Klute (1971)
The Long Goodbye (1973)
The Conversation (1974)
Chinatown (1974)
Night Moves (1975)
Cutter's Way (1981)
A film season (on the DVD player, not at an art-house cinema), some of my favourite films fit together really rather well. All produced over a decade in which American film, having asserted an artistic, challenging sensibility since the late 1960s with some daring, uncategorisable, personal films from awkward cinephiles picking up the new wave attitudes of European filmmakers, has one last hurrah before being swallowed up by the new-New Hollywood choppers of Jaws and Star Wars. Directed by creative young(ish) directors who emerged in the 1960s (Altman, Coppolla, Penn) and ex-pat Europeans(Polanski, Passer), these are American genre movies - detective thrillers. They all hark back to film noir and earlier detective fiction (one is period set, the others contemporary). Most of the components of those earlier fictions are intact in these films, but in tone they are definitely products of their own time rather than pastiche.
So Noir, and yet so far
Film noir is characterised by a shadow obssessed visual style and a tone of threat and suspicion. Characters find themselves trapped in an uncaring world. Though a sense of hopelessness and doom is common to noir, generally the classical noir and detective films ultimately reward the virtuous and punish the evil, studio movies of the 1940s and 1950s obliged by Hollywood's production code to adhere to upstanding moralistic conventions, even if such outcomes can appear rather arbitrary and out of keeping with the general mood of the films. The 1970s noirish iterations, freed from a moralising production code, allow the bleakness to bleed through to the bitter end. Endings that follow the internal narrative logic of these films can end full of doubt, with no sense of resolution with threads ragged, suspended.
Urban paranoia, breakdown of authority and official responsibility, moral failure of institutions: corrupt power structures, callous capitalism - all the fun things! that run through noir are in the 1970s emphasised with renewed lack of faith in the correctability of tricky situations. In the later films justice isn’t served, not even natural justice: everyone ends up a loser.
David Thomson's Suspects is a book that connects characters from the classic film noir period with the later noiresque thrillers, a network of family and acquaintance, business dealings and changes of identity that intriguingly centre around one George Bailey of Bedford Falls. Harry Moseby (Night Moves), Mo Cutter (Cutter's Way) and Travis Bickle are revealed as long-lost Baileys. Thomson creates a continuity across these films (through a meta-fictional web) spanning 50 years of American cinema, and it is notable how the later films though bleaker and artier, more given to the actuality of psychological collapse, irresolution and ambiguity, an inability to put the pieces together again, do not actually transgress the fundamental rules of the genre.
The drive in detective fiction is to find out. The desire to know, and in darker works the disavowal of that which you ultimately find out. The classical mode: finding out means solving a crime, bringing the perpetrators to justice. The later mode: finding out comes too late to save the day and involves discovery of something you didn't want to know. Klute perhaps allows a more classical resolution, but its unsettling tone leaves more doubt than satisfaction at the end - do Klute and Bree really have a chance together? Self-knowledge and its corrolary, despair mark out these later films.
Chinatown's earlier setting plays out the loss of innocence, the seeds of America's moral decline. More traditional detective films made in this period Farewell, My Lovely (Chandler revisted again), and The Drowning Pool have their existential angst cranked up too.
I'm no historian but parallels with the USA's sense of itself post World War (directly into the Cold War), and the 1960s damage to the American psyche, must be influential in the tone of Hollywood's darker output of these periods. There was a bruised romantic world-weariness to noir, America edgy rather than triumphal after World Wars. It's a different dis-United State of America in the 1970s, its confidence in itself shot, ragged and tired, riven with self-doubt and division. Internally, assassinations, polarised over civil rights, political intrigue and corruption, vulnerable to oil import crises and rising unemployment; externally, the dispiriting generational drag of conflict in South East Asia, the continuing Cold War, wounded, waning in power and reputation, in Empire shock, overseen by a distrustful, paranoid president heading towards impeachment. The situations and characters of these films take their lead from the social mood. Cynicism, bitterness and indifference are the prevailing and appropriate responses to this atmosphere.
