Naked Noir

Setting the Mood for a Festival of Films From the Gritty Genre of Mugs in Homburgs

I woke early that morning , fished for a cigarette, fought a hangover. No cigarette, big hangover. Spiders trapped flies a few feet in front of my eyeballs and when I swatted at them, they scattered, then reformed their picnic. I had it bad. I didn't want to but I had to: thought of the blonde. The name -- what was it? Wanda, Thelma . . . no, no, Velma.

Those eyes, those hands. Those lips. The taste of a Chesterfield on her tongue, the smell of sweet, cheap perfume, the missing husband, the missing 50 grand. I reached into the drawer for the gun. I could see the carbon smudges at the muzzle. I popped the cylinder latch, and Mr. Colt snub-nose Detective Special obliged, spilling out the big, perforated tube of cold steel. You have to be a real detective to get one of these, either that or go to the local sporting goods store with $58.95. I looked at the cartridges. One had been fired, but not by me.

Velma -- dream gal, gams of lyric poetry, lips red as arterial blood spray -- Velma, why did you do this to me? I saw the squad car pull up out front and McGonnagle of Downtown Homicide get out. He looked like a giant junkyard hound with about 300 cc's of mean injected into his bloodstream. The rear window was the only way out.

Well, I could go on, but you'd have to pay me a lot more money. That intro contains almost every noir cliche. It's offered in tribute -- a mood setter, you might say -- to the very interesting Noir City DC festival, which opens Friday at the AFI Silver Theatre in Silver Spring.

What's so great about this lineup is that while it offers a selection of the most famous noirs, it also throws in some of the most obscure. So one can sample the full spectrum of the dizzying existential genre that changed world cinema when Americans, abetted by European refugee genius, created it, refined it and then parodied it forever after.

I'm an enthusiastic amateur but no expert; of the 11 features AFI will exhibit, I've seen six, possibly seven, and I confess I've never seen the accidental masterpiece that lies at the heart of noir, director Edgar G. Ulmer's "Detour," made for about 30 bucks in 1945 with the great Tom Neal (who?) but oh-so-beloved by serious noirophiles to this day. If you promise to read the rest of the piece anyway, I'll promise to order it the second I'm finished. (I think I have it on video, but the VCR left town with Velma several years ago.)

What is film noir? you ask. I answer: Suckers never given an even break, dames, nocturnal city streets slick with rain or blood, a cascade of shadows dense as the plots that justify them, shamuses, more dames, right crosses that knock you out coming from nowhere, gals who know how bad you want them and use it against you, the sensation of the fly, the wonder at the spider, private eyes fishing butts out of garbage cans, too much booze, cigarette smoke swirling like detonation shock waves, lurid poetic titles with words like "savage," "raw," "dark," "naked," "jungle" and "hell" in them, flashbacks within flashbacks, the sense of being closed in on, nowhere to run, no justice but the justice you achieve on your own with gun and knife, the sweet taste of revenge. Hmm, sounds like another day in the newsroom.

For definitive answers about noir, you have to go to the place where they tell you how many stars are in the night sky and how many trees in the forest. Noir is actually sort of a blur, even to the selection committee of this festival, as we shall see. But: What does it look like, what does it feel like, where does it come from, what are its theoretical justifications, why has its influence lasted unto this day, what kind of guns did they use -- on subjects like these, I might be able to help you a bit.

The easiest one is the guns. The guns were not especially important to noir directors and are almost never addressed directly, not even in "Gun Crazy," the 1950 masterpiece about two psycho lovebirds. (A minor exception: "The Killer Is Loose," 1956. And by the way, the two films just mentioned are not part of AFI's roster, nor are several others mentioned in this piece.) So you seldom see a gun in close-up; generally, they are the generic snub-nosed Colts carried by most plainclothes men at the time. The lack of gun fetishism in mid-century noir movies marks their directors as different from our filmmakers today. Postwar filmmakers were interested in why people do things, what drives them, much more than how and with what equipment.

The most important aspect of noir, in that same vein, is its unselfconsciousness. That is one reason why "neo-noirs" -- films made today in homage to the genre's mandates -- never quite feel authentic. It's that overstudied sense of film-school savvy, that over-designed "look" look to them. Of modern noirs (say, post-1985), I'd rank the made-on-the-cheap "One False Move," directed by Carl Franklin, over other more finely machined studio jobs like the same director's "Devil in a Blue Dress." That's because he was not self-conscious in the first, and also desperate, trying to finish the film for under a million dollars from a great script by one of its stars, Billy Bob Thornton. In "Devil," working with an A budget with a big star (Denzel Washington) from the Walter Mosley novel, the thing had the feel of a tracing, a sense of dead lines and no spontaneity anywhere.

That's the essence of good noir: It's organic. It came from many roots but in roughly the year 1946, the central idea, technique, technology, casts, creativity and really cool hats all came together. (These generalizations have exceptions: Billy Wilder's great "Double Indemnity" is from 1944, and it anticipated much of what would follow, especially the hats part.)

That central idea was pretty much: Everything stinks. This was quite an astonishment to postwar audiences, who had always gone to the movies for inspiration, optimism, assurance, moral guidance and idealized imagery. Instead, they got: The universe is a rigged game; women are predators (unless played by ingenues); cops are crooked and brutal, mobsters are brutal and crooked; when you're shot down, the streets will almost certainly be wet; yes, it is odd how, photographed through a certain lens at a certain angle in a certain light, an alley can look just like a steel cage art-directed by a German refugee from a West Village production of Strindberg.