USING THE NOIR-O-METER FOR "FACTOR ANALYSIS" OF TCM's "MARCH BADNESS"

Famous "barroom analyst" Eddie Muller has devised a sendup of college basketball's "March madness" that uses Twitter for the thing it was meant for: mindlessly entertaining polls that occasionally reveal something interesting within a sub-group. "March Badness" (a name doubtless conjured up after several libations) is an amusing conceit, but whether the poll means anything at all depends on how it is executed (and we don't mean choosing between the noose and lethal injection!). 

The voting is underway, and a few surprising results as the contest snakes its way down to the so-called "ultimate noir villain" have prompted us to look more closely at both the poll's initial construction and the related factors involved with each villain. Is there a predictable pattern in the voting results that might hold up no matter what pair of villains face off? The short answer: probably. Whatever art/artifice was used to generate the noir "field of 16" (semi-conscious choice, drawn out of a hat, ouija board) may not matter in terms of who wins. 

The long answer is below, focused on an interesting anomaly in the voting that cropped up in the first round: bratty little Veda Pierce (Ann Blyth) from MILDRED PIERCE knocked out the formidable Kathie Moffat (Jane Greer) from OUT OF THE PAST. Veda is the only teenager on the list (though Annie Laurie Starr isn't much older, and certainly isn't psychologically) and yet there she is (as you can see in the table below...) ready to face off against giggling madman Tommy Udo (Richard Widmark) in KISS OF DEATH.

That anomaly made me think that we can apply two control measures to create a form of "factor analysis" to predict results in these polls. I'll deal with the second first, which is simply the number of "rating votes" that the film in which the villain appears has received at the Internet Movie Data Base (IMDB).

The primary factor for our purposes is a "noir element" taken from our old friend the "Noir-o-Meter," which those who occasionally frequent (is that an oxymoron?) this blog will remember (presumably neither wisely nor too well). The element that matters to us for "badness" is the "fatal(e)" element, which we make more verbose with the following: "degree of peril produced by fatal(e) characters." The element has a maximum of 15 points (out of the 200-point scale), so it has a good bit of significance in the overall method and it has enough room for gradation (which I've tried to make as systematic as possible). That said, it is still a subjective measure, and some will not agree with our conclusions (of course, some people never agree with anything).

The "factor analysis" is to compare the two films by the "fatal(e) value" and their likely familiarity to voters (the IMDB vote total). In the table (above) we show the "factor relationships" with a two-character code. If a film has a "fatal(e)" character rating higher than its opponent and it has more votes cast in the IMDB poll, we code it "xx." If it has a higher character rating but fewer votes, it's coded "xy." If it has a lower character rating but more votes, the code is "yx." And if it has both a lower character rating and fewer votes, the code is "yy." (Chromosomes, you can start your engines...)

There are two more possible categories we should mention, which occur if the character ratings are identical. With a tie score in factor 1, we assign a "z" to that factor, so a tie in the character rating plus more votes produces a "zx" code, and a tie in the character rating plus fewer votes creates a "zy" code.

What we see in the results is that the character rating code predicts the winner almost all of the time (at least thus far--we have only 7 results in from the poll as yet, so things could change). Any factor code beginning with "x" has a 5-1 record; only that Veda Pierce, with a character score well below that of Kathie Moffat and (surprisingly) fewer votes, pulled off a win with a factor code beginning with "y."

In the one case where the character scores were identical (Kasper Gutman in MALTESE FALCON and Johnny Prince in SCARLET STREET), the film with greater familiarity seems to have carried its anti-hero to the next plateau in "Eddie Muller's Badness Valhalla" (which is a great name for a stage act, BTW: "Eddie will be here all week--try the veal!").

So if we were to predict what will happen via the "factor analysis," we'd see Mr. Brown (Richard Conte) overcome his opponent Vince Stone's (Lee Marvin) greater visibility (check the IMDB vote totals: shockingly, THE BIG COMBO is the least-seen of these films). At that point, he'd be up against the Fat Man, and their character scores are much closer than the IMDB votes; thus one would figure that Gutman will win in the second round.

