"TOUGH-TENDER" DISTRIBUTION FOR NC LA 2018

The Noir City LA (they like to call it "Noir City Hollywood") festival schedule for 2018 is out--20 films over ten days. It's more of a kitchen sink approach, looser (and better) than the rather contrived "Noir from A to B" gimmick that the Film Noir Foundation has employed of late.

The films skew into the 50s (thirteen of them were released in 1950 or later, including another Muller-Ellroy noir conjunction built around L.A. Confidential) and present two interesting Paramount titles that the FNF boys have finally turned their attention to after churning out so many mediocrities from Universal--The Turning Point (1952), one of the first (and arguably the best) of the Kefauver "organized crime noirs," and The Scarlet Hour (1956), Michael Curtiz' quirky remake of Double Indemnity, where the difference in tone and attitude between the 40s and 50s noir is summed up perfectly by the character played by Elaine Stritch.

Better late than never, at any rate. And add to that turn of phrase the fact that the FNF is following in the footsteps of Elliot Lavine and at last screening noirs with some actual social relevance, as evidenced by their Joseph Losey triple bill (The Prowler, M, and The Big Night, all made in 1951).

As noted, this is a bit of a step up from recent efforts, and continues the FNF's retrenchment into American noir.

With the schedule announced, we are once again in the position of being able to graphically present the films on the "hard-boiled to melo" scale that we've been employing in recent posts. We don't think you'll be surprised to see that NC LA 2018 skews toward the hard-boiled side of things:

The films with the high "hard-boiled to melodrama" character element ratios (those in the upper left quadrant of the chart) are He Walked by Night, Kiss Me Deadly, Dragnet, and Armored Car Robbery. The films with a high "MELO RATE" (those in the lower right quadrant) are Jealousy, The Turning Point, and Night Has A Thousand Eyes. The rest of the films in the series are reasonably close to the overall average for these measures, though the graph shows that there is still a significant skew toward the hard-boiled.

The series plays at the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood from Friday, April 13 through Sunday, April 22.

HOW DO SPY NOIRS DIFFER FROM "STANDARD" FILM NOIR?

We specialize in loaded questions. But it's one that must be asked and answered, in order to fully demonstrate that the analytical approaches in the Noir-o-Meter™ align with the continuing research that Dan Hodges is conducting regarding a key aspect of film noir's evolution--the rise of the "spy noir."

Using the noir elements, it's possible to make general statements that go beyond Dan's purely narrative approach. (As we will see, the Noir-o-Meter might well help Dan do a more thorough job of discriminating between which spy films are "noir" and which are not--his decision to lump in any and all of the films that contain even a soupçon of noirish visuals might well explain some of the results that we will examined below.)

The charts below show the aggregate values of the noir elements (using the 26-element system as opposed to the still-in-development 27-element system with a reduced value for "flashbacks") for the entire classic noir database (films from US, UK, France, Italy, Germany, Spain, Scandinavia, Japan, Korea, Mexico and other South American countries). These are raw values--the second chart scales these to the 200-point system to show the range of intensity that these elements possess.

Alongside the overall data are the analogous data values for just over 70 "spy noirs" comprising a large percentage of the films identified in various sources and synthesized into a single group in Dan's research. The side-by-side comparison of these values will show the differences in emphasis and intensity that the Noir-o-Meter detects for "spy noirs" as distinct from the overall set of films in the database:

Note that elements which come from the "hard-boiled" components of noir are shown in blue, while those that come from the "melodrama" understructure are shown in green. The DIFF column is based on a scale where 100 means that the intensity value is exactly equal between noirs as a whole and "spy noirs."

As you can see, the "spy noirs" are, as a group, around 20% less intense than the overall population of films noirs. All elements where "spy noirs" are at least 15% less intense have had the raw "spy noir" values and the DIFF measure put into bold type for ease of reference. 13 of the elements--half of the entire element grouping--are at least 15% less intense. Only three elements--violence relative to character development/interaction; exotic/remote/barren location setting; and a betrayal/double-cross--are more intensely present in "spy noirs" than in noirs as a whole.

