Find today's showtimes
Out of the past
Noir City: Chicago needs a more precise name.
When it comes to defining film noir, the only thing everyone agrees on is that no one can agree. Is noir a genre? A style? A set of interests? A time-bound film cycle that began during World War II and ended just before the Cold War’s hottest period? Some cite Kiss Me Deadly or Touch of Evil as the last film noir—but where does true noir end and neo-noir begin?
To paraphrase Potter Stewart on pornography, you know it when you see it. (It’s often forgotten that Stewart later renounced his statement, calling it “far from deathless.”) In any case, the films at Noir City: Chicago, a weeklong program at the Music Box, serve as good test cases for setting the boundaries of the term, even if—or perhaps because—the two films set in Chicago aren’t particularly noirish.
Anyone who’s tried coming up with a checklist of noir tropes—antiheroes, femmes fatales, postwar malaise—may wince at seeing the designation applied to Call Northside 777 (1948), which fits more snugly into the true-crime genre. The movie doesn’t explore the dark side of human nature so much as tell an inspiring story of a wrongfully imprisoned man saved by an upright journalist (James Stewart). The lack of noir credentials doesn’t make it any less entertaining, though, and director Henry Hathaway’s decision to film on Chicago locations has paid off in time. It’s a rip to see our man Jimmy sleuthing in late-’40s Back of the Yards or working for a news desk pomposity (Lee J. Cobb) whose office has a view of the Merchandise Mart.
Even more gripping—and rarer—is Fred F. Sears’s Chicago Syndicate (1955), which finds an undercover accountant peering through the city’s “carpet of complacency and inertia” (the narrator’s words) to root out a criminal operation led by the gentlemanly Paul Stewart. Essentially a gangster picture, the movie exhibits a noirish attitude toward its villain: Stewart’s kingpin is, like James Cagney’s hood in White Heat, just a mama’s boy gone bad, still sentimental about the house on Maxwell Street where he grew up. (As with Northside 777, the location shooting is superb.)
No one needs to be told to see Billy Wilder’s übernoir Double Indemnity (1944) or Orson Welles’s magnificently strange The Lady from Shanghai (1947). Lesser known is Richard Wallace’s Framed (1947), another femme fatale story in which drifter Glenn Ford gets roped into a murder by a banker (Barry Sullivan) and his girl (Janis Carter). “He’s an honest man,” someone says of Ford’s character—which is, of course, his problem.
The revelation of the series is Joseph Losey’s The Prowler (1951), cowritten by blacklistee Dalton Trumbo. Van Heflin is the former school basketball star who became a cop after losing his college scholarship; Evelyn Keyes is the failed actress who meets him when she calls in a prowler. Her radio-host husband works nights, and soon the officer insinuates his way into her life. (It’s ambiguous to whom the title refers.) The plot twists are firmly in James M. Cain territory, but the tarnishing of the righteous-cop archetype gives the movie its discomfiting edge. As a portrait of a poisoned marriage, the film is also a fascinating companion piece to Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place (1950).
The main attraction, alas, is set in New York. But Harry Belafonte will appear at the Saturday screening of Odds Against Tomorrow (1959), a jazzy landmark that tweaks the heist genre to comment on race relations. (It was written by Force of Evil director Abraham Polonsky, who had his credit hidden behind a front until 1996.) Belafonte and Oklahoma bigot Robert Ryan agree to work together on a robbery, but will they trust each other? If there’s one thing we know about film noir, it’s that trust is in short supply.
Noir City: Chicago runs Friday 31 through Thursday 6.
