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

The conservative strategy paid great dividends in 1947, the annus mirabilis of film noir, which was also the year of the Taft-Hartley Act (forbidding communists in labor unions); of an executive order from the White House requiring government employees to take loyalty oaths; of the HUAC investigations; and of a speech by Eric Johnston, newly elected president of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), calling for more movies that extolled virtue and "the American way of life." Hollywood did not stop producing dark thrillers in 1947, but beginning at about that time, a number of skilled craftspeople who had used such films for socially critical purposes were either silenced, destroyed, or driven underground. The purge was made all the more easy by an economic downturn in the industry, which solidified the power of management and changed the structure of the old studio system. Looking back on the period, radical actress Karen Morley commented, "The right wing rolled over us like a tank over wildflowers" (quoted in Schwartz, 253).

Warning signs of the Left's imminent defeat could be seen throughout 1946 and 1947, at the very moment when writers and directors were becoming intensely interested in the fate of returning veterans. In order to demonstrate how the various forces of official repression and artistic resistance operated in those two years, let me pause here to consider the climate of "moral" and political censorship surrounding a pair of representative films noirs, both of which were concerned with home-front readjustment. The first is a Raymond Chandler thriller with liberal overtones, and the second is a manifest social-problem picture. Each production encountered massive intervention from studio bosses, industrial agents, and government bureaucrats. However, each managed to suggest unorthodox or politically "dark" ideas.

Raymond Chandler wrote the screenplay for The Blue Dahlia (1946) as an action vehicle for Paramount's Alan Ladd, whom he regarded as a "small boy's idea of a tough guy." 16At the same time, he made typically evocative, almost panoramic use of Los Angeles, and he managed to include mordant commentary on postwar America. In keeping with the spirit of his novels, Paramount photographed the exterior scenes in locales such as the Sunset Strip, Malibu, Griffith Park Observatory, the Hollywood bus terminal, and "canteen row" on Cahunega Boulevard. An uncredited writer named ''R. McGowan" also worked briefly on the script, but the completed picture is marked by Chandler's distinctive settings and verbal style; it is, in fact, his only original screenplay (not counting the unfilmed Playback), and it won him his second Academy Award nomination. Almost from the beginning, however, The Blue Dahlia was a troubled project, subject to major revisions and fraught with real danger for its author.

The chief problem, according to producer John Houseman, was Chandler himself, who almost died trying to complete his assignment. In Front and Center, the second volume of his charmingly urbane memoirs, Houseman claims that sometime during the last days of 1944, the frail, nearly burnt-out Chandler showed him 120 pages of an incomplete novel that could easily be turned into a film script. Houseman and co-producer Joseph Sistrom immediately persuaded Paramount to buy the property for Alan Ladd, who was only months away from being reinducted into the army. Chandler was given the job of screenwriter, and production began within forty-eight hours of the purchase. Houseman recalls that Chandler "delivered the first half of his scriptabout forty-five minutes of filmin under three weeks, at the rate of four or five pages a day" (137). The job of casting went smoothly, and shooting was soon underway, moving along at a much faster rate than expected. As time passed, the only difficulty was Chandler's slow progress with the second half of the screenplay. "Ray's problem with the script (as with the book)," Houseman writes, "was a simple one: he had no ending'' (139).

Houseman recalls that during story conferences, Chandler "seemed only half there, nodding his head, saying little" (140). Finally, the studio's general manager, Henry Ginsberg, arranged a private meeting in which he announced to Chandler that the entire future of Paramount Pictures was at stake. Ginsberg offered a large bonus for the completed script, but this only shook Chandler's already fragile self-confidence and made him feel that Houseman, whom he regarded as a "fellow Public School man" (141), was being betrayed. Chandler offered to resign. Not long afterward, however, he came to Houseman with a bizarre proposal: he would finish the script if he could arrange to drink whiskey under supervised conditions.

Amazingly, Houseman agreed. He and Chandler went out to a posh restaurant, where the writer downed three double martinis and three double stingers. The studio then posted two limousines, six secretaries, a nurse, and a doctor at Chandler's home, where the inebriated author worked on the script for eight days, never eating solid food but always keeping a glass of bourbon at hand. He completed the story, but he also seriously damaged his health. (Significantly, the final script begins with three characters walking into a bar and ordering "bourbon with a bourbon chaser," and it ends with one of them asking, "Did somebody say something about a drink of bourbon?")

This anecdote is even more harrowing and suspenseful than the similar one Houseman tells in the first volume of his memoirs, where he recalls nursing the alcoholic Herman Mankiewicz through the writing of Citizen Kane. Unfortunately, neither story is completely true. Houseman seems to have forgotten that Orson Welles was the coauthor of the Kane screenplay, just as he forgets that Raymond Chandler had a perfectly good ending for The Blue Dahlia from the moment the film went into production. Chandler's problem was not a writer's block, but the United States Navy, which refused to clear the project because the killer was a mentally disturbed ex-serviceman (played in the completed picture by William Bendix). Because of the navy's objections, Paramount Pictures rejected the closing scenes as they were originally written. In other words, Houseman was collaborating in a process of censorship that required Chandler to change his script and compromise his basic idea. No wonder Chandler became so detached, uninspired, and thirsty.

Houseman's account has been only slightly modified by subsequent historians, even when they acknowledge that Chandler wanted to make a returning naval veteran into an unwitting killer. 18But records in the Motion Picture Academy Library show that a complete treatment of The Blue Dahlia, including suggested dialogue for the closing scene, was submitted by Chandler on January 18, 1945, only a few weeks after he signed an agreement to write the screenplay. This treatment was unusually downbeat and socially realistic, rather like a noir version of The Best Years of Our Lives; and although it was written in haste, there is every indication that Chandler was excited by the possibilities it offered. "In less than two weeks I wrote an original story of 90 pages," he told Charles Morton of The Atlantic Monthly. "It was an experiment and for a guy subject from early childhood to plot-constipation, it was rather a revelation. Some of the stuff is good, some very much not" (quoted in Mac-Shane, Life of Raymond Chandler, 115).

In the opening pages of the treatment, Chandler describes The Blue Dahlia as the story of Johnny, George, and Buzzthree returning veterans who represent the sort of cross section of social classes we find in most World War II combat films. The three men are "the last survivors of a bomber crew that made too many missions," and they have been given early discharges because of wounds or stress. Johnny's eyesight is failing, George finds it impossible to concentrate, and Buzz has a silver plate in his skull that gives him headaches and blackouts. To make things worse, the world they return to is hardly better than the one they have left overseas. Before the war, Johnny was a "tester" for a Southern California oil company, living with his wife and child in a five-room house; while he was away, the child died of diphtheria and the wife sold the house and moved to Los Angeles, where she became the occasional lover of a gangster who owns a Sunset Strip nightclub. George was a practicing lawyer, but he was neither well educated nor successful, and his girl has left him. Buzz, the most proletarian of the three, has come home only to discover that his alcoholic father has abandoned his mother, who lives in abject poverty.