Noir Cool and The Great Depression

Journal of American Studies, 42 (2008), 3, 415–448 f 2008 Cambridge University Press doi:10.1017/S0021875808005513 Printed in the United Kingdom ‘‘ Emergent Noir ’’: Film Noir and the Great Depression in High Sierra (1941) and This Gun for Hire (1942) JOEL DINERSTEIN This article theorizes a new periodization for film noir through a prewar category of ‘‘ emergent noir’’ : seven films released between 1940 and 1942 – including The Maltese Falcon and Citizen Kane – that defined the genre’s thematics, aesthetics, visual style, and moral ambiguity. Using archival research and trauma theory, the article analyzes High Sierra and This Gun for Hire as case studies of ‘‘ failure narratives ’’ : each film resonated with American audiences by validating the recent suffering of the Great Depression, allowing for a vicarious sense of revenge, and creating new ideals of individuality and masculinity. Both films were surprise box-office hits and created new film icons for the 1940s : Humphrey Bogart, Alan Ladd, and Veronica Lake. All three were embodiments of ‘‘ cool, ’’ a concept herein theorized as a public mask of stoicism. Nearly all scholarship on film noir presumes a postwar context despite the genre’s emergence in 1941, a historical paradigm ironically traceable to the influence of French film criticism. It is well known – although not fully appreciated – that the term ‘‘ film noir’’ did not exist in American parlance until the early 1970s, even among film critics.1 ‘‘ In an important sense, the French invented the American film noir, ’’ James Naremore declares in his introduction to the translation of A Panorama of American Film Noir (1955), the genre’s first full-length study. Authors Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton framed their thematic analysis through psychoanalytic theory, aesthetics, narrative, and genre, but with little concern for historical context. They perceived the new ‘‘ dark cinema’’ as ‘‘a synthesis of three kinds of Tulane University. E-mail : [email protected]. For their readings, suggested revisions, and invaluable advice with regard to this article, my thanks to Andy Erish and, especially, the anonymous referee for JAS. 1 Foster Hirsch, The Dark Side of the Screen : Film Noir (New York : Da Capo, 2001; first published 1978), x–xi ; Paul Schrader, ‘‘ Notes on Film Noir, ’’ in Alain Silver and James Ursini, eds., Film Noir Reader (New York : Limelight, 2000), 52–63. http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 13 Jun 2009 IP address: 129.81.50.111 416 Joel Dinerstein [1930s] film’’ – the gangster film, the horror film, and the ‘‘deduction-based detective film’’ – and pegged the shift in artistic register to the effects of wartime experience. As for its reception, they guessed that the American ‘‘ public in 1941 or 1942 was tired of comedies and melodramas,’’ and so, in response, ‘‘ Around 1941 ambiguity and ambivalence penetrated the psychological drama.’’ In terms of reception, noir critics have not advanced much from this position, and Frank Krutnik (in 1991) claimed scholars of the genre generally provide only ‘‘ an introductory ‘ potted history’ ’’ of the 1940s and thus ‘‘ the history of noir which has emerged from _ film criticism leaves much to be desired. ’’2 Despite landmark works such as Krutnik’s In A Lonely Street: Film Noir, Genre, Masculinity (1991), Naremore’s More than Night (1998), and Edward Dimendberg’s Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity (2004) – and several studio histories – there is still little cultural history to shed light on noir’s populist appeal.3 As a scholar of the interwar period,4 I was immediately confounded by a discursive question : why do the dominant historical paradigms of noir connect the genre to wartime experience or postwar anxiety if its first classic – everyone agrees – is John Huston’s The Maltese Falcon (1941) and if, in the same year, Citizen Kane modeled the genre’s signature visual style? By general consensus, the first full cycle of noir thrillers begins with Double Indemnity (1944), but there is a slow, steady release of noirs between 1941 and 1944, and yet almost no analysis of this temporal discrepancy. ‘‘ While noir would reach its apotheosis after the war,’’ a Huston scholar typically wonders, ‘‘ one is intrigued, if still somewhat puzzled, about noir’s origins during the war. ’’ Robert Porfirio labels the years 1940 to 1943 the initial ‘‘ experimentation’’ phase ; Krutnik writes off The Maltese Falcon as a ‘‘ false start. ’’ How can an artistic breakthrough be experimental – or a false start – if its first auteurs have fully mapped out a new genre’s visual, thematic and narrative style (i.e. flashback, chiaroscuro, alienation, voice-over) ?5 Since the United States did 2 3 4 5 James Naremore, ‘‘ Introduction, ’’ in Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton, A Panorama of American Film Noir : 1941–1953 (San Francisco : City Lights, 2002; first published 1955), ix ; Borde and Chaumeton, A Panorama of American Film Noir, 21, 24–25, 33. James Naremore, More than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1998) ; Edward Dimendberg, Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity (Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, 2004) ; Frank Krutnik, In a Lonely Street : Film Noir, Genre, Masculinity (1991), 28. Joel Dinerstein, Swinging the Machine: Modernity, Technology, and African-American Culture between the World Wars (Amherst : University of Massachusetts Press, 2003). David Desser, ‘‘ The Wartime Films of John Huston : Film Noir and the Emergence of the Therapeutic, ’’ in Gaylyn Studlar and David Desser, Reflections in a Male Eye: John Huston and the American Experience (Washington, DC: Smithsonian University Press, 1993), 23; Krutnik, 35–36; Robert Porfirio, ‘‘ Introduction, ’’ in Robert Porfirio, Alain Silver, and James Ursini, http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 13 Jun 2009 IP address: 129.81.50.111 Film Noir and the Great Depression 417 not officially enter World War II until nearly 1942 (7 December 1941), The Maltese Falcon, Citizen Kane, and High Sierra are all in fact prewar films. Moreover, noir’s stylistic and thematic roots developed throughout the interwar period. From the French poetic realism of Jean Renoir (La Bête humaine (1936), Pépé Le Moko (1938)) and Marcel Carné (Le Jour se lève, (1939)) came the figure of the sympathetic violent criminal central to noir; in all three films the stylish, nonchalant transgressions of actor Jean Gabin’s protagonists anticipate the Bogart persona. Noir’s trademark chiaroscuro is indebted to German expressionism from The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919) to the early films of Fritz Lang; as Marc Vernet has shown, a fraternity of international directors and cinematographers over three decades contributed to the enshrouding of characters in ‘‘disproportionate shadows,’’ framing them in ‘‘ oblique lines ’’ of composition, and exploring the aesthetics of ‘‘the relation between the expanse of dark areas and the scarcity of strongly lit areas. ’’ As the cream of the German film industry’s craftsmen emigrated to Hollywood throughout the 1930s to escape the Nazis, noir represents a synthesis of international cinema under Hollywood auspices.6 Drawing on archival material and primary sources, this article will make two claims, one historical and one theoretical. First, the emergence of the noir genre in the United States – its popularity and resonance – reflects a mediation of traumatic experiences from the Great Depression. According to trauma theorist Shoshana Felman, ‘‘ art inscribes (artistically bears witness to) what we do not yet know of our lived historical relation to events of our times.’’ Trauma theory has often engaged literature as an act of artistic ‘‘ witnessing’’ – of historical trauma (Camus’s The Plague on the Holocaust), of cultural trauma (the end of ideology in Kafka or Beckett), or of personal trauma (the fragmentation of consciousness in Hemingway’s In Our Time). Yet outside of documentary films such as Shoah or the highly mediated, fictional quasidocumentary Hiroshima, Mon Amour, scholars have been slow to frame fictional film narratives as sites of historical witnessing, whether for directors, actors, or audiences. My first claim is that noir’s success and resonance depended upon a visual style and haunted cityscape that generated a virtual 6 eds., Film Noir Reader 3: Interviews with Filmmakers of the Classic Noir Period (New York : Limelight, 2002), 2. For a concise summary of German expressionism and French poetic realism, see Mark Bould, Film Noir: From Berlin to Sin City (London: Wallflower, 2005), 24–40 ; he calls these two genres ‘‘ the prehistory of film noir. ’’ For a methodical historical analysis of the aesthetics of Expressionism see Marc Vernet, ‘‘ Film Noir on the Edge of Doom,’’ in Joan Copjec, ed., Shades of Noir : A Reader (London : Verso, 1993), 7–12. http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 13 Jun 2009 IP address: 129.81.50.111 418 Joel Dinerstein space for American audiences to consider their own unarticulated personal traumas during the Great Depression.7 Noir thus emerges in the United States as a search for a recast individualism using violence as a cinematic language of resistance. The genre’s protagonists lack history, geography, family, and nearly all bonds of affection, but they believe in their own individual agency. Mark Bould calls this central tension in noir ‘‘ determinism without predictability, ’’ and opposes it to the more rigid naturalism of its French precedent. For example, Fritz Lang defines his cinematic vision as ‘‘ this fight against destiny, against fate, ’’ and in his films ‘‘ the fight is important _ not the result of it. ’’ Noir protagonists may fail in their attempts at ‘‘regeneration through violence ’’ (to borrow Richard Slotkin’s phrase), but their symbolic resistance to the undignified work, anonymity, and shocks of technological society resonated with audiences sympathetic to the genre’s groping for new models of individualism (and new parameters for ‘‘ freedom ’’ itself).8 Within the context of late-1930s Hollywood film, then, noir emerged as an inquiry into a fallen national mythos. The sustaining myth of American industrial capitalism was the Horatio Alger narrative. As Nathanael West reflected in 1940, ‘‘Only fools laugh at Horatio Alger, and his poor boys who make good. The wiser man knows that _ Alger is to America what Homer was to the Greeks.’’ Despite the hollow ring of the work ethic during the depths of the Depression, American audiences refused to expunge the myth, and instead the Alger narrative morphed into the ethnic gangster’s rise from rags to riches (e.g. Scarface, Little Caesar). In replacing the virtuous hero of the businessman with a rogue criminal protagonist, the gangster film grafted a revenge narrative onto the Alger formula: it provided a vicarious outlet for those who felt cheated of their savings, hopes, and future, without sacrificing the myth of upward social mobility.9 7 8 9 On trauma and witnessing in literature see Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, Testimony : Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History (New York : Routledge, 1992), xx and passim ; Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 49–50, 67–68, 105–6, 179 ; Jim Barloon, ‘‘ Very Short Stories: The Miniaturization of War in Hemingway’s In Our Time, ’’ Hemingway Review, 2 (2005), 5–17; and Mark Seals, ‘‘ Trauma Theory and Hemingway’s Lost Paris Manuscripts, ’’ Hemingway Review, 2 (2005), 62–73 ; on trauma and film see Joshua Hirsch, Afterimage : Film, Trauma, and the Holocaust (Philadelphia : Temple University Press, 2003) ; Schrader, 55. Jean Gabin’s characters are entrapped by family, history, or local loyalties ; the atomized protagonists of noir act upon an imagined agency. Bould, x, 32 (Lang quote), 36–40 ; Richard Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence (Middleton, CT : Wesleyan University Press, 1973). Nathanael West, ‘‘ ‘A Cool Million ’: A Screen Story,’’ in idem, Novels and Other Writings (New York, Library of America, 1997), 745; Schrader, 58, 62. West’s screen treatment is http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 13 Jun 2009 IP address: 129.81.50.111 Film Noir and the Great Depression 419 Noir should also be considered alongside the annis mirabilis