FIRST IMPRESSIONS IN FILM NOIR

A well-crafted debut scene can divulge all you need to know about the character involved, as well as setting the tone of the film and expressing key themes. Below are ten of the best from the annals of film noir.

ROSE GIVENS, CRY OF THE CITY

EXTERIOR, STREET (NIGHT). Harried hoodlum Martin Rome (Richard Conte) fetches up at a massage parlour. He rings the bell, peering through the glass-panelled door. A burly female figure appears silhouetted at the end of a dark hallway. She strides towards the front door purposefully, turning on lights as she goes, and resolves into the formidable form of Hope Emerson’s ironically monikered Rose – surely the most intimidating masseuse in film history. At 6ft 2in and around 16st, she scarcely needs the tilted camera to imbue her with menace. Siodmak was one of noir’s expressionist masters. His style was cramped somewhat in Cry of the City, which was shot largely on location, but this cleverly conceived introductory scene – it marked not only the character’s entrée, but that of Broadway veteran Emerson to the big screen – could scarcely have been bettered in a studio. Kevin Grant

MOOSE MALLOY, MURDER MY SWEET

INTERIOR, OFFICE (NIGHT) PI Philip Marlowe (Dick Powell) is sitting at his desk in the semi-darkness, facing the window. A neon hotel sign is blinking opposite, throwing his reflection on the glass. He is ruminating: “There’s something about the dead silence of an office building at night… not quite real.” Suddenly, a baleful visage appears in the upper pane – a nightmare in the neon glare. Marlow spins round in his chair and looks up – way up – at Moose Malloy (Mike Mazurki), his next employer... To achieve the effect, director Edward Dymytryk placed a plate of glass between the camera and the desk. He then reflected Mazurki’s face in the glass so that it appears larger than life, DP Harry J. Wild using split lighting to keep the giant actor’s furrowed features partly shaded. It is not the last time in this film that visual trickery will be employed to expressionistic effect; nor is it the last time that Moose Malloy will make an unexpected and dramatic entrance. Kevin Grant

AL AND MAX, THE KILLERS

EXTERIOR, DESERTED STREET (NIGHT) A low-rent diner, lit harshly from within, casts a thick shadow that bisects the tarmac. Two shadows penetrate the upper corner of the frame – two men enshrouded in trench coats. Engulfed by the night, they walk towards the foreground, where they circle a trio of petrol pumps. A bulky, cruel face looms into close-up, followed by the mean, spiky visage of his companion. Both share the same pernicious intent: to kill the Swede. The camera pans and dollies left as they begin a slow, steadfast walk towards the diner, entering through opposite doors. Masterfully staged by director Robert Siodmak, the opening scene of The Killers sets chiaroscuro lighting against the hard faces of William Conrad and Charles McGraw to crystallise the black art of noir – each second of their introduction portends danger. The titular hit men, implacable in their movements, set the bar for the genre’s cavalcade of intimidating heavies. Clark Hodgkiss

ALICE REED, THE WOMAN IN THE WINDOW

EXTERIOR, NEW YORK STREET (NIGHT) Disenchanted middle-aged professor Richard Wanley (Edward G. Robinson) exits his gentlemen’s club. He marvels at a painting of a porcelain-featured young woman in the adjacent art gallery. The camera, placed behind the glass, captures the portrait and professor in tandem. A woman, her face identical to that in the painting, suddenly appears to its left. A double take. The face remains. Wanley turns to gaze at the subject in the flesh: a siren in a black dress. Sequins blink under the streetlights. Noir recurrently used mirrors and windows to reflect fears, but also desire. Here, director Fritz Lang’s gift for visual chicanery tees up a fateful obsession in a few magical seconds. Joan Bennett’s cool sexiness makes the resulting foolishness of an otherwise intellectual man entirely plausible. Clark Hodgkiss

GILDA

INTERIOR, HOUSE (NIGHT) Casino owner Ballin Mundson (George Macready) is giving his new factotum, the chancer Johnny Farrell (Glenn Ford), a tour of his house. They approach the bedroom. Johnny’s face is in soft shadow as they hear a woman singing. He looks pensive – that voice, it couldn’t be…? They enter the chamber and Mundson calls, “Gilda, are you decent?” Cut to Rita Hayworth, rising from beneath the frame, throwing back her head and that luxuriant mane, beaming at the camera: “Me?” Her gaze shifts to Johnny and the smile fades. A chill descends. It is obvious they have a history, and a painful one at that, but neither discloses it – not directly. For much of the scene the camera is fixated on Gilda, whose belittling of Johnny (“Such a hard name to remember, and so easy to forget”) marks the resumption of hostilities in one of the most destructive relationships in noir. Kevin Grant

