Through the 1930s, American mass culture had treated criminals and
their culture predominantly as exotica, glamorizing both the criminal
masterminds who cracked safes and controlled the traffic in illegal
liquor and the detectives whose well-advertised eccentricities gave
them a similarly exotic cachet. As the decade drew to a close, however,
the attitudes Hollywood seemed to encourage toward both fictional
criminals and fictional detectives grew less straightforward and
more conflicted. At the same time, in an even more fundamental shift,
crime films grew more figurative, their criminals metaphors for a tangle
of social forces and attitudes rather than heroic outsiders in their
own right.
The gangsters played in the later 1930s by Humphrey Bogart illustrate
this shift from the exotic criminal to the metaphoric criminal.
After several years playing nondescript characters in the early 1930s,
Bogart had left the screen for the stage, and it was in a stage role he
5. The Hound of the Baskervilles: Nigel Bruce and Basil Rathbone as the bestloved
Watson and Holmes of all.
had originated in 1935, Duke Mantee in The Petrified Forest, that he
returned to Hollywood a year later. Mantee is the first of Hollywood’s
overtly metaphorical gangsters. Although he is by far the most commanding
presence in Robert Sherwood’s play and Archie Mayo’s film
(1936), his role is nothing more than a plot contrivance, a catalyst that
allows the metaphysically weary hero Alan Squier (Leslie Howard) to
sacrifice his own life and leave a legacy that will allow Gabrielle Maple
(Bette Davis) to escape the existential paralysis Squier cannot.
Warner Bros. paired Bogart with James Cagney in three films in the
later thirties: Angels with Dirty Faces (1938), The Oklahoma Kid (1939),
and The Roaring Twenties (1939). In each of them, Cagney was the dynamic
lead, whether as criminal or avenger, Bogart the dishonorable
villain as social pathology. Bogart’s Baby Face Martin was used to explain
juvenile delinquency in Dead End (1937); his George Hally helped
embalm the Prohibition era as historic Americana in The Roaring
Twenties; but not until after he emerged from Cagney’s shadow in High
Sierra (1941) would his Roy Earle meld Squier’s anachronistic pretensions
to the gangster’s atavistic grandeur. Unlike Cagney, whose appeal
was direct, physical, and extroverted, Bogart, who could suggest
depths of worldly disillusionment beneath a crooked shell, was the
perfect choice to play gangsters designed to explore the ambiguities
of nongangster culture: a stifling society’s thirst for cathartic violence;
the need to blame intractable social problems on outside agents or to
project them onto a comfortably remote history; the recognition that
the gangster’s power, like the western gunslinger’s, was for better or
worse a reminder of a simpler time long past.
Better than anyone else before or since, Bogart incarnated the romantic
mystique of the doomed criminal. He never played the nobly
redeemable crook of Sternberg’s Underworld or the dashing outlaw
who flouts unjust laws – a figure popularized by Mae West (She Done
Him Wrong and I’m No Angel, both 1933) and Errol Flynn (The Adventures
of Robin Hood, 1938). Instead, Bogart’s protagonists were ambivalent.
Bogart villains like Roy Earle were sympathetic despite (or because
of) their guilt, Bogart heroes like Sam Spade (in The Maltese
Falcon, 1941) [Fig. 6] tainted with guilty knowledge. Bogart continued
to trade on the mystique of the soulful criminal and the hero with a
shady past, even when cast against type as the aging sailor Charlie Allnut
in The African Queen (1951) or the obsessive Captain Queeg in The
Caine Mutiny (1954). On the eve of John Huston’s pivotal caper film
The Asphalt Jungle (1950), Bogart would close the forties by starring
in a pair of 1948 Huston films that confirmed the metaphoric power
of the criminal, appearing as the psychotic Everyman Fred C. Dobbs
in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and as Lt. Frank McCloud in Key
Largo, whose admonition to Americans to rouse themselves from their
exhausted postwar apathy to battle the forces of evil represented by
Johnny Rocco (Edward G. Robinson) makes it the most allegorical of
all the great gangster films.
