31 Days of Oscar: Noir

This article was originally written for the 31 Days of Oscar programming in the TCM Now Playing newsletter in March 2023.

Film noir has been called a genre, a style, an attitude, a movement, even an era of Hollywood filmmaking. Yet when filmmakers like Robert Siodmak, Billy Wilder, Otto Preminger and Fritz Lang were making the dark crime melodramas, murder mysteries and gangster thrillers that defined the genre, the term "film noir" was nowhere to be heard, at least not in the U.S. First coined by a French film historian in the 1940s, it wasn't widely used stateside until the classic noir period was already over.

In a way, the term elevates genre that was considered a little disreputable by critics of the time, even when the films in question were produced by major studios with Hollywood stars and big budgets. They rarely earned Oscar nominations, let alone won, but a few of these shadowy nightmares from the dream factory were recognized by the Academy and one of them even gave new life to a one-time superstar whose career was on the downward slide. 

Joan Crawford had been branded "box office poison" in 1938 and MGM, her home for almost 20 years, released her from her contract a few years later. When Warner Bros. signed her to a three-picture deal at a fraction of her MGM salary, Crawford was almost 40, long past her days as an ingénue and no longer considered for the glamorous romantic leads that made her a star. She realized that she needed a strong part in a big film to revive her faltering career and, though she was initially resistant to playing the mother of a teenage girl, she lobbied for Mildred Pierce (1945), an adaptation of the James M. Cain novel. Director Michael Curtiz had no interest in casting Crawford—he wanted Bette Davis, who turned it down, and pursued Barbara Stanwyck, who was busy with another project—but producer Jerry Wald was on her side and convinced her to swallow her pride and do a screen test and show Curtiz what she could bring to the role.

Director and star clashed during the initial weeks of production as Curtiz fought to deglamorize the actress and give her a more believable middle-class presentation, but the antagonism evolved into collaboration and mutual respect, and it shows in Crawford's portrayal. Her Mildred is full-blooded and conflicted, a single mother and a smart, talented, ambitious woman fighting her way through a world where the men don’t just make the rules, they set the standards of judgment. It's melodrama as film noir, complete with a murder, a mystery, a femme fatale and a road to success that begins in the suburban world and ends up lost in shadow and darkness. It earned Crawford the Academy Award for best actress, the sole Oscar of her career, and famously, she wasn't even in attendance to accept it. She was at home nursing a fever and director Curtiz, who accepted the award in her stead, skipped the after parties and went directly to Crawford's home to personally present it to her. 

In spite of her absence—or perhaps because of it—Crawford upstaged the rest of the winners. Photos of her in bed, clutching the statuette with a big smile, freshly-applied make-up and picture-perfect hair (a hairdresser was on call for that very possibility) dominated the newspaper coverage. In addition to Crawford, Mildred Pierce received five additional nominations: for supporting actresses Eve Arden and Ann Blyth, screenwriter Ranald MacDougall, cinematographer Ernest Haller and for Best Picture (which was won by The Lost Weekend, 1945).

A year earlier, director Billy Wilder shocked audiences and collided with the morality watchdogs of the day with his adaptation of another James M. Cain novel. Double Indemnity (1944) is a film noir classic that codified the moral corruption and sexual charge of the nascent genre at its most cynical. Barbara Stanwyck is perfectly cold-blooded as the icy adulterer and Fred MacMurray, a star of light romantic dramas and comedies, took a daring step away from his familiar screen persona to play the conniving insurance agent tempted by Stanwyck's seductive siren to plot the murder of her rich husband. The film also ended one of the most successful creative relationships in Hollywood. Wilder's producer and screenwriter partner Charles Brackett was outraged by the story and refused to be a part of the production. They never worked together again. In need of a collaborator, Wilder signed hardboiled novelist Raymond Chandler to help him bring a pulp poetry to the tawdry tale of murder and betrayal. 

The result is a masterpiece of double-dealing and one of the touchstones of film noir, and it was nominated for seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Director, Adapted Screenplay, and for John F. Seitz's cinematography. Stanwyck picked up her third nomination as best actress and Miklós Rózsa, perhaps the defining composer of film noir soundtracks, earned one of his two nominations that year for original score. Perhaps it was just a little too cynical and sour to win anything but Wilder and Rózsa both took home Oscars the very next year, Wilder with The Lost Weekend and Rózsa for his Spellbound score.

