the hat

"There's nothin' more foolish than a man chasing his hat."
-- Tom Ryan (Gabriel Byrne), a gangster who's haunted by a dream image of his hat blowing away in the woods, in Joel and Ethan Coen's Miller's Crossing (1990)

No matter how roughed-up he gets or what sort of situation he finds himself in, a film noir man instinctively grabs for his hat before he exits a scene. A man's hat is as much a part of him as... well, his gun.  If the noir hero (say, the cop or the private dick or the newspaper reporter in the course of piecing together an investigation) can be seen as a kind of tarnished knight pursuing a quest, then his hat is a vital part of his armor.  It helps preserve his hard-boiled shell, casting a shadow over his eyes should they ever unwittingly betray any sign of vulnerability or emotion.  He pulls down his fedora and raises his collar whenever he needs to cloak his identity and move through the streets incognito. And, what's more,   it keeps the damn sun out of his face -- just in case he ever has to go out in the daytime...

	At the end of John Huston's The Maltese Falcon (1941), Phillip Marlowe (Humphrey Bogart) watches stoically as he sends away a dame for a long time. He likes her, but she's no good.  The shadow from his hat shields his eyes...
... but if we look a little closer under the brim... (This is a frame enlargement; there's no such close-up in the movie.)
The ending of Joel and Ethan Coen's Miller's Crossing (1990) hauntingly recalls that of The Maltese Falcon.   In each case, the hardboiled hero sends his loved one away -- for his own complex reasons -- and watches with tear-swollen eyes.  Many a scene in Miller's Crossing begins or ends with a hat that signals someone's presence, or someone's departure:  a hat on a dresser, on a bed (bad luck!), tumbling down a staircase... Or, in the opening titles, a hat blowing away through the woods.  It's a recurring dream Tom (Gabriel Byrne) has.  But he never pursues the elusive fedora, he just watches it blow away:   "There's nothing more foolish than a man chasing his hat."
Prof. Richard Wanley (Edward G. Robinson) has a perfectly practical reason to pull down his hat -- and it's not just to keep the rain out of his face.  You see, the corpse of the man he's just killed is in the back seat, and he's been forced to stop at a toll booth while the attendent searches for the dime he just dropped...  in Fritz Lang's The Woman in the Window (1944).
	And speak of the devil, here's that corpse.   There's something particularly disturbing about a man's hat when the man is no longer alive to wear it.  In this case, the hat can become yet another stray clue to the identity of the murderer...
The hat worn by Fred MacMurray in the Dark Room was actually lifted right off the head of the gentleman in the top left corner of this still from He Walked By Night (1949).  The movie, which was largely directed by an uncredited Anthony Mann, was the inspiration for TV's Dragnet series.

back into the dark room