As a genre trafficking in the subversive delights of mystery and intrigue, it seems fitting that the definition of film noir remains enigmatic. Cinephiles endlessly frame debates about what titles should be included in the category, based on varying conceptions of what noir should be. Despite the contention, some generally accepted principles operate: All films noir must integrate melodrama, naturalism, and expressionism in their stylistic palette, and they should deal with crime as their subject.
Discussions concerning what film noir is often minimizes the historical circumstances the genre sprung from. Andre de Toth’s Pitfall exemplifies the evolution of the crime film both in terms of style and content, presenting criminality within the context of an emerging “affluent society” defined by consumer confidence and corporate prosperity. It is also very specific in its depiction of changing urban demographics of Los Angeles, utilizing physical landmarks of the city’s West side and Mid-Wilshire districts to convey the character of its neighborhoods. It creatively uses budget limitations to create an unnatural, artificially constricted world that substitutes physical realism for something more psychologically intense.
Like 1944’s seminal Double Indemnity, middle class dissatisfaction serves as a source for the specific type of criminal behavior that Pitfall depicts. It follows the angst strewn path of an insurance claims manager named John Forbes (Dick Powell), whose adjustments to the social expectations of postwar society fuel feelings of dullness and worthlessness. Although happily married with a nice suburban house and an adoring son, and rewarded with a fine desk job, he feels a lingering sense of discontentedness. Because his war service relegated him to clerical work, he made an easy transition to bureaucratic, white collar management. He naturally feels some guilt over the advantage he obtained over the combat vets who got the glory and respect for their heroism, but the short end when it came to opportunity once hostilities ceased. Forbes’ respectability, in short, masks an inner sense of undeserved entitlement.
He also earns the envy of an independent investigator named Mac (Raymond Burr) who seethes over the ease in which his client obtained social stature without putting in an appropriate display of masculine effort. Both men recognize a profound degree of inequity in the awarding of status in the postwar years, yet they express it differently. Forbes responds to his station by mouthing a series of resigned wisecracks and tirades about the boredom of bureaucratic life while treating those below him with indifference and condescension. Mac takes it upon himself to destroy Forbes for continually offending his dignity by repeatedly giving him the high hat. When Forbes begins seizing assets on a particular fraud claim, the latent hostility between these two men comes out into the open.
This being film noir, the catalyst of the conflict involves a woman. In tracking down the assets of an insurance fraud case that Forbes is handling, Mac discovers that much of the money went, in the form of gifts, to the fraudster’s girlfriend, Mona Stevens (Lizabeth Scott, whose hard-bitten, sultry weariness places her in the top rank of femme fatales). Even though Mac lets Forbes know he is interested in seeing her in a more intimate manner, Forbes nevertheless becomes smitten with the woman whose presents he must repossess. When Forbes lets Mona keep a motor boat, he allows an opening for Mac to extort him. Later, as the relationship between Mona and the married adjuster becomes more romantic, the investigator embarks a more daring set of schemes to move the adjuster out of the picture and the model into his bed.
Once an aura for suspicion is established in the appearance of a marital transgression, there is little that Forbes and Mona can do to come clean without destroying whatever relationships they hold dear. As Forbes’ paternalistic boss says, why confess an affair when all that would do is appease your guilt while further hurting the aggrieved spouse? They conceal the nature of their relationship to their loved ones, only to see the nature of those obfuscations create unexpectedly violent and tragic consequences when Mac exploits every transgression to his advantage. Ultimately Mona takes a decisive step against her stalker/antagonist, becoming the only character to face justice for a series of moral lapses in which she is the least guilty party.
In most movies of domestic suspense, where husbands are lured into dangerous affairs of the heart, the “other woman” is usually the instigator, using feminine wiles to secure material comforts in a world where men control the power. Pitfall foregrounds that inequity by underscoring Mona’s sense of decency and morality. She, for example, calls off the affair with Forbes when he fesses up to his marital status. Despite being lured into an affair under false pretenses, she continues trying to protect Forbes from Mac and his deranged methods of intimidation, and later, from the jealous rage of her enraged ex-boyfriend, to whom she also lies to in order stop a greater evil, to no avail. In the ultimate expression of her protective instinct, she commits a crime that lets a dishonest, if repentant, man go free while she goes to jail. Mona is no femme fatale, but “a woman in the middle”, doomed for acting on feminine virtues and impulses in a world of morally compromised heroes and psychically disturbed men.
Pitfall exemplifies a significant trend in the crime story that carried into the 1940s from the previous decade. The most popular escapades of criminal daring-do in the 30s were inspired by the gangsters of Prohibition. Crime was a product of urban social conditions, bad laws, and the press portraying the underworld “boss” as a kind of anarchic celebrity. Criminality was thereby defined in sociological terms. In the 1940s, the focus shifted towards the psychological adjustment of people to new expectations brought on by the conditions of post-WWII prosperity. Forbes and Mona alleviate their boredom and loneliness by taking a break from the routines of daily life in each other’s company. The guilt resulting from their trysts and their investment in their other personal relationships make them hide their affair with their partners until Mac forces out the truth. Constrained by the weight of their evasions, their inner turmoil manifests itself in the outbreak of repressed violence. The mental stress of social expectations is a constant theme in this film, and in those like Act of Violence, another 1948 noir dealing with upward social mobility and veterans, where suppression of human desire comes into conflict with the suburban sublime.
As an historian, I really enjoy the film’s specific references of Los Angeles’ post-WWII suburban terrain. Forbes lives in Baldwin Hills (a suspicion that I confirmed when I Googled his address), and he travels via La Brea and Wilshire Boulevards to his office. Mona works at the May Company department store on Fairfax and Wilshire a few blocks west of Forbes’ route (that location, by the way, is the future home of the AMPAS museum). The marina where Mona’s boat is docked would be a few miles off to the west of the apartment where she lives as well. The Los Angeles depicted here is not the archetypal symbol of alienation so often deployed in movies such as Murder My Sweet, but one of growth and sprawl, and the movie strives to present its setting in precise architectural detail and topographic specificity.
Pitfall differs from De Toth’s other memorable L.A. noir, Crime Wave, in that, despite being a literalist depiction of the city in its time, it eschews a neo-realist representation of the landscape in favor of something more psychologically immediate and claustrophobic. De Toth’s cameraman Harry Wild shoots the cramped apartment units and closed concept rooms in deep focus, emphasizing the physical separation of the actors, and also uses various contrasts on foreground and background elements to add great depth and texture to each conversation. The viewer experiences a terrific sense of tension in this contrast between the claustrophobia of the interiors and the expanded space in which the characters interact. The use of rear screen projection during the exterior sequences (and in one scene at Mona’s workplace) seems pretty jarring, but it also produces an alienating effect. While the movie unfolds in a city that boasts an objectively authentic physical geography and style, the presentation is subjective and strives for psychological intensity.
Like the best of films noir, Pitfall uses the dramatic potential of the crime story and the specifics of urban geography to portray the relationship between social forces and personal anxiety. It deploys abstract modes of geometrical composition and theatrical artifice to create an emotional, melodramatically enhanced vision of alienation from society’s norms. Its sense of place is authentic, but its spatial aesthetics are hyperbolically romantic, forcing us to directly experience what we might otherwise only contemplate from a position of philosophical distance. If I were to ascribe my own definition of film noir, I’d emphasize its poetic abstraction of concrete responses to the conditions of modern life for deeply emotional purposes. Pitfall just might be the best manifestation of this ideal.