by Mark Osteen
HUAC swooped down to complete the job. As Trumbo wrote, the committee attacked Hollywood “to destroy the trade unions, to paralyze anti-fascist political action, and to ‘remove progressive content from films’” (qtd. in Neve, Film 93).6 At the forefront of the conservative backlash was Eric Johnston, a former president of the Chamber of Commerce hired as head of the Motion Picture Association of America in late 1945, who declared: “We’ll have no more films that deal with the seamy side of American life. We’ll have no more films that treat the banker as a villain” (qtd. in May 177). But, in fact, HUAC showed little interest in the content of films. Rather, the committee aimed to limit movie content to what fell within its own narrow definition of Americanism by preventing Communists or “pinkos” from working, simply labeling any movie made by a known Communist or former Communist, no matter how anodyne, as “subversive.” Ceplair and Englund conclude that such charges “served as a pretext for silencing a cultural and humanitarian liberalism” (254). The strategy worked and by 1951 had permanently altered “the structure of power and ideology in Hollywood” (May 197) by emasculating the guilds and purging radicals from the studios (Ceplair and Englund 222).
But before the first hearings, in October of 1947, spirits were high among the nineteen subpoenaed radicals.7 The group decided on a strategy of evasion, though many of them also prepared statements explaining why the investigation was unconstitutional and defending their First Amendment rights. A Committee for the First Amendment, formed by respected liberals Philip Dunne, John Huston, Humphrey Bogart, and William Wyler, distributed press releases and statements defending the nineteen. But these plans quickly foundered as a stream of “friendly” witnesses cited long lists of alleged Communists; although HUAC allowed these persons to read statements, it not only cut off the “unfriendly” witnesses but, when they refused to cooperate, cited them for contempt of Congress.8 Within days the CFA had collapsed out of fear of being painted red (Bogart even issued an abject apology in Photoplay a few months later). In November studio executives issued the notorious Waldorf Statement, which declared that no studio would knowingly hire a Communist.9 With it the blacklist began.
Ten of the original nineteen subpoenaed radicals were jailed; but perhaps more significant than the jailings was the blanket of fear that immediately descended on Hollywood. HUAC withdrew between 1947 and 1951, but radicals—even if their involvement with the Communist Party had been minor or had taken place in the distant past—saw jobs vanish overnight: even Trumbo, the highest-paid screenwriter in Hollywood in 1947, was forced to use a “front” to sell his work. If the original hearings had been designed to flush out Communists and force the studios to police themselves, the 1951–53 hearings were mostly a series of what Victor Navasky calls “degradation ceremonies” (314): their purpose was not really to find or prosecute Communists (most names were already known) but to induce witnesses to name other radicals. That is, the committee’s goal was to humiliate and convert those who testified, ostracize and stigmatize those who did not, and meanwhile drum up publicity for themselves. The committee also sought to transform the perception of the informer from that of “rat” to patriot. Those who named others and apologized were permitted to work again; those who refused to name others—even if they testified—were blacklisted. For the studios, however, it was all about money. Already hemorrhaging audiences in the wake of the Paramount v. Loews decision that stripped them of theater ownership, and fearing the advent of television, studios were less concerned about reds than about red ink.