JOE GILLIS, SUNSET BOULEVARD

EXTERIOR, MANSION GROUNDS (EARLY MORNING) As the film opens, police cars roar up to a decaying mansion. The camera observes from a dispassionate vantage. William Holden’s voice-over kicks in, sardonic in tone, as director Billy Wilder cuts from a high-angle shot of a body floating in the outdoor pool to an underwater close-up of the victim’s face. It is Holden’s character, Joe Gillis, intoning on his fate, on his entanglement with the delusional Norma Desmond (Gloria Swanson), on his ironic reward: “The poor dope. He always wanted a pool.” This is an audacious variation on one of noir’s hardiest tropes: the protagonist’s voice-over. In Double Indemnity, Wilder had a character completing his monologue just before expiring, while the narrators in Criss Cross and Laura also died before the end. The difference here is that the audience is in on the grim joke from the beginning. The effect would have been even more mordant and macabre had Wilder retained his original opening – Gillis recounting his tale in the morgue to an audience of corpses. Kevin Grant

CORA SMITH, THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE

INTERIOR, DINER (DAY) Drifter Frank Chambers (John Garfield) sits at the bar of the diner where he has just taken the job of handyman. He is alone. He hears a sound, turns to see a lipstick rolling across the floor towards him. The camera takes Frank’s point of view, panning back to a pair of peep-toe shoes, lingering on the owner’s shapely legs. Cut back to Frank, eyes wide, rapt. Now a full-body shot of Lana Turner’s Cora Smith, framed in a doorway. White crop top, tight shorts, turban. She is unabashed, enjoying the attention. She poses side on, touches up her lips, departs. The lipstick may as well be bait on a fishing line, so effectively is Frank reeled in at this first sight of the woman he will kill for. Turner’s white outfits, it was hoped, would help the steamy plot pass censorial scrutiny: “We figured that dressing Lana in white somehow made everything she did seem less sensuous,” commented director Tay Garnett. The point is debatable, to say the least. Kevin Grant

NICK BEAL, ALIAS NICK BEAL

EXTERIOR, WHARF (NIGHT) In John Farrow’s Faustian film noir, upstanding district attorney Joseph Foster (Thomas Mitchell) is summoned to meet the mysterious Nick Beal, who tempts him with incriminating information on the city’s slipperiest racketeer. It is a foggy night by the docks (a Paramount soundstage). The camera cranes forward slowly, in concert with low, rumbling notes on the soundtrack. A neon sign cuts through the mist. A man whistles a tune. A dark figure materialises from the murk and walks towards a pool of light, heavily diffused, his silhouette creating a chiaroscuro effect. This is Nick Beal, alias Ray Milland, putting his signature roguish charm to sinister ends. Inside the China Coast Café, he seals the deal with the unwitting Foster, whose path to power becomes littered with compromise and corruption. Beal is a metaphor for contemporary political fixers as much as a manifestation of mythological evil. Kevin Grant

FRANK BIGELOW, D.O.A

INTERIOR, POLICE DEPT (NIGHT) A suited man enters the lobby of an austere police station. The camera stalks him from behind. Bold 3D title cards explode onto the screen before the image fades to another tracking shot. The man strides the full length of a corridor, glancing at each door he passes. He stops. HOMICIDE DIVISION. Inside, he speaks to the man in charge: “I want to report a murder.” “Who was murdered?” Close-up on the man: jacket scuffed, tie skewed, demeanour broken: “I was.” Director Rudolph Maté’s experience as a photographer serves him well in this ingenious gambit, as Bigelow (Edmond O’Brien) disproves the maxim that dead men tell no tales. Alluding perhaps to the ‘white light’ reportedly seen on the point of death, the walls of the dingy corridor converge on a glass door illuminated from behind in pure white. Before the poison in his system drags him there, Bigelow has time to recount his tragedy – and confess to his own feral version of justice. Clark Hodgkiss

ANNIE LAURIE STARR, GUN CRAZY

INTERIOR, CARNIVAL MARQUEE The MC takes the stage to usher in the main act: “So dangerous! So appealing! So lovely to look at!” Cue a flurry of smoke and noise, two manicured hands firing pistols, until the shooter is revealed – a platinum angel with a wicked smile. Her electric gaze rests on Barton Tare (John Dall). Aiming at him – at us – she caresses the trigger. He freezes in fear, but for now, she’s firing blanks… Ms. Starr’s entrance is the most erotically charged in noir, a crack-shot assault of raunchiness and cordite. Dressed in figure-hugging cowgirl duds, her guns unapologetically phallic, she instantly has gun-nut Tare under her spell. Rarely has a genre relationship been driven by such base carnality: director Joseph H. Lewis told Welsh-born starlet Peggy Cummins that she was “a female dog in heat”; he was even more frank with John Dall – “Your c***’s never been so hard.” Clark Hodgkiss