MovieChat Forums > Ministry of Fear (1945) Discussion > Why it's not film noir, and what is

Why it's not film noir, and what is

posted 10 years ago by dmayo-911-597432
9 replies | jump to latest

*** This post contains spoilers ***

In my review of Ministry of Fear ("Accent on thrills, not fear"), I say, "It certainly is not film noir, though Universal marketed the VHS release under that rubric." Since many of the other reviews and forum posts here refer to it as film noir, I feel an obligation to explain why I say it isn't and what I think film noir is.

We need to bear in mind that although the 1940s are known as the film noir period, no film of the 40s was originally released as film noir or made with that concept in mind. The term film noir originated in French criticism in the latter half of the decade, and it was not generally recognized as a descriptive category until much later. Film noir was not anyone's creation, but a discovery made by looking back on an accumulation of films and noticing what they had in common. We today need to discover it in the same way. It's like noticing a family resemblance in a number of faces. No single description fits all the faces, but there's a network of traits that connects them as a group.

If there's one very general term that does apply to all unquestioned film noir, it's grown-up. This doesn't mean the films are "adult entertainment," as adolescent entertainment is commonly called. It means the characters have been around, they've lost their innocence, they know the odds against a happy ending. It would be going too far, though, to say that there are no happy endings in film noir. The movie that's widely regarded as the first true example of the type, Stranger on the Third Floor (1940), ends in smiles and hopeful departures. In contrast, The Maltese Falcon (1941), which is generally closer to the Hollywood mainstream, has an ending that practically defines that element of film noir: two world-weary lovers -- or lusters -- descending separately by elevator and stairs; one, to face a murder charge; the other, to face a more hardboiled life than ever; both departing for a lower hell. What is essential is that, on the way to either kind of ending, the characters drink from a bitter cup in a world where there's not much else on the menu.

Traits commonly attributed to film noir include physical ones like urban settings and shadowy lighting, but what matters most is the characters' sense of belonging in those urban shadows. Suppose that, as you passed by an all-night bowling alley between a slumbering cigar store and a dozing bus station, you found the ghosts of the damned going in and out on furtive errands but never bowling. That would be the afterlife in the realm of film noir. Even the good people of the story belong here. They're not adventurers from the realm of innocence.

This is where Ministry of Fear most clearly fails the film noir test. It doesn't fail to be a good film, mind you, it just isn't noir. We meet the hero -- a word that doesn't suggest itself in connection with film noir -- as he's being discharged from a mental hospital. About twenty minutes into the story, he reveals that he was sent there for the murder of his wife. That sounds promising, but wait. The next moment he reveals that she was suffering with a terminal illness and begged him to end her life. His crime is supposed to have been mercy killing. That still works, but wait. He goes on to reveal that he didn't kill her after all. He had obtained a drug intending to do the deed but couldn't go through with it. His wife found the drug and took it herself. He was a devoted husband all along, and apparently when his wife was dead he shielded her memory from the stigma of suicide by confessing to homicide. We even hear that he wasn't insane at all but had to be committed because the law required it. Having been thus assured that our "man just out of a mental hospital" has no history of mental illness, let alone a stain on his character, we can put our minds at ease and simply enjoy the thrills until good triumphs over evil. This trick of having it both ways to keep the show within the comfort zone of the general public is typical of mainstream cinema. It's alien to film noir. For some comments on the visual qualities of Ministry of Fear, which suggest the noir style without really achieving it, please see my review.

Film noir is a magical medium that creates a disturbing illusion of reality without conveying anything particularly realistic. The sets are pretty much like other movie sets, except that some have ceilings which we glimpse in low-angle shots. The casts contain the usual proportion of familiar Hollywood faces. The dialogue, whether gaudy or flat, would turn heads if anyone sprang it in the real world. The events, while more plausible than in Ministry of Fear, are more coherent and more abundant than in reality. Perhaps, after all, we find film noir realistic because it appeals to a grown-up taste the way the bitterness of coffee does. There's nothing of the fairy tale about it, or of the Boy's Own adventure, as there is about Ministry of Fear.

If the reality of film noir is a cloud of disturbing illusion, the cloud suddenly materialized before the eyes of someone I knew years ago. We were both working as ushers at a small suburban movie theater in the US. One night when the other boy had the last shift and was cleaning up after the show, he took out the trash -- and found three respectable-looking corpses in the parking lot. Two were those of a man and a woman who had been to the movies together. The third was that of the woman's husband. All had been shot to death with the husband's gun.

