10 of the best private eye movies ever made

Entry for Reaktion Books blog (on 31st July 2013) to mark publication of The Private Eye: Detectives in the Movies by Bran Nicol.

Available at: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Private-Eye-Detectives-Locations-Reaktion/dp/1780231024/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1375706506&sr=1-1&keywords=Bran+Nicol+the+private+eye

Thanks to countless portrayals over the years, the private investigator is one of the most familiar characters in cinema. Think of Humphrey Bogart looking out quizzically from under his fedora in The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep, Jack Nicholson in Chinatown, ‘branded’ by having his nose unceremoniously sliced by a hood (played with relish by director Roman Polanski), or Mickey Rourke in Angel Heart, finally able to look himself in the mirror, and terrified by what he sees: ‘I know who I am!’

My book is the first study of this classic cinematic figure. It offers readers two things: first, a history of the private eye movie, containing discussions on the most significant examples from the 1940s to the early twenty-first century and, second, an analysis of what I think they are really about.

It’s natural to see the private eye as a heroic beacon of masculinity. But as I watched and re-watched scores of movies while researching the book, a different kind of figure emerged. The private eye is not really about steely heroism, or brilliant detection, or rooting out dangerous criminal elements from society. No, his job is more simply to present us with the mysteries of private life. The special function of the private eye is to enter into people’s private spaces and expose them to us, the viewers, so we reflect on our own.

Given the rise of new media, social networking and reality TV, the News of the World scandal, the Leveson Inquiry and the current furore about government surveillance, questions of privacy are more urgent and complex in the twenty-first century than ever, and this, despite the fact that it represents a bygone, very twentieth-century world, is one of the values of thinking about this movie tradition now.

Having the chance to immerse myself in some wonderful pieces of cinema was one of the great pleasures of writing the book. As a taster, here are examples of what I consider to be the ten best. As with all such lists, it probably reflects personal preference more than anything else, and no doubt will prompt disagreement. In particular, you might be surprised that half my choices are movies that pay homage to the great films noirs of the 1940s and ’50s rather than coming out of this period. However, besides finding these films more gripping and satisfying, I’d argue that since the 1970s directors seem to have managed to find ways in which to capitalize on the potential of private eye movie conventions to say something profound and poignant about human beings.

Angel Heart (1987)
Overblown and bombastic it may be, but Alan Parker’s Gothic take on the private eye movie is still compelling and frightening. Mickey Rourke – before his decline, and recent rebirth – is the perfect private investigator, a loner, rather dishevelled but plausibly attractive to woman, sassy and scared in equal measure, traversing a set of ‘mean streets’ new to the genre: those of New Orleans.
Memorable scene: a demonic Robert de Niro peels his hard-boiled egg with long sharpened fingernails before devouring it with conviction. Breakfast will never be the same again.

The Maltese Falcon (1941)
The first ‘proper’ private eye movie, and for many the first proper film noir. Humphrey Bogart’s Sam Spade is barely off-screen as he attempts to figure out a double mystery: who killed Floyd Thursby and Spade’s own partner Miles Archer, and where is the eponymous priceless artefact that so many criminals are trying to get hold of? The true mystery, though, is Spade himself, and what makes this curiously heroic, morally ambiguous figure tick.
Memorable scene: the famous ending, as Mary Astor’s femme fatale, Brigid O’Shaughnessy, is ushered into a lift to take her downstairs. Ostensibly this is so she can be dealt with by the law, but as the bars of the lift close on her and the dramatic music kicks in, it’s clear this is really a descent into hell.

