Black and White Blues

Black and White Blues
My Fascination with Film Noir

It’s often called:
 “The Dark Side of American Cinema.”
Someone else asked if Film Noir was another name for those shoot-em-ups like “Little Ceaser” with James Cagney talking about “You dirty rats.”
Well yes, Film Noir is often confused with Cop and Robber flicks of the Forties and Fifties, where the bad guys are all bad, the good guys squeaky clean, and truth and honesty ultimately win out.
In Noir, not only do the good guys often lose, by the end of the movie, you’re often rooting for them to do so. No one’s all clean, everyone’s a little dirty, no one gets out alive.
Movies like “The Set-Up” stand as monuments to sleaze and corruption, the underlying moral being: “Everybody has a price.”

In post WWII America, Hollywood was hard at work painting a reality that reinforced a rigid status quo.
Around the edges, there were some different postcards turning up.

Double Indemnity

Ten years before he became America’s favorite single parent, Fred McMurray made one of the greatest, seediest films ever shot.
“Double Indemnity” stars Fred and the original Black Widow Her- Own- Bad -Self, Barbara Stanwyck.
It seems that the two of them, he, the sleaze ball insurance salesman, and she, the sleaze ballet (not bad, Wirtz) wife of an oilman, upon seeing each other, develop such a mutual case of the Whoseyerdaddies, that they are willing to sell her emotionally unavailable, closet alcoholic, physically abusive husband, an insurance policy that pays big cabbage should his Cruise Ship head down The River Styx ahead of schedule, in the hopes that indeed it will.

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 Fred And Babs cook up a scheme to speed up the process, and increase the odds of said accident, hoping to make it look like Jerk Wad (whom by now, you really don’t like) falls off the back of a train.
Meanwhile, they strangle him.
Not only that, but Miz Barb seems to be er, enjoying herself, while it’s occuring.
(Another, often not discussed characteristic of the Noir genre is a serious element of thinly veiled S/M. )
From there, it gets dark.
Made in 1946, directed by Billy Wilder, it brought attention to a style which up until then, had been more of an underground style known as “Thrillers”. There’s not a drop of blood,  curse word, or naked breast, but, trust me, “Double Indemnity” is indeed a serious f-cking Thriller with dialogue  written by number –one bad-ass hard-boiled writer, Raymond Chandler 
Indeed, Film Noir often features screenplays written by such huge talents as James M. Cain, Cornell Woolrich, William Faulkner, Raymond Chandler and the legendary Jim Thompson. If some of these names aren’t immediately familiar, imagine screenplays written by Stephen King, George Pelacanos, Sue Grafton, Lee Smith, or Clive Barker, you get the idea.) 
While America tried to convince itself that all was clear cut and understandable in  the Post War World,, these great writers, along with onscreen talents like Ida Lupino and Robert Ryan, and directors like Nicholas Ray, Orson Welles, and Anthony Mann, reminded us that Good and Evil are rarely Black And White, but more often shades of Grey.