Examining these differences by element types is instructive. Given that "spy noirs" have a more rigorously formulaic approach to establishing character, it's not surprising that the intensity of noir attributes as possessed by characters in "spy noirs" is significantly lower. By contrast, there is much less of a difference in the visual elements.

But note that plot/screenwriting elements show the greatest dip in intensity. This is because so many of the early "spy noirs" do not partake of any of the narrative strategies that first developed in melodrama in the late 30s and early 40s (a trend that is traced in David Bordwell's recent book REINVENTING HOLLYWOOD). Later on, these techniques began to be applied to spy noirs as well, but they were "late to the party" in terms of this narrative innovation (and this is reflected in the numbers).

The hard-boiled/melodrama "balance in tension" within film noir is what the Noir-o-Meter succeeds in quantifying for us, and we can see how this relationship differs in "spy noirs" as compared to noir as a whole. The intensity of both element clusters is lower in "spy noirs," but the greatest drop is on the "hard-boiled" side. As a result, "spy noirs" trend toward the "melodrama" understructure by roughly another 10%, focusing more on actions and visuals than on flamboyant manifestations of character. When the "ruthless" character is part of an assumed worldview as manifested in the the "spy noir's" dramatic context, the actions of those characters are less outside the norms of behavior than what we customarily see in film noir as a whole. Hence the "hard-boiled" portrayal of character is diminished.

Thus the hard-boiled to melodrama character element ratio is lower as well, though it is not as pronounced (down to 84 from 89).

Now let's look at the same data expressed in the 200-point system of the Noir-o-Meter. We've color-coded for levels of intensity:

We highlight in bold type the elements which have the greatest drop in intensity in the spy noirs--and, per the discussion above, you can see that it's the elements in the "character" and "plot/screenwriting" element types that have all of these.

The "decriminalization" of the "spy noir" is most evident in the difference seen in the noir element entitled "story told from the perspective of the criminals." Though spies in "spy noirs" often commit acts that in other contexts would be considered criminal in nature, they are seldom treated that way within these films. The suspension of moral rules within this narrative sub-universe gives them a "pass" in this area, even though we don't see characters in spy noirs as any more "morally ambiguous" than the garden-variety noir character.

All in all, "spy noirs" are definitely noir as seen by the Noir-o-Meter, though they are much closer to the 100-point dividing line. This is largely due to the fact that the early "spy noirs" grade lower in many of the elements measured here--the average Noir-o-Meter™raw score for "spy noirs" made up until America's entry into WWII is just over 90. That average rises to 109 for those films made in 1942 and beyond.

DO AMERICAN "WAR NOIRS" TEND TOWARD "MELO"?

One of the theses that Dan Hodges (the indefatigable critic of classic film noir's deceptive "hard-boiled paradigm") has promulgated is that the American noirs made during World War II (particularly those made from 1940-43, before the war effort reached its peak of effectiveness and prospects for Allied victory began to significantly improve) were different in tone and character than those which began to appear in 1944-45 throughout the rest of the decade.

While virtually all noir scholars (including Dan) don't  accept the notion that film noir is not primarily an American phenomenon (Dan is more open to this fact than most, but has wanted to couch this as a function of the rise of "spy noir"), what becomes clear when we apply the analytic tools built into the Noir-o-Meter™is that American noir is significantly less "hard-boiled" in the years 1940-43.

Using the measurement tool we've been applying variously in recent posts--a scatterplot depiction of the degree that characters in noirs skew toward the "hardboiled," measured against the overall "MELO RATE" (using all three element types--character, visual, and plot/screenwriting)--we can see that what Dan used to call the "war noirs" (as discussed in his essay for Film Noir Reader 4) definitely skew to the "melo" side of the chart:

(Recall that films whose scores land in the upper left quadrant are more "hard-boiled," while those that land in the lower right quadrant are more "melo.")

