Transformed Spaces: Of Crime and the City

As with all great films, crime dramas, at their best, are much more than the machinations of their dense plots. Some of these films contain a forbidden allure, one that allows us to  revel in the criminals’ utter disregard for the norms of respectable society, before our moralizing mechanisms kick into gear and let the law tighten its noose. Others bring about sympathy for the criminal, treating him as an ordinary human being inevitably thrust into a life of crime by ideological forces beyond his control. While both these kinds of films (and those which marry the two) provide us with their pleasures — the pulsating thrill of evasion, the  throbbing suspense wrought from the criminals’ predicaments, the rough-hewn, hard-boiled swagger of the protagonists and the rigorous, elaborate codes of criminal gangs which riff off and counter the legal codes of society — they also allow us to grasp the spaces traversed and the structures undergirding them.  

Criminals are among the few who constantly straddle the high and low, to borrow the title of Kurosawa’s greatest film, forcing themselves into spaces and properties inaccessible to those constrained by the law. When the location is confined to the labyrinths of the teeming metropolis, the architecture of the city comes alive as a living, breathing organism, continually transformed by and, transforming the roiling interiors of its inhabitants. Nothing is sacred anymore, all areas are ripe for exploration. The lawlessness of crime permits filmmakers to exploit and study the geometries of their space while simultaneously propelling their plot  forward. How else could Alfred Hitchcock delineate the contours of the British Museum in Blackmail (1928) without a high-wire chase on the museum’s rooftops instigated by a criminal on the run? 

Before Hitchcock, Louis Feuillade used criminal gangs in his crime serial, Les Vampires (1915-16), in similar chases on the rooftops of bourgeois homes. Every building, crevice, and nook is an opportunity for navigation, a means of feeling the architecture and its various facets. The gang constantly redefines traditional entry and exit points through their exploration of various inlets and outlets in buildings; vents and windows are as much mediators between the external and internal as are doors, with rooftops existing as a liminal space that’s simultaneously outside and inside. While the plot itself involves the adventures of Philippe Guerande, a reporter who tries to stop the gang, the criminals are far more interesting precisely because of their ability to tap into the potentialities of all these spaces, possessing a limbering grace in their gleeful flouting of norms — immortalized by Irma Vep (one of the criminals, played by Musidora) and her spandex suit. Irma Vep’s wall-crawling antics and destabilization of traditional spatial structures in Paris captivated so many filmmakers, including Olivier Assayas, whose meta-film Irma Vep (1996) resurrects the immortal character to delineate the state of cinema in France itself without forsaking the pleasures of seeing Irma Vep grab snatches of conversations as she jumps from wall to wall. 

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The action in Les Vampires is not limited to the city alone, extending to the countryside and train stations as well, but its principle of exploiting various recesses in buildings has been utilized in many films set in a modern city. One of the most intriguing of these is Seijun Suzuki’s Branded to Kill (1969), which uses its bare-bones plot of one hitman trying to assassinate another to stage extraordinarily arresting shots (pun intended) from various vantage points in the city. Goro Hanada (Joe Shishido), a hitman who is “Number 3” on the rankings, is fleeing from “Number 1” after Goro botches an assignment given to him. The ludicrousness of the plot is only an invitation for Suzuki to create an atmosphere of paranoiac surveillance from the strangest of vantage points, such as the hole created by a billboard for a cigarette lighter. 

The urban landscapes are crammed with details and advertisements, so much so that an assassination can happen from anywhere. Paradoxically, these assassination attempts combine surveillance with a kind of homoeroticism between the two hitmen, culminating in a perverse courtship of feints at an apartment. Existing in the niches is itself a form of exhilaration, and the joy which arises from Branded to Kill emerges not only from the bizarre surrealism and outrageous one-upmanship, but also from the discovery of unique spaces in a packed urban landscape. 

While these crevices are very useful for assassinations, they are overkill (no pun intended) for more modest criminal activities such as thieving and pickpocketing. Blending with the crowd is more than sufficient for pickpocketing, and if spotted, buildings, sharp turns, and narrow alleys are great avenues for escape. A gang of pickpockets are thus, required to be familiar with the contours of the city, and a film centering on them, like Johnnie To’s Sparrow (2008), becomes a study of street architecture. Johnnie To films the gang with a lightness of touch, portraying their pickpocketing as a logical extension of their meanderings in the city. A mysterious woman (Kelly Lin) crossing their paths triggers an elaborate game of ruses and reversals scattered across the streets of Hong Kong. Since the gang consists of four pickpockets, To particularly trains his eye on the geometry of four-way intersections and car traffic, observing how the characters alternate between anonymity and visibility amidst the bustle. Bodies dissolve into intersecting lines and curves in long shots, while they become more scattered in medium shots and closeups. This frequent abstraction of the plot through streets and bodies makes Sparrow an exceptional city poem, even though the plot mechanics  occasionally force the action indoors.  

