Criminal Culture and Mass Culture

Criminal subcultures had already been posed as social microcosms
throughout the 1940s. More explicitly than any earlier prison film,
Brute Force (1947) offered its prison as existential social metaphor for
a meaningless, tragically unjust round of activities that would end only
in death. The boxing cycle of the later 1940s (Body and Soul, 1947;
Champion, 1949; The Set-Up), besides treating the ring as one more exotic
milieu to be mined for its sociological interest, insistently equated
it with one more inescapable prison.
White Heat inaugurated a cycle of films using crime melodrama
to tame the omnipresent danger of the nuclear bomb. The power of
White Heat’s psychotic gang leader, Cody Jarrett (James Cagney), is
linked to uncontrollable technological forces like the steam generated
by a railroad engine, the “white-hot buzz saw” that he feels inside his
head, and the natural-gas refinery he invades in the film’s climactic
sequence. Faced with Jarrett’s outlaw power, the police have recourse
to superior technology of their own, pursuing Cody’s mother in radiodirected
cars and plotting, by means of a radio-tracking device, the
course of the truck that takes the Jarrett gang to their last job. The
subtext is clear: When threatened by technological nightmares, fight
fire with fire.18
Interestingly, this subtext remains virtually unchanged in two later
crime films that otherwise have little to do with each other, or with
White Heat: The Big Heat (1953) and Kiss Me Deadly (1955). All three
films use explicitly apocalyptic imagery both to indicate the dangerous
extent of the criminals’ threats and to depict the cleansing destruction
of the criminals. In The Big Heat, the apocalyptic fury associated
with the A-bomb’s fearsome capacity to burn, maim, and kill
individuals and whole communities is unleashed when Mrs. Duncan
(Jeanette Nolan), a crooked cop’s widow, is shot and murderous thug
Vince Stone (Lee Marvin) scalded by the thug’s former moll, Debby
Marsh (Gloria Grahame). Debby’s position beyond the pale of social
morals and her own scalding by Stone – which has given the face of
which she was so vain the half-scarred, half-beautiful look of a Dick
Tracy grotesque – allow her a greater freedom to avenge herself than
the upright, widower-cop hero Dave Bannion (Glenn Ford) could ever
have. By killing Mrs. Duncan, Debby releases “the big heat” – intense
police activity based on evidence against big-city crime boss Lagana
(Alexander Scourby) and his organization that the cop’s widow had
safely stowed – which the film persistently links to images of catastrophically
uncontrolled power and the “traumatic consequences”
of nuclear holocaust.19 The much darker Kiss Me Deadly pits another
social outsider, “bedroom dick” Mike Hammer (Ralph Meeker), against
a lineup of criminal plotters and government conspirators, leading
him literally inside the body of a dead woman for the key to what his
secretary dubs “the Great Whatsit” – an atom bomb waiting in a locker
of the Hollywood Athletic Club – while at the same time condemning
Hammer’s dim, brutal machismo, whose effects are as disastrous as
the criminals’ schemes.
In each of these films, as in the prison and boxing films of the forties,
crime is used as a way of converting noncriminal but potentially
unbearable social anxieties into entertainment by scaling down their
threat from the global to the subcultural level, linking the threat to a
series of charismatic heroes and villains who can encourage a strong
rooting interest, and directing the audience’s concern along the comfortably
generic lines of the crime film. Ten years earlier, the crimereporter
hero’s editor in Foreign Correspondent (1940) had cut the Nazi
threat in Europe down to size with the injunction, “There’s a crime
hatching on that bedeviled continent.” Now films like Kiss Me Deadly
showed how the crime genre could be enlisted to domesticate the
equally imponderable threat of global holocaust.
