The Vitality of Film Noir

Film noir (literally “black cinema”) is one of the most durable traditions to come from 1940s Hollywood. Never precisely defined—the term was coined by French critics to describe the dark films coming from America just after the war—the style and mood can be found in westerns (Pursued, Ramrod), private-eye movies (The Big Sleep, The Killers), the woman’s picture (Mildred Pierce), the crime thriller (Double Indemnity) and even some musicals. The early noirs owed a great deal to German expressionism, with its low-key lighting and shadows that so impressed the French in the 1940s, but even then there were noirs such as Out of the Past that exploited rural settings and sunlight as well as shadows and rain-washed streets. It is the dark recurring themes of obsession, fear, ambiguity, entrapment, and sometimes hallucination, that characterise these films rather than simply expressionist shadows.

No one knows this better than Martin Scorsese. Taxi Driver (1976), his first collaboration with screenwriter Paul Schrader, not only surrounds its psychotic protagonist with the deepest of shadows—much of the film was shot night-for-night—but also often seems like an extended nightmare made even more compelling by Bernard Herrmann’s last score (completed literally hours before the Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock composer died). Bringing Out the Dead, a 1999 reworking of similar themes from another Paul Schrader script, is if anything even more hallucinatory, but this time the “dreams” are coupled with very Catholic themes of death and redemption. And in The Departed (2006) Scorsese and his writer, William Monahan, transform the marvellously devious plot devices they inherited from the Hong Kong thriller Infernal Affairs into a gritty Boston gangster movie/film noir complete with shadows, sardonic voiceover and an even more complex narrative than the original.

With Shutter Island, however, the director goes back to 1954, a time when Hollywood studios were still turning out film noir. This allows Scorsese to use the coats and fedoras of the original movies without the self-consciousness that sometimes afflicted Jean Pierre Melville when he clothed the likes of Alain Delon and Jean Paul Belmondo in snap brims and trench coats for his highly individual French adaptations of American film genres in the 1960s and early 1970s. Shutter Island is based on a novel of the same name by Boston crime writer Dennis Lehane. According to Scorsese it was the original’s storytelling that attracted him to the project; and indeed the book, written in Lehane’s characteristic spare prose, is superbly structured. Absent are the author’s usual descriptive passages. Much of the book’s dialogue is used to great effect but the film’s images come almost entirely from Scorsese and his regular cinematographer Robert Richardson together with production designer Dante Ferretti.

The film begins almost like a 1940s haunted-house melodrama. A boat surrounded by fog—an image that could have come from any of the three versions of King Kong—heads towards Shutter Island where a hospital for the criminally insane is located. It is 1954 and two US marshals, Teddy Daniels (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Chuck Aule (Mark Ruffalo) have been sent to investigate the disappearance of one of the patients. It’s a situation familiar from hundreds of thrillers.

The hospital’s chief administrator, Dr John Cawley (Ben Kingsley) seems to have something to hide; the patient’s cell was locked and there seems to be no way she could have got out; there is tension between Cawley and his colleague Dr Naehring, played by Max von Sydow as if he has strayed out of The Seventh Seal and is about to play chess for someone’s soul; and there are suggestions of secret government experiments plus the threat of lobotomies for the intractable patients. Then in the best tradition of the genre there is a spectacular storm cutting off all contact with the mainland.

Scorsese handles all this with great panache; but there is more. What about Daniels’s nightmares, or are they flashbacks; and the nightmares within the nightmares? The film’s imagery moves from semi-documentary—some sequences were shot at the old Medfield State Hospital in Massachusetts—to gothic horror. Daniels’s search through the asylum that is all shadows and cages where he is described in the dialogue as “like a rat in a maze”, would do credit to any of James Whale’s Frankenstein movies. On the other hand, the recreation of Daniels’s experiences during the liberation of Dachau is treated almost symbolically, with Scorsese adapting Lewis Milestone’s famous tracking shot from All Quiet on the Western Front showing soldiers mowed down by machine guns for the scene where the American troops execute the concentration camp guards. (Milestone’s shot was left to right while Scorsese’s is right to left.)

For all this, Shutter Island is not just a flamboyant exercise in technique. The technical virtuosity serves Laeta Kalogridis’s adaptation of Lehane’s novel brilliantly, and as with all the director’s best work the visual style is subordinated to the narrative. I don’t want to go any further because on one level Shutter Island is a mystery and a very good one at that.

Performances are uniformly excellent, with Leonardo DiCaprio adding to the gallery of obsessed heroes he seems to play exclusively for Scorsese these days. Is it too much to hope that they might do a comedy together sometime? The director has said that Shutter Island is his tribute to the studio films he grew up with in the 1940s and 1950s. Certainly it deserves to stand beside such masterpieces of film noir as Pursued and Out of the Past. Perhaps back then Raoul Walsh and Jacques Tourneur made it all seem more effortless, but they had to battle the ludicrous censorship of the period and could never be as explicit as Scorsese and never would have been allowed even to attempt films like Goodfellas or Taxi Driver.

February also saw the release of yet another film noir, Martin Campbell’s remake of the classic British mini-series Edge of Darkness. The original broadcast on the BBC in 1985 can be best described as Thatcher noir, one of a number of films and television series such as Defence of the Realm, The Whistle Blower and A Very British Coup. They portrayed the abuses and cover-ups of the era, but with the Labour Party divided and the Thatcher government riding high after the Falklands War, just about all these works despaired of holding anyone to account.