If Veda can take down Kathie freakin' Moffat, she's probably a match for Tommy Udo (particularly since Veda is young and lithe and has no need for wheelchairs). So in this bracket it's Veda vs. the Fat Man, and it's hard to vote against a man who enjoys talking to a man who likes to talk. In that scenario, Gutman is still on his seventeen-year quest to be the biggest baddie of them all ("not just in girth!" he grunts: "I'm not made out of lead...I'm no phony!!"). To which we say: thank God that Gutman is not made out of lead--he'd be the original immovable object if he were...

Over in the other bracket, we figure Phyllis D. (Barbara Stanwyck) will take down J.J. Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster) thanks to the "xx" code (and that honey of an anklet: our male voters don't miss a trick!). In the other contest, let's first admit that the IMDB vote total for NIGHT OF THE HUNTER vis-a-vis DETOUR is just staggering, and since the two villains are tied in the Noir-o-Meter's "fatal(e)" category, we have to go with Harry Powell (Robert Mitchum) over the fearsome Vera (Ann Savage).  So it's Phyllis vs. Harry in the semi-finals. 

And in that round, Phyllis will take out Harry, with the other bracket simply too close to call due to the "Veda anomaly." Gutman would beat Tommy Udo rather handily, but folks seem to cotton to these teenage vixens (says something sick about present-day society, if ya know what I mean...) and Veda just might commandeer that wheelchair from Tommy's victim, lure Gutman into it, and push him down the stairs!

Either way, however, I think it's safe to assume that the eventual winner of this is going to be the lady whose blonde wig freaked out Paramount's Buddy DeSylva so much that he compared his femme fatale to George Washington. Despite that lamentable attribute, Phyllis Dietrichson is almost certain to be the baddest when all the votes have been counted (except the ones they will be suppressing in Georgia). 

And at that point, Eddie may want to start to get worried when this is all over, and in one of his booze-encrusted dreams, Phyllis sidles up to him and says: "Bourbon will be fine, Eddie." Time to go on the wagon, Muller!

CORNELL WOOLRICH AND THE NOIR-O-METER

A recent post at the Blackboard from Dan Hodges--long-time jouster against the "hard-boiled paradigm" that continues to distort the popular understanding of film noir--focused on problems of interpretation he encountered in discussions of the Cornell Woolrich "melo-noir" NO MAN OF HER OWN (1950), starring Barbara Stanwyck (in a role that gave that great actress much to work with on both sides of her emotional register--even though she is, like Joan Crawford in this time frame, often ten years too old for the parts she is playing).

Dan's aversion to the hard-boiled has only hardened over the years, but it appears to me that some of the noir/melodrama dynamics that we have discussed during those times have actually rubbed off on his writing. His claims for the greater emotional depth and avoidance of "deterministic" narrative sequences that we find in melodrama is at least an unconscious admission that noir needs to connect with a greater spectrum of human emotion in order not to become clichéd and formulaic. That said, melodrama also needs noir to sharpen the edges of that emotion in ways that connect it with life-and-death situations.

Dan spends many paragraphs discussing minute plot details in order to debunk an overly "hard-boiled" analysis by academic Mark Osteen. There are some good points in his argument, but he meanders within a series of actions within NO MAN OF HER OWN that don't really connect to one another. He's also a bit too concerned about the difference between the two competing source materials for the film (Cornell Woolrich, who often recycled and revised story elements, did just that with the material combined into the script for the film--the novel  I MARRIED A DEAD MAN and the earlier short story "They Call Me Patrice."

Though Dan remains innately suspicious of our Noir-o-Meter (see previous posts for details about how this "how noir is it" method operates...), we think that its ability to isolate the structural/dramatic roots of "noirness" via an integration of "hard-boiled" and "melodrama" (which we sometimes think of as Empedoclean forces at work within the aesthetic/philosophical underpinnings of noir) is just the ticket to establish a different viewpoint about NO MAN OF HER OWN that gets beyond most of the messy specifics and puts it (and other writings of Woolrich as adapted into film) into a context that is both coherent and consistent. 

