An essay by

William Preston Robertson

excerpted from
The Big Lebowski: The Making of a Coen Brothers Film
published by WW Norton & Company, Inc.

A fedora-bedecked man stands in the shadows, staring out at the city lights. A match flares under his Lucky Strike. For a quick, chiaroscuric moment, we see his face: eyes haunted by recent murder, upper lip quivering with psychosexual conflict. He blows out the match. A backlit puff of smoke curls up from his silhouette--a not-too-subtle brimstonic portent of the damnation that is his fate, beckoning to him like a dark-eyed siren lounging in a cheap cocktail dress on the rocky shore of lust. The man turns up his collar. Touches the warm gun in his overcoat. And steps out to face the night, his bowling bag clutched firmly in his fist. His bowling bag? That's right. Because this isn't just any film noir. This is that sub- of sub-genres, the rarest of the rare, the hardest of the boiled: bowling noir. Or, as the French might say: bowling noir. What's that? You've never heard of bowling noir? Huh. What film school did you say you went to?

Let's start with basics. The term "film noir" has been greatly misused in recent years to describe pretty much any low-budget movie in which nudity, violence, and a smoke machine figure heavily. Among hard-core celluloid pinheads, however, true film noir is an American cinehistorical phenomenon that spanned the decades between 1940 and 1960. Generally, the '40's-'60's era in America was a time when the great suburban exodus from the city took place, when hard-boiled pulp novels were all the rage, when the post-total-war male power structure became terrified of the strength and independence American women had shown in the labor force during WWII, and when there were a number of expatriate Austro-Germanic directors kicking around Hollywood desperately seeking any outlet, however inappropriate, for their arty Teutonism. Thus, film noirs were noteworthy for vertiginous angles and kinetic camera usage, claustrophobic set designs, a theatrical use of light and shadow; for presentations of the city as "evil" and likewise strong, independent women. The noir actors were often as deadpan and terse as the cinematography was flamboyant. And the screenplays were classic tales of badly flawed, deeply obsessed individuals unable to escape their predetermined fates. Right. Now throw in some bowling--and you've got the idea.

For the uninitiated, a good bowling noir to start with is Double Indemnity (1944), the best and best-known of the genre. What makes Double Indemnity a bowling noir is the scene in which Fred MacMurray, quite nearly febrile with the realization that Barbara Stanwyck is seducing him into a plot to murder her husband, delivers the following jittery voice-over: ...I knew I had hold of a red-hot poker and the time to drop it was before it burned my hand off....I didn't want to go back to the office, so I dropped by a bowling alley at Third and Western and rolled a few lines.... Suddenly, this otherwise murky tale of passion and murder flashes the cheerful, brightly lit image of Fred hurling a bowling ball down the hardwood with what can only be called balletic grace. And, just as quickly, the moment is gone. Fred goes back to Babs for more of the old in-out-in-out, and gives her hubby the heave-ho, never to return to the comforts of kegling. The inexorable darkness closes in. For that is the cruel law of bowling noir. Bowling is a bright beacon of chuckleheaded salvation burning in the dark existential American night, which noir characters can either follow to safety or spurn to wander forever lost. It is a symbol of goodness, wholesomeness, and tract housing--insipid, yes, even nightmarish in its own peculiar way, but rejected at one's own peril. Put another way: bowl or die.

Bowl or die. This is Fred MacMurray's lesson in Double Indemnity, and it is the lesson for Burt Lancaster in Criss Cross (1949), a bowling noir by virtue of the complete absence of bowling. Here, Burt is lured by Yvonne De Carlo into an ill-fated plot to hold up an armored car. Early in the doings, as the toothy, broad-shouldered one wavers between embracing the joys of family life and doing the same to Yvonne, Burt's father amiably suggests one night after dinner: "You wanna go bowling?" Burt grins and shakes his head wryly. "I'm no bowler, Pop!" he says. With this, he has unwittingly pronounced his own death sentence. In a moral sense, the bowling noir universe is divided into those who "are bowlers" and those who "aren't bowlers."

A movie with a more redemptive spin on the theme, as well as being the most brazenly unabashed bowling noir of all time, is Road House (1948). In Road House, bowling is not just alluded to, it is the movie's very milieu: a flashy resort-town bowling center called Jefty's. The story concerns a noirish love triangle between lonely soul-cum-bowling-center lounge singer Ida Lupino, lonely soul-cum-bowling-center manager Cornel Wilde, and perennial noir psychopath Richard Widmark. Here, bowling represents "the good life" and "settling down." As Cornel and Ida engage in the classic push-me-pull-you noir courtship, they shift between the seedy darkness and smoke of the bowling-center lounge to the clean, hopeful lights of the lanes as Cornel attempts to teach longtime single gal Ida "how to bowl." Structurally, the movie is all Ida's, as we follow her uplifting rehabilitation from independent, hard-as-nails hussy to what in the vernacular is known as an "avid bowler." Bowling imagery abounds--from the saucy jazz montage of rumbling balls and two-tone shoes that opens the film, to the ubiquitous trophies and plaques that decorate the sets, to the nonstop clatter of off-screen tenpins that punctuates the drama like thunder in a horror flick. Widmark goes psycho, of course, and some gunplay is involved, but in the end, bowling conquers all in Road House.

Here, a question arises--at some point, every student of the genre must ask it: if film noir's cinematic ancestry lies in the curious marriage of German expressionist cinema and the American gangster movie, from which side comes the bowling? Don't bother scanning Das Kabinett des Doktor Caligari (1919) for scenes of a black-clad Conrad Veidt rolling cubes down a skewed lane. The answer lies in the early gangster classic Scarface (1932), specifically the scene in which Paul Muni, in his vicious crusade to wipe out his enemies, guns down Boris Karloff as he happily bowls at the local lanes. It is a shocking moment, illustrative of Muni's ruthless ambition and utter disregard for all that is sacred. Such blasphemy, of course, cannot go unpunished in bowling noir; by the final reel, Muni gets his, but good. Still, the ball had been set in motion in Scarface, and when the gangster flick mutated to create full-blown film noir, the bowling gene was there.

By the 1960s, bowling noir had all but played itself out, and there would be only one more entry of note. In Cape Fear (1962), Bob Mitchum as the malevolent and irrepressible ex-con Max Cady stalks Greg Peck and family. So malevolent and irrepressible is Bob he actually follows the family on an outing to the bowling center--a violation Greg later recounts with eyebrow-bobbing, tooth-whistling Peckian indignation to pal Martin Balsam: "You have to know him to feel the threat. He stopped me this afternoon after court, and he showed up again this evening at the bowling center!" Balsam is flabbergasted. Clearly, they are dealing with a madman. By the time Cape Fear came along, however, the varnish on the old "bowling center as desecrated sanctuary" lane was well worn. The bowling noir genre had returned to its Scarface roots. The cycle was complete. Film noir; bowling noir. Even the coolest of genres may be burdened with an idiot son.

Text Copyright 1998

 

Der Geck Bleibt.

 

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