cinema review

An exegesis of one of the central preoccupations in the films noirs, contact with the Other, focusing on films which foreground a specific kind of alterity, that is, one of international cosmopolitanism.

Ever since 1955, when Borde and Chaumeton employed Nino Frank’s coinage in reference to a certain series of American films, criticism of the “genre” has run in mad circles over the issue of whether film noir can be called a genre at all. Raymond Durgnat, in the seminal “Paint it Black: The Family Tree of Film Noir” (1970), attempts to exhaustively categorize the “dominant cycles or motifs” [i] of film noir in order to show how, “film noir is not a genre, as the Western and gangster film, and takes us into the realm of classification by motif and tone.” [ii] This argument was soon furthered by Paul Schrader in his Notes on Film Noir (1972). Noir, for Schrader as well, is not a genre because it lacks “conventions of setting and conflict” and is rather grouped by consistent “cultural and stylistic elements.” [iii] He proposes instead a purely historical classification of noir into three distinct “cycles” spanning from 1941 to 1953. Against such reductionistic visions, more recent critics such as Alain Silver have argued for a more accumulative understanding of genre whereby film noir assumes generic cohesiveness through the repetition and categorization of what is at first innovation or anomaly. In other words, touches we may find innovative in 1941 about The Maltese Falcon, by 1958 border on self-parody in Touch of Evil, and so a genre over time comes to take shape.

More relevant to the present work is that second great wave of debates in noir criticism over noir’s “nationality.” Agreeing to disagree over whether noir is a genre or a cycle, a series or a style, critics have since taken up the vexing question of who “owns” film noir, of whether it is an American or a European phenomenon. All critics agree that the “roots” of noir are firmly European. In its most banal formulation, noir is after all little more than the visual sensibilities of German Expressionism applied by Hollywood studios to the plots of the French film policier and Italian neo-realism. The list of German expatriate directors working in Hollywood during the core years of the 40’s and 50’s (Lang, Wilder, Preminger, Siodmak, et al) does seem both long and convincing, despite Schrader’s oft-quoted caution of the “danger of over-emphasizing the German influence in Hollywood.” [iv] Marc Vernet, in “Film Noir on the Edge of Doom,” calls noir “the triumph of European artists even as it presents American actors,” pointing out somewhat tongue-in-cheek that it is “a great example of cooperation—the Americans made it and then the French invented it.” [v] Vernet, at the same time, however, insists on a closer examination of the obvious European influences, pointing out for one that the type of cinematography we have come to know as “ German Expressionism” co-existed in America as early as 1915. Alain Silver seems to ignore this side of Vernet’s argument when he launches into a vociferous attack on Vernet’s “Eurocentric bias,” baldly asserting that far from European, film noir “is the unique example of a wholly American film style.” Moreover, he calls it “a self-contained reflection of American culture and its preoccupations at a point in time.” [vi] As an “indigenous American form,” noir acts for Silver as America’s reflective mirror, how she looks to herself after the war.

What is at stake in this profound anxiety over the national origins of film noir? What does it reveal when critics avow, as Silver does so vehemently, its “indigenous form”? If it is a vision of America, whose vision is it? We will return to this question over the American-ness or European-ness of noir later on and examine Vernet’s ambiguous and fertile claim, “that film noir was the Europeanized form of American cinema,” [vii] and we will see that the very fact of these critical bickerings over cultural identity tells us something about the genre itself.

Before that, however, I will engage in an exegesis of one of the central preoccupations in the films noirs themselves, namely, contact with the Other. Since the issue of alterity is so broad, and to my mind, practically endemic in film noir, I have chosen films which foreground a specific kind of alterity, that is, one of international cosmopolitanism, where culture (low and high) and fear of that culture are what effect the bifurcation between self and Other. In unsurprisingly cynical noir fashion, I will show the cosmopolitan Other portrayed as the monster in our midst, as the evil guest let into our homes, the visitor whose very presence threatens to destroy normal ways of life. Opposed to this figure of the monstrous Other is a double or döppleganger “Self,” often equally monstrous on his own or through contact with the Other. I will then look at films that feature cosmopolitan sites where divergent cultures collide (so-called “dens of iniquity”) in which anxiety over the hazards of cultural-mixing is paramount.