of the Hollywood studio era – 1939 – a year full of epic reflections on mythic national identity : Gone With The Wind (southern myth), Stagecoach (frontier myth), Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (Mid-west ‘‘ heartland’’ myth of virtue) and The Wizard of Oz (technology and innocence). By contrast, noir is a shadow genre that arises in the wake of these broad considerations of American identity, depicting instead the mundane experiences of Depression-era Americans. In his cross-country travels during the 1930s, Sherwood Anderson perceived a pervasive sense of failure among the unemployed men he picked up hitchhiking, as they told stories of domestic upheaval and the loss of dignified work. Historian Warren Susman summarized the national mood as one of internalized failure : [In the 1930s,] middle-class America [was] frightened and humiliated, sensing a lack of any order _ and tending so often to internalize the blame for their fears _ [They were more likely] to feel shame at their inability to cope rather than overt hostility to a technological and economic order they did not always understand.10 Such a fragmentation of ideology created the artistic conditions for films whose absence of direct social critique is compensated for by its cynical, trapped, alienated, and ‘‘ presentist’’ (so to speak) protagonists. The short prewar period (1938–42) provided a window of opportunity for the production of films that darkly illuminated the collapse of the nation’s myths and symbols, its lost faith in businessmen and the work ethic, its first bouts of technological pessimism and class war. To mark the changes wrought on their own beliefs and sensibilities, American audiences required new icons, innovative narrative techniques, and a haunted cinemascape. In terms of trauma theory, the average noir often featured a protagonist with some kind of repetition compulsion; that is, a lifestyle allowing for a pattern of violent behavior in response to an unarticulated past trauma (whether as detective or as criminal). According to Freud and trauma theorists, the cure for such an individual must come from ‘‘working through ’’ the trauma: to remember, articulate, transfer it to the therapist, grieve, and finally process the repressed emotions. In noir the protagonist thus functions as a symbolic sacrificial hero. Noirs provided audiences with the chance to ‘‘ work through ’’ their traumatic experiences of the Depression (1929–37) as the economy recovered due to the build-up of the defense industries. In other 10 related only in name to his literary deconstruction of the Alger formula in A Cool Million (1934). Warren Susman, Culture as History (New York : Pantheon, 1973), 196–97; see also Sherwood Anderson, Puzzled America (New York : Scribners, 1935), 29, 46, 147. http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 13 Jun 2009 IP address: 129.81.50.111 420 Joel Dinerstein words, for noir audiences, ‘‘ witnessing’’ functioned as a form of selfreflexivity.11 If we approach noir up from the 1930s rather than retrospectively, its emergence in 1941 makes sense. Noir’s first American auteurs – John Huston and Orson Welles – appear as fully formed artistic voices in their film debuts. The genre’s signature technical innovation – Expressionistic key-lighting – distinguishes Citizen Kane as an artistic breakthrough, and master Hollywood cinematographer Gregg Toland’s sophisticated work with Welles soon becomes a new model. Within a fifteen-month period, Humphrey Bogart and Alan Ladd are embraced as new icons of white masculinity in personae that will dominate the 1940s. And in the two films under discussion, Ida Lupino and Veronica Lake play semi-independent, empowered ‘‘ femmes’’ who are not ‘‘ fatale. ’’ In fact, the femme fatale as a formulaic element of 1940s noir may be overstated; in eighty films featuring central female characters, Angela Martin argues that only eight are actually fatale. (And as to reception, Martin suggests women might also have enjoyed ‘‘ the treat of seeing women giving as good, if not better, than they got. ’’12) To perform effective close readings of High Sierra (HS) and This Gun for Hire (TGFH), five other coeval films must be kept in mind. First, The Maltese Falcon (1941), Bogart’s next project after HS, with John Huston as writer and director. Second, The Glass Key (1942), the next project for Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake after TGFH, from a Dashiell Hammett novel. Third, The Grapes of Wrath (1940) : the archetypal Depression film is also a proto-noir, featuring a sympathetic criminal protagonist unrepentant about murder, a priest who has lost his Christian moorings, and innovative chiaroscuro by Toland (before Kane). And then two films that are foundational to the genre : Kane and Casablanca (1942). Soon after the release of Citizen Kane, Orson Welles declared his objective was to create a ‘‘ failure story’’ – something in contrast to ‘‘ the formula of the ‘ success story’ ’’ (i.e. the Alger narrative). To some extent, all seven aforementioned films are meditations on failure ; more precisely, each of them manages to spin a narrative of social failure into a myth of individual integrity. Even Casablanca is a failure story of this type, spun like celluloid gold into the smartest Hollywood ending ever conceived. As for Kane, according to David Thomson, not only did the film’s ‘‘ high contrast/high-focus 11 12 All of these generic aspects are formative to the genre, even as noir inflected toward postwar concerns. Angela Martin, ‘‘ ‘ Gilda Didn’t Do Any of Those Things You’ve Been Losing Sleep Over !’: The Central Women of 40s Films Noirs, ’’ in E. Ann Kaplan, ed., Women in Film Noir 2nd edn (London : BFI, 1998), 209–10, 218–25. http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 13 Jun 2009 IP address: 129.81.50.111 Film Noir and the Great Depression 421 photography ’’ create a new visual spectrum of darkness, but Welles’s ‘‘use of the investigative flashback structure, ’’ and Kane’s feeling of ‘‘spatial suffocation _ melancholy,’’ and ‘‘ overall sense of entrapment,’’ anticipate the paradigmatic noir sensibility of Double Indemnity and Murder, My Sweet by three years.13 If noir is visually and thematically fully realized by 1942, its basis of disillusion and alienation cannot be World War II or the Cold War.14 I propose to call this cycle of seven films ‘‘ emergent noir. ’’ These films represent the first flowering of a delayed cinematic response to the traumatic experience of the Great Depression that continues throughout the classic noir period (1941–58). In 1957, French film critic André Bazin recognized the nearly concurrent release of Citizen Kane and The Maltese Falcon as the start-date of noir: ‘‘ It must be the case _ that there is some secret harmony [here at] _ the end of the prewar period, [with] the arrival of a certain novelistic style of cinematographic écriture, and, through Bogart, the triumph of interiorization and ambiguity. ’’ This article attempts to decode that ‘‘ secret harmony’’ and to explain the appeal of ennobling failure narratives for a society in transition.15 If these seven films can be said to comprise a cohesive cycle of emergent noir, that would disrupt the two accepted historical paradigms – wartime and postwar – making a discursive analysis necessary. Feminist film criticism dominates the discourse and requires a postwar paradigm for its trenchant analysis of the femme fatale, an object of desire so powerful and threatening to the controlling male gaze that she must first be demonized and then killed off in narratives scholars often now recast as ‘‘ male melodrama.’’ The role of the femme fatale reflects white male anxiety over shifting gender roles in the workplace during wartime, later exacerbated by the problem of veterans’ readjustment to civilian life. Krutnik’s work is typical, and his historical chapter is entitled ‘‘ The War, Women, and ‘Postwar Maladjustment. ’’’ Postwar social historians extend that analysis to characterize noir as a genre reflective of the war’s disruption of community, anxieties over ambiguous class identity, and patriarchal resistance to domestication and consumerism. ‘‘ Film noir translated justified resentments against a corporatist culture of conformity into atomized individualistic self-pity,’’ according to George Lipsitz, ‘‘ aestheticiz[ing] alienation _ [and] a craving for revenge. ’’ Cultural 13 14 15 David Thomson, Rosebud : The Story of Orson Welles (New York : Vintage, 1996), 151–55, 241 n. 35, 398; Michael Walker, ‘‘ Introduction, ’’ in Ian Cameron, ed., The Book of Film Noir (New York : Continuum, 1993), 32. Welles quoted in Frank Brady, Citizen Welles (New York : Scribner, 1989), 81. André Bazin, ‘‘ The Death of Humphrey Bogart, ’’ in Jim Hillier, Cahiers du Cinema: The 1950s (Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, 1985), 100. Emphasis added. http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 13 Jun 2009 IP address: 129.81.50.111 422 Joel Dinerstein theorists such as Slavoj Žižek and Fredric Jameson frame the femme fatale as an agent of resistance that the hard-boiled detective cannot dominate through narration or violence; she comes to represent an encounter with the death drive itself. In the wake of Auschwitz and Hiroshima, such narratives resonate with audiences dimly aware of the existential futility of creating a meaningful existence in the wake of lost ideologies.16 For Thomas Schatz, the premier film historian of the 1940s, the genre is simply a domestic wartime development – an inquiry into the ‘‘ dark side’’ of human nature as revealed in war. Extending his analysis, Sheri Biesen locates the origins of noir’s Expressionist sensibility – its dark shadows, fervid anxiety, and innovative lighting techniques – in the mundane experience of West Coast power blackouts, paranoia about Japanese attacks, and limited studio budgets (i.e. the artistic equivalent of rationing). Biesen makes a compelling argument, but the thematic content of an art form cannot immediately reflect social experience (consider post-9/11 artistic production). Typically, she claims that Citizen Kane in every way ‘‘ anticipated film noir’’ with its ‘‘ self-destructive antihero, ’’ documentary style, and ‘‘ bitter, existential noir finale, ’’ yet does not grapple with the temporal discrepancy of prewar’s emergent noir.17 Finally, scholars who extrapolate from the production end, such as Naremore and Schatz, often link the genre’s atomized, isolated, haunted protagonists to the artistic vision of German and central European (often Jewish) immigrant directors in Hollywood. After escaping Nazism or fascism, these directors allegedly galvanized an intellectual ‘‘ left culture’’ in Hollywood, and Naremore rightly presses Welles’s political aspirations and Huston’s ‘‘leftist satire ’’ to serve his argument. For Naremore, noir does not represent ‘‘ a national zeitgeist, ’’ but instead its overwhelming ‘‘ atmosphere of death and disillusionment _ [has] a great deal to do with a specific community [Hollywood] that could no longer maintain its Depression-era faith that America would someday evolve into a socialist democracy.’’ For this influential paradigm, noir’s cynicism, claustrophobia, and Marxist critique marry cultural-front politics to imported proto-existentialism. Noir’s 16 17 Krutnik, In a Lonely Street, 57–72 ; see also Copjec, Shades of Noir; Kaplan, Women in Film Noir; James F. Maxfield, The Fatal Woman: Sources of Male Anxiety in American Film Noir, 1941–1991 (Madison, NJ : FDU Press, 1996), 10–11 ; George Lipsitz, Rainbow at Midnight (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 286. Also see Mike Davis, City of Quartz (London: Verso, 1990), 40–41 ; Slavoj Žižek, Looking Awry (Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, 1991), 62–66 ; and Fredric Jameson, ‘‘ The Synoptic Chandler,’’ in Copjec, Shades of Noir. Thomas Schatz, Boom and Bust: The American Cinema in the 1940s (New York : Scribner, 1997), 3–5, 138, 204–6, 232–39 ; Sheri Chinen Biesen, Blackout : World War II and the Origins of Film Noir (Baltimore : Johns Hopkins Press, 2005), 1–6, 34–35 (on Citizen Kane), 59–95. http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 13 Jun 2009 IP address: 129.81.50.111 Film Noir and the Great Depression 423 dark moods and alienated protagonists thus follow from its auteurs, caught (as they were) between Depression-era hopes for social democracy and postwar evisceration of their political dreams. Despite the validity of Naremore’s framework in the Cold War context – when leftist politics were indeed ‘‘ repressed, marginalized, and _ extinguished ’’ – his political analysis evades the enormous popularity of literary noir (i.e. hard-boiled fiction) for working-class male audiences of the Depression, and the various forms of resistance (class, gender) implied by their responses to the genre.18 Nearly all noir scholars agree that the genre could easily have emerged ten years earlier but for the Hays Code of 1934, as enforced by the Production Code Administration (PCA). The ‘‘ noir ethos didn’t spring out of nowhere in 1940,’’ Michael Walker declares, ‘‘ it would be more accurate to say it had been suppressed during the ’30s.’’19 Noir’s first wave depended upon the hard-boiled bestsellers of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, and Cornell Woolrich – when a ‘‘ dark style of narrative emerged from the American imagination’’ – but before 1941 it was impossible to create verisimilitude for such works within the code’s ‘‘Victorian principles.’’20 Under the clergy-influenced leadership of Joseph Breen, all ambiguous sex and violence had to be punished on screen ; for example, the PCA specifically forbade making films of Cain’s works (e.g. Double Indemnity, The Postman Always Rings Twice). Hard-boiled source texts that were produced in the 1930s (e.g. earlier versions of Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon or The Glass Key) lack the ‘‘ more serious tone’’ of noir, and the iconography of its actors, styles, fashions, and sets are indebted more to the prosperous modernity of the 1920s than to Depression-era grittiness.21 In the earliest version of The Maltese Falcon (1931), Sam Spade comes off as a supercilious, greedy bachelor; in the next version, Satan Takes a Lady (1936), Spade is a huckster playboy. In both films the tone is more Thin Man jauntiness than Big Sleep existentialism. The PCA fenced off literary noir from Hollywood until World War II, at which point scholars recognize an aesthetic shift : the violence and gore of wartime newsreel footage toughened the American visual palate, predicating 18 19 20 21 Naremore, More than Night, 104, 123–35; see also Davis, 40–41 ; and Paula Rabinowitz, Black & White & Noir: America’s Pulp Modernism (New York : Columbia University Press, 2002). For the reception of hard-boiled fiction in the interwar period see Erin A. Smith, Hard-Boiled : Working-Class Readers and Pulp Magazines (Philadelphia : Temple University Press, 2000), passim. Walker quoted in Cameron, 32 ; see also Schrader, ‘‘ Notes on Film Noir, ’’ 58–59. William Marling, The American Roman Noir: Hammett, Cain, and Chandler (Athens, GA : University of Georgia Press, 1995), ix ; Barton Palmer, Hollywood’s Dark Cinema: The American Film Noir (Boston : Twayne, 1992), 4. Vernet, ‘‘ Film Noir on the Edge of Doom, ’’ 14, 20. http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 13 Jun 2009 IP address: 129.81.50.111 424 Joel Dinerstein a shift in national standards of sex, violence, and morality. In addition, Joseph Breen took a six-month leave of absence in late 1941, and several noirs slipped through – including TGFH – with their sex, violence, and stark realism intact.22 By 1944, the relaxation of the Hays Code made possible faithful adaptations of hard-boiled literary source texts. In the first American essay written on noir (‘‘ Notes on Film Noir,’’ 1972), Paul Schrader theorized that the genre was a delayed reaction to the Great Depression, but did not follow up this observation. More recently, Nicholas Christopher has linked noir’s tremulous, disjointed tone to the rapid cultural change, urbanization, and social transformation of the entire industrial period (1865–1940), with the noir cityscape serving as a container for the memory and erasure of American history: the noir movement, as much as it is a collective shudder on the threshold of the Atomic Age, is also a delayed reaction – delayed by the war – to the Depression _ [and to] demons lurking since the predawn of the Industrial Revolution and the breakneck consolidation of our large cities. For Christopher, noir was a waking traumatic dream carrying emotional lag resulting from the ‘‘ hothouse speed ’’ of urban development, and all the ‘‘ attendant hothouse permutations _ [q]uicksilver migrations, immigrations, and displacements. ’’ For Andrew Dickos, artistic reflection on such upheaval manifested in a ‘‘ compulsion to subvert our screen’s imagery ’’ from Hollywood and its ‘‘myths encoded to prescribe [social] harmony.’’23 These are all important Impressionistic asides in analyses focussed on genre, urban space, or aesthetics. In effect, noir depends upon a cognitive tension between public memory of prewar experience – urban life, distrust of authority, economic uncertainty, class hostility, an aura of desperation – and the tentatively secure economic footing of the second half of the 1940s. In Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity (2004), Edward Dimendberg begins his study by invoking the genre’s temporal disjunction, ‘‘its traumas of unrecoverable time and space, [with] the inability to dwell comfortably either in the present or the past. ’’ Postwar audiences were nostalgic for the ‘‘transparent social structure ’’ of the Depression, Dimendberg suggests, a time when ‘‘ power relations could still be traced with relative ease by a morally irreproachable detective figure. ’’ 22 23 Biesen, 43–45. Schrader, 15 ; Nicholas Christopher, Somewhere in the Night: Film Noir and the American City (New York : Free Press, 1997), 37–38 ; Andrew Dickos, Street with No Name (Lexington : University Press of Kentucky, 2002), 8; Thomson, Rosebud, 166, 206. Christopher’s idea that noir mediates upon an extended industrial period (1865–1940) is synchronous with the lifespan of the fictional Charles Foster Kane (1871–1941). http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 13 Jun 2009 IP address: 129.81.50.111 Film Noir and the Great Depression 425 Unsure of their identity and economic footing in the new postwar era, noir’s ‘‘ harassed working-class protagonists [and] petty criminals _ [living in] ramshackle urban neighborhoods and threatening skyscrapers ’’ provided a familiar visual universe for their as-yet-unworked-through Depression-era experience. Noir’s streets were akin to ‘‘ a modern vision of purgatory,’’ a useful metaphor for a postwar cultural imaginary caught between the hell of a poorly understood set of past social upheavals and an insecure Cold War nuclear victory.24 Dimendberg theorizes a tension between centripetal and centrifugal space. The former term designates urban, industrial, public, and historical spaces of a specific cityscape – train stations, distinctive neighborhoods – while the latter reflects postwar dispersal to generic suburbs and a postindustrial, postmodern, sensibility. He analyzes several films in which protagonists take ‘‘ walking cures ’’ around familiar neighborhoods, as if to validate their own existence on landscapes of semi-permanence (i.e. in comparison with new subdivisions). Such a productive tension might serve a rootless, mobile population, unsure of their own class identity and social status – literally, their ‘‘ place ’’ – after a long economic depression, a world war, and widespread geographical dislocations in search of job opportunities. It is in part this nostalgia for stable spaces – visual, artistic, urban, architectural – that draws filmgoers to noir, and it may even account for its longevity (and for the neo-noir genre). As Dimendberg suggests, ‘‘ the nonsynchronous character of film noir is best apprehended as a tension between a residual American culture and urbanism of the 1920s and 1930s. ’’25 In 1993, Marc Vernet accused the scholarly field of complacency : a lazy collusion of French criticism, Anglo-American criticism, and ‘‘ the loveobject ’’ of noir texts shared by both sets of scholars left its creation myth intact and the discourse static. The substance of this challenge remains valid: if French criticism finds an advantage in inventing film noir, Anglo-American criticism, by taking up without any contestation its basic arguments, gives American cinema a cultural label and a critical force validated by Europe, all the while sparing itself the labor of historical research that would _ put it into question.26 To some extent, I am taking up Vernet’s challenge to recontextualize the genre and begin such a ‘‘ labor of historical research ’’ through questions of reception. 24 25 Schrader, 53–64 ; Dimendberg, Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity, 1, 3. 26 Dimendberg, 3, 86–118. Vernet, 12. http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 13 Jun 2009 IP address: 129.81.50.111 426 Joel Dinerstein THE ‘‘ ROMANTIC HEAVY’’ AND COOL-MASKED MASCULINITY If the first claim of this article is to situate film noir’s meta-consciousness in the 1930s, the second is to analyze a central aspect of early noir’s masculine sensibility : the cross-class social acceptance of ‘‘ hard-boiled masculinities. ’’ The hard-boiled tough was a heroic mode for male working-class readers of pulp magazines in the interwar period, and the closest cinematic analogy was probably the charismatic gangster (e.g. James Cagney as Rocky Sullivan in Angels With Dirty Faces (1938)). Why did this working-class figure, so recently thought vulgar and uncouth, suddenly become attractive (literally) to middleand upper-class audiences – both male and female – as the nation emerged from the nadir of the Great Depression?27 In 1942, Paramount Studios tried to float a new term for rising star Alan Ladd : ‘‘ the romantic heavy. ’’28 Since in studio parlance, the ‘‘ heavy ’’ meant the villain and the romantic lead was always the hero, this is an oxymoron; the term might be translated as the ‘‘ heroic badass,’’ and it did not take. ‘‘ Good ’’ men were not ‘‘badasses’’ in pre-1940 Hollywood films: if their violence was justified, they were lawmen (sheriffs or policemen) ; if unjustified, they were gangsters or murderers, to be arrested or gunned down according to the dictates of the Hays Code. From a contemporary perspective, the ‘‘heroic badass’’ seems ubiquitous in American narrative going back to the nineteenth century, whether in Cooper’s Natty Bumppo or early dime novels. Yet evidence from interwar popular culture indicates a gap of class, prestige, and experience between the hard-boiled tough heroes of the pulp magazines and the romantic leads of studio convention.29 The crucible of the new ‘‘ romantic heavy ’’ was his masking of emotion – his cool. This was not the sangfroid of aristocratic nonchalance or the dullness of brute indifference, but a near-kinetic detachment projected with a subdued intensity suggesting conscious (and conscientious) suffering. The assertive silence of such men created a resonance between actors and audiences that both validated private suffering and expressed the costs of survival. Stanley Cavell once called it the ‘‘ banking [of] destructive feeling ’’ through body language and physical gesture; he suggested that encoding such restraint on the body becomes appealing precisely at historical moments when ‘‘ society requires greater uniformity, ’’ and thus audiences are seeking a new ‘‘ strategy of individuality and distinctness.’’ Cavell’s generous (and archaic) spin 27 28 Christopher Breu, Hard-Boiled Masculinities (Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 188, 193 n. 1; see also Smith, passim. The term was stamped on promotional stills from The Glass Key (1942), Margaret Herrick 29 Library, Los Angeles, California (hereafter MHL). Smith, passim. http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 13 Jun 2009 IP address: 129.81.50.111 Film Noir and the Great Depression 427 on masculinity – the ‘‘ silent strength’’ and ‘‘ hidden fire ’’ of the romantic heavy – comes from a memoir two generations old, yet his analysis is useful both as early film scholarship from an academic philosopher and as personal testimony of a (confessed) non-academic filmgoer between 1935 and 1960. Writing within a more familiar discourse, Christopher Breu pathologizes ‘‘ the hard-boiled male’s shell-like exterior’’ and its investment in patriarchal violence. In either case, the ‘‘ unemotive violent masculinity’’ of Hollywood icons such as Bogart and Ladd represented a set of new masculine signs that were immediately seized upon by critics and audiences. Almost overnight, the ‘‘ romantic heavy’’ became a new masculine type in the American dream factory.30 Elsewhere, I have traced the origins of the word and concept of ‘‘ cool’’ as a trope of emotional self-control in early-1940s African American jazz culture. As an ideal of self-presentation, to be ‘‘ cool’’ meant to present a flat affect, suggested emotional self-control to the point of detachment, and signified an insolent defiance as registered in facial expression and body language. According to Ben Sidran, among jazz musicians the cool ‘‘ ethic’’ communicated a sense of ‘‘actionality turned inward’’ and was ‘‘ effected at substantial cost and suffering. ’’31 Although the term ‘‘ cool’’ does not often appear in noir, the genre carries a parallel cool sensibility. The masking of emotion communicates an inner intensity critical to the self-presentation and embodiment of Bogart, Ladd, and Robert Mitchum (among many others). The liminal figure of the hard-boiled detective or the sympathetic criminal is a floating signifier of 1940s noir, and of a society groping for a revitalized masculinity. In other words, the pain simmering through the mask validated the audience’s experiences of the Depression precisely by putting a haggard face on it. In a sense, cool is a mask of composed violence : it is a public mask, a metonym of what Cavell called ‘‘ banked [inner] fire. ’’ There is little else to explain the sudden stardom and sexual appeal of the short, older, grizzled Humphrey Bogart (five feet seven inches tall, forty-two years old) – an actor typed as a gangster – who overnight became Warner Brothers’ ‘‘Clark Gable.’’ Borde and Chaumeton called Bogart ‘‘over the hill’’ before The Maltese Falcon rejuvenated his career and Linda Williams wonders whether ‘‘ Bogart, with his perpetually wet lower lip, [has] ever been, objectively speaking, sexy?’’ Leaving aside the matter of whether anyone is ever 30 31 Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed (New York : Viking, 1971), 68 ; Breu, 197. Joel Dinerstein, ‘‘ Lester Young and the Birth of Cool, ’’ in Gena Caponi, ed., Signifying, Sanctifying, and Slam-Dunking (Amherst : University of Massachusetts Press, 1998), 239–76 ; Ben Sidran, Black Talk (New York : Harcourt, Brace, 1971), 109–14. http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 13 Jun 2009 IP address: 129.81.50.111 428 Joel Dinerstein objectively sexy, between 1940 and 1942 Bogart received seventy-five percent of his fan mail from women, many of whom wanted to see him in more romantic roles even before Casablanca. The ‘‘ raison d’etre of his [Bogart’s] existence was in some sense [simply] to survive,’’ Bazin reflected upon the actor’s role as cultural worker. ‘‘ Distrust and weariness, wisdom and skepticism : Bogey is a Stoic, ’’ he concludes – and ‘‘stoic ’’ is simply the ancient Greek synonym for ‘‘ cool.’’32 The cool mask in hard-boiled masculinity was part and parcel of noir’s stylized framework that enabled American audiences to consider a decade of sacrifice, subsistence, and instability. John Houseman, Orson Welles’s partner in the Mercury Theater, reflected upon the years from 1937 to 1940 as ‘‘ a time of transition between the end of the Great Depression and the beginning of the _ industrial boom that accompanied our preparations for World War II.’’ What was new about the prewar moment (1939–42) ? Cautious economic hope prevailed as factories were retrofitted for defense industries and unemployment fell drastically; defense spending surged passed $2 billion a month in the months before Pearl Harbor. Perhaps the best economy in more than a decade resulted in an unconscious hunger for reflection upon recent experience after a decade of escapism (comedies, musicals and revues, gangster films, Busby Berkeley).33 With the context of rising expectations (and incomes) in mind, I turn to the films under discussion: High Sierra – the film in which the Bogart persona is first codified – and This Gun for Hire, Alan Ladd’s first film and pairing with Veronica Lake. In both films the protagonist is a sympathetic violent criminal ; in both, he has a work ethic, a personal code, and each character insists on completing a job at considerable personal risk; in both, he wins the love of the female lead – as far as the spectator’s gaze is considered – before dying at peace. More to the point here, the initial bond between the couple is the acknowledgment of shared hard times. The trust established allows the women to help the protagonists work through their violent pathologies as caused by past trauma. Like other modernist artists, noir directors knew their Freud : both protagonists have recurring dreams that mark the origins of their violence and its repetition compulsion; in both films the female partner 32 33 Cavell, 55 ; Pressbook, Casablanca, Warner Brothers Archives, University of Southern California (hereafter WB/USC) ; Borde and Chaumeton, A Panorama of American Film Noir, 16; Linda Williams, ‘‘ Of Kisses and Ellipses, ’’ Critical Inquiry, 32, 2 (Winter 2006), 36 ; Bazin quoted in Naremore, More than Night, 25–26, and in Hillier, Cahiers du Cinema, 98, 100. Houseman quoted in Thomson, Rosebud, 73 ; John Morton Blum, V Was for Victory (New York : HBJ, 1976), 91. http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 13 Jun 2009 IP address: 129.81.50.111 Film Noir and the Great Depression 429 acts as the therapist that guides them away from acting out to the process of working-through the pathology. According to Felman and Laub, to narrate one’s own traumatic story requires a witness ; in fact, even to bring forth the fragments of memory and emotional strife the victim must find an ‘‘addressable Other’’ capable of either sympathy or the suspension of judgment.34 This concept works on two levels for these two films. First, each male protagonist encounters a woman who perceives that his toughness is a mask. She witnesses the internalized trauma and guides his therapeutic integration ; she is the addressable Other in the film. Second, the two noir directors found an addressable film audience of Americans willing to use these films to reflect upon their recent experience. In the short-lived window of opportunity offered by the prewar moment, audiences wanted their experiences of the Depression validated in the faces and gazes, attitudes and speech, bodies and memories of their actors and actresses. High Sierra (1941) In Raoul Walsh’s High Sierra, Roy ‘‘ Mad Dog’’ Earle is the last living member of the Dillinger gang and his old boss (Big Mac) engineers a parole for him. Earle’s release is front-page news. Earle receives instructions from Big Mac to drive cross-country to a camp in the Sierra Nevadas and take control of a gang to rob a resort in Los Angeles. He finds his underlings (Babe and Red) to be substandard thugs, and instead befriends Babe’s girlfriend, Marie, and the camp’s denizens (a minstrelized dimwitted black caretaker, Algernon, and a dog named Pard). The gang pull off the robbery but an inside tip puts the police on their tail during the escape ; Babe and Red die in the chase. Earle goes on the lam with Marie (Ida Lupino), the dog, and the jewels ; he is eventually shot down in an overnight siege in the mountains that becomes a national media event broadcast live on radio. This skeletal plot outline does little justice to the film, but it makes clear why some reviewers considered it a gangster film. Originally Paul Muni (Scarface) accepted the part, but when he backed out Bogart immediately wired producer Hal Wallis: Dear Hal, You told me once to let you know when I found a part I wanted. A few weeks ago I left a note for you concerning High Sierra _ I’m bringing it up again as I understand there is some doubt about Muni doing it. Regards, Humphrey Bogart.35 34 35 Felman and Laub, Testimony, 7, 59–62. Bogart telegram to Hall Wallis, 4 May 1940, WB/USC. http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 13 Jun 2009 IP address: 129.81.50.111 430 Joel Dinerstein At that moment (4 May 1940), Bogart was a B actor best known as Warner Brothers’ ‘‘ number one screen gangster ’’ for his role as Duke Mantee in The Petrified Forest (1937). In Roy Earle, Bogart saw another chance to break out of his Hollywood typology : Earle’s a gangster but a thoughtful, sympathetic, even ethical man. It would follow up his last role as a hard-working, hardfighting independent trucker in They Drive by Night (1940) – a film also directed by Raoul Walsh and co-starring Ida Lupino – in which he loses an arm and has a crisis of masculine identity since he cannot work. It is Cavell’s crucial perception about the studio era that Hollywood functioned for its audiences as ‘‘ an enormous stock company, America’s only successful one, its State Theater, ’’ and that within the system, ‘‘ the individuality of stars was defined by their self-identity through repeated incarnations.’’ An actor’s cultural resonance at a given moment was cumulative : actors’ ‘‘ histories bec[a]me part of what the movies they are in are about. ’’ Through a strategic choice of roles, Bogart engineered his cinematic redemption over a five-year period, from the malevolence of Duke Mantee to the ethical hard-boiled working-class hero. The public’s experience of familiar B actors like Bogart – whom audiences watched age on-screen and whose off-screen lives were also familiar – became reflections of their own experience, and thus ‘‘ an account of the paths of stars across their various films must form part of the internal history of the world of cinema.’’36 An actor’s persona can change even within a genre he embodies. The gangster film of the 1930s was characterized by urban settings, ethnicinflected gang leaders, Prohibition social realities, emotional instability, and social climbing through violence. Roy Earle is neither ethnic nor urban ; he is from Indiana and even visits the old family farm on his cross-country drive to the Sierra mountains. In a suit and tie he leans over the fence of the farm and makes conversation with its current tenant, a bewhiskered farmer. ‘‘ You’re not from the bank, is ya? ’’ the farmer suddenly worries. Earle laughs at the irony, then tells the man’s sons where to find the best local fishing hole. As the farmer suddenly realizes this is ‘‘ Mad Dog ’’ Earle his eyes widen ; Earle waves and turns away. The patronized, poverty-stricken farmer seems equally scared of both banks and bank robbers, a position redolent of Depression-era experiences.37 In terms of 1930s studio conventions, then, High Sierra is not a gangster film. 36 Cavell, 75–76. Thanks to Adam Newton for directing me to Cavell’s book and this line of 37 analysis. Paula Rabinowitz, Black & White & Noir, 19–20, 106, 110. http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 13 Jun 2009 IP address: 129.81.50.111 Film Noir and the Great Depression 431 The very next scene finds Earle back on the road, where he swerves to help keep another car from going off the road. Out come Ma and Pa Goodhue and their granddaughter Velma, a premodern virtuous agrarian family who have lost their farm and are heading to California. Seeing Earle’s suit and tie, Pa Goodhue assumes he is a slick urbanite. When he finds out Earle’s a farmboy, he is thrilled – ‘‘ I knew you were one of our kind,’’ he claps happily. The juxtaposition of these two scenes suggests that the Goodhues’ current experience mirrors the Earles’s uprooting of a generation earlier, which had brought Roy Earle to the city and eventually to a life of crime during the Depression. Earle lends Pa Goodhue some money on a handshake – establishing their bond – and falls for Velma, who is young and pretty and has a clubfoot. The scene suggests a Capra-esque nostalgia for small-town community, and later Earle finances an operation to heal Velma’s foot. Here, then, are two other Depression-era themes in emergent noir: respect for hard work and the virtue of loyalty in service to idealized traditional masculinity. These themes apply across emergent noir: as virtues, they apply as much to Sam Spade (detective), Rick Blaine (nightclub owner), Tom Joad (farmer), and Charles Foster Kane (newspaper publisher) as for Ed Beaumont (political operative), Roy Earle (gangster), and Philip Raven (paid assassin). The sympathetic protagonist of emergent noir is a worker who speaks the American urban vernacular, resents official corruption, and has seen dignified work – as an aspect of masculine identity – taken from him (from the worker’s perspective).38 He lives in humble circumstances (with the exception of Kane), has an egalitarian world view and a personal code of ethics, and carries class hostility towards wealth and institutional justice. Authority figures are assumed to be lying until proven otherwise, and ‘‘ what’s his angle? ’’ is a noir trope. As Marie asks Earle about the saintly Goodhues in HS, ‘‘ What’s their racket ? ’’ The cool-masked protagonist of emergent noir must be loyal and hardworking, as if to suggest that unemployment was never a matter of laziness or left-wing radicalism. Even as a bank robber, Earle has a work ethic : he is loyal, he executes, and he protects others. For example, after the heist, Big Mac dies and an ex-cop named Kranmer (a middleman) offers to split the take rather than follow Mac’s original directions for fencing the jewels. Earle is defiant: ‘‘ I’m still working for Mac and so are you.’’ Kranmer pulls a gun and laughs : ‘‘ Hand over the box, Earle. Give me any trouble and I’ll fill ya 38 http://journals.cambridge.org Smith, 42–47. Downloaded: 13 Jun 2009 IP address: 129.81.50.111 432 Joel Dinerstein full of lead. I’d be reinstated for capturing ‘ Mad Dog’ Earle and probably get a promotion.’’ Earle replies with true disgust: ‘‘A copper’s always a copper. ’’ To Earle, Kranmer is an unethical person – regardless of occupation – whereas he tries to be loyal and fair within his circumstances. The audience is directed to sympathize with Earle: he outwits Kranmer the next moment and kills him. Earle’s ethical egalitarianism also extends to women, allowing for context. At first, finding Marie with Babe and Red, he mutters bitterly, ‘‘ Those two will be spilling blood over you before long.’’ But Earle quickly recognizes that Marie is smarter than both men and hedges on his threat to send her away. After Babe hits her, Earle walks her over to his cabin and directs Marie to hit him with his gun. She hesitates, and instead Earle backhands Babe with the pistol as her proxy. That night, Marie asks to stay in Earle’s cabin on a cot, yet he notices neither her flirtation nor her disappointment when he turns in for bed. Later, when they’re on the lam, Marie yells at Earle for his listlessness, then apologizes two hours later. ‘‘ Are you kidding? I wouldn’t give two cents for a dame without a temper,’’ Earle commends her. ‘‘ My folks fought like cats and dogs for years.’’ The key trope for Earle’s redemption is the repeated phrase ‘‘ to crash out. ’’ Its first use in the film is literal: Earle tells Marie of a prison break he was planning. Later that night, Earle writhes in troubled sleep as Marie watches : ‘‘ Take the gates away, ’’ he moans. ‘‘ I’m crashing out _ I’ll go back to the farm _ Don’t hold me back _ You can’t take it away. ’’ As Earle wrestles with his demons, Marie’s sympathetic gaze reveals her romantic (and redemptive) desire. The next morning Marie interpolates the phrase into the breakfast conversation. ‘‘ I’ve been trying to crash out as long as I can remember. My old man used to knock us around a few times a week, ’’ she tells Earle evenly. ‘‘ I crashed out just like you did _ I guess I was never hooked up with a guy who wasn’t wrong. Till I met you.’’ Earle listens sympathetically but rejects her entreaties : ‘‘ I got plans, see ? _ You could never mean nothing to me. ’’ Earle remains in love with Velma, the symbol of female dependence and Edenic innocence. It is only after Velma rejects him that Earle, Marie, and Pard the dog come to form an unconventional – but cinematically cohesive – family unit. In HS, ‘‘crashing out’’ translates simply, abstractly, as individual freedom. To successfully ‘‘ crash out’’ means ‘‘ to be free ’’ – of economic uncertainty, of traumatic pathologies, of class distinctions, and of social stigmas (for Earle, the tag of ‘‘ Mad Dog’’ ; for Marie, of being a taxi-dancer). The trope was woven into the studio PR : ‘‘‘ Mad Dog’ Earle _ battl[es] a force bullets cannot conquer _ [and] crashes out – at last – to freedom !’’. At least http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 13 Jun 2009 IP address: 129.81.50.111 Film Noir and the Great Depression 433 one contemporary reviewer caught the existential connection of crashing out : [Earle’s] masterpiece of crime is nothing but a masterpiece of futility _ [But] He has his woman and his dog. In a smashing climax he realizes that’s about all that’s worth struggling for in all of man’s long sad pilgrimage _ You’ll remember ‘‘ High Sierra ’’ and talk about it long after it has faded from the screen. The trope of crashing out helped turn HS into a fully fledged noir, redolent of existential motifs and modernist self-construction, focussed more on subjectivity than on sociology, and imbued with the genre’s dark vision of entrapment, transgression and violent death.39 At the end, Earle is cornered in a car chase and neither panics nor confesses his remorse. The time has come to die the death of the Hays Code since crime cannot pay, so Earle parks and runs up Mount Whitney with a gun and some supplies. When the sheriff asks him to come down, he shouts, ‘‘ Come and get me, copper’’ – yet this scene is not a prelude to a shooting spree even though Earle cops a defiant attitude; he has chosen his death and looks satisfied with it. By way of contrast, a reporter’s running commentary prattles on as a meaningless soundtrack while Earle’s quiet, nighttime vigil seems like meaningful action. Earle plays neither to the media nor to the crowd, just hunkers down to survive as long as possible. At dawn, director Raoul Walsh shoots the sun rising over the mountain behind Earle and it bathes him in sunlight. With his black collar up and black rifle alongside him, he seems either blessed by divine grace or living in defiance of the very concept. Suddenly Earle recognizes his dog’s bark and realizes Marie is there; he yells her name three times as if there is one last thing to tell her. He is not granted last words – the equivalent of a film’s last rites – but is instead shot dead right then by a marksman who climbed the mountain behind him. In the short two-minute denouement after Earle’s death, Marie asks the reporter what ‘‘ crashing out ’’ means: ‘‘ It means you’re free, ’’ he shrugs. The last shot of the film is a soft-lit close-up of Marie whispering ‘‘free, ’’ a one-word eulogy for Roy Earle. In the Warner Brothers studio pressbook, the most common adjective used to describe Roy Earle is ‘‘ strange, ’’ a polyvalent term covering ‘‘ different, ’’ ‘‘ disturbing,’’ and ‘‘ compelling.’’ This is Bogart’s ‘‘ strangest role _ as the strangest killer in history, ’’ one poster reads, and on another Roy Earle is dubbed ‘‘ the strangest man in the strangest of stories. ’’ There’s also plenty of gangster-film rhetoric: ‘‘ He killed _ and he must be killed !’’ 39 Mat 208, Pressbook, HS, WB/USC ; ‘‘ Movies to Watch for, ’’ Kansas City Star, 26 Jan. 1941, 12, clipping file, HS, WB/USC. http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 13 Jun 2009 IP address: 129.81.50.111 434 Joel Dinerstein Marie is a ‘‘taxi-dancer, gun-moll, hungry-hearted woman! ’’ She is ‘‘ a dame with more nerve than ten guys.’’ Here is the tagline for the Lupino–Bogart match-up : ‘‘ A tough dame with a soft heart _ meets a dreamer with a gun. ’’ The studio itself distinguished HS from the generic gangster film. Many posters featured one of two unusually long taglines, each emphasizing Earle’s tragic, undeserved fate : (1) He wasn’t born to be a hunted criminal. His hands were made for a plow, not a tommy-gun _ A strange man, yes _ and a strange story. (2) A lone man clings to a rocky crag of the High Sierras _ He’s cornered, yes _ but he isn’t beaten! Because, you see, this isn’t what he was born for ! He should have had a fireside on a friendly farm, the warm arms of a loving woman. Instead, his strange destiny _ [is] carved forever on the peaks of _ HIGH SIERRA!40 The film was uncategorizable in 1941. Here is how the studio’s public relations classified the film in the feature-length articles of its pressbook : ‘‘ ‘ High Sierra ’ is a paradox _ It’s a gangster story that isn’t a gangster story at all _ Humphrey Bogart carries a gun, an unsmiling face, and a prison record _ But he doesn’t admit he’s a criminal. ’’ Film critics fared only slightly better. Bosley Crowther of the New York Times read it as a gangster film, but noted that Earle was a ‘‘ gunman who has got some ideas about freedom and the joy of living. ’’ Another critic noted Bogart’s ‘‘ grim authority ’’ and his ‘‘perfection of hardboiled vitality.’’ The critic for the New York Journal–American was frustrated by the idea of a non-virtuous hero: A man who is kind to dogs _ loves the great out-doors _ befriends strangers and who plays fair with his associates is, by every _ standard, a good and worthy citizen _ [A]t the same time _ [he is] a notorious criminal who doesn’t hesitate to shoot and kill anyone who stands in his way. You’ll have to figure it out for yourself. And audiences did, making it the surprise hit that established the Bogart persona as a box-office draw and heralding the emergence of the romantic heavy.41 This is an original reading of HS, but the film is recognized as a breakthrough noir, ‘‘ the turning point when gangster films become psychological. ’’ The 1930s gangster, full of violence, emotion, and ambition, now shifts to a figure with a rich, disturbing inner landscape who anticipates the 40 41 Various posters and mats, Pressbook, HS, WB/USC. ‘‘ Second Day Advance ’’ (article), Pressbook, HS, WB/USC ; Bosley Crowther, ‘‘ The Screen: ‘HS ’ at the Strand, Considers the Tragic and Dramatic Plight of the Last Gangster, ’’ New York Times, 25 Jan. 1941, n.p. ; and ‘‘ ‘High Sierra ’ New Tenant at Strand’’, New York Journal–American, 25 Jan. 1941, n.p., Clipping file, HS, WB/USC. http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 13 Jun 2009 IP address: 129.81.50.111 Film Noir and the Great Depression 435 postwar antiheroes. ‘‘ High Sierra explicitly reverses _ the conventions of the classic gangster films,’’ Krutnik declares, calling it more a ‘‘ male melodrama’ _ than a straightforward and dynamic old-style gangster film.’’ Not only is the protagonist an ‘‘ alienated hero,’’ but HS ‘‘revers[es] the conventional significance of the good girl [Velma] and bad girl [Marie] – for the former betrays the hero, while the latter remains loyal. ’’42 Why did audiences root for Roy Earle? Because his cool mask – the ‘‘ unsmiling face ’’ that conveyed ‘‘grim authority’’ and a ‘‘ perfection of hardboiled vitality’’ – represented controlled suffering that was the result of hard-earned individual experience. In the scenes shot at the mountain forest camp, Earle signifies noir’s post-traumatic subtext through dress alone: Bogart strolls through the bright daylight scenes in a stylish dead-black suit and fedora, darkening every beautiful landscape like a walking indictment of the American dream (or as if walking to a funeral). But by adjusting his sights to reality and providence (Marie and a bad-luck dog) – and away from fantasy, nostalgia, and innocence (Velma) – the character of Roy Earle performs a symbolic transmutation of shifting expectations for his audience. Earle’s complexity was in fact a creative collaboration between Bogart and John Huston, as the character was considerably more animalistic in the source text. In W. R. Burnett’s novel, ‘‘Mad Dog’’ Earle is a man of instincts, a tall, dark, heavy-shouldered ‘‘ farmer-ape ’’ who could not control his rages. It was Huston, a studio writer and script doctor, who convinced the studio to buy the rights to Burnett’s novel against two other internal reviewers, and it was Huston who wrote the first draft of the script in three weeks by himself. Huston and Bogart together sculpted Earle into a modern, alienated individual.43 Six months later, Huston directed Bogart in The Maltese Falcon, jumpstarting the entire genre. Its reputation as noir’s first classic depends upon the Bogart persona, in particular ‘‘ his individualist stance in the face of the unknown.’’ This persona became codified in Casablanca (1942), a noir transposed in a patriotic key. In less than two years the Bogart persona had shifted from Warner Brothers’ ‘‘ number one screen gangster ’’ to a sympathetic interiorized gangster, was then ‘‘ flipped to [the] right side of [the] law ’’ just barely as Sam Spade, and then came to embody the nation’s favorite iconic antihero in the second ‘‘ greatest American movie of all time’’ (according to the American Film Institute; the first is Citizen Kane).44 In this 42 44 Alain Silver and James Ursini, Film Noir (New York : Taschen, 2004), 112; Krutnik, In a 43 Lonely Street, 198–201. Internal memoranda, HS file, WB/USC. Dickos, Street with No Name, 116; www.afi.com/Docs/tvevents/pdf/movies100.pdf. http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 13 Jun 2009 IP address: 129.81.50.111 436 Joel Dinerstein short prewar period, Bogart traded his black hat for a white one, almost literally : from Earle’s tight-lipped con in a dead-black suit and fedora to restaurateur Rick Blaine’s white tuxedo dinner jacket. In Cavell’s terms of a cumulative cinematic biography, these five years of Bogart roles mirrored the audience’s awakening to reflection and a renewed search for individuality after the sacrifices of the Depression. In Bazin’s terms, the Bogart persona emerged as a postwar signifier for ‘‘ accepting the human condition which may be shared by [both] the rogue and the honorable man.’’45 In terms of my argument, heroic masculinity was conscripted into World War II from the noir side of human nature – the heavy’s dark, cool-masked side – not the traditional hero’s virtuous side. If anything, this subtext is even clearer in TGFH. INTERLUDE : EMERGENT NOIR AND HOLLYWOOD TYPOLOGY Film noir was a genuine cultural phenomenon in terms of reception leading production. Industry conventions prevented the production of films with a complex moral vision in part because studios typed their actors. Neither Paul Muni nor George Raft wished to risk their box-office appeal on a ‘‘strange ’’ character like Roy Earle ; only Bogart saw the role’s potential. In the analogous case of Double Indemnity (DI), Billy Wilder was turned down by all of Hollywood’s ‘‘heavies ’’ for the role of Walter Neff. ‘‘ It was difficult to get a leading man,’’ Wilder recalled, since it would hurt the actor’s bankable image : Everybody turned me down _ including George Raft. Nor did Fred MacMurray see the possibilities at first. He didn’t want to be murdered, he didn’t want to be a murderer. He said, ‘‘Look, I’m a saxophone player [as a type]. I’m making my [hit] comedies with Claudette Colbert. ’’ In terms of artistic vision, ‘‘ [only] Stanwyck knew what she had,’’ Wilder remembered ; ‘‘none of the key players had predicted the success of Double Indemnity,’’ according to Biesen, ‘‘ or _ anticipated its influence.’’ Director Edward Dmytryk had a similar experience in casting Murder, My Sweet (1944), a noir nearly as important as DI. For this film version of Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely, Dmytryk wound up casting an eager Dick Powell, a song-and-dance man known for his roles in Busby Berkeley musicals and desperate to change his image in Hollywood. In retrospect, it 45 http://journals.cambridge.org Bazin quoted in Hillier, Cahiers du Cinema, 99. Downloaded: 13 Jun 2009 IP address: 129.81.50.111 Film Noir and the Great Depression 437 seems extraordinary that no leading man wanted to play detective Philip Marlowe.46 Such evidence contradicts the theory of Naremore (and others) that noir was the result of a ‘‘left culture’’ indebted to the imported alienation of European (often Jewish) émigré directors. Such scholars presume that the existential angst of the Weimar period was brought to Hollywood by noir directors and cinematographers trained in the German film industry (e.g. Fritz Lang, Robert Siodmak, Billy Wilder). Certainly these directors grafted some of their political radicalism and artistic formalism onto noir, creating ‘‘ palimpsests _ overwriting fatalist Weimar sociopsychology and expressionist aesthetics onto the American crime film.’’47 Yet the directors themselves attribute the narrative tone and aesthetic style of noir to American society during (and just after) the Depression. Asked by Robert Porfirio if Double Indemnity reflected ‘‘an angst pervading Central Europe after World War I, ’’ Billy Wilder simply replied, ‘‘ I think the dark outlook is an American one.’’ Likewise, Dmytryk called DI a ‘‘ very typically American’’ narrative, and perceived Wilder as ‘‘ falling into a very American tradition,’’ one obviously ‘‘ preceded by The Maltese Falcon. ’’ Asked if ‘‘ the Eastern Europeans _ brought their own sardonic mood to pictures, ’’ Dmytryk admitted only one influence on Murder, My Sweet: ‘‘Of course, I don’t want to give Orson Welles any more credit than I have to, ’’ he reflected with admiration and envy, ‘‘but I would say that he had a lot to do with it. ’’ (Director Robert Wise worked as an editor on Citizen Kane and recalled ‘‘ the thrill of working on it, ’’ how ‘‘ [e]very scene that Gregg Toland shot seemed to be a completely fresh shot. [And] It wasn’t just camerawork. It was art direction, acting, and _ editing as well.’’) Asked if his ‘‘ fatalistic outlook [was] bred in Germany, ’’ Fritz Lang claimed only an artistic perspective ‘‘of the human condition’’ that was ‘‘ existential’’ in a positive sense.48 This evidence is not overwhelming, but Wilder, Lang, and Dmytryk were three of the most acclaimed noir directors in its wartime phase and all were émigrés from Germany or central Europe. Yet all three recognize the prewar period as formative and view the genre as American in mood. As J. P. Telotte has pointed out in his illuminating study Voices in the Dark: The Narrative Patterns of Film Noir (1989), all of noir’s major cinematic innovations were in the service of subjectivity: voice-over narration, 46 47 48 Billy Wilder and Edward Dmytryk quoted in Robert Porfirio, Alain Silver, and James Ursini, Film Noir Reader 3, 108–9 ; see also Biesen, Blackout, 97. Bould, Film Noir, 32. Dmytryk, Wilder, Wise, and Lang are all quoted in interviews by Robert Porforio in Film Noir Reader 3, 30, 35, 101–2, 122, 133. http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 13 Jun 2009 IP address: 129.81.50.111 438 Joel Dinerstein flashback, subjective point of view, and documentary-style presentation. For Telotte, such ‘‘ exploration points to a deeper identifying characteristic of the form : a compelling urge to _ formulate and articulate the human situation at a time when our old formulations _ no longer seemed adequate. ’’49 What if, at such a moment, narrative conventions have been exhausted, and, in a unique historical situation, a nation lacks cohesive mythic symbols (and values)? If the film industry is dominated by its formulae and ‘‘ reluctant to alter or challenge a proven profitable procedure,’’ from where will innovative narrative frameworks emerge? Two conditions for artistic rebellion existed : a younger generation bored by a form’s current conventions ; and a source of new narratives – hardboiled fiction, an already popular genre – seeking its cinematic equivalent. Citizen Kane reflects the first condition: a young genius of theater and radio is given unprecedented control over his first film, brings a squadron of new faces to Hollywood, and his artistic vision inspires master craftsmen to push the envelope: ‘‘ So [set designer Perry] Ferguson, [editor Robert] Wise, [soundman James G.] Stewart, [makeup expert Maurice] Siederman, [Gregg] Toland and the actors – a band of compatriots, [were] all given a unique opportunity, a moment against the grain of the factory system, a chance for _ showing what a movie could be. ’’50 Bogart and Huston represent the second condition : an ability to embody new narratives that enable audiences to transgress vicariously, and in the case of Depression-era witnessing, to cheer their own survival in ironic and cynical tones. Emergent noir was a delayed opportunity for a younger generation of upstart American professionals: the young genius and his master craftsmen (Welles); the young, headstrong literary man who suddenly finds a creative and bankable partner (Huston and Bogart) ; and finally a studio pro (director Frank Tuttle) simply looking for a new face (Alan Ladd). Significantly, just as Huston and Bogart changed Burnett’s brute protagonist (Earle) into a traumatized, alienated, freedom-loving hard worker in HS, so also Tuttle and Ladd transformed the hideous, harelipped protagonist of their source text, Graham Greene’s This Gun for Hire, into a charismatic killer, an (anti)heroic badass, a romantic heavy.51 49 51 J. P. Telotte, Voices in the Dark : The Narrative Patterns of Film Noir (Urbana: University of 50 Illinois, 1989), 1–2, 14 ; added emphasis. Thomson, Rosebud, 167. Naremore discusses the liberties Tuttle and screenwriter Albert Maltz took with Graham Greene’s novel in more depth in his study, and analyzes the influence of Greene on the entire genre. Naremore, More than Night, 72–74. http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 13 Jun 2009 IP address: 129.81.50.111 Film Noir and the Great Depression 439 I now turn to Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake, a new star pairing, blank slates written upon by the audiences of emergent noir. Ladd was a boxoffice phenomenon in the 1940s : he received twenty thousand fan letters a week and his films were often in the top ten. So many female defense plant workers wore their hair in Veronica Lake’s trademark ‘‘ peek-a-boo’’ hairdo – the length of which endangered assembly-line work – that the War Production Board passed an ordinance requiring she wear it short and out of her face for the war’s duration. ‘‘ I must admit, ’’ Lake reflected later, ‘‘ I was flattered to think I had become that crucial to our war effort.’’52 Noir scholars have always been more interested in Ladd than Lake, but as a team they were nearly as popular as Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland had been just before them (or Astaire and Rogers), and the phenomenon of their chemistry deserves deeper inquiry. This Gun for Hire (1942) Alan Ladd’s star turn in TGFH came from a completely opposite set of circumstances to those of Bogart in HS. Veronica Lake had a breakthrough performance in the hit Preston Sturges comedy Sullivan’s Travels (1941), but Ladd’s experience was limited to bit parts until he became an overnight sensation as a contract killer with the portentously noir name of Philip Raven (or just ‘‘ the Raven’’).53 Originally, character actor Robert Preston was cast as Raven, but director Frank Tuttle wanted a new face, and quickly perceived Ladd’s charismatic combination of toughness and vulnerability. He downgraded Preston to the ‘‘ romantic lead’’ of the good-guy cop, then ‘‘ rewrote the script to favor [Ladd].’’54 As Lieutenant Michael Frank, Preston is the ostensible hero and marries Lake ; but it is Ladd’s Raven who thwarts the corporate traitors and steals Lake’s love. In terms of the cinematic gaze, Ladd and Lake are more often framed as a couple than Lake and Preston: they have the cute meet, the nascent sexual chemistry, the dramatic courtship, and the tragic romantic ending. As with Roy Earle, critics read the character of Raven as ‘‘ strange,’’ and the subtext of the New Yorker review reveals an emergent sensibility: with new faces (‘‘ young and youngish _ not oppressively familiar’’), transgressive roles (‘‘ strange roles’’ leading characters into 52 53 54 Borde and Chaumeton, A Panorama of Film Noir, 37–38 ; Marilyn Henry and Ron DeSourdis, Alan Ladd : The Films of Alan Ladd (Secaucus, NJ: The Citadel Press, 1981), 15 ; Veronica Lake with Donald Bain, Veronica (London : W. H. Allen, 1969), 85. There is a promotional still with the shadow of a raven coming out of Ladd’s head. TGFH, MHL. ‘‘ The Tough and the Peek-a-Boo, ’’ American Movie Classics, Aug. 1995, 14. Clipping File, TGFH, MHL. http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 13 Jun 2009 IP address: 129.81.50.111 440 Joel Dinerstein situations ‘‘ under _ bizarre circumstances’’), and a fresh mood (‘‘ altogether quite a surprise ’’).55 TGFH is a showcase for masculinity in transition in the prewar period. As with Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca the same year, the camera frames Lake (Ellen Graham) in love with two men: her fiancé, the straight-arrow cop, and Raven, the paid assassin. In both films, the romantic lead retains the love of his partner only because the cynical, violent man steps aside; it is as if the virtuous man had lost his hold as a romantic lead for American audiences, since surviving the