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

Rather like Leo, Hollywood tried to keep Chandler from getting too complicated. But The Blue Dahlia is not the sort of movie in which criminals can be brought to simple justice and society restored to order. Chandler always wrote about corruption, or about what W. H. Auden called "the Great Wrong Place." Despite the star system, the Breen Office, and the United States Navy, there is just enough of this theme left in the film to make questions of individual guilt seem trivial and to suggest Chandler's amusement, anger, and romantic fascination at a world gone bad.

One year after The Blue Dahlia, RKO's Crossfire managed to depict a homicidal U.S. soldier without encountering objections from the armed services. The film was set in Washington, D.C., at the very end of the war, and it made the humid nighttime streets of the nation's capital seem like a limbo or purgatory, teeming with restless military personnel. A civilian character who is about to be murdered (Sam Levene) comments on the mood of the place; as he puts it, the whole country has been intently focused on the "win-the-war peanut," but now the peanut is eaten and nobody knows what to do. "We're too used to fightin'. But we just don't know what to fight. You can feel the tension in the air. A whole lot of fight and hate that doesn't know where to go."

Crossfire was loosely based on The Brick Foxhole, Richard Brooks's 1945 novel about life in the stateside military, which had been published while Brooks was still a private in the marines at Camp Pendleton, California. Despite the novel's awkward characterizations and sometimes painfully sententious prose, it deals powerfully with many subjects that were taboo in Hollywood. The plot centers on Jeff Mitchell, a former animator of Walt Disney cartoons, who has been drafted and assigned to a signal corps studio just outside Washington. Jeff believes that his wife back in California is having an affair, and in frustration he uses a fifteen-day furlough to go on a wild spree. Along the way, he is accompanied by two sergeants: Peter Keely, a much-decorated liberal correspondent for a military newspaper, and Monty Crawford, a former Chicago cop who seethes with hatred for Jews, blacks, foreigners, and civiliansespecially when they are 4-F. On the first day of the furlough, the three men attend a boxing match, where Monty enjoys watching a Jewish fighter get beaten. On the second day, Jeff reluctantly joins up with Monty and another soldier, a vicious southern bigot named Floyd Bowers, who has been picked up by a wealthy, effeminate civilian known only as "Mr. Edwards." When Edwards invites them all to his apartment, Floyd nudges Jeff: "We're set, buddy. Set. I ain't beaten up a queer in I don't know how long."

The ensuing events are described from Jeff's drunken perspective, in a kind of hallucinatory internal monologue that suggests the casual humiliations and random violence to which Edwards is subjected. Jeff almost passes out, and just at the point when things are about to turn truly nasty, he leaves Edwards's apartment, assuming that the party is over. On the next day, he wakes up in a prostitute's bedroom, confronted by a strange man who alternately claims to be her husband, her lover, and her pimp. Meanwhile, the police find Floyd Bowers in an alley, strangled with his necktie, and Mr. Edwards in the bathroom of his apartment, beaten to death with the flat porcelain top of a toilet tank.

The reader of The Brick Foxhole has no problem guessing who committed the crimes, but the police suspect Jeff, who goes into hiding while Peter Keely searches for Monty. In a highly allegorical conclusion, the liberal tracks down the fascist, confronting his enemy at night in a closed and darkened military museum. The two men regress to primal hostility, and at the end of a protracted bayonet-swordfight, they kill one another. Soon afterward, the police discover that Monty was the murderer of both Bowers and Edwards, and Jeff is allowed to return to his former life in the army. Although Jeff has been temporarily freed of his sexual paranoia, he remains troubled by what he has experienced, and he seems aware that the war being fought in Europe will also have to be fought on some level in the United States.

Almost as soon as it was published, The Brick Foxhole was brought to the attention of producer and social activist Adrian Scott, who, together with director Edward Dmytryk and writer John Paxton, had formed a unit at RKO devoted to modestly budgeted, left-wing melodramas. Scott, Dmytryk, and Paxton were strongly identified with tendenz films (Tender Comrade and Till the End of Time), and they had recently achieved major boxoffice success with a pair of antifascist, hard-boiled thrillers starring Dick Powell (Murder, My Sweet and Cornered). The Brick Foxhole presented an opportunity to combine the two styles; consequently, in the winter of 1945, Scott optioned the novel and proposed a low-budget adaptation at RKO.

Joseph Breen had already declared that Brooks's story was "thoroughly and completely unacceptable, on a dozen or more counts," and the initial response to Scott's proposal at RKO was chilly. But Scott was a proven success at the studio, and he was strongly backed by RKO's incoming production chief, Dore Schary, who had made his own reputation from social-problem movies. With Schary's approval, John Paxton was put to work on a screenplay, which Scott described as a study of "personal fascism" in the character of a brutal United States Army sergeant. To avoid potential objections from censors, Scott and Paxton eliminated all references to homosexuality, emphasizing instead the theme of race hatred. Although the Production Code explicitly forbade the use of racial epithets, and although the studios in general strongly discouraged any suggestion that American society was prejudiced, World War II had made attacks on anti-Semitism topical, safe, and even patriotic. Darryl Zanuck's much-discussed adaptation of Gentleman's Agreement was currently in production at Twentieth-Century Fox, and Dore Schary must have realized that Scott's quickie adaptation of The Brick Foxhole would anticipate Zanuck and gain considerable prestige for RKO. 21

Paxton's script, originally entitled Cradle of Fear, was a policier centering on the colossal irony of a Jew being murdered by a U.S. soldier during the immediate aftermath of World War II. For various reasons, Paxton and Scott also wanted to suggest a broader, more generalized history of racism and to argue that the fascist hatred of minorities was perennial, not confined to the recent war. Their research file contained numerous articles on racial persecution in America, including accounts of the "Protestant Crusade" of the 1840s and 1850s, the subsequent outbreak of "Know-Nothingism," and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan. Paxton's screenplay employed the deterministic, "what-will-have-happened" plot structure of classic detective fiction (including a "lying" flashback), and this structure occasionally allowed him to move further back in time than the immediate story required, depicting the purely historical past. The murder and the search for the killer took place in a little over a day, but the opening of the original script emphasized that the narrative as a whole had vast temporal dimensions:

1. establishing SHOTWashington, D.C., at night, perhaps with the Lincoln Memorial in the background, a soldier and a girl strolling across in the foreground. The feeling is lonely and barren.

NARRATOR

This story began a long time ago. It isn't over yet, either. It began in the time of Genghis Khan, in the time of Moses, in the time of Jesus Christ, in the time of Attila the Hunand in the time before that.