Thrillers

HEYDAY OF THE AMERICAN CRIME THRILLER

After 1940, major developments in the movie thriller centered around various phases of the crime thriller, especially in the American cinema. This cycle began in the detective genre, particularly the hard-boiled detective story associated with such writers as Dashiell Hammett (1894–1961) and Raymond Chandler (1888–1959) and adapted by such films as The Maltese Falcon (1941), Murder, My Sweet (1944), and The Big Sleep (1946). In contrast to the refined, detached sleuths of whod unit authors like Agatha Christie (1890–1976) and S. S. Van Dine (1887–1939), the hard-boiled style developed a more vulnerable detective hero, susceptible to physical violence and emotional entanglements.

The hard-boiled detective film fed directly into the film noir movement that blossomed in America in the mid-1940s. First identified by French film enthusiasts, film noir (literally, "black film") earns its dark name by virtue of both its shadowy visual style and its pessimistic themes. In the spectrum of thriller protagonists, the film noir hero is one of the most profoundly vulnerable, with a passive or susceptible personality that combines with hostile outside forces to sweep him away: the milquetoast husband (Edward G. Robinson) caught in a quagmire of sexual temptation and murder in Scarlet Street (1945); the weak-willed hitchhiker (Tom Neal) taken for a fate-filled ride in Detour (1945); the nonchalant gumshoe (Robert Mitchum) enmeshed by a femme fatale in Out of the Past (1947); the gullible sailor (Orson Welles) gobbled by a sharkish couple in The Lady from Shanghai (1948).

Closely following film noir and providing a rational, affirmative alternative to its nightmare world was the semi-documentary crime film, featuring well-adjusted organizational heroes such as James Stewart's crusading Chicago reporter in Call Northside 777 (1948) and Barry Fitzgerald's veteran Manhattan cop in The Naked City (1948). The most celebrated aspect of these films was their use of factual story material and nonstudio locations, which supplied additional opportunities for articulating the frisson—the tension between the ordinary world and its adventure-heightened state—that stirs the feverish pulse of the thriller. For example, the climax of He Walked by Night (1948) transforms Los Angeles's utilitarian storm drains into a Phantom of the Opera netherworld of concrete caverns and rippling shadows.

By the early 1950s, film noir and semidocumentary elements had both been absorbed into the prevailing style of the era's crime films. An impressive series of 1950s police thrillers combined the organizational heroes of the semidocumentary with the social and spiritual malaise of film noir. "Flawed-cop" films such as Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950), On Dangerous Ground (1952), and Touch of Evil (1958)—with anguished, deeply compromised policemen moving through expressively charged locations—represent a peak of character depth and moral complexity in the history of the movie thriller.

Flourishing around the same time as the flawed-cop cycle was the syndicate-gangster film. Whereas earlier gangster films (e.g., Little Caesar , 1930; Scarface , 1932) had drawn a sharp distinction between the criminal and straight worlds, syndicate-gangster films (e.g., The Big Heat , 1953; The Brothers Rico , 1957; Underworld U.S.A. , 1961) portray vast criminal organizations that reach into every corner of ordinary American life and become virtually indistinguishable from it, moving the genre closer to the thriller's characteristic creation of a double world.