The Underground in Film Noir

Underground infrastructure seems to be ignored by most film critics studying film noir and the city. Instead, when critics examine what have been defined as noir films in relation to the city and its modern foundation, they highlight the spaces above this underground, especially in relation to cultural context rather than filmic history. In Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity, for example, Edward Dimmendberg explores “How … film noir illuminate[s] the late-modern spaces of the 1940s and 1950s to which it provided unique access…. [and] What lessons might its spatial representations offer in the present” (3). Dimmendberg concludes that film noir does not fit into the filmic history that comes before and after the noir period and argues,

the nonsynchronous character of film noir is best apprehended as a tension between a residual American culture and urbanism of the 1920s and 1930s and its liquidation by the technological and social innovations accompanying World War II, as well as the simultaneous dissolution of this new social compact of the 1940s and 1950s by the society emerging in the 1960s, in which the simulacra and spectacles of contemporary post-modern culture are clearly visible in retrospect. (3).

For Dimmendberg, although nonsynchronous with filmic history, film noir and its representation of the city stand out as a transition between a modernist urban (centripetal) world and a post-modern fragmented world that grows out of post World War II “innovations.” In the film noir world, bifurcations remain, so good and evil is more easily discerned. In the post-noir world, “the dark cities of film noir” are “eclipsed by the dispersal of space in the suburbs and the geographic ubiquity and impersonality of the large corporation and the more opaque social and economic relations developing in its wake” (Dimmendberg 4).

    Dimmendberg’s argument makes sense from an architectural perspective, where prior to the Interstate Highway System of the 1950s, the city center served as the space of focus in wartime and post-WWII U.S. cities—thus a centripetal urge. Centrifugal (outward) forces stimulated suburban growth and, in film noir, action moved outside the city from the 1950s forward, according to Dimmendberg. But Dimmendberg begins from the perspective that the cityscape and its evolution are a given, a “natural” response to changes in social and cultural conditions rather than an environmental adaptation that effects change at the level of ecosystem. Instead of simply an element of the mise-en-scene, we suggest that film noir’s cityscape is a constructed space resting on the sewer system and underground infrastructure below it. We argue, then, that in He Walked By Night (1948) and The Third Man (1949), the heroes both adapt and are adapted by an underground built to sustain the city above them, all in response to a war-torn world around them.
    Underground rail systems play a big part in film noir. Subways, like the underground sewer and water drainage systems in other films, are first constructed and then reconstructed to serve the needs of the films’ protagonists. In Pickup on South Street (1953 Sam Fuller) and Dark City (1998 Alex Proyas), for example, a noir underworld becomes a literal underworld in scenes shot in a dark angled subway used primarily as a hiding place for protagonists and/or their enemies. In film, the underground serves as a cinematographic wonderland, an aesthetic as well as ecological space that serves both function and form for films noir like He Walked by Night and The Third Man. 

    He Walked by Night (1948) and The Third Man (1949) examine the idea of the city as a social and cultural construct. They also highlight how and why social, cultural and historical forces construct “gangsters,” not their genes. But what sets these films apart from other noir films is the attention they give to the urban infrastructure hidden below its progressive construction. By foregrounding sewers as constructions, escape routes, and seemingly safe havens for noir characters, He Walked by Night and The Third Man demystify what seem like givens and call into question the idea of the city as natural.  

    For example, the storm drains built to stem floods and control the Los Angeles River are further transformed to assist He Walked by Night's Roy (Richard Basehart) in his crime wave and produce a suspenseful noir. The low-ceilinged and low-lit round and square drains serve as sinister frames for Roy’s escape attempt. They foreground how trapped Roy has become—both literally and figuratively. But they also remind us that the urban space of Los Angeles has become transformed twice, first from a natural fertile basin to concrete, and now from a drainage system to an escape route.  Harry Lime (Orson Welles) constructs the sewers of Vienna in similar ways in The Third Man, highlighting how 

film noir suggests through its visuals that a constructed urban environment may both literally and figuratively trap characters in a chaos they seek to escape.

An underground first seems to provide safety for post-war noir heroes in He Walked by Night (1949) and The Third Man (1949), as it did for civilians during World War II; it also serves as an ideal aesthetic space for post-World War II film noir. Adapting an already transformed concrete space into both an escape route and a quintessential noir setting, Roy and Lime seem to construct (or at least adapt to) a setting devoid of nature where lone anti-heroes escape the urban wilderness above them. Building on the already de-naturalized environment—a concrete covered river and valley in Los Angeles and a bombed-out and segmented version of Vienna—He Walked by Night and The Third Man suggest that in such an unnatural world, human nature also suffers. Instead of saving them, the sewers Roy and Lime reconstruct trap them and ultimately serve as their graves. Constructed as criminals seeking success after World War II, Roy and Lime meet the only fate an underworld and underworld culture can provide, especially in the noir world of the late 1940s cinema—death.