Why Poets Love Noir #3 [by David Lehman and Suzanne Lummis]

This is part three of a dialogue between two poets who are hooked on film noir.

Do you believe "The Maltese Falcon" should be categorized as "noir"?

Suzanne Lummis:
It's a terrific movie but ultimately not as dark as others -- Noir Gris. But regardless of the quality of darkness, I'd feel funny about any poet of my generation, or the one following, who hadn't seen John Huston’s classic with the great Warner Brothers cast (Bogart, Mary Astor, Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre, Elisha J. Cook). I'd wonder what else they hadn't seen, or read. Had they seen On the Waterfront? Had they read Orwell's 1984, or only read about it?  Et cetera. But re. Noir or Not, there's an undercurrent of pessimism that we usually feel from film noir and don't in The Maltese Falcon. However, it has many noir elements, the dialogue certainly, especially in the final scene where Bogart tells Mary Astor,  "I don't care who loves who. I won't play the sap for you! You killed Miles and you're going over for it. If you're lucky you'll get life and be out in twenty years. I'll be waiting for you. If they hang you, I'll always remember you."   

David Lehman

The Maltese Falcon, one of my all-time favorites, is similar to a noir movie but not the same thing, mainly because the male protagonist does not succumb to the wiles of the femme fatale.  Compare Bogart in The Maltese Falcon to Robert Mitchum in Out of the Past. The former belongs to a different genre, the detective story, in which justice, however much compromised, does prevail in the end.  Sam Spade refuses to “play the sap” for his femme fatale; that is alas exactly what Mitchum does with Jane Greer in Out of the Past. The division is epitomized in Edgar Allan Poe’s stories. The detective stories such as “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and “The Purloined Letter” stand on the one side, and the gothic horrors (“The Fall of the House of Usher”) on the other.  The detective story affirms the possibility of justice, of the restoration of order. The noir movie suggests the opposite and introduces the figure of a femme fatale to ensure that failure or death is the likely end of any criminal or questionable enterprise.

Beyond its antithetical relation to Out of the Past, there are plenty of reasons to consider this, John Huston’s first movie, in the context of noir.  Sam Spade is not unambiguously a servant of law, order, and ethical kashruth.  The brilliant Warner Brothers cast – Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre, Elisha Cook, Jr., and Mary Astor join Bogart – arouses noir expectations, and the status of the sculpted bird,  a fake responsible for at least three deaths, elevates the tale to the level of a parable about fortune, value, and desire.

There are a lot of other movies that I like to consider in relation to noir: Le Jour se leve [Daybreak] (Marcel Carne), if only because of the number of cigarettes that Jean Gabin smokes, and A Bout de soufflé [Breathless] (Jean-Luc Godard), primarily because of Belmondo’s imitation of Bogart. Neither is noir, but the former is like it, and the latter is an homage to it that testifies to the genre’s success. 

Click here for last week's exchange in which Night and the City and The Asphalt Jungle are discussed.

Comments

[Woody Haut]

Interesting discussion. At the risk of blowing my own flugelhorn, just thought I'd draw your attention to some poems from my collection On Dangerous Ground of the books you've covered.
Double Indemnity- http://woodyhaut.blogspot.com/2018/06/on-dangerous-ground-film-noir-poetry_29.html
The Asphalt Jungle- http://woodyhaut.blogspot.com/2018/05/on-dangerous-ground-film-noir-poetry.html
The Maltese Falcon- http://woodyhaut.blogspot.com/2019/02/on-dangerous-ground-maltese-falcon-1941.html
Night & the City- http://woodyhaut.blogspot.com/2019/03/on-dangerous-ground-night-and-city-1950.html

cheers,
Woody Haut

[The Best American Poetry]

Thank you. We're grateful for the comment and suggestions, Woody.

[Jeffrey Bryant]

Perhaps this is a case of a retroactive assessment of the film as noir, or its genesis? As noted above, the cast and especially Bogart give such a flavor to what we later recognize as definitive in noir, its attitudes, language, conversational tones as David notes re arousing expectations. I think Bogart's protagonist is so much of a template for similar roles played both by him and others that it set the tone we expect from such protagonists in the more definitive noir films (world weary/sarcastic/street wise). Thus it gets lumped in or identified as seminal because of what it influenced. Certainly Huston's role here is key as the tone and qualities here are maintained across the noirs in his career. Great discussion.

[The Best American Poetry]

Thank you again for weighing in, Jeffrey. I hope you'll make it a weekly habit! DL

[Suzanne Lummis]

Jeffrey, yes I agree, Bogart's portrayal of Sam Spade introduced into the movies a unique interpretation of the Private Eye, the "Lone Wolf Detective, one with a particular kind of humor. I don't know if the movies had seen that before. The humor comes from his refusal to take this life among the cops and the crooks, the innocent and the people pretending to be innocent, Too seriously. And, of course, that begins with Dashiell Hammett's book, which so influenced Chandler and enabled him to shape his own version of the private eye, Philip Marlowe. And Marlowe also had that devil-may-care attitude.

[Jeffrey Bryant]

Agree. I finally got The Long Goodbye under my belt during my recovery from surgery, and as I read it I thought of how details Chandler works into Marlowe's typical day really make for good noir poetry inspiration, things that are too time-consuming for any movie. He'll linger on a morning cigarette and coffee and mundane decisions about breakfast and other things that serve to thicken the atmosphere, especially as the wheels in his head are turning about plot events. The really good movies provide so much, but buried in the text are some minutiae that can trigger some ideas.

And Bogart's humor and a kind of seasoned exterior nonchalance definitely have rubbed off on so many other actors trafficking in the noir male protagonist territory. I'm a big fan of Dick Powell's Marlowe even if he does seem to be borrowing a lot from Bogart's playbook. But he's good at it and it shows too in other films like Pitfall and Cornered.