The chart tells us that Dan was indeed onto something, especially when we compare it to the master chart that appeared several posts previously. "War noirs" are rarely "hard-boiled": as a group, they are noticeably different than the films which are made after WWII.

This chart does not include any of the spy noirs that Dan has uncovered in his most recent research. We'll include them in a subsequent presentation, which will deal more specifically with the relationship of "spy noir" to the overall notion of film noir, along with a parallel examination of a significant sub-category from France that Dan (and virtually all other students and scholars of film noir) overlook as they cling to an Anglo-American paradigm for how to define the "essence" of noir.

What is the name of that significant sub-category? According to scholar Colin Crisp, it's called the "provincial gothic." Its application will eventually be seen as pivotal to a more complete structural understanding of how the noir "virus" seeped into the bloodstream of melodrama and ran rampant, with various sub-categories and sub-types taking their turn in the limelight before a coarser, more calcified concept of noir's essence coalesced, coagulating critical appraisals of it almost from the dawn of the attempts to assemble and evaluate its history and significance.

DO FRENCH NOIRS TREND TOWARD "MELO"?

We are getting enough data in the Noir-o-Meter to take a look at this question. And we can do so using the same method we've been using to examine the "spectrum" of film noir (in our previous posts, which do not include the French noirs graphed in the chart below).

The "revisionist" camp (which has to be extremely precise in identifying exactly what it is revising, as there are so many "revisionists" out there...) has one wing which wonders about the hard-boiled, while also (usually to a lesser extent) turning a skeptical eye to the claims of "American exceptionalism" when it comes to film noir.

What if we discovered that the earliest manifestation of film noir, which is (arguably) the French--who begin in the early 30s, as expatriated directors with various flavors of "dark cinema" in their previous work make their way through France and influence the "local talent"--what if we found that these earliest manifestations of noir were by and large much less "hardboiled" in nature? What would that say about the "American brand"? Would we start to see it as something that was influenced by historical and aesthetic conditions unique to it and that it might at last be seen as a kind of aberration to what developed previously and elsewhere?

It's entirely possible that such might need to be the case...at least, the preliminary results from our mapping of "tough vs. tender" as it applies to French noir is concerned. (For this to be fully mapped, of course, we'll need to go past the 60 or so noirs in this initial mapping--we'll need to create the Noir-o-Meter data for all 507 French noirs that we've unearthed to date.)

But the chart below, using the same approach ("Hardboiled vs. melodrama character element ratio mapped against the overall MELO RATE") shows us that French noir looks a lot more like that subset of American noir with high scores in character triangulation--the ones we've taken to calling "melo-noirs." Take a look:

Note that the distribution across the chart is a great deal tighter than what we saw in the American sample. "Hardboiled-to-melo" character element ratios with high "hardboiled" scores are less frequent and not nearly so extreme here, in the French noir universe.

Now there are many, many more French noirs to add to the database, including a number of the "poetic realist" films (which turn out to be just one of three major sub-types of film noir that developed in France during the 1930s). So we can't be totally sure that this distribution is totally accurate...but it's an intriguing indicator of some potentially game-changing perceptions about film noir. Stay tuned!

WHICH NOIR ELEMENTS HELP SEPARATE FILMS INTO SUB-TYPES? A LOOK AT TRIANGULATION...

We've seen that it's very possible to graph noirs against the data in the Noir-o-Meter™ (most recent post). Here is a more global look at the distribution of the "noir universe" based on the parameters used previously--a two-dimensional scatterplot mapping the level of "toughness" (hard-boiled) in the character elements vs. the overall relationship between hard-boiled elements and melodrama elements (what we call the MELO rate).

As you can see, this chart--which uses about 40% of the current Noir-o-Meter database--gives us a very good sense of how the noirs range from "tough" (to the left and up) to "tender" (to the bottom and the right).

