In the Shadow of World War II: Émigré Noir

From People on Sunday Towards the Noir

Noir went down in cinematic history as a movement, a genre and a style. Crime stories, femme Fatales, heavy shadows in the frame, rain and fog conjuring a dreamlike atmosphere are essential ingredients of film noir. The origins of noir are traced back to the American hard-boiled detective. Usually, two films by American directors, John Huston's The Maltese Falcon (1941) and Orson Welles' Touch of Evil (1956) are referred to as its beginning and end, respectively. Jewish filmmakers escaping Hitler's rule in Europe had pushed noir’s visual aesthetic to the limit and created most of its programmatic films.

It so happened that the vibrant gang that made the 1930 silent film masterpiece People on Sunday formed the backbone of the future leaders of the noir film movement. Billy Wilder and Fred Zinnemann wrote its screenplay. It was directed by Robert Siodmak and Edgar G. Ulmer, with Eugen Schüfftan as the cinematographer. Schüfftan later contributed to the 1937 film Port of Shadows (Le Quai des brumes) by Marcel Carné, a work of French poetic realism which in many ways determined the future noir). It was the last German silent film, an upbeat film that unfolded on the streets of Berlin, with the characters basking in their youth and enjoying life.

In Germany between 1930 and 1932, there were many upbeat films. With the advent of sound, this niche was occupied mainly by musical comedies, poorly preserved and somewhat forgotten by history. In contrast, People on Sunday persisted: brimming with light and air, it was the last breath of freedom before the world was thrown into the chaos of Nazism and World War II. There will be neither light nor air in the 1940s noir films: their characters and world will be trapped inside the confines of sound stage props and light-and-shade arabesques.

Double Indemnity  

Double Indemnity, on par with The Maltese Falcon, became a landmark noir film. Billy Wilder directed the film. Following People on Sunday, Wilder continued working as a screenwriter. Originally from a family of Polish Jews, he landed a job as a journalist in Vienna and later in Berlin, where he first began writing scripts. The day after the Reichstag fire, Wilder packed a single suitcase, took some money and a few original Lautrec posters, and headed for Paris. There, Wilder first tried directing on Bad Seed, which failed, and for lack of further prospects, Wilder left. Then, in the same year, 1933, he arrived in Hollywood.

His breakthrough comes six years later - Wilder writes the screenplay for Ninotchka by Ernst Lubitsch, his idol and mentor. Like Lubitsch before him, Wilder was to become a comedy maestro. However, it wasn't until the mid-1950s that he directed legendary films like The Seven Year Itch and Some Like It Hot, both starring Marilyn Monroe. At this point, however, Wilder wrote a few more successful screenplays, and finally, in 1944, he was given the go-ahead to direct Double Indemnity. Together with Raymond Chandler, they adapted the eponymous novel by James M. Cain for the screen.

The film has all the hallmarks of a noir: the plot is about an insurance salesman (reminiscent of a private detective) who gets caught up in a deadly affair orchestrated by a femme fatale named Phyllis. As it was to become commonplace in noir films, the on-screen action is accompanied by a voiceover, and the plot unfolds via flashbacks. The film is full of shadows and darkness. It becomes increasingly apparent that these shadows were not exclusively the product of the dreadful 1940s but also the roaring 1920s when German Expressionism was on the rise. As once in expressionist paintings, shadows harbored the protagonists' worst nightmares; in Double Indemnity, too, death stares at the protagonist through the dark lenses of Phyllis's sunglasses.

Sunset Boulevard

In 1950, Sunset Boulevard was released, crafted from Wilder's original screenplay, which would subsequently earn him and his long-term partner, Charles Brackett, an Academy Award.  Once more, it is narrated through flashbacks, with a voiceover narrator, and it's a bleak and unforgiving tale of a faded film diva. Wilder here does something unheard of in Hollywood: rather than telling a story of a professional collapse or triumph, as in A Star Is Born, he makes a film noir about the life of a Hollywood star. Moreover, Wilder also uses the performers' real-life backgrounds when delivering the screenplay fiction. The entire lead cast of the film are legends of silent Hollywood: Gloria Swanson (starring as Norma Desmond), Buster Keaton (one of her guests), Erich von Stroheim (former director and now Norma's butler), director Cecil Blount DeMille ( playing himself). It's not just the film's protagonist that's fading away; it's also an era.

