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

This part of it happened in Washington, D.C., in 1946.

DISSOLVE

2. series of shots. Streetlamps. Each shot is closer, until the tempo is staccato.

tNTERIOR. SAMUELS' APARTMENT NIGHT.

3. medium CLOSE-UP table lamp. There is the brief SOUND of a fierce struggle, o.s., then someone crashes backward into the lamp, sending it to the floor.

Near the end of this version, Detective Finlay's speech on race prejudice to a southerner named Leroy is accompanied by an elaborate montage illustrating the persecution of Finlay's nineteenth-century Irish ancestors. Finlay concludes the speech with a reference to racism in the American South:

Finlay (quietly): That's history. They don't teach it in schools, but it's history just the same. . . . Thomas Finlay was killed in 1850, because he was an Irish Catholic. A few weeks ago, a Negro was lynched, because he was a Negro. This evening, Samuels was killed, because he was a Jew.

In all subsequent drafts of the script, both the montage of a Boston race riot and the line about the Negro were dropped, probably because the studio wanted to avoid giving offense to any particular segment of the audience. But the film was in danger of being criticized no matter what course it took. When Scott and Paxton broadened their focus, they risked alienating specific communities; when they narrowed it, they were accused of timidity or of catering to the interests of a Jewish-controlled motion-picture industry. The Breen Office hinted at the last of these motives in its initial report on the screenplay, which noted that "in view of the speech of the police captain, the story could be defended as being a plea against all forms of racial and religious intolerance. However, the basic story is still open to the charge of being a special pleading against current anti-Semitism."

Following a conference with Scott, Dmytryk, and Paxton in late February 1947, Joseph Breen gave tentative approval to the film (now entitled Crossfire) and sent Schary a letter emphasizing five points of understanding that had emerged from the discussion. One, racial epithets would be eliminated from the film's dialogue. Two, references to drinking and drunkenness would be toned down "whenever possible." Three, there would be no suggestion that the girl Ginny is a prostitute, or that the strange older man in her apartment is her customer. ("Our recommendation," Breen wrote, "is that this man who wanders in should definitely be indicated as Ginny's divorced or separated husband who is trying to win her back.") Four, there would be "nothing of a 'pansy' characterization about Samuels or his relationship with the soldiers." Five, RKO would agree to ''make certain that nothing in the finished picture will cause any complaint from the War Department."

The released film is in technical compliance with most of these agreements: it retains two racial slurs ("Jewboy" and "Mick"), but it uses them sparingly; it contains only one scene of drunkenness, followed by many others in which coffee is consumed; it makes Ginny seem a relatively soft-boiled taxi dancer who longs for domesticity; and it invents an army major who makes a climactic speech assuring viewers that the U.S. military disapproves of anti-Semites. But even when Crossfire does exactly what the Breen Office and the studio wanted, it enables us to "see" (in Christian Metz's sense) many of the things that censorship was trying to repress.

Notice, for example, how it conveys something of the forbidden homosexual content of Richard Brooks's novel even when it works hard to assure us that Samuels, the murder victim, is heterosexual. Sam Levene plays the role without a hint of effeminacy, and when he first appears he is accompanied by an attractive woman (Marlo Dwyer), who asks him to speak with Corporal Mitchell (George Cooper), a troubled young soldier she observes from across a barroom. Mitchell turns out to be a former artist (a former WPA muralist, no less), and he engages Samuels's interest partly because he is such a vivid contrast to his companion, the boorish Montgomery (Robert Ryan). And yet, even though Samuels appears motivated by nothing more than decency and concern for a veteran, and even though we are told that he and Mitchell talk mostly about baseball, the scene has a sexual ambiguity. The effect is heightened because of the Socratic intensity of the conversation, because the actor playing Mitchell is boyishly handsome, and because the bizarre setting creates psychological tension. The city streets, bars, and hotel lobbies are surreally crowded with uniformed men, and Dmytryk's mise-en-scene occasionally resembles an expressionist, militarized locker room. In this place, as one character remarks, "the snakes are loose," and nobody seems purely innocent.

To some degree, the film's quasi-psychoanalytic effect was imposed on Dmytryk because of financial limitations. Crossfire was budgeted at a respectable if not extravagant five hundred thousand dollars, but Dore Schary used most of the money on salaries for the star players. (According to the notes in his personal copy of the script, he originally contemplated an even more expensive cast, led by James Cagney as Finlay and John Garfield as Keely.) The picture was shot completely in the studio in a mere twenty-four days, and out of necessity it mixed the conventions of realistic photography (sharp resolution, elaborate depth of field, and plausibly motivated sources of light) with minimalist or black-art devices that eliminated the need for extras or costly sets. The result is a visibly artful and oneiric film, charged with sexual implication or "repressed" meaning, which invites its audience to explore the relationship between movies and dreams.

In the completed film, Dmytryk often relies on symbolism or synecdoche, using a single prop, such as a lamp or a pot of boiling coffee, to convey entire settings and states of mind. The seedy or blankly institutional interiors are broken up dramatically with pools of hard light, and the studio-manufactured streets have no sky overhead, only a pervasive darkness that generates a feeling of entrapment or confinement. This stylized quality extends also to the presentation of the actors. Whenever the important female characters are seen from Mitchell's perspective, they seem momentarily fantastic: Ginny (Gloria Grahame) appears suddenly in close-up, her hair framed by an aureole of light and her entrance announced by a dance-hall band playing "Shine"; Mary (Jacqueline White) is like a ghost or an apparition from suburbia, moving through the smoky beams of a projection booth in an allnight movie theater. Meanwhile, nearly all the males are sinister or strange. Monty, an obvious psychotic, is photographed with a grotesquely distorting 25 mm lens, but even Detective Finlay looks offbeata professorial detective who speaks in a weary, alienated monotone from around a pipe or a cigarette that rarely leaves his mouth.

The most Kafkaesque and memorable character in the film is the nameless man in Ginny's room (Paul Kelly), who had troubled Joseph Breen from the beginning. (One of his first lines of dialogue is "You're wondering about this setup, aren't you?") True to their promise to the PCA, the filmmakers never depict this man as a prostitute's customer; instead, taking a cue from Brooks's novel, they make him an enigma without a solutiona chameleon who glibly constructs a series of plausible scenarios to explain his presence and then calmly declares that each explanation is a lie. "I want to marry her," he says to Mitchell at one point. "Do you believe that? Well, that's a lie, too. I don't love her and I don't want to marry her. She makes good money there. You got any money on you?" By turns sinister, pathetic, and comic, he seems to mock the conventions of realist narrative, and as a result he opens his part of the story to all sorts of scandalous interpretation.