Dream-makingHUM 3280: Narrative Film

Fall 2014Dr. Perdigao

September 22-24, 2014

Origins• Dashiell Hammett novel The Maltese Falcon (1930), serialized pulp fiction

• Hammett was a Pinkerton detective; granddaughter describes code of being a detective, creating barrier between self and rest of the world, remaining secret, anonymous, invulnerable

• After contracting tuberculosis, left Pinkerton, started writing short stories, pulp fiction

• Black Mask magazine

• Started writing about Sam Spade in 1928, before Depression

• Ideas changing during the time

• “avaricious aspirations”—hunt for wealth not what one thought it would be

• Turning detective story into “literature”

“Film[ing] the book”• Warner Bros. bought film rights

• 1931 film version, pre-Code The Maltese Falcon, originally titled “Woman of the World,” emphasis on sex, sexuality

• Hal Wallis wanted to remake the film

• 1936 Satan Met a Lady with Bette Davis as femme fatale, falcon as ram’s horn

• Inspiration from Welles’ Citizen Kane

• Director John Huston said he would “shoot the book”

• Short shooting schedule, small budget, all interior shots

• Alterations to satisfy Code

John Huston• The Maltese Falcon (1941)• Key Largo (1948)• The Treasure of Sierra Madre (1948)• The African Queen (1951)• The Red Badge of Courage (1951)• Moulin Rouge (1952)• Moby Dick (1956)• Casino Royale (1967)• Wise Blood (1979)• Annie (1982)• Prizzi’s Honor (1985)• The Dead (1987)

Casting• Samuel Spade: Humphrey Bogart

• Miles Archer: Jerome Cowman

• Ruth Wonderly/Brigid O’Shaughnessy: Mary Astor, scandal in personal life, “parody of her life in the press” as Black Widow, femme fatale

• Joel Cairo: Peter Lorre

• Kasper Gutman: Sydney Greenstreet

• Effie Perine: Lee Patrick

Defining Genres• As first great detective film

• Breaking stereotypes—no good guys, girls

• Matching style and content

• Film noir

• Over-exposure, smoky atmospheres

• Name from French film critics but style from German expressionist filmmaking technique

• Light and shadow, dramatic camera angles, generally pessimistic world views

• Low camera angle, asymmetrical composition

• Effects of light slashing through scenes, on bodies

Crises• Female workforce in US in early 1940s rose from 11 million to 20 million

during the war years (Avila 223)

• Despite celebration of “Rosie the Riveter,” animosity toward women abandoning traditional social roles (Avila 223)

• Film noir’s representation of “new breed of public women—sassy, conniving, and out to undermine masculine authority through her many misdeeds” (Avila 223)

• “crisis of white masculinity at the outset of the postwar period” (225)

• “destabilization of the white male identity within the topsy-turvy world of the modern city” (225), anti-hero

• Avila, Eric. “Film Noir, Disneyland, and the Cold War (Sub)Urban Imaginary.” Hollywood’s America: Twentieth-Century America Through Film. 4th ed. Ed. Steven Mintz and Randy W. Roberts. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. 219-233. print.

Defining Genres• Drawing from characters and plots of gangster movies and hard-boiled

detective fiction of the 1930s (Mintz and Roberts 175)

• Gangster films set in the 1930s, Prohibition as context (Corrigan and White 356)

• Protagonist representing the law or more ambiguous version of it (176)

• Film noir as subgenre of crime films

• Darkness and corruption in world, characters—no resolution (176)

• Paranoia and entrapment (Dick 147)

• Canted shots to show world changed, shrouded in fog (147)

• Stock characters: private detectives, insurance salesmen, prostitutes, murderous housewives, two-time losers, ex-convicts, and gamblers (147-148)

Defining Genres• Femme fatale and male lover

• Death in ending, of either character (Dick 148)

• Blonde, wearing white

• Idea of fate

• Voiceover narration and flashbacks, flashbacks within flashbacks (149)

• Plots: whodunit, man/woman in hiding, old dark house, cover-up, murderous couple, murderous lover (149)

Defining Genres• European émigrés fleeing Hitler’s Germany—wartime necessity with limited

availability of bright lighting and effects—looming shadows, stark contrasts of darkness and light (Mintz and Roberts 175)

• Films and directors “tap[ping] into broader cultural concerns” (175), more realistic than Depression-era films

• Shift from or rejection of films that “sought to raise morale and reinforce traditional values,” moving toward representation of gritty view of society in its realism (175)

• Influenced by Freudian psychoanalysis, psychological sophistication in genre (177)

• Film noir giving “tangible expression to the psychic confusion of a nation that had won the largest war in history but faced even greater uncertainties in peacetime” (Mintz and Roberts 22-23)

“I’m not heroic”• “World War II had produced far-reaching changes in American life: it

accelerated the mobility of the population, raised living standards, and profoundly altered race relations and the role of women. Film noir metaphorically addressed many anxieties and apprehensions: the disorientation of returning GIs, fear of nuclear weapons, paranoia generated by the early Cold War, and anxieties aroused by the changing role of women. Characterized by sexual insecurity, aberrant psychology, and nightmarish camera work, film noir depicted a world of threatening shadows and ambiguities—a world of obsession, alienation, corruption, deceit, blurred identity, paranoia, dementia, weak men, cold-blooded femmes fatales, and, inevitably, murder. Its style consisted of looming close-ups, oblique camera angles, and crowded compositions that produced a sense of entrapment. The films’ narratives were rarely straightforward; they contained frequent flashbacks and voiceovers” (Mintz and Roberts 23).

• “We often think of the postwar era as a time of optimism fueled by economic prosperity, but film noir reveals the underside of the era: its anxieties, its paranoia, and, in the wake of the Holocaust, the concentration camp, and the dawn of the atomic age, its doubts about the essential goodness of human nature” (Mintz and Roberts 177).

Breaking Shots• Camera angles similar to those in Citizen Kane

• MacGuffin—use of prop, feeding characters’ greed and giving existential weight to tale—Hammett’s “fatalistic metaphor of the futile pursuit of wealth”

• Rosebud’s significance

• http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20010513/REVIEWS08/105130301/1023

• Upsetting conventions

Framing• Role of the detective

Sherlock, Jr.?

• Masculinity and femininity

• Authority

• Corruption

• Loyalty, truth, integrity (Corrigan and White 176)

• “The stuff that dreams are made of”

• “Huh?”