Laura (1946)
Another film revealing the Gothic origins of the noir private eye thriller, this one revolves around a clash of worlds, as jobbing police detective Mark McPherson (Dana Andrews) investigates the apparent murder of the beautiful socialite and advertising executive Laura Hunt (Gene Tierney). Goaded by her ‘friend’, the effete novelist Waldo Lydecker, who finds him vulgar and ‘cheap’, McPherson loses his bearings as he tries to get to grips with the case. This is because he has fallen in love with the portrait of Laura hanging over her fireplace even before she suddenly reappears . . .
Memorable scene: McPherson has taken, rather strangely, to wandering around Laura’s empty apartment and, having helped himself to a whisky, falls asleep in an armchair under Laura’s portrait, only for him to be startled awake as she herself suddenly walks in. His fantasy about Laura seems so strong that it’s somehow managed to revivify the real person.
Kiss Me Deadly (1955)
Stylish and violent, this film sees the wandering ‘Chandlerian’ private eye recast as borderline psychopath. Ralph Meeker plays the sadistic, womanizing Mike Hammer with relish: street-smart, dapper, but with a undeniable streak of cruelty. The film is beautifully shot, showing just how far film noir in the 1950s has come since the previous decade’s B-movie origins. It also elevates the standard hard-boiled plot of Spillane’s original novel (married woman meets dangerously attractive drifter, trouble ensues) into a paranoid, apocalyptic Cold War drama revolving around, er, the ‘great whatsit’.
Memorable scene: trying to find an Italian opera singer’s apartment, Hammer walks cautiously, gun at the ready, around a shadowy LA apartment block (in a part of pre-renovation LA district Bunker Hill – now lost forever, apart from in films like this) made to seem like an eery labyrinth by the overhead camera.
Klute (1971)
Set in an inescapably claustrophobic New York, Klute marks a departure not just from the Chandlerian wandering private eye but from California, where the majority of 1970s private eye films are set. Nevertheless it revolves around a typical private-eye theme: the inability of the detective to remain detached from a case. John Klute (Donald Sutherland at his thoughtful, taciturn best) falls for Jane Fonda’s Brée Daniels, the high-class prostitute he is supposed to protect from a killer at large in the city. The innovative camera angles and creepy soundtrack manage to make the viewer fluctuate between feeling helpless and complicit in the stalker’s intrusions into Daniels’s life.
Memorable scene: all the terrible vulnerability of a woman alone in an uncaring metropolis is conveyed as Daniels settles down in her bed late at night, and the phone rings . . .

Brick (2005)
Rian Johnson’s cool, indie 'mash-up' of genres – high school movie meets film noir – manages to breathe new life into the private eye movie. It’s a reworking of The Maltese Falcon for the slacker generation, with the eponymous object a block of heroin rather than a jewel-encrusted ornament. The combination of genres invites us to think of the private eye in a new way: as an adolescent trying to enter the unforgiving adult world. He is morally pure, though often tempted by impurities, and tries to preserve justice in a world where official law is nowhere to be seen.
Memorable scene: Brendan Fraser’s desolation is palpable as the camera stays fixed, unflinchingly, as he crouches in a storm drain beside the abandoned body of his dead girlfriend.

Murder, My Sweet (1944)
No doubt it might seem a little heretical to choose this film over the more celebrated early Chandler adaptation starring Humphrey Bogart, The Big Sleep (1946). But Murder, My Sweet, the first time Philip Marlowe appears on screen (played by a believably vulnerable Dick Powell), is superior both in its plotting and its depiction of a detective entering a bewildering, dangerous world. This film combines the classic noir techniques of chiaroscuro lighting, subjective camera angles and flashback voice-over narration, to end up with the closest cinema has come to Chandler’s convoluted first-person novels.
Memorable scene: Marlowe begins and ends the movie with a bandage over his eyes in a shadowy interrogation room surrounded by police – a clear visual metaphor for the detective’s inability to see what has been in front of his eyes until the very end.

The Long Goodbye (1973)
A movie which, as one critic of the time noted, ‘satirizes Hollywood and the entire Chandler genre’. Nevertheless, as Elliott Gould’s downscaled Marlowe shambles around his neighbourhood, always one step behind, Altman’s brilliant movie captures the essence of the private eye better than any other. A lone hero, faced with a bewildering, uncaring world, carries the fight because . . . Why? Because someone has to.
Memorable scene: Sterling Hayden’s doomed alcoholic novelist Roger Wade ‘wades’ despairingly into the Pacific to end it all, as Marlowe, registering what’s happening too late, is powerless to stop him.

