Crime Film Criticism: A Historical Review

Summary of the main argument(s) from the reading

Summary of the main argument(s) from the reading. The summary should address the full arguments of the chapter, the instructor will be looking for a complete summary.

The three most important/compelling aspects of the reading to you and a brief description as to why. While the class is designed to encourage critical thinking, and I will hope that some of the insights push you to think about film, genre and society in a more critical/complex way, this does not mean that the content is strictly philosophical. The reading may get you to think about consuming film, but it may also encourage you to think about making film in more complex ways. Be clear as to how and why these insights are important/significant to you.

Two aspects of the reading you do not understand and a brief description as to why this interfered with your ability to understand the reading. Some of the reading will be more academic or filled with jargon and I encourage you to embrace the arguments rather than dismissing them. But we may need help in clarifying terms, argument, examples, etc., and this is what this section is for.

One question that seeks to go beyond the reading content. The question should therefore ask a deeper film, society or theory-based question.

Like comedies, westerns, horror films, and science fiction, the crime film has inspired dozens of volumes of critical commentary. tary. It is difficult to write a coherent history of criticism of the crime film, however, especially because of its tendency to split into subgenres whose import is apparently only distantly related. The project ect of genre theory itself has depended throughout its history on the ascendancy of such critical methodologies as the structuralism of Tzvetan Todorov, which allows the systematic analysis of generic conventions, ventions, and the revisionist historicism of Rick Altman, which uncovers covers economic motives for the rise and fall of specific Hollywood genres. In the same way, critical responses to the crime film and its numerous subgenres have divided according to which modes of academic demic criticism have been fashionable from moment to moment: auteur teur criticism, mise-en-scene criticism, thematic criticism, structural criticism, psychoanalytic criticism, economic criticism, critical interrogations rogations of race or gender or identity politics. Overlaid on these categories, egories, however, is a different, surprisingly rigid series of categories dictated by the different crime subgenres themselves. The gangster film, the first crime subgenre to provoke serious commentary, tends to generate discussions of Hollywood mythmaking. Though this thematic matic strand continues in discussions of film noir, it is complemented by an equally strong thread of mise-en-scene criticism. Later, psychoanalytic analytic and feminist approaches rediscover the film noir and grapple ple with the emerging erotic thriller. Still more recent critics deal with film noir in terms of economic or cultural history. Despite continuing debates about the value of these approaches, they share one thing in common: They are all anti-intentionalist, seeking the meaning of popular ular genres not in the avowed purposes of their creators but in something thing broader and deeper - universalistic myths, industrywide production duction styles, patriarchal hegemony, material or cultural forces beyond the creators' control and sometimes beyond their understanding. standing. This anti-intentionalist strain of criticism, though it remains the single gle leading note of most contemporary academic criticism, has never achieved anything like the same dominance in criticism of the detective tive film. Although criticism of detective fiction has long been influenced enced by structuralism, another anti-intentionalist school, structural analysis has never had a similar impact on criticism of the detective film. Instead, most commentary on detective films seems to have taken en its cue from the rationalistic, hero-oriented bent of the films themselves. selves. The result is an odd kind of auteur criticism, organized around the detective (or occasionally the roster of stars who have played the detective in different films) as auteur, and a strong tendency to accept the films on their own terms rather than analyzing them, individually or as a group, in any terms they do not explicitly invite. One result of this difference is the production of two distinct kinds of genre history, an intentionalist history focusing on detective films and an anti-intentionalist history devoted to gangster films and films noirs. Jon Tuska and James Naremore can both be called historians of the crime film, since both attempt to root crime films in their cultural contexts, but Tuska's history is intentionalist, a chronicle of the facts and faces behind particular detective series, whereas Naremore's is a far more tendentious attempt to unmask the motives and influences of creators who may have been unwilling to acknowledge them, or indeed consciously unaware of them. For these reasons, criticism of crime films, like the films themselves, is more illuminatingly surveyed in terms of subgenres and the critical methodologies they have encouraged couraged than in terms of a single discontinuous chronology. But isolating lating the leading tendencies in commentaries on the crime film from each other and tracing the development of each one produces a general, eral, though often recursive, chronological history of crime-film criticism, icism, a history best understood in the context of earlier theories of crime fiction.

