Strange Hero compiles a movement vocabulary for the celluloid hoodlum: a tense, almost rigid body, projecting control through languidly prolonged, repetitive gestures like removing a cigarette from the lips or reaching menacingly towards a pocket. Taut stillness gives way to sudden flicks and jabs of motion, hair-trigger reactions, and then a crescendo of stylized violence against phantom enemies. A similar vocabulary appears in the funniest and most elaborate dance parody of film noir, the “Girl Hunt Ballet” from Vincente Minnelli’s The Band Wagon (1953), and again in the titular nightclub number from Jules Dassin’s Rififi (1955). In the latter, Magali Noël sings a masochistic ode to an abusive lover while behind her a man in a suit and fedora dances in silhouette in a lighted frame, a shadow-puppet taking the repertoire of hard-boiled gestures to its purest level of balletic abstraction. Angular, tensed, he spins on his toes and strikes hieroglyphic postures, knees bent, dukes up. Fred Astaire brings a loose, jazzy swagger—and steamy duets with Cyd Charisse—to the “Girl Hunt Ballet,” a send-up of Mickey Spillane pulp detective stories. But here once more is the clenched, crouched-to-spring physicality of guys in broad-shouldered pinstripe suits; the ritualistic gestures of reaching for a gun or flicking open a knife; the rigid, spasmodic, Frankenstein’s-monster-like movements; and the orgies of choreographed violence, guys punching and shooting and falling ad nauseam.

This kind of terpsichorean satire was “a cinch” because film noir and gangster movies were often as stylized as kabuki. When, in the films of Jean-Pierre Melville, Alain Delon or Jean-Paul Belmondo pauses in the midst of deadly violence to meticulously adjust his hat-brim, they are honoring a tradition that goes back at least to George Raft’s coin-flipping, patent-leather-haired henchman in Scarface (1932), and to the volatile hoods played by James Cagney, whose compact body was charged with energy that might explode at any minute—into a crackling tap dance as likely as a burst of aggression. Both actors, of course, had gotten their start as hoofers. Raft’s style was smooth as oil, whether steering a lady through a foxtrot or cutting loose in a sinuous, rubber-legged soft-shoe (see Rowland Brown’s Quick Millions). Cagney’s mode was staccato, his body pitched forward, knees locked, behind jutting out, looking more like an animated cartoon than anything flesh and blood. Jean Gabin, who in his poetic realist films of the late 1930s was arguably the first great noir antihero—doomed, steeped in romantic fatalism—also started as a song-and-dance man in French music halls. As a fugitive gangster in Julien Duvivier’s Pépé le moko (1937), he is a fashion plate in black dress shirts, elegant scarves, and snazzy two-toned shoes, showing off his outlaw glamour not with guns, fists, tough talk, or daring crimes, but by the debonair way he strolls down the street and owns it. When he takes Mireille Balin for a spin on the dance floor, he moves with the unshowy precision and authority of a Swiss watch; later he expresses his love-struck elation by bursting into song on the terrace of his apartment, strutting in rhythm as if back on the stage of a Paris music hall.

For these men of the thirties, dancing was another way of flaunting their prowess, as much as firing a gat or delivering a poke in the nose.

In the postwar years, movie tough guys grew more constrained and buttoned-down, though there is still ample grace to be found in the big-cat prowling of Robert Mitchum; the silky élan of Richard Conte, who recalled taking classes with Martha Graham; and Burt Lancaster’s circus-acrobat athleticism, which gave his huge, muscular body both lightness and menace. The quintessential forties men, though, are those like Humphrey Bogart, Alan Ladd, and Dana Andrews, whose minimalist body language speaks of ease painstakingly achieved and sustained, who wear their boxy suits and trench coats like armor. Dancing starts to be suspect (“You know, a man looks sort of silly doing this,” John Garfield complains while essaying a rhumba with Geraldine Fitzgerald in Nobody Lives Forever [1946]), which explains why those prancing gangsters in the “Girl Hunt Ballet” or Guys and Dolls come off as cute, defanged caricatures.

In Strange Hero, Nagrin subversively brings out hints of femininity in his wasp-waisted, snake-hipped tough guy. If there is discomfort (in white, Western culture) with the idea of men dancing, it has to do most obviously with the puritan association of dancing with sex and erotic spectacle, but also with the body moving in ways that are playful, sensual, uninhibited—and hence vulnerable.

Ten Cents a Dance

Erotic spectacle is what nightclub floor shows and burlesque turns are all about. In Melville’s films, squads of leggy women in matching costumes and headpieces strut and sashay in the background of nightclub scenes, mere animated wallpaper. PG-rated burlesque performances are glimpsed in Armored Car Robbery (1950) and The Crimson Kimono (1959): cookie-cutter routines of vamping and boa-twirling before a crowd of howling, slavering men. One of the saddest floor shows appears in John H. Auer’s City That Never Sleeps (1953), which keeps circling back to the Silver Frolics, a tawdry nightclub with pretensions (“International Follies! Paris in Chicago!” the huge signs outside trumpet). Inside, on a cramped little stage, women parade in elaborate, flouncy gowns and enormous headpieces, spinning flowered parasols or flapping butterfly wings in a cut-rate imitation of the Ziegfeld Follies formula, which presented women less as dancers than as living statuary. These productions are an effort to dress up—pun intended—a strip joint: although we never see the main attractions, we hear brassy bump-and-grind music and see garments tossed into the wings. Every time the movie returns to the Silver Frolics, the floor show is still going on—later in the evening, it morphs into a frenzied calypso number—a forced, maniacal charade of energy and fun that goes on, again, ad nauseam.

