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.
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