In addition to the stock plot components: the false friend, the red herring, the ulterior motive, the femme fatale, the wisecracking hero, there is the dialogue. Earlier noir was in love with its hard-boiled repartee. In the later films, this ping-pong talk comes off as elliptical and abstract, as if the characters know that words are meaningless, their hearts aren't in it, it's a reflex. It seems in these films, communication is murkier, connections are missed, coming together is impossible. In the case of The Long Goodbye, Chandler's trademark tough-guy act gets subverted and celebrated at the same time through Gould's mumbly riffing whether in the police interrogation room or the cat-food aisle of the 7-11.
In style there is a new wave influence to the films - jumpcuts, no establishing shots, naturalistic lighting, diegetic soundtracks, and in another break from classical noir, shot in colour. Not only colour, but much of the action of these later films occurs in the open air and Californian or Floridian sunshine, as if to say bad things don't just happen in the dark, it's all around you and being out in the open is no hiding place (and that there's plenty of fog and shadow on the inside). The use of telephoto lenses and other non-standard lenses adds to the disconnect, disorientation and discontinuity (lots of disses). For the viewer this means difficulty in placing the leads in a confused picture, a sensation shared by the characters who seem like they can't get a grip on where they are in relation to the space they're in and other people. The opposite effect to the convention of classic Hollywood eye-level medium-close two-shots. These shots also emphasise the sense of observing and being observed, but with the difficulty of contextualising what you're seeing. Early noir used shadow and camera angle to achieve an effect of pitting the characters against dark destiny, so it is an interesting comparison to see how the development of a surveillance-culture has given later filmmakers a tool to represent disorientation. The Conversation, Klute, Night Moves all heavily feature recordings, audio and video, answerphone messages, voices from the grave.
A feature of these films is how the female characters are subtler than their archetypes, the femme fatale predecessors from film noir are powerful but here they tend to be well drawn complex people from a recognisable world with all too recognisable emotional baggage, life-toughened, vulnerable, operating through depression and half-masked desperation - Evelyn Mulwray-Cross in Chinatown, Mo Cutter, Bree Daniels, Paula in Night Moves. In Cutter’s Way, Mo (Lisa Eichorn) is alcoholic, lost, bruised, numbed. Bree in Klute, genuinely menaced, but tough-fragile, an actress; is brittle victim a role, is self-destructive survivor?
Eye Eye
The detectives here are anachronisms in an increasingly amoral indifferent world. The knight errant of Philip Marlowe or Sam Spade is a constant reference for these detectives, and however much they try and follow the same principles, they can't live up to it, situations unravel, their grip on the situation is useless, intangible, the big picture eludes them. They are liable to distraction or the old trope of deception - duped by a femme fatale. In darkest noir the leads are trapped by the human condition. In the 1970s films too even their effectiveness in decoding the plot has deteriorated: lost and alone, their confidence is shot, instincts distrusted and unfounded.
The physical beatings taken by Marlowe are translated into damage with a psychological edge - Gitte's slit nose, the pre-dated trauma and emptiness in Cutter and Bone, and Moseby's closedness in Night Moves. In post-Kennedy America, wounded by Vietnam, the detectives seem withdrawn, almost in a daze, (the big picture eluding them is not new) tranced out by the gloomsteep in the human condition, often less a man of action as a man of inertia. Though a variety of types played by the pantheon of 1970s male leads - Gould, hip (stoned?), Sutherland withdrawn, Hackman two degrees of slippery-abrasive, - they are all forced to face up to their own naivety and half-hidden idealism, the broadly ethical, well-intentioned behaviour of the detectives at the mercy of the unethical toxic monoliths.
