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Of all the movie genres developed by the studios and given Hollywood's mark-the big-pageant musical, the screwball comedy, the romance, the star vehicle-film noir turns out to be the most complex and satisfying. The virtuosity of the creative artists (directors like John Huston, Jules Dassein, Nicholas Ray, Edward Ulmer; actors such as Bogart, Burt Lancaster, Edward G. Robinson and Gloria Grahame) matched the ferocity of the stories (in Scarlet Street, a banker's messy marriage leads to extortion and a dead husband who pops up; They Live by Night deals with an innocent man in prison who escapes with a pair of bank robbers and agrees to do one last job to get money for his defense, only to have the thieves come back to haunt him). If the inner stories of film noir are messy-divorce, extortion, double-crosses, ex-cons trying to go good, mistresses ending up in bed, or dead-the outer look is immaculate: the celebrated black-and-white cinematography is a mixture of an eighteenth-century artist's chiaroscuro and a modernist's eye for revealing camera angles. There's a sheen to the screen. Dead people never looked so good.

Film noir came out of the B picture genre; I imagine when moviegoers first saw the likes of Fritz Lang's Fury or the smoldering couple John Garfield and Lana Turner in The Postman Only Rings Twice they didn't think twice. The stories were tight and the denouements inevitable (particularly throughout the Forties, when the War was a clear moral compass of right and wrongs, and the Fifties culture of disillusionment). To view them now, through decades of neglect and then rediscovery, at a time when culture is global yet also derivative whether from American art or European or elsewhere, still amounts to a jolt. Noir filmmakers directed with grit between their teeth. They pushed and pulled some of the best (and most conventional) actors to rise above themselves. And their stories, either written by or adapted from some of the finest streamlined authors-Dashiell Hammett, James M Cain, and Patricia Highsmith to Raymond Chandler-never played nice. Film noir was never about make-believe; it was about make-believe-this-is-not-happening.

The entertaining and informative Film Noir Showcase curated by the Tivoli Cinemas and the UMKC Dept of Communication Studies, running consecutive Thursday nights throughout October and November, is designed to give a modern moviegoer a brief history lesson in this most adaptable of film styles. The series began last week with the quintessential noir, Billy Wilder's 1944 Double Indemnity. It continues this week with Orson Welles' magical The Lady from Shanghai; The Third Man (October 30); Laura (November 6); before ending with Godard's subversive classic Alphaville (November 13). The selection provides an arc so that we can observe the styles and the themes of film noir, from the domestic to the exotic to the otherworldly to, in Godard's film, the foreign view: by the time the series turns to Alphaville, a futuristic film noir from 1965 made at the height of Godard's politico-mystical powers (the story revolves around a trench-coated private eye seeking to overthrow the computer Alpha 60 which rules Alphaville), the extent of film noir as an influence far beyond the movie screen should be obvious. Noir was not about showing something we had never seen before onscreen, like a Cecil B. De Mille spectacle or a technical fantasy like The Wizard of Oz; no, it was about revealing the other side of us, the side editorialized and preached against, if it was whispered about at all. Today, we live in a film noir world.

The sheer psychological drive of these films puts them closer to literature. We can see the desperate sweat on the screen; we can feel the desire to make the right choice, even if it turns out to be dead wrong. The Lady from Shanghai pivots on one of those twists: Welles himself plays a man whose involvement with a beautiful blond (Rita Hayworth) on a boat leads him into one compromising situation after another (first one man approaches him to fake his murder for money and then a second tries to manipulate Welles, who discovers he was set up originally to take the fall). The plot is similar to Double Indemnity, directed by Billy Wilder at his craftiest: Barbara Stanwyck seduces poor Fred MacMurray into killing her husband so she can collect on the double-indemnity insurance clause. Otto Preminger's stylish 1944 Laura takes its mystery beyond the grave; there is enough madness in these pictures to out-Hamlet Hamlet, if he were foolish enough to leave Denmark for Hollywood.

The phrase "film noir" is said to have originated with the French critic Nino Frank, in 1946, in an essay that pulled together what he viewed as an international sensibility toward darkness, toward the brutal underexposed side of humanity. Few American films had been seen in France during the Second World War; violent, intimately depicted dramas such as The Maltese Falcon and High Sierra were daring, an escalation from the studio cranked-out happy endings. This was a time of high art in low art for American art; every frame contained an existential decision. It is unsurprising that film noir has not lasted, apart from parodies and imitations; the screen has gotten smaller while the outer world has grown larger and directionless. Real drama is saved and captured on our cell phones-which is to say, après Godard, life is something we carry with us at all times, but only experience as entertainment. Film noir in its golden age cut through the comfortable see-no-evil-hear-no-evil bourgeois complacency to ask, What do you really know about your spouse, or your neighbor? Can you trust yourself? Is life only a movie?

By Steve Shapiro

Theatre Contributor (Past writer)
Steve Shapiro has been writing about the arts for over twenty-five years. He wrote and broadcast a weekly radio book review on KCUR-FM for ten years, and has contributed to NPR's Morning Edition book segment.

As a contributor to local publications such as KCMetropolis.org, KC Tribune.com, The Kansas City Star, Review, The Pitch, and Helicon 9, he has published essays and criticism on art, books, cinema, theater and the cultural Zeitgeist.

A chapter on the museum architects Frank Lloyd Wright and Steven Holl was published in the anthology, The Sixth Surface: Steven Holl Lights the Nelson-Atkins Museum (2007). On the side, he juggles Dachshunds and is available to moderate book groups.