pool. As the cops take his picture and try to figure out what happened he tells the story. It was a brilliant idea and gave a campy movie the feel of noir and crime.

The next screening-audience loved it. What Wilder did is a great example of rewriting. He didn’t let the laughter of the audience change his concept of opening his film with a dead character talking; he used the context of the mystery genre to give the opening it’s own reality, tension and suspense.

Rebecca would just be another class-conscious love story if it weren’t for Rebecca’s questionable death. Was it murder? That mystery frames the story and is its driving force along with the haunting performance of Dame Judith Anderson as Mrs. Danvers.

In Jane Eyre, the wife isn’t dead. She’s crazy and locked in the turret. But without her you would have another English story of a young woman falling in love with her employer, a brooding nobleman.

Obviously Jane Eyre and Rebecca are not film noir, but they are shrouded in mystery and suspense and that is what holds us. The mystery form can take the banal story and make it anything but trite.

Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious is another example of using the elements of noir. He and Ben Hecht took a romantic thriller and brought darkness to it by making Ingrid Bergman’s character a “bad woman.” Noir loves bad women. It is her cynical promiscuity and alcoholic character that Cary Grant despises and despite himself is obsessed with. Just as the two of them start to let down their tough exteriors and begin to fall in love, he allows her to use her promiscuity to seduce and marry a German agent (Claude Raines) the CIA is after. The noir cynicism is complete. Yet, Notorious is a great love story. And a very sexy movie.

Sweet Smell of Success is not a mystery; but it oozes the dark cynicism of noir, giving it the gritty feel of crime. J. J. Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster) is not unlike Waldo Lydecker (Clifton Webb) in the movie Laura. They are both arrogant and power hungry. But Laura is a true mystery and Lydecker must die for his sins. In Sweet Smell of Success, it’s Falco (Tony Curtis) who pays at the end of the movie by being beaten up by the cops. Yet it’s Hunsecker’s sister who prevails. She is the only one who escapes his grasp and seeks independence. I just recently discovered that this movie was taken from a short story, “Tell Me about it Tomorrow” by Ernst Lehman, who also adapted the screenplay with Clifford Odets.

It’s interesting how many of these movies depend on the strength of their female characters. Noir didn’t use or reduce women. Noir gave them a sense of power. I’ve read great literature about women, but it was the first hard blonde that strode into a bar in a Raymond Chandler story that made me sit up and take notice. She had to be dealt with.