James Naremore
More Than Night: Film Noir in its Contexts
Berkeley, Los Angeles,London: University of California Press, 1998
ISBN 0 520 21294 0 359 pp
US $19.95 (paper)
Uploaded 16 April 1999

Almost every book on film noir begins with the problem of definition, usually only to deposit it half-way through the Introduction once it has served its purpose of justifying the author’s particular set of criteria. By contrast, James Naremore’s excellent More Than Night: Film Noir in its Contexts is structured around the problem of film noir’s definition, at the same time that he asserts that noir has no essential characteristics, that it is not a specifically American form, and that there is no “right” definition of noir, only a series of more or less interesting uses. What is at issue in most arguments about definition are questions of critical method, and particularly the deeply problematic status of the generic categories imposed on Hollywood’s output by a first generation of academic film critics with little reference to commercial and industrial history, with which in large part we continue to work. As Naremore notes, the critical durability of the concept of noir – much like the critical durability of the auteur – is not unrelated to the cultural cachet of its Francophone terminology. He also argues that genre criticism would benefit from abandoning its semantic concern with ideas of essence and boundary and adopting a more fluid conception capable of describing Hollywood’s system of constructing pictures through the assembly of interchangeable component parts, and the complex radial structures of association among movies that results.

Naremore views noir as “one of the dominant intellectual categories of the late twentieth century” (2) but he treats the idea of “noirness” as a kind of postmodern mythology, examining its discourse through a series of historical contexts: the Left Bank surrealists and existentialists who saw redemption in the ambiguous actions of American popular culture’s isolated killers in the years after their own annees noires: the constraints of formal and informal self-regulation engineered by the Production Code Administration and the blacklist: Manny Farber’s “underground” criticism, which conflated Hollywood’s budget categories and inverted its middlebrow relationship between production costs and cultural prestige, giving viewers who shared his taste the opportunity to feel “irresponsible and discriminating at the same time” (151). Naremore offers a valuable corrective to the common critical tendency to treat all film noirs as B-movies at the same time that he accounts for the role that this particular misperception has played in their cultural capitalisation. His central argument, which emerges from his analysis of Hammett, Greene and Cain, is that noir results from and to a large extent describes the “tense, contradictory assimilation” (7) of high modernism into the American culture industry’s melodramatic formulas. At moments in the 1940s, the serendipities of the studio system threw together a project – Double Indemnity , for example – which allowed its architects to express their “high-modernist belief that the modern world was cheap, insubstantial, and destructive of true culture” (86) through an object of that popular culture. Inevitably, the result was profoundly ambivalent, but the contradictions of that encounter have themselves been assimilated into the bland commercial intertextuality and fetishised imagery of postmodern “noir lite”. Noir was a term invented on the deathbed of modernism, and it describes one aspect of the culture industry’s appropriation from dying out with the end of the studio system, the idea of noir is almost entirely “a creation of postmodern culture – a belated dreading of classic Hollywood that was popularised by cineastes of the French New Wave, appropriated by reviewers, academics, and filmmakers, and then recycled on television” (10)

Naremore is both an able historian and an astute critic: much of the strength of his  Acting in the Cinema – by far the most useful book on the subject – comes from his skills as an observer of what actually happens on the screen. It is a pleasure to report that  More Than Night: Film Noir in its Contexts contains several passages of precise yet evocative description to rival his account of Cary Grant’s clothes in North by Northwest: passages on Faye Dunaway’s performanc and John Alonzo’s photography in  Chinatown, or Kiss Me Deadly’s schizophrenic attitude to its source material, for instance. One could carp over details of historical emphasis or critical interpretation, but such occasional disagreements are probably inevitable in a work that is as wide-ranging, and as well-read as this. Naremore’s writing is both witty and purposive: his engaging put-down of Miller’s Crossing as being “about the glamour of men’s hats” (215) is not simply a snappy one-liner for inclusion in a glossily illustrated book of critical quotes on noir: it exactly illustrates his argument that the Coens’ movie refuses to engage seriously with political or social history, in contrast to the Hammett novels and gangster movies it pastiches. Naremore concludes by suggesting that as a look and a marketing strategy, noir is likely to be with us for a long time to come. Not all boutique neo-noir is merely commercially self-referential, however: noir can, he argues, occasionally be reinvigorated by such reinventions as Devil in a Blue Dress which, in a subtle and sympathetic intepretation, Naremore views as an optimistic and redemptive work. In itself, More Than Night: Film Noir in its Contexts itself stages a reinvigoration of noir criticism that sets new agendas for historical and critical investigation.

Richard Maltby