MONSTERS IN OUR MIDST

The Stranger and Lolita

“He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster.”
- Friedrich Nietzsche

The Stranger

Orson Welles’ The Stranger (1946) is in many ways an example of a postwar “institution film,” [viii] a reenactment/celebration of victory over the Nazis bordering on propaganda. It was also an attempt on Welles’ part to prove he was capable of making both artistically and commercially successful films within the restrictions of the studio system. Despite these constraints, The Stranger is also quintessentially noir in its shadowy look and mood, in its detective plot, and particularly for our discussion, in its sinister portrayal of the cosmopolitan Other, Franz Kindler, as a “monster in our midst.” For Welles, the politics of the film had less to do with cheerleading American victories than providing a warning of dangers to come. In an editorial written after the war for the New York Post, he explained the sort of dangers he would come to portray in The Stranger as that “phoney fear of Communism” which for him was “smoke-screening the real menace of renascent fascism.” [ix]

The Stranger is the story of Franz Kindler (played by Welles himself), fictional mastermind under Hitler of the methods and ideology of extermination in the Holocaust. Kindler has escaped the prosecution of Nuremberg by concealing his identity and fleeing Europe for America. Welles constantly heightens the dark ironies of the picture, making Kindler not only an upstanding member of idyllic Harper, Connecticut (“In Harper,” we’re told, “there’s nothing to be afraid of”) but further, a teacher of History at a prestigious boys’ prep school under the pseudonym of Charles Rankin. Moreover, at the film’s outset, with borderline comic symbolism, Kindler is to be married to Mary Longstreet, only daughter of a Supreme Court Justice. What Welles sets at stake in this film, then, is not only the abstract notion of “our way of life” but the very safety of our families, and in the more demonic vein of Lolita, of our daughters. In a chilling speech to his underling, Konrad Meinike, Kindler suggests his ultimate plans for “renascent fascism”:

Guess what I’ll be doing at six o’clock tonight. Standing before a minister of the Gospel with a woman’s hand in mine, a daughter of a Justice of the United States Supreme Court, a famous liberal. The girl’s even good to look at. Yes, the camouflage is perfect. Who’d think to look for the notorious Franz Kindler in the sacred precincts of the Harper School surrounded by the sons of America’s first families? And I’ll stay hidden ‘til the day when we strike again.

At issue here is faith (or lack of it) in the reform of the Germans, in the authenticity of their rejection of fascism after the war. Over dinner at Judge Longstreet’s, rumors recounted from a report by the “Foreign Office” of “underground meeting places” and undying German “fanaticism” giving rise to secret “pagan rituals,” give us the impression of a wounded snake lying in wait to strike again. Kindler adds to this by suggesting to his dinner audience that the German mind, unlike all other European minds, will never be capable of valorizing egalitarianism, and that it will require extermination of the Germans themselves to guarantee that their “Gods of War” will not rise again. The film’s call for steady vigilance against enemies both within and without, even in times of peace, may border on the paranoid and xenophobic, but it gives us a sense of the postwar (and noir) mindset towards the German Other. What makes The Stranger different, however, from an ordinary morality tale of good and evil (what makes it noir in other words) is the indelible taint of evil left on the “good” characters of Mary and Wilson the detective (Edward G. Robinson), even after their “victory” over Kindler.

Mary, whose very name contrasts the virginal innocence of small town America to her husband’s monstrosity, serves as the locus of realization of evil in the film. The action of the story moves along with her gradual process of awareness and innocence lost, played psychologically by Loretta Young from hysterical repression and rejection of her husband’s true identity to final acceptance and action when she shoots him in the clock tower at film’s end. When confronted with concentration camp footage, she rebuts Wilson by telling him, “I’ve never so much as seen a Nazi,” to which Wilson replies, “Well, you might have without knowing it. They look like other people and act like other people.” On this score, “the threat of the film’s monstrousness,” says R. Barton Palmer, “is its paradoxical invisible visibility, the fact that it is an integral, accepted part of the everyday world that must be defamiliarized in order to be contained.” [x] Palmer also points interestingly to the thematic significance of Welles’ untypically “unlayered” performance. Welles does not portray Kindler qua Rankin as a man struggling to seem American. There is no accent to contend with, no errors in language. While this may be unconvincing as realism, it reemphasizes the ease with which Kindler’s monstrosity is overlooked by the community. There is a fluid, penetrable gap between American and German, or “Self” and “Other.” This “innocent mistake” made by the community offers no consolation to Mary who cannot accept that she could have given her love to such a man. Her father, trying to both console and convince her of her husband’s guilt, says that she owes no duty to her husband if she has “innocently married a criminal.” Of course, both identity and culpability are already shared through their union. “I am already a part of the crime,” she tells her husband at one point, “because I’m a part of you.”