Depression required a grittier stoicism.56 The difference was once captured by one of my students. After showing Casablanca, I asked why we read Rick Blaine (Bogart) as ‘‘ cool’’ rather than Victor Lazlo (Paul Henreid), the brave, heroic, dramatic, urbane, sophisticated Nazi-fighter. ‘‘ He’s too good, ’’ a sullen young man muttered in reference to Lazlo, nailing the salient difference between the saintly pose of traditional heroic masculinity and the restrained ethical violence of cool-masked masculinity. Preston’s Lt. Frank is ‘‘ too good’’ to be cool in TGFH, and he fails to engage his fiancée’s imagination, sympathy, or sexuality. TGFH opens in Raven’s bare room in a San Francisco boardinghouse. He wakes up in mid-afternoon, feeds a stray cat, roughs up the maid for being intrusive, puts on the noir detective’s classic uniform of trenchcoat and fedora, then goes out and executes a chemist and his luckless secretary (noir is an irredeemably misogynist genre). Raven meets with a heavyset Los Angeles nightclub-owner named Willard Gates (Laird Cregar), who pays him in marked bills and then phones in a robbery to silence him. A stock noir villain, Gates is an effete, wealthy businessman marked as homosexual ; in TGFH, he fronts for the owner of a chemical company selling poison gas to the Japanese. But Raven eludes the police and hops on a train for Los Angeles, vowing revenge on Gates. He has no unmarked cash, but luckily winds up sitting next to Ellen Graham, a singer and magician heading to LA to headline Gates’s club. Graham is engaged to Lt. Frank, but unbeknownst even to him, she has recently been enlisted by federal intelligence agents to foil Gates’s spy ring. 55 56 ‘‘ The Current Cinema : That Odd Miss Lake, ’’ New Yorker, 13 May, 1942, n.p., Clipping File, TGFH, MHL. Laura Mulvey perceives a similar hero-versus-heavy split in the postwar western, as early as Duel in the Sun (1946) and culminating in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962). Laura Mulvey, ‘‘ Afterthoughts on ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema ’ inspired by Duel in the Sun,’’ in Constance Penley, ed., Feminism and Film Theory (New York : Routledge, 1988), 69–79. http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 13 Jun 2009 IP address: 129.81.50.111 Film Noir and the Great Depression 441 The film first stirs audience sympathies for Ladd/Raven and Lake/ Graham through Depression codes. Raven steals a five-dollar bill when Graham goes to the bathroom then pretends to be asleep when she returns. Graham immediately notices the theft – 1930s tough cookie that she is – and asks, ‘‘ Are you that broke? ’’ Raven returns the money and Lake offers him a dollar, no strings attached. Raven grudgingly accepts, and they have a short conversation before falling asleep. In the morning they wake up together, his head on her shoulder; it is an intimate gesture that foreshadows Raven’s trust in her. During the night, Gates walks through the train and spots the couple sleeping ; he calls ahead to the LA police and they greet the train, searching for a man with a deformed wrist, a childhood injury of Raven’s. Raven forces Graham to help him escape ; once off the train, he intends to kill her in an abandoned building, but she escapes when workers interrupt them. In Los Angeles, Gates invites his club’s new headliner to his mansion ostensibly for dinner (but really to kill her), and there comes the first test of hero versus heavy: rescuing Graham from Gates. Before she arrives, Gates listens to his valet Tommy’s details of how he will dump the body and he shudders at the details, reaffirming his character as a corrupt, sadistic hypocrite who outsources his dirty work. Gates and Tommy’s exchange transpires over a backdrop of thunder and lightning, and even a power blackout: these are allusions to noir’s horror-film antecedents and in effect frame Gates as a monster. To the storm’s soundtrack, Tommy knocks out Graham and hides her upstairs. Lt. Frank soon arrives in a cab, having been tipped off by a friend of Graham’s as to Gates’s sexual intentions. He takes Gates at his word that Graham has already left, and they head into the city together. By contrast, Raven rips a page (‘‘ W Gates ’’) from the phonebook and gets directions from a scraggly old man who looks like a migrant worker from the FSA (Farm Security Administration) files. ‘‘ That house is way up in the hills. You can hitch a ride up if you’re broke. ’’ Raven arrives in a laundry truck and stays hidden when Frank leaves with Gates. He then knocks out Tommy and finds Graham tied up in an armoire in a back room. Raven lifts Graham out pietà-style and lays her gently on a chaise longue; she wakes up into a clinch, close in his arms. Visually, at this moment, Graham is Raven’s girl; thematically, the survival skills acquired from trauma (or poverty) are valorized over institutional authority and wealth. Ladd and Lake remain in this clinch for a terse, knowing, deadpan exchange – Ladd’s flat monotone met by Lake’s cool contralto – that will become characteristic of noir: RAVEN=LADD : What’s Gates got against you. GRAHAM=LAKE : Saw us on the train. Thinks I’m your girl. http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 13 Jun 2009 IP address: 129.81.50.111 442 Joel Dinerstein Look, I’m not gonna hurt you. You treated me OK. But you do what I say _ So you’re a copper’s girl ? LAKE : Who told you that ? LADD : He was here looking for you. Here is the difference between conventional virtuous masculinity and the cool-masked kind: the hero came looking for her; the heavy found and rescued her. This tight, spare dialogue spoken in subdued tones in a back bedroom of a haunted mansion symbolizes individual suffering kept secret. In a few, quick strokes, Raven/Ladd’s work ethic and grim perseverance are set against the plodding forces of virtue (Lt. Frank) and Gates’s lazy treason. Meanwhile, the corporate forces of the Depression take form in the aged Mr. Brewster – called ‘‘Old King Chloride’’ – a malicious, hypocritical, and wheelchair-ridden millionaire ; such a depiction of impotent economic power depends upon the fall from grace of the businessman–hero of the 1930s (such as Henry Ford). Who can trust corporate power as embodied in Brewster and Gates, or the masculinity it requires? Simply to frame this rhetorical question is to recognize the implicit logic (and attraction) of Raven’s outlaw violence. Having now flown both his heroic and antiheroic colors, Raven has engaged the audience’s sympathy as ‘‘ a victim of Depression-era social injustice, ’’ in Naremore’s succinct description, one now capable of ‘‘ becom[ing] a champion of democracy.’’57 TGFH’s noir sensibility – visually speaking – rests on an extended nighttime sequence of more than twenty minutes set at Brewster’s gasworks and railyards where Lt. Frank and the LAPD have cornered Raven and Graham. The police wait all night for a vast fog to clear – noir’s classic ambience as a metaphor for consciousness. It is early 1942 and the noir matrix has arrived: impenetrable fog, darkness, trains, a mysterious alluring woman, an easily duped police force, key lighting that turn bodies into shadows, and a sympathetic romantic heavy dressed in fedora and trenchcoat. Raven and Graham escape from the gasworks, then crawl through a sewage pipe and drop onto the train tracks, then hole up in the switching-man’s shack. Descending three levels through dirty tunnels from the gasworks to the street-level railyards, they hole up in the shack, and there Raven finds his addressable Other in Graham. Here is the exchange that triggers the release of what Raven calls being ‘‘ bottled-up ’’: GRAHAM=LAKE : Why don’t you sleep for awhile? RAVEN=LADD : It’s no good; I’d only dream. Every night I dream. LADD : 57 http://journals.cambridge.org Naremore, 73. Downloaded: 13 Jun 2009 IP address: 129.81.50.111 Film Noir and the Great Depression 443 Then Raven asks quietly, almost shyly: ‘‘ You wouldn’t laugh if I told you, would you? ’’ referring to the dream. Raven does not tell her the dream but instead its root cause, implying that the recurring dream recalls the initial crime. Raised after his parents died by a cruel aunt who beat him regularly, Raven killed her when he was fourteen. He had reached for a piece of chocolate and she had struck him with a flat iron. ‘‘ All I wanted was a piece of chocolate, ’’ Raven nearly shrieks, emoting for the first time in the film. He has since turned his pathology into his job as paid assassin, and ‘‘ there’s nothing I can do about it, ’’ he deadpans. Graham demurs: ‘‘There is something you can do. Don’t kill anymore. You’re just killing her all over again.’’ It takes Graham all night to convince Raven to channel his rage into the war effort. In the morning, Graham dresses up in Raven’s trenchcoat and fedora as a decoy, allowing him to escape. While the cops corner Graham, Raven infiltrates the gasworks, overpowers the guards, and captures Gates and Brewster single-handedly ; he does it for Lake, not the war effort, and thus on his own terms. For this selfishness and his crimes, Lt. Frank and the LAPD shoot him down in a wave of bullets. Yet again, heroic masculinity is conscripted into the war effort from the heavy’s side, not the hero’s: Raven’s actions eliminate an espionage ring ; Lt. Frank kills only a (potentially reformed) criminal framed by venal corporate officers. That covers the climax and denouement, but the main action of TGFH during the long scene in the railyards is the growing intimacy of Graham and Raven – the therapeutic relationship that replaces the latter’s ‘‘ acting out ’’ (by killing) with the working-through of his past trauma (channeling rage into productive penance). To displace Raven’s repetition–compulsion of killing, Graham asks him not to kill Gates and Brewster but instead to get a signed confession that they are selling poison gas to the enemy, creating ‘‘ Japanese breakfast food for Americans.’’ Raven at first refuses, but while obsessively rubbing his deformed wrist, now cut from barbed wire during their escape, Graham bandages his arm and notices his appreciation : ‘‘You’re a funny guy. You like that but you can’t say that you do, ’’ Lake/Graham plays the soothing therapist. ‘‘ That’s sucker talk, ’’ Raven snaps back. ‘‘ You’re trying to make me go soft, ’’ he adds with a tinge of anger, ‘‘ and I don’t go soft for nobody. ’’ This line echoes Rick Blaine’s iconic line from Casablanca, ‘‘ I don’t stick my neck out for nobody. ’’ Just as Ilse Lund does to Rick Blaine, Ellen Graham invokes patriotism to Raven – to assist in the war effort – but he remains stolid : GRAHAM=LAKE : Why don’t you stop thinking about yourself ? RAVEN=LADD : Who else is gonna think about me? http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 13 Jun 2009 IP address: 129.81.50.111 444 Joel Dinerstein Significantly, the camera frames their exchange as a conversation between equals – not lovers, not victims, not girl scout and bad boy. Lake keeps her voice calm and low, without recourse to traditional feminine markers, whether sentiment, tears, or histrionics. Nor is there pity or remorse – or heroic or tragic grandeur – in Raven’s responses. In other words, this is the cool register, and it was new to movie audiences as an emotional mode. The New Yorker praised Lake’s laconic style with an amazing phrase: ‘‘ Whether it is simply her lackadaisical hair-do or the exquisite effect she suggests of a wink combined with rigor mortis, the poor child’s graces are alarming.’’ The control, style, and laconic allure of cool detachment created sexual icons of Lake and Ladd in their rejection of eagerness, transparency, and conventional morality. TGFH was chosen as Life’s movie of the week, and the writer admired Lake’s ability to ‘‘cool the fevered brow of a sick man _ [and] produce a fever in a well man. ’’ For Ladd’s side, the Los Angeles Times critic was prescient : ‘‘ Preston is overshadow[ed] by the new young man on the screen.’’ Although Ladd is ‘‘ a sullen type _ [he] never overdoes this quality, ’’ and more importantly, ‘‘ despite he is a hard-bitten criminal[,] Ladd in his role gains [the audience’s] sympathy. Maybe that offends the morals code, but it’s a fact anyway. ’’ Fans, too, preferred Ladd’s cool pose to Preston’s company-man. Four years later, Ladd reflected that TGFH was the film that first ‘‘ brought me a flock of fan letters, convinced Paramount that I could do stellar parts, and really started me on my way. ’’58 The term ‘‘ cool’’ did not yet exist in mainstream vernacular usage, yet in retrospect Naremore calls Ladd a ‘‘ coolly lethal dandy,’’ and Ladd’s biographers invoked the now-iconic sensibility on page one : ‘‘ He was aloof, self-sufficient, occasionally lonely, and sometimes outside the law. His aura was one of great cool, of a forceful, masculine presence with a strong undercurrent of violence and heavy sex appeal _ That’s how the fans who went to the movies in the 1940s saw Alan Ladd. ’’ Nor was it type-casting; Ladd was a short (five feet five inches), blonde, eager, pretty boy, again pointing up the mysterious emergence of a new male icon in the early 1940s. Ladd’s biographers duly noted the contradiction of ‘‘ a small, shy, self-effacing, moody young man [who] _ come[s] across on screen as a hard, cynical, 58 ‘‘ Movie of the Week : This Gun for Hire – Lake and Ladd Make an Unusual Melodrama, ’’ Life, 22 June 1942, 49–53, emphasis added; ‘‘ The Current Cinema : That Odd Miss Lake’’ ; ‘‘ Alan Ladd, Lake, Cregar Intrigue in ‘ Gun for Hire, ’’’ LA Times, 26 June 1942, n.p., emphasis added; Alan Ladd, ‘‘ The Role I Liked Most _ ,’’ Saturday Evening Post, 28 Dec. 1946, n.p. Clipping file, TGFH, MHL, emphasis added. http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 13 Jun 2009 IP address: 129.81.50.111 Film Noir and the Great Depression 445 sexy, self-contained tough guy. ’’ The audience elevated Ladd to stardom, not the studio.59 Given the box-office successes of both HS and TGFH, each character found an addressable (American) audience as conducted through the sympathies of the female lead. TGFH was made for $500,000 and grossed $12 million, making Ladd an overnight sensation. ‘‘ No need to hail Ladd as a comer,’’ wrote the Hollywood Reporter, ‘‘ he has arrived in one jump.’’ Audiences saw in him a fresh, stylish emotionlessness. ‘‘ He seems to be a rather agreeable killer, his felt hat pulled down at a frivolous angle, his mouth only a trifle sullen. A different kind of mugg, ’’ the New Yorker observed, ‘‘ smooth and with even a parlor manner. ’’ The Hollywood Reporter cited ‘‘the killer’s laconic nontalkativeness’’; Variety called attention to Ladd’s ‘‘ still ferocity’’ and lack of emotion. Life noted Ladd’s ‘‘ deadpan acting, ’’ but seemed surprised that ‘‘ the festering bitterness of a killer who hates everything’’ could come from a ‘‘ green-eyed, sandy-haired young American’’ (i.e. a white man, not an ethnic Other). In the New York Times, Bosley Crowther admired Ladd’s ‘‘ tight-lipped violence’’ and concluded, ‘‘Mr. Ladd is a new sort of gangster – a moral gangster. There is despair in him.’’60 Without this muted despair, the cool mask would register neither style nor personal suffering for its audiences. Instead, the flat affect and unemotive violence would connote brute stupidity or coldness, a void or a vacuum, a lack of consciousness. Without cool, such blank dispassion conveys a warped, withdrawn pathology: a zombie’s unconsciousness, the bare life of an automaton, the mechanical workings of a wind-up toy soldier. For cool characters to resonate with audiences, their masking of emotion must signify both control of one’s inner intensity – including rage and pride – and its cost. The persecution of Raven by official authority and corporate hypocrites, the hitman’s vulnerability in Graham’s hands, his artisanal execution of vigilante justice – all lent Ladd’s masculinity a complexity lacking in Preston’s naive righteousness. The final scene of TGFH is set in an unmarked space. Raven lies stricken on a couch with several bullets in him and awaits only Lake’s absolution. He looks up with a boyishly hopeful look: ‘‘ I did all right for ya? ’’ Graham/Lake 59 60 Henry and DeSourdis, Alan Ladd, 13–14 ; Naremore, 74. ‘‘ T G F H,’’ Hollywood Reporter, 17 March 1942, n.p.; ‘‘ The Current Cinema : That Odd Miss Lake ’’ ; ‘‘ T G F H, ’’ Variety, 17 March 1942, n.p. Clipping file, MHL. For Borde and Chaumeton, Ladd’s cool-masked masculinity was both revelatory and disturbing ; he exited each scene, ‘‘ ever silent, ever unfeeling ’’ ; and, more importantly, his ‘‘ expressionless features in situations of great tension reveal[ed] a fearsome, inhuman frigidity.’’ Borde and Chaumeton, 37–38. http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 13 Jun 2009 IP address: 129.81.50.111 446 Joel Dinerstein nods and smiles, and immediately Raven/Ladd is released into eternal bliss, dying peacefully in the presence of his therapist fatale. Lake throws herself into Preston’s arms and moans with some desperation, ‘‘Hold me, darling. ’’ As with Casablanca, the studio solution for the female lead’s ambivalent desire is to allow the heavy to win the major screen battles of masculinity and romance in terms of the cinematic gaze, while the virtuous hero wins the off-screen war and the woman. Most older moviegoers had known Bogart for five years and forty films : his was less a new face than one marked and scarred by experience. Ladd was a brooding matinee idol for the generation that would fight World War II, more along the lines of James Dean (whom he surely influenced) than any 1930s actor. The New York Times’s Bosley Crowther caught his appeal: It is apparently his tight-lipped violence his fans love – especially the kids – his neoChicago gangster toughness combined with a touch of pathos. Is it that youngsters see in him some vague implications of themselves ? That is, beyond the obvious romance attached to a handsome tough guy, do they see imaged in him their own insecurities, a sympathetic rebel against the problems and confusions of modern youth ? And do they find vicarious pleasure in his recourse to violence?61 Crowther nearly identifies the pre-birth of cool from prewar youth culture here. The word ‘‘ teen-ager ’’ was coined in 1935 (not 1955), and movie reviewers in particular would have been well aware of the swing-era generation’s numbers, habits, and tastes, as big bands and studio films appeared on the same programs in the same theaters. On the back of the promotional stills for Ladd’s next film – cast as Ed Beaumont in a film version of Hammett’s The Glass Key – Paramount stamped a paragraph hailing the actor’s sudden stardom. Alan Ladd, ‘‘pictured here _ is styled a ‘romantic heavy,’ a sort of combination of George Raft and Robert Taylor because both women and hard guys admire him. ’’ He was quickly promoted to ‘‘Hollywood’s Rogue’s Gallery’’ – along with Bogart, Edward G. Robinson, and Peter Lorre – but with a difference: ‘‘ Alan combines romantic qualities with his ability to portray a sinister type of role. ’’ For Borde and Chaumeton, Ladd instantly became ‘‘ part of noir mythology ’’ by introducing a new type – the ‘‘ angelic killer’’ (their term). ‘‘ Alan Ladd is a truly remarkable creation, ’’ they fairly rhapsodized, whose ‘‘ slight frame _ docile baby face _ limpid eyes _ [and] gentle, unobtrusive features ’’ were in marked contrast to the gangster genre’s ‘‘ huge and brutal killers. ’’62 61 62 Crowther quoted in Beverly Linet, Ladd: The Life, the Legend, the Legacy of Alan Ladd (New York : Arbor House, 1979), 71, emphasis added. Promotional stills, TGFH, MHL; ‘‘ Alan Ladd Added to Hollywood’s List of ‘ Heavies,’ ’’ unidentified clipping, 30 Oct. 1942, MHL; Borde and Chaumeton, 37–38. http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 13 Jun 2009 IP address: 129.81.50.111 Film Noir and the Great Depression 447 Ladd was a new face – a new mask, so to speak – a tabula rasa for a young generation’s mood on the verge of entering the war. The Bogart persona appealed to an older generation as a man redeemed from instinctual urges. Roy Earle transcends a traumatic past, practices ethical violence, shows vulnerability, treats women fairly, and yet acts with self-confident conviction. In retrospect, Bogart’s individual break from gangster roles can be seen from Petrified Forest to Dead End to They Live By Night (1937–40), yet the studio’s pressbook for HS nonetheless describes him as ‘‘ off the reservation again’’ (i.e. not acting within prescribed gangster typology). Studio promotional materials could barely formulate an actor who shifted from villain to softy. ‘‘Humphrey is back behind his six-shooter, practicing villainy _ [but] ‘ High Sierra’ _ shows him as a heavy with a soft heart. ’’63 Lacking a vocabulary for complex, interiorized characters, such propaganda simply unified oppositions of good and evil, romantic and heavy, virtue and villainy, to give the people what they (apparently) wanted. One missed opportunity of emergent noir was cool-masked womanhood. In the notes for a recent program of Ladd and Lake films, the writer called attention to ‘‘ the stars’ icy good looks and temperaments, ’’ and how ‘‘together, they became a national sensation.’’ The flat affect of both actors was germane to their sexual charisma. ‘‘Men admired Alan Ladd’s cool _ women loved Veronica Lake’s style. They walked and talked like her, and they styled their hair into her immortal peek-a-boo.’’ Women aspired to her laconic self-control ; men were thrilled by her smooth sensuality. ‘‘ When she smiles, as she does perhaps twice in this film, hearts can be heard to break _ throughout the loges, ’’ the New Yorker critic reported, ‘‘ and the tougher element upstairs have to shout their ecstasy.’’ In her memoir, Lake claimed modestly to have been merely a Hollywood type : ‘‘Veronica Lake as Everyman’s mistress. ’’ Perhaps, but besides Lake and Lupino, female characters that exhibited individual style, economic independence, selfreliance, and the tough-cookie heart of 1930s screwball comedies – and were not fatale – were rare in later noir. Perhaps this supports the dominant paradigm of postwar noir: men returning home from the war were threatened by working women and shifting gender roles, a frustration focussed through the role of the femme fatale.64 In emergent noir the United States has yet to enter the war, coastal blackouts and limited budgets were not yet in place, the female leads are not femme fatales but transgressive female rebels in their own right (with the 63 64 ‘‘ Bogart Packs Punch In New Hit’’ and ‘‘ Third Day Advance, ’’ Pressbook, HS, WB/USC. ‘‘ The Tough and the Peek-a-Boo ’’ ; ‘‘ The Current Cinema : That Odd Miss Lake. ’’ http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 13 Jun 2009 IP address: 129.81.50.111 448 Joel Dinerstein important exception of The Maltese Falcon). The setting is the Depression era, and the men are violent, sympathetic loners who have found crime will have to pay if free-market forces do not provide dignified work. Emergent noir synthesized a prewar, post-Depression white masculine iconography across class : there is the demonization of the wealthy businessman – Gates and Brewster – now rendered as frail, effete, and corrupt; there is the rendering of policemen and institutional justice as either unredeemingly corrupt or plodding and virtuous (Kranmer and Preston, or in Grapes of Wrath) ; there is the concession of individuality and rational intelligence to the former ethnic gangster ; there is a battle between hero and heavy for the female lead. There is also the continued effacement (and absence) of non-white males, especially African Americans, as in the minstrelized character of Algernon in HS. Earle and Raven die not only as moral retribution for breaking the law (and perhaps for being social pariahs), but because there is literally no place for them in the era’s narrative conventions. Just before the entrance of the United States into World War II, Bogart and Ladd burst forth fully formed as embodiments of what would become a major postwar American vernacular mode of masculinity : cool. In their hardboiled masculinities, in their insistent maintenance of individual agency, in their attempts in these two films to work through the loss of belief in the American mythos with female partners, Roy Earle and Philip Raven found a place in the collective dream of the prewar moment. Vicariously groping towards reflection of their own traumatic experiences, Americans were apparently sympathetic to the subdued ethical violence of the failed, cornered men of emergent noir, representative of a shift in aesthetics, taste culture, and even morality that required new faces, a new vocabulary, and an addressable audience. http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 13 Jun 2009 IP address: 129.81.50.111