Noir Journal #5: Film Noir in Color

Film noir in color 

On the Amazon Film Noir Community, January 23, 2009, at five past midnight, “Micah S” wrote 

i am trying to see if the infamous style of noir translates well into color films and what you all think are the best examples...

That kicked off a year-long discussion with hundreds of responses (473, up to this moment), analyses, film recommendations, offended sensibilities, and camaraderie.

In this post of Noir Journal, I'll lay out the features that characterize a film as noir and then look at exactly how some directors in the'40s and '50s successfully transitioned this traditionally black-and-white genre to the color screen.

Somewhere in the Night

The idea of film noir 

in color brought me 

back to an excellent 

book I've been 

reading, very slowly, 

over the past few 

months-- Somewhere in 

the Night: Film Noir 

and the American City,

by Nicholas 

Christopher.

As you may know, the 

term film noir was 

first used in France 

in 1946, and didn’t make its way across the 

Atlantic for many 

years.  In fact, 

according to 

Christopher, until 

around 1955, American 

directors of film noir were: 

“blissfully unaware that, as a 

group, they were creating an entirely new 

genre of film.”

Let’s take a look at this genre that Nicholas 

Christopher calls the “teeming, multifarious 

darkness of film noir.”

Classic Black-and-White Noirs

Christopher builds a noir “bare-bones” model from classic black-and-white noirs, including Out of the Past; D.O.A.; Double Indemnity; Sunset Boulevard; Murder, My Sweet; Citizen Cane; and Kiss Me Deadly (“perhaps the most perfectly realized film noir ever made.”)

 I’ll use quotations from Christopher (along with my own headings) to present the “model” of film noir that emerges.

Flawed Hero, Elusive Quest

It is night, always . . . the hero enters a labyrinth on a quest . . . alone and off-balance . . . imagining he is the pursuer rather than the pursued . . .

 Our hero in his dark night of the soul has many stations through which he must pass . . . and innumerable characters, on a broad, demonic scale, who seek to impede or implicate him, or to grease the skids for his destruction.

A woman . . . joins 

him . . . at a 

crucial juncture, 

when 

he is most vulnerable 

. . .she may appear to be wreathed in light . . .Or duplicitous . 

. .Often she is a hybrid of the two . . . her 

eventual betrayal of him . . . is as ambiguous 

as her feelings about him . . Often 

in film noir, men veer along a zigzag 

path with regard to the femme fatale. 

. . reflecting . . . their feelings 

about their own condition, their own 

entrapment as the walls seem to close in 

around them.

The farther he progresses, the more 

clearly his flaws come into focus. 

Whatever his surroundings, he 

remains isolated.

He descends downward, into an underworld, on a 

spiral. The object of his quest is elusive, 

often an illusion. Usually he is destroyed in 

one of the labyrinth’s innermost cells, by 

agents of a larger design of which he is only 

dimly aware.

On rare occasions, he reemerges into the light 

. . . . But scarred . . .and embittered, with 

no desire to return to the labyrinth . . . a 

burnt-out case . . .

Jagged Narrative

 And on the film noir narrative patterns, Nicholas Christopher says

The [voice-over] narrator is 

possessed . . . by images of 

alienation, flight, and abysmal 

fear. . . the jagged, fragmented mosaic in 

which . . . flashbacks are arrayed; like the 

voice-over  . . . is another distancing device 

that makes the action, and the orbit of the 

characters, that much more alienated, remote, 

and unstable . . .

City in Shadows

Would a film be noir without the oblique lighting, the elongated shadows, the maze of dark, menacing urban streets and alleys?

 [In film noir]. . .the night, complex, frictional, sensorially explosive, stimulating in its contrasts envelops us with an exotic, often erotic pleasure . . .

 [There is a] claustrophobic . . 

.collapsing, convoluted landscape, 

architecturally and emotionally

. . . the framing of the city, is as 

significant an element as plot or 

characterization. The oblique lighting and 

camera angling [my emphasis] . . .reinforce 

our  . . . understanding that the characters’ 

motives are furtive, ambiguous and 

psychologically charged . . .

[His] innermost conflicts are rooted in urban 

claustrophobia and stasis . . . . [There is an] 

obsessive emphasis on urban settings that are 

precarious and dangerous: rooftops, walkways 

in bridges, railroad tracks, high windows, 

ledges, towering public monuments . . .unlit 

alleys, and industrial zones . . . moving 

trains and cars . . .

  

 So, Where’s This Lead Us?

Quoting Harvey M. Canter of the Amazon Film Noir Community:

[To quote the] original text by Borde and Chaumeton (translated as A Panorama of American Film Noir 1941-1953)  . . . [film noir creates a] suffusion in violence and death, moral ambiguity, confused/complex dreamlike unfolding of the story

The film gives "the public a shared feeling of anguish and insecurity. . . A state of tension created in the spectators by the disappearance of their psychological bearings. . . ."

Malaise Into Color

How do filmmakers translate noir angst and ambiguity into color? Christopher provides some interesting ideas. He begins with the films Leave Her to Heaven (1945) and Slightly Scarlet (1956).

I’ll show some the noir elements of the plots and then get into his explanation of how color can be used to create a noir film.

(plot summaries from FILM NOIR: An Encyclopedic reference to the American Style)

In Leave Her to Heaven, “Ellen Berent is insanely jealous and possessive of her husband, writer Richard Harland, who resembles her dead father to whom she was completely devoted. In order to be Richard’s sole companion . . .[Ellen] lets his [invalid] brother Danny drown ,and then murders their unborn child by throwing her down a staircase. Ellen continues to fear Richard’s alienation and feels threatened by the presence of her adopted sister Ruth.”