The Asphalt Jungle (1950), released at the beginning of a new decade,
consolidated this tendency to define criminal subculture as a mirror
of American culture. The cycle of caper films it exemplifies, from
foreshadowings like The Killers and Criss Cross to full-blown later examples
like The Killing (1956) and Odds against Tomorrow (1959), used
the planning and execution of a robbery that infallibly went wrong to
dramatize the irreducible unreasonableness of life. Its aura of existential
despair made the caper film popular with European filmmakers,
whose homages to Hollywood, beginning with Rififi (Du Rififi chez les
hommes, 1955) and The Swindle (Il bidone, 1955), broadened into a
wider and more complex mixture of nostalgia and critique with the
coming of the French New Wave, which produced such notable crime
films as Frantic, also known as Elevator to the Gallows (Ascenseur pour
l’échafaud, 1958), Breathless (À bout de souffle, 1959), Shoot the Piano
Player (Tirez sur le pianiste, 1960), Alphaville (1965), and The Unfaithful
Wife (La femme infidèle, 1969). In the meantime, the doom-laden
atmosphere of caper films was lightened in such British Ealing comedies
as The Lavender Hill Mob (1951) and The Ladykillers (1955), and
the Italian I soliti ignoti (1958), a notable U.S. success as Big Deal on
Madonna Street. Hollywood was slower to adopt a comic attitude toward
the big heist, with the international coproduction Topkapi (1964,
directed by Rififi alumnus Jules Dassin) the pivotal film, followed by
Gambit (1966), How to Steal a Million (1966), and The Hot Rock (1972)
and Bank Shot (1974), both adapted from Donald E. Westlake’s caper
novels about the comically frustrated thief John Dortmunder.
Far more surprising than the rise of the caper film as an anatomy of
noncriminal society or its leavening through the comedy of ineptness
is the enlistment of crime films to promote family values. The authority
of the 1930 Production Code had become so shaky that it was successfully
challenged by Fox, which released Otto Preminger’s The
Moon Is Blue without a seal in 1953, and Warner Bros., which released
Elia Kazan’s Baby Doll in 1956 despite the condemnation of the Legion
of Decency. In the wake of the anticommunist witch-hunts of 1947 and
1950, however, calls for central control of the mass-entertainment media’s
content remained strong, particularly when those media targeted
children. Psychologist Fredric Wertham’s influential study Seduction
of the Innocent (1954), attacking comic books, especially crime
comics, as “an agent with harmful potentialities,”20 provoked widespread
public outrage and a Congressional investigation under the
direction of Senator Estes Kefauver. In response, industry leader DC
(Detective Comics), which published the adventures of Superman,
Batman, Wonder Woman, and many of their superfriends, rushed to
join other publishers in establishing a Comics Code that would preclude
any government censorship, drawing a sharp line between code
and noncode comics that would prepare the way for underground
comics ten years later.
At the same time, the burgeoning popularity of television, which
was rapidly taking control of the formulaic genres that would have
been Hollywood’s province only a few years earlier, created a demand
for formula melodramas suitable for family viewing that could fit into
slots of half an hour or an hour.21 Some popular radio anthology programs
like Suspense and The Whistler made successful transitions to
television; others, like Alfred Hitchcock Presents and its successor The
Alfred Hitchcock Hour, were created especially for the new medium.
The mainstay of television programming, however, became the halfhour
comedy or drama series that followed the adventures of a continuing
character. This formula was ideally suited to the detective story,
and between 1950 and 1960 Ellery Queen, Boston Blackie, Flash Casey,
Pam and Jerry North, Nick and Nora Charles, Mike Hammer, Charlie
Chan, Philip Marlowe, and Mike Shayne had all tested the waters,
where they were joined by the new detectives who headlined Peter
Gunn, Mannix, Richard Diamond, Private Eye, 77 Sunset Strip, Hawaiian
Eye, and Surfside 6, along with the indefatigable Perry Mason. In 1952,
Dragnet brought LAPD Sgt. Joe (“Just the facts”) Friday from radio to
television, followed by M Squad, Highway Patrol, The Untouchables, The
Naked City, Ironside, Hawaii Five-O, Adam 12, The Mod Squad, Columbo,
and a dozen other police dramas. Although The Defenders frequently
explored troubling moral ambiguities in the cases that came
to its father-and-son law team, most crime series, whether they focused
on private or police detectives, set their heroes problems that
could be comfortably solved in less than an hour, thus emphasizing
the cleaner, less troubling side of crime.
