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

All of which brings us to the issue of control over Hollywood's explicit politics. And here again we are involved in a return to the 1930s. As movie historians have frequently remarked, several of the most celebrated films noirs echo the New Deal populism of earlier pictures such as I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, Fury, and You Only Live Once. This type of social melodrama was by no means the exclusive province of the left wing, but it was inflected by the coalition of liberal and socialist interests that flourished throughout the Depression and World War IIespecially by the writers, actors, and directors who worked with the Group or the Mercury Theater, and who were interested in social and psychological "darkness." The connection between noir and the culture of the Popular Front is sometimes deemphasized, however, because critics usually claim that Hollywood's dark cinema expresses an unusually bleak, sardonic, and apolitical attitude toward society. Paul Schrader, for example, argues that the defining quality of noir is a "hopeless" and "relentlessly cynical" mood ("Notes on Film Noir,'' 169); along similar lines, most of the contributors in the Alain Silver and Elizabeth Ward encyclopedia contend that noir is essentially pessimistic or perverse. For these and many other commentators, the noir category as a whole should be kept slightly distinct from both utopian entertainment and every type of social-problem picture.

There are problems with such assumptions. Leaving aside the question of how a supposedly depressing type of cinema could have survived for two decades and then become an object of affection and nostalgia, there is simply no empirical evidence to support the notion that noir involved a cynical rejection of politics. Oil the contrary, most of the 1940s directors subsequently associated with the formincluding Orson Welles, John Huston, Edward Dmytryk, Jules Dassin, Joseph Losey, Robert Rossen, Abraham Polonsky, and Nicholas Raywere members of Hollywood's committed left-wing community. Among the major crime writers who provided source material for dark thrillers, Dashiell Hammett, Graham Greene, and Eric Ambler were Marxists to one degree or another, and Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain were widely regarded as social realists. Among what Robert Sklar has described as the major "city boy" actors of the period, Bogart and John Garfield, who played veterans of the Lincoln Brigade in Casablanca and The Fallen Sparrow (1943), were icons respectively of liberalism and leftist radicalism. Meanwhile, the credits for noir screenplays usually included such names as Albert Maltz, Howard Kotch, Waldo Salt, and Dalton Trumbo, all of whom were eventually blacklisted, and these screenplays were often based on literature by such politically engaged figures as Kenneth Fearing, Vera Caspary, Daniel Fuchs, and Ira Wolfert.

There is good reason to conclude that the first decade of American film noir was largely the product of a socially committed fraction or artistic movement in Hollywood, composed of "Browderite" communists (after Earl Browder, head of the American Communist Party) and "Wallace" Democrats (after Henry Wallace, the radical vice president and potential successor to Franklin Delano Roosevelt). 11This movement is somewhat downplayed by Borde and Chaumeton, who emphasize the anarchic, antisocial qualities of noir and who initially argued that the form died off with the rise of neorealist policiers in the late 1940s. The Cahiers critics and subsequent American commentators tended to depoliticize noir even further, thereby obscuring the fact that many of the best thrillers of the 1940s and early 1950s were expressions of the Popular Front and the radical elements of the New Deal. A more accurate account would show that although the noir category viewed as a whole has no essential politics, it has formative roots in the left culture of the Roosevelt yearsa culture that was repressed, marginalized, and virtually extinguished during the postwar decade, when noir took on increasingly cynical and even right-wing implications. 13During the 1950s, the congressional hunts for communists in Hollywood were themselves based on a kind of noir scenario and were crucially important to the history of American crime movies, affecting not only their politics and their doom-laden atmosphere, but also their reception by later generations. 14

Even before the organized attack on left-wing films began, the liberal or anarchic-libertarian elements in Hollywood were closely monitored by guardians of morality and officials of the U.S. government. To fully appreciate the degree to which every type of filmmaking encountered censorship, we should recall that the Breen Office was not the only agency capable of overseeing a movie's content. Throughout World War II, the Bureau of Motion Pictures (BMP) and the Office of War Information (OWI) helped to promote official government policy; the War Department and the various branches of the armed services were charged with protecting military security; and the U.S. Office of Censorship was given the responsibility of reviewing all pictures intended for foreign export. At another level, organizations such as the Writers' Guild of America, the Writers' Mobilization Congress at UCLA, and the secretly conducted Communist Party Writers' Clinics helped to encourage tendentious, antifascist, and relatively upbeat screenplays. After the war, the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) became strongly interested in movies, and a wide range of quasi-scientific studies of popular culture led to new forms of conservative repression. In fact, when we take into account all the governmental and semiofficial organizations of the Left and the Right who were involved in making judgments about film, the period between 1941 and 1955 was probably the most regulated and scrutinized era in the history of American entertainment.

During this period, Hollywood's darkly psychological thrillers were attacked not only by the Breen Office, but also by prominent Communist Party intellectuals. John Howard Lawson, the first president of the Screen Writers' Guild, argued in 1935 that "the function of revolutionary drama is to circumvent a Freudian escape from truths people wish to avoid" (quoted in Schwartz, 135). He and other members of Hollywood's radical Left criticized films such as This Gun for Hire because of their "psychoanalytic" properties and because they made gangsters or hoodlums into heroes of the fight against fascism. After the war, films of a similar type were examined and criticized by an array of liberal ' 'experts" and pop sociologists, who described The Big Sleep, The Killers, and The Dark Corner as sinister mirrors of American angst and moral decay. In a year-end review for The Nation in 1946, James Agee reluctantly admitted that sociological interpretation of these films "as practiced by Dr. Sigfried Kracauer and Barbara Deming" might have a certain value; as far as he was concerned, however, "the most sinister single thing that happened during the movie year was the emergence of just this kind of analysis." It seemed to him that "the function once performed by clubwomen and the nastier kinds of church pressure groups" was now being taken over "by the kind of people who used most earnestly to oppose priggishness" (238).

New forms of "cultural anthropology" and "psychocultural" analysis were being produced, laying the groundwork for a glib and often tautological style of academic criticism that still flourishes today. Even a celebrated amateur like John Houseman got into the act, writing a think-piece for Vogue in which he implicitly criticized his former collaborators Raymond Chandler and Orson Welles for catering to the zeitgeist by making ''tough" movies about a "land of enervated, frightened people with spasms of high vitality but a low moral sensea hung-over people with confused objectives groping their way through a twilight of insecurity and corruption." 15The cold-war sociologists, however, were as nothing compared to the Republican-controlled U.S. Congress, which in 1947 began its purge of the Hollywood Left. In that year, the coalition of radicals and liberals that had been shaped by the New Deal and World War II was torn asunder, and America's residual Popular Front came to an end. The conservatives who had been relatively silent during the war used many of the same "analytic" techniques as the highbrow sociological critics. Moreover, as Nancy Lynn Schwartz has shown, they were able to achieve a quick victory through two forms of censorship: first was an "objective" pressure on filmmakers via organizations such as the Breen Office, the Johnston Office, the Tenney committee in the California senate, the Thomas committee in Washington, the Hearst press, and the Motion Picture Alliance; and second was the creation of an insidious atmosphere of selfcensorship or "before-the-fact editing of writers and other creators in the industry who found themselves avoiding the controversial" (255).