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Systematic criticism of the crime film was delayed by three obstacles. cles. Early champions of film art like British documentary filmmaker and historian Paul Rotha tended to dismiss the established genres of Hollywood entertainment in favor of more ambitious, individual, original inal films that were the very antithesis of the crime film. Even among genres, the crime film continued to suffer neglect in favor of the western, ern, which enjoyed a renaissance in the widescreen, Technicolor incarnations of the 1950s, because so many crime films were routine B-film "programmers"; Double Indemnity (1944), whose budget and Oscar car attention made it Paramount's closest criminal analogue to Shane (1953), was not very close at all. Finally, Alfred Hitchcock's predominance inance in the suspense genre meant that when academic critics considered sidered the crime film, they turned first to Hitchcock's films and the auteurist perspective they encouraged as products of a single director. tor. For all these reasons, few critics writing in English paid close attention tention to the crime film before 1970. By that time, criticism of the detective story, the first sort of crime fiction to have encouraged sustained critical analysis, had already gone through several distinct phases. As early as 1901, G. K. Chesterton ton had written in "A Defence of Detective Stories" that such stories are "the earliest and only form of popular literature in which is expressed pressed some sense of the poetry of modern life," the romance of the modern city evoked so ably by Robert Louis Stevenson but neglected so completely by most other writers of serious literary pretensions.' A quarter-century later, after his Father Brown mysteries had captured tured the popular imagination, Chesterton added a prophetic dimension sion to his analysis of the genre's appeal: Since a detective story's movement from mystery to enlightenment is a prefiguration of the apocalypse, the moment when every earthly veil will be swept away, each mystery must be governed by a single unifying concept that makes its ending "not only the bursting of a bubble but rather the breaking of a dawn."2 The greatest influence of Chesterton's theological analysis of the detective story's appeal was indirect. In the opening chapter of Trent's Last Case (1913), E. C. Bentley burlesques the millenialism to which his friend Chesterton had alluded by showing the earth-shattering (yet ultimately inconsequential) results of the shadowy financier Sigsbee Manderson's shooting as the introduction to a case whose twists seem to mock human reason. The detective-story writers who followed Bentley, from the Britons Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Margery Allingham to the Americans S. S. Van Dine, Ellery Queen, and John Dickson Carr, secularized Chesterton's emphasis on rationality as a prefiguration of a transcendental apocalypse, trivializing its theological ological overtones in the course of producing the influential recipe for the detective story as a comedy of manners for the characters and a civilized game of logical inference for the audience, all climaxing with a "Challenge to the Reader" made explicit in Queen's first nine novels (1929-35): an invitation to solve the mystery on the basis of the clues presented to detective and reader alike. The often highly formulaic interactions of the stock character types were nothing more than a pretense for the story's true action - "a hoodwinking contest," as Carr put it - between the enterprising author devising ingenious new means for murder and methods of concocting alibis and the wary reader determined to figure out the solution before it was revealed in the final chapter.; The principal theories of the formal or Golden Age detective story, as John Strachey dubbed it,4 took the form of historical ical introductions to anthologies of detective short stories or lists of rules for authors to observe in order to play fair with the readers It was not until the 1940s that criticism of the formal detective story came to focus on the moral import of these games. Nicholas Blake added to Chesterton's analogy between the revelatory denouement and the apocalypse the proposition that since readers of detective fiction tion identify with both detectives and murderers, the stories are folk myths whose aim is to purge postreligious audiences of guilt by reconciling ciling "the light and dark sides" of their social attitudes.6 W. H. Auden, agreeing with Blake that the detective stories appeal to their audiences' ences' "sense of sin," argued by contrast that "the illusion of being dissociated sociated from the murderer" in detective fiction, as opposed to the more literary novels of Dostoyevsky and Raymond Chandler, provides "the fantasy of being restored to the Garden of Eden" by using "the magic formula" of "an innocence which is discovered to contain guilt; then a suspicion of being the guilty other has been expelled, a cure effected, not by me or my neighbors, but by the miraculous intervention tion of a genius from outside who removes guilt by giving knowledge of guilt." 7 In the meantime, a third phase of detective-story criticism had begun with Chandler's influential essay "The Simple Art of Murder" (1944). Unlike critics who defended the Golden Age formula of baffling mystery and rational detection as an intellectual game or a morally purgative ritual, Chandler announced in his frankly challenging opening ing sentence: "Fiction in any form has always intended to be realistic." Against the "badly-scared champions of the formal or the classic mystery tery who think no story is a detective story which does not pose a formal mal and exact problem and arrange the clues around it with neat labels bels on them," Chandler defended the hard-boiled private-eye stories of Dashiell Hammett, and by implication his own work, by arguing that they "gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, sons, not just to provide a corpse; and with the means at hand, not with hand-wrought duelling pistols, curare, and tropical fish." 8 Chandler's dler's passionate partisanship of hard-boiled fiction's proletarian realism, ism, ignoring the equally formulaic qualities of his own fiction,9 established tablished a conflict between realistic and ritualistic impulses - the tendency toward photographic or psychological realism versus the tendency toward the revelatory structure of dream, myth, and fairy tale - that serves as a backdrop for the theories of crime films that begin gin to emerge shortly thereafter.