There is considerable sentiment in the film, but even more ghostly images of the dead. Norma Desmond's lavish home is a true Nosferatu's castle, where the living are not allowed to enter (hence the reporter and Norma's young lover's death). When Wilder was asked in an interview in 1975 about the expressionist imagery, his émigré experience and what it was like for him to be a Jew during World War II and how much of this came through in his screenplays and films, he just shrugged. He has no idea. Except maybe subconsciously, he does. And given how intimately expressionism and noir engage with that very fabric of the subconscious, that's no small thing.

Detour

Another outstanding film, the 1945 classic film noir Detour, was directed by Edgar Georg Ulmer. Originally from the Czech town of Olomouc, Ulmer was born in Austria-Hungary. Like Wilder, he moved to Vienna and there became a set designer at the Max Reinhardt Theatre. He worked with Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, directed People on Sunday and then moved to the USA. He had a successful career start at Universal. But one wrong move, having an affair and then marrying Shirley Kassler, the then wife of producer Max Alexander, a nephew of the head of Universal, Carl Laemmle, got Ulmer kicked out of Hollywood. Undeterred, he and his beloved wife left for the east coast.

In New York, Ulmer takes a job with one of the smallest and poorest B-movie companies, PRC (Producers Releasing Corporation), and puts the company's name on the map, acting as both a director and a producer. Ulmer is known for his ability to produce films quickly, cheaply and with high quality. " He shot Detour in just six days. This noir begins on the road, with the future narrator arriving in Reno and a guy by the name of Al getting off a car, entering a roadside cafe and there sinking in his thoughts of his recent past, his story. The familiar noir voice-over accompanies the scenes passing before Al's eyes. He is on the road again, catching a ride, but he is caught up in some bizarre events: the car's owner dies, and a mysterious woman approaches Al and starts blackmailing him. One more femme fatale and one more relentless shadow is looming over him.

Casablanca 

Michael Curtiz and his 1942 classic film noir, Casablanca, is another celebrated émigré from Eastern Europe. Curtiz was a Jew from Budapest who had emigrated to the States in the mid-1920s at the invitation of Warner Bros. His 1942 release of Casablanca was a hit. It is not pure noir, more of a mixture of a spy movie and a romantic melodrama, made in a “dark" style. However, the lead actor in the film did come from noir - it was Humphrey Bogart, who had starred in The Maltese Falcon.

Casablanca is a transit point for those fleeing the Nazi regime. Among the supporting characters, one can indeed spot yesterday's refugees. Paul Henreid plays Laszlo, the leader of the Czech resistance movement. The Nazis did not care about Henreid's Jewish background - his father, a Viennese banker, converted to Catholicism in 1904 and changed his last name from Hirsch to Henreid. However, with his anti-Nazi remarks, Henreid earned the title of an enemy of the Third Reich. Henreid arrives in the States from the UK, where he is assisted in the emigration process by Conrad Veidt, the 1920s German star who played the sleepwalker Cesare in the first expressionist film, The Cabinet of Dr Caligari.

Veidt was cast in Casablanca as the German Major Strasser. Veidt flees Germany with his Jewish wife Ilona (originally from Miskolc). When the largest German studio UFA conducted a poll - everyone was required to fill out a form and specify their racial identity - out of solidarity, Veidt stated that he was a Jew. Another émigré star, Peter Lorre, also stars in the film, and Casablanca will prove to be not only a hit but also an émigré anthem. Most of the crew, starting with the director, are non-natives. And this, too, is very much of a noir narrative: no safe space in a world that is no longer home, with nothing left but unsettling sounds, smells, shadows and blissful forgetfulness, ever interrupted by flashbacks that keep catching up with you.

Sorry, Wrong Number 

There are, in fact, some highly experimental noir films that come close in their innovation to Hitchcock's Rope, shot entirely in one space with very few cuts. One of them is Sorry, Wrong Number, by Anatole Litvak. Like Curtiz, Litvak had not been a part of Sunday People but had a similar background as an immigrant. Born in Kyiv, he fled to Germany in the 1920s following the revolution and then to France after 1933. After his film Mayerling (1936) had international success, he left for the States.

