Nightmare Alley - Film Noir And The American Dream (41 page)

Leftist filmmakers were out front in fighting fascism both before and during World War II, as the long, impressive list of their antifascist and/or patriotic war films attests.
³
They also contributed a good deal to the intellectual life of Hollywood, founding and sustaining the journal
Hollywood Quarterly
, the only venue
in which working filmmakers could discuss technique and theory.
⁴
Many were involved in the labor agitation that swept Hollywood in the mid-1940s and that drew the attention of reactionary elements inside and outside of government.
⁵
Rightly perturbed that the rank and file had seen little evidence of the vast profits studios had earned during the war, the guilds and unions struck for better pay and working conditions (Broe 9). Though they won some early battles, they lost this war once the radical-led Conference of Studio Unions was overwhelmed by the more conservative International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE). Ronald Reagan was elected president of the Screen Actors Guild, and, with the help of conservative Hollywood organizations such as the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals (MPAPAI), vehement anticommunism won the day. The Screen Writers Guild, long the bastion of Hollywood reds, fell apart. Soon business moguls united with Republican lawmakers, using the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 (which severely regulated labor unions and prevented Communists from leading them) to expose and fire leftist labor leaders.

HUAC swooped down to complete the job. As Trumbo wrote, the committee attacked Hollywood “to destroy the trade unions, to paralyze anti-fascist political action, and to ‘remove progressive content from films’” (qtd. in Neve,
Film
93).
⁶
At the forefront of the conservative backlash was Eric Johnston, a former president of the Chamber of Commerce hired as head of the Motion Picture Association of America in late 1945, who declared: “We’ll have no more films that deal with the seamy side of American life. We’ll have no more films that treat the banker as a villain” (qtd. in May 177). But, in fact, HUAC showed little interest in the content of films. Rather, the committee aimed to limit movie content to what fell within its own narrow definition of Americanism by preventing Communists or “pinkos” from working, simply labeling any movie made by a known Communist or former Communist, no matter how anodyne, as “subversive.” Ceplair and Englund conclude that such charges “served as a pretext for silencing a cultural and humanitarian liberalism” (254). The strategy worked and by 1951 had permanently altered “the structure of power and ideology in Hollywood” (May 197) by emasculating the guilds and purging radicals from the studios (Ceplair and Englund 222).

But before the first hearings, in October of 1947, spirits were high among the nineteen subpoenaed radicals.
⁷
The group decided on a strategy of evasion, though many of them also prepared statements explaining why the investigation was unconstitutional and defending their First Amendment rights. A Committee for the First Amendment, formed by respected liberals Philip Dunne, John
Huston, Humphrey Bogart, and William Wyler, distributed press releases and statements defending the nineteen. But these plans quickly foundered as a stream of “friendly” witnesses cited long lists of alleged Communists; although HUAC allowed these persons to read statements, it not only cut off the “unfriendly” witnesses but, when they refused to cooperate, cited them for contempt of Congress.
⁸
Within days the CFA had collapsed out of fear of being painted red (Bogart even issued an abject apology in
Photoplay
a few months later). In November studio executives issued the notorious Waldorf Statement, which declared that no studio would knowingly hire a Communist.
⁹
With it the blacklist began.

Ten of the original nineteen subpoenaed radicals were jailed; but perhaps more significant than the jailings was the blanket of fear that immediately descended on Hollywood. HUAC withdrew between 1947 and 1951, but radicals—even if their involvement with the Communist Party had been minor or had taken place in the distant past—saw jobs vanish overnight: even Trumbo, the highest-paid screenwriter in Hollywood in 1947, was forced to use a “front” to sell his work. If the original hearings had been designed to flush out Communists and force the studios to police themselves, the 1951–53 hearings were mostly a series of what Victor Navasky calls “degradation ceremonies” (314): their purpose was not really to find or prosecute Communists (most names were already known) but to induce witnesses to name other radicals. That is, the committee’s goal was to humiliate and convert those who testified, ostracize and stigmatize those who did not, and meanwhile drum up publicity for themselves. The committee also sought to transform the perception of the informer from that of “rat” to patriot. Those who named others and apologized were permitted to work again; those who refused to name others—even if they testified—were blacklisted. For the studios, however, it was all about money. Already hemorrhaging audiences in the wake of the
Paramount v. Loews
decision that stripped them of theater ownership, and fearing the advent of television, studios were less concerned about reds than about red ink.