Two aspects of the reading you do not understand and a brief description as to why this interfered with your ability to understand the reading

Though neither of them names Paul Rotha directly, Parker Tyler and Robert Warshow, the first important critics to deal in English with crime films, both tackle his condescension toward genre films head-on. on. The two of them, writing soon after Chandler's "Simple Art of Murder," der," share the same project: to reveal the unconscious collective myths that play a much larger role than deliberate individual artistry in shaping Hollywood movies. As Tyler argues in Magic and Myth of the Movies (1947), "the lack of individual control" over any given Hollywood wood project. coupled with "the absence of respect for the original work" and "the premise that a movie is an ingenious fabrication of theoretically oretically endless elasticity," all produce conditions more congenial to collective myth - "the industrialization of the mechanical worker's daylight dream" - than to individual art.1° Tyler and Warshow ignore the avowed programs of individual filmmakers to examine the unconscious scious myths that underlie "what the public wants" - the collective tastes to which movies appeal.l " Yet their approaches to the crime film could hardly be more different. Tyler, America's first metaphysician of the movies, is an antigenre theorist for whom the narrative films produced by Hollywood studios constitute their own sovereign genre formed in response to its audience's ence's needs and desires. Although most of the films Tyler discusses represent specimens of popular genres rather than aspirations to individual dividual artistic achievement, he is less interested in the specificity of their genre markers than in their contribution to a transgeneric ontology tology of cinema. Tyler's analysis of Double Indemnity, for example, focuses on the relationship between Walter Neff and his boss Barton Keyes. The intimacy between the two men, he avers, is from the beginning ning an example of the insurance industry's psychopathology. Insurance ance salesmen like Walter make their living by marketing "the myth ... that human wisdom has provided a method of safeguarding against certain consequences of accident or death," while at the same time claims adjusters like Keyes, who are "waiting to invalidate this myth," serve as "an ethical corrective" to the salesman's success in selling it. As the story unfolds, Tyler contends, Keyes appears more and more clearly as Walter's "sexual conscience," the unyielding figure who "presides sides over his life as the hidden judge of his sexual claims as well as the insurance claims of his clients," and who condemns the "war psychology" ogy" whereby Walter "sells himself the idea of murderous violence as an aid to moral enthusiasm - in his case an enthusiasm for sex." 12 Turning to Mildred Pierce (1945), Tyler compares it to Citizen Kane (1941) in compromising its identification of the camera eye with the "Universal Spectator" by failing to see just what the audience would most like to know: the identity of Rosebud, or of the person who fired the fatal shots into Monte Beragon (Zachary Scott). Both films depend pend on a single paradox: the substitution of "the rational or mechanical ical mystery" of the detective-story formula and the potentially omniscient scient camera eye for "the irrational or symbolic mystery of the human soul" for an audience that subliminally recognizes the incommensurability bility of these two sorts of mystery. Hence Mildred Pierce, whose story proceeds toward a climactic visualization of Monte's murder that finally ly identifies Mildred's daughter Veda (Ann Blyth) as his actual killer, works at the same time as "Mildred's dream of guilt" for having wished for Monte's death and created both the conditions under which he died and the executioner, the double of her younger self and her present ent desires, who is "a form of herself ... [who] for some reason has taken on her incest crime."13 As the detective apparatus of the film vindicates dicates Mildred (Joan Crawford) in order to motivate a happy ending, her identification with Veda implicates her in Veda's guilt [Fig. 13]. Tyler's ler's own implication is that this paradox, although it emerges with unusual usual clarity in mystery stories, is essential to all the dreams of Hollywood, wood, essential indeed to the nature of the camera eye of narrative cinema.14 In "The Gangster as Tragic Hero" (1948), Warshow emphasizes by contrast the specificity of the gangster genre in posing a resistant alternative ternative to the prevailing myth of optimism and social happiness that amounts to an unofficial imperative of democratic cultures. Unlike "`happy"' movies like Good News (1947), which "ignores death and suffering," fering," and "`sad"' movies like A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945), which "uses death and suffering as incidents in the service of a higher optimism," mism," gangster films express "that sense of desperation and inevitable table failure which optimism itself helps to create." The gangster of Hollywood mythology - a figure much better known to most audiences than any actual gangsters - expresses the ethos of the city: "not the real city, but that dangerous and sad city of the imagination which is so much more important, which is the modern world." And his "pure criminality," which "becomes at once the means to success and the content of success," shows, through the rise and fall of his career, his futile attempt to establish his individual identity in a world whose only security is to be found in protective social groups, that "there is really only one possibility: failure. The final meaning of the city is anonymity and death." In the end, the gangster dies as the scapegoat of his conflicted flicted audience, the man who represents both the capitalistic imperative ative to rise above others and the democratic imperative to remain equal to others. Hence "he is under the obligation to succeed," even though his audience knows that "success is evil and dangerous, is - ultimately - impossible." He does what no other movie hero can do: allows his audience to accept their failure as a moral choice by disavowing avowing the corruption implicit in his fatal success.

