1996). For a dazzling analysis of how it grows out of Scorsese's cinephilia, and of how it exemplifies postmodern intertextuality in general, see Lesley Stern, The Scorsese Connection (London: BFI, 1995). Other elaborately produced noir remakes include Against All Odds (1984), which is based on Out of the Past, and No Way Out (1987), which is based on The Big Clock. Perhaps the most egregious instance of remake inflation is the 1988 version of D.O.A., which is actually the second remake of a movie that was already a remake. The well-known 1950 production, directed by Rudolph Mate, was loosely based on Robert Siodmak and Billy Wilder's 1931 German film, Der Mann, Der Seinen Morder Sucht. In 1969, Australian director Eddie Davis filmed Color Me Dead, an inexpensive and uninspired modernization of the same basic story. Then came Rocky Morton's expensive and loudly expressionistic retelling for the 1980s.
The 1950 Mate film is a relatively straightforward thriller with a shocking plot twist (the star dies, after telling a couple of cops how he tracked down his own murderer), and much of its fascination derives from documentary- style shots of pudgy, sweating Edmond O'Brien as a small-time accountant running through San Francisco and Los Angeles. In contrast, the 1988 film casts trim, athletic Dennis Quaid in the role of a college English teacher, and it treats the action in the style of MTV art, using rapid cutting, lurid colors, tilted compositions, and every camera trick known to the industry.
26. Financial data and quotations from DTV producers are taken from Michele Willens, 'Bypassing the Big Picture,' Los Angeles Times 'Calendar' section (Sunday, 28 November 1993): 25.
27. For information on the marketing of Red Rock West, see the 'Arts and Entertainment' section of The New York Times (Sunday, 3 April 1994): 19.
28. Probably the award should have been given to Jaye Davidson, whose performance gave the film much of its shock value and popularity.
Chapter 5 1. Janey Place and Lowell Peterson, 'Some Visual Motifs of Film Noir,' in Film Noir Reader, ed. Alain Silver and James Ursini (New York: Limelight Editions, 1996), 69.
2. Geoffrey O'Brien, 'The Return of Film Noir!' New York Review of Books (15 August 1991): 45.
3. In their 'balance sheet' or summary argument about American film noir, Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton make the following remarks on style:
''One notes the German influence and its taste for high-contrast lighting. The systematic investigation of depth of field is rare; it has best suited certain 'psychological' films where it is used to illustrate complex relationships among multiple characters who are arranged at different distances from the lens. . . . The subjective camera is used often, and, in the years 194547, an offscreen commentary that is nowadays reserved for the police procedural' (Panorama du film noir americain, 19411953 [Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1955], 179, my translation).
4. Edward Dimendberg, 'Kiss the City Goodbye,' Lusitania 7 (spring 1996): 5657.
5. Dimendberg's argument is developed further in 'City of Fear: Defensive Dispersal and the End of Film Noir,' Any, no. 18 (1997): 1418. His book on this Issue, Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity, is forthcoming from Harvard University Press. For a discussion of how technology affected style across the entire history of Hollywood, see Barry Salt, Film Style and Technology: History and Analysis (London: Starword, 1983).
6. Medical officer quoted in Thomas Doherty, Projections of War: Hollywood, American Culture, and World War II (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 264.
7. Tom Gunning's term, the cinema of attraction, is designed to indicate certain affinities between popular and avant-garde spectatorship in the earliest days of the movies. One of his most recent discussions of the idea may be found in 'An Aesthetic of Astonishment,' in Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film, ed. Linda Williams (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 11433.
8. Three-strip Technicolor cameras of the 1930s cost as much as thirty thousand dollars to build. They were rented, not purchased, from the Technicolor organization, and the cost of making color release prints for distribution was significantly greater than the cost of black and white. Variety estimated that color added as much as 25 percent to the earning power of a film, but it could also increase the budget by as much as 30 percent. See Gorham A. Kinden, 'Hollywood's Conversion to Color: The Technological, Economic, and Aesthetic Factors,' Journal of the University Film Association 31, no. 2 (spring 1979): 2936.
9. Guy Green quoted in Steve Neale, Cinema and Technology: Image, Sound, Color (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 149.
10. This was also a period when a great many musical comedies were still being made in black and white. As only one example, consider I'll See You In My Dreams (1951), starring Doris Day and Danny Thomas.
11. Louise Nevelson quoted in Wodek, Black in Sculptural Art (Brussels: Atelier 340, 1993), 193. Hereafter, Wodek's work is cited parenthetically in the text.
12. David Anfam, Franz Kline: Black and White, 19501961 (Houston: Houston Fine Art Press, 1994), 2021. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically in the text.
13. Michael Leja, Reframing Abstract Expressionism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 11011.
14. Leja points out that in 1949, Life magazine published a black-and-white photo of an unsmiling Jackson Pollock, standing next to one of his paintings and looking slightly off to the right; the near side of Pollock's face was illuminated by a hard light, and the far side was hidden by the long shadow he cast against the canvas. The caption beneath the image asked whether he might be 'the greatest living painter in the United States.' Leja remarks that this 'noir-ish presentation was often more influential in the culture's absorption of the New School artists than was their work' (Refraining A bstract Expressionism, 113).
15. For a discussion of the cultural politics of postwar modernism, see Serge Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983).
16. John Alton, Painting with Light (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995),
45. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically in the text.
17. Conversation with the author, Hollywood, California, May 1996.
18. In his useful introduction to the 1955 edition of Alton's Painting with Light, Todd McCarthy observes that 'Alton habitually wears a beret and has the air of a Continental bohemian of the 1920s' (xvi). At MGM, Alton became one of Vincente Minnelli's favorite cameramen and was given an Academy Award for the Technicolor dream sequence in An American in Paris. Besides that film, his color work with Minnelli includes Designing Woman, which occasionally parodies the hard-boiled style. He also photographed the noirlike nightmare in Father of the Bride.
19. Notice also that Out of the Past contains several brief but eloquent camera movementsas in the scene in which the camera pans slowly from Jeff Bailey, who is seated at a bar, to Kathie Moffat, who enters the room. Midway through the pan, the image dissolves, signifying the passage of time. This photographic lyricism, which is evident in both low-key and high-key scenes, can also be found in Tourneur's other great film noir, Nightfall (1957), photographed by Burnett Guffey.
20. Whether we are speaking of black and white or color, it is much more difficult for a photographer to make films look interesting in daylight than in darkness. On sunny days, it helps a great deal to have the spectacular mountain scenery and expansive sky of westerns, as in Out of the Past. The most difficult scenes in daytime are the ones shot on city streets. 'If you have a totally dark room and you have a night scene,' photographer Michael Chapman observes, 'you do it all. . . . But if you have a day exterior, there's just plain less you can do on it. . . . I think a lot of [the problem] is simply the enormous recalcitrance of daytime. It's simply