The role of the private eye is to observe and work things out, but here they can't see it, they look, can't work things out til it's too late, heroic interventions are mistimed, badly handled. Moseby in Night Moves plays an old chess game over and over where the beautiful endgame he admires wasn't seen at the time, the player left to worry at it after the event ("He didn't see it. He played something else, and he lost."). The un-detectives are left holding a shot woman, bleeding in a boat circling, just circling, left blowing a sax in a torn up apartment, or impotently pointing a gun at someone who has already defeated you and laid waste to your principles - why pull the trigger? why not pull the trigger? These detectives are not destined to come back for more, to pull another adventure from their casebooks; these films are the cases that knock the stuffing out of them, shatter them, tip them into breakdown or retreat. There is no triumph, just despair. Bleak. Nicholson's depressed character in The Passenger another (artier and challenging) version of this, sleepwalking into a change of identity and a gun-running plot; loss of self and loss of narrative grip.
Nixonland
Paranoia became part of the mainstream of American politics in the 1960s, suspicion of government becoming the default position of left and right - the acceptance that governments, presidents and corporations lie to the consumer/citizen. Secrecy, disillusionment (the Watergate scandal broke in 1972), abuse of power, the country polarised and disunited. The sinking feeling captured in these films made under the presidencies of Nixon, Ford and the failed promised of Carter - the Iranian hostage crisis seen as another marker in US power-failure. The overtly politically paranoid thriller of conspiracy spins out of a similar reaction to the corrupted role of the US – Pakula, following Klute, picks up the political paranoid vibe further with The Parallax View, All the President’s Men. Along with The Manchurian Candidate, (earlier than the rest), Three Days of the Condor, and plenty since, these films though expand the narrative to big conspiracy theory territory, political assassination, global corporate power games. The detective films are low-key, personal, infused with a sadness and sense of loss (American Paradise lost?) , believable people let down by the world, overmatched and unprepared by the situation, but not at the centre of a vast malevolent network of global control. They are more resonant films it seems to me, because of this sense of scale, proportionality. Intimate and concentrated in their paranoia they are not so easy to dismiss as dystopian fantasy. The same reason that Edge of Darkness (the original BBC series 1985) works so well: its changes of pace, its soundtrack, casting and characterisation, wilful transgressions too – Craven’s conversations with his dead daughter, the tangible grief in sniffing and kissing her vibrator - are natural and intimately observed. The wider plot of crime, secrecy and protection afforded to corporations and their nuclear energy and defence contracts, fits around the central character’s need to discover more about his daughter.
Seen as slices of life in this unbrave new world, they highlight the bigger picture, erosion of trust in government and justice, the sense of subjugation to corporations, at the mercy of inexorable capitalism that is above country, government, the law. There is no one man against all odds make or break moment, everyone and everything is already broken, whether they realise it yet or not. Noah Cross is too rich and entrenched to be subject to the law, but his control of state-wide water resources is wrapped up in his incestuous control of his daughter, granddaughter and daughter-granddaughter to the point where he’s essentially blithe to anyone’s efforts to try and save anyone or change anything for the better. J.J. Cord in Cutter's Way is another manifestation of this, imperturbable control over Santa Barbara, able to dismiss law or retribution with more (or less) than disdain. What may be smuggling plots, or insurance frauds, or grubby sex crimes, that spiral out of missing person investigations, pit the detective against richer more powerful people, but the sense of right and wrong spirals out too: something’s wrong, everything’s wrong, I’m wrong, the world is wrong.
Unaccountable, unsolvable; what's a clue and what's 'just' another grisly reminder of humanity's jarring disconnect? Everything is perhaps a clue to the crime of being human on this planet (original sin?) - the only solution: shut your eyes, close your ears and walk away ("It's Chinatown, Jake"). And don't hold out hope that cinema will save you either. Maybe the little beat up boat at the end of Night Moves, circling, is about to be swallowed by a blockbusting great white shark (or blown out of the water by the Death Star).
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