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

No historian has been able to show exactly what effect the subsequent restructurings, blacklistings, and imprisonments had on American culture, but Thom Andersen has intelligently addressed the important question of whether the most famous victims of the blacklist were talented filmmakers who were responsible for a distinctive kind of cinema. Andersen concludes that during the years between the first HUAC hearings in 1947 and the second in 1951, a group of soon-to-be-blacklisted leftists and their "fellow travelers"Robert Rossen, Abraham Polonsky, Joseph Losey, Jules Dassin, John Berry, Cyril Endfield, John Garfield, John Huston, and Nicholas Rayresponded to the threat of political repression by creating what amounted to a subgenre. All of the writers and directors in this group relied upon conventions of the film noir, but according to Andersen, they tried to achieve a "greater psychological and social realism." Andersen labels their work film gris, because "we have been taught to associate Communism with drabness and greyness" and because their movies are "often drab and depressing" (183). He lists thirteen examples: Rossen's Body and Soul; Polonsky's Force of Evil; Dassin's Thieves' Highway and Night and the City; Ray's They Live By Night and Knock on Any Door; Huston's We Were Strangers and The Asphalt Jungle; Curtiz's Breaking Point; Losey's Lawless and The Prowler; Endfield's Try and Get Me; and Berry's He Ran All the Way.

Having made this argument, Andersen confesses that he feels uneasy about his central term and "would be relieved if no one should adopt it" (183). I shall grant his wish, chiefly because film gris has already been proposed by other historians, who have something quite different in mind. Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg, for example, distinguish between "the 'pure' black cinema of Nightmare Alley and Double Indemnity and the excursions into "gray" melodrama of the adapters of Hammett, Chandler, and Graham Greene." 27And John Tuska complicates things even further when he calls The Maltese Falcon a "film gris" and The Big Sleep a "film noir.'' Any new stipulation would only create more confusion. Besides, as I have been trying to suggest, it is usually a good policy to avoid making neat distinctions among Hollywood formulas. It seems undeniably true that a neorealist or documentary grayness infiltrates late 1940s melodrama, but this tendency is not confined to a single political group. As Higham and Greenberg point out, almost 30 percent of the Hollywood films given Code approval in 1947 had a "problem" content and showed a marked departure from the studio-bound expressionism of the previous decade (16); indeed several of the left-wing films in Andersen's list, such as Night and the City, are less gris in their visual effects than the work of a "friendly witness" like Elia Kazan.

And yet, the filmmakers Andersen places together (to whom we should probably add the original Hollywood Ten, plus Orson Welles, who became a European exile in 1948) do in fact constitute a left-wing school or community. It also makes sense to distinguish in a general sense between two major branches in the "family tree" of noirone tending toward cynicism and misanthropy (Hitchcock and Billy Wilder), and the other toward humanism and political engagement (Welles and Huston). The second branch became especially militant in the years after the war, and we can easily identify its politics and aesthetic strategies. 28

Left filmmakers in the late 1940s and early 1950s often gave a social-realist spin to familiar noirish plotsas in M (1950), a documentary-style remake of Lang's classic, directed by Joseph Losey and written in part by the blacklisted Waldo Salt; or as in The Prowler (1951), a more class-conscious version of Double Indemnity, also directed by Losey, and cowritten without credit by the blacklisted Dalton Trumbo. The Left was also greatly interested in stories about fascist or authoritarian personalities. Brute Force (1947), directed by Jules Dassin and scripted by Richard Brooks, is an attempt to bring Crossfire's perverse violence into the world of prison melodrama, with the sadistic Captain Munsey (Hume Cronyn) presiding over an enclosed, militaristic state. Key Largo (1947), directed by John Huston and once again coscripted by Brooks, emphasizes the affinity between a classic Hollywood gangster (Edward G. Robinson) and the Nazi dictators. Equally notable are two films dealing with protofascist politicians: Ruthless (1948), a low-budget variation on Citizen Kane, supervised by Robert Rossen and directed by Edgar G. Ulmer; and All the King's Men, adapted and directed by Rossen, which won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1949. (This last film has never been called noir, but it qualifies on many counts.)

As Andersen observes, Red Hollywood's leading personality was John Garfield, who represented the tough street culture of the Jewish working class. The Left in general was "proletarian" in its concerns, often making films about middle-European or Mediterranean immigrants and repeatedly dealing with the failure of the American dream in the big industrial centers. Consider Dassin's Thieves' Highway (1949), loosely based on the A. I. Bezzederies novel Thieves' Market, which portrays the struggles of working-class Greeks in the California trucking industry; consider also the Polonsky-Garfield production of Force of Evil (1948)in many ways the quintessential example of what Andersen means by film griswhich uses Ira Wolfert's Tucker's People to create a tragic study of Jews and Italians in the New York numbers racket. These films and a few others allowed working-class characters from marginalized ethnic groups to express themselves in dignified form for almost the first time, and they offered a vivid contrast to the WASP look of utopian Hollywood.

Racial intolerance was in fact a central issue for the Left. In his initial testimony before the HUAC in 1947, Adrian Scott accused the Republican Congress of being anti-Semitic and antiblack; to prove his point, Scott cited the credits of threatened filmmakers Robert Rossen, Howard Kotch, Albert Maltz, Waldo Salt, Ring Lardner Jr., Herbert Biberman, and Lewis Milestoneall of whom had made pictures attacking racism. During World War II, when black soldiers were fighting overseas, the government had encouraged these and other filmmakers to produce liberal pictures about racial problems, but after the war, with Roosevelt dead and the civil rights movement not yet fully underway, any attempt to discuss such issues on the screen was scrutinized for its potential as "communist propaganda." In response, left-wing Hollywood tended to show the effects of racism indirectly, chiefly through pictures about lynch-mob violence directed against whites. The clearest example is Storm Warning (1951), written by Richard Brooks and Daniel Fuchs, which starred two of Hollywood's most prominent anticommunists, Ronald Reagan and Ginger Rogers. Another such film was Losey's remake of M, but Losey also managed to overcome intense Breen Office objection to The Lawless (1950), a B-picture dealing with a young Mexican in California who is falsely accused of raping a white girl. For all its compromises, this film could not have failed to remind contemporary audiences of recent events in Los Angeles, including the Sleepy Lagoon case and the Zoot Suit riots.

Easily the most disturbing postwar film about lynching was Try and Get Me (1950, originally released as The Sound of Fury), directed by Mercury Theater alumnus Cyril Endfield, who was blacklisted soon afterward. Inspired by an actual incident that occurred in San Jose, California, in 1933, this picture is in some ways a throwback to Depression-era Hollywood, especially to Fury and They Won't Forget. It tells the story of unemployed veteran Howard Tyler (played by a perpetually worried-looking Frank Lovejoy), who desperately needs to support his pregnant wife and small son. Tyler grows increasingly resentful because of the TV sets and department stores he sees all around him, and he eventually joins up with a narcissistic petty criminal (Lloyd Bridges). The two men commit a few holdups and then kidnap the son of the richest man in town. But to Tyler's surprise and dismay, his companion in crime turns the kidnapping into a brutal murder.