Music in Film Noir – Jazz and beyond…

Rain-sodden streets shimmering in the glow of a single streetlight. A gumshoe in soup-stained mac cupping his hand over the cigarette stub he is vainly trying to relight. The siren of the paddy-wagon picking up lowlife from the street corner. And a lone trumpet howling to the moon from an upstairs window. Classic ingredients of the Film Noir.

Or are they?

For many people, American film noir is virtually synonymous with jazz. And indeed the two come from a shared era – a heyday of the late nineteen forties to the mid- fifties. They even share a setting – the all-purpose anonymity of the American city.
Put a chick in a tight sequinned frock and she becomes a femme-fatale, put a guy the wrong side of the law and he becomes an antihero. Put them both together and the most obvious place for them to meet is the seedy after-hours nightclub nice boys and girls wouldn’t be seen dead inside. The Jazz Musician, snuggling alongside the Peacock-Pimp and the Alcoholic Hack is possibly one of the most stereotyped characters of the twentieth century – a reefer-smoking beatnik who can’t get out of bed until the sun gets west. A popular (mis?)conception. Even today, musicians are ranked in the same insurance class as “gypsies” and scrap metal dealers….

Time after time the Noir night-club is the venue for shady deals, illicit affairs and police busts. And, from a movie-maker’s point of view, that club provides the perfect excuse for a little night music. But is that music jazz?

Rarely.

Most of the music in Film Noir took the form of popular music of the day – either big band swing or lavish orchestral strings. Sometimes a little light classical. There are a few obvious exceptions – Otto Preminger’s “Anatomy of a Murder” being notable. But these are very late examples, made when the genre had not only been identified but accepted as a form in itself. Even the sublime 1958 “Touch of Evil,” chiefly remembered for its opening crane-shot and accompanying Mancini score has, for the main part, a pure rock ’n’ roll soundtrack. More Bill Haley than Bill Bailey. No jazz within a mile. And Marlene Dietrich’s musical theme in the same movie has more to do with “The Third Man” than the Bird man...

Of course, there are one or two films – such as “The Sweet Smell of Success,” also a very late Noir, that feature jazz. Interestingly, that film challenges popular concepts of the jazz musician, showing the utopian young guitarist as one of the only non-corrupt characters in a malodorous late-night New York, though the jazz is used mainly as a backdrop – much the same as the drenched city streets and nightclub babble. The real drama belongs not to the featured Chico Hamilton Quartet but the synonymous-with-noir Elmer Bernstein’s classic score.

What has really shaped the public image linking Noir and jazz is the rediscovery of the genre from the sixties onwards. The classic wailing saxophone and heavy modern big-band can be more directly linked to TV cop shows and detective movies – “Dragnet,” “Peter Gunn,” “Mike Hammer” – spoofs like “The Silencers” and “Our Man Flint” – European influences – “Deux Hommes dans Manhatten,” “Ascenseur Pour L’Echaffaud,” and true neo-noir such as “Taxi Driver” and “Chinatown.” (I don’t count the most recent batch of “neo noirs” where any old triumph-of-style-over-content that has a few shadows and a detective becomes instant “noir.”)

It is almost as if we are remembering Noir as we wish it was and reinventing it to our own stipulations - “something less historical than mythical,” as Jean Louis Comolli puts it in his Cahiers du Cinema essay. On an actual re-watching, the original cycle of films very rarely have any straight “jazz,” though music plays a very central and often pivotal part in the narrative.

It is not a perfect genre. There is no checklist that indicates whether a film counts as a noir if it scores highly enough – though many have tried to create one over the years. It is a feel; a mood, with a few flags here and there, but no overall rule. It could be a detective movie – but not all cop films are noirs. It could be a melodrama – but not all weepies are noirs. It could be a b-movie – but not even all of them could be classified as noir. Visually it is dark, hero and villain both shrouded in shadow. Repeated images of neon, mirrors and alleyways are also a clue, but ultimately for me, the only real pointer to the true Film Noir is in its bleak vision of the Great American future. No one is totally good – even the heroes have flaws which make them human – or in some cases inhuman.

It is a world of stereotypes. The good-boy hero who makes one fatal mistake and pays for it in true Faustian tradition. The wise-cracking gumshoe investigating a crime that isn’t what it seems. The mob boss living the life of Riley in his final days before a bloody comeuppance. And the Femme Fatale. The world-wise bad girl who sings her siren call, seduces the hero and gets all the best lines.

The image of jazz seems to dovetail nicely with these icons. It too has its dark underbelly. There’s the “nice” image of swing – Glenn Miller, Rudy Vallee, Tommy Dorsey – white boys singing the blues. Then there’s the hard, Apollo Theatre, Harlem image. The poor image. The one that goes hand in hand with poverty, hardship, sex and drugs. The musician that plays because that’s all he can do. Jazz means bad boys in the popular mind – the guys who live life in the same world as the mobsters, the hookers and the barflys. Jazz is the same world as our own, but seen from a different perspective. Hollywood romanticises the image, of course, but it is still a valid one.

True jazz soundtracks, as I have said, are rare. But tantalising glimpses into the world of the jobbing musician flit throughout Noir. In “Phantom Lady,” Elisha Cook Jnr is a pit drummer in a burlesque, but he is seen after hours with his one true love, jazz, where he, as close as the Hays Code would allow, literally climaxes over his solo at an after-hours jam session. Tom Neal is the would-be jazzer in “Detour” who sells his soul for a piece of the action out west. Dan Durea, as the alcoholic pianist in “Black Angel” cannot believe that his wife doesn’t share his love of jazz, despite his “day job” as pianist for a cabaret act.

