The Noir Auteur

The concepts of genre and the auteur are often thought to be antithetical, the former emphasizing the recurrent patterns of popular culture, the latter celebrating the unique ‘signature’ of the individual artist able to ‘transcend’ generic formulae. However, this study has argued already for the importance of the authorial presence – Hitchcock’s Vertigo, Welles’ Touch of Evil – where the director’s genius lies in the ways in which generic elements are used so as to yield their most profound meanings. Analysis of an auteur’s films noirs therefore provides another way of understanding the noir ‘phenomenon’. Although a number of directors – Jules Dassin, Samuel Fuller, Fritz Lang, Joseph H. Lewis, Anthony Mann, Otto Preminger, Nicholas Ray, Robert Siodmak, Jacques Tourneur, Edgar Ulmer, Orson Welles and Billy Wilder – have some claim to auteur status, this chapter attempts to make the case for three: Mann, Siodmak and Lang. Each produced a substantial body of films noirs – over half-a-dozen – and all three were closely associated with the development of film noir, dual criteria which distinguish them from the other names on the list above, except Hitchcock who has been excluded for reasons of space and because his work has received such voluminous interpretation in recent years. ¹ No justification is necessary for the choice of the émigrés Lang and Siodmak whose contribution to the noir cycle was immense; and while it is true that Mann was first critically rehabilitated on the strength of his Westerns, his seven noirs have also come to be seen as an important body of work, the efforts of an indigenous American director working creatively with an evolving form. ²