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

Critics sometimes attribute the lyrical fatalism of scenes such as this to a national zeitgeist. Actually, the atmosphere of death and disillusionment in The Asphalt Jungle and most of the other crime pictures of its day has relatively little to do with the nation as a whole, and a great deal to do with a specific community that could no longer maintain its Depression-era faith that America would someday evolve into a socialist democracy. The despairing tone of The Prowler, Try and Get Me, Force of Evil, Gun Crazy, All the King's Men, and In a Lonely Place is clearly related to the politics and historical circumstances of individual writers, directors, and stars. As Joseph Losey remarked in 1979, the Left in Hollywood was utterly demoralized by Truman, the atomic bomb, and the HUAC investigations, and it was beginning to recognize "the complete unreality of the American dream" (quoted in Andersen, 187).

Paradoxically, the blacklist helped to create some of the finest and most socially outraged examples of film noir, as if the material that government officials and Hollywood censors were trying to repress had managed, in Metz's language, to "get through, one way or another." Even so, an important movement in American cultural history was coming to a dark and destructive end. After The Asphalt Jungle, John Huston never again made a film that resonated with the leftist satire of his early work. Between 1945 and 1950, Orson Welles was listed by the FBI as a "threat to the internal security" of the nation, and because he had never been popular in Hollywood, his brilliant career in American entertainment was essentially over. Meanwhile, at least three hundred movie professionals were placed on the blacklist. Many of the younger generation of directors were forced to work abroad, and some of America's best actors had difficulty finding even bit parts. Among the literati, Hammett was in prison, and several key scriptwriters were never allowed to work again. Ironically, the censorship laws regarding sex and violence were slowly being liberalized, but the most popular private eye in American fiction was Mickey Spillane's fascistic avenger, Mike Hammer.

Of course, the film noir itself did not end (Americans did not yet know the term), and many of the people discussed here went on to do excellent work on other types of movies. Although Dassin and Losey were better directors of Hollywood genre pictures than of European art films, they obtained a good deal of critical and even commercial success by working abroad. 34Endfield made two outstanding entertainments in Britain: Hell Drivers (1957) and Zulu (1964). Dmytryk recanted before HUAC and resumed his Hollywood career, but his best film is the rarely seen social drama Christ in Concrete (1949, a.k.a. Give Us This Day), based on the radical novel by Pietro de Donato, which was made in England while Dmytryk was still on the blacklist. After the mid 1950s, several of the blacklisted writers, including Carl Foreman, Ring Lardner Jr., Howard Kotch, Albert Maltz, and Dalton Trumbo, slowly reemerged into the light of day, sometimes commenting on their experience through their scripts, and even Abraham Polonsky was allowed to make a revisionist western during the Vietnam years, when protest became fashionable.

The death of Dix Handley in The Asphalt Jungle (1950).

Billy Wilder quipped that only two of the original Hollywood nineteen were talented, whereas the rest were merely "unfriendly." But Thom Andersen's research has shown that Wilder was cruelly wrong. Without the Red generation of the 1940s, the tradition of film noir would hardly exist, and whenever a member of that generation returned to the scene of his "crimes," the results were usually interesting. Dmytryk's Mirage (1965) is an antifascist thriller that deserves to stand beside his best work of the 1940s; Rossen's Hustler (1961) is a moral allegory of life on the mean streets that improves on Body and Soul; and the Hill-Lancaster production of Sweet Smell of Success (1957), scripted by Clifford Odets and Ernest Lehman, is the American cinema's most acid commentary on the promoters and show-business types who profited from the blacklist. Burt Lancaster's frightening portrayal of J. J. Hunsecker in the last of these films-is intended to remind us of red-baiting newspaper columnists such as Walter Winchell and Westbrook Pegler, but Lancaster is also reminiscent of Charles Foster Kane, the isolated, fascistic personality who stands at the very origins of left-wing noir. Meanwhile, Tony Curtis overturns his pretty-boy persona of the 1950s, making press agent Sydney Falco into an even more repellent and pitiable character than Harry Fabian in Dassin's Night and the City. Odets and Lehman further intensify the noirish atmosphere by providing both Hunsecker and Falco with a hipsterish patois similar to the dialogue in Odets's antiblacklist play, The Big Knife (adapted for movies by Robert Aldrich and James Poe in 1955).

Thus when Falco plants marijuana on a jazz musician whom he also accuses of being a "card-carrying communist," he has a colorful, distinctly hard-boiled way of informing a corrupt cop that the deed has been done: "The cat's in the bag, and the bag's in the river."

The Kennedy generation of writers and directors, especially Stanley Kubrick and John Frankenheimer, were able to continue this tradition, albeit in a less realistic, more coolly self-reflexive fashion. One of Frankenheimer's best pictures, The Manchurian Candidate (1962), closely adapted by George Axelrod from a Richard Condon novel, deserves special attention because it functions as a kind of pop-art retrospective of the 1950s, recalling virtually every movie genre and political event of the previous decade, spinning from one mood and narrative convention to another but maintaining a noirlike and highly Wellesian sense of style. 36Ultimately, this film attempts to outflank the right wing by using their own strategy of cold-war paranoia: a McCarthy-like senator is shown to be an unwitting dupe of the communists, and the red scare itself is revealed as a plot managed by spies from Moscow and Peking.

Although The Manchurian Candidate is set in the immediate aftermath of the Korean War, it makes no attempt to visually recreate the 0950s; for example, it depicts a racially integrated military, and it features an African-American psychiatrist (Joe Adams) who behaves like a New Frontiersman. The picture was in fact produced by staunch supporters of John Fitzgerald Kennedy, and it received indirect approval from JFK himself, who was a great fan of Condon's novel. Perhaps for that reason, its narrative is fully imbued with the ideological strangeness of the time when it was made. To appreciate this fact, contemporary viewers need to recall that Kennedy was able to institute liberal reforms only by maintaining his image as a vigorous champion of the cold war. During his campaign for the presidency, he exploited a supposed "missile gap" between the United States and the Soviet Union, and his greatest popularity in office came as a result of his naval blockade of Cuba. The Manchurian Candidate mirrors such contradictions perfectly. It features an explicit endorsement of the American Civil Liberties Union, but at the same time it seems deeply fearful of the Reds; in the last analysis, the only defense it offers against a totalitarianism of either the Left or the Right is the national security state.

In sexual terms, The Manchurian Candidate tells an equally bizarre story. As Michael Rogin points out, the film taps directly into cold-war fears of "Momism," which is the "demonic version of domestic ideology," dealing with ''buried anxieties over boundary invasion, loss of autonomy, and maternal power." 37In this case, a communist plot to assassinate the president is masterminded in Washington by a seductive matriarch, who becomes outraged when she learns that the Communist Party has also arranged for her son to act as the killer. The most darkly satiric moment comes when the mother gives her brainwashed son a sexy kiss on the mouth, thereby contributing to his ultimate decision to kill both her and himself.