Exploring the Construction of the Modern Noir City: (Draft Paper please do not quote)

Andy’s Junk Yard Scene: Beaver Canal
Black men stealthily surround a salvage yard where a large group of white men noisily prepares to bring violence to the black part of town. Suddenly, a bang, blinding white light fills the sky. White faces bleached further, frozen and exposed. Silence

Doctor Wharton’s Suburban House Scene
A crazed white man, murder on his mind, threatens a black man with a pistol. This is the end, he aims. Blackness, thick and dark, brings salvation for the endangered life. The white woman had turned out the light.
(Scenes from No Way Out, Mankiewicz, 1950)

Cinema and the city
This is the stuff of film noir. But the scenes above present film noir in a different light. They invert the normal binary associations. White light exposes the dark intent of the white racist gang. Black darkness, created by the white femme fatale, brings protection to the kidnapped black doctor about to be murdered in a black rage by the deranged white man. The physical city is also seen in a different light. The black part of town is portrayed as a place of safety where children play on the streets. A different picture from the often imagined dangerous place over there inhabited by the Other.

The importance of the city in film noir is under researched. For Reid and Walker (1993: 68) the relation of film noir to the big city is studied less closely than might be expected, perhaps because it seems so obvious: which in a way it is. Clarke (1997) and Shiel and Fitzmaurice (2001) are wide ranging collections of thought provoking papers seeking to establish an academic place for the study of cinema and the city. Unfortunately both are rather lacking in clear, consistent themes and offer disjointed collections with the authors providing their own limited take on cinema and the city. Neither do the editors of the volumes pick out film noir for special treatment despite it being a genre which concentrates attention on the imagined city. Davis (2001) is one of the few writers to put the physical city, Los Angeles’ Bunker Hill, at the centre of an analysis of film noir. He draws attention to the location filming in Kiss Me Deadly (Robert Aldrich 1955) but does not take up the manner in which the film also makes visible a black presence in Los Angeles (LA). For Naremore (1998: 242) that presence is significant in this and later films, a point discussed below. Krutnik (1997) in a sweeping discussion of the ambience and feel of the noir city does outline some of its physical characteristics, its “iconography”. In the wild urban world of Pottersville (It’s a Wonderful Life Frank Capra 1946) we understand the riot of neon, burlesque halls, dance joints, pawnbroker’s and bars all suffused by an atmosphere of jazz, signify the noir city. Shades of Noir (Copjec 1993) provides a stimulating collection of papers presenting many challenging ideas on film noir, including a provocative article by Diawara (1993) on “noir by noirs”.

Most texts and articles deal with the definition and history of film noir, the noir visual style, characterisation, plot, noir auteurs such as Orsen Welles and Fritz Lang, and narrative structure, for example, Tuska (1984) and Shrader (1986). Silver and Ursini (1996) bring together several classic noir articles such as Borde and Chaumeton’s Towards a Definition of Film Noir, first published in France in 1955, who concentrate on the German expressionist origins of film noir. Gender issues have been studied by Kaplan (1998a). Race in film noir is touched on by Naremore (1998) and examined in more depth by Diawara (1993) and Kaplan (1998b). Interestingly none of these authors mention No Way Out.

Nowell-Smith (2001) provides a general account of the cinematic city across a range of film genres. He uses the notion of the city as protagonist, a concept which suits the menacing look of London in Night and the City (Jules Dassin 1950) and the magical look of LA in the neo noir Blade Runner. He is also one of the few writers to explore the construction and reproduction of the physical city in films, and makes a useful distinction between the “mostly studio-shot film” and the “mostly location-shot film” Nowell-Smith (2001: 101). Interestingly, the studio/location distinction is not one that is always obvious. Even Mike Davis, author of City of Quartz, a long time LA resident, is not sure if the famous Angels Flight cable care scene from Kiss Me Deadly, is studio or location shot Davis (2002).