What made Bogart and his colleagues stop working exclusively for
criminal gangs and go to work for cultural analysts who were using
movie criminals as metaphors for American culture? The most obvious
cause for this shift was the decline in high-profile organized crime,
partly because of the repeal of Prohibition in 1933, partly because of
the well-publicized success of the FBI. The adventures of Scarface’s
Tony Camonte and “G” Men’s Brick Davis could fairly be claimed to
be ripped from newspaper headlines; the gangsters played by Paul
Muni in Angel on My Shoulder (1946) and James Cagney in White Heat
6. The Maltese Falcon: Humphrey Bogart as the private-eye hero tainted with
guilty knowledge. (Bogart, Sydney Greenstreet)
(1949) are self-consciously anachronistic, memoirs of a gangster culture
whose day has passed.
As the journalistic currency of criminals declined, their literary matrix
stood out in sharper relief. Ever since the coming of synchronized
sound had encouraged Hollywood to turn to literary and dramatic
sources, the great gangster films, like the great detective films, had all
been based on literary properties; even Scarface, allegedly written
from Chicago headlines, credited Armitrage Trail’s novel as its source.
But the crime films of the 1940s sprang out of a fictional tradition that
was already hailed as more self-consciously literary despite its hardboiled
roots.16 It may seem strange to claim Dashiell Hammett, Raymond
Chandler, and James M. Cain as literary, but all of them had connections
and pretensions to the literary establishment, and all of them
– unlike fellow pulp writers Carroll John Daly and Erle Stanley Gardner
– turned from action writers to literary stylists when they left the
short story for the novel. The second paragraph of Chandler’s first
novel, The Big Sleep (1939), for example, is a classic of playfully metaphoric
foreshadowing of the detective as disillusioned knight-errant
that would have been blue-penciled from any of Chandler’s submissions
to Black Mask, Detective Fiction Weekly, or Dime Detective:
The main hallway of the Sternwood place was two stories high. Over the
entrance doors, which would have let in a troop of Indian elephants, there
was a broad stained-glass panel showing a knight in dark armor rescuing
a lady who was tied to a tree and didn’t have any clothes on but some long
and convenient hair. The knight had pushed the vizor of his helmet back to
be sociable, and he was fiddling with the knots on the ropes that tied the
lady to the tree and not getting anywhere. I stood there and thought that if
I lived in the house, I would sooner or later have to climb up there and help
him. He didn’t seem to be really trying.17
Cornell Woolrich, the pulp writer who had an even greater impact on
crime films of the forties, was no one’s idea of a stylist, in either short
forms or long, and yet his contribution to the crime film was equally
metaphoric: a knack of tying particular crimes to a pervasive sense of
urban paranoia and a claustrophobic compression of dramatic time.
So powerful was the appeal of Woolrich’s nightmare fantasies that
apart from Erle Stanley Gardner, whose dozens of Perry Mason novels
served as the basis for the 1957–66 television series, no crime writer
approaches the number of Woolrich’s source credits for movies. Films
based on his novels and stories include Convicted (1938), Street of
Chance (1942), The Leopard Man (1943), Phantom Lady (1944), Mark
of the Whistler (1944), Deadline at Dawn (1946), Black Angel (1946),
The Chase (1946), Fall Guy (1947), Fear in the Night (1947), The Guilty
(1947), I Wouldn’t Be in Your Shoes (1948), Return of the Whistler (1948),
The Night Has a Thousand Eyes (1948), The Window (1949), No Man
of Her Own (1950) and its remakes I Married a Shadow (J'ai épousé
une ombre, France, 1982) and Mrs. Winterbourne (1996), Rear Window
(1954), and a pair of French adaptations directed by François Truffaut,
The Bride Wore Black (La Mariée était en noir, 1967) and Mississippi
Mermaid (La Sirène du Mississippi, 1969). The indirect influence of his
fiction on other films noirs extends even further.