From here, there are dozens of ways to slice the Noir-o-Meter data to look for patterns and trends. Since the different types of elements can co-exist, it's likely that many of the "noirest" films based on their raw scores (the 200-point scale that's assigned via scoring each of the 27 noir elements) will be closer to the mid-point (and you can see on the above chart where that is, as we've drawn in the averages for these two measures--it's where the red and the green lines cross). That's something we'll examine in a subsequent post.

Right now, we're interested in seeing if we can find any of the noir elements that isolate or cluster films in either the "tough" or "tender" region of noir. The elements that are likeliest to help us do this are, in fact, the ones derived from melodrama. And among the likeliest in that category is the element entitled "Degree of character triangulation."

Why this one? Because romantic triangles involve feelings and emotions. They evoke vulnerability in characters. It stands to reason that films which have a marked emphasis on character triangles are going to skew toward the "tender" side of the graph.

So we separated a sizeable subset of the Noir-o-Meter database into two groups: those which have a score of 9 or 10 in "degree of character triangulation" (an element assigned a maximum of 10 points), and those which have a score of 5 or less. We are surmising that this should produce two graphs that will give us some significant spatial separation.

Let's begin with the "tough" side...which we should find with films whose "degree of triangulation" is below average (5 or less is definitely below the overall average of 6.7/10). Here's what that chart looks like:

(Note we didn't include the axis labels that you saw on the first graph--but they are the same as above. And as you can see, we added some shading effects in the graph...because we're suckers for greyscale.)

Looks like that gives us mostly films in the upper left quadrant, which is where the "tougher" noirs are located.

Now--will we get a similar clustering when we look at the films whose "degree of triangulation" element score is 9+? Let's take a look:

And the answer is a resounding "yes." Films with a high degree of triangulation between characters have a strong tendency toward high MELO RATEs and low hard-boiled-to-melodrama character element ratios, pushing a larger preponderance of them toward the bottom right-hand region on the graph.

Of course, this too is not monolithic in nature, just as was the case for the low triangulation subgroup. But as you can see, at this level of triangulation there really are only a few films that cross over into the "tough" side of noir.

We can probably expect a graph of those films whose "degree of triangulation" scores are in the mid-range (6-8) to fall roughly halfway between these two extremes.

Which means that it looks like the "triangulation" element is a kind of bellwether for separating film noir sub-types.

We'll want to look at the films in the lower left and upper right portions of the graph, as these groups tend to resist the separation effect. Their placement may tell us something that those films have in common--higher or lower raw scores, for example.

At any rate, these uses of the data in the Noir-o-Meter provide strong indications that the system is fundamentally sound in its assumption that noir's dualism is ultimately its most defining characteristic, the quality that gives it its essential tension and allows it to be a protean form that operates across a wide range of story types, even invading established genres. Stay tuned for more...

A HARD BOILED FESTIVAL USING THE NOIR-O-METER...

While the Noir-o-Meter™ is an item that often provokes eye-rolls among aesthetes due to its quantitative approach to film criticism, its advances over the past ten years are quite promising. Film noir, that ever-elusive concept, is slippery because of its multiplicity of dualisms--and one of the most significant is the tension between the "regular rules" of (melo)drama and noir's effort to "crash in" on those rules by inverting them.

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.

FILM NOIR ORIGINALS VS REMAKES PER IMDB RATINGS

An interesting little study from Solomon at the Blackboard about the IMDB ratings of classic noir originals (40s-50s-60s) and their various remakes. As the line chart (below) indicates, none of the 40+ films in the sample had the remake score a higher rating than the original, though 5 of them had scores that were at least 90% of the original:

The average IMDB score for remakes is just about 80% of the score achieved by the originals. It's also clear that the folks who opted for remakes picked some of the better films of the classic noir era, which probably made it more difficult to match the scores.

The data that would be really interesting here would be to see the average for those folk who saw each film and cast votes for both in the IMDB ratings. That's a level of detail we don't have readily available, however. Our guess is that the score gap is somewhat greater, with the remakes scoring in the low 70% range among such voters.