Themes and structure
This paper examines the representation of the city in Hollywood noir cinema from a number of different perspectives. Several major elements of the city are discussed; the physical city, the social city and city sounds, all within the context of big city corruption. An important assumption of the paper is that different elements are combined in real life to produce the city of imagination. The noir city is a city gone wrong. Corruption suffuses the city in a ghastly dark light. The differences and similarities in which film noir presents the city are examined by comparing a number of films. No Way Out, (Joseph L Mankiewicz, 1950) is compared with The Big Heat (Fritz Lang, 1953), focusing mainly on how the physical city is created and imagined and who is allowed to be made visible in the city. Murder, My Sweet (Edward Dmytryk 1944) and Farewell My Lovely (Dick Richards 1975) are compared to explore how adaptations of the hard boiled detective novel can reveal differences and similarities in how far film makers will go in confirming and challenging society’s views the city. The neo noir/tech nor Blade Runner (Ridley Scott 1982) is discussed because the director went to great lengths to create the right look and feel for the city using the whole of innovative cinematic technologies.

This paper further argues that enduring similarities include the opportunity for crime in the big city, retribution, the noir style, corruption of individuals and institutions, and disturbing human motivations, such as, greed lust and the power which money brings. The argument presented here is that Hollywood film noir both confirms and challenges received wisdom, images and popular understandings of the city held by the audience and wider society. Films, it is maintained in this paper, tell us a great deal about how society views the city but also about the extent to which audiences are comfortable participating in somebody else’s imagined city. Most importantly, regarding how far and in what ways, they will allow their deeply held views of the city and the people in them to be challenged by Hollywood noir cinema.

The paper proceeds by considering the contested nature of film noir itself. Is it a genre, a visual style, a mood, or a movement? Notions of the city are then examined briefly to provide a context for the emergence of the hard boiled detective and the peculiar doom laden city of film noir. What follows is a discussion of the major elements of the noir city in turn; the physical city, city people, the social city and city sounds.

Defining film noir
The term film noir is generally believed to have been coined in France by Nino Frank in 1946 in reference to a few Hollywood films of the early 1940s (Tuska 1984: xxi). But even this basic fact is contested (Naremore 1998: 15) sees the origin of the term and film noir cinema in late 1930s France. Given this failure to agree, it is unsurprising that most of the definitions of film noir are contested. For Shrader (1986) it is a time limited American cinematic movement, 1941 to 1958, not a genre. Naremore (1998: 276) in one of the most exhaustive studies of film noir, goes to great lengths to examine definitions of film noir. His conclusion is that film noir is a “critical discursive construction”. Naremore and Diawara (1993) both consider the legacy of classic film noir by accepting as legitimate the film categories of “neo noir” and “noir by noirs”. Naremore examines important issues of who is made visible in the noir city in Deep Cover (Bill Duke 1992) and Devil in a Blue Dress (Carl Franklin 1995). Diawara provides an analysis of A Rage in Harlem (Bill Duke 1991) highlighting the transgressive role of the black femme fatale.

For some writers film noir may not have started out as a genre but became one (Erickson 1996). For (Reid and Walker 1993: 59) this interminable debate about definitions has grown stale and “tiresome”. Most writers do agree about its basic elements, though not whether they are sufficient and necessary. One of the major elements is the setting — the big city — creator and creation of modernity. Dark mean streets and severe contrasts between rich and poor locales dominate. Noir characters often exhibit a degree of ambivalence, especially the male protagonist and the female femme fatale. That good and evil dwell within them is revealed by the expressionist lighting, bright key lighting and heavy black shadow, often presenting a face split in two. Low fill lighting creates voids of blackness from which the characters emerge and into which they disappear. Lead characters are steeped in powerful desires and drives. Plots can be contorted and narratives misleading. A world weary voice over can help sort things out for the audience, or add layers of confusion and not provide explanations, as in the neo noir The Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976). A feeling of something dreadful about to happen, hangs heavy in the air.