What I felt when I heard about that incident is akin to the feeling I get from film noir. In any film, a crime of passion may be shocking and tragic. In film noir, as in reality, it's also mesmerizingly sordid. We're repelled and transfixed with equal force. It's as if we had forgotten that this mortal world is a world of sin, and then a corner of the social cover had been turned back to remind us. We wouldn't want to see such a sight, really -- and yet we wonder how the bodies looked. And had that usher seen the lovers in the theater lobby when they were still people and not yet bodies? Probably so, even if he didn't remember it. Imagine that! And what state did the dead leave their homes in? Somebody had to go in and sort things out. Even if it was somebody who loved them, the work must have been a drag. In reality, we may actually think such thoughts. We don't think them while watching film noir, because we know it's make-believe (having been around a bit ourselves), but we're put in the mood for thinking them.

Finally, here's a personal list of films that define film noir better than my words can. I've arranged them in the order in which they most strongly represent the "film noir family" to me. Other lists will be welcome.

Out of the Past (1947)
More rural scenery than usual, but alarmingly infested with urbanites.

Crossfire (1947)
Visual and moral gloom that's almost opaque, eerily illuminated by a scene with Paul Kelly.

Force of Evil (1948)
Genuine tragedy, genuinely noir.

Double Indemnity (1944)
Self-assured self-corruption in the gun-toting middle class.

The Enforcer (1951)
A story of crime-busting rather than moral rot, but dominated by the criminal element.

Also:
The Woman in the Window (1944)
This is on the polite fringe of the film noir world and could even be seen as a pastiche of it, but the noir atmosphere does become intense.

As for Ministry of Fear, I own a copy of it and enjoy watching it. I can't get enough of its fortune-telling, its séance, its secret menace, or its intrepid hero in the person of Ray Milland. It's just that I think those things add up to a thriller, not a work of film noir.

[–] pt100 10 years ago

Your rather lengthy analysis omits two key elements of classic film noir. In addition to shadowy settings (they are usually gritty urban settings), the key elements are: (1) a basically good guy finds himself in circumstances that are either beyond his control or that rapidly spiral out of control; and he is (2) brought down by a femme fatale.

The most classic examples include Double Indemnity, Out of the Past, The Postman Always Rings Twice, and Detour.

It is better to be kind than to be clever or good looking. -- Derek

[–] dmayo-911-597432 10 years ago

Thanks for adding those points. I've missed both The Postman Always Rings Twice and Detour so far, but I'll try to catch them if I can.

In the musical comedy The Band Wagon (1953), the hardboiled-detective spoof at the end contains both of the elements you mention and has the added charm of being narrated entirely in stock idioms like "I was beginning to see daylight" and "She was bad. She was dangerous. I wouldn't trust her any farther than I could throw her. But -- she was my kind of woman."

[–] pt100 10 years ago

Detour is rarely aired anymore, but Postman comes around now again, usually on TCM. John Garfield is splendid in that film, and the supporting cast is also very good.

It is better to be kind than to be clever or good looking. -- Derek

[–] TheCinemator 10 years ago

Mayer and McDonnel in "The Encyclopaedia of Film Noir" consider it a noir. That's good enough for me. When I watch it I think noir from the get go, that seals it for me.

[–] gcassidy2 10 years ago

I consider MoF on the shadowy edges of film noir. It's too optimistic to truly fit in the (style/genre/movement) of noir, but I think Lang may have been using a few of the elements that went into making many of the early 40s movies that were setting the style, and it tricks you into thinking it falls into that category. But personally, if I had to catalog it I'd put it in with spy thriller/suspense.

[–] jd-276 8 years ago

Yeah, me too. In the end, the main character isn't brought down by a femme fatale. In fact, he isn't brought down at all and the femme fatale ends up saving the day. Also, our hero's motivations for following up the events are not sexual, as they are with say, "Double Indemnity". He's just trying to find out why someone tried to kill him. It certainly has the dingy look of Film Nior but the story is at odds with it. Graham Greene often wrote good Nior material. Has anyone read the book? I have not.

[–] mgconlan-1 8 years ago

So many misconceptions and stereotypes from the contributors above trying to read “Ministry of Fear” out of the film noir canon. The poster who started all this, dmayo-911-597432 (an online “handle” that looks less like a name than like something I’d put in my gas tank to get better mileage), wrote a lengthy analysis that ignores how many films noir start, like “Ministry of Fear,” with a (relatively) ordinary person suddenly taken out of the normal world and into the noir underworld. Much of the thrill of a noir of this type, like André De Toth’s “Pitfall,” John Farrow’s “The Big Clock,” and Max Ophuls’ “The Reckless Moment” (a 1949 film remade by Scott McGehee and David Siegel in 2001 as an excellent neo-noir, “The Deep End”), stems from the clash between a character torn out of a comfortable suburban existence and suddenly thrust into the noir world. Despite dmayo’s contention that films noir have to have characters with a “sense of belonging in those urban shadows,” many of the best ones have leads who don’t. Certainly “Ministry of Fear” is far closer to classic noir than “The Enforcer,” a good cops-and-killers drama which offers noir actor Humphrey Bogart in his last role for Warner Bros. but is really a straightforward crime tale with good-good guys, bad-bad guys and none of the moral ambiguity of the people in “Ministry of Fear,” particularly Ray Milland’s character as well as the brother and sister played by Carl Esmond and Marjorie Reynolds.