On Wilson too, Kindler’s evil leaves an indelible mark, physically represented by the bruised head and sprained ankle he receives by film’s end. In a döppleganger relation to Kindler, he must leave his own sense of justice behind, risking Mary’s life as bait to catch his opponent: “Mary … becomes a pawn in the game of cat and mouse played by Rankin and Wilson; neither one cares about her, and each sees her largely as a means to an end.” [xi] Wilson must, to borrow Nietzsche’s phrase, be careful not to become a monster in the act of catching one.

Kindler’s arrival shatters complacent everydayness, forcing the atrocities of the war to be faced. “In The Stranger,” notes Palmer, “victory over the forces of darkness, both foreign and domestic, can be achieved only by rejecting the false belief that all is well, that things are as they appear, that no one intends to harm anyone else.” [xii] This conflation of the foreign and domestic, of the Other and the Self, inevitably resolves in noir into negative terms. Characters such as Mary and Wilson may “conquer their demons,” to use a relevant metaphor from psychoanalysis, yet the “therapeutic” value of the act is always undermined by the wounds and scars, physical and psychological, of the encounter with alterity. While justice is attained, it remains a pyrrhic victory (as victories in noir must). There is a shared guilt (both Mary and Wilson shoot at Kindler) and a horror that even his death cannot overcome. The Stranger forces its viewers to “identify the ways in which the ordinary is the same as the monstrous” [xiii] or at least becomes so in the transformations of Mary and Wilson. The allegorical power of Mary’s story, in that it represents America’s gradual awareness of what happened in Europe during the war, is something we will return to later in The Third Man when Holly Martins decides to visit “the Other side.”

Lolita (1962)

Historically speaking, Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita postdates most categorizations of film noir by a few years, the genre often thought to “close” with another film far from irrelevant to this discussion, Welles’ Touch of Evil, [xiv] in 1958. Nevertheless, a case can easily be made for its inclusion. In addition to its somber visual style, Lolita employs the noir hallmarks of the flashback and voiceover narration. We begin at the end, the murder scene of Clare Quilty. We are then ushered to the beginning (“4 Years Earlier”) by Humbert as narrator when Humbert first takes up residence in the Haze home, “having recently arrived in America where so many Europeans have found a haven before.” At important segues which coincide with Part I and Part II of Nabokov’s novel, Humbert interjects further 1^st person narration. As well, Humbert’s diary is employed, through his stylized omniscience, as mediation to reflect back on the characters of Lolita and her mother, Charlotte. Of course, as a film of the Hays Office era, its real issues of sexual deviance and pedophilia (or “nympholepsy” as Humbert terms it) could barely be brushed. In a strange sense, this adds to the noir-ness of the film by forcing Kubrick to be suggestive, through double entendre and coy innuendo, about a decadent sexual underworld being carried on in small towns like Ramsdale, New Hampshire. Finally, through its theme of the dangerous visitor, the European Other as another example of the “monster in our midst,” Lolita makes for a quintessential noir. Indeed, Humbert Humbert is a veritable archetype of the cosmopolitan Other as monster, one of the most complex (and humorous) representations of the American psyche’s obsession with “bogeymen” out to snatch our children. Unlike Kindler, Humbert is not purely evil; he is no fascist hellbent on ruling the world. On the contrary, he is at times a tragic, pitiable figure, and in the climax, a quasi-heroic avenger in relation to his döppleganger, Clare Quilty. What separates Humbert from other monsters is that he is a man of learning, of high culture, a respected expert in French poetry visiting America on a lectureship to Beardsley College. These cultural differences between Europe and America are the key to understanding alterity in Lolita. Various dichotomies are established between highbrow and lowbrow, between art and pop. Then, in typically complicated noir fashion, our expectations of normalcy and deviancy are overturned: puritanical America turns pervert and “Old World” decadent Europe is forced to save it from itself.

