Out of the Past and Into the Fire

1) Genre-idolizers are usually the wrong guys for the job of making noir work in the '90s.

"Asking 'Why isn't contemporary film noir as good as the old?' is like asking 'Why isn't contemporary Impressionism as good as Monet?' " observes writer-director Nick Kazan. "There's art, then there's imitation. When writers and directors derive feeling and technique from 40-year-old, black and white masterpieces, how can it be anything but stale and pathetic? It's like once having fallen madly for a girl with short, dark hair, then spending the rest of your life going to bed with girls with short, dark hair, trying to recreate something you never can recreate."

In great old noir, feeling excites technique. In new noir, technique pinch-hits for feeling. Nobody in the '40s and '50s learned moviemaking at school. Nobody but Frenchmen sat around loathing/idolizing American pop, revering such writers as Chandler, Hammett, Cain, Cornell Woolrich and Patricia Highsmith, enshrining such directors as Hitchcock, Hawks, Don Siegel, Phil Karlson and Sam Fuller. "Turning noir into a cult," asserts Michael Tolkin, who co-wrote Deep Cover, "made it a blind alley to filmmakers. Breed a generation of film school graduates who grow up studying noir, who only know movies, and that puts noir, or any other kind of film, in the way of their being able to see it. Or to make it."

Once critic-turned-director Peter (Paper Moon) Bogdanovich made it seem hip and profitable to direct movies about other movies, the gate was blown wide for such other encyclopedic film buffs as George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Paul Schrader, Joe Dante, John Landis, Mel Brooks, John Carpenter and Lawrence Kasdan to play Raiders of the Lost Genres. Just when Vietnam was a festering, open sore, a wave of nostalgia (for danger long since warded off, like WWII Nazis, space creatures or whatever) came along to balm it over. In the '60s and '70s, such films as Marlowe, The Big Sleep (the remake), The Maltese Bippy, Peeper, Gumshoe, Dead and Farewell, and My Lovely winked knowingly as they paraded around in vintage clothes like trick-or-treaters and bracketed their line readings with quotation marks.

Things livened up when Kasdan did Body Heat in 1981. Not that this film didn't cast backward glances. The plot steals from James M. Cain, and, though set in the present, the film's mired in '40s imagery--slow-whirling ceiling fans, chinks of light through half closed blinds, and so on. But Body Heat was not just a slow dance down memory lane. The erotic scenes have the feel of post-'60s sex in them; Mickey Rourke is unmistakably modern-screwy; and William Hurt is a purely contemporary dupe--a young, loutish lawyer fuckup ("You're not very bright, are you?" Kathleen Turner observes. "I like that in a man").

But Kasdan's achievement was the exception, not the rule. Just look at the sequel to Chinatown to see how far wrong a guy can go mining noir. Whereas Roman Polanski had brilliantly played with our expectations of the private eye/treacherous dame genre, director Jack Nicholson wowed us with production values and went without a subtext. Polanski had known enough to ditch screenwriter Robert Towne's original upbeat ending for an oedipal bloodbath straight out of Greek tragedy. In The Two Jakes, Nicholson seems to have conned himself into believing he could hide the wobbles with period window dressing. "When moviemakers draw on old stories, old styles," says Henry Bean, "they're going to get trapped in forms that refer to an earlier vision." Indeed.

2) Contemporary noir films do not address our times the way classic noir films addressed theirs.

"What's inspiring about noir is what's inspiring about postwar Japanese movies or Italian movies of the '50s and '60s," says Michael Tolkin. "They're pictures of a social moment. They're what happened when filmmakers looked at their time in a cold light and tried to make sense of it." Hanging heavy over vintage noir is the sense that times are rotten and unlikely to improve, and people are scared because the game of life is rigged. In Criss Cross (1949), shot extensively on the streets of the Bunker Hill section of L.A., Burt Lancaster deadpans in voiceover: "It was in the cards or it was fate or a jinx or whatever you want to call it." Characters in old-time noir come by such fatalism honestly. They're suffering from war wounds, reeling from bad love affairs. They've been scammed by friends. On top of that, they're panicked at being a paycheck or two away from homelessness. When audiences left theaters, their terror wasn't just about how other people lived.

"The job of art is to talk about our lives now, or what's the point?" says Henry Bean, whose Deep Cover is a thriller about our government's cozying up to a powerful, Noriega-like drug trafficker. "We've got George Bush as president, a terrible economy, cities going to hell, terrible race relations, an America completely bereft of any kind of optimism about itself. What more material does anyone need to make contemporary stories that let go of these old noir forms?" As Nick Kazan says, "The future right now seems at least as bleak as it seemed any time films noir were made in the past. A pessimistic world view, the stuff of noir, seems the only sane response."

"We don't know how to look at our time," says Tolkin. "We're dumb, where guys back in the days of Billy Wilder, Sam Fuller and Don Siegel were brilliant. Storytelling is so lame now. We don't have people who can even plot the way Robert Towne did Chinatown."

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