



When the masses hear the term “film noir” they seem to reflexively conjure a single iconic and generic image: a lone figure in a trenchcoat and fedora smoking a cigarette, half-obscured by deep shadows as he walks the lonely, rain-slick city streets to the accompaniment of a solo wailing alto sax. It’s a fine and atmospheric image that in a blink evokes the ennui and loneliness so central to postwar American crime cinema, and that mournful sax sums it up perfectly.



Jazz and film noir have come to be deeply intertwined in our collective cultural consciousness. It’s a very specific kind of jazz, and there’s no getting away from that saxophone. In the second decade of the 21st century, you can even hear a subgenre known simply as “noir jazz,” featuring musicians who perform numbers designed to evoke those dark rainy streets and the cigarette smoke so closely associated with the stylish crime films of the late 1940s. There’s only one problem with this.

If you go back to the noir films of the classic period, roughly 1945 through 1956—fundamentals like D.O.A., Double Indemnity, Out of the Past, Dark Passage, On Dangerous Ground, and so many countless others—what you in fact hear on the soundtracks (not including the inevitable nightclub scenes) are very traditional fully orchestrated movie scores written by busy in-house studio composers like Max Steiner or Bernard Herrman. They tended to be more tense, driving and foreboding than you’d find in say, a romantic melodrama or comedy, with a greater emphasis on brass and percussion. In many cases crime film scores were not that far flung from the scores for war movies. Some were quite good and memorable, a few incorporated themes from popular songs of the day, but they were most decidedly not jazz, and bore little resemblance to what we think of today when we think of “noir music.”

It was considered a radical move in 1955, already late in the game, when Elmer Bernstein and Shorty Rodgers composed the first all-jazz score for Otto Preminger’s near-noir film The Man With the Golden Arm. Despite the score’s label and reputation, the music remained fully orchestrated and much more akin to the rich and brassy Big Band sound of Benny Goodman or Artie Shaw than the tighter contemporary jazz of Shelly Manne, who appears as himself in the film.

Even as other later films began hiring jazz composers to provide film scores—Duke Ellington for Preminger’s Anatomy of a Murder in 1959 and Johnny Mandel and Gerry Mulligan a year earlier for I Want to Live!—they remained rare exceptions, with most late noir films still relying on standard, if strident, in-house orchestral scores. Although there are brief and fleeting hints of the future noir jazz cliche in Mulligan’s score, it’s not quite there yet.

Where jazz scores really became commonplace was not the gritty crime films, but low-budget drive-in movies about wild juvenile delinquents and beatniks. Before rock’n’roll took over, it was that insidious hot jazz music that sent the little wastrels straight into the devil’s clutches. It’s telling that nowadays the producers behind compilations of supposed original noir jazz themes (and these are plentiful), are often forced to plumder ‘60s TV series like 77 Sunset Strip, AIP features like Beat Girl, and even Hollywood comedies like The Apartment to fill out the proceedings. Because simply put, with the exception of the two Preminger films and I Want to Live!, authentic noir jazz never existed.

Which all begs the question, where the hell did that film noir solo sax come from, given it had nothing to do with film noir? This is where things get complicated. It’s also where the French get involved.

Three important cultural vectors emerged out of the paranoia and dissillusion of postwar America. In theaters you had downbeat, fatalistic crime dramas, often involving innocent characters who unwittingly and unexpectedly become ensnared in webs of doomed intrigue. In the little clubs of New York, Chicago and San Francisco, the Big Band sound of the war years was evolving into the leaner, tougher smaller ensembles blowing out what came to be known as hard bop, practicioned by the likes of Charlie Parker, Charles Mingus, Stan Getz, Gerry Mulligan and Miles Davis. And on the literary front The Beats were starting to find each other, find their voices, and come into their own. The Beats never made any bones about their tight connection with the reigning jazz scene, with Kerouac and Ginsberg in particular attempting to capture the rhythm and flow of jazz on the page. In the public mind, the jazz clubs and beatnik coffee houses of the 1950s were essentially one and the same, so in that there’s little surprise jazz would become such an intrinsic element of the beatsplotation films that would come along later. But that still leaves the question of how crime films got dragged into all of this.

Now jump ahead to the very end of the ‘50s. Kennedy was poised to become president, things were looking brighter, and those nihilistic crime dramas of the previous fifteen years no longer reflected the mood of the country, so as a style they petered out and were forgotten. Over in France, however, itellectuals and cultural critics began recognizing and writing about them, even coming to declare them a a genre unto themselves which they called film noir. They’d also embraced American jazz from the same period, which they took to be a reflection of the same sort of values and world view they saw in film noir. The music, they correctly noted, tended to be at turns more low key, angry, and lonely. Mingus, Monk and the others could certainly rip it up when they chose to, but the overwhelming mood was one of melancholy introspection. So when those same intellectuals and cultural critics began making their own films and the French New Wave emerged, many of them tried to recapture that same mood, making films clearly and directly inspired by American noir (like Godard’s Breathless and Truffaut’s Shoot the Piano Player), accompanied by spare scores which tried to approximate the hard bop sound. The core, though, the heart of what was to come, arrived two years earlier in 1958, when Louis Malle conscripted Miles Davis to score Ascenseur Pour L'Echafaud, or Elevator to the Gallows. It’s still the echo of Davis’s trumpet we’re hearing in the noir jazz cliche today, which is ironic given this iconic, purely American sound, so inextricable from an iconic, purely American film genre, was composed for a French film few Americans saw, and one which was considered at the time an homage rather than an authentic original expression of the form. Listen to the soundtrack today, however, and it seems to say everything there is to say when the masses think of film noir. It’s so absolutely perfect it sounds, yes, like a cliche.

Back in the States in 1965, Arthur Penn directed Mickey One, a Warren Beatty vehicle whose paranoid storyline was clearly influenced by the newly-christened film noir, and whose style, also clearly, was meant to ape the French New Wave. So it only made sense he would give the film (in a nod to the Malle picture) a score written and performed by Eddie Sauter and Stan Getz. Although the picture was far from popular at the time and remains mostly forgotten today, and while the music is a bit less spare than Davis’s earlier score (with Getz improvising over Sauter’s lush string and samba arrangements), it did mark the moment in American cinema when a mostly mournful, saxophone-centric jazz score would seem to become standard noir dressing. But it only came long after the fact, only in retrospect, and only thanks to the French. Within the decade, as seen in the likes of Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye and Dick Richard’s new adaptation of Farewell My Lovely (to name just two), the mellow jazz and solo sax became commonplace, and by the explosion of neo-noir films in the ‘80s and ’90s it had become inescapable. These days it’s become a cartoon cliche, though that certainly hasn’t stopped anyone from trotting out the solo sax whenever they want to evoke a certain mood, a certain genre, or a certain time. Even serious documentaries about classic noir feel obligated to use it, though it makes little historical sense. It was pure artifice, a cultural misconjuncture, the invention of filmmakers who were, they thought, paying homage and looking at noir with nostalgic eyes. But it was a false nostalgia for something that never existed. It was all a lie and a myth, a product of French intellectuals years after noir was dead. Thing is though, it’s a myth and a lie that somehow works.

by Jim Knipfel