Ellen falsely implicates Richard and Ruth in a murder. Will they prove themselves innocent? That I will not tell.

 Slightly Scarlet tells of of petty criminal Ben Grace, who works for a mob boss. When an honest man runs for mayor, Ben discovers some dirt on him—the candidate’s lovely secretary June has a sister with a prison record. Ben courts June and falls in love with her. The mob boss falls from power and leaves town. Ben takes over as “A dishonest gang boss with some good instincts.” But the boss returns,and . . .

 Nicholas Christopher adds some zip to the description of the film.  Both sisters, he tells us, “exude enormous sexual energy.” They “rapidly slip into a sexual rivalry, first for one man, then for another.” Both sisters are “knockouts,” with “hourglass figures” and “manes of flaming orange hair.”

Then Christopher explains how the use of color replicates the noir feel of alienation, malaise, anguish, insecurity.

The predominant color in Leave her to Heaven is an orange that suggests the same sickness and corruption as the high-contrast photography of black-and-white film noir and also dominates other noir films shot in color, such as  John Alton’s Slightly Scarlet.

The highly charged mix of colors [in both Leave Her to Heaven and Slightly Scarlet] produces a stream of surreal effects: colored telephones deco or early-Space Age furniture, two tone cars, wild and provocative clothing, and the Dayglo panoply of the honky-tonk night in which neon signs span a nocturnal rainbow.  

Christopher next discusses color noirs shot in the desert, especially A Kiss Before Dying (1957), a film 

 . . . awash in oranges and reds; set as it is in the baking desert heat, those colors appear even more infernal than they might be in a metropolitan setting.[In this and other color noirs shot in the desert] the oranges and reds become the very colors of hell, emanating from the fiery lake, the furnaces of lost souls.

The writers of FILM NOIR add:

In contrast with cold blue shadows and night exteriors, the warm amber glow of Leave Her To Heaven  . . .[gives] a distinctive tone that can be, in context, as ominous as the grays and blacks of standard film noir.

 Thus, both Nicholas Christopher and the writers of the encyclopedic FILM NOIR believe that the orange, amber, red in contrast with colors such as cold blue shadows, all serve to create the tension, anxiety, surreal, off-balance malaise that made black-and-white noirs so hauntingly effective.

To Be Continued

In the next post (or two), I’ll continue on Christopher’s analysis; I’ll discuss the full list of noir color films Christopher covers; and I’ll summarize film recommendations and comments from the Amazon Film Noir Community, adding some of my own favorites.

Links

Until then, check out Tony D’Ambra’s definitive film noir site http://filmsnoir.net

And for a really great noir/mystery site, please take a look at “The Rap Sheet” at http://therapsheet.blogspot.com/

Finally, thanks to Debbie Mack for putting Noir Journal in her links under “Criminal Masterminds” in her blog, “My Life on the Mid-List: A Few Reflections on the Writing Life.” http://midlistlife.wordpress.com/

 Take care. Comments about this blog are greatly appreciated. Click on “Comments” or send a note to noir_journal@yahoo.com.

And watch yer back,

ML

 

Comments

[Chris Wood]

I love the analysis of the skies in "Leave Her To Heaven." That's one on my to-watch list. Noir broadening into colour while keeping the same themes but expanding them with a bigger palate is a great area to explore - especially with the sometimes suffocatingly gaudy colouring that crops up in some 60's films. I'd be curious to see how Hitchcock and Bava (surely descended from noir?) would fit in. Great stuff.

I hope "Chinatown" features in the next post.

[Tony D'Ambra]

A really interesting post Mike. I have always held the prejudice that a film noir had to be in black and white, but your synthesis here has prompted me to re-assess my feelings and revisit the movies you mention. Thanks.

Also Cristopher's prose very effectively expresses the look and meaning of noir. A great choice for your review.

Thanks again for your too generous reference to FilmsNoir.Net.

[sam millar]

Mike
love the colour/color added to the site. Sometimes noir is simply left black, by nature, but you've got it right on the bullet. Keep up the great work. Your site is quickly becoming more addictive than firing a pump-action shotgun early in the silence of the morning...

[Joe Murray]

Really cool site, Mike. Great discussion on Amazon you are having about noir writers. Had to get my five cents worth in.
Noir Fan

[Susie Levin]

Hi ML-

I'm a big fan of old movies, mostly romantic comedies. I just love the old actors, Cary Grant, Carole Lombard, James Stewart, too many to name.

What I didn't realize was how many movies I've also watched over and over are Noir.

I love your blog, the pictures you've posted are priceless.

Susie

[Susie Levin]

Hi ML,

I love your article on Sam Millar.
I've got to get my hands on one of his books, I'm having trouble deciding which to read first. Maybe when in doubt it's best to start at the beginning.

I hope all is well.
Susie

[Susie Levin]

Hi Mike,

I just read more reviews on Allan Guthrie's books.

I was surprised Slammer's average rating was 3 stars on amazon.

Two-Way Split has 5 stars.

It's just curious to me but doesn't matter, I just ordered both books. I've never ordered more than one book from any write unless I've read at least one. I trust your recommendations!

Thanks,
Susie

[Susie Levin]

Hi Mike,

Did you mention Millar having other books out besides his Kane series?

I ordered Allan Guthrie's Slammer and Two-Way Split yesterday.

thanks
Susie