One question that seeks to go beyond the reading content

Tyler's and Warshow's work grows out of a tradition of American journalism nalism that also produced the criticism of James Agee, Otis Ferguson, Manny Farber, and Pauline Kael. When film criticism entered American can universities some twenty years later, however, it was not this journalistic nalistic impulse that predominated, but the sort of auteur criticism typified by Andrew Sarris's The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, tions, 1929-1968 (1968), with its notoriously precise ranking of directors tors from "Pantheon" status down through the ranks to "Strained Seriousness" ousness" and "Less than Meets the Eye," and by Francois Truffaut's book-length interview Le Cinema selon Hitchcock (1966), translated as Hitchcock (1967).16 Even though the auteurist championing of popular filmmakers like Hitchcock, which began with Cahiers du cinema and traveled to America through Sarris's Village Voice reviews and polemical ical essays, eventually helped bring crime films to critical attention by turning critical scrutiny from prestige studio productions like Gone with the Wind and The Wizard of Oz (both 1939) to B movies like Detour tour (1945) and The Big Combo (1955), the immediate effect of auteurism ism was to stifle any systematic analysis of popular genres. Not only was genre study unable to compete successfully with the study of individual dividual directors, but Hitchcock's long-standing popular success - which Sarris and Truffaut urged to academic respectability - acted, as Charles Derry has observed, to inhibit analysis of the suspense genre, which was so often identified as that filmmaker's own exclusive prov- ince. The auteurist impulse remains primary in the first book-length critical ical study of the crime film in English, Colin McArthur's Underworld U.S.A. (1972). Noting the predominance of thematic and auteurist approaches in recent film criticism, McArthur defines his own approach to what he calls "the gangster film/thriller" as a focus on its "iconography," raphy," the leading visual and semiological codes that link gangster films like The Public Enemy (1931) and Dillinger (1945) to thrillers like The Maltese Falcon (1941) and Dead Reckoning (1947) and establish their world as common and distinctive.18 But after four introductory chapters ("Genre," "Iconography," "Development," and "Background") in which this iconographic approach is intermittently maintained, McArthur Arthur proceeds to a director-by-director survey of Fritz Lang, John Huston, Jules Dassin, Robert Siodmak, Elia Kazan, Nicholas Ray, Samuel uel Fuller, Don Siegel, and Jean-Pierre Melville in which auteurist concerns cerns predominate over genre analysis. McArthur concludes his discussion cussion of Fuller's Pickup on South Street (1953), House of Bamboo (1955), The Crimson Kimono (1959), and Underworld US.A. (1961) by urging, in true auteurist fashion, that "with the possible exceptions of John Ford and Elia Kazan, no Hollywood film-maker has so consistently ly explored the American psyche. [Fuller] deserves to be taken se- riously."19 It was left to other critics to pursue McArthur's argument further from its roots in, and its ultimate allegiance to, the careers of individual filmmakers.

