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Chapter Fifteen. 1944
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1944 271 Chapter Fifteen 1944 There is a scrap of dialogue in Robert Wise’s 1947 thriller Born to Kill that might serve as an epitaph for the film noir genre as a whole. The picture concerns a divorcée, Helen Brent (Claire Trevor), who must confront her own corrupt nature when she falls for Sam Wilde (Lawrence Tierney) whom she knows to be a psychopathic killer. Helen discovers that Mrs. Kraft (Esther Howard), an elderly friend of one of Wilde’s victims, has hired a private detective to find the killer and bring him to justice. Helen goes to see the old lady and warns her that unless she calls off the investigation, she will have her killed. Terrified, Mrs. Kraft agrees to Helen’s terms. But as Helen is leaving, Mrs. Kraft demonstrates what she thinks of her by spitting on her back. HELEN (turning around): Bad cess to me? MRS. KRAFT: No need for me to say it. You carry your own curse. Inside of you. This is the key to so many of the men and women who sauntered through the great noir films of the 1940s and early 1950s: they all carried their own curse. In film noir, even the most virtuous heroes and heroines are damaged goods, one way or another. They are the ones who can no longer believe in the complacent dreams that lie at the heart of American life, which is exactly what puts them in the path of danger. Because they no longer aspire to lead a ⟈ The Bennetts 272 nice, clean existence, they become susceptible to the stiff drink, the cheap thrill, the fast buck. Film noir came along just when American audiences were ready for it. It seemed the ideal antidote to the noble, flag-waving films of World War II, such as David O. Selznick’s Since You Went Away (1944), with its condescending portrait of the brave “little” people holding down the home front. Said actress Teresa Wright, who played a long string of fresh-faced heroines in the 1940s, “The girl next door wasn’t really the girl next door. She was the girl next door to the movie star next door. There’s something in all my early performances . . . I don’t know how to describe it except to say that it’s so 1940s. . . . It’s not that I wasn’t thinking the right thing. I was, but the thought is dressed in something prettier. We were all used to that technique. You were doing the real thing as that girl would do it if she were perfect.” In truth, film noir was not necessarily more realistic than the scrubbed and wholesome wartime dramas. Strictly speaking, realism in the American cinema was still at least a decade away, and most film noir had a stylized language and grammar all its own that had little to do with the way real people spoke or behaved. Often, the press scorned these films—“so many of these murder operas are an insult to thinking people,” sniffed Louella Parsons in 1944—and the actors who appeared in them often failed to recognize their significance. Audrey Totter, who starred in fine noir examples such as The Lady in the Lake (1946) and Tension (1949), said, “Film noir really wasn’t regarded as anything important in the 1940s. It was the big color historical and musical movies that were highly thought of.” But to many in the audience, film noir presented an accurate picture of the world—or what the world had become. With the world split asunder by war, Americans suddenly saw darkness all around them, in a frightening and immediate way. Many in the audience sought escapism, but many others seemed to have developed a craving for brutality on film, as if the fantasy world of crime onscreen could help blot out the horrors taking place around the globe. In this respect, film noir belongs absolutely to the 1940s, but [3.236.139.73] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 18:55 GMT) 1944 273 there were earlier influences. Among them were the Warner Bros. crime melodramas of the 1930s, although they were spare and artless , without all the striking lighting effects and camera angles associated with the noir style. But what really presaged film noir was German expressionism— an embrace of the decadent side of human nature that had sprung up following Germany’s defeat in World War I. The harsh terms of the armistice, and the...