Whatever the motives of its perpetrators, the blacklist cut a swathe through Hollywood. Loyalty oaths became de rigueur, as many radicals and former radicals—including Dmytryk and Rossen, along with Sterling Hayden, Elia Kazan, Silvia Richards, and many others—were paraded through the committee chambers and forced to cite names, thereby preserving their livelihoods but earning a lifetime of second thoughts and condemnation from those who refused to testify. The ritual was chillingly successful: as Navasky observes, no Hollywood Communist or former Communist who was called to testify and failed to name others worked under his or her own name again for many years (84). An estimated 350 creative artists lost their jobs, and only about 10 percent of blacklistees salvaged their careers (Broe 85; Ceplair and Englund 419).10 The radicals’ view—that HUAC’s witch hunt was not only unconstitutional but un-American—was drowned out by the loud chorus of fearmongers (which included the American Legion and other hyper-“patriotic” organizations), publicity seekers, and media shills. Among the “recklessly mangled lives and careers” (Navasky 76) were those of some of the finest artists in Hollywood. According to Ceplair and Englund, blacklisted writers had scripted ten of the ninety-one top grossing films before 1952 and had accumulated 14 percent of available accolades while contributing 20 percent of the material on which recognition was based (333). And though several writers were able to sell screenplays using fronts, their earnings dwindled, and they relinquished any control over the outcome. The news was worse for directors and actors. Polonsky (not one of the Nineteen but an outspoken radical who had been involved in labor organizing before coming to Hollywood) was unable to direct a film between 1948 and 1969. Losey, Endfield, and Dassin emigrated, and though all three had success abroad, they were cut off from their communities and friends. Actors John Garfield and Canada Lee, two stars of Body and Soul, were hounded to death: as Navasky puts it, both men died “of blacklist” (340). In sum, the blacklist was a disaster not just for Hollywood’s radical community but for the entire American movie industry.
Red Noir
Yes, they were skilled; but were they subversive? John Howard Lawson wrote in 1949 that “it is impossible for any screen writer to put anything into a motion picture to which the executive producers object” (qtd. in Ceplair and Englund 322). As we have seen, the writer in midcentury Hollywood exerted little control over the final product. Moreover, the Hollywood reds had little or no interest in subverting the United States government, as HUAC charged. Yet these writers and directors did critique certain American values in the crime films that we now call noir. James Naremore argues that “the first decade of American film noir was largely the product of a socially committed faction … composed of ‘Browderite’ communists … and ‘Wallace’ democrats” (More Than Night 104).11 Paul Buhle and Dave Wagner likewise declare that noir was “the cinematic triumph of the Left’s filmmakers … over adverse circumstances and ideological resistance from Communist aesthetic reductionism” (xvi); Philip Kemp has even suggested that radical ideas underpin the entire noir canon.12 More plausibly, May divides noir into two types, one set focusing on authority figures who demolish evildoers, cure pathology, or ease adaptation to the middle-class dream, and a second group (created by the Left) that celebrates nonconformism and “perpetuate[s] the ideal of the hybrid rebel in quest of wholeness against an alienating society” (220). Broe further argues that the leftist slant of noir between 1945 and 1950 was supplanted after 1950 by a conservative wave (30). Although Broe’s dates are questionable (Try and Get Me! and The Prowler were released in 1951; the right-wing pseudodocumentary Walk a Crooked Mile appeared in 1948), he is correct that radical style and politics were much harder to find in 1950s noir.
In his seminal 1985 essay “Red Hollywood,” Thom Andersen lists thirteen films as exemplars of what he dubs “film gris,” a subset of noir distinguished by greater emphasis on social “realism” (257; his list includes most of the films I discuss in this chapter). Expanding the list to sixteen, Joshua Hirsch outlines the sources and themes of this subgenre, which he describes as “the most radically leftist cycle of Hollywood pictures” before the 1960s (84).13 But even Andersen seems embarrassed by the term film gris, so I propose a new name for these products of Hollywood radicals: red noir. Though indebted to the gangster films of the 1930s, as Joshua Hirsch argues, the red noirs turn those pictures’ implied critique of capitalism into an explicit one (89, 85).14 As he explains, this group scrutinizes three as
pects of American society: the class system, capitalism, and the ideology of the American Dream (86). These categories provide a helpful template for the ensuing discussion.
Making a Killing: Noir’s Class Critique
“You’re Genghis Khan, Alexander the Great, Caesar! … Your every move is obvious. … Not cleverness, not imagination. Just force, brute force.” Intoned by Dr. Walters (future blacklistee Art Smith), these lines not only cite the title of Jules Dassin’s violent prison melodrama but also state its major theme and describe its villain, Captain Munsey (chillingly enacted by Hume Cronyn). Unfortunately, the lines also pinpoint the film’s main flaw: though its heart is in the right place, its every move is obvious.15
In portraying the inhumane conditions that prompt inmate Joe Collins (Burt Lancaster) to lead a prison break, Brute Force presents an allegory of a fascist society, with Munsey as its Fuehrer and Collins (note his initials) as a Christ figure who sacrifices himself to take Munsey down. Dassin succeeds in making us hate Munsey, a sadistic martinet who listens to Wagner while torturing a prisoner and spouts neo-Nazi twaddle such as “weakness is an infection that makes a man a follower instead of a leader. … Nature proves that the weak must die so that the strong may live.” Ultimately, the film’s conflict boils down to a face-off between Hitler and Jesus.