Theories of Crime Fiction

Critics who read French were already familiar with the groundwork for a thematic approach to the crime genre laid by Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton in their Panorama du film noir americain (1955). Noting film noir's leading points of departure from other films about violent death - its adoption of the criminal's point of view and fascination nation with the criminal's psychology, the moral determinism of the ambiguous and unstable criminal milieu, and the persistent oneirism that associates realistic individual details with constant suggestions of symbol, nightmare, and unbridled chaos - Borde and Chaumeton conclude that the goal of each of these devices is "to make the viewer coexperience the anguish and insecurity which are the true emotions of contemporary film noir. All the films of this cycle create a similar emotional effect: that state of tension instilled in the spectator when the psychological reference points are removed. The aim of film noir was to create a specific alienation." 20 Borde and Chaumeton's distinctions both focused their study of representative noirs more sharply and helped give film noir a greater critical impetus than the larger genre of the crime film from which they wished to distinguish it.21 Fifteen years after Borde and Chaumeton's pioneering work, Raymond mond Durgnat returned to the project of thematic analysis in "Paint It Black: The Family Tree of the Film Noir." Despite the essay's title, it does not establish a family tree of precedents for or influences on film noir; instead, it proposes eleven branch topics along which Durgnat briskly disposes some three hundred films from Easy Street (1917) to 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), this last on the grounds that "film noir is not a genre ... and takes us into the realm of classification by motif and tone" rather than the subject of crime. "Only some crime films are noir," Durgnat contends, "and films noirs in other genres include The Blue Angel, King Kong, High Noon, Stalag 17 ... and 2001. "22 But Durgnat's gnat's eleven topics - "crime as social criticism," "gangsters," "on the run," "private eyes and adventurers," "middle class murder," "portraits traits and doubles," "sexual pathology," "psychopaths," "hostages to fortune," "blacks and reds," and "guignol, horror, fantasy" - are thematic matic rather than motivic or tonal, although a brief analysis of them reveals that they neither distinguish noirs from non-noirs nor, in their frequent overlapping and lack of parallelism, provide a systematic framework for defining film noir. Durgnat's work was accordingly most useful in suggesting topics for further research, encouraging discussion sion about the categorization of specific films, and provoking an alternative ternative approach to the crime film. His thematic approach has been adopted by critics from Robert Porfirio to Glenn Erickson, even when they take issue with the specific categories Durgnat proposes.23 Restless critics seeking an alternative approach to Durgnat's thematics matics - intermittently promised by McArthur's description of his emphasis phasis as iconographic and Durgnat's description of noir in terms of motif and tone rather than subject or genre - might have found such an approach already implicit in Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg's discussion, in their Hollywood in the Forties (1968), of "Black Cinema," which begins: "A dark street in the early morning hours, splashed with a sudden downpour. Lamps form haloes in the murk. In a walk-up room, filled with the intermittent flashing of a neon sign from across the street, a man is waiting to murder or be murdered."24 As befits its context in Higham and Greenberg's survey of forties films, their discussion cussion of noir iconography and their perusal of representative noirs from Shadow of a Doubt (1943) to The Lady from Shanghai (1948) is evocative rather than systematic. The first theorist to attempt anything like an iconographic grammar of film noir is Paul Schrader, not yet a noted screenwriter (Taxi Driver, 1976; Raging Bull, 1980; Bringing Out the Dead, 1999) and director (Hardcore, 1979; Patty Hearst, 1988; Affliction, 1998). Agreeing with Durgnat gnat that "film noir is not a genre," Schrader identifies it instead with "a specific period in film history, like German Expressionism or the French New Wave." According to Schrader, the flowering of noir in the 1940s and early 1950s depends on four leading influences: postwar disillusionment, illusionment, the worldwide resurgence of an often harsh realism, the influence of Germanic expatriate directors and cinematographers, and the hard-boiled tradition of American writing exemplified by Chandler as novelist and screenwriter. Schrader divides the development of film noir into three overlapping phases. The first (1941-6), typified by The Maltese Falcon and This Gun for Hire (1942), is dominated by "the private vate eye and the lone wolf." The second (1945-9), ushered in by Double ble Indemnity and exemplified by The House on 92nd Street (1945) and The Naked City (1948), is "the post-war realistic period," focusing on "the problems of crime in the streets, political corruption and police routine." The third (1949-53), represented by Gun Crazy (1949) and The Big Heat (1953), is marked by the sort of "psychotic action and suicidal impulse" that eventually produces the deliriously climactic Kiss Me Deadly (1955), "the masterpiece of film noir," and "film noir's epitaph," Touch of Evil (1958).25 This historical summary, however, is only a frame for Schrader's summary of the mise-en-scene that makes film noir coherent and memorable: the prevalence of nighttime lighting for interiors and exteriors teriors alike; the preponderance of oblique angles and skewed lines over verticals, horizontals, and right angles; the tendency of the lighting ing and blocking to give inanimate objects as much emphasis as actors; tors; the preponderance of portentous compositional tension over cathartic physical action; the "almost Freudian attachment to water" (particularly unrealistic in stories set in and around Los Angeles); the prevalence of romantic voice-over narration - like the memorable line with which Michael O'Hara (Orson Welles) introduces The Lady from Shanghai: "When I start out to make a fool of myself, there's very little can stop me" - to establish an unquenchable yearning for the past and a fatalistic frame for the present; and a rigorously confusing use of flashbacks and time shifts "to reinforce the feelings of hopelessness and lost time." These techniques work together, Schrader concludes, to "emphasize loss, nostalgia, lack of clear priorities, insecurity; then submerge these self-doubts in mannerism and style. In such a world style becomes paramount; it is all that separates one from meaning- lessness."26 Schrader's emphasis on noir as a period and a style rather than a subject or genre is echoed by Janey Place and Lowell Peterson in "Some Visual Motifs of Film Noir" (1974), a brief but profusely illustrated ed catalog of visual devices that the authors divide into a distinctive "photographic style: antitraditional lighting and camera" (low-key lighting; movement of the key light off to the side; night-for-night shooting; increased depth of field; optical distortions of space and shape associated with wide-angle lenses) and an equally distinctive "directorial style: antitraditional mise-en-scene" (irregular or unbalanced anced figure placement; claustrophobic frames within the frame; doubling bling characters with shadows or reflections or inanimate objects in order to depersonalize them or suggest their hidden depths; withholding ing establishing shots or camera movements that would root the characters acters more securely in the frame and the space and world it pre- sents).27 Place and Peterson make a persuasive case for the decisive importance of such visual motifs to film noir, not only as signatures of individual auteurs but as expressions of a particular view of the world [Fig. 14].

