The Maltese Falcon
Film noir is a style, a mood and an implicit commentary on American society. Although French critics coined the term in the 1950s, the genre was already coalescing in 1941 with the release of The Maltese Falcon. As the term suggests, the films were dark, usually making use of deep shadows and pools of light that were characteristic of German Expressionist filmmaking (Hollywood was populated by 1940 with refugee directors). Regardless of the mandatory happy endings and the strictures of Hollywood censors that criminals must always pay for their actions, the films often embarked on perilous journeys through the underworld of American life, the shadow cast by the dream.
The new “Film Noir Collection” is an inexpensive way to sample the genre. The two-discs include one universally acknowledged classic, Orson Welles’ Nazi-in-hiding drama The Stranger (1946); and one that was probably intended as a genre parody, the Humphrey Bogart vehicle Beat the Devil (1953). Film buffs will be familiar with Fritz Lang’s classic of romantic-sexual humiliation, Scarlet Street (1945); and the wild bebop club scene and random machinery of fate depicted in DOA (1950). However, most of the collection’s contents are delightfully obscure.
Some of the noirs included here were produced as A List pictures, including Otto Preminger’s Whirlpool (1949). Preminger made full use of the craft of golden age Hollywood with luminescent black and white cinematography, music by Alfred Newman, screenplay by Ben Hecht and gowns for star Gene Tierney by Oleg Cassini. The plot could have come from pre-Nazi German cinema: Jose Ferrer plays a hypnotist who victimizes women in a milieu of Freudian analysis.
Other noirs were B pictures but interesting nevertheless. Port of New York (1949) concerns heroin trafficking and is built around rat-a-tat documentary-style narration. Although the voice over admits that the flow of narcotics to America “has never been completely checked,” the film gives the impression that U.S. Customs searches every box and bag entering the country, and that the Bureau of Narcotics (forerunner to the Drug Enforcement Administration) commands a vast network of informers and knows the whereabouts of everyone. Some Americans were comforted by this Panopticon vision; for others it may have a source of anxiety.
Port of New York is also remarkable for its villain, played by then-unknown Yul Brynner (with hair!). He is head of a drug-smuggling ring, cultivated but cold, with a purring vaguely European voice, feline manners and an excellent tailor. As is often the case, especially in B movies, the villain was far more interesting than the square-jawed good guys.
