Review – “Somewhere In The Night, Film Noir And The American City” by Nicholas Christopher

Humphrey Bogart is my favorite actor and has been since childhood. While I couldn’t really have explained his appeal when I was young, the actor’s persona still spoke to me, the sardonic voice, the open contempt for authority, and most of all his roles as a lone wolf against the system, someone with the intellect to see the rot and the guts to fight against it even though defeat was likely if not certain. This all adds up to a fairly good summary of one type of noir hero or antihero, a man thrown onto his own resources either by chance or due to his own nature, opposed by a treacherous, all powerful, all controlling system with the woman he loves as the one most likely to betray him.

It was an easy transition from my youthful Bogart admiration to a fascination with noir films, one of my favorite genres (Westerns, of course, taking first prize). I therefore read this book with no little interest. The author is an academic, novelist, and poet with a number of publishing credits. Somewhere is his workmanlike analysis of the noir aesthetic in films. Christopher does a good job of tracing the genre’s roots and antecedents from the hard boiled prose of Dashiell Hammett to the influence of German Expressionist movies. He also makes interesting points about the survival of noir beyond its golden age of the ’40’s and ’50’s with discussion of more recent films such as The Usual Suspects where he notes that, although filmed in color and set in the contemporary world, they still deal with noir themes like treachery and individual helplessness in an urban environment.

In undertaking such analysis, like many academics, Christopher succumbs to the temptation of trying to derive universally applicable insights from his topic. While I think he’s correct in saying that noir represents more than a film genre, that it’s also a way of perceiving, I’m also wary of grand generalizations that are derived from the study of pop culture, which films admittedly are to a very large extent. Christopher also makes a few pop culture errors along the way that nitpickers like myself find somewhat annoying, e.g., he states that Lenny Bruce died of an overdose of speed when it was heroin, but this is a minor cavil. When Christopher sticks to the main topic, noir films, his analyses are incisive and authoritative. He starts with one of the best, most archetypal noir films, Out Of The Past, and also does an excellent job discussing other classics such as Night And The City, The Killers, and Kiss Me Deadly, possibly one of the most deeply cynical films ever made. My only reservation about this facet of the book is the fact that there were so many more films and actors he could have discussed. I think that any book about noir films should at least mention The Strange Love Of Martha Ivers, a morally ambiguous film that remains somewhat disturbing to the present day. While Bogart figures fairly prominently in the book, he still doesn’t get enough attention. The same goes for Kirk Douglas. In fairness though, I must admit that any book that dealt with all that in addition to the ground covered by Christopher would be more like 600 pages than about 250, the length of this book.

I recommend this book to anyone generally interested in films of pop culture and to those specifically interested in noir.

https://www.amazon.com/Somewhere-Night-Film-Noir-American/dp/1593760973/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1488299574&sr=8-2&keywords=somewhere++in+the+night