Film Noir and Femme Fatales

Farewell, My Lady in the High Window

(With apologies to Raymond Chandler.)

I still had one job to do, but this was personal. I’d done with work for the day so I’d lost the newshawk and was gunning solo. I walked up the hill towards the hotel, pulling my case along the flat-top like a button man dragging a stiff. Nobody gave me a second thought. I carried on in though the doors and into the lobby. This was no flop-house. It was a high class hotel, the kind of place a famous mystery writer would disappear to and only a banjo player would notice.

I walked to the bar. The air was thick, thick with loose talk of bad deeds. People spoke of murder as free and easy as a two bit snitch with a gat to his head. I looked around, saw a few faces I’d seen before, staring out of mugshots mainly. Others I couldn’t finger, but I knew I’d recognise their work. This was no ordinary weekend convention. This was the great and notorious of a criminal world and I was slap bang in the middle of it.

I cast my gaze to the bar and the liquor bottles called my name. They didn’t call loud enough. I saw her at the end and I caught her eye or more it caught me, like a mantrap. Christa Faust.

I left my case in the middle of the floor and walked through the crowd to the bar. She said goodbye to the couple she had been talking to, turned around and smiled. It was a smile that could charm the cassock off a bishop.

“Well hello.” she said. Her accent gave her away as an out of towner. I picked out East Coast, New York most likely, but it had softened. She had made a habit of being from out of town. The accent seemed the only thing that had softened. Being a stranger in a strange town didn’t faze her. We might as well be just off 5th Avenue for all she cared. She had the presence to own any bar in any town.

“Are you ready?” she said, her eyebrow arching like a pointer’s front leg. I didn’t feel much like being hunted. In a little over ten minutes I’d be the one looking down my sights at her.

“Sure,” I said, “Ready when you are.”

“I hope I’m not dressed too nice,” she said as she smoothed out the front of her black cotton dress, “Not too housewifey?”

“You look swell,” I said, to her, “Don’t worry, when I’ve finished no-one’s going to mistake you for a housewife.”

She smiled in appreciation. “Where’s your stuff?”

“My case is back there, I’ll pick it up as we go past.”

She brushed past me to lead the way. I followed her perfume back through the bar, like the cat with the cream.

She stopped at the door. “I thought my friend could join us. We look good together, light and dark, good and bad.”

A tall blonde smiled at me. She wore a light blue dress, patterned with a small gold relief. It looked like Chinese silk but we were a long way from Shanghai.

“Sure,” I said, “The more the merrier,” but then I would, I was never going refuse a blonde and a brunette together. A looked around for a redhead but figured I shouldn’t be greedy.

I turned to the blonde and she held out her hand.

“Alison Bruce, pleased to meet you.” Her gaze held mine as firmly as her hand. I could tell straight away that if a man wasn’t careful she was a dame who could tie him up with a single line and pistol whip him with the period. She was also the kind of dame that would make a man careless.

She had a gee in tow. That figured, you only ever see a dame like that on her own if she’s shopping or in trouble. She didn’t look like much would trouble her and I couldn’t see any shopping bags.

The man smiled and his eyes twinkled like the rock on a movie star’s ring-finger. I’d never met him before but I liked him, and not just because he was shorter than me. I fingered him for a right guy. I could tell he had personality. He was man enough to carry off wearing a shirt so bright it would give a statue a headache. That takes some personality.

“Where shall we do it?” Christa asked, “It’s hardly the mean streets around here.”

“We can go around the back,” I said, “I’ve already picked a spot.”

I led them through the hotel, down a long hall with blood red carpet and out the side door. We followed the road around to the rear of the building. It doesn’t matter how swanky the joint, like a cigarette girl with too much make-up, the back never lives up to the facade. The Old Swan was no exception. A disused outbuilding had a dockyard air, I could almost taste the salt. A longshoreman wouldn’t have looked out of place on the rickety gantry, or being thrown down the flight of open tread steps that led up to it.

The ladies liked what they saw. I asked them to go up the steps and onto the gantry. I didn’t need to ask twice, they were up the stairs quicker than a couple of bangtails in the Kentucky Derby.

Just when I was thinking that it was all going a bit too easy, Christa chimed in.

“Okay, I’ll do this, but on one condition.”

“And what might that be?” I asked.

“I’m only doing this if we can have a cat fight.”

“Oh boy,” I thought, “Was there such a thing as having too much luck?”

 

 

Shooting in a Film Noir Style

I’m a huge fan of both hard boiled fiction as a genre and the asthetics of film noir so when I found Christa Faust’s Website while researching authors for the Theakstons Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival the other week, I saw the potential for a great photo shoot. Luckily, not only was Christa happy to play along, she also introduced me to Alison Bruce, another crime writer with a great femme fatale style.

Film Noir isn’t so much a genre of cinema, more a stylistic approach to film making that uses low-key lighting to create contrast, hard light and deep black shadows that echo the conflicted characters and dark themes of the stories. Often objects (known as gobos, flags or cookies) are deliberately placed in front of lights to cast shadows, either across the set or the actors, helping create tension and brooding atmosphere. In the shot below, my first attempt at the Film Noir style, I’d used my own arm to cast the shadow of the unseen gunman onto the wall. In the classic Film Noir movies it wasn’t always as unsubtle as that with either recognisable objects such as pot plants, venetian blinds, fans etc used to cast interesting shadows onto walls or simple boards to control where the light fell.

 

For this shoot I wanted to concentrate on trying to get good sharp shadows of Alison and Christa on the building behind them, while letting the railings, steps and gantry cast interesting shadows around them as a fortuitous side effect. The lighting was supplied by one or two Nikon SB-900 Speedlights on light stands, zoomed all the way to 200mm to make the size of the light source as small as possible to create hard dramatic light and pulled back from the scene to make the shadows as crisp as possible. With the camera on a tripod, these strobes were then controlled by a handheld SB-800 on an SC-29 cable. Once the lights were set, it was then just a matter of directing Alison and Christa while keeping an eye on the how the light was striking them and the shadows they cast. Both Christa and Alison were fantastic at playing up the part as femme fatales, striking great poses on the gantry, casting those strong shadows on the wall and letting the light hit theirs faces at just the right angles to give that hard defined edge.

I’d have been happy with the just shots we’d got there and then, but Christa really did say that she was only doing this if they could have a cat-fight and it was when she started acting out a scene with Alison that the shoot really came alive. Together, they gave me scenes to shoot which could have been lifted straight from a movie.

Christa had the scene on the steps all laid out in her mind’s eye, right down to one of her shoes having fallen off. Rather than static posing, I asked them to act out their own final climatic struggle on the steps, which they did with such relish that Christa even let out a blood-curdling scream, so loud and awful that I was expecting the sound of sirens to follow shortly after.

Post production was relatively simple. Starting in Photoshop I cropped the frames to the old standard cinematic ratio of 16:9 and removed an incongruous white cable which snaked down the wall. I then converted the images to black and white in Lightroom with a preset, adjusting the exposure to get the right balance of shadows and highlights. I then created a slight vignette and finally, added grain to each shot to give them a filmic quality.

Alison Bruce’s latest book, The Calling is published by Soho Press

Christa Faust’s latest book, Choke Hold, is due out in the UK in October, published by Titan Books.

Finally, I have to reserve a special mention to Alison’s husband, Jacen who not only was so gushing in positivity that you couldn’t help but get caught up by it, he also made a fantastic voice activated light-stand. Jacen has an album out The Siren, 14 Songs of Fact and Fiction.