Much of the narrative structure and malevolent ambience of the film noir city is derived from the American hard boiled detective pulp fiction from the 1920s onwards. Most famous are writers such as Dahsiell Hammet, Raymond Chandler, James M Cain, Mickey Spillane and the lesser know Cornell Woolrich (Reid and Walker 1993). But it also has earlier literary antecedents. Victorian anti urban sentiments are evident in noir literature and film:

The City is of Night, perchance of Death,
But certainly of Night; for never there
Can come the lucid morning’s fragrant breath
After the dewey morning’s cold grey air
(James Thompson 1880 The City of Dreadful Night, in Hall 1988: 14)

The ‘city of dreadful night’, originally the title of this poem by Thompson,
was contrasted with a mythical rural arcadia by such influential British figures as William Morris and in the American context Thomas Jefferson (Krutnik 1997: 83). The countryside/city binary divide is taken up in film noir along with others such as, downtown/suburbs (McArthur 1997: 21). It was the 19th century that taught society to imagine the city as a place of division, especially socio-geographical division. Cities were imagined as a collection of neighbourhoods that were labelled as clean, respectable and safe, the suburbs: or dirty, disreputable and dangerous, for example the East End of London and Bunker Hill in LA. They were peopled by strangers, immigrants, Negroes, criminals, lunatics and prostitutes, who all represented the dangerous Other. In these parts of town danger lurked. Social geographies were mapped out. Frederick Engels pioneered this way of understanding the emerging modern city, as a city of different physical structures, social spaces and people, in his landmark text, The Condition of the Working Classes in England in 1844. Davis (2001) discusses the importance, for film noir, of the realist urban novels of Engels’ contemporary Charles Dickens.

Like film noir the city is a contested idea. Its parts seem to add up to more than the whole. The physical city of wide boulevards, dark alleys, decrepit tenements and soaring sky scrappers is only part of the essence of cityness. Peopling the city helps but does not result in a satisfactory understanding either. Crucially, cities are also imagined, “the city is a state of mind” (Robert Ezra Park (1925) quoted in Massey et al 1999: 42). Cities evoke a variety of meaning and feelings, for example, the Manhattan skyline has different meanings for different people; excitement, opportunity, power, affluence, loneliness, decadence, corruption, mystery or congestion (Pile 1999: 7). These conceptualisations of Manhattan capture something of the ambivalence which pervades our attitudes to big cities, an ambivalence reproduced in the shadows of film noir. Cities attract and repel simultaneously. Poverty and enormous property values exist side by side.

The physical noir city
The Big Heat (Fritz Lang 1952) is a mostly studio-shot film. Most of the action takes place at night. But Lang manages to create the physical city as a place of separate districts or zones. Downtown (the city centre) is a place of work for Dave Bannion, the honest cop. Luxurious downtown apartments are enjoyed by criminals, such as Vince Stone, from whose balcony we can enjoy views of an expensive Manhattan-like skyline. Here also is the location of leisure and pleasure activities. Neon-lit clubs, cheap hotels, theatres and dance halls dominate the streetscape. Bar flies, like the unfortunate Lucy Chapman, buzz around nights clubs like The Retreat. People come and go. Downtown is a place where nobody needs to know who you really are, what you do, or where you go. For Bannion it is the place to which he escapes. When needing to hide from the boss of the crime syndicate, Mike Lagana, Bannion chooses a crummy downtown hotel.

The world of downtown is contrasted starkly with other worlds. The suburbs are places of safety where criminal violence is not expected to reach. Bannion lives in this suburb, home of honest working ordinary folk. It is a place where children’s toys can be left outside on the front porch until late at night without fear of theft. However, film noir narrative often challenges popular notions of the spaces of the imagined city, in this case the suburbs. Violent death intrudes along with threatening telephone calls. This violent intrusion was more shocking to the 1950s audience (McArthur 1992). Now society’s concerns about the suburbs as a place of danger are represented in many films like the Nightmare on Elm Street series. The Truman Show (Peter Weir 1998) confirms a different view of the suburbs, as a place of such intense routine and boredom, as to be too safe for sane people.

Bannion’s wife, Katie, is murdered brutally, by one of Lagana’s cronies, outside her own front door. She confirms the 1950s myth of the dutiful wife. She does not do paid work, but cooks, cleans and looks after her husband and daughter. However, by smoking, drinking and driving she may have transgressed her gender boundaries, death may be the salutary consequence. Her death disrupts the family norm established earlier in the film. Bannion’s response is to give up his home and the police force. This turn of events allows Lang to challenge our notion of the honest cop, positioning Bannion as outside the law and consequently, the home, the family and the suburbs. Morally he becomes an ambiguous character driven to the edge of a psychotic abyss. But at no time does he consider leaving his city.