In the rearing of Lolita, we might expect America to be more conservative than dirty, old Europe, but the reverse turns out to be true. When Humbert suggests Charlotte is being “too liberal” in letting Lolita spend the night at the “very broad-minded” Farlow’s, Charlotte calls him “charmingly Old World.” Lo’s healthy interest in boys is encouraged, and she is sent off to “Camp Climax” for a “healthy” summer with Charlie. Quilty too, disguised as the German-turned-American psychologist, Dr. Zemf, tells Humbert how we here in America have become liberal, releasing the libidos of our children from “unhealthy” repression.

After Charlotte’s death, Humbert keeps as tight a leash as possible on his nymphet, due to both his carnal lust and cuckold anxieties. He will not let her go out on dates or participate in “that atmosphere” of the school play (the decadent world of “theatre types”), he claims, for her own good. At home he reads to her Edgar Allan Poe, and in the hospital, he brings her edifying books such as James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, all in an attempt to save her from the corrupting influences of America’s pop culture. Throughout the film, “bubblegum” images of movie starlets (in Lolita’s bedroom) and b-grade “monster movies” abound. Humbert places her in Beardsley’s school for girls where he tells us, “it is my hope that she will be persuaded to read other things than comic books and movie romances.” In Lolita the novel, Humbert describes Lolita as “this beautiful hardly formed young girl whom modern co-education, juvenile mores, the campfire racket and so forth had utterly and hopelessly depraved.” [xv] America’s low culture, to him, is to blame for her lost innocence. The great irony of the story is that Humbert, while corrupt himself, is usually right about the equal if not greater corruption that surrounds him and his “daughter.” While he treats Lolita hellishly himself, he does at least care for her. On the surface, Humbert may embody the over-cultured European who is led by his learning to moral degradation, symbolic of a uniquely American paranoia towards “Old World” values and beliefs, but the brilliant twist is that Humbert in the end must become America’s avenger against even greater corruption from within, the monstrous Other within America itself encapsulated in the character of Clare Quilty.

Quilty, Humbert’s döppleganger, acts as a strange hybrid of low and highbrow culture. We are told he is a writer of television shows. He is also an accomplished playwright and a secret maker of “artfilms” (implied pornography). He is considered a strange genius by many in Ramsdale. Lolita tells Humbert what drew her to him: “He wasn’t like you and me. He wasn’t a normal person. He was a genius. He has a sort of Oriental philosophy of life.” This issue of normalcy takes center stage in the meeting of Humbert and Quilty on the patio of the Enchanted Hunter’s Hotel. Through Peter Sellers’ hysterically frenetic performance, normalcy and deviancy become completely confounded. Quilty tells Humbert he has “the most normal looking face I ever saw,” [xvi] while he himself looks “so suspicious” he can get picked up by cops “especially when I stand on street corners.” By the end of the soliloquy (in which the word “normal” is innumerably uttered), the terms end up reversed, “I get sorta’ carried away,” says Quilty, “being so normal and everything.” He hopes that two “normal guys” like them could talk: “It would be great for two normal guys like us to get together and talk about world events, you know, in a normal sort of way.” He also offers to speak to the hotel clerk Mr. Swine, another “real normal, nice sort of guy,” about Humbert’s accommodations. All the while Humbert sits uncomfortably shocked. The effect of Quilty’s sleazy speech is a conflation/confusion of identities between the men. Humbert, situated next to Quilty, is now perceived as the innocent, in his own eyes and certainly in the eyes of the increasingly sympathetic viewer. Merely a pedophile, Humbert comes off clean compared to Quilty’s even greater debauchery. But what exactly does Quilty do? We are never told, though orgiastic “art films” (further confounding low and high) starring runaways and weightlifters and sexual encounters with local women (Mrs. Haze herself whispers of what he did to her) and rugged young men (the aptly dubbed “night manager” Mr. Swine) are all intimated. His ubiquitous nature transforms him into a symbol of the pervasively debauched underworld of puritanical America. The question to ask of the Humbert/Quilty döppleganger is who is the Other? Further, who is the monster, who the more accomplished pervert: the European visitor or the American? Lolita takes the issue of monstrous otherness a step further than the oftentimes xenophobic The Stranger (perhaps only a function of the difference in their 15 year span), begging the question of whether America is not already beyond the point of corruption by contact with alterity, if the European Other is so very other after all. In the Afterword to his novel, Nabokov notes two readings of Lolita, “Old Europe debauching young America” versus “young America debauching Old Europe.” [xvii] A third reading of Old Europe as voyeur witnessing America in the act of debauching itself is what Kubrick’s Lolita offers us, recalling Vernet’s claim of film noir as the “Europeanized version of American cinema.”

