Out of the Past and Into the Fire

5) Noir demands actors with voltage, and they are in short supply these days.

Some of the sizzle from old-time noir comes from the zombie cool of the pros who starred in it. "One of the great pleasures these movies give," says Michael Tolkin, "is seeing how other people live. Watching and listening to Dan Duryea, in Ministry of Fear or The Woman in the Window, wearing a cheap suit with a too-wide tie, tells volumes. He's playing one of the million characters that exist in that world, where movies today have about two of those characters." It's axiomatic that noir requires stylized, vivid actors. Barbara Stanwyck once defined "presence" as "coming on the screen as if someone kicked you in the seat of the pants." But noir requires a different, surreally downplayed "presence." Humphrey Bogart and Mary Astor in The Maltese Falcon, or Gene Tierney, Dana Andrews, Vincent Price and Clifton Webb in Laura, play with a flattened-out monotone cool that's completely unlike anything else they did. Audiences in the '40s and '50s grooved to the new, affectless acting style they found in noir. But that's because they could tell it was deliberate. Contemporary audiences take chillcd-out, colorless actors for granted. These days, who doesn't sound like one of the walking dead?

In modern noir, we've mostly gotten Kevin Costner--one of our least resonant actors--floating through No Way Out. Or Costner and Madeleine Stowe, the frozen dead, in Revenge, barely changing their expressions. "We're approaching the post-personality era," James Toback asserts. "Shifty nuances of consciousness, dangerous extremes of mood--historically, the respiratory system of film noir--have, at best, become 'weird,' or, at worst, 'sick.' The future is with biochemistry, astrophysics, genetic engineering: Cut out aberration, smooth out rough edges, straighten out the twists. Can irrational man and film noir be saved? Time is not on our side."

It's not like we haven't had actors born to bite into noir: Jack Nicholson, Nick Nolte, James Caan, Tuesday Weld, Michelle Pfeiffer, Melanie Griffith, Richard Gere, Andy Garcia, Ellen Barkin, Judy Davis. But few actors believe they can sell tickets playing an ambiguous character. Tony Good-stone, an actor who is working on a book about the advertising of noir, believes audiences want to see "invincible, Schwarzenegger heroes, whereas noir heroes are aware they're in a losing situation, fight through it anyway, and almost always lose. How many actors want to play that? How many people will pay to see it?"

Okay, so very few writers, directors or actors know how to do it anymore, but film noir, like the western, the suspense thriller and the musical, appears to be virtually indestructible. "Audiences may prefer fantasies where the man carries off the girl in his arms at the end," says Nick Kazan, "but something in the souls of creative people attracts them to bleaker material." Which implies that noir will always be a hothouse species. And that reminds me: Gotta go catch a screening of China Moon, a new, erotic noir starring Ed Harris and Madeleine Stowe. Will it be any good? The odds say no. But, hey, once a noir die-hard, always one.

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Stephen Rebello interviewed Drew Barrymore for our March issue.

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