“The plot didn’t matter at all”

Rita Hayworth in ‘Gilda’ (1946).

Just some splendid stills from thrillers (mostly) of the 1940s and 1950s, reproduced from ‘Film Noir’ (Alain Silver, James Ursini, Paul Duncan: Taschen). I love Film Noir. ‘Gilda’ is one of the best and most noirish. Above is Rita Hayworth doing a passive-aggressive musical number/striptease in a club to get back at her boyfriend and her ex-boyfriend for their machinations with each other and with her. As you do.

Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray in ‘Double Indemnity’ (1944).

Jane Greer and Robert Mitchum in ‘Out of the Past’ (1947). Greer is a classic femme fatale in this one, smiling placidly as she guns down a man Mitchum’s character won’t kill but whom she wants dead. This is the only colour still on this page, though the film’s in black and white like all the others.

Sterling Hayden in ‘The Asphalt Jungle’ (1950), with Anthony Caruso in the background.

Gloria Grahame and Glenn Ford in a publicity photo for ‘The Big Heat’ (1953). Er, subtle? With respect to Freud’s famous aphorism, sometimes a gun is just a gun… but not in this case.

Martha Vickers and Theodore Von Eltz in ‘The Big Sleep’ (1946).

It’s clear that Carmen Sternwood (Martha Vickers) is meant to be understood as a junkie– she’s seen here so totally off her knockers she doesn’t realise that Arthur Gwynne Geiger is dead at her feet– but despite reading the book and seeing the film repeatedly, to this day I have no idea what on earth she might be getting up to in the “compromising photographs” that could be so bad it eventually leads a number of people to death or ruin. I feel less bad about this fact knowing that the cast and crew (and Raymond Chandler, who wrote the thing) were famously confused. During production the director Howard Hawks asked Chandler why a certain character was murdered and Chandler answered that he was damned if he knew. Hawks also later said of ‘The Big Sleep’:

“The plot didn’t matter at all. All we were trying to do was make every scene entertain. I can’t follow the story. I saw some of it on TV the other night and I’d listen to some of the things he [note: Humphrey Bogart as the private detective Philip Marlowe] would talk about and it had me thoroughly confused.”

Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart in ‘The Big Sleep’ (1946).

Technically pre-Noir, I guess, but this still is too good to leave out. Jean Harlow in ‘The Beast of the City’ (1932).

Curiosity irradiated the cat: Gaby Rodgers annihilated in the incomprehensible and influential late Noir ‘Kiss Me Deadly’ (1955).

The mysterious glowing container from ‘Kiss Me Deadly’ is even semi-jokingly called “the great whatsit” by a character in the film, another example of plot being subordinate to the poetic, existential fatalism and archetypes of Film Noir. Having said that, I highly recommend David Thompson’s intriguing novel ‘Suspects’ to Noir fans. Thompson attempts to fit many of the films and characters mentioned here (plus other Noir classics like ‘Sunset Boulevard’ and neo-Noir such as ‘Chinatown’) into the same coherent timeline and narrative, drawing out the possible relationships between the characters, their histories and their fates beyond the films.

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