James Naremore - More Than Night - Film Noir in Its Contexts

Hays's logic was typical of the American right wing throughout the 1930s, and it seems remarkably disingenuous. After all, the Production Code itself was a manifestly ideological or propagandistic document, containing prohibitions not only against lustful kissing, visible pregnancy, adultery, prostitution, and "perversion," but also against miscegenation. One of its three "General Principles" was that "law, natural or human, shall not be ridiculed, nor shall sympathy be created for its violation" (Steinberg, 461). Elsewhere, it contained specific rules against criticism of the police, the clergy, the U.S. government, and officials of foreign nations. Joseph Breen, the chief of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA), and Martin Quigley, the coauthor of the original Code provisions, were both Catholics, and both were anti-Semitic. 3Breen was a working-class intellectual who sometimes approved of social-problem movies. But such distinctions may not have mattered in the long run, because the process of review itself tended to enforce a conservative "line." Consider the first page of the standard report form used by the Breen Office during the 1940s: 4

ROLE characterization (straight/comic;

sympathetic/unsympathetic/indifferent)

Leading Roles

Professions: Banker_

Lawyer_

Doctor_

Journalist_

Public Officials: Judge_

J. P._

Police_

District Attorney_

Sheriff_

Religious Catholic_

Workers:

Protestant_

Jewish_

Races or _

Nationalities:

Miscellaneous: _

liquor shown at nightclub_bar_saloon_home_other_

drinking none_little_much

court scenes, how treated? dignified_comic_

religious ceremonies, how treated? dignified_comic_

ADULTERY_ILLICIT SEX_DIVORCE_MARRIAGE_SUICIDE_

GAMBLING_

TYPES OF CRIMES

NUMBER OF KILLINGS

OTHER VIOLENCE

FATES OF CRIMINALS

Given such a form, it seems remarkable that any of the classic films noirs could have been produced at all. In This Gun for Hire, The Glass Key, and Laura, the line between ' 'sympathetic" and "unsympathetic" characters is blurred, and criminals often seem more appealing, or at least more authentic, than representatives of law and order; in The Lady from Shanghai, The. File on Thelma Jordan, and Where the Sidewalk Ends, most of the police officers, judges, and district attorneys are corrupt and brutal; in Ace in the Hole, The Big Clock, and While the City Sleeps, the leading journalists and magazine editors are predatory and murderous. All such films are permeated with alcohol and illicit sex, and in at least one instanceVal Lewton's Seventh Victimsuicide is treated as a poetic act.

The censors, however, always saw to it that evil was punished in these pictures and that sin or corruption was depicted with a degree of restraint. The Breen Office policy was evident in the monthly report of May 31, 1941, in which, Joseph Breen announced to Will Hays that the MPPDA had just completed reviewing one hundred and ten scripts in five categories: "social problem" (sixteen, including The Shanghai Gesture), "crime/horror" (forty-three, including The Maltese Falcon), "musical" (fourteen), "western" (thirty-two), and ''miscellaneous" (forty-five). Of the total, five were rejected for "illicit sex and drunkenness"among them, The Maltese Falcon, which, according to a PCA report to Jack Warner, required the following revisions: Joel Cairo should not be characterized as a "pansy type"; the "suggestion of illicit sex between Spade and Brigid" should be eliminated; there should be less drinking; there should be no physical contact between Iva and Spade "other than that of decent sympathy"; Gutman should say "By Gad!" less often; and "Spade's speech about District Attorneys should be rewritten to get away from characterizing [them] as men who will do anything to further their careers."

A similar pattern of objections can be seen in the Breen Office reports on other celebrated films noirs. A November 2, 1943, review of Laura insisted that Waldo Lydecker must be portrayed as a "wit and debonair man-about-town" and that "there can never be any suggestion that [he] and Laura have been more than friends"; meanwhile, scenes of police brutality had to be downplayed, along with the drinking at Laura's apartment. An April 13, 1944, report on Farewell, My Lovely informed the producers that "there must, of course, be nothing of the 'pansy' characterization about Marriott"; by the same token, Mr. Grayle could not "escape punishment" by committing suicide, and the scenes of pistol-whipping, drinking, and illicit sex would have to be reduced or treated indirectly.

If we did not already have the evidence of the films themselves, the censorship reports of the period reveal that classic noir was almost obsessed with sexual perversity. The villains in these pictures tend to be homosexual aesthetes ( The Maltese Falcon, Laura, Phantom Lady) or homosexual Nazi sadists (Brute Force) who threaten the values of a democratic and somewhat proletarian masculinity. Breen Office censors were especially concerned about such characters, just as they were about realistic depictions of heterosexual passion. "When people talk about realism," Joe Breen observed, "they usually talk about filth" (quoted in Leff and Simmons, 145). To gain Breen's approval of love scenes, directors learned the art of omission. In Double Indemnity, when Phyllis visits Walter's apartment and kisses him for the first time, he immediately lights a cigarette, mixes a couple of highballs, and begins planning the murderbehavior that seems almost laughable by contemporary standards, with little of the steamy urgency of James M. Cain's novel. Even so, the film manages to imply that Walter and Phyllis go to bed with each other. At one point she puts her head on his shoulder and cries softly, like the rain on the windows. The camera tracks backward and we dissolve to the insurance office, where Walter speaks into the Dictaphone, explaining his motives to Keyes. (These motives have less to do with sex than with a desire to cheat the insurance company and make a great deal of money.) After a few moments, another dissolve returns us to the apartment: time has passed, and Walter and Phyllis are at either end of a sofa; he is reclining and smoking a cigarette while she reapplies her makeup.

Hollywood in the 1940s always depicted sexual intercourse through symbolism and ellipsis. In The Maltese Falcon, Spade bends over to kiss Brigid, who is lying seductively on his couch, and the camera moves past him toward an open window, showing the "gunsel" Wilmer on the street outside; the image fades, time passes, and when Spade and Brigid meet a day or so later, they embrace and call each other sweetheart. In Possessed, David Sutton (Van Heflin) and Louise Graham (Joan Crawford) have obviously just been to bed together, even though they are shown fully clothed and at opposite ends of a room: David smokes a cigarette and plays Schumann on the piano ("making love" to the instrument, as he says) while Louise moves about ecstatically and contemplates going for a swim in a moonlit lake that we can see outside a window.

Scenes such as these remind us of what Christian Metz calls the "peculiarity" of censorship, which always allows things to pass around it, "like the sluices you sometimes see at the mouths of rivers, where the water gets through one way or another." 5The censor (whether we are speaking of the state, the church, or the superego) seldom leaves a blank spot or an X across a scene. "You can see the censor," Metz remarks, much as you can see the workings of secondary revision in dreams; usually it manifests itself as a slight incoherence or displacement (such as the water imagery in classic noir), and from the point of view of aesthetics, it sometimes has salutary results. Thus Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton contend that the Breen Office had a paradoxically "positive" effect on film noir: it helped to make pictures like The Big Sleep and The Lady from Shanghai seem confusing and dreamlike, and in many cases "the necessity for innuendo promoted a type of lighting that could not but enhance the suggestive power of the images" (19).