Dassin’s antifascist allegory is coupled with an equally heavy-handed class critique. The prisoners are shown laboring in factorylike conditions, and those Munsey disfavors are sent to the “drain pipe,” a grimy, dark, dangerous place where inmates attempt, seemingly without stint or success, to clear muck. The inmates are lower-class workers enslaved to Munsey’s tyrannies, which include extreme punishments for minor infractions and the cultivation of informers. The latter element—omnipresent throughout—looms especially large after Collins’s escape scheme is doomed by the Judas among his apostles, “Freshman” (future blacklistee Jeff Corey). Though it was released just before the first HUAC hearings, Brute Force nonetheless conjures the period’s paranoid atmosphere. For a radical like Dassin the relationship between Munsey and the oppressed inmates may also have evoked the one between studio heads and the striking workers who risked the loss of careers and even imprisonment from their activities.
If Brute Force’s leftist politics seem ham-handed, Dassin’s next film, The Naked City, suffers from the opposite problem: far from naked, its class critique is, as Rebecca Prime has shown, muffled by compromises.16 After the shoot, Dassin made producer Mark Hellinger promise not to change anything while he was out of the country, but the pledge became moot after Hellinger died in December (Prime 149). Viewing the final version a few months later, Dassin was outraged that the film had been shorn of “anything connected with poor people or poverty or struggle” (qtd. in Prime 150). A muted class critique does linger in the opening sequences, which show ordinary folks hard at work while the idle rich—including playboy Frank Niles (Howard Duff) and his soon-to-be murdered girlfriend Jean Dexter—live off their labor (Broe 91). The plot, too, suggests that Dexter, whose working-class parents lament her obsession with wealth, was infected by a virulent version of the American Dream: ripping off the wealthy in order to become just like them. During the film’s exciting conclusion we pass through the teeming streets of the Lower East Side as the police pursue murderer Willie Garzah (Ted de Corsia), yet the tenements are little more than a colorful backdrop. Hellinger’s self-congratulatory voice-overs notwithstanding, the finished film does not “lay New York open” but diverts its gaze, turning radical politics into a run-of-the-mill police procedural.
A more successful exposure of the proletariat’s plight appears in Dassin’s next film, Thieves’ Highway, adapted by A. I. Bezzerides from his novel, Thieves’ Market. Nick Garcos (Richard Conte) returns from military service to learn that his father (future blacklistee Morris Carnovsky) lost his legs when corrupt produce wholesaler Mike Figlia got him drunk and, Nick believes, wrecked his truck and took his money. Seeking restitution, Nick teams up with Ed Kinney (Millard Mitchell) to drive a shipment of Golden Delicious apples to San Francisco. Because this is the first crop of the season, Kinney assures him, it’s “like money in the bank.” For Kinney the apples are wealth incarnate; for Nick they are embodied aspiration. In short, the apples are fetishized commodities that represent, in Marxian terms, the entire system of production: hence we see Kinney try to cheat the growers who load his truck. Yet for Kinney—so poor that he can’t afford to fix his decrepit vehicle—their purpose is less to make him rich than to help him survive. And though he assures Nick that they’ll “make a killing,” it’s a risky venture, as Kinney must race two other drivers, Pete (Joseph Pevney) and Slob (Jack Oakie), to reach the market first.
