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

13. Double Indemnity was budgeted by Paramount for $980,000 and was one of the most critically admired films of the year. Although it was not among the box-office champions of the decade, it was widely regarded as a new and important kind of product. As Boxoffice magazine reported, Indemnity was a "precedent-setting, cycle-initiating hit" that elevated "the cops-and-robbers melodrama to a new stratum of exhibition importance" (2 February 1946).

14. Almost every Hollywood director who wanted to do something "deep" experimented with some variation of this style. Consider James Cruz (Beggar on Horseback, 1923), Josef von Sternberg (Underworld, 1927), King Vidor (The Crowd, 1928), Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur (Crime without Passion, 1934), and John Ford (The Informer, 1935).

15. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 19141991 (New York: Pantheon, 1994), 182. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically in the text.

16. The institutionalization of modern art went hand in hand with a widespread dissemination of Freudian ideas. During the 1930s and 1940s in America, highbrow psychoanalysis had split into two terrains, described by Russell Jacoby as a "technical orthodoxy restricted to doctors" and a "looser revisionism that encouraged cultural and moral theorizing" (The Repression of Psychoanalysis [New York: Basic Books, 1983], 153). Meanwhile, the Frankfort School settled in New York and California, Theodor Adorno wrote psychoanalytic studies of the Hitlerian personality, and Freudian-inspired literary criticism began to appear everywhere. Among the most influential examples of such writing in the 1940s and 1950s are the translation of Marie Bonaparte's study of Edgar Allan Poe, Edmund Wilson's interpretation of "Turn of the Screw," and Lionel Trilling's essays on Freud and art. As many commentators have shown, Freudian ideas pervaded Hollywood in the 1940s, affecting all the genres and stars to some degree: compare John Wayne in Stagecoach (1939) with John Wayne in Red River (1948); or compare Ginger Rogers in Top Hat (1935) with Ginger Rogers in Lady in the Dark (1944). For a discussion of actual psychoanalysts who worked in Hollywood during this period, see Stephen Farber and Marc Green, Hollywood on the Couch (New York: William Morrow, 1993).

17. Fredric Jameson, "Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture," Social Text 1 (1979): 135.

18. Frederic Jameson, The Political Unconscious (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), 206.

19. I have discussed Hammett's career at greater length in an earlier essay, "Dashiell Hammett and the Poetics of Hard-Boiled Detection," in Essays on Detective Fiction, ed. Bernard Benstock (London: Macmillan, 1983), 4972.

20. Lee Server, Danger Is My Business: An Illustrated History of the Fabulous Pulp Magazines (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1993), 9.

21. Joseph T. "Cap" Shaw quoted in Frank MacShane, The Life of Raymond Chandler (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1976), 46. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically in the text.

22. Dashiell Hammett, Red Harvest (London: Pan Books, 1975), 39; The Maltese Falcon (New York: Vintage, 1972), 227; The Glass Key (New York: Vintage, 1972), 169. Hereafter, these works are cited parenthetically in the text.

23. Blanche Knopf quoted in Diane Johnson, Dashiell Hammett: A Life (New York: Random House, 1983), 70. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically in the text.

24. David O. Selznick, Memo from David O. Selznick, ed. Rudy Behlmer (New York: Viking Press, 1972), 26.

25. Stephen Marcus, introduction to The Continental Op, by Dashiell Hammett (New York: Random House, 1974), xvii.

26. Dashiell Hammett, The Thin Man (New York: Vintage, 1972), 12. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically in the text.

27. Andrew Sarris quoted by Tom Milne in Mamoulian (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970), 36.

28. James Agee quoted in Patricia King Hanson and Alan Gevinson, eds., American Film Institute Catalog: Feature Films, 19311940 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 782.

29. I have discussed James Agee's comments and examined the "male myth" underlying the film in "John Huston and The Maltese Falcon ," reprinted in The Maltese Falcon, ed. William Luhr (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 14960. That volume contains a continuity script of the film and other useful material. For additional background on Huston, see Gaylyn Studlar and David Desser, Reflections in a Male Eye: John Huston and the American Experience (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993), where my essay on Falcon is also reprinted.

30. Jonathan Latimer's best novel, Solomon's Vineyard, is a synthesis of The Maltese Falcon, Red Harvest, and The Dain Curse. It was written in 1940 but was not published in the United States in an unexpurgated trade version until 1988. It deserves to be placed alongside Paul Cain's Fast One (1933) as One of the toughest, most sadomasochistic Hammett imitations of all time.

31. The myth that Hammett was a relatively simple stylist, together with the myth that he did not write about a world in which "gangsters can rule nations," seems to have been generated by Raymond Chandler in "The Simple Art of Murder." Critics have seldom noted that Hammett was also to some degree a typical southern writer (he was born in Maryland). He could render wild landscapes with the accuracy of a man who has lived outdoors, and he must have loved dogs, because his books contain several beautifully observed descriptions of canine behavior. (The original Asta is as funny as MGM's but much less cute.)

32. Graham Greene, The Ministry of Fear (New York: Penguin, 1978), 65. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically in the text.

33. Graham Greene's religion and politics may seem contradictory, but they were consistent with his educational background. There was a strong tradition of Catholicism and high-church religion among British literary aesthetes, beginning with nineteenth-century figures like Cardinal Newman and Frederic Rolfe and culminating in "revolutionary classicists" T. E. Hulme and T. S. Eliot. However, many among Greene's generation at Oxford had also become interested in Karl Marx. Greene managed to keep the two impulses in balance, behaving like a high modernist in cultural matters but supporting socialist government.

34. Graham Greene, Collected Essays (Harmandsworth: Penguin, 1970), 167.

35. The quote is from Martin Seymour-Smith, Who's Who in Twentieth-Century Literature (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976), 142.

36. Graham Greene, A Gun for Sale (New York: Penguin, 1974), 28. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically in the text.

37. During his early years in Paris, Eliot was attracted to the protofascist l'Action français. His style of anti-Semitism in such poems as "Gerontion" and "Sweeny among the Nightingales" was fashionable among the intellectuals of his day, and it exerted a strong influence on the next generation. (See The Great Gatsby, which is filled with anti-Semitic references and wasteland imagery.) Interestingly, Eliot was also a great admirer of crime and detective fiction. He praised Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins for their melodramatic effects, which he claimed were "perennial and must be satisfied," and he insisted that "literature" ought to give the same pleasure as "thrillers" (see Michael Shelden, Graham Greene: The Man Within [London: William Heinemann Ltd., 1994], 100101; hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically in the text).