By Michael Bayer
In Lewis Foster’s Crashout (1955), a gang of escaped convicts are hiding out in a cave. With one dying of a flesh wound and pleading to be baptized, two of the other men lean him back and submerge his entire head into a muddy drainage pool, holding it underwater for a moment too long, glancing at each other cryptically, as if contemplating using this most sacred ritual of rebirth to commit murder instead. It’s a grotesque but effective depiction of the battling forces in the noir character: instinctive evil and the yearning for redemption. French critics Borde and Chaumeton said that film noirs end with “the sin that’s too heavy to bear.”
In the noir world of angst and meaninglessness, religious faith rarely takes center stage but Christian morality, particularly sin and redemption, seems to be omnipresent. God may be hiding in the inky shadows, but He is always there. In fact, philosopher Thomas Hibbs sees film noir as critiquing the two major philosophical dangers of modernity – nihilism and Gnosticism – which view the material universe as either purposeless or wicked. The film noir vividly expresses these dangers by setting tales in overpowering, soulless modern cities with webs of mechanized institutions and thick shadows as if ashamed to illuminate the full, physical world.
Religion was an enormously important aspect of American culture during Hollywood’s Golden Age, especially as an antidote to communism during the Red Scare. Whether compelled by censorship, consumer demand, or both, Hollywood producers were obliged to portray religion and religious authorities as above reproach. In most Hollywood films of the 1940’s and 1950’s, God not only existed but He was an American.
Film noir emerged during a sort of religious Renaissance in America which some have even called a Third Great Awakening. After decades of religious conflict and marginalization, Franklin Delano Roosevelt brought together, for the first time, key figures of Protestantism, Catholicism, and Judaism to advise his administration. This was recognized as a sort of ecumenical truce among what had clearly become the country’s three principal religious traditions. In a nation with a sterling Protestant pedigree, Catholics and Jews had finally achieved a prominence and respect that would bear postwar fruit.
Like Jews, the far more numerous Catholics weren’t able to make a serious dent in America’s dominant Protestant culture until the 1930s. Quotas had limited Jews to certain industry enclaves, notably retail and entertainment, while most Catholics had been circumscribed to the urban neighborhoods where they had found work, community, and support. Both were subject to ethnic, religious, and regional quota systems in business, education, and government. Heavy immigration from Italy, Ireland, Germany, and Poland, for example, brought armies of Roman Catholics, while first and second-generation Jews from Eastern Europe had built up thriving neighborhoods, especially in New York. In fact, most Hollywood studios were launched by New York Jews who had departed that city’s garment industry to create entertainment for the masses. Six of the eight majors (Big Five and Little Three) were Jewish-controlled (RKO and United Artists were the exceptions), but these Jewish owners, or “moguls” as they would come to be called, were relatively nonreligious, motivated entirely by moneymaking and glamour, not religious freedom.
Largely as a reaction to the Soviet goal of state atheism during the Cold War, America’s national Christian faith was significantly strengthened under the Dwight Eisenhower administration in the 1950’s. The words “under God” were added to the Pledge of Allegiance in 1954. “In God We Trust” was made the national motto in 1956. Thomas Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountain, about his contemplative life in a Trappist monastery, became an enormous bestseller. Disliked and dismissed by President Truman, evangelical preacher Billy Graham, enormously popular among Americans, became Eisenhower’s informal religious advisor. Indeed, Graham is the only real-life religious figure to appear in film noir; footage of Graham’s Los Angeles Crusade is an important plot element in Dick Ross’ Wiretapper (1955).
In the 1950’s, America’s second-most popular religious figure, Bishop Fulton Sheen, rose to prominence on television and radio as Catholic conversions soared. The first Catholic president, John F. Kennedy, Jr., was elected in 1960. And morally speaking, Catholics controlled classic Hollywood. Billy Graham’s evangelicals didn’t. The Jewish moguls didn’t. The Catholic Church was the singular authority deciding what film entertainment looked and sounded like.
In 1934, William Hays, head of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA), appointed Catholic journalist Joseph Breen to run the newly formed Production Code Administration (later dubbed the “Breen office”), the office tasked with reviewing every studio film and issuing certificates of approval as a condition of wide release. The Code not only banned content that violated strictures around sex, violence, anti-capitalism, and anti-Americanism, but sought to actively promote traditional (Catholic) values too. Breen was chosen in part to appease the growing chorus of Catholic organizations that had been protesting the studios’ scandalous output.