One reason filmmakers in this period were more aware of the literary
traditions their work was following was that they were different
filmmakers. The rise of Nazism and the coming of World War II had driven
a generation of European filmmakers, including such important
crime-film directors as Fritz Lang (Fury, 1936; You Only Live Once, 1937;
The Woman in the Window, 1944; Scarlet Street, 1945; The Big Heat,
1953), Robert Siodmak (Phantom Lady; The Spiral Staircase, 1946; The
Killers, 1946; The Dark Mirror, 1946; Criss Cross, 1949), and Billy Wilder
(Double Indemnity, 1944; Sunset Blvd., 1950; Some Like It Hot, 1959),
to the United States, where they were joined by British émigré Alfred
Hitchcock (Rebecca, 1940; Strangers on a Train, 1951; Rear Window;
Vertigo, 1958; Psycho, 1960). Worldly, ambitious, and sophisticated,
many of these European filmmakers managed to adapt to the big budgets
of Hollywood studios while maintaining their sense of expressive
visual style and their fondness for literate dialogue. Their attempt to
use criminal plots to encapsulate the audience’s whole world was hallowed
by recognition from French critics, if not by American, as early
as 1946, when the term film noir first appeared in print in describing
the style of five crime films first released in 1944: The Woman in the
Window, Laura, Phantom Lady, Double Indemnity, and Murder, My
Sweet.
The noir cycle, which continued through the mid-1950s, featured
amateur criminals – people who did not think of themselves as criminals
at all – trapped in ordinary situations gone wrong, using everyday
drives for love and success as the basis for criminal nightmares
driven by the expressionistic psychopathology of everyday life rather
than the imperatives of Depression economics. The weak hero sucked
into a life of crime by the treacherous femme fatale, the tough private
eye hoping to outwit the criminals who owned his city, the maze of
rain-slick night streets leading nowhere, the hallucinatory contrasts
between glaring white faces and deep black skies, the lush orchestral
scores ratcheting up moments of emotional intensity still further – all
of these figures were familiar to film-noir audiences not from the headlines,
but from a mythic world created mainly by other movies.
When the inevitable reaction against the expressionistic world of
film noir set in, it focused on style rather than figuration. The semidocumentary
approach pioneered by the anti-Nazi thriller The House
on 92nd Street (1945) flourished in the location shooting of films like
Kiss of Death (1947), Call Northside 777 (1948), and The Naked City
(1948), with its you-are-there voice-over prologue and epilogue delivered
by producer Mark Hellinger: “There are eight million stories in
the naked city. This has been one of them.” Although the crime film
seemed poised to follow a new trend toward documentary realism,
Robert Wise showed in The Set-Up (1949) that a realistic handling of
mise-en-scène, coupled with the unfolding of the story in real time,
could serve as the basis for a new, harder-edged expressionism, and
it was this amalgam of realism and expressionism that sparked crime
movies as different as D.O.A. (1950), Sunset Blvd., and Detective Story
(1951).
By the end of the decade, home-grown American critics were beginning
to look more closely at the figurative power of popular films.
While disclaiming any special artistry for individual Hollywood products,
highbrow critics like Parker Tyler and Robert Warshow regarded
Hollywood itself as a stage for repressed American cultural anxieties,
which seemed to be running at an all-time high in the years immediately
following the war, when the national identity the country had constructed
for itself was in danger of collapsing along with the national
project of winning the war. As Joseph Samuels (Sam Levene) prophetically
tells Sgt. Montgomery, the anti-Semitic veteran who will soon
murder him in Crossfire (1947):
Maybe it’s because for four years now we’ve been focusing . . . on one little
peanut. The “win-the-war” peanut, that was all. Get it over, eat that peanut.
All at once, no peanut. Now we start looking at each other again. We don’t
know what we’re supposed to do. . . . We’re too used to fightin’. But we just
don’t know what to fight.
It was time for the crime film, armed with its newly acknowledged
metaphoric power to diagnose hidden social problems, to be pressed
into service in shoring up a new national identity.
Crime Films/Thomas Leitch/ http://www.cambridge.org
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