The Look Of Noir -- Exhibit Of Stills, Posters Pays Homage To A Film Genre

Art review "Night and the City: Homage to Film Noir," at the Seattle Art Museum, through Feb. 22. Hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Sundays, until 9 p.m. on Thursdays.

Maybe there are really only two kinds of people in this crazy, rotten, dead-end world.

There are people who like musicals. People who think a Judy Garland lullaby can warble the darkness out of a hopeless, starless night. People who think that a little fancy footwork by a penguin-suited Fred Astaire can prettify the demons and nightmares that sulk inside of every guy and every dame.

Then there are the people who know that life ain't no bowl of cherries. Life is an ashtray of lipstick-smudged cigarette butts. A sagging shelf of empty whiskey bottles. An asphalt jungle of stop signs. A place where you'd better watch your back because no one else is going to. To make matters worse, it's usually raining.

For those in the second group, and those intrigued by stylish noir nihilism, a small but engaging new show at the Seattle Art Museum is good fun. "Night and the City: Homage to Film Noir" is a small gallery of movie posters, lobby cards and stills from such '40s and '50s noir masterpieces as "The Maltese Falcon," "The Blue Dahlia" and "The Lady from Shanghai."

The show was co-curated by Trevor Fairbrother, SAM's curator of modern art, and Greg Olson, SAM's film curator and the longtime organizer of SAM's popular Thursday evening film series. The

130-some objects on view are mostly from two Seattle private collections: the John Teagarden/Dale Nash Collection and the George Ulrich Collection.

The show, too, is an homage to the 20th anniversary of SAM's popular film noir series, which Olson puts on each fall. The series always sells out, a sign of the continued appeal of the genre.

Also included in the exhibition are five photographs by the film director David Lynch, the best-known of a contemporary generation of directors working in an updated noir style. Lynch's "Blue Velvet" (1986) and his influential "Twin Peaks" television series of the early '90s are among his most memorable works. Olson is writing a biography on Lynch, who spent part of his youth in Idaho and Spokane. Lynch's photographs are moody, shadow-filled faces of a pouty, red-lipped young woman, a modern noir siren.

There are also three works by Los Angeles contemporary artist John Baldessari, whose large black-and-white photo montages often have a noirish mood, according to Fairbrother. The best of the works, a montage of black-and-white photos that could easily have come from films of the '40s, was specially commissioned by SAM for the show. It is being used for the show's poster.

Highlights of the show are unquestionably the dozen or so big, door-size movie posters, most of which were illustrated by now unknown commercial artists. Aside from their appeal as artifacts of the original era, they are reminders of a time when posters were considered important marketing tools, and seen as works of art in their own right. In this age of digital graphic tricks and photo manipulation, it seems remarkable that a major motion picture studio would trust a single artist with a box of paints and pens to make a poster.

There's Bette Davis wearing a surprisingly prim full-length red dress, more of a Renaissance velvet robe really, with a Hester Prynne-ish, high white collar. The poster is for "The Letter," a 1940 film by William Wyler. Davis holds a revolver in one hand. She looks evil, but not sorry. The quote beside her head says, "With all my heart I still love the man I killed."

Then there's Rock Hudson in a clinch with Lauren Bacall in the poster for the French version of "Written on the Wind," a 1956 noir melodrama by Douglas Sirk. In the foreground, Robert Stack's looming profile is a lurid pink as he lifts a glass of scotch to his lips. A leafless tree bends in the background as though pushed to snapping by a howling storm. Leaves swirl. These are images of self-destruction, deception and ruined lives. You don't have to see the movie to figure that out.

And it's hard to resist the seductive appeal of the poster for the "Maltese Falcon," the 1941 John Huston film that many film historians credit as the first film noir. Based on the 1929 story by Dashiell Hammett, the poster shows a world-weary Humphrey Bogart, a mysterious but lovely Mary Astor, and shifty-eyed Peter Lorre all drawn inside the outline of a falcon. In one corner two cars skid down a road, headlights beacons in the night. Elsewhere a man runs as he shoots a guy following him across a bridge. A luxury liner is steaming in at the top. The poster contains most of the stock icons of film noir, but somehow manages not to look cluttered or dumb.

Also interesting for their dramatic stylishness and skilled execution are the several dozen lobby cards, which are 11-inch-by-14-inch mini-posters that were tacked around theater lobbies to promote the movies. While not as eye-catching as the big posters, the cards are notable for their often lurid color schemes and excellent draftsmanship.

Film noir was the defining American film style of the '40s, though it extended into the '50s and was the precursor to many of the darker and more fatalistic films of the '60s and '70s. It has made a comeback in the '80s and '90s with such movies as "Fargo" and "Dead Again." The genre tells the stories of brooding, down-and-out characters, most of whom aren't likely to end up happy, even if they end up alive. Characters are often unlucky Sam Spades who owe back rent on their grubby offices, and tough, felonious femmes fatales who'd rather not talk about their pasts. Bad guys lurk around every lamp-lit, rain-slick street corner.

Film historians trace film noir to the German and Austrian directors such as Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder, Otto Preminger and Robert Siodmak who fled Nazi Germany in the '30s and '40s for Hollywood. Once there, they brought their brooding, pessimistic, Expressionist ethos to their Hollywood films.

Having witnessed totalitarianism and Nazi depravity, they were not an upbeat bunch. As avant-garde Europeans, they were also influenced by French Existentialism, which dovetailed neatly with the new American genre of hard-boiled, urban detective stories being written by Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett.

"In the '40s, if you would have gotten a bunch of these directors sitting around having lunch on the Paramount lot, and asked them what they were working on, they would have said a Western, or a crime movie, or a mystery," said Olson. "None would have said they were doing film noir. That's part of the beautiful unconsciousness of it, that they all just fell into this. It took a couple of French film critics writing in the '50s to identify the genre as film noir."

Olson notes that there's plenty of "noir ethos and aesthetic today in MTV, radio ads, and it has also influenced some our young writers. . . . I think it goes back to Greek tragedy and the idea of the duality of human nature."