The Aesthetic of Noir

Nearly 100 years ago, Dashiell Hammett wrote The Maltese Falcon. The novel was adapted for the screen in 1931 and again in 1936, but it didn’t connect with audiences until John Huston remade it in 1941 with Humphrey Bogart.

Perhaps the third time is also the charm for Barry Gifford’s No Daylight in That Face: Adventures in Film Noir, a collection of film criticism originally published as The Devil Thumbs a Ride and Other Unforgettable Films in 1988 and reissued, with some additional content, in 2001 as Out of the Past: Adventures in Film Noir.

Twenty-four years later, Gifford has expanded the book once more, adding a new preface and seven essays. The book offers a master class in blunt language and precise thinking, and the reviews are far from formulaic. Sometimes, Gifford provides a plot summary; other times, he focuses on an actor, a director, or even the novelist who wrote the source material. Considering Stanley Kubrick’s 1956 caper film The Killing, he suggests that the movie “really pulls in all of the sicko elements of noir that master novelist Jim Thompson specialized in. It’s basically cruelty heaped on top of cruelty; nobody can get it right so nobody gets anything. End of moral, end of story.”

In the preface, Gifford explains that he didn’t intend to create a comprehensive guide; rather, the book should be read as a collection of impressions. The entry for Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole (1951), for instance, recounts an experience Gifford had while driving on the outskirts of Albuquerque, New Mexico. After passing a couple of grizzled ranchers in an old pickup truck, he stopped at a diner for eggs and a cup of coffee. The waitress was so young and hardened, it practically hurt him to look at her. When he was done eating, Gifford reluctantly drove off, “leaving the angel of the desert café…to what I couldn’t touch but what I could not help but be touched by.”

That’s the extent of the review. There’s no mention of the story, the actors, or anything. But in the span of six short paragraphs, Gifford captures the essence of noir. The wrong man falls for the wrong woman (or vice versa), and if he pushes his luck there’s going to be trouble. Each moment Gifford lingered in that diner, I waited for those ranchers to come through the door and all hell to break loose.

Technically, Ace in the Hole isn’t noir. It’s more of a pitiless Day of the Locust–style takedown of sensationalist journalism, but Gifford is less concerned with any rigid definitions of form than with the impressions these movies made on him.

For him, noir isn’t a genre unto itself but rather a rough aesthetic that comes in many shapes: homage noir (The American Friend); Western noir (Blood on the Moon, Johnny Guitar); noir enough (Body Heat); film noir outré, as in “outside the usual boundary of darkness” (Chinatown); under-noir (Detour); postmodern/neo-noir (House of Games); science fiction noir (Invasion of the Body Snatchers); high melodrama noir (Laura, Out of the Past); war noir (Ministry of Fear); noir horror (Repulsion); black comedy noir (Cul-de-sac); terror noir (Stranger on the Third Floor); and Dream Factory noir (Sunset Boulevard).

These distinctions don’t matter. All that matters, as Gifford reminds us in his review of Delmer Daves’s Dark Passage (1947), is the feeling. “Everything that happens in this movie,” Gifford writes, “is silly, farfetched, or just plain unreal. All of which is perfectly fine—movies aren’t meant to be real. The reality is in the feelings produced by the viewing.”

Gifford, of course, is no stranger to Hollywood. Several of his novels have been adapted for the screen, including Wild at Heart, and he cowrote the screenplay for Lost Highway with David Lynch.

His connection to noir runs equally deep. From 1984 to 1989, he was a founding editor at Berkeley’s Black Lizard publishing house and worked to get dozens of novels by Thompson, David Goodis, Charles Willeford, and others back into print, exposing a new generation of readers to these overlooked works. He grew up in Chicago, the son of a low-level Jewish racketeer and an Irish Catholic beauty queen. After his father’s sudden death in 1958, Gifford and his mother hit the road, shuttling between Chicago and Key West, Florida, and he spent a lot of time in front of hotel-room television sets, watching black-and-white movies that were considered old even then.

In his review of Autumn Leaves, a Robert Aldrich film from 1956 starring Joan Crawford, Gifford enhances his description of the character’s lousy, no-good husband with this devastating line: “My mother had a husband like this.”

There’s more heartbreak in those seven words than in many of these movies. Maybe that’s why Gifford’s definition of noir is so broad: All movies are stranger and scarier when you watch them alone in the dark, late at night.

“I got up at 3:30 in the morning to watch this movie on T.V.—the perfect time for it,” Gifford notes in his review of The Devil Thumbs a Ride, “the period during which reality is suspended, when the rational mind loses control, and everything goes haywire.”

The sense that everything has gone haywire is with us 24-7 these days. So it’s hardly surprising that Gifford’s final word on the desperate men and women in these movies feels startlingly of the moment: “But nobody can gain in this universe: everything turns up empty, a hustle on both sides of the law, which itself is a scam.”

Is he describing the plot of 1950’s The Asphalt Jungle or the world we occupy today?•