Out of the Past (1947)
You can’t take your eyes off Robert Mitchum throughout Jacques Tourneur’s movie, despite the beautifully-shot, evocative locations, both urban and (surprisingly for a noir) pastoral. The wistful feeling of the settings is matched by Mitchum’s portrayal of Jeff Bailey, a private eye trying to go straight but unable to because of his murky past. The profession of private detective here – as in so many other films – carries with it none of the romance we associate with a Philip Marlowe. As Bailey puts it in his opening lines, he does ‘shabby jobs for who’d ever hire me. It was the bottom of the barrel, and I scraped it, but I didn’t care. I had her.’
Memorable scene: one of the great femme fatale scenes in movie history, as Jane Greer’s Kathie Moffat looks on while Bailey and his former partner Fisher fight to the death in the claustrophobic surroundings of a rural cabin. As the camera shifts to her face we realise her expression conveys not fear but . . . unmistakable arousal.

Chinatown (1975)
A rare example of a great private eye movie written for screen rather than based on a literary original, Chinatown uses the qualities of cinema to elevate the popular thriller to the level of art. This ‘film blanc’ has everthing: absorbing plot (about the sins of the fathers, in every sense), convincing acting, lush cinematography and a haunting soundtrack. But what makes it unbeatably powerful is how plot and underlying themes lock together into an unforgettable conclusion: it’s not ignorance that hurts you, it’s what you know.
Memorable scene: another great private eye movie ending: a car horn sounds continuously as its driver collapses on the steering wheel after being shot. The sound seems to signify Jake Gittes’s recognition not only that he is completely powerless in the face of corrupt LA authorities, but that his own dark private history has repeated itself.

And three of the worst . . .

The Eye of the Beholder (1999)
Is it possible to make a film boring, when it’s about a seductive female serial killer and the voyeuristic detective who abandons his job because he has fallen for her? Yes: here’s the proof. Stephan Elliott’s adaptation of Marc Behm’s masterful 1980 novel is pedestrian and unwilling to fully inhabit the deranged desolation of the central character that drives both Behm’s novel and its original adaptation, Claude Miller’s Mortelle Randonée (1983). A miscast Ewan McGregor comes across as apologetic rather than unhinged.

The Lady in the Lake (1947)
You could see the appeal for Robert Montgomery, both director and star of this third Philip Marlowe movie. Why not try to create a literal cinematic equivalent of the first-person perspective of Chandler’s original fiction by confining the perspective to Marlowe’s? A drink is offered to the camera, then we see the detective’s hand putting it down; when Lavery punches him, we see the fist draw back and then the camera keels over and blacks out. But the effect is fatally stagey and unconvincing. Characters parade in front of the camera, eyeing the detective with exaggerated suspicion and intoning lines from the overly literary screenplay. And the attempt to make us hear Marlowe’s speech as if it’s our own voice fails too. One critic has remarked that when he tells Adrienne that her role in life is to take care of him, ‘it sounds as if he’s leaning out of a car window and ordering burgers and fries at a drive-through window’.

The Big Sleep (1975)
This film demonstrates why the conventions of the American private eye movie cannot be translated into an English setting without extreme care (or by giving them a comic makeover, as in Stephen Frears’s Gumshoe, 1971). Like The Lady in the Lake, it must have seemed like a good idea at the time, to build on the success of Dick Richards’ Farewell My Lovely (1975) in casting an ageing but stately Robert Mitchum as Philip Marlowe. Yet, as Mitchum wanders around a peculiarly 1970s British world of suburban semis, Fulham penthouses and mundane locations like ‘Hunt’s Garage’, he looks as if he’s having serious doubts.

A Space Oddity

Academics are wondering whether we are still postmodern, if the attitudes typical of the last few decades of the Twentieth Century still pertain in the early Twenty-first. Chris Hadfield's much-publicized return to Earth at the end of the International Space Station's 'Expedition 35' suggests that, in some places at least, they do.

