A Film Canon

The strongest B-noir of the 1940s, Detour incorporates all the restrictions and setbacks of its shooting schedule into an extraordinary anti-aesthetic of sordidness, or impoverishment, in which the bourgeois self-hatred of classical noir is replaced by two, desperate journeys from New York to Los Angeles, in search of more promising employment. This divests the central 'crime' - nightclub pianist Al Roberts' (Tom Neal) manslaughter of the driver giving him a ride - of any exoticism, or voyeuristic thrill, while ensuring that the ensuing complication - another hitchhiker, Vera's (Ann Savage), discovery of the crime, and subsequent blackmail of Roberts - is similarly devoid of any sexual tension, or agenda: "If this were fiction, I would fall in love with her...or else she would make some supreme class-A sacrifice for me, and die..." The result is a profound, nihilistic banality, which finds most explicit expression in the gradual relocation of the antagonism between Al and Vera from a criminal, to a merely domestic, register, but is perhaps most poetically figured in the use of back-projections for virtually every sequence. This collapses New York, Los Angeles and, most strikingly, the miles of highway between them, into a single, blurry, gritty medium - as if to reinforce that, in the world that these protagonists (if they can even be called that) inhabit, all such distinctions are meaningless; or, rather, that the initial journey to Los Angeles, made by Al's lover (Sue Roberts), in search of Hollywood stardom, neglects the continuity between the studios and the gutter from which that journey is made.

This superb film turns on roughly the same premise as And Then There Were None, but nuances it further in the direction of a proto-slasher aesthetic. Most generally, Siodmak suffuses the (largely housebound) action with a mild hyperbole that lends an ambiguously supernatural aura to the killer. More subtly, by debilitating most female members of that household - a mute chambermaid, a drunken cook, a dying matriarch - and specifying that the killer's modus operandi is a taste for such debilitation, screenwriter Mel Dinelli ensures that the voyeuristic pleasures of his crimes are raised to a sexual pitch, anticipating the masses of dead teenage bodies to come, and beautifully encapsulated in the opening murder, which takes place against a screening of Edison's The Kiss. However, the most impressive gesture is Siodmak's poetic subjectivisation of the house - and, more specifically, his transformation of it into an extension of the killer's giant, omnipresent, aqueous eye, which incorporates everything into its hallucinatory, vertiginous scheme, of which the eponymous staircase is the mere epitome, or culmination. For this reason, horror tends to stem either from the characters' isolated immersion in fluid, connective spaces (corridors, staircases, porches), all of which represent so many variations on the aquarium that preoccupies the master of the house, or from their concomitant failure to recognise the extent to which their 'safe' rooms and communal areas are couched in such liquidity; that is, the extent to which the plot-long storm pervades and infiltrates the house, explaining the profound terror generated by a perpetually, and mysteriously, opened upstairs window.

And Then There Were None artfully translates the central innovation of Agatha Christie's crime writing - a late, abrupt transition from the third to the first person - into a fusion of the two modes, such that every character on the island upon which the narrative takes place seems to be both author and object of a series of murders sufficiently autonomous to consume everybody, including the perpetrator. To this end, Clair translates his taste for shared space into a visual, rather than aural, register, replacing the musical refrains of his Parisian films with an observation-network in which each character is simultaneously observer and observed, the house that they share becoming a mere synecdoche for the tools of observation - keyholes, windows, binoculars, telescopes - that contain and separate them. Despite the association of this gaze with paranoia, Clair nevertheless manages to suffuse the film with the wry humour of the original, as if to identify the camera with Hals' unsmiling, yet undoubtedly comical, cavalier, a portrait of whom appears in the living room that, along with the kitchen, represents the main space in which this comedy tends to manifest itself, insofar as it relates to the peculiar subversion of etiquette that the murder's anonymity and proximity brings. In the same way, the cast is almost entirely made up of character actors (including Walter Huston, Judith Anderson, Barry Fitzgerald, Roland Young and C. Aubrey Smith), creating a charismatic panorama that both reinforces this wry humour, as well as ensuring that the deaths have a less functional import than in the novel, and the modified conclusion is no more contrived than necessary.

