tv Earth Focus LINKTV October 18, 2018 9:00am-9:30am PDT
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and by: and the annual financial support of: hello, i'm john lithgow. welcome to "american cinema." the end of world war ii in 1945 brought an era of homecoming, of rediscovering family, of rebuilding. that year, hollywood premiered "the best years of our lives," a story of a returning veteran and his family
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that won the academy award for best picture of the year. but another picture premiered that year that portrayed a different version of america. it was called "detour," about a man who wandered from a life of little possibility to one of total doom. the motion picture association first reviewed the picture, they refused to give it a rating. it had broken a rule. the murderer was not brought to justice at the end. instead, he was left to wander aimlessly on american highways. for such stark stories, these films had their own look. though they were uniquely american, french film critics came up with the name that stuck: "film noir," which literally translates "black film." they were black and white, they were dark, and they were often raw. in this breed of film, the only law was rule of fate; the only order, a moral restitution where everybody dies at the end. but these films were always seductive. listen to richard widmark tell you.
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it is hard to refuse a story of sex, money and murder, as you will see in "film noir." (music playing) (narrator) it was the 40's. right after the war. going to the movies was like going to a candy store. something for everybody. popular films were melodramas, romances, musicals. the big song and dance. (singing romantic song) (crack) but that's not my kind of movie. (dramatic music playing) (laughter)
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(gunshot) (splash) (dramatic music playing) (crash) aaahh! (dramatic music playing) (screams) it was all very queer, but queerer things were yet to come. (narrator in shadows) you could always find me in a theatre around the corner. people like me liked pictures dark and mysterious. most were "b" movies, made on the cheap. others were classy models with "a" talent. but they all had one thing in common. they lived on the edge. told stories about life in the streets, shady characters, crooked cops, twisted love and bad luck. the french invented a name for these pictures "films noir," black film, that's what they called 'em.
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about a darker side of human nature. about the world as it really was. as i growing, these films were part of my daily reality. in other words, i didn't analyze them, i was affected by them. (knocking at door) (martin scorsese) i related to them emotionally. who is it? police. (martin scorsese) the first film i can remember that had to do very clearly with what i knew daily, living on the lower east side was abe polonsky's "force of evil." it was about the numbers racket and it was about two brothers. it portrayed a world i hadn't seen on film before. in a very honest way, too. violation 974 of the penal code, policy. (martin scorsese) i grew up in a world that film noir images reflect. night life, people drinking in bars. gambling. you take the money from people who bet just like every other crook in this racket. they call this racket policy because people bet numbers. that's why, policy.
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you make the film according to your mood, the circumstances, the way the story is written. the influence of the writer, the actors on you and so on. and if they're reflecting this sense of jeopardy in life, which is what exists in all film noir. (abraham polonsky) it's a correct representation of the system's anxiety. sometimes you feel as though you're dying here and here, here, you're dying while you're breathing. (abraham polonsky) and this is what this picture is about. how circumstances become more and more unendurable. and yet you must endure. freddy, what have you done? (errol morris) great noir poses the question, why me? why is this happening to me? and the very dark answer that it provides. an almost unacceptable answer:
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for no reason. for no reason at all. buddy, you look like you're in trouble. (errol morris) noir is concerned with error, with confusions. i think i'm in a frame. don't sound like you. i don't know, all i can see is the frame. i'm going in there now and look at the picture. (errol morris) it's the noir idea. we don't know what's going on, but we do know something bad is out there controlling events. for me the great noir films are films about fall guys. a person who finds himself caught in a net. the more he struggles, the deeper and deeper he becomes entwined in nightmare. (man's thoughts) did you ever want to forget anything? did you ever want to cut away a piece of your memory? (paul arthur) "detour" is the first wave of noir production. it lays out a blueprint for how the noir narrative works.
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there's a character who has a secure job at the beginning. has a secure relationship with a woman. the woman leaves to go to hollywood. and this man goes to join her. (man's thoughts) if only i had known what i was getting into. (paul arthur) this starts a journey where he, in an almost myth-like fashion, is picked up by a kind of messenger. but this man dies under mysterious circumstances. the hero takes on the identity of a dead man, the most desperate thing you can do in film noir. (man's thoughts) i saw at once he was dead and i was in for it. who would believe he fell out of the car? (kathryn bigelow) "detour" is quintessential noir insofar as it's so raw, it's so exposed. there is nothing to comfort you. (man's thoughts) instinct told me to run, but i realized it was hopeless. enter the heart of darkness, it is a descent into hell, visually and internally, from which you cannot escape until it's over with.