Whatever the motives of its perpetrators, the blacklist cut a swathe through Hollywood. Loyalty oaths became de rigueur, as many radicals and former radicals—including Dmytryk and Rossen, along with Sterling Hayden, Elia Kazan, Silvia Richards, and many others—were paraded through the committee chambers and forced to cite names, thereby preserving their livelihoods but earning a lifetime of second thoughts and condemnation from those who refused to testify. The ritual was chillingly successful: as Navasky observes, no Hollywood Communist or former Communist who was called to testify and failed to name others
worked under his or her own name again for many years (84). An estimated 350 creative artists lost their jobs, and only about 10 percent of blacklistees salvaged their careers (Broe 85; Ceplair and Englund 419).
¹⁰
The radicals’ view—that HUAC’s witch hunt was not only unconstitutional but un-American—was drowned out by the loud chorus of fearmongers (which included the American Legion and other hyper-“patriotic” organizations), publicity seekers, and media shills. Among the “recklessly mangled lives and careers” (Navasky 76) were those of some of the finest artists in Hollywood. According to Ceplair and Englund, blacklisted writers had scripted ten of the ninety-one top grossing films before 1952 and had accumulated 14 percent of available accolades while contributing 20 percent of the material on which recognition was based (333). And though several writers were able to sell screenplays using fronts, their earnings dwindled, and they relinquished any control over the outcome. The news was worse for directors and actors. Polonsky (not one of the Nineteen but an outspoken radical who had been involved in labor organizing before coming to Hollywood) was unable to direct a film between 1948 and 1969. Losey, Endfield, and Dassin emigrated, and though all three had success abroad, they were cut off from their communities and friends. Actors John Garfield and Canada Lee, two stars of
Body and Soul
, were hounded to death: as Navasky puts it, both men died “of blacklist” (340). In sum, the blacklist was a disaster not just for Hollywood’s radical community but for the entire American movie industry.

Yes, they were skilled; but were they subversive? John Howard Lawson wrote in 1949 that “it is impossible for any screen writer to put anything into a motion picture to which the executive producers object” (qtd. in Ceplair and Englund 322). As we have seen, the writer in midcentury Hollywood exerted little control over the final product. Moreover, the Hollywood reds had little or no interest in subverting the United States government, as HUAC charged. Yet these writers and directors did critique certain American values in the crime films that we now call noir. James Naremore argues that “the first decade of American film noir was largely the product of a socially committed faction … composed of ‘Browderite’ communists … and ‘Wallace’ democrats” (
More Than Night
104).
¹¹
Paul Buhle and Dave Wagner likewise declare that noir was “the cinematic triumph of the Left’s filmmakers … over adverse circumstances and ideological resistance from Communist aesthetic reductionism” (xvi); Philip Kemp has even
suggested that radical ideas underpin the entire noir canon.
¹²
More plausibly, May divides noir into two types, one set focusing on authority figures who demolish evildoers, cure pathology, or ease adaptation to the middle-class dream, and a second group (created by the Left) that celebrates nonconformism and “perpetuate[s] the ideal of the hybrid rebel in quest of wholeness against an alienating society” (220). Broe further argues that the leftist slant of noir between 1945 and 1950 was supplanted after 1950 by a conservative wave (30). Although Broe’s dates are questionable (
Try and Get Me!
and
The Prowler
were released in 1951; the right-wing pseudodocumentary
Walk a Crooked Mile
appeared in 1948), he is correct that radical style and politics were much harder to find in 1950s noir.

In his seminal 1985 essay “Red Hollywood,” Thom Andersen lists thirteen films as exemplars of what he dubs “film gris,” a subset of noir distinguished by greater emphasis on social “realism” (257; his list includes most of the films I discuss in this chapter). Expanding the list to sixteen, Joshua Hirsch outlines the sources and themes of this subgenre, which he describes as “the most radically leftist cycle of Hollywood pictures” before the 1960s (84).
¹³
But even Andersen seems embarrassed by the term
film gris
, so I propose a new name for these products of Hollywood radicals:
red noir
. Though indebted to the gangster films of the 1930s, as Joshua Hirsch argues, the red noirs turn those pictures’ implied critique of capitalism into an explicit one (89, 85).
¹⁴
As he explains, this group scrutinizes three aspects of American society: the class system, capitalism, and the ideology of the American Dream (86). These categories provide a helpful template for the ensuing discussion.

