My Favorite Film Noir Bad Boys
- Terry Hamburg
- 5 days ago
- 3 min read
Film noir anti-heroes are often flawed and damaged, or average Joes dealt a fateful, lousy hand. Even when they’re toxic, most have redeeming qualities. But some are just bad to the bone. The dark streets are crawling with them. It’s their playground.
Almost by definition, a film noir must have at least one dangerously offbeat character. Some are “sociopaths.” You know them when you see them: tightly wound, impulses pulsating, ready to fly off the handle, and amoral. Loose cannons. “Psychopaths” are just as amoral, but cool and calculating—manipulative, often charming, and difficult to recognize on sight, which may make them even more dangerous. Cads, cons, and sometimes killers.
My award for the Best Film Noir Sociopath is shared by Tommy Udo and Cody Jarrett. Richard Widmark in Kiss Me Deadly and James Cagney in White Heat virtually defined the role. Both actors managed to escape the Hollywood straitjacket to pursue a versatile film career. A young Widmark was terrified that his brilliance as the giggling Tommy Udo time bomb - which garnered an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor in 1948 - might typecast him for life. He lobbied 20th Century Fox studio head Darryl Zanuck for more varied roles and eventually got them. He did make four more noir films, all toned-down versions of Tommy Udo, except Panic in the Streets where he portrays a courageous young doctor racing alone to save New Orleans from a deadly plague.
Psychopaths in film noirs can range from serial killers to media moguls. They have clear, defined goals and the rational amorality to achieve them. The evil psychopathic genius is one of the oldest characters in literature - think of Dr. Moriarty, the omnipresent nemesis of Sherlock Holmes. Many of the noir psychopaths do not murder, unless they absolutely must, and some never must.
They can take the form of simple but talented grifters who will con or caress anyone to get what they want, usually money. Sex for them is transactional; they are already in love with themselves. Howard Duff in Shakedown plays a slick, amoral photojournalist who will lie and cheat his friends and lovers on a climb to notoriety and fortune. The Great Jewel Robber, based on a true story, features David Brian as the most heartless of heels, using his husky, handsome charm to exploit and deceive every skirt he can find to further his ambitions as a high society burglar. Both remain unrepentant and narcissistic to the bitter end.
Neither of these characters killed anyone. As deplorable as they were, murder would be out of character. This takes a special kind of psychopath - the likes of a young Robert Wagner in a Kiss Before Dying. The slick, calculated callousness with which he plots the murder of his girlfriend is bone chilling. The type can also be a clever, conniving husband who is controlling an innocent madly-in-love-with-him wife for the most dastardly of reasons. Sudden Fear and Sleep My Love portray ice-in-their veins husbands who plot with diabolical malice aforethought to dispatch their wives for fortune. A similar psychopath in Gaslight will settle for her lifetime commitment to an insane asylum.
What about the ladies of noir? Weren’t they just as psycho? Indeed. Dames rival men in such roles, which makes them the equal of men, a threatening and revolutionary message beneath the soft femme fatale glamor. It is more shocking when the “weaker” and “fairer” sex dances with Lucifer. Hell has no fury like a woman. In another blog you’ll meet some very vexing vixens.
