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| BearManor Media (June 2023). |
“Nailing down a coffin lid is far easier than nailing down a universally agreed upon definition of the term film noir.” – Robert Strom
Every so often a book comes along that somehow manages to evoke our childhood and our love of films at the same time. Robert Strom’s Cries in the Night: Children in Film Noir is just such a book.
I grew up in a place I used to call Shadowland, a quiet suburb of Toronto known officially as Don Mills (the first formally designed suburb in North America) where there wasn’t much to do but listen to music and watch movies. Luckily I was also a kid in the 1960’s, a time when the best of both of those pursuits was available to us in abundance. When I was about ten years old my life was changed forever by a secret practice I used to engage in when the rest of my relatively normal suburban family was fast asleep at night. Back in those days, after midnight the public broadcasting system in Canada used to transmit overnight classic movies across the airwaves and into our homes, and I would quietly go out into our dark living room, turn on the television and start watching old films long into the wee wee hours. That was my initial and probably too young exposure to dark movies I would never have been allowed to watch in theatres or during the daylight.
Why I called it Shadowland becomes immediately apparent when one recalls the kinds of films I saw during my nocturnal roamings as a prodigy of noir. Having already been exposed to the usual fantasy menu that commenced in the 1950’s with such stalwartly innocent yet unintentionally surreal televised reveries as Father Knows Best, The Donna Reed Show, Leave It to Beaver and The Honeymooners, you can imagine my nighttime shock at suddenly being plunged into the Hollywood pre-Code cinematic nightmare landscapes of Public Enemy (1931), Little Caesar (1931), Scarface (1932), and other excursions into remorseless crime and grime. Although historically prior to the official film noir domain (roughly 1941-1959), such films were obviously noir-saturated plunges into a fateful realm, a kind of karmic carnival of lost souls that instantly liberated me from the otherwise soothing arms of Father Knows Best’s maternal Jane Wyatt.
One additional bonus of my newfound fetish for the fever dreams of alienation, angst, violence and lust was a parallel entry into the world of misspent youth on celluloid, captured in such classics as Angels with Dirty Faces (1938) and The Dead End Kids (1939). Toss in that heady mix of mayhem The Bad Seed (1956), and I had left the dreamy childhood domain of Andy Hardy and Henry Aldrich far behind me. By the time I was eleven, I had absorbed the more sultry adult vibes of Gun Crazy, Detour, The Maltese Falcon, Murder, My Sweet, Double Indemnity, The Lost Weekend and Sunset Boulevard, and, much to my amazement, I was also bemused to see the family name flash on my flickering screen affiliated with the latter two. I suppose that discovery must have sealed my fate somewhat and set me on the precarious course of transforming my simple childhood fetish into a job description, as a film critic/historian and curator of movie programs for Cinemathèque theatres.
I insert this personal preamble about what I’ve described as a noir childhood (nothing bad actually happened to me, mind you, but I became infatuated which watching bad things happen to other folks, especially when the bad guys eventually got what was coming to them) solely because it helps to situate my delight in encountering this recent book by Robert Strom. A kindred soul of sorts, perhaps, especially since we both subsequently ended up utterly fascinated with the film noir stylistic motif (a term I prefer to the word genre) and we both seem to celebrate our curious predilection by immersing ourselves in the fateful joys and sweet sorrows of artful noir movies. His splendid and encyclopedic Cries in the Night: Children in Film Noir offers us all a much needed recognition of an often overlooked element of the noir narrative: the surprisingly frequent presence, often just outside the primary sinister storyline but hiding in the shadows, of vulnerable kids. Kids portrayed by stellar child stars such as Mimi Gibson.
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| Mimi Gibson in One Step Beyond (1959). |
The star of two distinguished noirs, Strange Intruder (1956) and The Brothers Rico (1957), and an actress with a longer career than most later on in television, Gibson wrote the Foreword to Strom’s book on the many talented children in this dark cinematic style territory. Gibson calls Strom the “Detective of Film Noir” as a result of his tireless tracking down and documenting of the young performers who provided an empathy and warmth to otherwise often relentlessly dire movies.
