JG Ballard on Film Noir

A Staircase Of Corpses...
JG Ballard celebrates
the enduring appeal of film noir.

By J.G. Ballard

"You build my gallows high, baby," a harried Robert Mitchum mutters to Jane Greer, as they speed down the dark road that will carry him to his death. This bitter comment, in the film based on Geoffrey Homes's novel, sums up almost the entire genre of film noir, those doom-laden thrillers, dominated by violence and sexual deceit, that are among Hollywood's most memorable movies. Moody loners, the toughest of tough guys, drift into town and are soon ensnared by a pitiless femme fatale interested in only one thing, hard cash, and ready to climb a staircase of corpses to get to it.

For all their worldly experience, defined by the trench coat and weary eyes, few of the noir heroes ever stand a chance. Like Fred MacMurray in Double Indemnity, they may have spent years selling life insurance to restless housewives with one eye on their dozy husbands and the other on the clock, but the merest glimpse of a swinging ankle chain is enough to give them an instant lobotomy.

Two puzzles surround film noir. What made its heroes sleepwalk towards their own destruction? And why did this compelling genre, one of the most adult Hollywood ever produced, last less than ten years, from The Maltese Falcon in 1941 to White Heat in 1949? In trying to explain the heroes' fallibility, one has to accept the fearsome nature of the opposition they faced. Noir films featured some amazingly implacable women. Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon was strong enough to resist Mary Astor, who had killed his partner, but he was rare among noir heroes in being driven by a raging anger and something close to moral indignation, a quality virtually absent from Hollywood films of today.

Most of the noir heroes lacked any kind of compass bearing, and were part of the psychological debris that floated to and fro after the war. By contrast, the women who ensnared them knew exactly where they were going. Barbara Stanwyck and Joan Crawford, the queens of film noir, projected an intensely focused menace that was a bravura display of fine acting, well beyond the powers of today's Nicole Kidman or Jodie Foster.

In her private life, so we are told, Crawford was even more baleful than in her screen roles, where she sometimes affected a clinging vulnerability. Off-stage, both Stanwyck and Rita Hayworth, another goddess of noir, were good fun. Hayworth, never more alluring and mysterious than in Gilda and The Lady From Shanghai, had little luck off-screen with the men in her life, though she knew the power of the noir heroines. "They went to bed with Gilda," she famously said of her lovers, "and woke up with me."

Feminist critics have faulted noir films for creating a series of female fantasy figures, the witches and enchantresses of old in modern dress. I prefer to think of Stanwyck and Crawford as proto-feminist heroines, locked in a Darwinian struggle with the male world and using any means that would bring them victory, a triumph signalled by the hero's self-willed death. In the late 1940s, when I first saw Stanwyck in Double Indemnity, she reminded me, bar the anklet and platinum wig, of my mother and her bridge-playing friends. The anger, frustration and ruthlessness in Stanwyck's face seemed closer to the average housewife of the day than to Medea or Lady Macbeth.

Many film critics argue that the noir films expressed the anxieties of American men returning from the war to find that women were economically independent, leaving the home for jobs in offices and car plants. But Hayworth and Stanwyck never looked as if they had handled a rivet gun, and the reasons for the demise of film noir must lie elsewhere.

I remember watching Build My Gallows High in a Cambridge cinema in 1949 and being gripped by the stylised and affectless violence, where psychopathy was the key to character. Here was a clear look at the dark side of the American dream, and a better guide to the world we were living in than the lectures of Dr Leavis (in fact, I was supposed to be reading medicine).

Once the war was over, however, an immense confidence rolled across America like the highways of the prosperous Eisenhower years. The noir films, with their expressionist black and white photography, their themes of guilt, suspicion and emotional betrayal, were too downbeat and too European for American audiences discovering television and the charms of perpetual adolescence.

Film noir lives on, in neo-noir films such as Point Blank, with the unforgettably psychotic Lee Marvin pulling down the walls of the syndicate, and in The Last Seduction, where Linda Fiorentino plays a classic enchantress. The Coen brothers' Blood Simple is a desert noir, with sand in place of asphalt, and Fargo would be a noir film but for all that blinding snow. Perhaps it falls into a new category of film blanc.

Build My Gallows High was adapted by Geoffrey Homes from his own novel, long out of print but now reissued. In many ways, it has hardly dated, set in shadowy cabs and bleak city streets. At least one change was made for the better. The seductress bears the least likely name for a vamp in the whole of crime fiction - Mumsie McGonigle. Faced with a name like that, even Mitchum at his most somnolent would have found his way to the door.

