Film Noir Blog-A-Thon: Happy Endings, I'll Drink To That

We don't think of happy endings when we think of film noir.  Yet, the two films I watched here for the first time, and will discuss as my contribution to the exciting Film Noir Blog-A-Thon, Union Station (1950) and The Woman in the Window (1944), end on amazingly upbeat notes.  Literally, each of their scores twist up to a flute-like chirp at their resolutions, like something you might hear in a screwball comedy.  There is a lot of dark brooding going on in film noir, and make no mistake, there's plenty of that signature fear and loathing in the shadows in the films I am about to discuss here, too.  But structurally, they are designed in a way that lets us comfortably exhale when they are over.  They provide a happy return to the status quo after justice has been served, or in the case of the the first film, after one quietly wakes from a dream.

The Woman in the Window is a sharp little picture from auteur director Fritz Lang.  The year is 1944, so we're looking at this through a lens that is on the cusp of the post-war era that defines classical noir.  But noir's borders are movable, as we know, so transient in fact that we don't even call noir a proper genre.  Noir is more like a mood.  Which is why it's classically linked to one of the more disillusioning times in American history, the postwar period.  Of course, the war didn't end in the summer of 1945 and wave a formal go-ahead to movie studios that now was their time to spool out all of the worrisome grit leftover in their studio writing rooms and back lots.  For as helpful a structuring device as time is, the point at which we say an historical era begins is a hazy concept.  Likewise, as noir scholar James Naremore puts it in his excellent text More Than Night: Film Noir In Its Contexts, "film noir is an unusually baggy concept."  A "baggy" concept.  With no pun intended, how absolutely fitting his description is. 

The Woman in the Window opens at a sunny university campus where Professor Richard Wanley (Edward G. Robinson) lectures an auditorium of students on the psychology of homicide.  Homicide in the classroom?  And we're off!  A painting of a woman catches his eye in a shop window later that evening; his friends observe his admiring gaze from afar and laugh.  There's no harm in his looking, but it sure speaks to his emasculation that for him sexual intrigue is reduced to a series of inanimate brushstrokes.  But Wanley is too aloof and a tad too pathetic to care, and dashes off to the upper-crust dinner club where he dines with his friends.  Inky wines and cocktails are drunk from precious little glasses with collegiate panache.  Trouble strikes up when the woman in the window comes to life:

If you stare hard enough at that painting Joan Bennett appears.  Alice (Bennett) looks a little Glinda here, but the woman--la femme, perhaps I should say--needs a light for her cig.  They go back to her apartment, she asks seductively, "You mean you're afraid of me?"  Oh, you vamp, you, Alice.  She is a real vamp too, because storming in from the rainy streets is a hulk of a man with a jealous temper to match--how on Earth has she done him wrong, we wonder?  Well, he catches a stabbing from Wanley and goes down.  The professor of homicidal psychology a murderer himself?  It was self-defense of course, but he and Alice conspire to cover it up.  Risky business for a family man with a staid job at a university.  But the methodical, thoughtful professor that he is, Wanley lays out each and every procedure the two are to follow: the victim's belongings are stashed, his body is wrapped, transported through two police checkpoints, until Wanley dumps him at long last.  Exhale.

Yeah, exhale until you realize how completely off his rocker Wanley is.  Why didn't he just call the police?  If only he had simply called the police his mind, wracked with guilt, would be free.  Blame the woman.  Blame the rainy streets, the cigarettes, the cocktails.  We can't be rational with the weight of the cruelly dark world upon us in a noir picture.  Wanley acted in self-defense, after all.  You don't mean to say killing in self-defense has negative psychological effects, do you?  No officer, PTSD had nothing to do with it.  Dumping his body seemed like the right thing to do.  It was the logical thing to do.  It was the logical thing to do.  Wanley is operating in a world where the logical next step is to deny exactly what your first instinct tells you.  Police, nah.  They're only going to blame you for it, as if you planned the attack.  Paranoia like this can only be salved with one thing:

The making of drinks feature prominently in The Woman in the Window and in Union Station below, too.  It's not a simple pouring of a cocktail, but a whole scene designed around the presentation of how a proper cocktail is mixed.  Above, Alice is standing before a creep of a man who threatens and blackmails her--even shoves her in one scene; he promises to make public the killing and cover-up she's mixed up in if she doesn't pay him $5,000, and yet, here she stands poised, concocting a couple of Scotch and sodas like this is business as usual.  Noir!

