Film Chronicle

Abstract

Film Chronicle Jefferson Hunter (bio) The Dark Corner, directed by Henry Hathaway (Twentieth-Century Fox, 2005, and Netflix) Woman on the Run, directed by Norman Foster (Flicker Alley, 2016, and Amazon Video) Detour, directed by Edgar G. Ulmer (Amazon Video) Out of the Past, directed by Jacques Tourneur (Warner Archive, 2014, and Amazon Video) The Postman Always Rings Twice, directed by Tay Garnett (Warner Brothers, 2012, and Amazon Video) Double Indemnity, directed by Billy Wilder (Universal Pictures Home Entertainment, 2012, and Amazon Video) Criss Cross, directed by Robert Siodmak (Universal Pictures Home Entertainment, 2004, and Amazon Video) L. A. Confidential, directed by Curtis Hanson (New Regency, 2015, and Amazon Video) In The Dark Corner (1946), before the camera turns to the private eye and his secretary sharing a cozy table in the High Hat Club, it lingers on the image of a pianist tickling the jazz ivories onstage. Oddly, the image takes the form of a shadow cast against a blank wall. Why a shadow? It is hard to think of any reason for the shot except the director Henry Hathaway’s wish to demonstrate a familiarity with, supply a requisite icon of, the genre he is working in. You know a private eye by his fedora and gat and hard-guy talk; you know a film noir by its shadows, and The Dark Corner is absolutely a film noir. Hathaway’s movie nicely typifies the genre, coming as it does from noir’s richest period, the fifteen or so years after the close of World War II when Hollywood, seemingly anxious about the nuclear arms race, McCarthyism, big-city crime, or the unsettling prospect of new roles for women, translated those anxieties into hundreds of dark dramas. Often aided by émigré cinematographers and set designers who knew a thing or two about dark German Expressionism, the studios devised an instantly recognizable noir look, dramatically deep blacks and glaring whites, the twin effects of low-key, high-contrast lighting—“mystery lighting,” the great Hungarian-born cinematographer John Alton called it in his 1949 book Painting with Light. We also see strongly rhythmical line-ups of shadows, say those cast by the slats of Venetian blinds or the banisters of stairs in run-down boarding houses, and we see women’s hair and the curling smoke from cigarettes, both backlit, both alluring. Light in noir tends to come from sources within the mise-en-scène. These sources viewers in the 1940s quickly learned to read as emblems of a certain type of big-city life, simultaneously mysterious, violent, and cheaply glamorous. Neon signs for nightclubs blink on and off; streetlamps glare in reflection from [End Page 665] puddles on the wet asphalt; that kind of thing. If a door should suddenly open, it admits a stab of white into the blackness, and possibly the flash of gun muzzles, as in that most iconic and influential of noirs, the Hemingway adaptation The Killers, from 1946. To return to The Dark Corner, along with the noir look it features some quintessentially noir plot turns—a chase through busy streets and sudden outbreaks of violence, usually photographed in shadows so as not to offend the censor—and standard noir character types, like a pair of beautiful dames, one who can be trusted and one who can’t (the latter betrays her old husband sexually, then pulls out a gun). Along with these women, the story provides a tough thug, a tougher police lieutenant who drops by to give the private eye a hard time, and above all that private eye himself, Brad Galt, who like many male figures in film noir is damaged goods, having a guilty past to live down and depressive moments to get over. Galt dreads his “dark corner,” the sense that an unjust world is closing in, the better not to give a sucker like him an even break. This dark metaphorical space lends a real depth to all the literally shadowed doorways and nighttime streets we see. Partially countering the darkness, and making Hathaway’s film more varied and interesting, is its soundtrack, an unusually full repertoire of ordinary, undramatic urban noises, the shriek of a child’s...