Credit: Criterion Collection

This tension between anonymity and visibility is even more apparent in closed, crowded spaces, where one can lose track of a person easily. Samuel Fuller zones in on this angle in the opening scene of Pickup on South Street (1953), where the police are keenly watching Candy  (Jean Peters) inside a metro, a defining accoutrement of modern city travel. An unwitting bearer of communist secrets, her gaze is directed elsewhere, at the strong, tough pickpocket Skip (Richard Widmark), who in turn senses an opportunity to steal her purse. In a series of sharp edits, Fuller collides their multiple perspectives until Skip pockets her purse, flows with the crowd and slides along the metro door to the platform before the police realize what has happened. Swirling emotions and actions appear to converge for an infinitesimal second, only to be swept away by the density of the crowd. All actions are blurred in crowded city spaces until the moment has passed. 

Amidst such a crowd, finding even known faces can be difficult, especially in open spaces. Brian De Palma’s pet theme of doppelgangers is taken to a perverse, exploitative extreme in Blow Out (1981), where the killer responsible for the murder of a presidential candidate zones in on a feature of his target — her curly hair — only to realize that appearances can be deceptive,  as the girl whom he killed turned out to be someone else. The killer instead stages more copycat killings of curly-haired women to mislead the press. A hallmark of serial-killer movies becomes a conspiracy — a conspiracy arising out of the confusion of the shifting bodies in a crowded city. While such confusion could arise in a romantic comedy or in Jacques Demy musicals such as The Young Girls of Rochefort (1967)¸ where the characters search for lost loves in the city, De Palma inverts it for the crime cinema, albeit for a more exploitative purpose. 

The city can mislead even those who are familiar with its forking paths. For those who aren’t, it can be a nightmare. This, along with the transgressive pleasures of criminals, is one reason why crime films, or more accurately, films dealing with crime set in the city, tend to give greater prominence to the criminals. In Pépé Le Moko (1937), Jean Gabin plays a thief in Algiers who is wanted by the police, but they can never catch him in the crisscrossing streets of the Casbah, where roadways and alleys appear to duplicate themselves. Only a person familiar with the locales and its denizens can discern the differences and find uncanny escape routes. A policeman, in such films, is generally a dull protagonist, as the efforts needed to make him stand out come at the cost of diminishing the vibrancy of the city. 

Robert Altman, however, chooses to emphasize the unfamiliarity of his private detective protagonist in The Long Goodbye (1974), Phillip Marlowe (Elliot Gould), by transposing Raymond Chandler’s hard-boiled noir to post-hippie Los Angeles. Marlowe is not only a figure out of his time, but also out of his space, which is why he keeps struggling to catch up throughout the film. Characters and clues drift in and out of the story like faces in a crowd until they suddenly burst with greater urgency. Marlowe is a relic in a world of supermarkets, freeways, and regimented schedules, and Altman employs him as a means of exploring the fragmentation of Los Angeles under shifting times and, more subtly, ideologies. 

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Alternatively, a film involving crime could be centered around an outsider instead of the standard police and criminal. In Lino Brocka’s evocatively titled Manilla in the Claws of Light  (1975), a young fisherman, Julio, from the village comes to Manilla in search of his missing girlfriend who was recruited in the city as a maid. Julio toils for peanuts as a construction worker during the day and searches for his girlfriend in the night. Because of the personal investment, Julio can be called a “high tourist” (though he wouldn’t like that) as he explores the depths of the city in his quest, not restricting himself to the attractive bits. Brocka switches  various styles to match the moods of the city with Julio’s, shifting from cinema verité to eye-popping pulpiness to pastoral fantasias, stoking our (and Julio’s) righteous anger at the injustices of the city. In Brocka’s Manilla, every area is remade according to the attitudes of its inhabitants, as excursions into Chinatown and the gay districts show, where males strolling around the parks is of particular importance in the latter, informing our perceptions of the park itself. Julio’s high tourist wanderings are anchored by the knowledge that the city is inextricably tied to capitalism, so much so that the lightings and geometries of certain streets, though vibrant, are window dressings for a certain product. The explosive ending acquires an indelible force precisely because of this rebellious urgency. 

Kurosawa also relates the architectural framework of the city with the ideological framework in his aptly titled High and Low (1963), where a search for the kidnapper forces the cops to adopt the perspective of the criminal. A kidnapper blackmails a wealthy executive (Toshiro  Mifune) by (accidentally) kidnapping his chauffeur’s son, and the interior dilemma of the executive on whether he should accede to the kidnapper’s demands is thrust onto the external city as the police chase the kidnapper. The executive’s home is ensconced in the hills, towering mockingly over the inhabitants of the lower city. Kurosawa keeps drawing attention to this contrast through the chase, making even the police feel the kidnapper’s resentment as they toil in the lower city despite the oppressive heat. The rigid stratification and stark wealth disparity result in each area acquiring its unique characteristic, and the lower you sink geographically, the more desperate the people, as a moralizing sequence of nighttime grunge in an area of drugged denizens shows. Crime arises in a city from its construction, and is as intrinsic to the city as its office buildings. 