While not officially connected with the Breen office, the Catholic Legion of Decency was a powerful organization representing 20 million Catholics whose disapproval could sink a film’s ticket sales. Catholics were instructed not to see a C rated picture “under pain of sin” and to keep children away from B rated pictures. Many parishes took a collective pledge to that effect. This meant Breen’s Production Code and the Catholic Legion of Decency could team up to crush any producer unwilling to comply. The Legion had been particularly alarmed by the violence of gangster films like Public Enemy (1931), Little Caesar (1931), and Scarface (1932), so during the organization’s first three years of operation (1934-1937), it prevented almost any crime films from being made. This whole arrangement was acceptable to the major studios because they knew the alternative was worse: arbitrary condemnations by a patchwork of dioceses and parishes and/or regulation by state and federal government.
Despite so much Catholic control, overt Christian stories and settings weren’t particularly common in film noir. In fact, explicit Christian references were not imposed by the censors but often incorporated organically by filmmakers. While Catholic priests and nuns were occasionally main characters (Appointment with Danger, 1950; Thunder on the Hill, 1951; On the Waterfront, 1954), they were more likely to be found on the periphery of the story.
The legendary Alfred Hitchcock, a Roman Catholic, used Catholic iconography and plot elements quite regularly, perhaps most convincingly in The Wrong Man (1956), which starred Henry Fonda as a sensitive family man mistakenly arrested for armed robbery. Hitch’s most overt foray into Catholicism on the screen, however, was I Confess (1953), in which Montgomery Clift plays Father Logan, a priest to whom a parishioner has confessed murder but who soon becomes the prime suspect. Beautifully conveying the inherent conflict of the sacrosanct confessional and a modern society of law and order, the film in many ways is a treatise on sacrifice; Logan sacrifices his reputation, his security, and potentially his freedom in the hopes that a sinful man will repent. Hibbs described it as Father Logan undergoing a passion akin to Christ’s.
An important contributor to the noir cycle, English novelist Graham Greene, a devout Catholic, considered his faith a bountiful source of melodrama. Greene’s extremes of goodness and evil, of creating and destroying, allowed for the kind of anguished conscience that fueled some of the greatest noirs of the cycle. In Brighton Rock (1948), based on Greene’s novel of the same name, the despicable gangster Pinkie Rose (Richard Attenborough) wants to take everything he can from the innocent, generous Rose, the Catholic girl who loves him, up to and including her being. It’s a moral battle of such extremes, Satan tormenting Christ, that we almost expect the universe to cave in on itself.
Religious leaders aren’t without sin, but Christian hypocrisy didn’t necessarily represent hopelessness in film noir; in fact, hypocrisy often helped to clarify faith. For example, Robert Mitchum’s Reverend Harry Powell in Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter (1955) is a despicable fraud who lies, steals, beats, and murders his way toward a small fortune hidden inside a little girl’s doll. A noir masterpiece, the film is a blistering portrayal of religious authority and its potential for evil: Powell symbolizes every facile criticism of American Christianity, including greed, hypocrisy, misogyny, and self-righteousness. Laughton later told author Preston Neal Jones that the film “was a marvelous opportunity to show that God’s glory was really in the little old farm woman [who rescues the children], and not in the Bible-totin’ son of a bitch.”
While not nearly as execrable as Reverend Powell, a stuffy, thoughtless Catholic priest is the sinner in Mark Robson’s Edge of Doom (1950). He’s no monster, but the priest’s unforgiving, dogmatic refusal of young Martin Lynn’s (Farley Granger) request for his mother’s funeral represents a lazy, broken version of the Church. When Martin murders the clergyman, we find ourselves morally disoriented until a second priest, played by Dana Andrews, reminds us of what the faith stands for.
For both clergy and laymen, redemption is still available in the film noir universe. Cy Endfield’s The Sound of Fury (1950) begins with a blind street preacher warning passersby that “Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.” Here is the enduring Christian principle (and Production Code rule) that saves noir from tilting into nihilism. It reminds us that we can come breathlessly close to the pit of perdition, but with the softest plea for redemption, we can avoid falling in.
© 2024 Heart of Noir