COSMOPOLITAN SITES

The Shanghai Gesture and The Third Man

While in the previous section we have looked at the Other as the “monster in our midst” (the dangerous visitor), I will shift the focus slightly now to sites of alterity, to contact with Otherness through travels to foreign lands. Specifically, we will look at two cosmopolitan sites, one in the Orient, another in Europe, where cultural and racial identities collide. In doing so, I would be remiss in not briefly sketching certain influential notions of the Orient set out by Edward Said in his landmark books Culture and Imperialism and Orientalism. What the work of Said will lead us to ask in connection to our films noirs is whether there can be clear bifurcation between Self and Other after Imperialism (The Shanghai Gesture) or, for that matter, after two World Wars (The Third Man). This is, in a different sense, the same question put to us by Lolita, that is, whether the Other we demonize is so very other after all.

Said’s interpretation of Orientalism brings such issues to the fore on a global scale, contending that Western civilization achieved its identity historically by stressing separation from what was not Western and by simultaneously devalorizing it as less than Western. Thus, the need to invent a distinct, homogenous Orient:

Orientalism approaches a heterogeneous, dynamic, and complex human reality from an uncritically essentialist standpoint; this suggests both an enduring Oriental reality and an opposing but no less enduring Western essence, which observes the Orient from afar and from, so to speak, above. [xviii]

For Said, cultures are always too intermingled materially and historically, particularly after the history of colonial exploration, for their identities to ever remain discrete. Rather, cultures (along with individuals) are, for him, permeable amalgamations of materiality and history:

We have never been as aware as we now are of how oddly hybrid historical and cultural experiences are, of how they partake of many often contradictory experiences and domains, cross national boundaries, defy the police action of simple dogma and loud patriotism. Far from being unitary or monolithic or autonomous things, cultures actually assume more “foreign” elements, alterities, differences, than they consciously exclude. [xix]

This is a consequence, Said argues, of Empire’s “aspiration to sovereignity, to sway, and to dominance,” the irony of which is that this aspiration is precisely what undermines the “borders” and “distinctions” on which Imperialism is justified and by which it proceeds:

No one today is purely one thing. Labels like Indian, or woman, or Muslim, or American are not more than starting-points, which if followed into actual experience for only a moment are quickly left behind. Imperialism consolidated the mixture of cultures and identities on a global scale. But its worst and most paradoxical gift was to allow people to believe that they were only, mainly, exclusively, white, or Black, or Western, or Oriental. [xx]

Desire for purity is at the heart of this and, presumed in this purity, superiority. In the case of film noir, we see again and again a cynical nostalgia towards all such notions of racial and cultural purity, of clearly defined borders between America and Europe, Europe and Asia, or Occidental and Oriental; ultimately, between Self and Other.

Gene Tierney as Victoria Charteris (aka “Poppy Smith” enraptured by Shanghai’s cosmopolitan decadence in Josef Von Sternberg’s The Shanghai Gesture (1941)

The Shanghai Gesture(1941)

A case could almost be made for “Shanghai films” as a genre unto themselves with Josef Von Sternberg’s The Shanghai Gesture as its chef d’oeuvre. Shanghai Gesture serves, much like The Stranger, as another noir version of a morality tale, a dark take-off on the Madame Butterfly theme, in which the West asks itself what it has gained and what it has lost by trudging through foreign lands in the name of Empire. Sternberg accomplishes this in two ways: first, through his cinematic realization of Shanghai as the “den of iniquity” par excellence (the “cesspool of the Far East” one character dubs it), and second, through the symbolically charged tale of Victoria Charteris, daughter of Mother Gin Sling, dragon-lady of Shanghai, and Sir Guy Charteris, wealthy Western entrepreneur.

