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Noir AmericaCynics, sluts, heists, and murder most foul.

By Stanley CrouchPosted Thursday, March 15, 2007, at 7:05 AM ET

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The collections also include compelling to breezy work by Robert Mitchum, whose low-slung eyelids, sauntering walk, bodyguard's bulk, and voice that expressed disdain or attraction or menace with equal authority and shading brought a fresh personal extension to what we now consider "cool." As the wonderfully paced confrontation with the crime boss in The Racket shows, Mitchum was one of the few actors whose masculinity could meet Ryan's sweltering complexity nose to nose. In Out of the Past, when his fall-guy tells the elegant gangster played by Kirk Douglas not to foolishly trade blows with him, we believe Mitchum. His power seemed limitless but, like Ryan, so did his vulnerability. That was why he was an imposing romantic lead: Mitchum possessed an understated pound of delicacy for every pound of muscle.

One of the most characteristic elements of film noir is its avoidance of racist stereotypes. This is very different from the attitudes expressed in its pulp and detective-story sources. In a particularly brilliant reading of Raymond Chandler written for a 1995 issue of the New York Review of Books, Joyce Carol Oates revealed to readers the phrases

that fall casually and frequently from Philip Marlowe's lips: "nigger," "shine," "fag," "queen," "Jewess," "Mex," "greaseback," "wetback," "Jap." In this Caucasian-macho landscape, "a pansy has no iron in his bones, whatever he looks like." Marlowe's wisecracks are sometimes indistinguishable from ethnic slurs: "[You're] cute as a Filipino on Saturday night." A minor character in The High Window is "a big burly Jew with a Hitler mustache and pop eyes."

Conversely, the black actors of film noir are quite rarely expected to work their way through the greasy caricatures that have re-emerged in the contemporary minstrelsy now so common in rap videos and ethnic black comedy. In 1944's Out of the Past, the black bit players seem to be people with individual dreams and individual lives, not human whoopee cushions ever ready to shriek and guffaw while being humiliated. That is another casual American victory that we can add to the celebration of the finest things in film noir.