The hard-boiled detective and the film noir (Week 6)

Course Overview

• ENG234 focuses on City Culture and the Hong Kong Urbanscape.
• Week 6 centers on the hard-boiled detective and film noir genres.

Course Organization

• Reading week schedules differ for this class compared to Technoscience.
• Today's topics shift the focus from the UK to the US.
• Previous class touched on poetry, while this class and film noir could provide more recognizable elements.
• There is a departmental seminar on Esperanto and Chinese language policy on a Friday
• It will deal with cross-cultural encounters and can be attended in person or on Zoom

Key Concepts: Detection, Hard-Boiled, and Film Noir

• Hard-boiled detective stories and film noir are related but distinct.
• Detection is closely tied to the modern city.
• Hard-boiled genre has a "cowboy" or anti-hero approach
• Film noir deals with the structure and feel of the modern city.
• Detection involves crossing boundaries of class and public/private spheres.
• Detection features photographic archiving, fingerprinting, and chemical analysis

Sherlock Holmes and Urban Modernity

• Sherlock Holmes is related to, and represents, Victorian London and urban modernity.

The Hard-Boiled Setting

• Early 20th century U.S. setting includes the Great Migration (1910-30), Second Wave Immigration (ending in 1920), Prohibition (1920-33), and the Great Depression (1930s).
• North American cities became more mixed
• Prohibition led to organized crime with figures like Al Capone.
• The Great Depression caused widespread poverty.
• Pulp fiction became a popular market
• Pulp fiction featured serialized stories with heroic characters.
• Hard-boiled detectives originated in pulp fiction.
• Pulp fiction themes later influenced comic books

Gangster Films

• Gangster films portray 'true crime', pre-Hays Code
• Key examples include "Little Caesar" (1931), "Scarface" (1932), and "The Public Enemy" (1931).

The Hard-Boiled Detective

• The hard-boiled detective reconciles dime-novel outlaw and detective roles.
• This detective is both an agent of law and an outlaw, acting outside legal structures for personal justice or revenge.
• The hard-boiled detective focuses on the working class and underworld..
• Hard-boiled narratives are a form of social realism with action, crime, thriller, and detective elements.

Hard-Boiled Crime Novels

• Hard-boiled crime novels are more politically radical than other crime writing.
• A key appeal is the "acknowledgement of big business corruption" and "unpatronizing portrayal of working class experience.“

Defining the Hard-Boiled Detective

• The hard-boiled detective is typically male and usually a private investigator.
• This character is "burned out" by crime and corruption, leading to cynicism.
• The detective is "street-smart" with underworld contacts, unaffiliated with the police, and personally involved in cases.
• They express deficits in a city turns into a 'jungle' where individualism ensures survival
• Here is a connection to the American frontier
• City experiences rampant crime, corrupt officials, and powerful corporations which offer no safety or morality

Key Hard-Boiled Detective Figures

• Well-known examples include Hammett’s Sam Spade, Chandler’s Philip Marlowe, and Spillane’s Mike Hammer.

Raymond Chandler (1888-1959)

• Raymond Chandler created Philip Marlowe, who "roamed the back streets of Los Angeles as well as the canyons and beaches of the southland of the 1940s".
• Chandler lived in England from 1896 to 1912 with his British mother.
• He returned to California in 1919, became a successful business executive
• Success prompted him to write for pulp fiction magazines

Chandler's Writing

• He spent 15 years as an executive for the oil industry in LA and could determine qualities about the city's atmosphere
• He spent his school years from aged 8 in England
• His first story, "Black-mailers Don't Shoot," appeared in Black Mask in 1933.
• Best-known novels: The Big Sleep (1939), Farewell, My Lovely (1940), and The Long Goodbye (1954).

Film Noir Defined

• Film noir is a genre founded retroactively by French post-war critics of 1940s Hollywood cinema.
• This style has pessimism, fatalism, and menace.
• French critics originally applied this style to American thrillers or detective films from 1944–54.
• Directors from the period include Orson Welles, Fritz Lang, and Billy Wilder.

Bleak Outlook in Film Noir

• Film noir is based on hard-boiled fiction
• There are no good characters, everyone is somehow guilty.
• There is no morally right option
• Love is a trap
• Self-interest drives everyone.
• Both detective and protagonist are anti-heroes.
• Protagonist tends to fail.

Film Noir Protagonist

• The protagonist operates among criminals.
• Upper class citizens, companies, and government officials are corrupt.
• This protagonist is emotionally involved and not an observer.
• The protagonist often follows hunches, not clues in the plot
• Narration is used in hindsight with cynical outlook
• No reliant genius detective to rely on

Noir Directors and Themes

• While Chandler had a multi-cultural background, many noir directors were immigrants.
• These include Robert Siodmak, Fritz Lang, Otto Preminger, Samuel 'Billy' Wilder, and Julius 'Jules' Dassin.
• Common themes: Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis, abnormal psychology used as plot devices
• Marxist thought filtered into the films through immigration, etc.
• European and American life contrasts materialism problems of modernity.
• Urban space produces social isolation, and psychology harbors doubt, fear, aggression, etc.
• American individualism turns into greed

Three Noir Categories

• There is the investigative thriller, with a professional detective who restores order and the identity - by exposing the criminal conspiracy.
• There is the male suspense thriller, inverse of the above with the hero in an inferior position
• Criminal-adventure thriller: the hero with a woman transgress the law and faces consequences.

Double Indemnity (1944)

• It is more thriller than detective story
• Involves an insurance agent
• Has a first person account of decent into criminal conspiracy
• Femme fatale is present

Common noir elements

• Noir includes stained carpets, sand-filled spittoons, and poorly shutting glass doors.
• These elements shows the a meeting place between the luxurious private lives
• A dreariness of waiting rooms and public bus stations is another element of the films.

Los Angeles as a Noir Setting

• Los Angeles is a microcosm, a centerless city where classes are isolated.
• This contrasts with the 19th-century Parisian apartment house.
• Elements include run-down office buildings, dingy office interiors and characteristc armchairs.
• It also included rooming houses with managers doing illegal lines of business

Stylistic Features

• Lighting, angles, and environments are used, connecting urbanity with psychology.

Further Exploration:

• Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho" and David Fincher "Seven" are interesting films to consider for term papers in this area

Next Steps

• The readings for the next session are available on Moodle.