Arriving before the others, Nick meets Figlia (played with panache by future “friendly” witness Lee J. Cobb), who sends the prostitute Rica (Valentina Cortesa) to occupy him while his minions slash Nick’s tires and thereby provide a pretext for Figlia to sell Nick’s load.17 Nevertheless, Nick charms Rica and negotiates shrewdly enough with Figlia to earn $3,900 for the apple shipment. Bursting with pride, he phones Polly, his hometown girlfriend, boasts that he “made a killing the first time out,” and asks her to marry him in San Francisco. But when he takes Rica out for a celebratory drink, Figlia’s thugs beat him up and steal his earnings. Meanwhile, Kinney’s prediction about making a “killing” comes true when the U-joint of his truck breaks while descending a hill, causing his death in a fiery crash. As the truck burns, the apples bounce down the hill, mutely mocking the trucker’s aborted dream. Pete and Slob, who witness the wreck, do reach the market, only to be rooked by Figlia. Worse, Pete agrees (to Slob’s disgust) to help Figlia scoop up Kinney’s dumped apples for fifty cents per box. No matter that the fruit represents their dead friend: the apples are now money, which has no smell. The fruit here symbolizes how, as Marx famously wrote, capitalism transforms human relations into “a relation between things” (Capital 1:321).18
Rica, too, represents the commodification of human beings via the “cash nexus” (Marx and Engels 475–76). But at least she is straightforward about her goals, declaring to Nick that she wants “money, lots of money.” Polly is no better: as soon as she learns that Nick has lost his wad, she curses him and departs. “The only difference between you and Polly,” Nick asserts, is that “she’s strictly an amateur.” Figlia, however, is no amateur: he now has both the apples and Nick’s hard-earned money. The personification of capitalist oppression disguised as free trade, Figlia, like one of Marx’s factory owners, transmutes apples into surplus value by exploiting the labor of those who produce and transport them.
In the film’s hokey conclusion Nick and Slob catch up to Figlia at a diner, where Nick beats him into submission and avenges his father. The police arrive and lecture Nick about letting them take care of people like Figlia. Added by producer Darryl Zanuck after Dassin had left the country to escape the blacklist, this scene violates the film’s tenor and theme (we already understand that Figlia’s fiefdom operates with the tacit approval of the authorities) but does not erase its broader implications.19 Thieves’ Highway could scarcely be more direct in equating capitalism and criminality: although honest dealers are mentioned, we don’t see any and instead witness the wealthy steal from the proletariat and force them to exploit each other. Like the cars discussed in chapter 5, the men’s trucks are potential engines of upward mobility (it’s not an accident that Kinney crashes while cresting a hill) on a permanently blocked road. Hence, even as the film celebrates Nick’s success in achieving his American dream through individual enterprise, it more forcefully underlines the obstacles to such attainment.
Class is also the theme of The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (directed by Milestone and scripted by Rossen), a film that, according to the MPAPAI, contained “sizeable doses of communist propaganda” (qtd. in Buhle and Wagner, Radical 377).20 Propaganda or not, the film dramatizes “how class oppression had hardened since the Depression” (Broe 64) via a me
lodramatic tale of a love triangle involving Barbara Stanwyck’s Martha, the niece of a wealthy factory owner; Walter O’Neil (Kirk Douglas), the weak son of a middle-class striver; and Sam Master-son (Van Heflin), a lower-class boy Martha once loved.21
As a child in 1928, Martha, after being caught trying to run away with Sam, bludgeons her snobbish aunt (who has just killed Martha’s cat) and causes her to fall down the stairs to her death.22 Although Walter had snitched on Martha and Sam for running away, he stays mum about the murder and, with his father’s help, worms his way into the Ivers family by keeping the secret. Their shared information perfectly fits Georg Simmel’s description of the secret as a form of “inner property”; it is at least as valuable as the tangible property that Martha inherits (331). But, as Simmel reminds us, secrets are also “surrounded by the possibility and temptation of betrayal” (333): though it connects Martha and Walter, it also, like the secret in No Man of Her Own, places a barrier between them. Hence, if the secret gives Walter power over Martha, it also ties him to her in perpetuity and makes him her minion—and gradually converts him into a drunk who can’t enjoy his success. The secret also granted Walter’s father the leverage to “see all his dreams come true”: using the threat of blackmail, he sent his son to college, married him to an heiress, and participated in the framing of a homeless man for the murder.