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i knew him better. (kathryn bigelow) shortly thereafter, he picks up a woman, who coincidentally knows his true identity, traps him. you're a cheap crook. now, wait! shut up! you killed him. for two cents i'd change my mind and turn you in. please open the door. vera, open the door. don't use the phone, listen to me. (kathryn bigelow) he's a on a downward spiral from which he cannot emerge. and the more he tries to eradicate the situation, the worse it gets. (man) vera, don't call the cops, listen, i'll break the phone. (jean-pierre gorin) there is a complete wackiness in a film like "detour." there's the wackiness of getting a murder scene with a phone cord and someone yanking the stuff and on that level it's part three stooges, part marx brothers, part completely surrealistic. it's sloppy, it's smelly. it's disreputable.
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what's nice about film noir, it's disreputable filmmaking. the last scene in "detour," didn't have a seal of approval. it was all made. (martin goldsmith) there is somebody who actually killed somebody and what is he doing? he's hitchhiking around. (man's thoughts) someday a car will pick me up that i never thumbed. (martin goldsmith) so i put in just a few lines. (man's thoughts) yes, fate, or some mysterious force, can put the finger on you or me for no good reason at all. i think noir hit people so hard it's because essentially at the core of it all they're tales of survival, in a completely naked fashion. a certain kind of hard film, full of difficulty and emotion. and explosions of -- of emotional drama and anxiety
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was popular in the sense that people went to the movies to see that kind of thing. if you go back and look over the plots of film noir, you discover that more than a quarter of the total films have protagonists who identify themselves as war vets. (paul arthur) and what he discovers when he comes from the war is not a security in society, but rather quite the opposite. (announcer) multiplied and magnified, the insecurity of modern man was tragically demonstrated in catastrophe of total war. (paul arthur) one sees it, in a sense as the continuing experience of wartime trauma... in a domestic situation. now we start looking at each other again. we don't know what we're supposed to do. we don't know what's supposed to happen.
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we're too used to fighting, but we don't know for. you can feel the tension in the air. (otto friedrich) psychiatry was just being discovered in this period. the refugee psychoanalyst coming from europe came to hollywood, spread the faith. and it sort of reached the filmmakers. please, please, i'm sick! can't you see i'm sick? you're sick all right. (otto friedrich) this seemed to offer an explanation to things. it was newer then and people thought that that's what drove people crazy. you're perfectly sane. i'd rather be insane and alive than sane and dead. (narrator) it started with prohibition -- the line between legal and illegal got fuzzy. nightlife went underground. that made it even more seductive and dangerous. we could travel there safely in pulp magazines
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with writer raymond chandler and his private eyes. in a novelist like james cain, we could find ourselves sucked into a twisted triangle of love, betrayal and murder. he knew crime, the power of absolute seduction. crime is a left-handed form of human endeavor. experience has taught me never to trust a policeman. just when you think one's all right, he turns legit. one of the things about detective stories, murder stories, whodunits, is no matter how bad they are, i've never seen anybody walk out on one, because it's a riddle, it's a puzzle and you want to puzzle it out. well, it was about 7:00. anyway, it was dark. what were you doing at the office that late? i'm a homing pigeon, i always come back to the coop no matter how late it is. i'd been out peeking under old sunday sections for a barber named dominick, whose wife wanted him back.
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i forget why. only reason i took the job was because my bank account was trying to crawl under a duck. (edward dmytryk) as far as the narration goes, i could have done that picture without narration and we discussed that. but we wanted to get the flavor of chandler. chandler writes differently than any writer ever wrote. he's become a fad as it were, he has his own style. (man's thoughts) we were watched. i didn't see anything, i felt it in my stomach. i was a toad on a wet rock, a snake was looking at my neck. (edward dmytryk) he was the first one to say, "i didn't mean it really, i was trying it on for size." just trying it on for size, lots of things still don't fit. "trying it on for size," is part of our language now, but he was the first one to ever write that line. one thing that came along in fiction was the private eye, the hard-boiled private detective. (ron goulart) not part of the system, kind of a loner. hmm, you've got a nice build for a private detective.
