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The Arc of National Confidence and the Birth of Film Noir, 1929–1941

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 December 2008

PHILIP HANSON
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Abstract

Early in the Great Depression, Gerald W. Johnson remarked on the “fathomless pessimism” that had overtaken the American People: “The energy of the country has suffered a strange paralysis … We are in the doldrums, waiting not even hopefully for the wind which never comes.” Film developments of the decade were entwined with the ongoing economic crisis. This article offers an analysis of the extreme shifts in confidence in this period and argues for their relationship with the evolution of film noir, which had its roots in two film genres prominent in the period, the gangster and fallen-woman films, but which breaks with these genres, not after the onset of World War II, which has long been believed, but in the closing years of the 1930s.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of American Studies , Volume 42 , Issue 3: Special Issue on Film and Popular Culture , December 2008 , pp. 387 - 414
Copyright
Copyright © 2008 Cambridge University Press

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References

1 Malcolm Cowley, “A Farewell to the Thirties,” Harper's, Nov. 1939, 42.

2 Tyrus Miller, Late Modernism: Politics, Fiction, and the Arts between the Wars (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 8.

3 Frederic Jameson, “The Synoptic Chandler,” in Joan Copjec, ed., Shades of Noir (London: Verso, 1993), 23; also see James Naremore's discussion of film noir as a modernist art form in More than Night: Film Noir and Its Contexts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 40–95.

4 For studies of connections between art and social developments in Weimar Germany, see Peter Gay, Weimar Culture: The Insider as Outside (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001); Walter Laquer, Weimar: A Cultural History (New York: Perigree, 1980); Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974); Lotte H. Eisner, The Haunted Screen (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973); Bruce Murray, Film and the German Left in the Weimar Republic: From Caligari to Kuhle Wampe (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990).

5 Harris Gaylord Warren, Herbert Hoover and the Great Depression (New York: Oxford University Press, 1959), 53.

6 Arthur Schlesinger Jr., The Crisis of the Old Order, 1919–1933 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957), 162.

7 Paul Johnson, A History of the American People (New York: Harper, 1999), 744.

8 Quoted in William Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 1932–1940 (New York: Harper & Row, 1963), 26.

9 Schlesinger, 171.

10 Leuchtenburg, 28.

11 Schlesinger, 174, 176.

12 “An Angry Rancher's Revolutionary Ideas,” Hearings before a Subcommittee of the Committee on Labor, House of Representatives, in David A. Shannon, ed., The Great Depression (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1960), 122.

13 Schlesinger, 205.

14 Leuchtenburg, 26, 27.

15 Schlesinger, 57.

16 Leuchtenburg, 20.

17 Frederick Lewis Allen, Since Yesterday, 1929–1939 (New York: Bantam, 1965; first published 1940), 58.

18 John Dos Passos, 1919 (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1932), 375

19 Leuchtenburg, 218.

20 David Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 387.

21 Robert McElvaine, The Great Depression: America, 1929–1941 (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1993), 104, 106.

22 Leuchtenburg, 39.

23 Allen, 178.

24 On the fallen-woman genre see Lea Jacobs, The Wages of Sin: Censorship and the Fallen Woman Film, 1928–1941 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991); for representative studies of the gangster genre see Jonathan Munby, Public Enemies, Public Heroes: Screening the Gangster from Little Caesar to Touch of Evil (University of Chicago Press, 1999); John McCarty, Hollywood Gangland: The Movies' Love Affair with the Mob (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993).

25 Johnson, A History of the American People, 736, 744.

26 Tino Balio, Grand Design: Hollywood as a Modern Business Enterprise, 1930–1939 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 62.

27 Munby, 55.

28 Quoted in Arthur Schlesinger Jr., “When the Movies Really Counted,” Show, April 1963, rpr. in Gerald Mast, ed., The Movies in Our Midst: Documents in the Cultural History of Film in America (University of Chicago Press, 1982), 423.

29 Raymond Durgnat, “Paint it Black: The Family Tree of Film Noir”; and Robert Porfirio, “No Way Out: Existential Motifs in Film Noir,” both reprinted in Alain Silver and James Ursini, eds., Film Noir Reader (New York: Proscenium Publishers, 1996), 38, 77–93.