Umberto Eco once characterized the 'postmodern attitude' as that of a man who wants to tell a woman that he loves her madly, but is all too aware 'that these words have already been written by Barbara Cartland' and is sure the woman will know this too. So his solution is to say to her: ‘as Barbara Cartland would put it, I love you madly’. Thus he simultaneously acknowledges his painful conviction that everything meaningful has been said or done by others before, how conscious we are of following pre-written 'cultural scripts' in our everyday lives... but also manages to communicate genuine emotion. Eco's analogy explained the fondness for the many examples of postmodern literature and film which chose to parody or copy previous works.

Hadfield's return to Earth neatly illustrated Eco's logic. His method was not unexpected for a man whose expedition has embraced media culture from he outset, demonstrating an ease with one's private life being lived out in public. An exchange on Twitter with fellow-Canadian William Shatner, for example, included the lines, 'Are you tweeting from space?' (Shatner), 'Yes, Standard Orbit, Captain. And we're detecting signs of life on the surface.' (Hadfield). His return involved him putting together a video which showed him performing David Bowie's 'Space Oddity' live in space. As well as acknowledging that space travel - and the momentous address to humankind that comes with it - had been done before, in reality (the original Moon Landing in 1969) and in fiction (Bowie's song, which is itself a parody of the Kubrick film, 2001), it also manages to communicate the genuine sense of achievement felt by Hadfield. Truer still to Eco's logic is that Bowie's song contains the line 'Tell my wife I love her very much, she knows' - a way of telling his own wife, even though Bowie's narrator has said this before, and that his wife surely knows this is the case, that he loves her very much.

One Function of the Guardian/Observer for the Middle Classes (Neatly Encapsulated in the Title of a Single Article)

'I feel defensive about my second home - but my guilt is largely unnecessary' (Ian Jack's column in The Guardian, Saturday 27 October 2012)

The Demon in the Machine: Paranormal Activity 4

The idea which runs through the Paranormal Activity series is that the visual technology which is so much a part of contemporary life might just capture something horrible, either by accident or design. In the original film (2009), a couple attempt to make sense of frightening paranormal disturbances which have been occurring in their new home at night – a light turning itself on and off in the hallway, a door opening by itself, loud thuds and crashes upstairs, etc. – by mounting a digital camera in their bedroom and recording while they sleep. This is followed by handheld cameras in Paranormal Activity 2 (2010), security cameras in Paranormal Activity 3 (2011), a prequel to the original, and now, in this fourth instalment, a series of networked laptops recording continually via webcam throughout the house.

Our handheld digital world has had a huge impact on cinema, and not just because the compact nature of digital cameras and smartphones – and their low prices – makes filming accessible to all. Where the mediatized global catastrophes of the Sixties were televisual (the assassinations of the Kennedy brothers, for example), in the twenty-first century, they have been digital. One effect of this is the way footage from 9/11 and the 2004 Tsunami taught film-makers how to really ‘do’ realistic disaster (e.g. in Cloverfield - see previous post). But what Paranormal Activity suggests is that there is something disturbing about the technology itself, something dangerous about our very compulsion to record every moment of our lives. What if the devices we deploy to protect ourselves should uncover, or even unleash, a submerged world we would be better off not knowing about?

Jane and Louise Wilson

 

In its heyday in the late Eighteenth Century, gothic fiction specialized in exotic, enclosed spaces, fitting locations for heightened  drama, such as the rooms in castles or monasteries. Now we are as likely to encounter the gothic in the ordinary spaces of our everyday world – not only the urban architectural spaces explored in the photography of Jane and Louise Wilson, but in everyday suburban kitchens, bedrooms and garages. ‘Suburban Gothic’ is a label coined by Bernice Murphy to refer to a major sub-genre within American gothic over the past few decades, which expresses the anxiety that beneath the surface of the most mundane of environments something extraordinary is lurking, something virulent or evil. The Paranormal Activity series is a recent example of a sequence of films that include Halloween (1981) and Disturbia (2005). The original film was set in a modest example of ‘tract’ housing, the sequels in more affluent villas. Each, though, is representative of ‘suburbia’.

