E-Mail This Article to a Friend In black, white, and gray ‘Film noir’ is always with us BY CHRIS FUJIWARA

Film noir has always been a certain way of appreciating films rather than a definite (or indefinite) list. For the past 25 years at least, it’s been about the most talked-out angle of approach to cinema. Tedious as the discourses and the marketing campaigns built around "film noir" can be, however, many of the films that have been tagged with the phrase have proved remarkably durable.

The "Fox Film Noir Series" debuts on DVD with three films, among which the odd man out is also the masterpiece, Otto Preminger’s Laura (1944). Preminger, who routinely claimed in later years to have forgotten almost everything about his 1940s films, insisted nevertheless during an interview with one student of "film noir" that his work had nothing in common with other purported examples of this genre. You can see what he meant if you compare Laura with the two films with which Fox Home Entertainment has yoked it, Henry Hathaway’s Call Northside 777 (1947) and Elia Kazan’s Panic in the Streets (1950).

The subtle and unmistakable spell of Laura, an ultra-sophisticated whodunit, emanates from multiple sources. An atmosphere of enigma and obsession surrounds the heroine (Gene Tierney), enhanced by the famous score by David Raksin (who died last year, but not before having recorded an interview that serves as one of the commentary tracks on the DVD). The supporting performances of Vincent Price and Judith Anderson instill a pervasive sense of elite depravity. Preminger’s gliding, insistent crane shots heighten the pressure under which the characters all seem ready to crack up or spring upon one another. Joseph La Shelle’s lighting delineates the film’s luxury interiors in a profusion of seductive grays — an effect better appreciated on DVD than in previous video editions.

Another Twentieth Century Fox contract cameraman, Joe MacDonald, shot both Call Northside 777 and Panic in the Streets, and he gave them the hallucinatory crispness that’s generally associated with noir. In MacDonald’s shots, corridors stretch to infinity in wide-angle; bare lightbulbs dangling from ceilings arrest the eye amid rectangles filled with gray debris; rich, impenetrable areas of black engulf the faces of bit players. Unlike the studio-bound Laura, these two films benefit from extensive location shooting, and much of their interest lies in their exposure of actual streets and interiors. In Call Northside 777, when a reporter (James Stewart) tours a succession of bars in Chicago’s stockyard district in search of the lone witness who had identified a murder suspect years before, it’s an archæological expedition into an obscure and still living past.

The story concerns a newspaper’s campaign on behalf of an innocent man (Richard Conte) who was railroaded for a policeman’s killing in 1932. The film is at pains to distance Chicago’s bad old days from the modern present, to give every viewer the option of concluding, with relief, "It can’t happen to me." But the very obviousness of this effort makes Call Northside 777 sinister: the viewer also feels, if only subliminally, that if the film wants so badly to convince that injustice and corruption in America are things of the past, surely that’s because they’re as present as ever.

In Panic in the Streets, a public-health official (Richard Widmark) in a Navy officer’s uniform teams up with the New Orleans police to find the killer of an illegal Greek immigrant whose corpse is infested with pneumonic plague. Kazan’s air of hard-bitten professional cynicism still convinces. (A morgue attendant begs off a lunch invitation with "I got a date with a couple of bullets out of this guy’s chest.") The range of voices sprinkled throughout Kazan’s rich travelogue of New Orleans subcultures is extraordinary: all kinds of accents and dialects are spoken, and it adds up to an American tapestry almost as strange and exhilarating as Harry Smith’s near-contemporary Folkways Anthology. (Speaking of which: the film also boasts an unusual range of music, from boogie-woogie to gospel.) Panic in the Streets raises issues that are as pressing as ever, as the government’s need for secrecy is deemed to override the public’s right to know (and a journalist is locked up for learning the truth). And the visual equation between human beings and waterfront rats is as potent as anything in the catalogue of corrosive metaphors that still gets called film noir.