“You’re Genghis Khan, Alexander the Great, Caesar! … Your every move is obvious. … Not cleverness, not imagination. Just force, brute force.” Intoned by Dr. Walters (future blacklistee Art Smith), these lines not only cite the title of Jules Dassin’s violent prison melodrama but also state its major theme and describe its villain, Captain Munsey (chillingly enacted by Hume Cronyn). Unfortunately, the lines also pinpoint the film’s main flaw: though its heart is in the right place, its every move is obvious.
¹⁵

In portraying the inhumane conditions that prompt inmate Joe Collins (Burt Lancaster) to lead a prison break,
Brute Force
presents an allegory of a fascist society, with Munsey as its Fuehrer and Collins (note his initials) as a Christ figure
who sacrifices himself to take Munsey down. Dassin succeeds in making us hate Munsey, a sadistic martinet who listens to Wagner while torturing a prisoner and spouts neo-Nazi twaddle such as “weakness is an infection that makes a man a follower instead of a leader. … Nature proves that the weak must die so that the strong may live.” Ultimately, the film’s conflict boils down to a face-off between Hitler and Jesus.

Dassin’s antifascist allegory is coupled with an equally heavy-handed class critique. The prisoners are shown laboring in factorylike conditions, and those Munsey disfavors are sent to the “drain pipe,” a grimy, dark, dangerous place where inmates attempt, seemingly without stint or success, to clear muck. The inmates are lower-class workers enslaved to Munsey’s tyrannies, which include extreme punishments for minor infractions and the cultivation of informers. The latter element—omnipresent throughout—looms especially large after Collins’s escape scheme is doomed by the Judas among his apostles, “Freshman” (future blacklistee Jeff Corey). Though it was released just before the first HUAC hearings,
Brute Force
nonetheless conjures the period’s paranoid atmosphere. For a radical like Dassin the relationship between Munsey and the oppressed inmates may also have evoked the one between studio heads and the striking workers who risked the loss of careers and even imprisonment from their activities.

If
Brute Force
’s leftist politics seem ham-handed, Dassin’s next film,
The Naked City
, suffers from the opposite problem: far from naked, its class critique is, as Rebecca Prime has shown, muffled by compromises.
¹⁶
After the shoot, Dassin made producer Mark Hellinger promise not to change anything while he was out of the country, but the pledge became moot after Hellinger died in December (Prime 149). Viewing the final version a few months later, Dassin was outraged that the film had been shorn of “anything connected with poor people or poverty or struggle” (qtd. in Prime 150). A muted class critique does linger in the opening sequences, which show ordinary folks hard at work while the idle rich—including playboy Frank Niles (Howard Duff) and his soon-to-be murdered girlfriend Jean Dexter—live off their labor (Broe 91). The plot, too, suggests that Dexter, whose working-class parents lament her obsession with wealth, was infected by a virulent version of the American Dream: ripping off the wealthy in order to become just like them. During the film’s exciting conclusion we pass through the teeming streets of the Lower East Side as the police pursue murderer Willie Garzah (Ted de Corsia), yet the tenements are little more than a colorful backdrop. Hellinger’s self-congratulatory voice-overs notwithstanding, the finished film
does not “lay New York open” but diverts its gaze, turning radical politics into a run-of-the-mill police procedural.

A more successful exposure of the proletariat’s plight appears in Dassin’s next film,
Thieves’ Highway
, adapted by A. I. Bezzerides from his novel,
Thieves’ Market
. Nick Garcos (Richard Conte) returns from military service to learn that his father (future blacklistee Morris Carnovsky) lost his legs when corrupt produce wholesaler Mike Figlia got him drunk and, Nick believes, wrecked his truck and took his money. Seeking restitution, Nick teams up with Ed Kinney (Millard Mitchell) to drive a shipment of Golden Delicious apples to San Francisco. Because this is the first crop of the season, Kinney assures him, it’s “like money in the bank.” For Kinney the apples are wealth incarnate; for Nick they are embodied aspiration. In short, the apples are fetishized commodities that represent, in Marxian terms, the entire system of production: hence we see Kinney try to cheat the growers who load his truck. Yet for Kinney—so poor that he can’t afford to fix his decrepit vehicle—their purpose is less to make him rich than to help him survive. And though he assures Nick that they’ll “make a killing,” it’s a risky venture, as Kinney must race two other drivers, Pete (Joseph Pevney) and Slob (Jack Oakie), to reach the market first.