Edge of Darkness was shaped by writer Troy Kennedy Martin’s fear that after the election of Ronald Reagan, “born-again Christians and Cold War warriors were running the United States” and that the so-called Strategic Defense Initiative—“Star Wars”—that proposed using ground-based and space-based systems to protect America from nuclear missiles, could result in an all-out war with the Soviet Union. Another influence was the secrecy surrounding all aspects of nuclear power in the United Kingdom, especially the building of the Sizewell B nuclear power station. As well as the politics there was Kennedy Martin’s fascination with the Gaia hypothesis formulated by scientist James Lovelock that the earth is a single living system that self-regulates to create the best conditions for life. Of course no one making the series could predict that Star Wars would ultimately lead to détente or that Thatcher would prove more vulnerable than she then appeared. But all that paranoia made for a splendid series.

Within minutes of the opening, Emma (Joanne Whalley), the daughter of Yorkshire copper Ronald Craven (Bob Peck), is gunned down by a shotgun blast outside their home. It is teeming with rain, Craven is in a trenchcoat and media savvy viewers know our characters are surrounded by corruption even before we see trainloads of nuclear waste winding through the night and encounter the usual equivocal and mysterious public servants intent on manipulating everyone in sight. And indeed the great strength of the series proved to be the range of well-drawn characters that kept appearing in each episode and the marvellous sub-plots.

Bob Peck turned in one of the great television performances of the 1980s. Never sentimental, it is a complex multi-layered portrayal that even makes the character’s extended conversations with his dead daughter credible. (Kennedy Martin was reacting against realism on the small screen.) Nearly as effective was Joe Don Baker’s performance as the flamboyant CIA man Darius Jedburgh. Best known as an action star at the time, Baker took one look at the script, dropped his fee and accepted the part. It is easy to see why. How often do actors best known for parts like the club-wielding sheriff in Walking Tall get to ride around London in a white Rolls Royce wearing a white Stetson and deliver wonderfully over-the-top lines filled with black humour? Nearly as much fun are Charles Kay and Ian McNeice as shifty cabinet officers. All of this provides an effective counterpoint to Craven’s grim quest for justice.

But for all the richly textured writing and playing, Troy Kennedy Martin never quite resolves all the issues he raises in the six hours given to him by the BBC. There is a powerful indictment of the abuses of the intelligence services with just about everyone being betrayed—which we know now was only too accurate—but the final episode goes off in all directions. Part of the problem was Kennedy Martin’s obsession with the Gaia hypothesis, although we can thank Bob Peck and director Martin Campbell for vetoing the original ending that had Craven turning into a tree. But the main reason the series lacks a satisfactory resolution was, I suspect, the despair so many of the Left experienced during the Thatcher era. For all this, the first Edge of Darkness is an extraordinary achievement. Viewing it again for this article was a reminder that television has always been able to produce great drama; all it requires is for the executives to recognise quality material when they see it and get it to air, preferably without advertising breaks.

The 2010 movie version of Edge of Darkness is not quite in the class of the original, even though it has the same director in Martin Campbell. Australian playwright Andrew Bovell and William Monahan provided a script that while true to the main themes of the original drastically condenses the sub-plots. Gone too is the Gaia hypothesis and so is Craven and Jedburgh’s break-in to the nuclear waste disposal plant—the climax of the first version. The political corruption remains but it no longer involves the British Prime Minister or the US President. (The original does everything but name Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan as the principal villains.) And this version is set in America, specifically Boston, chosen because it had in Campbell’s words “a whole English, Irish feel to it”.

The extended conversations between Craven and his dead daughter (sensitively played by Bojana Novakovic) remain, only now their relationship has a specific religious context with father and daughter united at the end. Mel Gibson makes a powerfully brooding Craven but has nothing like the opportunities Bob Peck was given. Neither does Ray Winstone, playing a somewhat scaled-down Jedburgh. The rather bloody resolution, however, is more effective dramatically than Kennedy Martin’s.

These violent sequences have been overstressed in the publicity. Like the television series, the film version concentrates on the characters and the quest for the truth, during which Campbell takes his time building the suspense. Too much so, it seems for some tastes. The prints being screened here have awkward cuts and disjointed sequences that it is impossible to imagine being passed by a director of Campbell’s experience. We can hope the DVD will include the director’s cut. In spite of this vandalism, Edge of Darkness the movie is an impressive political thriller that does nothing to detract from the memory of its illustrious predecessor.

Just as I was completing work on this article the DVDs of the new British Wallander series arrived in the post. They were broadcast on the BBC in January and will probably be transmitted here later in the year when I’ll be writing a more extended treatment of both the films and the novels. For the moment, Kenneth Branagh is even better as the Swedish cop here than he was in the first series (which I reviewed in the April 2009 issue).

This time the writers, in adapting Henning Mankell’s Faceless Killers, The Man Who Smiled and The Fifth Woman, have created a fascinating emotional journey for Wallander that even has him solving one case while getting over a nervous breakdown. The crimes are as dark as ever and the summer light more relentless. Here we have a modern noir that like Leave Her to Heaven and Desert Fury makes sunlit landscapes appear as sinister as the rain-washed streets and shadows of traditional film noir. Alfred Hitchcock, who staged one of his most menacing scenes on a bright summer’s day in a wheat field, would have approved.

Neil McDonald writes: Both the 1985 BBC mini-series of Edge of Darkness and the 2010 second Wallander series are available on DVD.