A French noir produced right after the war in 1946 Panique is film about suspicion and mob injustice. Michel Simon plays Monsieur Hire, an aloof reclusive man who lives in a hotel where the residents of the neighborhood dislike him for the solitary and unfriendly manner. Life in the neighborhood is upended when as a carnival is setting up a woman is found murdered in a nearby field. The murderer, Capoulade, played by  Max Dalban, and his girlfriend, Alice, played by Viviane Romance, a woman Monsieur Hire had become infatuated with, manipulate the neighborhood’s distrust of Hire, attempting to place the blame for the murder on him.

Panique, though it never mentions or deals with the war or France’s occupation under Nazi rule, is seen by many as a statement about the behavior of people during the war. The fact that Hire is Jewish gives credence to this interpretation as mob mentality and the neighborhood rumor filled imaginations turn violent against a man whose only crime is being socially different.

With a brief running time of 91 minutes the film doesn’t waste footage with needlessly complex backstory or set-ups. The mystery of the murderer’s identity is for the audience quickly dispatched allowing the story of Hire, Alice, and the mob to progress without undue burdens.

Filmed in black-and-white by cinematographer Nicholas Hayer, Panique doesn’t not draw on the heritage of German expressionism like most classical noir films, but rather presents the movie’s subjects in stark realism rather then with exaggerated and stylized photography. The film was based on a novel and remade as Monsieur Hire in 1989.

An enjoyable excursion into noir from the country that coined the genre’s name, Panique is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel.

In now way am I proposing a final definitive definition of Noir fiction and what sets a story in that particular sub-genre but I do think I may have stumbled across one of the lines that separates noir  from its close elder cousin detective fiction.

Detective fiction, in general, derives from a European tradition of the intellectual puzzle solver that reveals the killers identity in a dramatic drawing room monologue. In the United States, a rougher culture, this transformed into the genre of hard boiled, where the detective still uncovered the killer’s identity, but through the course of resolving the mystery the protagonist usually faced more serious danger to his life and was often less than a stellar individual himself. Noir  also often dealt with detectives and a crime that needed resolving but as often as not the protagonists of noir  fiction were the criminals themselves and in the cases where the protagonists weren’t the perpetrators they often were as morally compromised as the characters the challenged.

Dividing the genre between hard-boiled and noir is difficult thing but I think it can be done with the concept of moral order and which characters are responsible for restoring the moral order.

In a murder mystery the moral order has been destroyed by the immoral killing of a character and it is restored when the killer is revealed and brought to justice. In this situation the detective is the agency that restores the moral order, it is the detective intelligence and devotion to that moral order that propels the characters, (Side note it is interesting that in Murder on the Orient Express  Poirot does not bring the killers to justice because it is determine that the murder itself is an expression of the moral order. In others words, ‘He had it comin’.’)

Noir  particularly that films made in the classic period of the 19640s and 1950s also restored the moral order by the time the credits appeared on the screen what set them apart was how the moral order was restored.

In noir  films the moral order isn’t restored by way of an intelligent and morally upright character but usually because the seeds of their own destruction sowed by the characters themselves fruited with the final justice. Consider how Keyes was unable to reveal the murders in Double Indemnity but instead Walter and Phyllis bring about their own destruction. The moral order is restored, after all the production code insisted upon that, but the restoration had little to nothing to do with the integrity of the upstanding characters.

Perhaps an interesting boundary case is the classic The Maltese Falcon.Sam unravels the mystery and turns Brigid over t the police, restoring the moral order, she will pay the price for her crimes, as will al the other criminals, but there is the lingering question of why does Sam do this? In the final scene between the lovers he gives lots of potential answers, when your partner is murdered you need to do something about it, maybe he loves her maybe he doesn’t, and of course if he doesn’t he could never trust her and not turning her over puts him, at the risk of ending up like Thursby. Pick an answer and you change the moral calculus. Is Sam doing the right thing because you honor your partner? Then this is more like detective fiction. Is he just looking out for himself? The moral tone gets darker with that outlook. Neither the novel nor the film provides any definitive answer to Sam and his motivation leaving it to our interpretation.

So one test, and only one test of many, for is something noir or not ask how does the moral order get restored and you’ll have a leg up on answering the question.

Last night my sweetie-wife and I watched an older British film of Amazon Prime, Circus of Fear. From 1966 and starring Christopher Lee and Leo Genn, who struck both of us as a low-rent James Mason, the movie is far less about horror than it is about crime.

After a daring daylight armored car robbery, are they all daring, which ends in the unintentional murder of a guard, Scotland Yard Inspector Elliott, (Genn), chases down leads until he’s confronted with a rogue’s gallery of suspects at a circus that is wintering over. With every character seeming harboring a deep and dangerous secret and a masked foreign lion tamer, (Lee) Elliott’s task of discovering the murderer and recovering the stolen 250,000 British pounds becomes much more difficult.