The big twist comes just when we think our protagonist Professor Wanley is committing suicide as his only escape from this nightmare.  Nightmare?  By jove, it was all a dream.  His conscience is cleared.  Wanley wakes in his chair at the dinner club, strolls out to the street, and there is the woman in the window again.  Cue that chirpy music I mentioned, and Wanley scurries home.  So noir can have a happy ending.  As gruesome as some moments are here with Alice and Wanley, they're not, for example, even close to the raw nerve endings that exist between Vera and Al.

Next up is Rudolph Maté's Union Station (1950), starring William Holden and the beautiful facial structure of Nancy Olson.  Maté is known for one of the most famous noir pictures, D.O.A. (1949) that opens with the gut yanking line, "I'd like to report a murder, my own."  By comparison,  Union Station is more polished, if for no other reason than the presence of William Holden, handsome, and bravely saving the day with integrity and even a little joy.  The plot is this: Joyce (Nancy Olson) boards a train headed to Chicago's Union Station; on the way she notices two suspicious men board at the next stop, one of them has a gun; she reports it to the conductor, who reports it to the police, and once the train arrives in Chicago Joyce is tied up in a sting to catch these and other key criminals in a kidnapping ransom demand for $100K. 

Lt. William Calhoun (William Holden) is the lead officer on the case who, besides an urgency to catch these crooks, also shares with Joyce a fondness for the taste of lemons.  Joyce's mother tells us in one scene how she liked to eat them as a kid.  All grown up, Joyce and Willy take them now with their cocktails.  Inspector Donnelly (Barry Fitzgerald) makes himself and Willy, below, a drink at home.  He sliced a bowl full of lemons especially for Willy's drink:

If you watch enough film noir you get an honorary bartending degree.  As in The Woman in the Window, Union Station has a very intricate procedural scene in which a drink is prepared.  Donnelly is making Hot Toddies.  This is beyond the simple Scotch and soda that Alice made, this involves a series of ingredients: whole cloves, boiling water, rum, a cinnamon swizzle stick.  Watch and learn, noir fans.  And notice their surprising moderation, as well.  They're not binging.  These characters are taking the edge off, and good on them for it!  What did you do today to deserve that glass of wine?  Crowded commute on the Lexington Avenue line?  Your boss "yelled" at you over email?  Oh, I'm sorry, Willy got SHOT AT.   Willy bled today.  Willy earned that Toddy.  I'm surprised, frankly, that he doesn't drink more than he does.  Wanley (Robinson) had a great many more cocktails in The Woman in the Window, but he also took his drink at a classy pace, never seeming to be drunk.

Moving on, there are two noteworthy chase scenes in Union Station.  One takes place just outside the Chicago elevated train line, but here a continuity error is revealed: palm trees in the far background of the chase that's spilled from the train platform into a south side cattle corral.  The second chase is the climactic scene between the kidnapper and Willy through an underground tunnel system.  The camera work here could possibly be hand held, but my guess is part of the scene was put together with a dolly that lumbers over a bumpy surface.  Whatever the case, the camera scares up a heap of terror with both Willy and his antagonist literally shooting in the dark--and just look at the lighting contrast:

Beautiful compositions, and both very dark.  Union Station doesn't have many of the signature noir characteristics we look for when we define this type of film.  You won't find a femme fatale, there are no venetian blinds, and aside from the climactic scene, the film is lit relatively bright.  Soft focus puts the finishing touches on Olson's flawless complexion, and Holden looks trim and tanned.  Joyce and Willy even find love in the end.  Another happy ending.  Just look at that face.

The Woman in the Window and Union Station are both available for streaming on Netflix.

--------

Say, and don't forget to donate!  The Film Noir Blog-A-Thon was kicked off to raise funds for the Film Noir Foundation, see.  Chip in your spare nickels!