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

The film nicely conveys the class structure of a city, and most of its minor characterssuch as the "tough" women who go drinking and dancing with the kidnappersare unusually complex. Although Endfield employs a great many Wellesian compositions, he also gives the action a feeling of authenticity by photographing everything on location in Phoenix, Arizona. The protagonist moves through a world of flimsy bungalows, mom-and-pop groceries, and drab hotels; and the murder is staged at night in a gravel pit, where the victim is bound, gagged, and beaten to death with a rock. Shocking as it is, this initial violence is nothing compared to what happens to the perpetrators after they are captured and arrested. A liberal newspaperman (Richard Carlson) whips up so much public outrage against the killers that a huge mob, led by a group of fraternity boys, descends on the jail and overwhelms the police. The siege is relentless and terrifying, and the two convicted criminals are briskly hauled offscreen to be tortured and killed. At the end, justice and civil order collapse utterly. The stunned newspaperman and the helpless police chief sit in an overturned office, listening all night to savage, carnivalistic whoops from a crowd in the distance.

Try and Get Me occasionally uses heavy-handed Christian symbolism to make its message seem "universal," and in secular terms it often seems preachy. One of its characters is an unintentionally annoying Italian visitor to America who keeps saying things like "Violence is a disease caused by moral and social breakdown. . . . It must be solved by reason." Nevertheless, the film's lynch-mob sequences are profoundly unsettling, and the story as a whole is such a thoroughgoing indictment of capitalism and liberal complacency that it transcends the ameliorative limits of the social-problem picture. Perhaps, as Andersen suggests, Endfield had moved beyond mere problem solving and was trying instead to make a presumptive allegory for the Left's fate at the hands of HUAC.

There is no question that the congressional investigations and the blacklist were treated allegorically in several other films. The situation in the late 1940s was in some ways analogous to what would happen in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when liberal Hollywood avoided direct attacks on U.S. policy in Vietnam but made countless movies about rebellious youth. (History also repeated itself in other ways. John Wayne produced the first Hollywood movie showing U.S. soldiers in Vietnam, and he starred in the first movie showing the HUAC investigations: Big Jim McLain [1952], a police procedural in which he played a tough congressional investigator hunting down Reds in Hawaii.) 29For an example of how the liberals allowed their political concerns to get through in disguised fashion, consider In a Lonely Place (1950), starring Bogart as Dixon Steele, an alienated scriptwriter who has been blacklisted by the studios not because of his politics but because of his drinking and brawling. The film makes Steele's problems seem existential and cultural: he is a hard-boiled literary type who is beset by what François Truffaut called "an inner demon of violence" and who despises the trashy taste of Hollywood producers. (As usual, the mass audience is represented by a womanin this case a hatcheck girl who visits Steele's apartment and tells him the plot of the latest best-seller.) At the same time, In a Lonely Place has a densely self-referential or autobiographical quality. It offers a fascinating commentary on Bogart, synthesizing many of his earlier performances and criticizing his tough-guy persona; it alludes to director Nicholas Ray's failed marriage to Gloria Grahame; and it reveals a political unconscious, enabling many of its key personnel to express guilt and anxiety over their professional lives. Significantly, Bogart was under intense pressure from the American right wing when the film was made; after it was released, Nicholas Ray claimed that he was "gray-listed," and character actor Art Smith, who plays Dixon Steele's highly sympathetic Hollywood agent, became a victim of the full-scale blacklist.

After 1947, many leftist filmmakers were treated as outlaws, and it is not surprising that they made some of their best pictures from the point of view of criminals. Once again they foreshadowed the "new American cinema" of the 1960s and 1970s: Force of Evil, for example, subtly anticipates Coppola's post-Code Godfather series (19721990) by drawing parallels between organized crime and big business and by placing heavy emphasis on a Cain-and-Abel theme; and Gun Crazy, written in part by the blacklisted and uncredited Dalton Trumbo, is a sharply satiric love-on-the-run movie that directly influenced Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and a host of other liberal pictures over the next three decades.

Among the best of these influential films was The Asphalt Jungle (1950), John Huston's study of what one of his characters calls "a left-handed form of human endeavor," which provoked a whole subgenre of "caper" movies. Remarkably, The Asphalt Jungle was made at MGM (where Dore Schary had just become production chief), and it emerged relatively unscathed by either the studio or the censors. The PCA's chief worries, stated in two letters of 1949, were that Huston planned to show a robbery in detail, and that one of the criminals was able to ''escape justice," by committing suicide. The completed film, which retained both of these elements, was nevertheless judged to have a "more or less" happy ending. Under the section of the PCA report headed "Portrayal of Professions," the reviewer noted that a lawyer, a private detective, and one policeman out of three were treated unsympathetically; but after the question "Does the story tend to enlist the sympathy of the audience for criminals?" the reviewer answered "no." Ultimately, the film was approved because it appeared to show that "justice triumphs through efforts of law."

One wonders if the censor was looking at the film, or at an early version of Ben Maddow's script, which had gone to some length to throw sympathy toward the police. like the W. R. Burnett novel upon which it is based, this initial version of The Asphalt Jungle focuses on a reformist police commissioner named Hardy, who is attempting to clean up a corrupt midwestern city. Maddow framed the story of the robbery with a "prelude" and "postlude" that show Hardy addressing a group of reporters in his office. In the prelude, Hardy reminds his audience that the only force between the people of the city and an "ominous flood" of crime is the police department; most cops, he asserts, are honest, and without them, "men could plan robbery, mayhem, and death with impunity.'' In the postlude, which occurs after the death of gang leader Dix Handley in a rainswept river, Hardy returns to the same theme: "The worst police force in the world," he says, "is better than no police force. And ours is far from the worst. . . . Take the police off the streets for forty-eight hours and nobody would be safe. . . . We'd be back in the jungle."

When Huston revised Maddow's script, he eliminated the framing device. His major concession to censorship was the penultimate sequencea bizarrely staged scene inside a police office, which borrows language from Maddow's original postlude. "It's not anything strange that there are corrupt officers in police departments," Hardy tells the reporters, but at the same time he argues that the overwhelming majority of cops are "honest men trying to do all honest job." He then switches on a bank of police radios in the wall behind his desk and asks rhetorically, "Suppose we had no police force, no matter how bad?" His answer is that "the jungle wins, the predatory beasts take over." 32

Hardy is played by John McIntire, who has the stern, austere intensity of a Puritan minister addressing his congregation. The most frightening beast in the jungle, he tells the reporters, is Dix Handley"a hardened killer, a hooligan, a man without human feeling or mercy." But The Asphalt Jungle has already gone to considerable lengths to establish Dix as a hero and a man of honor. (Dix is played by Sterling Hayden, a former communist who, together with Huston, was a member of the Hollywood Committee for the First Amendment and who reluctantly named names to HUAC soon after the film was released.) A key scene from earlier in the picture, in which Dix describes how his father's horse farm in Kentucky was destroyed by hard times, is clearly intended to elicit sympathy by evoking popular memories of the Great Depression. As if this were not enough, the last sequence, which directly follows the commissioner's speech, jarringly contradicts everything we have just heard. We see Dix driving frantically toward the Kentucky bluegrass country, where, with hardly enough blood left in his body to "keep a chicken alive," he pulls over to the roadside and struggles out of his car. Trailed helplessly by the woman who loves him (Jean Hagen), he wanders into a field and dies, his body gently nuzzled by thoroughbred horses.