Street With No Name by Andrew Dickos
As the Nazis rolled across Europe, a significant community of exiled filmmakers and writers, many German Jews among them, found themselves in Hollywood contending with the peculiar machinery of the American movie industry. As Andrew Dickos writes, “The adapted, for better or worse, to a world that was ruled by commerce but which sought to utilize the artistry it imported.”
In Dickos’ history of film noir, Street With No Name, he explores the connection between The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Double Indemnity. German Expressionism was the starting point of a line that zig-zagged through the turmoil of exile and the Hollywood demands of the box office and the Breen Office, whose approval was needed before a screenplay could be produced. The exiles brought with them attitudes at odds with the sunny optimism that prevailed in Hollywood. They looked at American with the eyes of outsiders and found much of it wanting. Noir became their vehicle.
Expressionism surfaced on European canvases as the first motion pictures began to flicker and emerged in the dramatic German cinema of the 1920s by directors such as Fritz Lang and F.W. Murnau. Stark shaft of light and pools of darkness revealed the inner angst of character more than the apparent surfaces of the physical world. Despite the Breen Office’s insistence that perpetrators be punished and the studios’ insistence on happy endings, film noir was permeated by pessimism over the human condition. The compromised moral character of society was painted darkly in The Big Sleep and The Killers. Even the most fortunate protagonists of noir were alienated to some degree, while the unlucky blundered blindly into the hands of fate. Film noir often “showed an America quite ambivalent in the pursuit of its dream.”
While the original film noir cycle slowed by the mid-1950s, the genre continues to inspire new generations of filmmakers with examples ranging from Chinatown through The Usual Suspects and 12 Monkeys. The worst neo-noirs are nothing more than genre mimicry, aping gestures from the past and saying nothing. Mediocre ones address cultural and social concerns bracketed by “quotation marks.” Even the best ones are usually more graphically violent than the originals “and often less disturbing” for showing the mayhem rather than allowing the imagination to do its work.
Dickos provides a sharp critical and psychological evaluation of a genre that continues to mutate long after many pronounced it dead.
The new paperback edition of Street With No Name: A History of the Classic American Film Noir is published by University Press of Kentucky.