Woolrich is unique among the major literary sources for film noir in his juxtaposition of psychological motivations for aberrant behavior and exaggerated, outlandish plot devices. This combination often produces a sense of dread that is often interpreted as being hard-boiled, but in fact is not. When the often almost transparent plot contrivances are superimposed, the formulaic aspect of pulp fiction is highlighted, which reinforces the perception that his narratives reside in the realm of the hard-boiled.

The noir-o-meter ratings for nine films adapted from Woolrich's work dispel this notion, however. The particular ratings that shine a light into this area are "ratio measures" that compare the intensity of "hard-boiled" elements in noir with the analogous strength of those elements derived from "melodrama" (or more traditional dramatic/theatrical structures). One of the surprises discovered via the application of this method was that the "melodrama" elements are stronger in application and intensity than the "hard-boiled" elements as they manifest generally across film noir. (In aggregate, the measures are about 12% apart: the "hard-boiled" element score 6.2 on a scale of ten, while the melodrama elements grade out at 6.8.) What we call the "melo rate" for noir sets itself at 112 as manifested in over 1,000 film noir titles. When we isolate on the character elements, where much of the meaning within the action is operating, we see that the relative strength of the hard-boiled elements is 89--reinforcing this general relationship by its opposite measure.

From there, the question shifts: where do Woolrich's films grade out using this scale? Are they all over the map, or do they show a pervasive pattern. If the former, we either have a stylistic/thematic inconsistency in Woolrich's work, or we have a method that doesn't (work, that is!). If the latter, then we would seem to have a method that captures tendencies within noir with a solid degree of accuracy.

And here are the results for nine Woolrich noirs (in the table below). The most intensely noir of the group is THE CHASE (1946), which features a highly menacing, borderline psychopathic fatal(e)-type character (Steve Cochran). Despite his presence, the overall "hardboiled" character score is only average (due to a triangle relatioship between Cochran, his estranged wife Michèle Morgan, and the beleaguered protagonist Robert Cummings). The early noir STREET OF CHANCE (1942), despite a somewhat plodding protagonist (Burgess Meredith) contains both menacing and ambiguous characters, but the relationships between the main characters are low-key, which (again) diminishes the film's "hard-boiled" characteristics. Three films with unlikely/unsuspected/unusual villains, PHANTOM LADY (1944), DEADLINE AT DAWN (1946) and THE WINDOW (1949), edge higher up the "hard-boiled" character scale while still retaining pronounced "melodrama" aspects. BLACK ANGEL's murder set-up is a combined blackout/wrongly accused plot (one that Woolrich was drawn to and used on several occasions) but the emotional connection between Dan Duryea (he of the "lost twelve hours") and June Vincent (the crusading wife of the "wrong man") keeps the hard-boiled at bay. 

And, along with NO MAN OF HER OWN, films with freakish coincidences, obsessive characters, and odd circumstances/backstories--I WOULDN'T BE IN YOUR SHOES (Woolrich at his most inspirationally contrived) and NIGHT HAS A THOUSAND EYES (his most atmospheric work, saved from its own hokum by a brilliant performance from Edward G. Robinson)--are the films most charged by melodrama, and with noticeably little hard-boiled characterization.

So what we see in Woolrich is a writer whose works work against the "hard-boiled paradigm," but who often finds himself lumped in with the other originating sources of noir (Hammett, Cain, Chandler and Burnett) who are more distinctly hard-boiled. Thus the methods within the noir-o-meter confirm a good bit of what Dan Hodges is saying about the narrative understructure of film noir, while (unlike Dan) suggesting that the dialectical relationship between the two forces is what makes these films distinctive and unique. The averages at the bottom of the diagram (removing THE CHASE, as it is somewhat anomalous in its intensity) show how Woolrich's work is pretty much the opposite of the "hard-boiled paradigm"--but is still as noir as it gets.