Eddie Muller: DARK CITY

Dark City: The Lost World of Film Noir
Eddie Muller
St. Martin’s Press, 1998

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Dark City is a strangely familiar place that we have all visited through the medium of cinema, directly or indirectly, through film noir and all of its offshoots and descendants. Like a clouded memory, or the remnants of a nightmare, the locales and characters herein evoke a startling emotional recognition, although we question their veracity. A nocturnal world of lonely streets, downbeat bars, miserable apartments, and looming jail cells, Dark City is populated by a shifty multitude of gangsters, losers, femme fatales, private dicks, crooked politicians, hard-boiled cops, and grifters galore. Like Superman’s Metropolis and Batman’s Gotham City, Dark City is a fictional urban centre, a thinly-veiled parallel world where stories unfold in the form of film noir. Author Eddie Muller, who has a vast knowledge and deeply ingrained love of the films in question, is the reader’s tour guide through Dark City’s many fascinating, and often shocking twists and turns, like Rod Serling to The Twilight Zone.

Muller takes obvious relish in introducing the reader to many recurring character types, settings, and storylines through the course of Dark City. The resulting read is both entertaining and informative, an enthusiast’s giddy take on a much-analyzed period and type of film, with an academic’s wealth of knowledge to back it up. Dark City explores the lives work of writers (Hammett, Chandler, Cain, Woolrich, and other key inspirations), directors (Lang, Fuller, Ray, Wise), actors (Garfield, Bogart,  Lancaster, Widmark), actresses (Grahame, Hayworth, Stanwyck, Lupino), and the great body of film work that was produced as a result of their efforts and sacrifices. While generally focusing on the mid-40s to late-50s “classic era of noir,” Muller does give consideration to some of noir’s significant predecessors (The Maltese Falcon, Stranger on the Third Floor), as well as post-noir achievements (Chinatown) that rightfully belong in the book. His premise is that, “Film noirs were distress flares launched onto America’s movie screens by artists working the night shift at the Dream Factory,” and he spends the book detailing his viewpoint.

Muller’s journey through Dark City moves freely from the sinister plotlines of the fictional world to the often equally sordid real-life tales of the writers, directors, and actors responsible for the films. Giving potency to the adage that “truth is stranger than fiction,” the lives of these often marginal Hollywood talents frequently held as much strangeness and tragedy as their on-screen personas. Muller relates a multitude of sensational biographical details: stories of a wayward Bogart being chased by a knife-wielding jealous wife; Gloria Grahame’s scandalous affair with her 13-year-old stepson (through marriage with Nicholas Ray); Lawrence Tierney’s frequent drunken brawls and stints in the can; Hammett’s alcohol-stunted writing career and victimization by McCarthy-era commie hunters; Polanski’s personal demons moving into Chinatown. And that’s just a brief sampling! The author has a substantial case in situating the real and imagined lives of those he writes about in the same foreboding environs.

The book is divided into a series of chapters that focus on different segments of the “city”, areas where certain types of familiar scenarios develop. The chapter titles read like a list of great film noir gems that you swear you’ve seen: Sinister Heights, Knockover Square, Hate Street, The Psych Ward. Muller explores in depth films both celebrated and obscure, offering plot summaries, biographies of key personalities, analysis in a historical and artistic context, and honest criticism. His story outlines, while occasionally exhaustive, are lovingly detailed (check out his synopsis of Gun Crazy or Nightmare Alley), and told with a freshness and excitement.  Muller doesn’t tow the critically accepted party line, and is not afraid to point out flaws in films considered noir classics (The Big Sleep, Kiss Me Deadly), while praising what he considers overlooked diamonds in the rough (The Sniper, Thieves’ Highway). His observations on the political climate of the post-war era, the emerging Cold War, its accompanying Red scare, and the prevailing conservatism in the film industry enforced by the Production Code add substance to the themes of paranoia and anxiety conveyed by film noir.

In a writing style that mixes history, politics, philosophy, social science, art and literature, interspersed with choice bits of film dialogue, biography, criticism, and a guilty love of pop culture, Eddie Muller vividly maps out the terrain of Dark City, and situates it in the realm of the imagination, brought to life by Hollywood’s risk takers. Dark City is an enticingly dangerous, but somehow irresistible place to spend your precious viewing hours, and Muller has become one of its more enthusiastic champions over the past decade. 

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Originally published in Vol. #1, Issue #13 (“Noir”).