From the film’s opening epigraph, Sternberg establishes a sullen, decadent mood, calling old Shanghai “a refuge for people who wished to live between the lines of laws and customs, a modern Tower of Babel.” From this, we are immediately met in the opening shot with, arguably, one of the foggiest streets in the history of cinema. Fog literally pours into the main thoroughfare, full of hectic rickshaw drivers and other Asians bustling, bartering, and arguing. Cinematically, the illusory nature of the Orient is emphasized further by the almost parodically noticeable stage sets that compose the street. The impression given by the shadowy fog and moody oriental music is of a dark and dangerous place, full of double-dealing and secret vices that recalls Said’s imaginary Orient of the West: “The Orient was almost a European invention, and had been since antiquity a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences.” [xxi] Sternberg’s Shanghai, we are quickly made aware, is an international settlement where cultures and races mix with degradation for all as the inevitable result.

The twisted plot of Shanghai Gesture revolves around Victoria Charteris (Gene Tierney), a young lady who takes the pseudonym of “Poppy Smith” to conceal her identity while in the club of Mother Gin Sling. Her father has recently purchased a great deal of territory in Shanghai and is forcing Gin Sling to vacate her premises by Chinese New Year. Discovering that Poppy is the daughter of Charteris, Gin Sling beseeches the hedonistic “Arabian love poet” Doctor Omar, a regular at the club, to lead Poppy deeper into addiction to gambling and drugs, allowing her to accumulate a debt with which she can pressure Charteris. We do not realize until the climax, at the Chinese New Year Party held at Gin Sling’s to which Charteris is invited, that Gin Sling and Charteris were once lovers. Gin Sling confronts him with her identity and exposes him for having abandoned her. Charteris in turn surprises Gin Sling with the knowledge that Victoria is their daughter (thought-dead by Gin Sling) from their former affair.

In Victoria Charteris’ pseudonym, Poppy Smith, the whole issue of cultural collision is contained. “Poppy” suggests the dangerously instinctual and narcotic allure of the Orient. In the industrious name of “Smith,” we find the most generic and stable identity of Englishness. Her real name, Victoria, is hardly without suggestiveness as well; with it, she represents the monarch of English empire herself. That she is the progeny of a destitute Asian subaltern and a British colonial capitalist makes her a perfect symbol for the “unholy union” between East and West. With characteristic noir cynicism about such a union, Poppy is played by Gene Tierney as a prodigal spoiled brat, all-too-easy prey for the corrupting influence of Doctor Omar. Before Mother Gin Sling knows that Poppy is her daughter, she tells her she is “a disgrace to her race” for carrying on in the club. That Mother Gin Sling dispassionately shoots her daughter for screaming and throwing dishes after the New Year’s party entails something of a final verdict on the film’s part about the positive possibilities in the meeting of East and West.

More importantly, any pretense of racial and cultural purity ends up ridiculed by the film’s cynicism. Shanghai is construed less as a harmonious “melting pot” or “salad bowl” than as a sort of polluted swamp. At Mother Gin Sling’s Club, there is no character without a noticeable accent of some kind, whether cockney, high British, Chinese, Arabic, or Russian. In one humorous instance, a Chinese rickshaw driver is approached by the flunky of Mother Gin Sling, a crippled Brit named Caesar Hawkins, who speaks to him in English. When the rickshaw driver doesn’t respond, the flunky tries Chinese. Finally, he finds out the driver is Chinese but only speaks Russian, and so they cannot communicate at all. In another sardonic touch, when asked from where he hails, Gin Sling’s bartender replies, “I have no country, and the more I see of countries the better I like the idea.” Another club regular then mutters, “I’m a thoroughbred mongrel, nothing that belongs to the Earth is foreign to me,” iterating a summation of the film’s ideology. Said tells us that the Orient serves as one of the “deepest and most recurring images of the Other,” [xxii] yet in films like The Shanghai Gesture, we are confronted with a vexed questioning of the very notion of Otherness. After Imperialism, it seems, in these sites of cultural collisions, everyone is a mongrel of some kind or other.

