Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-rcrh6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-03T18:10:18.780Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

3 - Hard-boiled Tradition and Early Film Noir

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2016

Homer B. Pettey
Affiliation:
University of Arizona
Homer B. Pettey
Affiliation:
Associate Professor of Literature and Film, University of Arizona
R. Barton Palmer
Affiliation:
Calhoun Lemon Professor of Literature, Clemson University
Get access

Summary

Partly it may be due to the sense that money as an accounting mechanism submits pleasures to an unforgiving scrutiny, like that of traditional morality. Most of all it has to do with money's anonymity, the sense that the trust it buys is somehow fraudulently acquired, being based on impersonal rules rather than personal understanding. Sexuality is the area of human life most permeated by the ideal of willing and autonomous exchange between partners motivated by convergent desire, and yet it is also the one most poisoned by … more indirect and mercenary motive. The indirect masquerading as the direct is likewise at money's very heart.

Paul Seabright, The Company of Strangers

Hard-boiled detective fiction and film noir are almost exclusively aligned with the desires for money and sex, two mirrored conditions of a fragile human economy. The Maltese Falcon (1941), Double Indemnity (1944), and Murder, My Sweet (1944) certainly rely upon economic issues in their adaptations from the Hammett, Cain and Chandler novels. All three novels and their film adaptations deal with sexual exchanges for material possessions: Brigid's erotic enticements to Spade for the mysterious falcon; Phyllis's promise of amorous reward for the monetary compensation from the indemnity policy; and Mrs Grayle's lubricious invitations to Spade in order to guard her jaded secret and thereby her social position. Of course, this concupiscence as capital outlay is hardly limited to feminine desires in film noir, since Spade, Neff and Marlowe engage in this kind of self-interested manipulation for profit. Emerging during the era of the international Great Depression and the rise of global fascism, film noir often addresses the complex, paradoxical interrelationship of economics and passion. Plots and thematic structures of proto-noirs and noirs of the 1940s and well into the next decade reveal the matrix of dependency between money and sex, among them: The Big Sleep (1940), Danger Signal (1945), Fallen Angel (1945), Mildred Pierce (1945), Out of the Past (1947), Railroaded (1947), Dark Passage (1947), Thieves’ Highway (1949), Too Late for Tears (1949), Dark City (1950), The Asphalt Jungle (1950), Gun Crazy (1950) and The Big Heat (1953). Excess – financial, sexual, material – serves as a central motif in all of these films as it had in the development of the hardboiled detective genre.

Type
Chapter
Information
Film Noir , pp. 58 - 79
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Print publication year: 2014

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×