Film Noir, American Workers, and Postwar Hollywood

Notes

Notes Introduction: Let a Thousand Fetish Objects Bloom 1. While Americans were busy creating the form, the French were naming and defining it. The earliest reference to film noir is by Nino Frank in 1946 in the French journal Positif, with the form then codified in Borde and Chaumeton ’s Panorama du Film Noir in 1955, in much the same way perhaps, in Marx’s formulation, the French had promulgated in 1789 a political revolution that the Germans then theorized. 2. Freud lived through a period in which vague middle- and working-class fears were expressed in the somber shadows of the German expressionist cinema and, earlier, in Vienna, in the brooding drama and literature of writers such as Arthur Schnitzler and Stefan Zweig and in Germany in the tortured novels of Joseph Roth. 3. Hobsbawm also distinguishes the social bandit from the gangster, the representative of the professional underworld for whom breaking the law is part of the normal way of life. Gerald Horne in Class Struggle in Hollywood points out the centrality of the mob to Hollywood in the 1940s and 1950s, in its encroaching on studio power and its use by the studios to discipline recalcitrant unions. Horne characterizes the crime film in that period as full of gangsters who validate the ugly antics of the mob. However, the gangster is not central to the immediate postwar film noir period. The gangster, who had dominated the Hollywood screen in the early 1930s, returns as a force in the 1950s era of the police procedural, portrayed as either a psychotic menace who justifies a preponderant use of force (the Lee Marvin sadistic enforcer in The Big Heat, 1953) or a part of an organized underground that rationalizes an extreme emphasis on surveillance and interrogating of working-class neighborhoods (the post–Kefauver Hearings gangsters of The Big Combo, 1955, and the citywide corruption nearing anarchy of the Sodom and Gomorrah–like Alabama town in The Phenix City Story, 1955). The gangster is still a prominent figure in Hollywood, and his representation on the Hollywood screen is mostly romanticized, though ironically in a hard-edged way through the toughness of a Tony Soprano in The Sopranos, who nevertheless is in the end struggling for a better life. Two contemporary films that undercut this image and recognize the centrality of the gangster to Hollywood studio relations are Death to Smoochy (2002), with its shady “charity head” calling the shots in an Ice Capade spinoff of a children’s television show, and Mulholland Drive (2001), where the gangsters dictate the choice of lead character in the filmwithin -the-film that is part of the actress Betty’s dream. 4. This structuralist approach to genre developed through the adaptation of Lévi-Strauss’s concept of myths as meditations on and mediations of deep conflicts in a society (see Structural Anthropology). Applied to Hollywood genres, this approach has tended to see the various genres as relegated to mediating different realms of experience and conflict in advanced capitalist society. See the work of Steve Neale and Frank Krutnik, especially Neale’s Genre. 5. These strikes never made it onto the Hollywood screen. For the lack of union representation in this era, see the very few titles listed in the period in Tom Zaniello’s compendium of working-class films in Working Stiffs, Union Maids, Reds, and Riffraff: An Organized Guide to Films about Labor. 6. These statistics are primarily compiled from Silver and Ward’s Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference to the American Style, Langman and Finn’s A Guide to American Crime Films of the Forties and Fifties, and my own viewing. 7. The form is often seen as conformist rather than resistant. In his discussion of The Big Clock, Barton Palmer describes how “the more radical aspects of Fearing’s book are eliminated and the novel is reproduced as a thriller,” whose boundaries he claims contain the critique of the book and testify to “the continuing power of socially conservative genre forms even in the heyday of noir filmmaking” (“Continuum” 56). David Bordwell, Janet Staiger, and Kristin Thompson make much the same argument for the formal transgressive aspects of film noir, saying that the form bends but does not break the stylistic boundaries of the classical Hollywood film. In contrast, Krutnik’s 140 · · · Notes to Pages xxiii–xxv In a Lonely Street focuses more on the resistant quality of the...