From the outset, the plot has been the weakest link in the Paranormal Activity series, despite the creditable attempts to embellish it in the sequels. A demon has attached itself to one of two sisters, staying with her throughout her life as she moves from one suburban locale to another, making sure she and her offspring stay in his possession, eliminating anyone who gets in his way. But why this is the case, and even how it works, is less clear. In a way the story is rather un-gothic: demons are more monstrous but less uncanny than ghosts. But in the end this doesn’t matter. In Paranormal Activity 4 the simple plot – demon wants boy back – is just a pretext for the real business of the film: to show us how menacing the spaces of our ordinary lives are. The films gives us the Freudian uncanny in an especially direct sense: our homes are made unhomely by the act of scrutiny. It may be that the most problematic inconsistency of the story is the fact that a force formidable enough to drag adults through rooms, start cars, and send chandeliers crashing down on people, is apparently unable to turn off a laptop. Yet this demon has no interest in stopping the camera, for it is his biggest ally.

*Bernice Murphy, Suburban Gothic in American Popular Culture (Palgrave, 2009)

When I'm Cleaning... etc.

Ah, George Formby Jr. Classic, supremely talented yet unfairly neglected, etc.

I just about 'get' what the George Formby thing is all about. It's a Northern thing. It's a British thing. It's the kind of thing that makes movies like The Full Monty successful, the idea that 'we' can never be as good as them because we're not as privileged nor as confident in ourselves as they are... But we can try and have fun amidst all the hardship and a sense of community and identity will result. And along the way we can produce pretty good music, films, etc. In other words: we lowly, down-to-earth Brits are not the Americans. And we Northerners are not like you guys from the South...

Frank Skinner's documentary about Formby (August 5th, BBC Four) was dressed up as a reappraisal, designed to persuade us that Formby was deserving of a position in the Twentieth Century roster of brilliant, influential artists. A brilliant ukelele player, and a composer of neat, comic songs, yes. But influential? There's the problem. As Skinner's own performances of Formby songs showed, it seems impossible to 'do' a Formby song without 'doing Formby' (ie. singing in that silly voice). It becomes an impression, a karaoke performance. Given that the style of Formby's music probably descended from ragtime roots and is thus flexible enough to be reinterpreted, it seems surprising that no-one's tried to re-do Formby's songs in his or her own style. But then we come to another problem: those lyrics...

London 2012 - Opening Ceremony

Another example of the self-reflexivity of our heavily mediatized everyday reality: the opening ceremony to the Olympics consisted of Danny Boyle apparently extending the phantasmagoric drug-induced hallucination scenes from Trainspotting to put together a trippy dream of British history and contemporary British reality, which included such bizarre random moments as the Arctic Monkeys playing a version of their 2005 (yes, 2005!) hit 'I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor' and then a cover of one of John Lennon's most meaningless, yet unmistakably 1960s, songs 'Come Together'. Ok, this was perhaps an Olympic sentiment. But then Paul McCartney was wheeled out to sing 'Hey Jude'. Why? What has this man and this song got to do with the Olympics and/or Britain 2012? The only explanation is that he represents a kind of rock Royalty.

This then became news, with commentators discussing it on the news channels late into the nights. Screened on the BBC, then analysed on the BBC as if it just happended to be a randomly-generated news event, when actually the BBC were talking about themselves!

Contemporary British Cinema

There are three kinds of British movie: 1. the plucky disenfranchised group working together to achieve a momentary success (The Full Monty, Made in Dagenham, Calendar Girls), a film which promotes the 'having a go' side of British life, as people force themselves to do something badly for the greater good and to cheer themselves up; 2. the aspirational (London) movie, where a group of affluent metrosexuals impress the Americans (Love Actually, Four Weddings and a Funeral, etc.); 3. the gritty, dark, bleak portrait of the futility of working-class life (Fishtank, Red Road, Made in England). Only the third is any good. What does this say about Britain and its sense of itself?