The Third Man (1949)

Carol Reed’s masterpiece, The Third Man, according to film historian James Naremore, stands as “one of the best and most representative films of a period when a certain kind of high art had fully entered public consciousness and when European sobriety and American entertainment sometimes worked in tandem.” [xxiii] For its screenwriter, Graham Greene, it was the fulfillment of a “long-standing desire to make an effective thriller that also functions as an art movie,” [xxiv] returning us to the issues of European and American high and low culture that feature so prominently in Lolita. Greene plays with these distinctions by making his noir protagonist, Holly Martins, a “hack-writer” of Western novels with titles like The Lone Rider of Santa Fe. At a gathering of the C.R.S. (“Cultural Reeducation Service”), Martins is asked to speak on the “contemporary crisis of faith” in the modern novel from the perspective of a writer “from the other side.” Questions concerning James Joyce and stream-of-consciousness render him speechless, and he announces his chief literary influence to be Zane Grey. These highbrow gags on Greene’s part reflect back on the moral themes of the film in interesting ways. Through Holly’s depiction as a writer of typically heroic (hence typically American) “entertainment” fiction (Western dime-novels), he is cast as the innocent American who will undergo a transformation, akin to that of Mary in The Stranger, through exposure to the “European sobriety” of postwar Vienna.

In the film’s opening sequence, we receive a montage of images ranging from police marches to outdoor Viennese sculptures, from back-alley black market dealings to corpses floating in the river. All the while an unidentified narrator sets the scene of postwar Vienna:

I never knew the old Vienna before the war with its Strauss music, its glamour, and its easy charm … I really got to know it in the classic period of the Black Market. We’d run anything if people wanted it enough and had the money to pay. … Now the city is divided into four zones, each occupied by a power, the American, the British, the Russian, and the French. But the center of the city, that’s International, policed by an International patrol, one member of each of the four powers. What a hope they had, all of them strangers and none of them could speak the same language, except a sort of smattering of German.

Like Sternberg’s Shanghai, postwar Vienna is a cosmopolitan site where cultures, this time the “four powers” of Eurasia, collide. Reed sets a mood, however, that is less hedonistic and more survivalistic than Shanghai. To live in Vienna, “like most cities after the war,” is to live in a sort of ruins, digging for scraps. Shot after shot of half-crumbled buildings and rubble-filled streets are spread evenly throughout the film, keeping the reality of recent war present in our minds. Moreover, an expressionistic aura of dangerous intrigue is established, again subtly throughout, by the scowls and suspicious glances of wary Austrian passersby. This climate of knowing silence prevents otherwise good citizens such as the porter from speaking up about the Harry Lime incident. “Better not to be mixed up,” he says to Holly, when asked why he withheld facts about Harry’s death at the inquest.

Most people in Vienna subsist in one form or another, we are told, by way of the black market, “doing things,” as Baron Kurtz recounts to Holly, they “would have thought unthinkable before the war.” When Holly expresses his naïve doubts that Harry could ever be “mixed up in a racket,” Kurtz replies, “Everyone in Vienna is. We all sell cigarettes and that kind of thing…. Once when I was hard up, I sold some tires on the black market.” Even Anna plans to sell the bottle of whiskey she has received. Everyone is corrupted by Vienna to some extent. This shared corruption poses a question of all the characters, especially Harry. Is there evil in Vienna, or are they all merely victims and victimizers of the circumstances? In Vienna, Kurtz reminds us, “one must make a living somehow.”

