By Michael Bayer
Is film noir un-American? After all, it was identified by the French and created largely by German immigrants. It paints the Land of Opportunity as a hellscape of sin and greed and crime. It mocks the American dream as a source of anxiety at best, a road to perdition at worst.
In truth, the politics of film noir was a balanced reflection of both ends of the political spectrum. Studio heads tended to be indifferent, often blissfully unaware of the political leanings of their contracted talent. Hollywood had right-wing filmmakers and left-wing filmmakers, each with a political agenda, either conscious or unconscious, that played some role in the development of their work.
The noir cycle rose from the ashes of a clash of civilizations, of European destruction and American optimism, of intellectualism and patriotism. Noir could just as easily have been claimed by the left as by the right, and perhaps this tension – or equilibrium – was an important factor in the unprecedented creativity of the cycle.
The most violent century in the history of mankind.
A world in complete decomposition.
A release of the twin evils of fascism and communism.
These are a few of the ways French critics Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton, authors of the first-ever book about film noir, A Panorama of Film Noir: 1941-1953 (1955), described the world in which noir was born.
The Allied Powers had vanquished fascism! We had fought for freedom and won! Americans had pulled together. Our soldiers hadn’t died in vain. Our women had entered the factories to help with the war effort. Our movie audiences had purchased the war bonds advertised by the Office of War Information at the end of our favorite films (including a few early noirs).
Why, then, during such a period of victory and peace, did the dark despair of noir find such an audience? Call it the existential angst of a freedom restored. Or, more accurately, call it post-traumatic stress.
Returning war veterans were rarely heralded and frequently disoriented (The Blue Dahlia, 1946; The Chase, 1946). In fact, sometimes they came home with no memories whatsoever (Somewhere in the Night, 1946; The Crooked Way, 1949). With 75 million human beings dead from the war, these veterans had seen the limits of human savagery and were re-entering a vastly changed society with fear and trepidation. Family units were incomplete. The Great Depression’s legacy still lingered. Many veterans were homeless or drifting, in need of a reason to live, which often came in the form of a beautiful blond or a get-rich-quick scheme. There had been a collective psychological uprooting, and the effects were perhaps felt most keenly in Los Angeles, which had experienced a phantom air raid and shelling of a nearby Japanese sub, and where a large portion of noirs were set and almost the entirety of American noir was produced.
A more practical reason for the film noir boom was money. The homeland having suffered relatively few losses, America had the most money to pay for film production (much of European production equipment had been destroyed or pilfered). Democrat Harry Truman, who had inherited the presidency after FDR’s death, extended the benefits of his predecessor’s New Deal with his own Fair Deal, a series of economic reforms which bolstered federal health insurance, public housing, labor unions, and the minimum wage. With money flowing, filmmakers had more opportunity to take creative risks too.
Truman was a transitional president, bridging the New Deal to the Cold War, which made his administration highly scrutinized and his favorability highly unstable. In 1946, as Truman was bogged down by labor strikes and outrage over wartime price controls, the Republicans took control of both houses of Congress (they lost it two years later), which gave the GOP power to go after “subversive” elements in the culture, especially in Hollywood. The Cold War had begun, and the power centers were cracking down on anything that smelled anti-American. The depiction of unhappy, disoriented veterans in film noir, for example, drew criticism.
As the Cold War intensified, the communist and non-communist hemispheres practically lost contact with each other, and their filmmaking priorities went in opposite directions. Hollywood doubled down on entertainment, individualism, and, most importantly, profit. Soviet cinema was tightly regulated to serve state interests and celebrate collectivism.
As fascism gave way to communism as the greatest ideological threat to the United States, American politics shifted markedly to the right. Borde and Chaumeton wrote that in the late 1940’s, one could simply replace “Nazi” with “Russian” for the same villainous impact. The establishment politicians in both parties were thoroughly anti-communist; numerous federal policies were introduced in 1947 to purge communism from Congress and other power centers.
The Truman Doctrine, considered the “official” start of the Cold War and a precursor to NATO, allocated military and economic resources to containing the encroachment of Soviet communism around the world. The Taft-Hartley Act, a comprehensive labor union reform law, required thousands of union leaders nationwide to swear by affidavit that they weren’t a communist. Millions of federal, state, and municipal employees across the country were required to pledge loyalty oaths (the Supreme Court ruled these unconstitutional in 1964).
Soviet power became the common enemy that united the various threads of American conservatism which had often seemed incompatible. This movement, called fusionism, brought together the libertarians who wanted to protect individual liberties, the economic capitalists who wanted to protect the free market, and the Christian conservatives who opposed the communists’ atheism. This unified bloc and its collective embrace of American values became enormously powerful. Movies were expected to extol the virtues of American democracy and capitalism. The studios endeavored to strike all references to the New Deal from scripts. Russian-American philosopher and author Ayn Rand, a member of the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals, advised film producers on how to promote American industry. Legendary FBI director J. Edgar Hoover was involved and influential in the production of anti-Communist films; in fact, several minor noirs (Parole Fixer, 1940; Queen of the Mob, 1940; Walk East on Beacon!, 1952) were adapted from Hoover’s own published writings.
