At its inception, film
noir was a genre of cities. From the rain-slicked streets of Los Angeles to the
midnight sidewalks of New York, the big city first defined classic noir’s
visual style and provided inspiration for its stories of lust and greed. In the
classic era, urban spaces were as pivotal to noir as wide-open spaces were to
the Western. One could see this just in the titles: THE ASPHALT JUNGLE, CITY OF
FEAR, CITY THAT NEVER SLEEPS, CHICAGO SYNDICATE, CRY OF THE CITY, DARK CITY,
KANSAS CITY CONFIDENTIAL, THE KILLER THAT STALKED NEW YORK, THE NAKED CITY, WHILE
THE CITY SLEEPS. The primary components of the genre were perhaps best
distilled in the title of a brilliant 1950 crime drama by the director Jules
Dassin: NIGHT AND THE CITY
But what about noir’s
country cousin, the rural noir? While the big city went to hell, what was
happening in the heartland, down south, and out in the sticks?
Quite a bit, as it turns
out. While most classic noir either ignored the countryside or presented it in
an idealized form (something like Jacques Tourneur’s 1947 OUT OF THE PAST, for
instance, is typical in this regard—it contrasts the peace of small town life
to the innate corruption of the city), the rural noir sought to darken the
picture. It wasn’t all Mom and apple pie out there in the woods.
The rural noir had early
progenitors in films like Fritz Lang’s 1936 FURY, which features Spencer Tracy
as a city slicker terrorized by a small town lynch mob. Like FURY, many of
these early films focused on city dwellers who, for one reason or another,
trekked into the wilderness and found trouble waiting there for them. This
storyline became a subgenre all by itself. Ida Lupino’s THE HITCH-HIKER (1953)
followed two buddies (Frank Lovejoy and Edmond O’Brien) on a fishing trip who
give a ride to a third man (William Talman) only to discover that he’s a
gun-wielding psychopath. Nicholas Ray’s films THEY LIVE BY NIGHT (1948) and ON
DANGEROUS GROUND (1952) both featured troubled protagonists—respectively, a
teen fugitive played by Farley Granger and a tormented cop played by Robert Ryan—who
try to escape their problems by fleeing into the country. To one extent or
another, however, these films were about how the desire to transcend the complications of city
life is thwarted when the simplicity offered by the country turns out to be a
chimera.
As noir developed, some
films began to present the country without its big-city contrast. These were
rural noir in the truest sense. The first fully formed of these films was the
haunting MOONRISE (1948). Directed by the legendary Frank Borzage (the first
director to win a Best Director Oscar), it tells the story of Danny Hawkins,
the disgraced son of a convicted murderer. Raised in shame, Danny grows up
tormented by other kids—particularly Jerry Sykes, the spoiled son of the town’s
banker. Years later, the adult Jerry Sykes (played by Lloyd Bridges) corners
Danny (Dane Clark) in the shadowy woods behind a dance party and tells him to
stay away from Gilly Johnson (Gail Russell) the pretty school teacher they both
love. When Jerry makes one last crack about how Danny’s old man was a murderer,
Danny lashes out. When he walks out of the woods a few moments later, he has
more in common with his father than just a last name.
In MOONRISE we find the
beginning of rural noir’s most resonant theme: the burden of kinship. More
frequently than its urban counterpart, rural noir locates its stories in the
tangled, and sometimes downright twisted, dynamics of family. For one thing,
the protagonist in a rural noir is far more likely to have a family in the
first place. Whereas the noir city is mostly made up of loners, in the noir
countryside, characters are often bound to their families like prisoners on a
chain gang. In Charles Laughton’s THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER (1955), for instance,
two young children are orphaned when their father goes to the gallows for
murder and their mother is killed by their stepfather, a religious nutjob
played with Satanic glee by Robert Mitchum. The film hews closely to the source
novel by Davis Grubb not just in the plotting but in the simmering grotesquery
of Grubb’s West Virginian vision. Familial obligation, as it so often is in the
Southern Gothic literature that helped inspire rural noir, is largely a matter
of children being made to pay for the sins of their parents.