The creepiest thing about the club is the Mechanical Man: an actor in a top hat, tails, and silver makeup who impersonates a robot in the window, a gimmick to attract customers who are invited to guess, “Is he a machine, or is he flesh and blood?” The actor, Greg (Wally Cassell), copes with this lonely, degrading stunt by separating himself from his body, mentally escaping into fantasies about the stripper he hopelessly loves. He hides his emotions and humanity behind a jerky imitation of an automaton, while the women onstage go through a cold, mechanical presentation of flesh, intimacy, and sexual excitement. Angel Face (Mala Powers), one of the performers, bitterly tells her married cop boyfriend about how she came to the city with dreams of being a ballerina, “And now I’m ground down to this. Four shows a day. Sweat and more sweat and leering eyes.”

It may have cost a dime to dance with a weary hostess, but it only cost a nickel to play a record on a jukebox. This is the downfall of Doc Riedenschneider (Sam Jaffe), the sage ex-con who plans a masterful jewelry-store heist in The Asphalt Jungle (1950). On his way out of town with his share of the loot, he lingers to watch a teenage girl jitterbug in a roadside diner, plunking a heap of coins on her table when her cheapskate boyfriend claims to be broke. (The eye-catching dancer is Helene Stanley, whose varied career ran from Poverty Row B flicks to modeling for Walt Disney’s Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty, and whose first husband was the ill-fated gangster Johnny Stompanato.) As she jives exultantly, Doc sits stone-still watching her, his expression not leering but intent, mesmerized, almost like someone gazing at a religious icon. The time it takes to spin a record is how long it takes for cops to show up and spot him; he pays for the dance with a handful of nickels and the rest of his life.

Moths Around a Flame

The complex, electric, and often dangerous charge between female performers and male spectators is a common motif in film noir. Exhibit A is Gilda (1946). It takes some effort to detach Rita Hayworth’s performance of “Put the Blame on Mame” from its freestanding, “iconic” status and see it in the context of the story. Try to look past the Hollywood polish: the witty song by Allan Roberts and Doris Fisher, the creamy vocal by Anita Ellis, the smashing Jean Louis ensemble of long black gloves and a shimmery black gown that seems to be sliding off Hayworth’s body. The choreography by Jack Cole gives Hayworth, a trained dancer, far less to do than she was capable of, as she showed in movies where she easily kept up with Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly. But Cole’s minimalism was potent, and Hayworth makes something electrifying out of the simple routine of swaggering, swishing her hips, spreading her arms wide, and tossing her hair; she gives herself to the dance with abandon. Gilda’s performance feels triumphant, defiant, and elated, yet she offers this would-be striptease—throwing aside her wrap, slowly peeling off a glove, even inviting a volunteer to help remove her gown—to torment her ex-husband Johnny (Glenn Ford) and, in some perverse way, to punish herself by earning his contempt. The camera keeps cutting away to Johnny watching her, looking sick and numb, like a man who’s just been slugged in the stomach and is holding still to keep from vomiting. In the end, he has her dragged off the floor and viciously slaps her, leaving her in tears. And yet, Hayworth’s joy in dancing is so natural, radiant, and spontaneous that she makes this misogynistic framework seem flimsy and contrived.

Affair in Trinidad (1952), which thriftily recycles elements of Gilda (grafting on some bits borrowed from Notorious and The Third Man), replays this scene at a party, where Hayworth’s character taunts Ford’s with a sexy number called “I’ve Been Kissed Before.” Again, he responds by slapping her. In this and Hayworth’s nightclub number from the same film, “Trinidad Lady,” Valerie Bettis’s choreography shows off Hayworth’s rhythm and the infectious pleasure she takes in dancing. All of these songs are about a woman’s power—to cause earthquakes and fires, to stir “mad desire” in viewers, to slay men, figuratively and even literally. The tone of the lyrics is knowing, teasing, following the template established by Marlene Dietrich’s gloriously insolent performance of “Falling in Love Again” in The Blue Angel (“Men cluster to me like moths around a flame / And if their wings burn, I know I’m not to blame”). Hayworth’s movies never resolve their own inner conflict, wanting to unabashedly celebrate her sexuality and also to tame or condemn it. They want to cast Ford’s punitive jealousy as the normal reaction of a healthy, red-blooded man, even as the dynamic of the musical scenes—she in her glory, he an onlooker frozen in impotent rage—makes him seem pathetic, lashing out because he can’t control her or cope with the feelings she arouses.