Many books and stories are about the adult stars of these notable movies. But this book has something different. It is the first of its kind. It looks at kids, mostly actors whose roles were few and far between in these films. Some child actors are stars, though, and you see the story through their eyes. Robert Strom has found and interviewed 50 of us. He found the group that are hanging on and glad to see another day. I am grateful to him for his love and unique insight into a genre that still endures to this day.
The noir children are very often on the periphery of what one Asphalt Jungle character described as “the left-handed form of human endeavors,” and until now I must admit I hadn’t paid nearly enough attention to the presence of children hovering innocently around the lurking menace of the main action. Strom deftly positions the chief stylistic currents of noir in a trajectory properly commencing with an emphasis on cinematography itself, especially that of landmark films such as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920), Nosferatu (1922), Metropolis (1927) and M (1931). In fact, for me, M, concurrent with the pre-Code Hollywood films I mentioned that so impressed my childhood appetite for dread, might just be the first actual noir masterpiece, focusing as it does on the notorious child murderer embodied by the remarkable Peter Lorre, and on his collision with justice.
The traumatized post-war American psyche would be exemplified to an extraordinary degree by the acclaimed films all noir lovers cherish, often with a sense of guilty pleasure. When I think of children in the film noir mode, the first movies that leap to mind as monuments to the terrors of childhood are the later entries to the canon, The Night of the Hunter (1955) and Cape Fear (1962). The psychopath portrayed with such surgical precision in both movies by the brilliant Robert Mitchum, possibly the greatest noir actor ever, sends chills down our spines, perhaps especially because of his horrible proximity to the two children protected by Lillian Gish in the first, and the young daughter of Polly Bergen in the second. But those two riveting characterizations of disrupted childhood, as Strom’s book illustrates so effectively, are only the tip of an innocent iceberg.
Strom takes us inside that ice and proceeds to melt our hearts with profiles that provide much deserved recognition for the little folks who are too often overshadowed by the nasty adults in these tales of intrigue and betrayal. As the author explains:
In many cases the young acting talents in this book appeared in many film noirs without character names other than boy or girl. For the most part the majority of them didn’t receive billing or appear in the closing credits. We remember these gifted youngsters who walked alone down the alleys of midnight cities. Like their adult counterparts, they took the detours and were trapped in the dead ends. Hoping for the light and praying that those born to kill wouldn’t find them. If they were lucky, there was someone there soothing the nightmares and kissing the blood off their innocent hands. There are many elements which define the noir genre. The author is open to a wide variety of potential noirs. You may quibble with some of the films included. That is your prerogative. Still, sometimes, it is fine to relax, let go of your pretensions and be entertained. New vistas await.
I was delighted to find a perspective as loose as my own, I must admit, especially since I consider a 1948 oddity called The Boy with Green Hair, featuring two favourite erstwhile child stars of mine, Dean Stockwell and Russ Tamblyn. This film, an anti-war drama which I insist on considering noir despite the absence of murder, detectives or femme fatales, so terrified me when I saw it in my midnight living room nocturama that I’m not sure I’ve ever fully recovered, also pleases me because two of the child stars went on to perform in David Lynch productions, Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks. Some noir aficionados might call Lynch neo-noir, and that’s okay with me. You’re entitled to call them whatever the hell you want. Especially since I’m entitled to call Lynch’s debut film Eraserhead (1977), as noir as they come. Maybe it’s even existential noir. But then, all noir is existential.