The leftists in Hollywood were now treated like outlaws on the fringe. As opposed to the overt patriotism of so many musicals, adventures, and war films, film noir was readily interpreted as a threat with its emphasis on government corruption (The Glass Key, 1942; The Mob, 1951), crooked cops (The Man Who Cheated Himself, 1950; The Prowler, 1951), and racketeering (Out of the Fog, 1941; Force of Evil, 1948), among many other threats to the American system.
The political stakes in Hollywood surged when the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) launched the blacklist. While it had existed in other forms since 1930, and the first Congressional investigation into communism had been conducted as early as 1919, HUAC was established as a U.S. House standing committee in 1945 under the leadership of Edward J. Hart, Democrat of New Jersey, and was given power to investigate average Americans suspected of communism. One of its first targets was Hollywood.
In 1947, HUAC held hearings into alleged communist influence in the motion picture industry, focusing first on the Writers Guild of America. Ten filmmakers, dubbed the Hollywood Ten, were convicted of contempt of Congress for refusal to answer questions and implicate colleagues. The biggest name on the list was director Edward Dymytyk, who had already made an impact on the emerging noir style (Murder, My Sweet, 1944; Crossfire, 1947); he later named names and restarted his career. Some filmmakers, led by directors John Huston and William Wyler, formed the Committee for the First Amendment to support the Hollywood Ten and protest the HUAC proceedings, but infighting and naïveté killed the effort quickly.
By 1950, 300 Hollywood professionals had been blacklisted, including noir directors Orson Welles, Joseph Losey, Jules Dassin, and Cy Endfield, and noir performers Edward G. Robinson, Lee J. Cobb, Howard Duff, and John Garfield, whose untimely death at 39 years old was widely attributed to the emotional stress of this period. Many on the list were forced to seek work in Europe, just as many European filmmakers had been forced to flee to Hollywood two decades earlier.
With the start of the Korean War in 1950 and continued anxiety over the Cold War, Truman had become increasingly unpopular. For the second time since the end of the war, the GOP took control of Congress in 1952 after netting five Senate seats in the previous election. (This too was short-lived; the Democrats regained control in 1954 and kept hold of it until 1981.) Dwight Eisenhower, a five-star general and former Supreme Commander of the Allied forces during World War II, was elected president in 1952, the first Republican since Herbert Hoover’s exit in 1933. The personification of American patriotism, Eisenhower maintained strong anti-communist policies, so scrutiny on Hollywood films continued apace throughout the decade. Increasingly, crime couldn’t be depicted as the result of poverty or systemic failure but had to result from individual choices or even mental illness.
Soviet cinema, especially after the Khrushchev Thaw in the late 1950’s, produced some of the most creatively and visually stunning motion pictures in history despite strict state censorship. Some have argued that these restrictions, far from impeding creativity, were responsible for the filmic excellence of this period as they forced Soviet filmmakers to find subtler ways to realize their vision. This same phenomenon, innovation compelled by production strictures, was also a significant factor in the creative genius of film noir.
From its earliest days, Hollywood had attracted rebuke. In response to growing condemnation of Hollywood sex scandals and the threat of hundreds of local decency laws, the major studios chose self-regulation in 1922, hiring Presbyterian elder William Hays to repair the industry’s image. Former head of the Republican National Committee, Hays was made president of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA), later renamed the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), a role in which he served for 25 years.
In 1934, twelve years into Hays’ tenure, the Production Code (also called the Hays Code) seized meticulous control of Hollywood film content through the 1960’s. Hays assigned Joseph Breen, a prominent Roman Catholic, to take charge of the newly formed Production Code Administration, the office tasked with reviewing every studio film and issuing certificates of approval as a condition of wide release. The Code not only banned certain types of content but also sought to promote traditional American values.
Perhaps surprisingly, violence made it through Production Code censors much more easily than sex or anti-Americanism, which may explain why noir violence in the 1950’s became increasingly graphic. Overt criticism of police, clergy, and government officials was strongly discouraged unless it was made clear that the individual was an exception, not the rule. Any form of crime had to be unsympathetic and punished. “Lustful kissing” was forbidden, as was prostitution, so “escorts” and “taxi dancers” served as substitutes. Fornication could only be shown if it was presented as objectionable, and homosexuality was an absolute negative even though this was never officially written into the Code. Adultery was allowed only if the perpetrator paid a stiff price for it. Madness was admissible as a cause for criminal or repulsive acts, so it appeared more frequently over time. Like any such authority, the Production Code Administration was subject to manipulation, so blackmail and bribery occasionally played a role. Director André De Toth recalled that he once blackmailed the censors because he had dirt on their extramarital affairs.
In 1952, the U.S. Supreme Court overruled an earlier decision, ruling that motion pictures were entitled to protection under the First Amendment, which eliminated any threat of government regulation and set the stage for a slow unraveling of the Production Code. The threats to Hollywood from television and foreign cinema, combined with changing cultural norms, forced changes to – or looser interpretations of – the Code in the late 1950’s. Adultery and prostitution, for example, became vaguely permissible. The Code remained in force but saw further erosion and was abandoned entirely by the mid-1960’s.
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