Interestingly, this
family theme only seems to have gained strength over the years. One of the best
(and most underrated) noirs of the 1990s was 1993’s FLESH AND BONE, directed by
Steve Kloves and starring Dennis Quaid as Arliss, a vending machine operator in
Texas who lives a solitary life in an attempt to free himself from his
oppressive father, a career criminal played by James Caan. When Arliss falls in
love with the daughter (Meg Ryan) of a family that his father massacred years
before, he is pulled into an almost biblical showdown with the old man. Past
and present collide in a way that invokes the famous adage of William Faulkner
(one of the guiding spirits of rural noir) that “The past is never dead. It’s
not even past.”
The starkest expressions
of this theme can be found in the two best rural noirs of recent years. Set in
southern Arkansas, Jeff Nichols’s 2007 SHOTGUN STORIES stars Michael Shannon as
Son Hayes, the bitter eldest brother of the Hayes clan, whose estranged father
abandoned them long ago to begin another family. Uninvited to their father’s
funeral, Hayes and his brothers crash the service and, in front of their
father’s horrified second family, Son delivers a withering eulogy and incurs
the wrath of his half-brothers. As petty slights steadily escalate to confrontations
and then to violence, there are unmistakable echoes of Faulkner’s tortured
families — particularly the brother versus brother drama of ABSALOM ABSALOM! — with
the deeds of the (unseen) father echoing down through the years, condemning all
his sons. We find another backwoods patriarch bequeathing misery to his
children in Debra Granik’s adaptation of the brilliant Daniel Woodrell novel WINTER’S BONE. It tells the story
of a pine knot-tough teenager named Ree Dolly (wonderfully played, in a star-making
performance, by Jennifer Lawrence) trying to find her missing drug dealer
father in the Ozarks of southern Missouri and northern Arkansas. Masterfully
adapting the Woodrell story, Granik deftly explores the crushing weight of
poverty and, in the formidable figure of Ree Dolly, showcases the kind of
marrow-deep grit required for a young woman to navigate a world of drugs and
deception, a world founded on reflexive misogyny and trigger-quick violence.
Like any genre, of
course, the rural noir can lapse into cliché. Just this winter, director Scott
Cooper attempted a gritty look at rural poverty and drug abuse with his film
OUT OF THE FURNACE. His story follows a steel worker (Christian Bale) in a
dying Pennsylvania factory town who has to journey up into the Ramapo Mountains
of northeastern New Jersey to look for his missing brother (Casey Affleck).
Despite a strong cast, the script feels underdeveloped and the film itself
lacks the lived-in quality of something like WINTER’S BONE or SHOTGUN STORIES.
A character like Woody Harrelson’s vicious drug lord (the film’s villain), for
instance, never expands past the point of being a vicious drug lord. Like so
many rural noirs, OUT OF THE FURNACE wants
to be a mediation on family, and on the causes and effects of violence, but the
film ends up being a good example of how the genre can repeat itself to little
lasting effect.
While something like OUT
OF THE FURNACE may suffer from a comparison to its betters in the genre, it
does further demonstrate how rural noir has become the de facto cinematic means
of exploring the culture and conditions of America’s rural underclass. In
today’s Hollywood, when fewer and fewer films can make it through the studio
system and only slightly more can find financing through the ever-corporatized
world of independent film, investigations of poverty and family hardship need
something sexy to attract potential investors and, further down the line,
audiences. The veneer of the crime film is that something sexy. Of course,
given the news of rampant drug addiction and economic distress coming out of
places like the Appalachians and the Ozarks, perhaps it’s not just a veneer
after all. It was ever thus with film noir. Whether set in the city or the
country, it’s always sought to tell the dark and disturbing truth.
Note: This piece originally appeared in the Winter 2014 issue of MYSTERY SCENE.
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