DARK NIGHT OF THE SOUL : THE STRUCTURE AND PSYCHOLOGY OF FILM NOIR.

Byline: Michiko Kakutani The New York Times

Title: ``Somewhere in the Night: Film Noir and the American City''

Author: Nicholas Christopher

Data: 290 pages, The Free Press; $25

Our rating: Three Stars

The archetypes of this genre are familiar ones. Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck plotting to murder her husband and collect his insurance money (``Double Indemnity''). Robert Mitchum realizing that a former lover and former employer have entangled him in a web of murder and deception from which there is no escape (``Out of the Past''). Ray Milland investigating a murder committed by his boss, only to find that all the clues point to himself (``The Big Clock''). Jack Nicholson drawn by a mysterious woman into a murder case that unravels to disclose an entire city rife with corruption and evil (``Chinatown'').

As poet and novelist Nicholas Christopher observes in his erratic but absorbing new book, film noir is more than just a style - it's a way of looking at the world, a ``dark mirror reflecting the dark underside of American urban life.''

Having watched more than 350 examples of the genre, Christopher has written a book that attempts to provide a wide-ranging anatomy of the form, while at the same time advancing a specific thesis, namely that film noir is ``an utterly homegrown modern American form'' that ``inevitably appears in, and emblematizes, times of deep stress.''

Evolution of a genre

Film noir, of course, has many precursors - from the dark tragedies of Jacobean England to the psychological horror stories of Poe, from the urban excavations of Dickens and Dostoevsky to the expressionist films of Fritz Lang. But its efflorescence as an American genre came in the wake of World War II - a reaction, like sci-fi and horror films, to the anxieties of the new atomic age, the prospect of sudden annihilation, the paranoia of McCarthyism, the tumultuous changes wrought by a postwar economy and brave new social mores. It became, Christopher suggests, a deeply subversive form, scornful of families and family values, partial to outlaws and outsiders, and ``filled with sexual exotica and issues of deviation and fetishism.''

Christopher also argues that film noir mythologized the American city as a kind of modern-day Babylon, a Darwinian jungle where crime pays, and killers, con men and extortionists prey upon the vulnerable and weak. Even its titles, he points out, underscore its urban bias: ``The Naked City,'' ``The Captive City,'' ``While the City Sleeps,'' ``The City That Never Sleeps,'' ``Side Street,'' ``One-Way Street,'' ``The Street With No Name,'' ``Scarlet Street'' and ``Street of Chance.''

Psychological landscape

Such movies turn the labyrinthine streets and office corridors of the city into a metaphor for the psychological mazes their heroes travel in search of self-knowledge, and in doing so, create a potent image of the modern American metropolis as a forbidding (and alluring) den of inequity and sin.

The noir city is a place devoid of the small-town consolations of neighborliness and compassion, a place where misfits and malcontents lead lives of sullen desperation, eager to use whatever means necessary to get their crack at the American dream. ``Money, the lifeblood of the city, is necessarily a central issue in all noir films,'' Christopher writes, ``whether they be preoccupied with crimes of the streets or of the heart.''

In the course of this book, Christopher makes many such generalizations, going so far as to offer a ``bare-bones formula'' for the genre. In the typical film noir, he writes: ``It is night, always. The hero enters a labyrinth on a quest. He is alone and off balance.'' This solitary hero, Christopher goes on, is invariably joined by a woman - usually a seductive Circe figure - ``at a critical juncture, when he is most vulnerable.'' Meanwhile, others seek to thwart him ``through brute force or subtler manipulation,'' and the hero begins to realize that he is isolated, alone in a world seething with vice and crime and corruption.

Step by step, the hero descends ``downward, into an underworld, on a spiral.'' The object of the hero's quest, Christopher writes, ``is elusive, often an illusion.'' More often than not, he is destroyed ``by agents of a larger design of which he is only dimly aware.'' If he survives at all, ``he is a burnt-out case.''

Forcing the issue?

This tendency on Christopher's part to try to fit a vast array of films into a single schematic formula can warp his reading of individual films. He insists, for instance, that the repellent Harry Lime in ``The Third Man,'' a black-market kingpin who deals in penicillin stolen from children's hospitals, is a vaguely sympathetic figure; in another chapter, he tries to stretch the genre to include such dubious nominees as ``The Terminator'' and ``Dirty Harry.''

Indeed, Christopher seems less comfortable in the role of film critic than he is as a sociologist explaining the relationship between film noir and the tensions it reflects in society at large.

The form, he concludes, not only experienced a spirited revival during the '80s when President Reagan's rhetoric about the ``evil empire'' was at its height, but has also continued to flourish as urban woes and post-Cold-War fears of terrorism and nuclear proliferation metastasize.

``The strongest, most urgent, and most undiluted aspects of noir are not going to disappear,'' he writes, ``so long as its essential wellsprings - violence, power, fear and angst, the glamour and depravity of the city and the seductiveness of our darkest impulses - keep bubbling to the surface.''

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Photo

Photo: Jack Nicholson, left, plays a character in ``Chinatown'' who is drawn into a murder case that reveals an entire city rife with corruption and evil.