Hail The Conquering Hero fufils the military satire lurking around the margins of Morgan's Creek. As in the earlier film, Eddie Bracken plays a small-town boy - Woodrow Lafayette Pershing Truesmith - thwarted in his dreams of military service. In this case, however, a group of renegade Marines co-opt him into a scam that involves replacing mild asthma with battle wounds as the reason for his discharge, thereby launching his home town into a patriotic frenzy. Although Bracken is memorable, the film belongs to the head of the Marines, who culminates the persona played by William Demarest in Sturges' oeuvre, as well as clarifying it - and this later strand of that oeuvre - in terms of an identification of America with opportunism, rather than individualism; or, alternatively, an explication of individualism as opportunism, explaining Demarest's curious ability to imbue his duplicity with an endearing, demotic wholesomeness. The result is an artful subversion of militarism, which consists not so much in contradicting it as in raising it to a slightly hysterical pitch - Capra on speed - as evinced both in a continuation of the chaotic, violent subtext of Morgan's Creek, as well as a hyperbolic conflation of different rhetorical registers, of which Truesmith's name is the mere epitome. From this perspective, the central conflict - both military and romantic - occurs between Truesmith and the insatiable, frequently aggressive, patriotism of his neighbours, which ultimately supervenes his revelation of the truth, proving that "Politics is a very peculiar thing...if they want you, they want you. They don't need reasons any more. They find their own...it's just like when a girl wants a man."

Double Indemnity stands in the same relation to James M. Cain and Raymond Chandler as The Maltese Falcon does to Dashiell Hammett, translating their particular hard-boiled visions into a series of motifs and preoccupations that will become prototypical for classical noir. In some cases, these visions intersect, as in the elaboration of a bourgeois family schism - and, more specifically, a sickly proximity between motherhood and sisterhood - that speaks to a scepticism both of bourgeois values, and of everything outside those values; that is, to a deep bourgeois self-loathing, as if the protagonists' true province were the fine line between classes. Nevertheless, Cain's taste for sophisticated villains sits uneasily with Chandler's proportionate simplification of women, with the result that only one half of the crime duo - a bored housewife (Phyllis Dietrichson) who convinces an insurance salesman (Fred MacMurray) to assist in the murder of her husband - is elaborated at any length, albeit to an extent that sets the stage for the proliferation of criminal protagonists and narrations to come. Concomitantly, Chandler and Wilder completely transform the relationship between the salesman and his boss (Edward G. Robinson), re-imagining it as a homosocial respite from women whose transgressive undertones nevertheless seem to relate more to the conception of an exclusively cerebral romance than to the suggestion of some alternate sexual persuasion -  a scenario that sits nicely with Robinson's peculiarly asexual screen presence. Similarly, Chandler integrates Cain's pulp locales into an - admittedly nascent - panoramic mobility more in keeping with his own lurid romanticism, if only by virtue of the particular attention he draws to those motifs of slowness (a stuttering engine, the carriage where the murder takes place, the final flight on crutches) that reflect the salesman's increasing demobilisation, as well as the duo's recognition that the only way to avoid capture is to sink back into all those spaces where anonymity might dwell, most poetically in several scenes shot in and around "Jerry's Market", in downtown Los Angeles.