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it gets me around. (ron goulart) you can't bribe him. you can't corrupt him. you can't even seduce him in many cases. (woman) you don't mind my sizing you up a little? most of us are ex-cops. i was fired by the d.a. this private eye could take you anywhere. down in the ghetto, into the underworld. you could go to haunts of the rich and famous. he gave you access to almost any level of society. (man's thoughts) it was a nice little front yard, cozy. only you'd need a compass to go to the mailbox. the house was all right, too, but not buckingham palace. i had to wait while she sold me to the old folks. it was like waiting to buy a crypt in a mausoleum. (woman) mr. marlow. (ron goulart) one thing about the private eye is he usually never got hurt. so he could take you into all these places that you were curious about and yet get out of it alive.
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well, you have two groups, then they cross back and forth. you have hammett and chandler who were the most successful, from the pulps. and then you have writers like james cain who dealt with similar material but who never really lowered themselves to writing for the pulps. cain probably thought he was above that kind of writing. james m. cain had an enormous influence, an enormous effect on all writers. he was basically a novelist. he wasn't a bit interested in movies at all, at first. my husband. you were anxious to talk to him? (martin goldsmith) other screenwriters did it, but from his books. there's a speed limit in this state, mr. neff, 45 miles an hour. how fast was i going, officer? i'd say around 90. suppose you get down and give me a ticket. suppose i let you off with a warning this time. suppose it doesn't take. suppose i have to whack you over the knuckles? he wrote with a meat cleaver, is what it was.
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he wrote with a hatchet. the classic cain situation, always the triangle. the guy falling in love with the other guy's wife and killing the woman's husband and then coming to no good end. (honk) what are you doing that for? why are you honking the horn? (narrator) life's a dangerous game. especially with a new breed of woman working all angles. making her own rules. film noir had its own rules, censorship. the hayes production code, it was hollywood's law. moral and ethical standards from a church social; the line you couldn't cross. i'm going to surprise you, it had a very good effect, because it made us think. in other words, if we wanted to get something across
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that was censorable, we couldn't do it openly, we had to do it deviously. we had to be clever. and it usually turned out to be much better than if we had done it straight. it allows one's imagination to take over, where the material is not completely exemplified. haven't you tried to buy my loyalty with money? what else is there i can buy you with? (dramatic music playing) you look for oil, sometimes you hit a gusher. susan, tell me, come on, what's bothering you? (joe lewis) the scene in the film, "the big combo," with nick conte kissing her on the eyebrow and then on the cheek and then on the chin and then on the neck and all the time the camera is moving in on her close-up. and of course by moving in you eliminate nick conte. the rest is up to the audience. let them supply the emotions.
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let them tell me where he went. let them tell me what he did. they were a three-man board now if i recall correctly and the first man to talk was a rather youngish guy who immediately lit into me like a 75-millimeter howitzer, how dare i shoot a scene as filthy as that. and what could i have been thinking of and all that. he accused me of everything. having a filthy mind and all. i let him talk, at the end of it, i said, "excuse me, sir, i don't quite understand what you mean. i don't know what's wrong with dollying in to a head close-up of a young lady. now please be more explicit." he says, "well tell me, where did richard conte go? you tell me that, where did he go?" i said, "i haven't the vaguest idea. he may have gone off the stage for a glass of water,
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what are you referring to?" with my baby-blue's, you know. well, they allowed it. the sexiness of the noir film is precisely linked to the fact that those guys couldn't show this stuff. so you're obliged to charge the environment, to play games. and on that level noir films were attuned with desire. give me the key to that locker, martin. (janey place) what you really see in film noir is the emergence of a psychological phenomenon, which is that men have always been endangered by a strong sexual female. they're extremely driven, selfish, ambitious characters which are characteristics associated with male character. kiss me, mike. i want you to kiss me. (woman) kiss me.
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the liar's kiss that says i love you. that black widow's sensibility comes up from the american male coming back and finding that the american female has changed her position in society. (paul schrader) she's worked during the war. she's much more independent. she may have had affairs during war. and that's very, you know, threatening to a lot of men. margaret will be giving up her job in a few months. don't kid yourself, darling, i'll take the six weeks maternity leave and then junior will have a nice nurse. you forget that you married a girl with a career. you can see it in art and icons throughout the ages, that that's a dangerous figure. a powerful, sexual female is a very dangerous figure. (janey place) and i think in film noir, what you see is the combination of things in a female that you don't see in film, especially in american film very often.
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she's very smart, powerful and she's extremely sexual. you drop this? um hmm, thanks. (janey place) she uses her sexuality to get what she's after. and what she's after is not the man in the picture. he's another tool. what she's after is something for herself. the spider woman of film noir is identified in obvious ways. first, through her sexuality. they tend to be characters with long hair, tight clothes. (janey place) long fingernails that are actually composed as claws. they often smoke, which has always been the sign of the woman of loose morals.