Published 26 March 2001

Build My Gallows High
Geoffrey Homes Prion, 153pp, £6.99
ISBN 1853754129

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A Staircase Of Corpses... JG Ballard celebrates the enduring appeal of film noir. By J.G. Ballard "You build my gallows high, baby," a harried Robert Mitchum mutters to Jane Greer, as they speed down the dark road that will carry him to his death. This bitter comment, in the film based on Geoffrey Homes's novel, sums up almost the entire genre of film noir, those doom-laden thrillers, dominated by violence and sexual deceit, that are among Hollywood's most memorable movies. Moody loners, the toughest of tough guys, drift into town and are soon ensnared by a pitiless femme fatale interested in only one thing, hard cash, and ready to climb a staircase of corpses to get to it. For all their worldly experience, defined by the trench coat and weary eyes, few of the noir heroes ever stand a chance. Like Fred MacMurray in Double Indemnity, they may have spent years selling life insurance to restless housewives with one eye on their dozy husbands and the other on the clock, but the merest glimpse of a swinging ankle chain is enough to give them an instant lobotomy. Two puzzles surround film noir. What made its heroes sleepwalk towards their own destruction? And why did this compelling genre, one of the most adult Hollywood ever produced, last less than ten years, from The Maltese Falcon in 1941 to White Heat in 1949? In trying to explain the heroes' fallibility, one has to accept the fearsome nature of the opposition they faced. Noir films featured some amazingly implacable women. Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon was strong enough to resist Mary Astor, who had killed his partner, but he was rare among noir heroes in being driven by a raging anger and something close to moral indignation, a quality virtually absent from Hollywood films of today. Most of the noir heroes lacked any kind of compass bearing, and were part of the psychological debris that floated to and fro after the war. By contrast, the women who ensnared them knew exactly where they were going. Barbara Stanwyck and Joan Crawford, the queens of film noir, projected an intensely focused menace that was a bravura display of fine acting, well beyond the powers of today's Nicole Kidman or Jodie Foster. In her private life, so we are told, Crawford was even more baleful than in her screen roles, where she sometimes affected a clinging vulnerability. Off-stage, both Stanwyck and Rita Hayworth, another goddess of noir, were good fun. Hayworth, never more alluring and mysterious than in Gilda and The Lady From Shanghai, had little luck off-screen with the men in her life, though she knew the power of the noir heroines. "They went to bed with Gilda," she famously said of her lovers, "and woke up with me." Feminist critics have faulted noir films for creating a series of female fantasy figures, the witches and enchantresses of old in modern dress. I prefer to think of Stanwyck and Crawford as proto-feminist heroines, locked in a Darwinian struggle with the male world and using any means that would bring them victory, a triumph signalled by the hero's self-willed death. In the late 1940s, when I first saw Stanwyck in Double Indemnity, she reminded me, bar the anklet and platinum wig, of my mother and her bridge-playing friends. The anger, frustration and ruthlessness in Stanwyck's face seemed closer to the average housewife of the day than to Medea or Lady Macbeth. Many film critics argue that the noir films expressed the anxieties of American men returning from the war to find that women were economically independent, leaving the home for jobs in offices and car plants. But Hayworth and Stanwyck never looked as if they had handled a rivet gun, and the reasons for the demise of film noir must lie elsewhere. I remember watching Build My Gallows High in a Cambridge cinema in 1949 and being gripped by the stylised and affectless violence, where psychopathy was the key to character. Here was a clear look at the dark side of the American dream, and a better guide to the world we were living in than the lectures of Dr Leavis (in fact, I was supposed to be reading medicine). Once the war was over, however, an immense confidence rolled across America like the highways of the prosperous Eisenhower years. The noir films, with their expressionist black and white photography, their themes of guilt, suspicion and emotional betrayal, were too downbeat and too European for American audiences discovering television and the charms of perpetual adolescence. Film noir lives on, in neo-noir films such as Point Blank, with the unforgettably psychotic Lee Marvin pulling down the walls of the syndicate, and in The Last Seduction, where Linda Fiorentino plays a classic enchantress. The Coen brothers' Blood Simple is a desert noir, with sand in place of asphalt, and Fargo would be a noir film but for all that blinding snow. Perhaps it falls into a new category of film blanc. Build My Gallows High was adapted by Geoffrey Homes from his own novel, long out of print but now reissued. In many ways, it has hardly dated, set in shadowy cabs and bleak city streets. At least one change was made for the better. The seductress bears the least likely name for a vamp in the whole of crime fiction - Mumsie McGonigle. Faced with a name like that, even Mitchum at his most somnolent would have found his way to the door. Published 26 March 2001 Build My Gallows High Geoffrey Homes Prion, 153pp, £6.99 ISBN 1853754129