The Hollywood studios, increasingly embattled by competition from
television, responded to the call for clean entertainment more subtly.
Although Rhett Butler’s memorable farewell line in Gone with the Wind
(1939) – “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn” – had survived censors
in and out of Hollywood, most studio releases of the fifties were
no more violent or explicitly sexual than those of 1934, and scarcely
more licentious in their language. The one way in which the movies
could be cleaned up, in fact, was to harness antiauthoritarian genres
like the crime film to images of authority. Hence The Desperate Hours
(1955), which pits escaped criminal Glenn Griffin (Humphrey Bogart)
against suburban father Dan Hilliard (Fredric March), turns the criminal
melodrama into a poster for the American family, which Griffin’s
gang parodies on a one-to-one basis (authoritarian Griffin is paired
with Hilliard, his shy kid brother with Griffin’s teenaged daughter, their
oafish sidekick with Hilliard’s little boy). In particular, The Desperate
Hours uses the dysfunctional criminal family to bolster its case for
the imperatives of American patriarchy. Like Griffin’s gang, which succeeds
only until each member strikes out on his own, the Hilliards falter
only when they disobey Dan, whose principled reluctance to kill
turns into a source of strength at the film’s climax, when he goes back
to his home with an unloaded revolver the police have given him, relying
on the fact that his son will trust him enough to run to the safety
of his arms even though Griffin is holding the unloaded gun on him.
In the same way, the central characters in Murder, Inc. (1960), whose
exposé of Louis “Lepke” Buchalter’s Brooklyn murder-for-hire organi-
zation would have made Lepke and his lieutenants the main characters
had the film been made contemporaneously with its Depressionera
action, are Joey Collins (Stuart Whitman) and his wife Eadie (Mai
Britt), whose marriage is stretched to the breaking point when the
contract killer Abe Reles (Peter Falk) makes Joey his unwilling accomplice.
Though Lepke (David J. Stewart) ends up in prison with his gang
in tatters, the central question of the film is whether the weak, decent
Joey can extricate himself and Eadie from Reles’s grasp. The film,
which subordinates the fate of its gangster empire to its solicitude for
the typical American couple it has dropped into their midst, plays like
Little Caesar with Rico’s straight-arrow sidekick Joe Massara (Douglas
Fairbanks Jr.) as the hero.
The most complete transformation of all crime subgenres in the
1950s, however, is reserved for the lawyer film. Earlier movies had presented
lawyer heroes as omnipotent or embattled; only in the fifties
did they become social prophets and social engineers. Anatomy of a
Murder (1959) casts James Stewart as Paul Biegler, an aw-shucks defense
attorney whose alcoholic associate worries he may be “too pure
for the impurities of the law.” Inherit the Wind (1960), which rehearses
the Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925, allows its Clarence Darrow hero Henry
Drummond (Spencer Tracy) to range outside his judicial bailiwick
in such authoritative pronouncements as “You cannot administer a
wicked law impartially.” By the time of To Kill a Mockingbird (1962), a
neighbor of Atticus Finch (Gregory Peck), the small-town Georgia lawyer
who fights unsuccessfully to get an African-American acquitted
of an obviously trumped-up rape charge, can memorialize his heroic
failure to his children: “There’s some men in this world who are born
to do our unpleasant jobs for us.”
Films like these realign the lone heroes of the great Depression
genres not so much morally as institutionally. Now the greatest heroes
are those that stand for establishment values against hopeless odds.
By the time of Experiment in Terror (1962), the San Francisco Police
Department fulfills the same job the United States Army did in Invaders
from Mars (1953): the paternal, all-wise, all-powerful organization on
which imperiled heroes and heroines can rely more certainly than
family or friends. If this pattern is not a revelation of the fifties conformity
satirized in films like Pleasantville (1998), it reveals how dear the
utopian ideal of social conformity remained as a wish of even such a
subversive genre as the crime film.

Crime Films/Thomas Leitch/ http://www.cambridge.org