Neo noir Thursday: Dusters

There is a lot of overlap between film noir and neo noir and other genres. A big part of the reason that the list of supposed noir at Wikipedia is so ridiculously long is that just about any action film, crime film or suspense film with dark overtones gets labelled noir.

But what about westerns? The thing about them is that the genre is so easy to identify as what it is that we  never have to wonder is this a western or is it something else. We do the opposite sometimes; we wonder, for example, whether the first Star Wars movie isn't really a disguised western becauser it isn't very credible as science fiction.

Anyway, The Man of the West is a western with a very noirish feel about it. Look at the opening credit above and you can see Gary Cooper! appearing very pointedly in a back hat. Just read the teaser at IMDb and you can feel it:

A reformed outlaw becomes stranded after an aborted train robbery with two other passengers and is forced to rejoin his old outlaw band. 

All the elements I have been discussing are there.

We have a man with a past who drifts into town. He is mysterious. He is carrying a lot of money. He lies. He gives different people different names and different hometowns when they ask where he is from. He is seeking a new life.

There is a moll, played by the very yummy Julie London and they get as much of her magnificent breasts as was allowable in 1958 on the screen for us to see. There is also an threat of sexual assault that runs through the movie. Gary and Julie also sleep together every single night but the movie never so much as lets us wonder what might or might not happen. They bond but we don't know if sex is adding its hardening and lubricating qualities to the union.

And that is a limitation. The temptation is to say they always handled sex better "back then" when the code forced film makers to imply rather than portray. Well, not always and neo noir is, I think a good example. An updated version of this story, with more explicit sex, could well be not just a better movie but a much better movie.

The moral aspects of the story are also right. There is a complication that upsets our protagonist and forces him into a situation where his past may lead him to fail in the way he has failed before. There is a distinct lack of moral clarity. The decision between right and wrong is never clear to us our to our protagonist.

There is conscious nostalgia. A way of life that is just disappearing is shown. One nice touch is when our protagonist flinches and cowers when the train comes in the station. He has never seen one before.

Related to that nostalgia,  there is a fabulous plot twist, a "something" about the old life and those who lead it that gets revealed very powerfully part way through.

In the end, though, it's Gary Cooper and it ends the way a Gary Cooper movie has to end and that isn't noir; although there is a certain vagueness about it that you could just imagine events after the closing credits that aren't quite 100 percent Gary Cooper if you wanted to do so.

Mythic reality
The primary reason it can't be noir—and the primary reason no western could—is that the story told here is mythic. We often think of a myth as a story that isn't true and it can even be pejorative to call something "a myth". But it is more accurate to say that a myth is a story where truth conditions don't apply.

It's easy to grasp if you think of its opposite. Testimony in court is a kind of story where truth conditions are paramount. If I say I saw the accused at the mall and it is later shown that that was impossible, my story is now worthless (except perhaps to prove perjury against me).

But there are other stories that aren't like that. If Mary tells an erotic fantasy to her husband to get him excited, for example, it is, paradoxically important that it feel like it could be true and equally important that it not be true.

Myths are something like that. It is important that they feel like they could be true but it is not particularly important that we check the facts. For a simple example of this, look at the opening picture at the top of this post. That is familiar western scenery and most of us might imagine that the old west looked like that. It didn't. By the time westerns were filmed, the frontier was long gone. The only open spaces big enough to give the feeling of the frontier were badlands and deserts. And so that is the image that goes with the west. We see cattle drives across country where cattle couldn't survive in real life.

Look at this still for example. It comes in the middle of a fantastic scene shot in a claustrophobic interior. The old outlaw appears, reveals the protagonist's murky past, walks out of the scene and towards the camera and then proceeds to deliver a soliloquy about the old, legendary life he and the protagonist led. It's very much like noir. There are similar encounters in Key Largo and we could imagine this guy as Edward G Robinson's character Rico and Gary Cooper and Humphrey Bogart's character soldier. But no noir could handle the scene in this way. It would all break down if we asked ourselves where exactly this guy is supposed to be standing. He has walked through the fourth wall; he couldn't have walked as far from the other guys as he has and still be in the cabin anymore.

I'll have more on this tomorrow. For now, suffice to say that new noir can't do anything like. It has to seem real.