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| Dean Stockwell in The Boy with Green Hair (1948). |
Strom commences his stroll through the nostalgic childhood realm of noir by identifying several intriguing categories where the often unnamed players figured prominently. The film noirs with the most children, such as Naked City and Moonrise, both 1948, the year before the memorable Bobby Driscoll film The Window. Naked City had sixteen children in the cast, most of them actual kids found on location in New York, and Moonrise had eleven, and to his credit the author tries to give as much credit due as possible. He also even focuses on children utilized in many flashback scenes used in noir dramas, on the character structures involving child sibling roles in noir, and the uncanny number of child actors who were in the Ma and Pa Kettle comedies and later appeared in heavy-duty noirs.
Even more uncanny were Little Rascals alumni Carl Switzer, George MacFarland, and Mickey Gubitosi, better known as Robert Blake. Blake’s story was, of course, a tragic one. He became famous as an adult in In Cold Blood and later on television’s Baretta but ended as a murder himself in real life. And the author also has empathy for those child actors who appeared in the crossover noir realm: dark westerns like 3:10 to Yuma (1957), science fiction like The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) and historical noirs like Anthony Mann’s bloody Reign of Terror (1949). Mimi Gibson appeared in the potboiler The Monster Who Challenged the World in 1957. But perhaps the most prolific in our youthful acting community was Dickie Moore, most famous for playing the deaf kid in the classic Out of the Past (1947), who appeared in a hundred and ten films all told.
No less a star than versatile Russ Tamblyn gave Strom his seal of noir approval: “Inspired by my friend Bobby Driscoll’s performance in The Window in 1949, Robert Strom has written a groundbreaking book. The research and fifty interviews offer rare insight into both the golden age of Hollywood and the genre of film noir. Cries in the Night is the film historian’s labour of love.” Poor Bobby Driscoll was a sad case illustrating the pitfalls and vagaries of becoming famous too young. Subsequent to his film acclaim, and parallel to many actors who couldn’t weather the transition from silent to sound films, he couldn’t sustain an adult screen persona; he struggled with addiction and died destitute at 31. Few who saw him in The Window at age 11, however, can ever forget his potent characterization of childhood terror.
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| Bobby Driscoll in The Window (1949). |
After situating the unique status of childhood stars, with specific emphasis on their subtle but perennial presence in the film noir universe, the author launches into the main menu, a detailed alphabetical series of profiles of child noir actors and actresses, starting with Lee Aaker (Black Tuesday, 1954) and ending with Nancy Zane (best known for The Night Holds Terror, 1955). He then provides an ample and detailed listing of noirs featuring young performers, with release dates, alternate titles, director and cinematographer credits. (I was particularly pleased to see one of my favourite Billy Wilder films, Ace in the Hole from 1951, which not nearly enough viewers recognize as a superb film noir achievement, perhaps because it takes place out in a blinding desert and the murder in question takes place in slow motion.)
Along the route of this guided tour of youngsters trapped in darkness I was reminded of many favourites of mine: Billy Gray, who played Robert ‘Bud’ Fontane in Talk About a Stranger (1952), and later on played Bud Anderson on Father Knows Best (1954-1960), while successfully suppressing his true Budness all the way; the prolific Jimmy Hawkins, in such dark gems as The Red Menace (1949), Shadow on the Wall (1950), the delightfully titled Private Hell 36 (1954), among others; Darryl Hickman in Leave Her To Heaven, (1945), The Strange Love of Martha Iyers (1946) and The Set-Up (1949); and so many other talented youngsters who temporarily made Hollywood their home away from home.
Cries in the Night approaches and reaches a level of humanity and tenderness quite rare in either film criticism or in the historical archiving of the dream factory, or nightmare warehouse, of Hollywood. Of special value is the series of personal interviews the author conducted with a wide range of former child stars, some of advanced age now, but all proud to be recognized for the sterling work they contributed to sometimes scaring us out of our wits. Kudos go out to him for that labour of love. That research and encounter mission must have been a daunting one, which probably accounts for why Mimi Gibson has dubbed Robert Strom the Detective of Film Noir. His book richly illustrates why that accolade fits him so well.
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