Comprised of studios shoots, tired stock footage of an actual circus, and emaciated elephants, Circus of Fear  can hardly be called a good movie. There were times, particularly with the repeated shots of a gloved hand throwing knives with lethal precision as character were eliminated from the story, that I was reminded of the Italian Giallo genre of lurid and sensation exploitative movies but sadly we were not watching one of those and whatever charm this movie had quickly faded.

The cast included Klaus Kinski as a mostly unnamed and looming threat over the proceedings but his part was rather small and did not provide enough screen time for ample amusement. Repeated uses of crash zooms and abrupt cuts failed to provoke any real sense of shock or dread and for the most part what you can say about this movie is that it was shot in focus and without absurd cuts covering poor editing choices. This is suitable for Riff Tracks ofrMST3K should they ever get around to it.

While exploring the content on some of the Roku streaming channels dedicated to Film Noir  I discovered what is possibly the worst Noir ever produced, Jail Bait  directed by what many consider to be the worst director of all time, the auteur responsible for Plan 9 From Outer Space (1959), Edward Wood Jr. Full spoilers follow.

Jail Bait(1954) has the elements of a film noir but like mayonnaise left in the summer sun it has gone quit bad. Don Gregor is the son of a wealthy, world-famous, Plastic Surgeon (This will be important later, putting Ed Wood ahead of Benioff and Weiss in understanding Chekov’s Gun.)  but Don, for *reasons* likes to carry pistols and hang around cheap hoodlums. At the movie’s opening Don’s sister Marilyn, played by Ed Wood’s girlfriend Dolores Fuller, bails Don out of jail after the police arrest him for carrying a revolver. After getting home and wasting time with stilted exposition laden dialog Don quickly takes his father pistol from its hiding space inside a book and leaves to hang out with his hoodlum friend, Vic Brady. Vic drags Don into a robbery of a theater that of course goes badly and end up with a retired cop dead and a woman shot. But it did net them 23,000 dollars which is over 200,000 dollars adjusted for inflation, so that theater must have been showing Avengers: Endgame. Within hours the radio’s exposition specific station is now broadcasting the news of the robbery, along with Don’s and Vic’s names and identities, here is where we learn that Don’s father is a ‘world famous’ plastic surgeon, but the reports even positively identify Don as the gun man who murdered the retired cop. Don goes back to his father, confesses to the crime and Dr. Gregor extracts a promise from Don to turn himself over to the police later, it has to be later for *reasons*. The police arrive and Don scoots out the back way. The police seem to know everything except the location of the back door but because Dr. Gregor is such a great upstanding citizen they don’t press him on anything. By the way the junior police lieutenant is played by legendary muscle man Steve Reeves but I doubt this is the movie Frank-N-Furter had in mind when he suggested an ‘old Steve Reeves movie’ in the Rocky Horror Picture Show. Any who Vic nabs Don coming out of Dr. Gregor’s officer and forces him back to Vic’s hideout where Vic’s girl Loretta is waiting. There more tedious dialog and to shut him up Vic kills Don. To escape the law, Vic decides that he needs a new face because apparently only the face is used to identify people as fingerprints an apparently lost tech in this alternate 1954.  Threatening to kill Don, who is of course already dead, Vic forces Dr. Gregor is perform surgery and give him a new face. Ed Wood apparently could not afford a hospital set in his budget, nor an operating room staff, so the doctor performs this major reconstructive surgery assisted by his daughter and with Vic chloroformed on a living room sofa. Now before the doctor could perform this living room plastic surgery he needed a basin of hot water, apparently facial reconstruction and delivering babies have the same equipment requirements, and while searching for a basin in Vic’s kitchen he discovers Don’s *standing* dead body. Dr. Gregor completes the surgery and advises Loretta that Vic must come to him in weeks when the healing will be complete. The two weeks pass and the police are baffled how two people can just vanish as they have found neither Vic nor Don and that just seems impossible. They get a call from Dr. Gregor and leave to get to his house. Vic and Loretta get the doctor’s house and before the bandages are removed the police bust in. Vic is smug and confident that he’s in no danger, assuring the police he is not the man that they are searching for. The bandages come off and Vic is revealed to have Don’s face. The police go to arrest ‘Don’ and there’s a gun fight which ends with Vic/Don dead face down in the house’s pool, a vision shameless stolen, poorly from Sunset Boulevard.

For those of you who have seen Ed Wood’s magnum opus Plan 9 From Outer Space you may have considered that the man had little talent as a filmmaker but I assure you that Ed’s skills had matured by the time he produced, wrote, and directed Plan 9. Jail Bait,and despite the poster the title has nothing to do with the women of the film, in addition to a most laughable surgical scene posses the dullest car chase ever committed to celluloid. Many noirs  have a nightclub scenes where the romantic interest of the protagonist performs some sultry song and while Jail Bait  has a night club scene in the middle of the movie it involves none of the characters, has no torch singer in a slinky dress but instead presents that most offensive of all club acts an honest to god white man in blackface minstrel show. So this move is not just bad, it’s deeply racist and has been, until the advent of streaming and YouTube, justifiably forgotten.