I know you've seen enough of the Falls for one trip, but don't cross us off your list

NIAGARA

1953

Directed by Henry Hathaway

Written by Charles Brackett, Walter Reisch, and Richard Breen

Spoilers: moderate (maybe a teensy bit high, but one generally knows how these things go, right?)

The phrase "film noir" doesn't mean a lot, and if it means less now, it didn't mean all that much even in the 1940s and 1950s, when all the "true" films noirs* were being made; but if it means anything, it should at least signify something along the lines of literal darkness, given that big expressionist stretches of inky photography comprise the hallmark of the genre, or movement, or whatever it is.  The archetypal noir is black-and-white, and while this was the result of a variety of factors, some merely industrial—the archetypal movie of the 1940s is in black-and-white; the modal movie of the 1950s is, still, in black-and-white—you do tend to think of that particular type of crime thriller as a monochrome and shadowy affair, tending to happen at night, on dangerous urban streets, perhaps attended by fog.  And then someone comes along and does it smack in the middle of the day, in what sure looks like summer, against the backdrop of what I'd contend is the most breathtakingly beautiful natural wonder in North America, and, because it would be an amazing waste of a location shoot otherwise, it's all in glorious Technicolor.

It's not like they didn't make color noirs besides Niagara, and perhaps several of higher reputation, including Bad Day At Black Rock a couple of years later, Inferno right alongside it (and even coming from the same studio, Fox), whereas I get the impression, seventy years on, that Leave Her To Heaven from fully eight years earlier has the most stock amongst cinephiles.  (Which could instigate a whole side discussion on the "noir doesn't mean shit" thing, given that I certainly don't think Leave Her To Heaven counts, nor would I—were I a zealous partisan of noir, which I am not—be very eager to count it, since it's more of a psychodrama and, to my recollection, a "good" one only to the extent it's shocking that a 1945 film has such content.  I would also like to say that Inferno, my impression of it being much more recent, just flat sucks.)  But I think Niagara might be the one that's the most "in color" on purpose, as such an important part of its visual scheme that even if director Henry Hathaway and cinematographer Joe MacDonald weren't aware of the term "noir" at the time (although having been coined seven years prior, it's entirely plausible that they were), it seems impossible that they weren't courting the irony on purpose anyway, and making a statement that the human condition is such that the nastiest shit can happen under a rainbow just as easily as in the darkest night.

It's also very pleased with itself for stumbling across such a ready-made metaphor for the irrepressibility of violent emotion and/or the irrevocability of consequences in the form of Niagara Falls, and while Niagara honestly has more than its fair share of problems—especially for a movie I'm content to call pretty damned great—one of its littler ones manifests immediately alongside one its biggest strengths, as we attend a study of the majesty of the Falls, and the insignificance of a man before them, which is of course also a study of this man George's Loomis's (Joseph Cotten's) impotence before fate and his own feelings alike.  It all amounts to some strong, smart filmmaking, except that Cotten is also voiceover narrating it, and basically saying exactly this out loud.  That goes away, but he'll raise the Niagaran metaphor to the level of text at least once more, and it's inevitably a little embarrassing and lame for him to do so, though I suppose poor George is an embarrassing and lame kind of guy.

For now, however, let's instead meet the Cutlers, Polly (Jean Peters) and Ray (Max Showalter working under "Casey Adams"), a couple of "newlyweds" in the sense that 1950s marketing man Ray has only just now, several months later, managed to get a week for their honeymoon at Niagara Falls, a destination he picked in part because he works for a shredded wheat conglomerate headquartered on the Canadian side and he hopes to get gladhanded for his celebrated shredded wheat promotional concepts by his big boss (Don Wilson).  At a fallside resort, they had reserved the cabin immediately overlooking the Falls, but it's still occupied by George and his wife, the rather younger Rose (Marilyn Monroe), and, suggesting that George isn't well, as much psychologically as physically, Rose activates the Cutlers' sympathies and they shrug and let them stay put.  Polly makes George's acquaintance later when he confirms that, whatever else, Rose wasn't lying about his psychological state, as she helps him dress a wound he sustained from throwing a temper tantrum over his obviously hot-to-trot wife playing a love song he clearly must hate, above and beyond the fact that Lionel Newman and Haven Gillespie's "Kiss" is a radically boring tune that is neither tremendously great shakes as the musical spine of a thriller, nor one that translates especially well (or even recognizably) into a giant bells melody, later used as a signal for a successful spousal murder.  Clearly, I've gotten ahead of myself, but of course that's where we soon land: Rose is cheating on George with a young man (Richard Allan), and they have planned this whole trip as a trap for George, to bash him in the head at the Journey Behind the Falls and stage it to look, instead, like just another Niagara suicide.  George is lured to the tunnel, and Rose's lover follows, and, it seems, George dies.

