Encyclopedia of Film Noir
6
White Heat, This Gun for Hire, My Name Is Julia Ross, The Gangster, High Wall,
Secret Beyond the Door, and On Dangerous Ground. These labels indicated a shift in
dramatic emphasis. No longer was the focus only on external obstacles confronting
the hero or heroine, a characteristic of simple melodrama, but also the internal
confl ict within the protagonist. Thus fi lm noir went beyond presenting the drama
as a simple or unequivocal confl ict between good and evil. Instead, they shifted the
dramatic focus to the “psychological” confl ict that emanated from an ambivalent
presentation of moral norms.
This tendency was recognized by French writers Raymond Borde and Etienne
Chaumeton (1966) in the fi rst book-length study of fi lm noir. Courage and
heroism were often superseded by doubt, despair, and vulnerability. While this
did not render the traditional melodramatic quest for moral legibility irrelevant,
and it did not mean, as some have suggested, its replacement by an ethically
irrational universe, it did represent a shift in (some) Hollywood fi lms in the
1940s. Unlike novelists such as Dashiell Hammett and Cornell Woolrich, the
fi lms were ultimately reluctant to abandon all hope of a moral world and rational
universe.
A change in the Hollywood crime fi lm was noted by French critics such as
Nino Frank and Jean-Pierre Chartier, who, in the summer of 1946, were exposed
to a sudden infl ux of Hollywood fi lms that were not available in France during
the German occupation. Frank (1999), who coined the term fi lm noir, or more
precisely, “fi lms, ‘noirs,’” argued that fi lms such as The Maltese Falcon, Murder My
Sweet, Laura, and Double Indemnity presented a different moral sensibility than
so-called museum pieces such as The Letter (1940) and How Green Was My Valley
(1941). In a similar, if less spectacular, manner, Hammett scholar and professor of
English and comparative literature at Columbia University Steven Marcus (1975,
12) described the effect that John Huston’s 1941 version of The Maltese Falcon had
on him when he fi rst viewed it as a 12-year-old:
What was striking about the event was that it was one of the fi rst encounters I can
consciously recall with the experience of moral ambiguity. Here was this detective
you were supposed to like—and did like—behaving and speaking in peculiar and un-
expected ways. He acted up to the cops, partly for real, partly as a ruse. He connived
with crooks, for his own ends and perhaps even for some of theirs. He slept with his
partner’s wife, fell in love with a lady crook, and then refused to save her from the
police, even though he could have. Which side was he on? Was he on any side apart
from his own? And which or what side was that? The experience was not only mor-
ally ambiguous; it was morally complex and enigmatic as well.
Double Indemnity also had a similar effect on Jean-Pierre Chartier in Paris in
1946, although he was much less complimentary than Marcus when he wrote that
“it’s hard to imagine story lines with a more pessimistic or disgusted point of view
regarding human behaviour” (Chartier 1999, 21).