By the mid-1970s, film noir had largely displaced the gangster film as the focus of crime-film criticism. Although most critics agreed that film noir was not a genre, the project of genre criticism itself was bolstered by the appearance of Stuart M. Kaminsky's American Film Genres (1974) and John G. Cawelti's Adventure, Mystery, and Romance (1976). As Tyler and Warshow had reacted against Paul Rotha, both Kaminsky and Cawelti broke explicitly with the auteurist assumptions that each work depended on a single authorizing creator and that the critic's task was aesthetic evaluation of different works and auteurs. As Kaminsky minsky put it: "The genre approach need make no popular judgment. It is an examination of popular forms, an attempt to understand, not to `sell' films or directors."29 The structuralist move from prescriptive to descriptive criticism is a reasonable response to a genre whose meaning ing is so completely generated by the conventions it shares with other members of the genre rather than its departures from them that, as Warshow had observed, "originality is to be welcomed only in the degree gree that it intensifies the expected experience without fundamentally altering it." 30 Structuralism offers the most logical basis for genre criticism because cause it focuses on meanings within conventions shared widely throughout a given genre rather than on the transformation of those conventions within individual works. Although he never uses the term structuralism, Cawelti's bibliographical notes make it clear that his approach proach to the formulas of popular fiction owes a foundational debt to Northrop Frye's structural study of myths in his Anatomy of Criticism (1957).31 By replacing auteurist critics' prescriptive faith in an authorizing izing creator, and timeless aesthetic standards with an anthropologist's ogist's interest in the anonymous productions of a given culture, the structuralist orientation redirected attention from the unique qualities of particular artworks to the contours of the popular genres they exemplified. emplified. The first clear example of Frye's influence in the study of crime films is James Damico's 1978 invocation of Frye's analysis of romance in order der to define film noir as a genre informed by an attitude and intent expressed through stock characters and a consistent armature of plot. Bypassing the attempt to seek thematic or stylistic denominators common to all noirs, Damico proposes "a model which embodies the 'truest' or 'purest' example of the type" from which more marginal noirs may be seen to diverge: A man whose experience of life has left him sanguine and often bitter meets a not-innocent woman of similar outlook to whom he is sexually and fatally attracted. Through this attraction ... the man comes to cheat, attempt to murder, or actually murder a second man to whom the lover is unhappily or unwillingly attached (generally he is her husband or lover), an act which ... brings about the sometimes metaphoric, but usually literal destruction of the woman, the man to whom she is attached, and frequently the protagonist tagonist himself.32 The structuralist impulse behind Damico's model provides a crucial link between the analysis of film noir and the more general commentaries taries on the crime film that lay ahead. Such a link would prove vital because criticism of the detective film, though nearly as voluminous throughout the 1970s, was taking a completely different course from the debate pitting myth against iconography in defining the film noir. The defining presence of a detective hero had made the detective film seem less problematic from the beginning. Considering the formulaic nature of detective fiction, it was eminently predictable that its conventions ventions would attract the attention of Tzvetan Todorov, the first-generation generation structuralist most interested in popular forms. Todorov's essay "The Typology of Detective Fiction" (1966) postulates lates two alternative modes: the detective story of rational deduction and the Serie noire, or thriller, which emphasizes suspense rather than curiosity and corresponds, as its French label indicates, to the film noir. Todorov proposes "the suspense novel," whose "reader is interested ested not only by what has happened but also by what will happen next," as a hybrid of the detective story and the thriller. The suspense novel presents a vulnerable detective "integrated into the universe of the other characters, instead of being an independent observer as the reader is." The mortal detective of the suspense novel, who can be either a fallible professional detective like Sam Spade or an innocent suspect who turns detective in order to clear his or her name, represents sents the genre's dissatisfactions with the detective formula and the endeavor to renew that formula by retaining only its suspense ele- ments.33 Todorov's essay remains important today as the first attempt to theorize a crime genre more comprehensive than the detective story, ry, the thriller, or the suspense novel by mapping out the transformations tions of their shared conventions. Although George Grella, writing a few years later, treated the Golden Age detective novel and the hard-boiled private-eye novel as equally formulaic in a pair of essays on the myths of Edenic purity and corrupted rupted romance that underlie the two formulas,35 only three theorists have reached outside the permutations of the detective-story formula to the larger structuralist project Todorov outlines: Cawelti, in the "Notes Toward a Typology of Literary Formulas" that introduces his discussion of mystery fiction in Adventure, Mystery, and Romance;36 Gary C. Hoppenstand, in the typology of mystery and suspense formulas mulas that frames his study In Search of the Paper Tiger (1987);37 and Charles Derry, in his typology of suspense films according to whether they focus on criminals, detectives, or victims, and the extent to which they include a strong detective figure as the exemplar of a rational world order.38 In particular, the kind of structural analysis practiced by Todorov has been much more influential in the criticism of detective fiction than in the criticism of detective films. Instead, that criticism has been dominated by quasi-auteurist studies, with the detective standing in for the director as auteur. It was only a short step from film historian an William K. Everson's The Bad Guys (1964), a lively categorical