The first of Lang's great dream-noirs, The Woman In The Window extrapolates a narrative from the window display that fascinates psychology professor Richard Wanley (Edward G. Robinson) - and, more specifically, from its subordination of the ostensible point of focus - an oil painting of a beautiful woman - to the uncanny emptiness surrounding it, which manages to be both ethereal and oppressive, light and dark, as if air were imbued with the opacity of glass. Appropriately, Wanley's relationship with the object of this portrait (Joan Bennett) is immediately subordinated to their mutual entrapment in just such a medium, due to the unforeseen, traumatic emergence of one of her jaded lovers, and the violent manslaughter that quickly follows. To this end, Lang imbues the action with the same glassiness, from the mirrors that pervade the woman's apartment, to the car windows and windscreens that so often constitute the only thing between Wanley and capture, as well as their common denominator - the rear-vision mirror that equates looking over his shoulder with the mere act of glancing into this medium. The result is the first film to fully transform tension, or suspense, into the more characteristically noir experience of an interminable, unbearable waiting, in which the exponential identification of what is with what might be produces a hallucinatory intensity that, along with this shimmering glassiness, paves the way for what might otherwise be a fairly disappointing, or at least conventional, conclusion.

This haunting film elegantly interrogates Mexico's Pre-Columbian mythologies, taking their quintessential image - the floating gardens of Xochimilco - as the province of an allegory that centres on the eponymous heroine's (Dolores del Rio) attempt to survive an equally hostile Indian and Spanish population, the one decrying her as an untouchable, the other withholding quinine for a few extra pesos. Along with several spectacular crowd sequences that anticipate the Revolution to come - or, alternatively, envisage it as an extrapolation of anarchic religious ceremony - this construes Mexican identity as a contested space, or no- man's-land, analogous to the surface of the river that provides Maria with her flowers, and upon which most of the action takes place. Nevertheless, cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa ensures that this unease also informs that surface, imbuing it with a hyperbolic stillness that allows it to be completely perpendicular with the poplars against which it is set, as well as completely continuous with Maria's lustrous skin, thereby explicating its artificial, fantastic qualities. Hence Fernandez' use of a framing device in which an artist tortuously questions his methods and motivations for representing Maria, giving the lie to his insistence that "Painting is not as difficult as one supposes. I just paint what I see: Mexico".

This Victorian noir effectively takes place in one house, and the square that surrounds it, both of which are enlivened in a manner that prevents the plot becoming too stagebound, to the extent that they tend to surpass their inhabitants as protagonists. As the "house of horror", 19 Thornton Square possesses secrets of a sufficient magnitude - especially those pertaining to the mysterious murder of Paula Anton's (Ingrid Bergman) aunt, and her husband Gregory's (Charles Boyer) fascination with the property - to constitute a mnemonic presence; an awareness of free-floating, elusive recollections. More specifically, playwright Patrick Hamilton structures the narrative around a series of events that emphasise the house's organic continuity, both in itself as well as with the other terraces adjoining the square - most explicitly in the omnsicient tread of Gregory's footsteps across the attic floor, but most poetically in the shared gas system, which ensures that his ominous passage causes all the other fixtures in the house to flicker, paving the way for a series of hallucinatory tracking-shots. These form part of Cukor's contribution to this enlivening - a pervasive condensation of the house to so many vertical sight-lines, such that the province of the action takes place along a trajectory encompassing the front door, stairwell, ceiling of Paula's bedroom, attic and skylight of the attic, as if to hypothesise a point-of-view shot of the entire house; or, rather, a point-of-view shot from the perspective of it. Unfortunately, the flipside of this enlivening is a tendency towards one-dimensional human characterisation, with the result that the talents of Bergman, Boyer and Joseph Cotten (as a detective who takes a slightly implausible interest in Paula) are subordinated to a melodramatic imperative that finds clearest expression in the former's madness, and means that the charismatic contributions tend to come from the supporting cast, especially Angela Lansbury and Mary Whitty. That said, this one-dimensionality nicely reflects the mercilessness with which Gregory objectifies anyone who stands in the way of his plans; or, rather, his reduction of their eyes to so many ciphers for the jewels he hopes to locate.