Mike Lagana exudes the power that money brings, symbolised by his mansion in the suburbs, but the suburbs of the mega rich. Film noir provides a different and unsettling perspective on the city by showing us the city from the criminal point of view. This is in contrast to other genres, such as the straightforward police procedural or the musical. For Lagana it is the cop and his world who is dirty and should not contaminate his home. Like the suburbs of Bannion, this part of town, for Lagana, the audience and wider society, is not meant to be a place of danger violence and death, even in conversation. Film noir confronts the audience with the uncomfortable truth that corruption and its violent consequences are all pervasive and cannot be isolated and quarantined in one part of town or class of people.

No Way Out (1950) presents a totally different physical and social geography of the big post world war two American city. It is the only film noir of the classic period to have a black protagonist and stars Sydney Poitier (Doctor Luther Brooks) in his first lead role. Immediately, this challenges the spectators’ imagined noir city and society’s view of the city. The film was omitted from the otherwise excellent More Than Night.

The camera in this film is focused unerringly on the city segregated not by wealth and the criminal Other but by zones of Blacks and Whites. This representation of the city would be expected by the mainstream 1950s audience and would confirm their view of the way things are and should be. However, in No Way Out the Black district is not reproduced as the slum or ghetto of popular imagination, an image prevalent in society since the 19th century, but also challenged even at that time (see, DuBois 1996). The streets are presented as safe, clean and vibrant, the kind of place where children play in safety, not too different from the streets of Bannion’s neighbourhood in The Big Heat. Substantial town houses, brownstones, make up Luther Brooks’ neighbourhood not decrepit tenements. These are the kind of streets honoured in 1961 for their civilising effects by Jane Jacobs in her 1961 book, The Death And Life Of Great American Cities. It is the white neighbourhood, Beaver Canal, that is unusually for the time, presented as a place of racist danger and moral corruption as the opening of this paper shows. This space is represented not as the public space of wholesome city streets but as an enclosed private space of vehicle salvage, Andy’s Junk Yard.

Tech Neo Noir LA in Blade Runner
Hollywood has continued to represent the big city in the visual style and violent, fatalistic mood of film noir. The neo noir film that has most to say about the physical city is Blade Runner. Although set in the year 2019, Blade Runner seeks to challenge our understanding of today’s physical city and its social geography. In this city there are no suburbs, or rather they seem Neo Noir LA in Blade Runnerto exist “off world”. Several writers (e.g. Harvey 1989) describe the cityscape as postmodern for its combination of the old, the present and the futuristic. However, this is surely a modernist characteristic of most large cities. Scott combined real iconic LA historic landmarks such as the Bradbury Building, designated a National Historic Landmark in 1977, with intricate high tech models and computer generated imagery to create what many regard as an attractive downtown city space. The use of virtual cityscape adds a third category to Nowell-Smith’s classification. Other LA icons included were the 2nd Street Tunnel, Union Train Station and a Frank Lloyd Wright designed house. Most of the street scenes take place on the Warner Brothers ‘New York’ backlot in Burbank. This huge set was retro fitted by Scott making it almost unrecognisable. In fact it is the same ‘street’ in which The Maltese Falcon (John Houston 1941)and The Big Sleep Howard Hawks 1946) were filmed (Channel 4 circa 1995). LA 2019 contains 20th century lunch counters, night clubs, shops, small business premises, loft apartments and public transport all within walking distance of each other, revealed and concealed by stunning noir lighting designs. Workers and commuters mingle with the urban poor in a bustling version of a 24 hour city: Leicester Square on a busy night.

These scenes, especially of the Zhora pursuit, during which we see most of the street life, create ambivalence in the audience. On the one hand it is a vibrant and exciting place, on the other it appears dangerous and threatening. Blade Runner forces film critics and theorists to confront the look of the physical city. For Harvey (1989: 311), “The sense of the city at street level is chaotic in every respect.”, it is a chaos for Harvey brought about by the mish-mash of postmodern architectural styles.

