Films Noirs and Musicals

Why is Scene of the Crime (1949) a "police procedural with a nourish tinge," as noir czar Eddie Muller called it, and not a true film noir, at least for the splitters among us:
1.It has a relatively happy ending, with detective Van Johnson and wife Arlene Dahl reconciling.
2. Van Johnson's character is not compromised or neurotic.
3. It is too much about cops and gangsters and not enough about individuals, making it more of the gangster genre than anything else.
4. There is little ambiguity; the good guys are good and the bad guys are bad.
5. The direction, by journeyman Roy Rowland, is weak and unfocused, lacking in fatalism.

For those lumpers who see Scene of the Crime as a film noir I will say that the script, by Charles Schnee (who wrote Nicholas Ray's They Live by Night, 1948) has unrealized possibilities, that there is a bad girl (Gloria DeHaven), a stripper with whom Van Johnson flirts, and there are a number of effectively seedy characters, particularly Norman Lloyd as Sleeper (because he always looks as if he is asleep)

Rouben Mamoulian's musical Silk Stockings,1957, has some wonderful dancing by Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse (choreography by Hermes Pan and Eugene Loring) but is in many ways a weak remake of Ernst Lubitsch's Ninotchka (1939).  Lubitsch made some wonderful musicals in the early days of sound but stopped making them when the production code started being enforced, mainly because of the limitations of moral ambiguity placed on the form by both the code and the audience (Joseph McBride's recent book about Lubitsch discusses this issue in some detail).  My quibbles with Mamoulian's film includes:
1. The widescreen format makes intimacy difficult; there is a strange song included making fun of the format, a format that Mamoulian didn't like and didn't do much to overcome.
2. I found the Cole Porter score weak; he puts too much emphasis on his clever rhymes and not enough on emotions.
3. Cyd Charisse danced beautifully but her singing was dubbed (by Carol Richards)
4. This so-called musical comedy had little comedy, most of which was relegated to the supporting cast and consisted of jokes about Russia and communism.  Of course Mamoulian was never known for his sense of humor

I made similar comments about Charles Walters's High Society (1956,also with a Cole Porter score) on June 28, but at least Silk Stockings has some lovely dancing.