The Miracle Of Morgan's Creek commences a more radical, if less consistent, period in Sturges' career, by transforming the comedy of remarriage into a comedy of bigamy. Not only does Trudy Knockenlocker (Betty Hutton) only recognise her desire for Norval Jones (Eddie Bracken) after an all-night binge that leaves her married and pregnant to a faceless soldier, but her use of an (unremembered) pseudonym makes remarriage an absolute necessity. At a certain level, this deconstruction of screwball conventions merely reinforces their profound affirmation of romance in the face of convention. Nevertheless, Sturges raises the comic disparity between Trudy's beauty and Norval's (supposed) ugliness to such a pitch that romance itself is poisoned by the cruel conflation of personality and appearance; or, alternatively, by the reduction of charisma to a mere extrapolation of physical gifts, rather than anything that might supervene them. At these moments, the film approaches Sullivan's Travels in its bitter self-revulsion, condensing the oppressiveness of a typecast star system into Norval's banal, pathetic, and ultimately self-fulfilling ruminations: "The older I get, the uglier I get...I guess a face like mine, you just can't grow out of it so easy...I really didn't blame you when you started looking at the personality kids with the Greek profiles." Similarly, Sturges pares the physical chaos that informs screwball back to its slapstick roots, drawing out its cruelty so as to suggest some deep, alarming violence texturing the comedy, and producing a series of pratfalls whose humour is ultimately subordinated to their rupturous reduction of characters to bodies. This culminates with the militaristic media frenzy that greets Trudy's birth of sextuplets ("Nature Answers Total War!...Platoon Born In Midwest!") - a miracle that, in Mayor McGinty's words, encapsulates "the biggest thing to happen to this state since we stole it from the Indians!"

The contemplative masterpiece of WWII cinema, A Canterbury Tale translates the strangeness of God into an extraordinary premise - that the war is a miracle, and its dislocations the mere pretext for a telescoping of history that condenses the spiritual life of Britain into a continuous revelatory presence, from the earliest days of the Iron Age to the peak of Anglicanism. This, in turn, presents a series of subsidiary miracles to a war nurse (Kim Hunter), American soldier (Bob Johnson), and English soldier (Dennis Price), all of whom find themselves on a modern day pilgrimage, to which end Powell and Pressburger subsume everything into topography, in its broadest sense. Not only is the narrative trajectory deflected into an elaboration of the various sight-lines of the cathedral - most pervasively from an elevated bend in the pilgrim's road, but most poetically from the vistas opened up by the bombing of Canterbury - but virtually every object hearkens back to a former time; or, rather, to a particular mythology of Englishness, encompassing hawks, ducking-stools, illuminated manuscripts, and the poetry of Dryden. Similarly, the 'characters' tend to be differentiated purely as various bodies of intimate, topographical knowledge, such that their very ability to converse at all both translates the temporal telescoping into a spatial register, and clarifies it as the product of a universal pastoral instinct, a longing for the country that is as old as war itself. The result is possibly the only film in which the duo benefited from black-and-white cinematography, conjuring up a shadowy universe between present and past that is ultimately identified with cinema itself.

Laura makes the astonishing, genre-bending gesture of replacing the hard-boiled lens that typifies noir with that of a verbose, effete aesthete (Clifton Webb), ensuring that the rugged masculinity proffered by the police officer (Dana Andrews) investigating the murder of socialite Laura Hunt (Gene Tierney) is subordinated to his status as a beautiful object, and his examination of the case subsumed into the audience's predatory contemplation of his adherence to those "muscular and handsome" ideals that constitute the real motivation for the crime. In the same way, his mobility is radically circumscribed, as is the province of the narrative, most of which takes place in two cluttered apartments, and, more generally, in a striking relocation of the noir universe from L.A. to Manhattan, and from a bourgeois to aristocratic mileu, both of which remove these spaces from the amorphous anonymity of their West Coast forbears. That said, mobility still remains, but is artfully transferred to the aesthete's omniscient, invisible poison pen, and the gossip that it generates, while romance finds itself caught between these two extremes; or, rather, finds expression in terms of the love affair between a gay man and his doll - an homme fatale and his sujet d'art - such that Laura is ultimately indistinguishable from her uncannily radiant portrait/reflection, and her sudden return merely clarifies that she was never really alive; a fine, porcelain ghost.