More startling still is the concentration of everybody in the downtown area of the city. We have come, sadly, to expect rich and poor, White and Non White to be segregated geographically in the city. But in 2019 LA they occupy the same geographical space, segregation is achieved vertically, as it was so memorably in Metropolis. It is clear that something peculiar has happened to the social geography of the noir city of 2019. It is a multiracial, multiethnic space, but one that panders to society’s ethnic stereotypes, and the Chinese are still doing food, the Egyptian wears a fez, is not to be trusted and is associated with Arabic sounding music. Said’s orientalism is at work here. But given the structure of the Hollywood film industry, we can agree that cinema is perhaps “…is not the place to look for coherent political argument” O’Shea (1996: 240). For unexplained reasons all LAs Blacks and Latinos have all disappeared. Did other Blade Runner squads “air them out”, to use Bryant’s memorable phrase? The presence of replicants, as the dangerous Other, is not tolerated in certain parts of 2019 worlds, surely a statement on the social geography of noir cities past and present.

Audiences can also reflect that the 2019 city still has its bad and good spaces. Replicant femme fatale Rachel might be, but she considers herself a respectable woman, which means there are certain parts of her imagined city she will not go:

[Deckard calls Rachel on a public videophone.] Rachel: Hello?
Deckard: I’ve had people walk out on me before, but not when I was
being so charming. I’m at a bar here now down at the Fourth Sector.
Taffy Lewis is on the line. Why don’t you come on down here and have a drink?
Rachel: I don’t think so, Mr. Deckard. That’s not my kind of place.
(Night Club Scene from Blade Runner, Ridley Scott 1982)

Logically, other parts of town are ‘her kind of place’. Only Rachel talks of leaving, “What if I go north. Disappear.”, in the same way as southern Black slaves talked of going north. This makes the un-noir bolted-on happy rustic ending, to which Scott objected, all the more unlikely. The attraction and repulsion of cities is beautifully illustrated in Blade Runner. Those that can leave for the “off world colonies”. Replicants, perversely in Deckard’s eyes, come to the city looking for freedom and a life without fear. Neo noir LA is powerfully attractive as was the noir city of the 1940s.

The dangerous Other drawn to the city in The Big Heat are represented by criminals, especially the Italian immigrant figure of Lagana, but also the femme fatale Debbie. As is common in film noir she occupies a position of ambivalence for the audience between good and evil, as at times does Bannion. In Lagana there is also the merest hint of the homosexual Other (Naremore 1998: 222). This is subtly communicated when he is awoken by his tall handsome bodyguard in the bedroom scene at start of the film, and by the absence of his wife, who is never even mentioned. Like The Big Heat, Metropolis was in the words of Naremore (1998: 236), “staged in artificially white settings”. For him this is an enduring feature of film noir. The paper now examines two versions of the same film to explore the question of who can become visible in the noir city in more detail.

Seeing invisibility

I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Alan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fibre and liquids — and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible you, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. (Ralph Ellison 1947 The Invisible Man, Prologue)

From the early days of Hollywood the question of who could be visible in the cinematic city was racialised. Metropolis set the standard by excluding black people from the cinematic city, in this case a dystopian future New York. In the haunting words of Ellison blacks became invisible. The disconcerting use of the biological term ectoplasms shows the black man of the Hollywood movie is a mere surface, without substance or mind. Where blacks were visible in early Hollywood as in The Birth of a Nation or The Clansman (1915, D.W. Griffith), they were tolerated only as unwholesome stereotypes (Bogle 1989).

There might be some justification for the absence of Blacks in mafia style gangster noir films such as The Big Heat. However, where blacks are totally absent from films adapted from novels that feature black characters in black parts of town, the explanation is less about artistic licence and more about audience reaction, censorship and social attitudes generally. Raymond Chandler’s noir novel Farewell My Lovely was first adapted for the screen in 1944 and first released in the U.S. under the title Murder, My Sweet. The novel opens in a black neighbourhood of Los Angeles:

It was one of those mixed blocks on Central Avenue, the blocks that are not yet all negro…Slim quiet negroes passed up and down the street and stared at him [Moose Malloy] with darting side glances…

Moments later inside the all Negro Florian’s Bar:

