The Hitman As Existential Hero: A Film Noir Invention?: Why is it that even the most unpretentious, not to say dumb, film noir is so easy to intellectualize? One could blame Sartre, Camus, or any number of French guys and/or whoever it was who coined the phrase "radical will." Or is it because way back in the day D.H. Lawrence wrote "the essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer?"Among the many delights of the Sony Film Noir Classics I set released on DVD this week are two discrete portraits of hitmen as existential sort-of heroes, and then as dupes. Of fate, or of themselves. The screen caps above and below kind of exemplify the respective modes of the characters. Above, that's Vince Edwards playing Claude, the hired killer of Irving Lerner's offbeat, stylishly low-key 1958 Murder By Contract. The first 20 minutes of the picture establish Claude's cold-bloodedness, but once he flies out to the coast for a job, we get to see his free and easy side. He drives his minders, a couple of low-level mobsters played by Phillip Pine and an especially droll Herschel Bernardi, completely nuts with his seeming lack of interest about the job. He upbraids a hotel waiter for indifferent service and then throws him a fin for a tip anyway. He spends afternoons soaking up the sun, whacking balls at the driving range. He's his own vision of a free man.
Eli Wallach's Dancer in Don Siegel's The Lineup, also 1958, represents a different but certainly related proposition. No matter what the environment, Dancer knocks stuff off the shelves as if he owns the particular place. He doesn't care what you think of it. And if you've got something he wants, he's gonna take it. In this film's scenario it's not what he wants, but what the syndicate and "The Man" are paying him to retrieve for them wants, and some might argue that his beholden position here makes him a slave rather than free. Which leads to the question of whether freedom is merely a question of attitude.
But it gets a little more complicated, because at the film's climax Dancer does commit what is inarguably the act of a free man, and it is this act which dooms him—or was he doomed to begin with? As for Murder By Contract's Claude, his blithe attitude is replaced by a bout of professional impotence just when he needs it least (ain't it always that way?). And so both pictures end in ways bound to pass muster with the Production Code. But has the demise of the Production Code, and the ability of such characters to Get Away With It in latter-day noir simulacurms really done anything to solve the conundrums posed in the earlier pictures? I think not.
I've never seen either.
― The Devil's Avocado (Gukbe), Friday, 6 November 2009 20:28 (fifteen years ago)