Low Is High: Budgets and Critical Discrimination
A disproportionate number offondly remembered B pictures fall into the general category of the film noir. Somehow, even mediocrity can become majestic when it is coupled with death.
Andrew Sarris, 'The Beatitudes of B Pictures, ' 1974 Murder stories are easy to produce, and a medium-budget, occasionally cheesy-looking thriller like Pushover (1954) is almost as fascinating to watch as Double Indemnity or Rear Window, two expensive films with which it has a good deal in common. But as Andrew Sarris suggests, there are also some important cultural reasons for the large number of 'fondly remembered B pictures' in the noir category. The very idea of film noir took root in America retrospectively, during the heyday of urban art theaters, when Bogart thrillers were especially popular in revival houses and college film societies, and when advanced film criticism took its inspiration from Cahiers du cinema and the French New Wave. Key examples of classic film noir (often looking cheaper than they actually were, merely by virtue of being old and in black and white) were exhibited late at night in funky venues like the Charles Theater in New York, which also featured 16 mm experiments by the local avant-gardeor in the espresso-bar surroundings of the Surf Theater in San Francisco, which later became a setting for Woody Allen's Play It Again, Sam (1972). Critical commentary circulated through alternative newspapers and campus film journals, and from the beginning, aficionados lavished special praise on B movies or slightly pulpish genre films. It was hip, for instance, to prefer Murder Is My Beat over The Maltese Falcon, or to argue that Touch of Evil was a better movie than Citizen Kane.
Jean-Luc Godard employed a similar strategy: Breathless was dedicated to Monogram Pictures, and it deliberately cultivated the grainy, improvised look of a low-budget production. Like much of the vanguard photography and painting of the previous decade, it was visibly 'imperfect,' evoking a jazzy, existential 'spirit of poverty' (the phrase is Jacques Rivette's), which could be set off against Hollywood's glossy illusionism. 1 Its allusions to down-market thrillers were particularly appealing to cosmopolitan audiences: after all, Hollywood films of the type had been staged on the streets where the bohemian intelligentsia lived, and they were usually photographed in a style that blended perfectly with the ambience of the commercially modest yet artistically sophisticated revival theaters. Hard-boiled pictures like Monogram's Decoy (1946) and PRC's Railroaded (1947) still play superbly well at nighttime screenings in museums or art houses, giving a hallucinated poetry to life in the 'naked city.'
Both Godard and the 1960s revival theaters were symptoms of an emerging postmodernism. To the new generation, the highest sophistication usually involved what Susan Sontag called an 'erotics,' or an appreciation of surfacesan intellectual hedonism that dissolved the distinction between highbrow and lowbrow. In a somewhat different way, Andrew Sarris contributed to this phenomenon. As he wryly observes, the auteurists were 'vulnerable to the charge of preferring trash to art,' because they took iconoclastic pleasure out of announcing that a film like Kiss Me Deadly was superior to Marty; in effect, they were employing 'the classic highbrow gambit of elevating lowbrow art at the expense of middle-brow art.'3 But the film critic who most exemplified the new spirit was Manny Farber, an early advocate of 'perceptive trash' (Sams 24), who brought a painter's sensibility to bear on male action directors. Farber had a great deal in common with Godard, and for many years he had been writing in The Nation about unheralded pictures from the middle or lower levels of Hollywood. As we have seen, he never used the term film noir, but he helped to establish a noir canon through his vivid, sharply intelligent discussion of Orson Welles, Anthony Mann, and John Farrow. He also greatly increased critical interest in what he called 'termite art'' as opposed to 'white elephant art.' In his famous 1957 essay 'Underground Cinema,' he makes the ordinary run of genre movies, many of which were thrillers, seem like a kind of primitive American poetry:
They are faceless movies, taken from a type of half-polished trash writing, that scorns like a mixture of Burt L. Standish, Max Brand, and Raymond Chandler. Tight, cliche-ridden melodramas about stock musclemen. A stool pigeon gurgling with scissors in his back; a fat, nasal-voiced gang leader; escaped convicts; . . . exhausted GT's; an incompetent kid hoodlum hiding out in an Fast Side building; . . . an underpaid shames signing tip to stop the blackmailing of a tough millionaire's depraved thumb-sucking daughter. 4
Farber's iconoclasm lay in the fact that he used the idea of the underground, long associated with outlaws and bohemian artists, on behalf of old-fashioned products of the culture industry. Such movies, he argued, have their 'natural home in caves: the murky, congested theaters, looking like glorified tattoo parlors on the outside and located near bus terminals in big cities' (15). Offering a powerful antidote to the 'banality and pomp' of Radio City Music Hall, they are best viewed in 'outcast theatersthe Lyric on Times Square, the Liberty on Market Street, the Victory on Chestnut,'' where the 'cutthroat atmosphere' resembles the action on the screen, and where 'the broken seats are only a minor annoyance in the unpredictable terrain' (18).
Ironically, the original French discussion of American film noir, which had helped to validate many of the pictures Farber admired, was stimulated not by fleabag productions, but by a series of major-studio releases that attracted widespread critical attention. Despite their sordid subject matter, prototypical films noirs such as The Maltese Falcon and Laura were highly publicized events and involved well-paid stars and directors. Howard Hawks, one of Farber's favorite 'underground' artists, was in fact one of the most prosperous and respected producer-directors in Hollywood, responsible for a string of box-office hits featuring the leading personalities of his day. What qualified Hawks for membership in Farber's 'trash' pantheon was not his working conditions, budgets, or exhibition venues, but his subject matter and style. Hawks specialized in