There was a silence as heavy as a waterlogged boat. Eyes looked at us, chestnut coloured eyes, set in faces that ranged from grey to deep black. Heads turned slowly and eyes in them glistened and stared in the dead alien silence of another race. (Chandler 1940 Farewell My Lovely)

These scenes from the novel invert the usual White to Black gaze. Here it is the White who is being stared at and positioned as alien. None of the crucial opening scenes, nor the murder of the black bar owner by the dim witted giant Moose Malloy are reproduced in the film. What is interesting is that they were not deleted by the censor. The racialisation of Hollywood film and the 1940s Production Code made it impossible for RKO even to consider including them (Naremore 1998: 234). Criticism of the police and city government was also muted in the film. The suave gangster, Mr. Brunette, at the centre of a web of corruption involving high class prostitution, gambling and blackmail, does not appear in the film. He is the key link between a number of apparently unrelated murders, and is allowed to operate only by paying off the police and city politicians. Instead in Murder, My Sweet the corruption is at the level of individuals or small foreign led criminal gangs.

Not until 1975 did a production company, Avco-Embassy, feel confident enough, in a changed political and censorship era, to produce a more faithful cinematic adaptation of the novel, Farewell My Lovely (Dick Edwards 1975). The differences between the two cinematic versions of the same novel are fascinating and say a great deal about how society is prepared to see the city, its people and institutions, represented through the lens of cinema. Edwards locates the opening of the film as did Chandler in the black area of Central Avenue. Opening location shots and night for night shots locate the audience from the start in the neon noir city. Despite the opening, like The Big Heat, there was little other location shooting. This is a mostly studio-shot film. Cinematic realism is created by the hard boiled narrative. In contrast, the neo noir Devil in a Blue Dress (Carl Franklin 1995), which has a black private eye, was filmed entirely on location (Naremore 1998).
Moose Malloy in Farewell My Lovely, wastes no time in killing the black owner of Florian’s bar. This event is a pivotal element of the second film and novel because it allows the insidious links between the deaths to sketch out a social and racial geography of ‘segregated’ LA. It also challenges the audience to participate in the social processes by which black lives are worth much less than white lives. Billy Rolfe, the most degenerate and corrupt of the cops says on arriving at the scene of the first killing, “Its only a shine killing”. The cops and Marlowe agree it does not need a proper investigation, the basic paperwork needs completing, nothing more. The Edwards version is clearly influenced by the changed race relations in post civil rights legislation America. A family of black mother, white father and son is treated sympathetically by the camera, which depicts them as a family unit. For many in the cinema audience these scenes would challenge their perceptions of the city, bearing in mind that segregation, whether physical or social remains a fact of city life.

Where the film tends to confirm society’s stereotypical view of the city is in the opening scenes showing Central Avenue. Here we see a collection of familiar black stereotypes; dangerous looking young men hanging around, a shoeshine boy and most telling of all, a young black female kitted out in a provocative red dress, signifier of sexual desire and danger, in close liaison with a black man. She is well placed to satisfy the sexualised gaze of the male and, some would argue, female spectator (Stacey 2001). Racism is confirmed in this film as being of little importance by virtue of its absence. This confirms mainstream society’s view that racism is largely an unjustified preoccupation of Blacks. The film, like most noirs, concentrates on the big city corruption spreading from organised crime to the police and politicians. This is in contrast to No Way Out, where the corruption brought to light is that of a morally corrosive racism. As the opening of this paper shows bright white light is used to expose the darkness and evil of white racism. Diawara (1993: 263) make a similar point about the manner in which the noir writing of Chester Himes throws light on White racism as a context for the terrible conditions of 1940s Harlem.

Hearing the city

Goldy’s scream mingled with the scream of the locomotive as the train thundered past overhead, shaking the entire tenement of the city. Shaking the sleeping black people in their lice-ridden beds. Shaking the fleas, making then hop. Shaking the sleeping dogs in their filthy pallets, the sleeping cats, the clogged toilets, loosening the filth. (Chester Himes A Rage in Harlem)

Sounds are a crucial element of city life and are important in noir novels as the quotation above shows. Sound in relation to cinematic image is under researched and under theorised (Ellis 1982:51), even though Blade Runner, provides an aural, not just visual feast. He rather over simplifies the issues with the claim that looking and listening in the cinema are fundamentally the same. Going to the other extreme is Chambers (1997: 232):

To ask the meaning of music, the significance of sound, is perhaps to seek to distil from the depths of our senses the ungraspable beingness of being.