This same sturdy formula turns up halfway around the world in Wang Tianlin’s The Wild, Wild Rose (1960), a noir musical about a nightclub performer in Hong Kong. The star, Grace Chang, is a tall, shapely knockout with an exultantly confident style. The film opens with her performing a jazzed-up version of the “Habanera” from Bizet’s Carmen in a smoky, noir-lit nightclub. The lyrics, in Mandarin, say that love is an illusion, nothing special, that men are just for fun, and anyone who falls in love with the singer is asking for trouble. She slinks around in a tight, side-slit dress, flirting with male patrons; her voice ascends siren-like from a low growl to a suggestively breathy soprano, as the arrangement mutates into up-tempo Latin jazz. Her performance is interspersed with reaction shots from a helplessly smitten new customer (Zhang Yang). In the end of the movie, he will stab her to death.

Just as the stylized posturing of tough guys can be pushed a little further into dance, the musical numbers by Chang, Hayworth, and Dietrich reveal something essential about the seductive demeanor of the femme fatale: an intensely performative awareness of female power that seduces with a show of being wise to the game, brandishing a threat that is also an invitation—and vice versa.

Crossing Borders

During the course of The Wild, Wild Rose, Chang performs a cultural mash-up of European opera—including Puccini’s Orientalist Madame Butterfly—flamenco dance, and mambo, all in Mandarin. Dance, like the film noir style, bleeds across borders. Swing dancing spread from the Black American communities where it originated, conquering white America and then the rest of the world. Migrant farm workers in Northern Italy Lindy Hop in the woods at night in Giuseppe de Santis’s Bitter Rice (1949), copying moves coined in Harlem ballrooms. Yakuza and their bar-hostess girlfriends do the same steps in a sweaty Tokyo dance hall in Akira Kurosawa’s Drunken Angel (1948).

Latin styles were a global craze in the postwar years: in Hollywood noir films, when people go to nightclubs the band is as likely to be playing Cuban or Brazilian rhythms as American jazz. In Criss Cross (1949), for instance, when Burt Lancaster steps into a local LA hot spot and sees his ex-wife (Yvonne De Carlo), she is dancing to Esy Morales’s rhumba band. (Her partner is an uncredited young Tony Curtis; we mostly see the back of his head, glistening with hair oil.) This is yet another scene of a woman sensually absorbed in her movement—twirling, shaking her shoulders, caught up in the rhythm—and a man watching, immobile and helplessly entranced.

The genders of performer and spectator are reversed in a singularly disturbing dance scene from Yves Allégret’s Les orgeuilleux (The Proud and the Beautiful, 1953), which also gives an unusual slant to the “cultural appropriation” motif of a white European copying an Indigenous dance form. The film stars Michèle Morgan as Nellie, a French tourist stranded in a Mexican village after her husband dies in a meningitis outbreak. She is first repelled by, then attracted to, Georges (Gérard Philipe), a former doctor who has sunk into a squalid existence as a homeless drunk. At the bar, the locals make him dance in exchange for tequila, splitting their sides at his clumsy impression of the huapango, a Mexican folk dance. Like a broken marionette, he kicks out his heels and stomps his feet, his body jerking back and forth, leaping into the air, faster and more spasmodically until he collapses with heat and exhaustion. But when he sees the haughtily beautiful blonde Frenchwoman watching, he redoubles his efforts, grinning grotesquely, yelling, leaping, and flailing until he falls to the floor. He wants to shock and disgust her, to flaunt his degradation in a frenzy of self-hatred and self-punishment. Rewarded with the promised bottle of tequila, he smashes it on the bar, telling Nellie, “I only did it for you.”

This is an upsetting scene, especially given Philipe’s delicate beauty and romantic persona. In one way, it is like Rita Hayworth’s striptease in Gilda: a performance enjoyed by an audience but aimed at one spectator who looks on in horror. In both cases, the performer is deliberately enacting an apotheosis of that viewer’s worst suspicions of him or her. Georges’ huapango is also an example of something that lies at the opposite end of the spectrum from the choreographed polish of Hollywood musical numbers. Bad dancing can also be riveting. (It can even be at once embarrassing and charming, like Marcello Mastroianni’s heroically dorky dance in Luchino Visconti’s 1957 Le notti bianche. Trying to impress a date, his shy character takes the floor in a café where young hepcats are jiving to “Thirteen Women,” and launches into a solo so crazy and awkward that it becomes, in its own way, cool.) In the dance-hall scene from Drunken Angel, the ailing yakuza played by Toshiro Mifune sits slumped over a table, wasted by both liquor and TB, his pinstriped suit jacket unbuttoned, tie rumpled, greasy hair hanging in his face. Defying his physical weakness, he grabs a partner and gets up to dance, jitterbugging with hunched-over ferocity. Egged on by the wild strains of the “Jungle Boogie,” he wiggles his butt at the camera, then does a funny, lurching walk, grimacing and raising his clawed hands like a cartoon monster. Uninhibited, undignified, desperate, these amateur efforts show the risks of dancing—looking foolish, losing control—but also the way that dance can be a release from conventions, restraint, and the prison of self-image.