Leave Her to Heaven (What is Noir?)

When I read the book Leave Her to Heaven by Ben Ames Williams, which I picked up at the City Lights bookstore in San Francisco a few years ago, I thought it would be kind of a cross between Laura and Bedelia, two books by Vera Caspary. In fact it came out in 1944, the year between those two books and was the seventh best-selling novel of that year and although it shares a lot of the same plot elements as those novels, I thought it superior to both, but those books I would consider noir fiction where as Leave Her to Heaven was pure melodrama. The only crime in the book would be called manslaughter at best and there is a lot of the Freudian psychology popular at the time, though the femme fatale was a cold-hearted bitch very reminiscent of Caspary's Bedelia and as ruthless as any in hardboiled crime fiction.

Then I saw the movie that was made the following year (1945). It would be nearly impossible to classify it as noir. Just the simple fact of its being in color disqualifies it from being noir, I believe. Which left me pondering the definition of noir fiction and film noir, so I decided to take a Freakonomics-style statistical approach to answering the question of what noir is.

First we need look at what most aficionados and film critics think of as noir--it's urban in setting, has crime as a subject or backdrop, it's shot in black and white and it was made in the 1940s or 50s. Using the Internet Movie Database (IMDB), we can get data on two of these categories for all the movies tagged as "film-noir"--the release date and whether the movie was shot in black & white or color. By eliminating results more than twice the standard deviation from the norm or in this case the peak of film noir popularity you pretty much end up with a group of films that everybody would consider noir. In fact, you come up with some intriguing results

Doing a search on IMDB for films tagged with "film-noir" you come up with 485 feature films, of which only 13 are in color. That means that 97% of the films tagged as noir are black and white and if you've seen some of the color films such as Leave Her to Heaven and A Kiss Before Dying you know instinctively that they aren't noir, so the percentage is even higher if you were to weed out results based on the other factors such as crime or the urban setting.

Now let's look at the distribution of films over the years that noir was popular and you find that the peak years for the genre was 1947 to 1950 in which 38% of all noir films were released and that 97% of all films tagged noir were released between 1940 and 1958. It's also interesting to note that 98% or these films were produced by the US or Britain and that the most popular tags for these movies were "beautiful woman" (364) and "murder" (277).

I've not actually seen a color film pre-1958 that I thought stylistically fits the genre. But not being color is the least of the disqualifying aspects of the movie Leave Her to Heaven, though. It's not urban. It's shot mostly in the daylight, outdoors and--the most disqualifying point of all--it's not really a crime film. The screenwriter seemed to overlook the fact that the crime for which one of the characters goes to jail for at the end or the movie was actually written out of the script leaving many a viewer, I'm sure, scratching his or her head at the end.