Some of the other posters set up a bizarre set of rules for films noir that I don’t think apply at all. No, pt100 (wasn’t that the boat John F. Kennedy had his accident in during World War II? No, that was PT-109), a film doesn’t have to contain a femme fatale character to be a film noir. And no, jd-276, a film noir lead does not have to be motivated by sex for a story to fit the category. And gcassidy2’s comment that “I think Lang may have been using a few of the elements that went into making many of the early 1940’s movies that were setting the style” for film noir ignores the fact that Fritz Lang INVENTED many of these “elements” in his classic German films from 1919 to 1932. Indeed, virtually all the visual characteristics of film noir, particularly the chiaroscuro visuals and artful use of shadows (the gimmick of having a set only half-lit was originally a money-saving measure, since if you were going to keep half a room in darkness you only had to build the half of the set that would show), came from the 1920’s German cinema, and so did the moral ambiguity of film noir plots.

Basically, film noir was the coming together of two sorts of fiction, the 1920’s German Expressionist cinema and the “hard-boiled” style of mystery writing pioneered in the 1920’s and 1930’s by writers like Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler and Cornell Woolrich. It was born when filmmakers working in the U.S. -- many of them expatriates like Fritz Lang, Robert Siodmak, Billy Wilder and Max Ophuls, who had fled Germany when the Nazis took power in 1933 -- realized that the dark, shadowy visual style of German Expressionist movies was an appropriate way to film the works of the “hard-boiled” detective and thriller writers as well as original screen stories in that mold. Indeed, one can trace the basics of noir from Weimar Republic Germany to 1930’s France (where a lot of the German expats settled until World War II started, France was about to fall and they skedaddled again, this time to the U.S.) and the spate of world-weary thrillers made in France in the late 1930’s, to the U.S. and the emergence of what came to be called film noir in the 1940’s.

Also, the explanation for the term film noir is actually quite simple. The French publisher who had the rights to Hammett, Cain, Chandler, Woolrich and a number of other important “hard-boiled” writers published the French editions of their books in a series with black covers and called it the “Série Noire.” So French film critics, reviewing U.S. movies based on books that had been published in the “Série Noire,” attached the term “film noir” to them, and the label stuck. And though film noir as a genre is generally thought to have started in the 1940’s, there are actually some powerful and interesting movies from the early 1930’s, like William Wellman’s “Safe in Hell” and Charles Vidor’s “Sensation Hunters,” that qualify as noir -- as does Lang’s first U.S. film, “Fury” (1936), and indeed virtually all Lang’s U.S. films that weren’t Westerns
or period dramas.

I’ll acknowledge “Ministry of Fear” is on the cusp of film noir and quite a number of other Lang movies (including his next two, “The Woman in the Window” and “Scarlet Street,” in both of which he used Dan Duryea because he’d been so impressed by his performance in “Ministry of Fear”) are deeper, richer and more noir. Ironically, the original reviewers of “Ministry of Fear” criticized it as a ripoff of Alfred Hitchcock, either not knowing or ignoring that Hitchcock had borrowed much of his style from Fritz Lang. Indeed, though there are strong similarities between “Ministry of Fear” and “The 39 Steps,” Hitchcock had already borrowed the ending of “The 39 Steps” from Lang’s 1928 German silent thriller “Spies,” and two other 1930’s Hitchcocks, “The Secret Agent” and “Sabotage,” also cribbed from “Spies.”

Hitchcock isn’t usually considered a noir director, yet the Alain Silver-Elizabeth Ward compendium “Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference to the American Style” lists four Hitchcock films (“Shadow of a Doubt,” “Notorious,” “Strangers on a Train” and “The Wrong Man”), and I suspect they would have listed “Rear Window” and “Vertigo” as well except that they were in color. The same book lists 10 films by Lang, including “Ministry of Fear” -- more than any other director, even though they only cover his U.S. work and leave out his early German films that anticipated noir and created many of its trademark devices.

Also, if dmayo and pt100 still haven’t seen “Detour” (directed by another German who fled Hitler, Edgar G. Ulmer), it’s in the public domain and there are at least three downloads of it available on archive.org. It’s a must-see if you love film noir!

[–] dmayo-911-597432 8 years ago

Thanks for your response, mgconlan-1. It's informative, thought-provoking, articulate, and mostly civil.

Just one negative: it weakens your otherwise excellent commentary to put in asides gratuitously abusing people's usernames. Mine was generated automatically by IMDb.

No hard feelings, though. I enjoyed reading your post and learned a lot from it.

[–] mgconlan-1 8 years ago

Thanks for the excellent response, and sorry for ridiculing your "handle." Internet pseudonyms, especially these preposterous jumbles of numbers and letters, are a pet peeve of mine. I should have known a computer made yours up!