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

Interestingly, the major challenge to Joseph Breen's sovereignty during the 1930s and 1940s came not from gangster movies or stories of middle-class murder, which usually involved repression and innuendo, but from costume pictures and westerns. 6The most notorious instance of a refusal to obey the Production Code was Howard Hughes's exploitation of Jane Russell as a busty cowgirl in The Outlaw (filmed in 1941, released in 1943, and rereleased in 1946). An even more significant breakthrough had already been achieved by David Selznick, whose multimillion-dollar production of Gone with the Wind received Code approval in 1939. Selznick's loud battle to retain the word damn was little more than a clever publicity gimmick; his real victories were in dramatizing the pain of childbirth and in retaining the novel's bodice-ripping sexual conventions. His assistant, Val Lewton, wrote him that preview audiences loved "what we term the rape scene. . . . They liked to have Gable compel Scarlett to sit in the chair and listen to him, and when he picked her up and ran up the stairs with her, the applause was almost equal to that extended to Babe Ruth when he hit a home run" (quoted in Leff and Simmons, 1067).

Hollywood's treatment of sex was only slightly liberalized in 1945, when Will Hays announced his retirement and Warner Brothers temporarily withdrew from the MPPDA. Duel in the Sun (1946), Selznick's epic tale of l'amour fou on the prairie, was ballyhooed in almost the same fashion as The Outlaw, and it attracted most of its viewers because it seemed daring and scandalous. Among films in this period that might be classified as noir, Alfred Hitchcock's Rope (1948) was unusually controversial; initially banned in Chicago, it was exhibited to "adults only" in Spokane, Memphis, and Seattlebut only after its opening murder by strangulation had been cut. Hitchcock escaped broader and more official censorship chiefly because he based Rope on a prestigious West End play and because his treatment of amorality and homosexual love was every bit as ironic, indirect, and dandified as the two characters who commit the murder. He ruthlessly satirized the bourgeois guests at the film's dinner party, but he made sure that he never overtly violated the standards of the Production Code. He even cast folksy James Stewart as the man who unmasks the villains, giving him a ringing, last-act speech against evil. Amazingly, advertisements for the film included an endorsement from J. Edgar Hoover, a closeted homosexual and celebrated watchdog against "filth," who proclaimed, "Never such terrific suspense! Leaves you breathless."

Marc Vernet has argued that, "so far as the female body is concerned," postwar American thrillers represented "a return to the status quo ante, to the state of censorship prior to 1933." 7But even the most daring of these movies were noticeably lacking in the forthright bawdiness and sexual display of the Depression years. None of the femmes fatales in classic films noirs could be seen in the braless, seminude costumes that had been worn by gangster's molls, chorus girls, and nightclub sophisticates in films such as Blonde Venus, Public Enemy, and I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang. Joseph Breen refused to approve the rerelease of the 1931 Maltese Falcon precisely because "the dame in the kimono" (Bebe Daniels) wore insufficient clothing; as if in response, the 1941 production garbed Mary Astor in a ladylike, almost schoolmarmish dress. Provocative thrillers such as Double Indemnity, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Gilda, and Scarlet Street relied chiefly on fetishized detailan ankle bracelet, a white scarf, a glove, or a long sweep of hair. 8They also slowed down the dramatic action and emphasized the intimate rituals of smoking and drinking in dimly lit rooms. During the period, studio publicists began to treat relatively innocuous kissing scenes as if they were daring. In 1946, MGM claimed that a lengthy kiss between John Garfield and Lana Turner in The Postman Always Rings Twice was timed with a stopwatch to make sure it did not exceed censorship regulations.

In the same year, the Selznick studio announced that Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman's extended embrace in Notoriousan embrace accompanied by a good deal of low-voiced conversationwas the longest kiss in screen history.

To find truly systemic violations of Breen Office morality or "good taste" in American mass culture during these years, one needs to look not at movies but at paperback books. Beginning around 1948, New York publishers of mysteries and realist novels began to use pulp-style covers; as a result, images of semiclothed women in erotic poses suddenly appeared in bus stations and drugstores all over the country. The trend reached its peak in the early 1950s, and it gradually influenced Hollywood thrillers, including two striking examples of 1953: Niagara, a Technicolored saga of passion and murder featuring Marilyn Monroe; and I, the Jury, a 3-D exploitation film based on Mickey Spillane's hugely successful paperback novel. 9Both pictures were situated somewhere between the brooding, repressed eroticism of old-fashioned Bogart movies and the emerging hedonism of Playboy and James Bond.

It was violence, not sex, that accounted for the most visible changes in the standards of motion-picture censorship during the 1940s and early 1950schanges that allow us to speak more accurately of a "return" to 1933. In his September 1946 review of The Killers, for example, James Agee remarks that various scenes in the picture are reminiscent of the "calculated violence" that was "commonplace in old gangster films." 10But the postwar thrillers also seemed more downbeat and perverse, perhaps because the war and its aftermath created a vision of ontological evil and a growing appetite for sadism. Throughout the war, the PCA disapproved of propaganda films that showed explicit scenes of torture; even so, elaborate offscreen whippings and brutal punishments became de rigueur in films such as Man Hunt (1941), Hitler's Children (1942), Behind the Rising Sun (1943), The Purple Heart (1944), and 13 Rue Madeleine (1946). Hollywood regularly portrayed the Germans and Japanese as sexually twisted killers who loved to inflict pain, and this vaguely eroticized, "psychological" imagery contributed to the psychotic villains portrayed at almost the same time by Richard Widmark, Dan Dureya, and Raymond Burr. Because of the war, screen violence also became more frighteningly realistic. Within a few years after the conflict began, unprecedented scenes of maimed and dying bodies could be seen in news magazines and combat documentaries. As the fighting drew to an end, the sense of victory was bound up with a vision of horror. Advertising for the short documentary With the Marines at Tarawa (1944) promised audiences ''the real thing at lastno punches pulled, no gory details omitted," and in the next year, the Breen Office censored none of the concentration camp footage that the U.S. military supplied to commercial newsreels (see Doherty, 3657).

Once victory came, feature movies evoked sober memories of the recent carnage, and for a while melodramatic fight scenes no longer looked graceful and bloodless. The newsreel footage of concentration camps made its way directly into The Stranger (1946), in which a sheltered daughter of a state supreme court justice (Loretta Young) is given a private showing of Nazi atrocities. In other films, small acts of violence were perversely frighteningas when William Bendix steps on Mark Stevens's thumb in The Dark Corner (1946). The tendency toward sadism was especially evident in a series of films about boxing: The Set-Up (1949), based on Joseph Marsh's narrative poem of the 1930s; Champion (1949), inspired by Ring Lardner's short story of the 1920s; and The Harder They Fall (1956), Humphrey Bogart's last screen appearance, from Budd Schulberg's original screenplay. These pictures were scarcely less bloody than Martin Scorsese's Raging Bull (1980), but they used violence in a more socially conscious way, fusing prewar images of economic depression with anxiety about fascism and cataclysmic destruction. In political terms, they had an obvious relationship with films made by former members of the Group Theater and the Actors' Studiofilms such as Golden Boy (1939), Body and Soul (1947), On the Waterfront (1954), and Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956). Indeed, they constitute one of several junctures at which classic film noir is nearly indistinguishable from Odets-style social realism and from the larger history of the proletarian or "ghetto" novel.