survey vey of movie villains ("the western outlaws," "the gangsters and the hoods," "the psychos," and so on) folded into an opulent, oversized collection of stills, to Everson's The Detective in Film (1972) - "an affectionate fectionate ... but certainly not comprehensive, introduction to the field," as its author called it - which replaced many of the equivalent photographs with more detailed historical information about the fictional tional heroes Charlie Chan, Dick Tracy, and the FBI, even though its large format still suggested a coffee-table book.39 The fan's impulse toward appreciation that drives Everson also underlies Jon Tuska's The Detective in Hollywood (1978), which again surveys the field detective tive by detective, from Sherlock Holmes and Philo Vance to the heroes of Dirty Harry (1971) and Chinatown (1974). Although Tuska writes at much greater length than Everson, the information he provides - biographies raphies of detective-story authors, production and economic details regarding particular films, anecdotes about and interviews with filmmakers makers - steers clear of any systematic critical analysis.4° The focus on typological characters as the genre's defining center of interest tends to accept these characters and the formulas they imply on their own terms, moving toward relative aesthetic judgments rather than analyzing them as structural or historical functions. If critical commentary on detective films struggled to find expressive sive structures beneath the genre's recurrent figures, the combination of structural analysis and social history enabled Jack Shadoian to define fine "the gangster/crime genre"41 more broadly yet more precisely than ever before in Dreams and Dead Ends (1977). Shadoian takes his cue from both Warshow's tragic myth and the brief sociological hints John Baxter had offered in the trenchant Introduction to his 1970 encyclopedia, cyclopedia, The Gangster Film, which emphasized the interaction of social, criminal, and Hollywood culture rather than the simple reflection tion of any one by the other. Since "criminals are the creation of society ety rather than rebels against it," Baxter notes that audiences' relation to these urban wolves, whose personal and professional code is often indistinguishable from that of the paid enforcers of the law, is ambiguous, ous, informed alike by "menace and glamour."42 In answer to the question, tion, "What does the genre do that can't be done as well elsewhere?" Shadoian expands this account to define the gangster as "the archetypal typal American dreamer" whose dreams rehearse the conflict between two blankly opposing national ideologies: the vision of a classless democratic society and the drive to get ahead. Echoing Warshow, Shadoian doian assigns central importance to the gangster's paradoxical drive for a success that will destroy him as surely as failure. Because neither ther gangsters, in their unappeasable thirst for success, nor their films propose any serious alternative to "the American way of life" whose shortcomings they dramatize, "they act on behalf of its ideal nature. If it could only work the way it is supposed to, there would be no problems." lems." Hence the alluring, fearsome gangster - incorporating both the belief in egalitarianism and the possibility of a better life, both audiences' ences' disillusionment with American society and their ultimate faith in its principles - is a contested figure on whom different periods can project their views of social utopia and social critique, from the limitless less aspirations of Little Caesar (1930) to the claustrophobic nightmare of The Killers (1946), from the "romantic rage of selfhood" in Gun Crazy and White Heat (both 1949) to the more sentimental humanism of Pickup up on South Street and 9.9 Riuer Street (both 1953), before tailing off in the nonrepresentational postmodernism of Bonnie and Clyde (1967), Point Blank (1967), and The Godfather (1972).43 Shadoian's eclectic readings of individual films, freely borrowing from mise-en-scene criticism, structuralism, and the historical analysis sis of gangster myths without committing themselves to any one of them, are echoed in three other synthetic studies that have become the standard narrative histories of their subgenres: Eugene Rosow's Born to Lose: The Gangster Film in America (1978), Carlos Clarens's Crime Movies (1980), and Foster Hirsch's The Dark Side of the Screen: Film Noir (1981). Rosow, whose sociologically oriented study devotes nearly half its length to films before 1930, argues for a close connection tion between the genre's changing appeal and the specific desires and demands of its changing audience. He is especially acute on the interrelations relations between organized crime and the business realities of Hollywood wood filmmaking, as in his observation that "success in the movie industry dustry ... was achieved in roughly the same way that bootleggers built and were continuing to build their empires" - that is, by former outsiders becoming "Robber Barons" through the ruthless enforcement ment of their monopolies.44 Clarens, addressing a question much like Shadoian's - "What can be said to be the true intent of the crime film? To awaken in the viewer a civic conscience? To instill an awareness of a fallible society? To establish distance from a very real problem?" - defines his field more narrowly, despite his title, by excluding "the psychological chological thriller" that "deals with violence in the private sphere" (e.g., Shadow of a Doubt, Kiss Me Deadly) to produce a field basically corresponding to the gangster genre; but he surveys this field much more broadly, providing a comprehensive history studded with brief, pointed commentaries on hundreds of films.45 Hirsch's volume is synthetic thetic in still another sense, drawing on the work of most important earlier commentators on film noir in chapters that successively consider sider its literary and cinematic antecedents, its iconography, its narrative rative patterns, its leading performers and directors, and its influence on other films. Though Hirsch, steering a course between appreciation and analysis, does not attempt an original reconceptualization of noir, his frequent asides on such matters as the returning veteran as "the only character type in noir connected directly to the period" and the motifs that tie Hitchcock's films to the noir tradition have made his volume an oft-quoted guide to its subject.46