Such a pessimistic view of the city is also characteristic of noir, where the long, elongated shadows and harsh lighting envision the city as a fatalistic, doomed space for its characters. The city has been famously described as a character in these films, where raging emotions are projected onto the urban landscapes, transforming them entirely into an unstable dreamscape of traps and desires. However, this makes the city less of a character than a site for projections. Many noirs aren’t exactly city films because the city is consumed by the fatalism of the director and the desires of the protagonist, leaving less space for the city to exert itself on the characters. In the case of Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly (1955), though, Los Angeles is shaken not by an individual protagonist, but by the tremors of the atomic bomb. The film traverses over multiple neighborhoods of Los Angeles, and accordingly, we have a  labyrinthine plot. But the entire city is engulfed by an apocalyptic paranoia, regardless of class, creed, and neighborhood. All roads converge to the bomb, though Aldrich at least uses this as an opportunity to explore the unique architecture of the city’s neighborhoods, as Thom  Anderson notes in Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003). The city isn’t exactly a character, but the actual people in the film aren’t fully formed either. Paranoia has become the abiding social and organizing order. Even in this nihilistic tale, Los Angeles appears as essential as the labyrinthine plot which goes everywhere and nowhere.

Credit: Criterion Collection

The organization of the city also becomes a stand-in for human nature, with the city representing the macrocosm of contradictory actions and impulses. This somewhat pretentious philosophical thesis forms the central idea in Carol Reed’s Odd Man Out (1947), where the theme of man on the run is adopted to explore Belfast at night. While the surface still focuses on compassion and selfishness during times of difficulty, Reed’s poetics, as in The Third Man, elevates the film beyond its philosophical trappings. His attentive eye scours not only the relation between the architecture and its inhabitants, but also the dramatic shifts in aura once nighttime arrives. Melancholy wafts into the air and mixes with the rain, which acquires a distinctive gleam as it pours onto the cobblestones. A study of the troubled characters also becomes a study of light, weather, and the architecture of the city at night. 

Organization though, as Fritz Lang’s masterful M (1931) shows, needn’t exclude the political, or even be cagey about it. Even though Lang doesn’t explicitly mention the complex political dynamics of Weimar-era Germany, or fascism — he does include socialism in one of his dialogues though, which frames the movie interestingly through collectives, mobs, and institutions, with the individual awkwardly caught in the mix — but imbues his film with an oppressive atmosphere, giving the impression of a city and its turbulent society at a boiling  point. The serial killer is a mere trigger which sets off two restless institutions in motion — the  police and the thieves — to enforce an atmosphere of strict surveillance and rigid compliance. The seedy is no longer the domain of the thief, nor are the affluent neighborhoods the domain  of the rich, with incursions occurring on both sides by both the institutions. Berlin acquires a completely new character in the eyes of its citizens; every street corner is laced with daggers. But Lang also chronicles the effect of this transformation on its citizens through his canted angles and overhead shots, which accounts for why we even perversely identify with the killer, because his independence from any institution renders the oppressive surveillance with an overwhelming intensity. Bright lights in city neighborhoods at night serve as constant reminder of an unknown threat, while also disrupting privacy and the standard rhythms of life. The psychological and the actual, the organization and the individual, and the fragmented and the whole all come together in Lang’s magnificent portrait of a city and society in flux.

The films described here are by no means exhaustive, and, naturally, crime is not necessary to explore the city in cinema. Numerous counter-examples exist, and many are without plot as well. However, plots in a commercial film, at least the best ones, are much more than mere compromises. Crime films observe figures on an urban landscape reworking the city in their own image, exploiting the architecture for their means and ends, and even transforming the geometry through that interaction (the entire suburb exploding in Jackie Chan’s Police Story  (1987) is a striking example of the latter). In the final scene of Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Eclisse (1963), the couple’s haunts are shown in a series of shots, but this time, devoid of the couple themselves. Their specters are eerily felt as it is impossible to decouple the people from the spaces after all we have seen — the spaces are strangely familiar and unfamiliar. The best films dealing with crime are striking illustrations of these transformed spaces and characters, allowing the forces of defiance, anarchy, and morality to commingle with the ideology and architecture of the city. In this way, crime liberates commercial cinema as much as it loosens our shackles to look at (and revel in) different possibilities, and in some cases, injustices inherent to the city.