There is the dialogue, voiceover, the music as soundtrack and music as part of the narrative, and other ambient sounds of the city. At times all these sounds will have shared meaning for film maker and audience. At other times directors will invert the meaning of sounds for dramatic and narrative effect, as in No Way Out. The ambience of the noir city is a product of the physical city, its people and institutions, but these combined cannot produce convincing cityness. What is needed is a feel, this is added by imagining the city. Society at large imagines the city and the cinematic city contributes to this imaginary place. Sounds and music are crucial elements in this imagined place. The bitter sweet piercing note of the jazz trumpet, the wail of the police siren, the hoot of the ship’s horn, the rumble of city bus, the clakety-clak of the train, the crying child, noisy neighbours next door, these are the sounds of the city. In addition the noir city hums to the crack of gunfire, death screams, desperate running footsteps, the sickening dull thud of the cosh, pounding hearts.

The city as a place of distinctive sounds remains a feature of neo noir films. Travis Bickle’s mood, and with it the feel of the city, in The Taxi Driver, is conveyed as much by the aural as by the visual. At various times the attractive side of the city is conveyed by cool melodic jazz, its unattractiveness with disorientating discordant music. Blade Runner was universally praised for its music soundtrack as well as its look. However, Scott’s LA gains much of its menace from an incessant deep throbbing background hum cum heartbeat, not just spooky Vangelis music.

For many people in society cities are places of excessive noise. Many noir films feature noisy neighbours arguing or playing music too loud. Usually these sounds appear as noise pollution. However, Mankiewicz in No Way Out, challenges this kind of city hearing, that imagines the city as a place overflowing with intrusive noise. Demonic Ray Biddle lures Brooks to the apparently safe suburban home of Doctor Wharton to kill him. Edie Biddle/Johnson has an idea prompted by the sound of her neighbours arguing, clearly audible through paper thin walls. Loud music, rather than a nuisance to be eradicated, becomes a means of escape. Edie turns up the volume of the radio until the thunderous noise attracts the attention of her neighbours allowing her to escape the murderous attentions of the deaf George Biddle and help prevent Brooks’ racist murder.

Noise and silence are also key elements of the junk yard scene quoted above. Edie leaves before the fighting begins. She seeks out Doctor Wharton in a clearly distressed state. She is sick and disorientated, her illness provoked, not by the sight of the fighting, but by the sounds of screams and blows against human flesh and bone. It is these sounds which convince her of the evils of racism. The audience constructs the race riot with Edie as she recounts the memory of these terrible sounds to Doctor Wharton. The site of the conflict, Andy’s Junk Yard, is established immediately for her, for Doctor Wharton and for the audience as a mythical place. Distinctions between here and there, then and now blur as we imagine the city’s spaces of danger and safety.

Conclusions
It is important to set film noir in its historical cinematic and literary context. Many of its major themes reflect society’s received wisdom about big cities. We love and hate cities. Film noir focusses attention on cities as places where something is rotten. It’s a sickly sweet place, like Sternwood’s orchid house in The Big Heat. However, the characters rarely leave, not alive anyway. A mood of ambivalence dominates the noir city. There is so much potential for wealth, happiness and success but because of enduring human flaws and hubris, the dénouement leads inexorably to disaster. The look of the physical city and its social geography in Hollywood noir are important elements in creating the feel of the city. Film noir and neo noir’s stunning visual style has enduring attractions. City sounds and how we hear and invest them with meaning are crucial to the creation of memories of the city. Together with the cinematic presentation of social relations, they help the audience to construct the city of imagination. The mutual tension between the real city as we imagine it, and the cinematic city, as the audience interprets it, informs our understanding of the city in a continuous process. Some times cinema challenges our beliefs about the city. At other times cinema creates unease by making visible uncomfortable aspects of city life which we prefer to imagine as invisible and inaudible. Film noir attracts in the way that the city of dreadful delight and night attracts.

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