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you have examples of women controlling the composition by being shot in low angle and then cut to a shot of a man shot from high angle, so they have visual dominance. the classic femme fatale to me is a woman that's getting the man into bed and then into trouble. (marie windsor) and i loved playing them because that's the character that people never forget. they love to hate me. what do you want? what are you waiting to see? what kind of a man you are, what you really are. try it on your own man. i'm trying you. (marie windsor) they also referred to my eyes as "bedroom" eyes. and that didn't fit very well for a goody-goody wife or a nice little girlfriend, somebody tending the home.
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you're not strong or weak enough. what is there about a hoodlum that appeals to certain women? hoodlums, detectives, woman doesn't care how a man makes his living, only how he makes love. (kathryn bigelow) there's a certain male fantasy to this violent woman who is uncontrollable, kind of like an untamed animal. and i think there's something very seductive about that. so appealing, so dangerous, so lovely to look at, the darling of london, england, miss annie laurie starr. (gunfire) (kathryn bigelow) somebody tamed and compliant is less seductive. the fact it's unobtainable, touch it, it'll scratch you, is very attractive. i think people like to play with fire. (joe lewis) i wanted a beautiful, innocent, lovable young lady who was a demon.
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who was vicious and yet could charm you. i got the two of them together and i said, "peggy, you are a female dog in heat. and you, john, you're a male dog in heat. and you meet for the first time. now, you don't know whether one or the other is going to attack and so you size each other up. and all that desire comes out." the only way that this picture could succeed was a love story. a love story that could never, never work out, but yet have an audience rooting for them. i love the sense of doom in it and i love the sense of you can just see it coming. i want a guy with spirit and guts. (paul schrader) that sense of romantic longing and obsession, and knowing that what you are doing is doomed
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and you can't stop from doing it. look, i don't want to look in that mirror and see nothing but a stickup man staring at me. you better kiss me goodbye, because i won't be here when you get back. come on, bart, let's finish it the way we started it, on the level. (martin scorsese) these people, they live right on the edge. and a lot of people identify with that. it's something that you react to emotionally. love in film noir usually takes the form of obsession. it's usually perversional love so it's much more passionate and it becomes more deadly. everything is on the edge, therefore it burns up faster. they burn up life faster. (dramatic music playing) (gunshot)
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(dramatic music playing) (gunshot) (dramatic music playing) (gunfire) (dramatic music playing) (crash) (click) (click) (bongo drums) (john bailey) there's an element in film noir a way light and shadow is used in such extreme contrast, it is almost religious or spiritual or philosophical. see any better this way? (john bailey) an age-old manichaeus dialectic of light against dark, good against evil. you can turn it off now, buster. you're wasting your battery. (john bailey) when you look at the film noir, the lighting complements that. light sources themselves become part of the scene's content.
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(glass shatters) susie, what are you doing in here in the dark? (john bailey) very bright, hot sources and very deep, deep shadows. well, can we turn the light on now? (woman) no, we can't. because of all the things that happened during the war, the development of faster film stocks, the development of portable cameras, smaller dollies, more contained lighting units. it was possible at night, to go out on the streets using the lights in a controlled, dramatic way. the sense of the frame, the world essentially black, which it is at night. and what you see is what you choose to define and pick out with a little bit of light. and this became signature of film noir. (music playing) there's almost a giddy euphoria of being able to use lights and the dramatic use of lights in late 40s, early 50s films.
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(music playing) (man) turn on the light again, cora, please. all right. waste your money. (edward dmytryk) we wanted to spend as little time with the mechanics, lighting a set, that kind of thing, setups, to give ourselves more time with the actors, to get the best possible scenes out of them. with film noir what you did is you want it like that, throw a shadow on it, get a gobolt, you know. and that's all, the shadow did it. (music playing) (kathryn bigelow) it's perfect externalization of those characters, trapped, a trapped character. there is no light, there is no release, there is no escape.
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things are very terrifying, mysterious if you can't see. so your imagination is forced to take over, which i think is the key to how noir material works on the subconscious. (woman) in here, walter. (john bailey) a lighting technique that became a signature of the noir films was the venetian blind, which was an effective way for the director of photography to create an interesting and unusual lighting pattern on an otherwise blank wall. and would create interesting psychological effects, depending upon the way they were slanted and adjusted. (romantic music playing) almost universally in noir film you see a tremendous sparseness in the production design.
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