Noir Beyond the City

As Smith told Aaron Cutler in the Believer a few years earlier, she was watching a batch of noirs made in the late 1940s and early ’50s when she noticed “how many nonurban settings there were: the desert, the ocean, the road, small towns, the Mexican border. I saw this pattern as significant because in the postwar years there was a movement away from cities into the suburbs—a rejection of urbanism. This relates to the way in which, in the nonurban noirs, emptiness—a sense of people stranded in vacant spaces and of things coming apart—replaces the claustrophobic, encroaching, and labyrinthine spaces associated with urban noir.”

The occasion for the interview was the publication of her book In Lonely Places: Film Noir Beyond the City, and from Friday through July 24, the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive will present a series under the same title. Smith will be there to introduce and discuss the first four features in the program, and she brought up two of them when Cutler asked her about styles of acting in these films.

“Without oversimplifying,” said Smith, “I think one can say that nonurban settings bring out more unguarded as well as more physically and emotionally active performances, whether it’s in the openness and sincerity of small-town ‘innocents’—for instance the beautifully honest performance by Phyllis Thaxter as the wife of a struggling fishing-boat captain in [Michael Curtiz’s] The Breaking Point (1950)—or the naked desperation of people pushed to extremes in deserts or the wilderness, like the characters played by Edmond O’Brien and Frank Lovejoy in Ida Lupino’s The Hitch-Hiker [1953]. There’s a greater physicality, sensuality, and naturalness in the nonurban films, and less of a stylish smoke screen.”

The other two films are westerns. “From the start,” wrote Smith in another piece for us in 2016, “the cinematic West was corrupted and enlivened by lawless towns, lynch mobs, range wars, and the frenzied greed of gold strikes; the cowboy hero was always a man whose self-reliance and integrity could shade into neurotic isolation and monomania. After World War II, westerns went down ever bleaker and stonier paths, finding in the vast, arid, craggy landscapes of the west a counterpart to the claustrophobic, labyrinthine spaces of urban film noir. The first and purest ‘noir western’ may be Raoul Walsh’s Pursued (1947), which opens in a charred, decaying ruin where a man [played by Robert Mitchum] takes refuge from a lynch mob.”

The other western is Lewis Allen’s Desert Fury (1947), which to Derek Smith at Slant “suggests the eccentric love child of Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past and Douglas Sirk’s Written on the Wind. Melding the fatalistic impulses of film noir with the amplified emotions of melodrama and the end-of-the-line frontier landscapes of the western, this oft-campy, glossy Technicolor genre mashup is one of the more strange and subversive American films of the 1940s. And as noted by noir historian Eddie Muller, it may just be ‘the gayest movie ever produced in Hollywood’s golden era.’”

Muller will be at BAMPFA next month to introduce and talk about two films: Edmund Goulding’s Nightmare Alley (1947), which Kim Morgan—who cowrote Guillermo del Toro’s 2021 version—has called “an A picture with the gritty, pounding heart of a B”; and Phil Karlson’s The Phenix City Story (1955). Karlson’s “noirish 1955 docudrama about organized crime is authentically seedy, shot in Alabama with adept use of many locals and an unusual candor about racist violence,” writes Jonathan Rosenbaum, and he delved deep into the backstory in a 2002 piece for the Oxford American.

Later this month, critic, historian, and prolific author David Thomson will introduce and discuss Shadow of a Doubt (1943), which Dave Kehr has called “Alfred Hitchcock’s first indisputable masterpiece,” and Nicholas Ray’s They Live by Night (1948). “Non-places proliferated in postwar America, with the growth of homogenous suburban tract housing, interstate highways, and car culture,” wrote Imogen Sara Smith in 2019.

“In road-movie noir,” wrote Smith, “people on the run take advantage of motels and auto courts designed for transients, places where people don’t look too closely or ask too many questions. The lovers in They Live by Night, after marrying in a quickie ceremony at a neon-lit roadside chapel, move through a succession of tourist cabins and boarding houses, and come to the end of their tragic road at the bleak Prairie Plaza Motel.”

Other films in the series include Edgar G. Ulmer’s tight and nasty Detour (1945), which will screen at the Paris Theater in New York on Sunday and the following Tuesday as part of Bleak Week; John M. Stahl’s Leave Her to Heaven (1945), featuring Gene Tierney as what Megan Abbot calls “one of the most perverse and remorseless femmes fatales in film history”; and Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil (1958), which Fred Camper, writing in the Chicago Reader, has called “a flat-out all-cylinders-running, eye-popping masterpiece.”

And as MUBI’s Daniel Kasman has pointed out, we find in Max Ophuls’s The Reckless Moment (1949) “a little bit of noir, a little bit of melodrama, shades of Douglas Sirk and Fritz Lang’s 1950s films, but also pure Ophuls—love that isn’t meant to last, the melancholy of romantic longing.”