As we defined more clearly the elements that exist in varying gradations within film noir, we were able to determine which of these stemmed from melodrama--elements that are more totally assimilated into the "rules of drama"--and those which arose from noir's "hard-boiled" incursion into character and story. Noir tries to explode beyond the normal rules of drama, which is why the techniques of expressionism and the desire to "novelize" narrative, often to the point of radical disjunctures in time (flashbacks and other non-linear narrative devices) became associated with noir.
The Noir-o-Meter can tell us "how much" noir there is in a film (it can do this for "regular melodramas" such as NOW, VOYAGER, or even for comedies, in order to show us how far the "regular rules of drama" take us toward noir--about one-third to two-thirds of the way, as a general rule). More interestingly, it can show us the "shape" of that noirness by looking at the ratios between elements derived from melodrama and elements which stem from the "hard-boiled." (That latter is often mistakenly considered to be the true and only defining set of characteristics for noir, but this is a grossly inaccurate oversimplification that persists to this day due to the circumstances under which noir was first popularized by film critics.)
Two measures that the noir-o-meter calculates help us show us the total dimension of the noir universe as the films occupy a version of the "stellar sequence" (noirs are not literally "red giants" or "white dwarfs," of course: this is just a rough analogy for what is really a distribution of wide-ranging sub-types). When we look at each group of elements--those which deal with the characters, those which address the visual information that films provide over and above traditional verbal/written storytelling, and those which anatomize how storytelling is altered and shaped toward a subversive inversion of standard plot and screenwriting techniques--we can compare the intensity of the elements which stem from the "regular rules of drama" (what we call the "melodrama elements") and those elements which come from forces that subvert/invert those rules (what we call the "hard-boiled" elements).
These measures, when applied, can distribute films noirs across a universe-like grid which demonstrates how much range exists within these elements as they combine and collide in individual films. Here we are going to look at the subset of those films that fulfill the region of that grid which houses the toughest, most hard-hitting, least melodramatic, and unsentimental examples of film noir.
How do we do this? We calculate two measures from the Noir-o-Meter data and create a scatterplot for them. What are these measures? The first compares the totals for the two "element sources" (melodrama/hard-boiled) across all the three element types (character/visual/plot-screenwriting). The second focuses only on comparing the totals in the character elements. The idea is that the character elements, where the action in the film has its most direct and immediate contact with the viewer, are the ones that give us the visceral "feel" of the action. So, if the character elements show a tilt toward the hard-boiled, we will get a measure that captures just how "tough" the film seems to the viewer.
Our first chart (above) shows a group of 150 films that have a hard-boiled-to-melodrama character element rate of 100 or higher. (The average for the more than 1500 films scored in the Noir-o-Meter DB for this measure is 89). The data points to the left and toward the top of this chart show the "toughest" films.
Think of this chart as the top slice of the film noir universe, with the next slice that you'd see being the one where the bulk of the films reside--in the middle region of a noir "galaxy" where these measures are both close to the overall average. On the other side of that large region will be the films that are the opposite of our "hard-boiled" extreme--those melodramas whose intensity has been coupled with at least near-criminal behavior and darker psychological conflicts than what is customary in films that otherwise are derived from the "regular rules of drama." (We'll look at that region in a subsequent post.)
The second chart zeroes in on the top end of the region depicted in the first chart. (You should be able to tell what subset of the data is common to each). These are the 32 films where the ratio between the character element comparison (hard-boiled v. melodrama) is at least 1.5 times as strong as the overall hard-boiled/melodrama ratio (what we call the MELO RATE).
The film at the top left of the chart in each case is Anthony Mann's BORDER INCIDENT. Those of you who know the film already will probably not be surprised that it grades out in such a manner. It is a particularly tough, violent, even grisly police procedural that features nasty, brutish, even racist characters who are caught up in an issue that still plagues America today: "illegal" immigration across the US-Mexico border.
The other film that seems well-separated from the pack of "tough films" (the one at the intersection of 50 on the horizontal axis and 200 on the vertical) is another film in which Anthony Mann participated (he completed the film on behalf of the original director, Alfred Werker). Many of you will nod in recognition upon reading its name: HE WALKED BY NIGHT, a film that still astonishes many for Richard Basehart's incredibly cold-blooded portrayal of the central criminal character.
These thirty-two films would make for quite a film noir festival, one which would demonstrate the most extreme manifestation of "toughness" that could likely be displayed. It might not be the most bitter, however, since that quality often contains melodramatic overtones that would color some of the other noir elements and add character relationships that would move the MELO RATE upward (to the right, as is evident by comparing the second chart with the first).
Take a look at my Blackboard post for a list of the films that are shown on the second chart.
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