While we’re on actors, I’d like to mention one who doesn’t sing, but who might have been expected to. Dick Powell, in the early 1930s, was the archetypal romantic musical hero. By the time of Film Noir, he had re-invented his image so completely that they even changed the title of his noir debut from the original Chandler “Farewell, My Lovely” to “Murder, My Sweet,” just in case audiences were disappointed when he got a severe beating instead of Shuffling Off to Buffalo…

Film Noir took a musical convention and actually, in Powell’s case, reversed it. Other musical stars, the most obvious being Rita Hayworth, were allowed to take their singing and dancing skills with them and use them to subvert earlier, more wholesome images. The one major cinematic difference being, of course that there was always a reason for bursting into song. Noir, more than any other form, allowed music to replace acts that the Hays Code outlawed –“strip-tease” in “Gilda,” “orgasm” in “Phantom Lady,” “rape” in “Touch of Evil,” “lovemaking” in “Nora Prentiss” – even “stabbing” in “Psycho,” that single repeated chord lingering in the mind long after the knife has been pulled out and plunged back into the victim’s body again and again.

Music is used as a cipher in many Noirs, commenting on the action. It is not always as up-front as those examples outlined above. “Nora Prentiss” is a fine example of this, and though many of these clues would be lost today, the generation for which the film was made would have picked up the clues subtly placed in the background, behind but backing up the themes. “Zing! Went the Strings of My Heart” play the house band as the hero first meets the femme fatale at her nightclub. “There’s a Small Hotel” croons the radio as they settle into their illicit little love nest. And it is no coincidence that the tune that just happens to be played by the kids at the hero's daughter's birthday party, the night he had intended to tell his wife he was leaving her is “Can’t We Be Friends?” This is all incidental music. No singing. But lyrics were unnecessary. These were famous standards of the day, and something with which the audience would have been familiar. Of course, there are songs within the action too – which further bolster the plot line. “Who Cares What People Say?” croons Ann Sheridan, looking Kent Smith right in the eye.

When it wasn’t standards (which in my opinion would have been brought in often because it would have been cheaper than commissioning new material as much as because they were appropriate) Noir used music that was, as with all other genres, designed to heighten the action. Composers such as Miklos Rozsa, Lalo Schifrin, Elmer Bernstein, were masters of their craft, and they knew exactly how to use music to illuminate the action. Sometimes the song from the film became a standard itself. The beautiful, haunting “Laura,” for instance, was specially written for the film by David Raksin and is still just as popular today. Let us not forget that music is a form of entertainment and these films were made to entertain….

The music is brought into the action in one of two ways. Film Noir and The Musical are two genres which do not cross – even the most pessimistic musical, “Too Late Blues,” for example, or “Pete Kelly’s Blues” are at best dramas with music and musicals about gangsters, though popular – look at “Love Me Or Leave Me,” “Guys and Dolls,” “Some Like It Hot,” “Kiss Me Kate” or the “Girl Hunt Ballet” (a pulp spoof) in “The Band Wagon,” have a light-hearted optimism that Noir is never allowed.

The first method is the direct orchestral overscoring used with great effect in films such as “Laura” and “Body and Soul,” imaginatively, but not directly within the action. (It is interesting to note that the producers of “Laura” had originally wanted to use Duke Ellington’s “Sophisticated Lady” as the film’s main theme. It was decided that this well-known tune would be too “loaded” as a cipher about the lead character and a new tune without preconceptions was commissioned.) Sometimes, especially in later noir, music is used almost against the picture up there on the screen. “Murder by Contract” (1958) uses a guitar accompaniment that is at once Godfather Italian-style tradition, jolly jazz and menacing classical, almost all of which comments across rather than with the action – something used in a much more extreme fashion more recently by Quentin Tarantino in “Reservoir Dogs” and to a lesser extent “Pulp Fiction” – both borrowing heavily from but not counting as noir.

The other main method is by incorporating the music within the action. A record player, a radio, a jukebox, or, more often a house band in a nightclub. “Touch of Evil” is an interesting example of the combination of both methods. The specially-composed music comments on the border town by using virtually every method possible. During the famous opening crane shot, as the car drives past different honky-tonks, bars, flop-houses, the music changes to create a cacophony that reflects the dangers of living in such a town. (Note: Orson Wells wrote copious notes regarding the studio cut of the film which have recently been taken up by editors who have re-cut both the movie and its soundtrack. The result makes an interesting experiment on which I won’t comment here, but highly recommend a comparison of the “studio” and “director” cuts…)

And of course, there are the songs. After trying to think of noirs which have male singers the best I’ve managed is Nat King Cole crooning two ballads and The Hi-Los warbling “Beyond A Reasonable Doubt” on a crackley 45rpm. Generally, the singing is left to the women. Nearly always the femme-fatale, her songs always tell something, however obliquely, about her life. From the man-eater – see “Gilda,” “This Gun For Hire,” “The Big Heat,” to the victim – for example, the disturbing rendition of “Moanin’ Low” in “Key Largo,” these songs illustrate the woman’s lot without need for further dialogue.

Music in Noir is as complex as every other aspect of this difficult genre. It reflects an area of contemporary American life as valid as neon signs, packed tenements, conspicuous consumption and Mafia rule and yet can be both jarring and unsettling in its use.

In the album “Noiresque,” I have tried to tread the tightrope between Noir fantasy and Noir reality in an era that has the luxury of hindsight. Should I go for authenticity or for the popular conception of what Noir music is? I decided to do the only thing available to me – my own interpretation. So shoot me….

© Sandra Lawrence 2001

further reading: “Musiques Noires Pour Film Noir” - Jean-Louis Comolli.
Cahiers du Cinema Numero Special Musique ‘95

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