I guess it might be a spoiler, of sorts, but obviously Niagara's mid-film twist presupposes he didn't, but he did switch shoes with his assailant, while trusting that Rose isn't going to just blurt out, "actually, that's my lover, with whom I planned the perfect murder," and now George has his own plan for a perfect murder.  At present, though, he's just dragged himself out of the tunnel and has been more-or-less wandering about, awaiting the opportunity for revenge, except he made a mistake when he returned to the cabin that was supposed to be the Cutlers' all along, for, even if nobody believes her—because it sure is 1953 and she's just a girl, ain't she?—now Polly knows he's still alive, too.

I've already mentioned my littler quibbles with Niagara—its infrequent but awful overenunciations of its own themes, its lackluster Meaningful Song (on the other hand, Sol Kaplan's very-present score, and its anxious "what happens now?" cues, are quite great)—and these aren't too serious.  What might be a medium-sized problem is just Hollywood being Hollywood, I suppose, though it's doing it more egregiously than usual, with Monroe as the focus.  1953 was the first year where Monroe was a bona fide cultural phenomenon, and Niagara sure is aware of it.  It would be annoying, but normal, if it were only the usual matter of being asked to pretend that [insert lead actress] is overwhelmingly hotter than everyone else on the screen, not that it's effortless in this particular case when I'm looking right at Jean Peters and getting confused why her dumbass screen husband feels the need, on their honeymoon, to describe the boners that Monroe in a fuchsia dress is giving him—especially when nothing about Niagara's set-up, besides femme fatale autopilot, actually demands that Rose be so overridingly attractive that beholding her inevitably bypasses any man's rational decisionmaking—but they stride out into full-on clownish self-parody when they decide to devote thirty seconds and a leering camera move to Monroe's not-even-particularly-sexy wiggle-walking, which would probably be ridiculous even without the hubba-hubba underscoring that means, besides everything else, that Kaplan's score isn't entirely good.  And it's a pity, because of course Monroe is nice to look at, without need to make a burlesque out of it, and she's also giving a pretty solid performance, both she and Cotten afforded space—in other parts of the movie, obviously—to explain with just the way they hold their eyes that while they hate each other a great deal, that also makes them sad, and Rose's decisions have been made as much in sorrow as anger.

But the actual, real-deal problem with Niagara is that it's just one remarkably uncareful screenplay that Charles Brackett, Walter Reisch, and Richard Breen cooked up between them, which, to its credit, sort of only hits you later; it's almost kind of shaggy, without necessarily feeling it.  (Then again, you notice all that detail I provided about Ray's job?  How much would you guess that matters, at all?)  But really, at a bottom level, there's not even that much motivation for Rose's murder plot—I think Brackett et al forgot that the husband is supposed to be wealthy, or at least solvent, in these plots, but George is a loser whose only source of income seems to be renting out the Midwest sheep farm he admits he failed to competently manage—so why divorce (or straight-up abandonment) aren't options for Rose remains rather unclear.  (I think we can, however, attribute it to shock that Rose failed to seize the opportunity that her dead lover provided—after all, it looks at least as much like George murdered him as Rose had a wild plan to trick him down into a tourist tunnel, throw him over the side, and have his killer play "Kiss" on the Rainbow Tower carillon.  It's a little bit harder to spot George the fucking telepathy he needs to have had to play "Kiss" on the Rainbow Tower carillon himself, somehow snatching this information from the ether and employing it as part of his own ruse.)

But these are more like nitpicks, and I don't wish to nitpick when it's such a tortured and warped structure that Niagara's screenplay's been afforded by its screenwriters, who have removed the deuteragonists of their noir plot, George and Rose, to, essentially, the supporting cast, even though Cotten and Monroe are still the marquee stars and everything, and accordingly pushed Polly and Ray into the foreground for reasons that possibly made sense in earlier drafts, but no longer do, because Polly and Ray—really just Polly, of course, as the disbelieved woman protagonist of a thriller—have almost no effect on any aspect of the plot, not even once George accidentally pulls Polly into it.  I think, from first principles, what you'd assume the remainder of Niagara will be about is Polly being put in the classic position of knowing too much, and hence George wrestling with his strategic need to eliminate the only person, besides his obvious vengeance target, who still knows he's alive; but sometimes reasoning from first principles doesn't get you the correct results, and while they toy with the possibility for a scene, George truly has so little interest in killing Polly I would not like to say that it's occurred to him that he probably "should."  Yet I frankly do suspect there's a truly powerful version of Niagara with all the exact same narrative events, right up through the finale, where "must George also tie up this other loose end?" is the real driving conflict, because even in the Niagara we get, where, in that finale, George must think quickly to save Polly from the plummet down the falls—because Polly has been deposited on his stolen boat by the purest Goddamn writer fiat you ever did see, practically fucking coincidence—there's always this itchy feeling that they did still want Polly to be important to the story, even if she hasn't been particularly instrumental to the plot.