30 Thomas Schatz, The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era (New York: Pantheon, 1988), 160.

31 Alan Brinkley, The End of Reform: New Deal Liberalism in Recession and War (New York: Vintage, 1996), 16.

32 Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 184–88.

33 Dewey W. Grantham, The Life and Death of the Solid South (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1988), 26–58.

34 Brinkley, 141–42.

35 Frederick Lewis Allen, The Big Change: America Transforms Itself, 1900–1950 (New York: Perennial, 1969; first published 1952), 140.

36 Leucthenberg, 217–19.

37 Kennedy, Freedom from Fear, 462–63.

38 Allen, The Big Change, 143–4.

39 See Lloyd Shearer, “Crime Pays on the Screen,” New York Times Magazine, 5 Aug. 1945, rpr. in Alain Silver and James Ursini, eds., Film Noir Reader 2 (New York: Limelight, 2003), 13.

40 Miller, Late Modernism, 27, 42.

41 Phil Hardy, “Crime Movies,” in Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, ed., The Oxford History of World Cinema (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 306.

42 Jacobs, The Wages of Sin, 147, 133–49.

43 Molly Haskell, From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies (New York: Penguin, 1974), 151.

44 Mira Komarovsky, The Unemployed Man and His Family: The Effect of Unemployment upon the Status of the Man in Fifty-Nine Families (Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press, 2004; first published 1940), 23.

45 Susan Ware, Beyond Suffrage: Women in the New Deal (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981).

46 Owen Young, “New Deal Weighed,” Time, 3 July 1933, 16.

47 Kennedy, Freedom from Fear, 337.

48 Representative studies of women in film noir include Elizabeth Cowie, “Film Noir and Women,” in Copjec, Shades of Noir, 121–65; James Maxfield, The Fatal Woman: Sources of Male Anxiety in Film Noir (Cranbury, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996); Frank Krutnik, In a Lonely Street: Film Noir, Genre, Masculinity (London: Routledge, 1991); Ann Kaplan, ed., Women in Film Noir (London: British Film Institute, 1978); Jurca, Catherine, “Mildred Pierce, Warner Bros., and the Corporate Family,” Representations, 77 (Winter 2002), 30–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

49 Daphne Du Maurier, Rebecca (New York: Perennial, 2001; first published 1938), 130.

50 Quoted in Kennedy, 351.

51 Brinkley, The End of Reform, 20.

52 Allen, Since Yesterday, 19, 58, 246.

53 Ibid., 127.

54 This term belongs to Neal Gabler. See his An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood (New York: Doubleday, 1988); and Norman Zierold, The Moguls: Hollywood's Merchants of Myth (Los Angeles: Silman-James Press, 1969).

55 Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton, A Panorama of American Film Noir, 1941–1953, trans. Paul Hammond (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2002; first published 1955), 13.

56 Miller, Late Modernism, 11–12, original italics.

57 For representative discussions of the city in film noir see Naremore, More than Night, 9, 35–6, 44–5; Foster Hirsch, The Dark Side of the Screen: Film Noir (New York: Da Capo, 2001), 1–22; David Reid and Jayne L. Walker, “Strange Pursuit: Cornell Woolrich and the Abandoned City of the Forties,” in Copjec, 57–96.

58 Brain Truster Raymond Moley ridiculed Brandeis for averting his eyes from urban America while hoping “America could once more become a nation of small proprietors, of corner grocers and smithies under spreading chestnut trees.” Raymond, After Seven Years (New York: Harper, 1939), 24. Eliot believed urbanization created people “detached from tradition, alienated from religion and susceptible to mass suggestion: in other words, a mob.” T. S. Eliot, “The Idea of a Christian Society,” in idem, Christianity and Culture (New York: Harcourt, 1967; first published 1939), 23; Roosevelt “always did and always would think people better off in the country and would regard the cities as rather hopeless.” Leuchtenburg, Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, 136.

59 Donald L. Miller, City of the Century: The Epic of Chicago and the Making of America (New York: Touchstone, 1996), 277; Erin Burns, James Sanders, and Lisa Ades, New York: An Illustrated History (New York: Knopf, 2003), 237.