Noir Hits the road, an Interview with Imogen Sara Smith

An interview with Imogen Sara Smith

by Aaron Cutler
Illustration by Tony Millionaire
Share
Copy link
12 Snaps
Noir Hits the road, an Interview with Imogen Sara Smith
Aaron Cutler

Copy link
12 Snaps

Film noir is usually associated with urban settings, but in Imogen Sara Smith’s
book In Lonely Places: Film Noir Beyond the City, she considers different noir
locations—pristine suburbs, Western deserts, seedy border towns—to describe the
genre as ultimately stemming from an existential condition. It’s an elegantly
detailed tour through genre classics like Out of the Past (1947) and On Dangerous
Ground (1952), in which Smith shows that no matter how far you run, you can’t
escape yourself. Smith is also the author of Buster Keaton: The Persistence of
Comedy.

—Aaron Cutler

THE BELIEVER: How did you start writing this book?

IMOGEN SARA SMITH: People always talk about the city as central, even necessary, to
noir. But a few years ago it dawned on me that there are many noir films with
nonurban settings. By coincidence, I had just watched several— I think they were
Raw Deal (1948), Border Incident (1949), and The Hitch-Hiker (1953). So at first—
just for fun—I was seeing how many of these films I could think of, and how many
nonurban settings there were: the desert, the ocean, the road, small towns, the
Mexican border. I saw this pattern as significant because in the postwar years
there was a movement away from cities into the suburbs—a rejection of urbanism.
This relates to the way in which, in the nonurban noirs, emptiness—a sense of
people stranded in vacant spaces and of things coming apart—replaces the
claustrophobic, encroaching, and labyrinthine spaces associated with urban noir. I
started thinking about the way society is depicted—or rather, not depicted—in noir.
Typical Hollywood films of the ’30s were full of crowds—there’s always an awareness
of a larger society surrounding the characters and the potential for some kind of
collective action. In noir, by contrast, it’s like people exist in a vacuum. When
any group or institution is portrayed, it’s almost always corrupt or criminal, or
it breaks down. People can’t be trusted; all relationships are vulnerable to
betrayal. Alienation is at the heart of the noir condition. I think noir is so
resonant in American culture because it delves into the dark side of our belief in
independence and autonomy, which relates to a traditional distrust of cities, the
importance of open space and mobility in the American imagination.

BLVR: Why did noir move away from communal spaces? Was it reflecting something that
was happening in the culture?

ISS: Yes, especially the political climate. A lot of the writers, directors, and
actors who were involved in film noir were left-wing, and many of them fell afoul
of the House Un-American Activities Committee during the ’50s—Joseph Losey, Jules
Dassin, Edward Dmytryk, Cy Endfield. I see noir in part as an expression of the
disillusionment of the left, because during the 1930s, socialism and even communism
seemed like they actually had a chance in America, as a response to the Depression.
Then the war changed the whole mood of the country, and after that came the Cold
War and the demonization of communism. Many noir films are bitter attacks on
capitalism: they show organized crime as essentially indistinguishable from big
business, or they show people warped by materialism until they turn to crime
because they’re so desperate to achieve the American dream. The films are
despairing and pessimistic, offering no solutions. They also reflect changes in
technology and social life. During the postwar era, television replaced theaters,
cars replaced public transportation, and the suburban “nuclear family” replaced
urban communal living or rural extended families. Because people had appliances,
they no longer needed servants, milkmen, icemen, and so forth. The glory of all
this new technology was supposed to be that it made the family, or the individual,
self-sufficient. But what noir reflects is that it also made life lonelier, and
made people less trusting of each other.

BLVR: What about the relationship between the sexes? How is that portrayed in noir?
Farley Granger and Cathy O’Donnell in They Live By Night (1948).

ISS: The standard account of the femme fatale figure is that the trope grew out of
male anxiety about women’s greater independence during the war. But the femme
fatale is never a woman who works. And she’s hardly an independent woman; she uses
men to get what she wants, exploiting her sexual wiles and manipulating men by
presenting herself as weak. The postwar years were a time when women were pressured
to leave the workplace, and America moved back toward a society where women
depended entirely on men for their livelihood. In noir, this becomes an ugly
equation: women use sex to get money, men use money to get sex, and both sides
lose. There is a whole category of domestic noirs that deal with how women react to
their limited lives. Household interiors appear oppressive or threatening, showing
the suburban dream home as a jail. Films like Leave Her to Heaven (1945), The
Strange Affair of Uncle Harry (1945), and Angel Face (1952) are all set in versions
of an ideal house and feature atypical femmes fatales who are motivated not by
greed and selfishness but by an obsessive need for love—a regressive inability to
grow beyond a childlike dependence on a father figure or brother figure. Another
common plot has a female protagonist imprisoned in her home and menaced by a man,
often her husband, which ironically undermines the notion of marrying for security.
On the other hand, some of the most positive versions of male-female relationships
in noir come in the subgenre of road movies that follow the Bonnie and Clyde
formula, like They Live by Night (1948), Gun Crazy (1950), and Tomorrow Is Another
Day (1951). In these intensely romantic films, the shared experience of living
outside the law and society brings couples closer than anything else. The lovers
can trust only one another, but in the end the society they abandoned destroys
them.

BLVR: How did the style of acting in film noir express the psychology of these
characters?
Ida Lupino and Robert Ryan in On Dangerous Ground (1952)

ISS: I think the acting style in noir is largely about the dichotomy between masks
and naked emotions. The mask is mostly a performance of the hard-boiled persona—an
intensely stylized self-presentation that is largely about protection, not
revealing any vulnerabilities or letting people know your real thoughts. The poker
face, clothing, accessories, and props are very important in this performance—all
masking and guarding the wearer. But noir is really about what goes on beneath the
surface, about what happens when the performance fails and the truth is revealed.

The hard-boiled mask is very much an urban style, and without oversimplifying, I
think one can say that nonurban settings bring out more unguarded as well as more
physically and emotionally active performances, whether it’s in the openness and
sincerity of small-town “innocents”—for instance the beautifully honest performance
by Phyllis Thaxter as the wife of a struggling fishing-boat captain in The Breaking
Point (1950)—or the naked desperation of people pushed to extremes in deserts or
the wilderness, like the characters played by Edmond O’Brien and Frank Lovejoy in
Ida Lupino’s The Hitch-Hiker. There’s a greater physicality, sensuality, and
naturalness in the nonurban films, and less of a stylish smoke screen.

BLVR: How did you structure your book?

ISS: I structured it geographically, so it starts with the city and moves into
increasingly remote, wild, or deserted regions—a largely westward movement. Travel
is important to the book. Noir consistently undermines the American love affair
with the road and the belief that travel equals freedom—that you can always get a
new start in a different place. In noir, no place is pure, and there’s no refuge to
be found in unspoiled wilderness or small-town innocence. The notion that you can
never get away from yourself runs through many of these films, so the final
location I discuss is the mind. Noir is ultimately about interior and subjective
states, and about people trapped within their own obsessive memories, fears, or
desires. Noir is also mainly about people who pursue their own interests outside
the bounds of society—and how they are destroyed by society. It seems to
simultaneously lament the excesses of individualism and to loathe the crowd—when
crowds do appear, they’re usually lynch mobs. This sounds like a contradiction, but
perhaps the essence of noir is that there’s no right answer: you’re damned either
way.