Word: noire
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...stabbing insults. There's the foppish crime boss who snootily tells a moll, "'Women should be struck regularly, like gongs.' That's from Oscar Wilde." And the moll snarls, "Give it back to him." The moll is Clara (Jane Randolph), one of those diamond-hard dames who, in the noir universe, are there to dish out abuse verbally and take it physically. Toward the end, when Clara gets drunk, Ireland takes her bottle away and gives her a severe slap: "Just when you oughta keep your head, you start picklin...
...remember, just after the war, when some men needed a domestic outlet for the martial skills they had learned overseas. That explains some of the violence in film noir, and the flashback format which, even if it didn't specifically refer to a wartime trauma, suggested that men were prisoners of what they had seen and endured...
...typical Mann noir is different. It rarely uses flashbacks. Most of the ganefs in Desperate and Railroaded! have no past to haunt them. The present is spooky enough. Like their movies, they exist in the now. They are what they do, and what is done to them: existential unheroes. Only rarely do they blame society for their scrappy status, as Joe does in Raw Deal: "And if you want to know what happened to that kid with the medal - he had to hock it at 16. He got hungry." The war, the defining event...
...Higgins' twist was to wed the docudrama to the crime romance (film noir, as the French later called it). For the docu part of the story, an authoritative off-screen voice would set up parallel narrative tracks: a criminal's m.o. and the dogged work of government sleuths to catch him. Audiences were assured that not only could this felony happen, it did happen, for it was "based on case histories in the files of" some federal agency. But that was just half of it. The veneer of authenticity allowed Higgins and Mann to display more rotten behavior, more thugs...
...question that for Mann, and the genre, the docudrama approach was mostly an excuse to show lowlifes in low lighting. And if Higgins supplied the craft of Mann's noir films, cinematographer John Alton surely served up the art. Before hooking up with Mann, Alton had a nomad's r?sum?: born in Hungary, an assistant in Hollywood silent films, shooting pictures in Argentina in the '30s, then B and C movies back in America. The two men clicked as collaborators, sparking with extreme visual tropes, each instantly elevating the other's work. "I found a director in Tony Mann...