Bette Davis reunited with director William Wyler, who directed her to her second Academy Award in Jezebel (1938), in The Letter (1940), the second screen version of the short story and play by W. Somerset Maugham. The first big screen adaptation was made in 1929, during the early years of sound pictures, and gave cinema audiences their first chance to hear Broadway legend Jeanne Eagels speak. Where the original film strained under the limitations of early sound cinema technology, Wyler brought a dynamic visual style to his film, with graceful long takes and shadowy imagery that gave a film noir quality to the exotic melodrama of a married British woman in Singapore on trial for murder. Herbert Marshall, who starred in the 1929 film as the woman's lover, was recast by Wyler as her blindly loyal husband.

William Wyler earned his third Best Director nomination and two-time Oscar-winner Bette Davis her fifth nod for Best Actress, while British actor James Stephenson earned his first and only nomination for his supporting role as the conflicted lawyer who defends Davis' character at trial. It could have been the break the veteran needed to send his career into bigger and better parts, but his career was cut short by a fatal heart attack mere months after the film's release. He was only 52. The Letter received seven Oscar nominations in all, including Best Picture, Cinematography, Film Editing and Music, but it was up against a stellar line-up of competing films that included Rebecca, The Grapes of Wrath and The Philadelphia Story (all 1940), just to name a few, and it came away empty-handed.

The first 20 minutes of The Killers (1946) is perhaps the most faithful adaptation of Ernest Hemingway ever put on screen, a moody, doom-laden prologue that sends a pair of hitmen from the city to take out a haunted young man who has already resigned himself to the end. The rest is pure Hollywood invention, a caper backstory created to explain the mystery of the man awaiting his death. The heist (inspired by a real-life Brooklyn robbery) was the brainchild of producer Mark Hellinger, a Broadway veteran making his mark in Hollywood with a series of hard-hitting crime thrillers. He handed his ideas to screenwriters Richard Brooks and John Huston, who worked out early drafts of the screenplay, while Anthony Veiller was brought in for the final drafts. Huston was under contract to Warner Bros. and couldn't take official screen credit, but he walked away from the project with something arguably more rewarding: the beginning of a life-long friendship with Hemingway. 

A big hit and a critical success, the film made stars of Burt Lancaster, who made his film debut as the doomed boxer turned petty criminal Swede Anderson, and Ava Gardner, who leapt from supporting roles to glamorous leading lady as the slinky siren who lures the lovesick sap into a criminal crew. Robert Siodmak earned his sole career nomination for Best Director, and it earned nods for Screenplay (attributed solely to Anthony Veiller), Film Editing and Miklós Rózsa’s score. But they had the bad luck of being up against William Wyler's very timely and powerful The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), which took home the gold in all four categories as well as for Best Picture. 

Crossfire (1947), a murder mystery involving the racially motivated murder of a Jewish man and American war veterans struggling with civilian life, was a risky bet for RKO. In the original novel by Richard Brooks, the murder victim was a gay man, but the production code forbade the very acknowledgement of homosexuality on screen. Director Edward Dmytryk and producer Adrian Scott hit upon the idea of instead making him Jewish and using the story to tackle bigotry and anti-Semitism in America. Across town at Twentieth Century-Fox, Elia Kazan was embarking on Gentleman's Agreement (1947), a big-budget drama with Gregory Peck that also addressed anti-Semitism. But taking on sensitive social issues was still daring at the time, even with a cast that included Robert Young, Robert Ryan and rising star Robert Mitchum. RKO hedged itself by giving the production a low budget and a 20-day schedule. Dmytryk worked with cinematographer J. Roy Hunt to light the film quickly and efficiently in a sparse, expressionistic style that used pools of illumination and dramatic slashes of light to create a shadowy atmosphere. Dmytryk credited Hunt, a veteran of more than 40 years of Hollywood features, for giving him the time to work closely with his actors while still completing the film on time. 

Thanks to the rapid schedule, Crossfire beat Gentleman's Agreement to theaters by months. It was lauded for its hard-hitting message, becoming RKO's biggest hit that year and was nominated for five Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Director (the first and only for Edward Dmytryk) and Adapted Screenplay. Robert Ryan earned his sole career Oscar nomination in the supporting actor category and Gloria Grahame, on loan from MGM for a small but vivid role, earned her first acting nomination. It was Gentleman's Agreement, however, that dominated the Academy Awards that year. It walked away with Oscars for Best Picture and Best Director and supporting actress Celeste Holm triumphed over Grahame, who would eventually get her Oscar gold for The Bad and the Beautiful (1952).