Even as Rosow, Clarens, and Hirsch were summing up an era in crime-film film criticism, a new wave of feminist studies was calling into question that criticism's methodology. As an earlier generation of critics had rejected jected Rotha's tenets of originality and ambition, the new feminist theory ory rejected the content analysis of Molly Haskell, aptly summarized by Haskell's 1974 summary of female roles in films noirs: "In the dark melodramas of the forties, woman came down from her pedestal and she didn't stop when she reached the ground."47 This revolt is fueled by the double influence of Marxist materialist aesthetics and Jacques Lacan's rewriting of Freud. Christine Gledhill explicitly invokes Marx in turning from the question, "What is this film's meaning?" (a question tion that assumes that meaning is immanent, objective, and readily available to the disinterested critic, a signifying function free of history tory and ideology) to the question, "How is its meaning produced?" which changes "the project of criticism from the discovery of meaning to that of uncovering the means of its production" - explaining why a genre or formula that has currency in a particular historical moment authorizes some meanings but not others. By changing the feminist critic's question from "Does this image of woman please me or not, do I identify with it or not?" to "What is being said about women here, who is speaking, for whom?" Gledhill and other feminists redirect the focus of genre theory from the content of stories, images, and conventions to the ideological conditions under which they were produced.48 Feminism's historical project is joined most decisively to Lacan's psychoanalytic theory in Laura Mulvey's influential "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" (1975). Asking how viewers can derive pleasure sure from potentially castrating images of women, Mulvey theorizes that movies address the fears of castration that images of women, who lack phalluses, arouse in (presumably male) viewers by allowing audiences the scopophilic pleasures of voyeurism and the narcissistic pleasures of identification with the human figures shown onscreen. Traditional narrative cinema, Mulvey argues, resolves the paradox between tween these two kinds of pleasure (looking at an image as object, looking ing at an image as representing a potentially engaging subjectivity) by casting woman as the object of a gaze that is "pleasurable in form" but "threatening in content." Patriarchal cinema neutralizes the potentially ly castrating power of women's images by fetishizing them, displacing their bodies or breaking them photographically into individually nonthreatening threatening pieces (as in Morocco, 1930), or making them the subjects of investigations directed by the male gaze (as in Vertigo, 1958) in order der to reserve for men alone the position of active agents capable of demystifying and possessing potentially threatening women.49 Although Mulvey's theory, like Gledhill's, is intended to apply to all commercial films, it has particular applications to film noir, which assigns signs a central role to erotically charged images of powerful, fearsome women. Instead of joining Haskell in condemning these images as degrading, grading, more recent feminists have used them to interrogate the allegedly legedly invisible signifying practices of Hollywood cinema by unmasking ing its patriarchal agenda. Claire Johnston, identifying claims adjuster Keyes as the "signifier of the patriarchal order," sees Double Indemnity as a displaced oedipal drama in which Walter Neff kills Dietrichson, a negative father-surrogate, in order to take his place as head of his family and achieve at the same time the secure position of Keyes as the positive father.50 Sylvia Harvey characterizes film noir as marked by "the strange and compelling absence of `normal' family relations," which "encourage[s] the consideration of alternative institutions for the reproduction of social life."51 Pam Cook, following Parker Tyler, argues gues in more general terms that Mildred's brutal assimilation to the patriarchal order in Mildred Pierce through the loss of her daughter and the deauthorizing of her narrative voice is one more example of the ways in which "the system which gives men and women their place in society must be reconstructed by a more explicit work of repression" pression" exemplified by the film's narrative and visual systems.52 The resulting critique has been developed in two leading directions. In attempting to make room for women in film noir, Elizabeth Cowie has challenged "the tendency to characterize film noir as always a masculine film form" by valorizing the female unwilling killer of The Accused (1948), the obsessional heroine of Possessed (1947), and the fatally smitten heroine of The Damned Don't Cry (1950).53 More often, feminist critics have sought to make room for female audiences by unmasking patriarchal motives behind noir conventions, even at the price of arguing that noir heroines onscreen are mere functions of male desire. Mary Ann Doane defines the femmes fatales who descend from Brigid O'Shaughnessy (Mary Astor), the treacherous client who nearly undermines Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart) in his manly resolve solve in The Maltese Falcon, as "an articulation of fears surrounding the loss of stability and centrality of the [male] self.... The power accorded corded to the femme fatale is a function of fears linked to the notions of uncontrollable drives, the fading of subjectivity, and the loss of conscious scious agency."54 James F. Maxfield is still more explicit: "The internal conflicts of the male protagonists are ultimately more important than external conflicts with other characters - even with the fatal woman. ... The women are merely catalysts; in the end it is the men who are destructive to themselves"55 [Fig. 15]. And Richard Dyer contends that "film noir is characterized by a certain anxiety over the existence and definition of masculinity and normality" - an anxiety that, since it cannot not be expressed directly (for such a direct expression would admit the existence of the very problem it is the films' work to obscure), is marked by the threatening predominance of nonmasculine images to indicate the boundaries of categories that cannot be constructed in positive terms.56 As the feminist critique of Hollywood patriarchy has continued, it has been supplemented by the project Dyer suggests: an analysis of Hollywood images of masculinity. Frank Krutnik's In a Lonely Street (1991) explores the ways in which the conventions of film noir (a genre Krutnik restricts to "`tough' thrillers" of the 1940s) amount to a definition inition and defense of masculinity by allowing the hard-boiled hero to grapple with "the dangers represented by the feminine - not just women in themselves but also any non-'tough' potentiality of his own identity as a man." More generally, Krutnik maintains, the work of the "tough" thriller is to elaborate and resolve contradictions between the whole range of male desire and those desires admitted by a patriarchal archal culture of the period. A common though often unwilling way "tough" thrillers expressed this tension was to follow the normal Hollywood lywood tendency toward heterosexual romance, since "the grafting of the love story onto the `hard-boiled' detective story meant that the films had to confront ... the question of how heterosexuality could possibly be accommodated within the parameters of such an obsessively sively phallocentric fantasy, without causing it to collapse."57 The result sult was not only films like Dead Reckoning, in which the hero's love for the heroine is thwarted by his determination to avenge the dead buddy she killed, but films like The Big Sleep (1946), in which the hero is paired with a heroine who, though she first seems as devious as any femme fatale, miraculously turns out to be worthy of his trust and love, thus vindicating both his tough, wary professionalism and his openness to love against all odds.