Paris was his favorite filming location; perhaps this was why in 1947, he directed The Long Night, a remake of the French film Le jour se lève (1939) by Marcel Carné. Or perhaps it was a coincidence that helped prove the link between the noir and the poetic realism that Carné's film exemplified. Either way, the remake, like the original, had the distinctive trait of having the plot unfold within only one space: the protagonist commits a murder and then barricades himself in his room. The viewers are told his story, leading up to the murder, through a series of flashbacks. Carné had a more interesting way of working with the objects in the room surrounding the protagonist than Litvack. But already in his next film, Sorry, Wrong Number Litvak proved that he too was no stranger to formal invention.

 The lead female character, played by noir star Barbara Stanwyck (who featured in both Wilder's Double Indemnity and Siodmak's noir The File on Thelma Jordon), is trapped in her room. She is unwell. All she can do is make and answer phone calls. Through her conversations, she learns what has happened to her disappeared husband and the meaning of an inadvertently overheard conversation about an imminent murder. Litvak openly plays with the voice-over ever present in noir, shifting it within the frame through phone conversations. This noir has few visual subtleties, yet the sheer brutality of fate and the stifling tightness of the enclosed space are palpable.

Laura

Otto Preminger was born in Vyzhnytsia ( present-day Ukraine), where his family had fled after the Russian army had occupied the region in 1914. His father, Markus Preminger, secures employment as a prosecutor in Graz, and just one year later he is offered a higher office in Vienna should he convert to Catholicism. The father declines but moves to Vienna with the whole family anyway.

Two decades later, in 1934, his son Otto found himself in a similar situation: he was offered the position of manager of the Vienna State Theatre on the condition that he converted to Catholicism. Like his father, Otto refuses. Not a religious man, he still has no intention of betraying his roots. In Vienna, he works at the Max Reinhardt Theatre simultaneously with Ulmer. In the spring of 1935, Preminger accepted an offer from Joseph Schenck and left for Hollywood in October. His parents never accepted him leaving Vienna, and when he persistently tried to persuade them to move to the States, they would refuse to leave their city and country. Like Wilder's mother and grandmother, they were to perish in concentration camps.

The 1944 film noir Laura was Preminger's first major American success. The plot followed a police detective investigating the murder case of Laura Hunt. Imagine his astonishment when the allegedly murdered woman showed up at her flat safe and sound! The logic of the action - a string of suspects, interviews, evidence and the room where the murder took place - had the feel of an intellectual rather than a hard-boiled detective. Nonetheless, a certain amount of cynicism and noir means of expression were also present. The film became a classic in the genre, and Preminger went on to direct five more noir films in the following nine years. Finally, by the mid-1950s, Preminger amassed the means to start making independent films and tackle taboo subjects like pregnancy outside marriage, drug abuse and homosexuality. Gradually noir shadows, understatement and anxieties take on more specific plot outlines, and the noir era draws to a close.

Hard-boiled detective is a detective sub-genre that gained popularity in the United States during the Prohibition era. The lead character was usually a private investigator fighting against corruption and organized crime. The hard-boiled detective was remarkable for its high degree of cynicism resulting from the sheer brutality of the world around. Among the masters of the genre were Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain, on whose novels many film noirs were based.

Poetic Realism was an artistic movement of French cinema in the 1930s that had a working class man as protagonist, and expressive means aiming at the poetization of his image. Prominent representatives were the poet and screenwriter Jacques Prévert, and the directors Jean Renoir, Jacques Feyder, Marcel Carné and others.

Expressionist cinema was an artistic movement in German cinema of the 1920s characterized by grotesque distortions of space, contrasting light and a profusion of dark fantastical characters including vampires, golems, devils, ghosts and even personifications of death. Prominent representatives of this movement were F.W. Murnau, F. Lang, R. Wiene, P. Leni and others.

B-films are low-budget commercial films. Between the late 1910s and the 1960s, in the so-called "Golden Age" of Hollywood, these were films that were screened as number two in the theater during double feature screenings (hence the letter "B", like on a vinyl single record the second side is labeled "B-side"). Over time, the term came to denote any film with a low budget and often of poor artistic quality.