That's a lot of complaining about a movie I pretty unreservedly adore, and I've barely even noticed those problems, honestly, the two times I've seen it.  What's much more salient is what a drop-dead gorgeous movie this is, with its unusually sunny take on film noir.  (Even Polly and Ray, I suspect, are intended to be part of that effect: the pair of affable normies—they're literally you, viewer!—whose agreeable and perhaps not especially-passionate coziness is contrasted against the sexy, sinister darkness of the two twisted noir protagonists the film's placed right next to them, the determined murderess and the—at least pretty firmly signposted as—sexually-inadequate insulted man who aims to turn the tables on her.  But, I mean, Ray is the most normal motherfucker imaginable, just a real moron.)

Niagara, anyway, would look impressive simply on the basis of its location shooting, which is a startlingly huge fraction of the film for any 1953 production—even allowing that the resort location had to be recreated on the backlot, there's much that is demonstrably location shooting at Niagara Falls, ON, and Niagara Falls, NY, and the joins between this and Lyle Wheeler's art department's fine work are virtually invisible (except, that is, for George's tantrum scene, which I think is this noir's literal only nighttime scene, where if you look you can see the lights, meant to simulate "motion" on the "waterfall" backdrop, rather badly missing the mark, to the point the word "malfunctioning" might be appropriate).  In its usual mode, Niagara has the cast of a pretty Technicolor travelogue, enjoying the handsome gender-coded slickers that they used to give you before switching to the disgusting shopping bag-like coverings they use these days, and it hits all the must-see tourist spots, crossing back over the American border just so we can see the Cave of the Winds and the scaffolding outside it, while also using that for heft and for thrills, since the real goal that Hathaway's pursuing with this detour is to wonder if, between the anonymizing qualities of those slickers, the numerous hidey holes, the visual obscurity of the splashing water, and the thunderous noise, a woman could be murdered in broad daylight and even in the middle of the crowd here at Niagara Falls.  (And if you've ever visited and thought those scaffolds looked pretty rickety, Hathaway's got that phobia covered too.**)

It's not just the lush travelogue photography then, though that lends it as much of an unsettling feel as any dark maze of city streets; there are, likewise, stunning instances of classical noirish tropes being translated right into Technicolor, with all the slatted shadows and silhouettes you could ask for (and, adding to the repertoire, the less-stark shadows of an afternoon rendered grim by the violence that occurs within them).  Yet my favorite shot in the entire film isn't a vista of mighty Niagara, or of Monroe's silhouette occluding the golden light streaming through between her cabin's venetian blinds, but the simple thrillmaking of the high-impact shock cut to Cotten at the end of a long row of columns at a bus station, of all things, resembling a pile of clothes that got wadded up and put away wet, that nevertheless stood up on their own with the cold rage of an avenging angel.

And that's only the kick-off to the "this is a great movie, no matter what problems I have" masterpiece of a chase sequence up the Rainbow Tower that concludes with a noiseless echo of the jagged montage of the carillon bells we'd previously seen ringing, that are now still and as silent as a grave.  The movie is noir as spectacle, to a degree and of a kind that the genre did not usually strive for in its classic era—the kind that has Coast Guard helicopters in it, and if I have had complaints, it says something that one of my actual biggest is the stupidest, that they didn't get permission to throw a real boat off the Falls—and I would defy you not to respond to the size and scale and craft of it, on top of how delightfully perverse it feels to stage crimes of passion against such a wonder in the first place.

Score: 8/10

*Just kidding.  Long live the difference, but "noir" is just an English word now.

**I am ineffably bugged, however, by the absence of wintering seagulls.  I don't know what the deal is—if they merely weren't there at that time, or if a bunch of people from the production chased them off to keep them out of the way, or if in the 1950s everyone was horrible and they just murdered the seagulls to keep the place cleaner, as they are a bit unsanitary, or what—but when I went it was swarmed with the little guys.