Light & shadow: crime flicks

A popular genre in cinema is the crime and detective story. Sir Alfred Hitchcock, about whom I wrote two months ago, surprisingly did not make films with detectives as main characters with the exception of the memorable “Vertigo” (1958).

The English have always been drawn to the subject of crime, and amongst the popular writers in this field have been Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Dame Agatha Christie and Ruth Rendell. The films that have been made from Doyle and Christie have never been masterpieces but have been popular enough. The series of Christie’s Miss Marple adaptations in the early sixties and the colourful realisation of “Murder On the Orient Express” and “Death On the Nile” (featuring the Belgian detective, Hercule Poirot) were expensive-looking but overladen with actors past their prime in cameo roles in a strange world that never existed. Not my kind of crime films.

I far prefer the “hard-boiled” school of American crime writing, typified by Raymond Chandler (the best), Dashiel Hammett and Ed McBain, and the cinematic adaptations have generally retained their cynical and realistic flavour. Two early masterpieces of this genre were “Farewell My Lovely” (aka “Murder My Sweet”) directed by Edward Dmytryk (1944) and Billy Wilder’s splendidly acerbic and cynical “Double Indemnity” (1943), both Chandler stories, which were notable for their witty scripts, excellent acting and controlled direction which made them big hits of their day.

The American gangster film of a decade earlier had given us classics such as “Little Caesar” (Le Roy, 1930), “Public Enemy” (Wellman, 1931) and “Scarface” (Hawks, 1932), all marked by their punchy dialogue with natural street cadences, urban energy and brutality.

The post-war “films noir” (to use a term coined by the French critics), was influenced by German Expressionism and had  a cheap but imaginative style, notable for dramatic lighting, full of shadows and garish lighting, and claustrophobic settings. The first of this type of film is reckoned to be “Stranger on the Third Floor” (Ingster, 1940) which featured a German Expressionist actor, Peter Lorre, as the murderer. Key films in this style are Huston’s “The Maltese Falcon” (1941) and “The Asphalt Jungle” (1950), “The Big Sleep” (Hawks, 1946), “Phantom Lady” (1944) and “The Killers” (1946) – both directed by the German Robert Siodmak, “Out of the Past” (Jacques Tourneur, 1947) and “Touch of Evil” (Welles, 1958), probably the last of the great films noir. They are marked by their world-weary characters, cynical dialogue, air of doom and relationships with dangerous women.

The French took to crime stories in a big way and they have long been admirers of the American style. Outstanding examples of such “policiers” are Dassin’s “Du Rififi Chez les Hommes” (1955), Melville’s “Le Deuxième Souffle” (“Second Breath”, 1966) and “36” (Olivier Marchal, 2006). Even the radical Jean-Luc Godard made an innovative crime film, “A Bout de Souffle” (“Breathless”, 1960).
In more recent years there has been a return to the gangster film, most notably Coppola’s “the Godfather” trilogy (1972 – 1990) of which part 2 is a superb masterwork full of wonderful period detail and atmosphere, “The French Connection” (1971), Friedkin’s brilliantly made cops and robbers film made on authentic New York locations, and Roman Polanski’s “ Chinatown” (1974) which is in a class of its own, dealing with corruption in the sundrenched beauties of California. The crime and gangster film is still alive and well and Michael Mann has contributed two, “Heat” (1995) and “Public Enemies” (2009), but with less success than the masterly Martin Scorsese, whose “Goodfellas” (1990) set horrific new standards in the depiction of Mafia brutality.  KR