By Michael Bayer
No matter what you’ve heard, only one thing ever mattered in Hollywood: profits.
Since the invention of motion pictures and the re-location of a small group of ambitious movie makers from New York to Los Angeles in the 1920’s, the studio system has been viewed as one big moneymaking machine. In fact, some have compared the original studio heads to the gangsters who populate so much film noir: they often behaved like thugs, led ostentatious lifestyles, preyed on those who desperately wanted opportunities, and colluded to destroy independent upstarts encroaching on their turf. These “Hollywood moguls,” as they were dubbed, kept an iron grip on the industry.
By the 1930’s, the studio hierarchy had settled into a well-known system of tier one (the Big Five) and tier two (the Little Three). The Big Five, which were vertically integrated across all aspects of production, distribution, and exposition (the studios not only made the films but owned the theaters where they were shown), comprised 20th Century Fox, MGM, Paramount, RKO, and Warner Brothers, and the Little Three were Columbia, United Artists, and Universal. Amidst the endless mergers, acquisitions, leadership changes, and independent ventures, most executives didn’t sit still, but a small group of moguls continued to hold most of the power in the industry: Barney Balaban, Harry Cohn, Samuel Goldwyn, Howard Hughes, Carl Laemmle, Louis B. Mayer, David O. Selznick, Jack Warner, Daryl Zanuck, and Adolph Zukor. (Click here for a gallery of these handsome gents.) These men cared little about ideals or art. New directors arriving from Europe were repulsed by their commercial practicality but found creative ways of working within the system to inject as much artistry as possible.
Perhaps the most important product of the Europeans’ artistic impulses was the category we call film noir today. The studios saw dollar signs in the new, hardboiled crime fiction that had taken publishing by storm. During the first half of the 1940’s, they raced to adapt works by Hammett, Chandler, and Woolrich, among others, in “a total submission of the cinema to literature,” according to French critics Borde and Chaumeton. In fact, these same critics noted a decline in the quality of noir after 1948 as studios began making them for profit rather than as an organic cinematic style.
As a studio concoction, early noir brought together the brutality of the Warner Brothers gangster film, the Gothic suspense of the Universal horror movie, and the mystery plotting of a 20th Century Fox or MGM detective film. The studio perhaps most associated with early noir was RKO: the lower-budget home of Orson Welles and horror producer Val Lewton often handed over complete creative control. RKO, of all the studios, delivered the most consistent noir visual style throughout the 1940’s.
Despite film noir’s association with low budgets, the initial group of American films (The Maltese Falcon, 1941; Murder, My Sweet, 1944; The Woman in the Window, 1944, etc.) which inspired French critic Nino Frank in 1946 to invent the film noir label were all glossy, generously budgeted studio fare. They were considered A films, or main features typically assigned budgets nearing $1,000,000 or well beyond.
A films were, by definition, superior to B films in terms of production quality. They commanded the strongest – and most expensive – creative and technical talent, the lion’s share of marketing and advertising resources, and most of the attention from critics. They were the prestigious films. In contrast, B films were shorter in length, almost always genre fare, often budgeted in the $50,000-$500,000 range, and exclusively shot in B&W because color film and processing were obscenely expensive (color cost 5x more than B&W, not including the additional specialists that had to be hired). Shown on screen before the A film, B films were sold to theaters for a flat fee as opposed to A films which typically earned a share of proceeds.
B films were introduced during the Great Depression to provide extra value for financially strapped audiences. For the price of a ticket, families could watch a B film, news reels, a couple of shorts, and the A film. This meant at least three hours in the theater, which translated to increased sales at the concession stand, an important profit center for theaters. Most B films came and went without much fanfare but some, like Anthony Mann’s T-Men (1947), became sleeper hits and warranted expanded distribution as an A film.
B film directors were given limited resources. They were budgeted limited film stock, which meant multiple takes were a luxury. They had very short shooting schedules, sometimes just a matter of weeks. They were given recycled sets and recycled actors, so lighthearted serials like Charlie Chan, Roy Rogers, and the Bowery Boys were a natural fit.
A large portion of film noir were B films whose budget restrictions pushed noir directors, many of whom had arrived in Hollywood with a dedication to European artistry, to make innovative use of limited resources, often for unexpected effects. French critics at the time described these films as “crude yet cultivated” and this trend as “organic artistry by necessity.” For example, restricted lighting budgets helped create the low-key look of noir: one light from below-front was much cheaper than classic lighting that bathed the entire set. Tight shooting schedules often necessitated day-for-night filming, which gave exterior night scenes a dreamy, crepuscular glow. Generous fog and obscure camera angles were used to conceal cheap-looking sets and the lack of extras. Later in the cycle, shooting on location became a more economical alternative to the expense of sound stage or studio rentals.
The cheapest films of all, however, were produced outside of the Top Five and Little Three by a small group of independent studios referred to as “Poverty Row.” Almost exclusively genre-focused, studios like Republic, Monogram, and Producers Releasing Corporation (PRC) cranked out motion pictures like candy bars, efficiency and quantity the key drivers of creative decisions. While westerns were by far their most popular genre, crime films were in a respectable second place.
Many key figures in film noir, such as directors Fritz Lang, Anthony Mann, Orson Welles, and Douglas Sirk, and actors Wendell Corey, Evelyn Keyes, James Mason, and Marie Windsor, worked off and on in Poverty Row, which produced noir classics like Dillinger (1945), Railroaded! (1947), The Flame (1947), House by the River (1950), and City That Never Sleeps (1953). The most famous of all Poverty Row film noir is Edgar Ulmer’s Detour (1945), shot in a few weeks on a minuscule budget; it’s widely considered a low-budget masterpiece of the cycle.
In 1940, the major studios produced 477 films which were exhibited in close to 25,000 theaters nationwide. By the late 1950’s, as the noir cycle was winding down, this number had dropped to 187. The majors were producing fewer films with larger average budgets, and this contributed to the decline of noir. At the same time, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against Paramount and the other Big Five in 1948, eliminating their control over distribution channels by forcing them to spin off their theater chain holdings. With such a major financial hit to the industry, RKO was unable to survive. The court’s decision also ended a practice called block booking, through which theater owners were compelled to accept a certain number of high-budget and low-budget films in advance without knowing the titles. Another blow to low-budget noir.
B films, which typically didn’t drive theater attendance, ceased production by the late 1950’s. Movie theater attendance had peaked in 1944 with 84 million tickets sold per week (yes, per week!), but this had declined steadily every subsequent year, losses accelerating throughout the 1950’s as postwar prosperity expanded the range of leisure activities, television entered more living rooms, and foreign films began streaming into the U.S. market.
Hollywood faced significant economic turmoil. To remain competitive, studios had to cut back on quantity significantly, producing fewer films, increasingly in color, with longer run times and higher budgets. None of this was good for the continuation of film noir; indeed, by the end of the 1950’s, more noirs were being made outside the United States than inside.
When the Baby Boomers entered young adulthood, everything changed. The moviegoing audience became much younger, which sparked the development of new genres focused on juvenile delinquency, exploitation, and teen-oriented music. Younger male audiences were still drawn to crime films, and the artsy aspects of noir were appealing to the increasingly educated urban and suburban populations, the same set willing to travel to an art house theater to watch a French or Italian import. But the death of film noir was imminent.
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