In the broader allegorical terms of the film, Harry and Holly exist as two sides of the same American coin. That Harry stands for Holly’s döppleganger is immediately apparent through the surface synonymy of their names. Greene calls attention to this repeatedly by making Anna call Holly “Harry,” as Holly even does himself on one drunken occasion. At the point of his arrival in Europe, Holly symbolizes that part of Harry (and America) that has remained a child, what Greene disparagingly terms “the eternal adolescence of the American mind,” [xxv] hence Holly’s fond recollections of their time spent together as children. Joseph Cotten’s almost stereotypical performance of the American in Europe, a brash loudmouth carrying on loosely, reemphasizes this childishness in Holly. In the opposite sense, Harry represents that part of Holly which has already lost its innocence. To re-appropriate Vernet’s term, Harry Lime is a “Europeanized” Holly, hardened by exposure to the Otherness of Vienna. Over the course of the film, parallel to Mary in The Stranger, Holly becomes irrevocably hardened (reflected in Cotten’s increasingly sedentary body language) both by an awareness of the atrocities of the war and by a loss of faith in a loved one he thought he knew. Like most noir protagonists in this respect, Holly cannot come away untainted by his experience with Otherness. [xxvi] Unlike the Western heroes Holly creates, who ride off into the sunset every time, Holly stands perfectly still in the film’s final scene, while Anna strides past him. In one of the film’s many brilliant touches, Anna passes Holly, walking directly into the camera, revealing she too longs to return to an irretrievable past. The Third Man offers us yet another noir allegory of America’s lost innocence, in Holly’s realization of what Harry has become, and in his realization of what Europe has become, as a result of the war. In this, it crystallizes the variant attitudes towards alterity we have analyzed in film noir.

Film Noir as Europeanized American Cinema

Orson Welles as Harry Lime, corrupt war profiteer in postwar Vienna, in Carol Reed’s The Third Man (1949)

Films such as The Third Man ask Simon Critchley’s cynical, troubling question: “why is radical otherness goodness? Why is alterity ethical? Why is it not rather evil or an-ethical or neutral?” [xxvii] In the current age of unadulterated optimism towards the “Other” and “pluralistic communities,” noir acts as a reminder from darker times that the integration of difference is never so simple. Sometimes, the blind extension of hospitality, the open invitation to the visitor, noir warns us, can exact a terrible price. This inevitably raises questions of nationalism, of whether a people can afford not to have borders, passports, immigration laws, to draw distinctions and close itself off from outsiders. Noir at times goes even further, reminding us of the dangerous transformation whereby one becomes more like the Other, becoming other to oneself.

What do these anxieties over alterity tell us about film noir as a genre? When we examine the history of noir’s genesis, it is not difficult to surmise how preoccupations with cultural collision could predominate. It was, after all, how many “dangerous visitors,” how many Humbert Humbert’s in the form of expatriate European directors and cinematographers, who came to change our “normal way of life” by plying their trade in the American dream machine of Hollywood? In the debates within noir criticism, as well, we find the same storyline acted out, the same anxiety over otherness (in critics like Alain Silver) through the bickering over noir’s nationalistic origins, hence Vernet’s claim that, “As an object or corpus of films, film noir does not belong to the history of cinema; it belongs as a notion to the history of film criticism.” [xxviii] Critics like Silver, by claiming that film noir stands as a cultural relic of America’s vision of itself after the war, seem to profoundly miss the point. Noir is not the “property” of America or of Europe but rather the playing out of the cultural interaction between Europe and America, reflected thematically time and time again by the films themselves. The Otherness in film noir, in other words, is a function of the Otherness of film noir.

If the depiction of monstrous alterity in such films as The Stranger and Lolita is to be understood as something greater than facile xenophobia or political propaganda, we must take into account this two-way perspective of the genre. Noir acted, in other words, not as America’s own looking glass turned back on itself, but as an “other” perspective imposed by foreign eyes. Vernet is attuned to this in his discussion of France’s own cultural xenophobia towards the U.S.:

The French have a paradoxical image of the United States; on the one hand, it permitted victory in the struggle against Nazism…. But on the other hand, the United States is an imperialist menace that threatens to impose upon France values and a culture that are not its own; if the Americans are superior and even saviours in the military and economic domains, they are judged to be inferior and dangerous in the domain of culture, for they threaten to replace red wine with whiskey, Marcel Proust with the dime detective novel, and ‘Le Temps des Cerises’ with jazz. [xxix]

The double-edged fear of culture, of American that is too low, and European that is too high, is at the heart of films like Lolita and The Third Man. If noir is to be considered at all radical, anti-Hollywood, anti-American dream, it is through this hard look at America as an equally monstrous “Other.” Film noir is this cultural collision of Europe and America, of highbrow and lowbrow, of monstrous Other and the Self that turns out to be just as monstrous in the end.

NOTES

About the Author
Chris Eagle is a graduate student in the English Department at U.C. Berkeley. A film noir enthusiast, his primary fields of study are Modernism and Continental Philosophy. He is currently working on a dissertation on Heidegger and Joyce.