The Grim Timeliness of “Noir and the Blacklist”
A new Criterion series of McCarthy-era noir films is a timely collection for an era of rising government repression — though you wouldn’t know it from Criterion’s oddly subdued promotion.
Anti-communist protesters demonstrate outside the Fox Wilshire Theatre in Beverly Hills, California, in December 1960. (American Stock Archive / Archive Photos / Getty Images)
The riveting new Criterion Channel film series “Noir and the Blacklist” is distressingly timely. It’s a sampling of film noir made by Hollywood directors, writers, and actors who were targeted as communists or broadly left-wing “subversives” by their own government in the post–World War II era by a punitive right-wing body called the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC).
The typically bleak noirs showcased here span a range of terrifying developments for leftists working in the film industry during and after World War II. Two offer harsh critiques of fascism when it was on the rise in 1930s Europe, clearly as a form of American wartime propaganda: Fritz Lang’s Hangmen Also Die! (1943) and Andre De Toth’s None Shall Escape (1944). Both were made by directors who had actually fled the Nazis to establish careers in Hollywood. Pervasive racism and antisemitism in the United States are examined in Edward Dmytryk’s Crossfire (1947), Clarence Brown’s Intruder in the Dust (1949), and Joseph Losey’s The Lawless (1950). Empty and twisted machismo is excoriated in Dmytryk’s Crossfire, Cy Endfield’s Try and Get Me! (1950), and Joseph Losey’s The Big Night (1951). And America’s sick obsession with guns is portrayed in electrifying ways in Joseph H. Lewis’s Gun Crazy (1949).
Almost all the films find ways to expose the cruel perversities of capitalism and the entrenched class war waged against the working poor that drives people toward crime and violence while dividing them by class and race in America. The most forceful of the series films to do so are Jules Dassin’s Brute Force (1947) and Thieves Highway (1949), Endfield’s Try and Get Me!, John Berry’s He Ran All the Way (1950), and Robert Wise’s Odds Against Tomorrow (1959). This anti-capitalist exposé was a conscious project on the part of the many of the leftist writers and directors caught up in the blacklist.
As writer-director Abraham Polonsky (Force of Evil, Body and Soul) — an unrepentant Marxist and one of the Hollywood Ten, who were among HUAC’s first targets — expressed it, “All films about crime are about capitalism because capitalism is about crime. I mean morally speaking. At least that’s what I used to think. Now I’m convinced.”
HUAC quickly targeted as “un-American” any such critical filmmaking, and those who made film noir — a rapidly forming genre not yet known by the French term, so referred to as “crime melodramas” and “tough films” in the United States — suffered the consequences of representing what was manifestly happening in their own time.
Several of the featured directors in this series, including Dassin, Losey, Endfield, and Dmytryk, finding themselves suddenly unemployed in the American film industry, “self-deported” (in the parlance of our time) to England and France to seek work there. Blacklisted writers such as Dalton Trumbo (Gun Crazy, He Ran All the Way) watched their careers wither or kept working by adopting fake names or “beard” writers willing to front for them by taking screen credit for their work.
A few films made in exile in England are included in the series: Dmytryk’s Obsession (1949), Losey’s Time Without Pity (1957), and Endfield’s Hell Drivers (1957). Dassin’s brilliant and unsparing noir Night and the City (1951) is unfortunately not included — it was the last film the director had to make to fulfill his contract at 20th Century Fox, and studio head Darryl Zanuck, knowing prominent leftist Dassin was sure to be blacklisted, rushed him to England, along with the film’s American stars Richard Widmark and Gene Tierney, in order to make the film where there would be no risk of interference by the American government.
Dassin carved out a successful film career post-blacklist, mainly in France and Greece, with Rififi (1955) and Never on Sunday (1960) as his most acclaimed hits. Joseph Losey, working in England, also triumphed with The Servant (1960), the film that heralded a major director the American film industry had thrown away. It’s ironic to consider that film noir in America was catalyzed to a significant extent by the tremendous European talent arriving in Hollywood in the 1930s and early ’40s as refugees from the Nazis. Just the directors alone include Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder, Robert Siodmak, and Max Ophüls, all noted noir filmmakers.
By the late 1940s and ’50s, America was doing its own talent purge that benefitted European cinemas. But not everyone could gain a solid foothold in other countries, and after a period in exile, both Dmytryk and Endfield returned to America and HUAC to “name names,” identifying Communist Party members or social progressive “fellow travelers” they knew in the American film industry.
It was a notorious test of national loyalty demanded by HUAC in order to clear oneself. Both directors were allowed to make films in Hollywood again, but Dmytryk especially, a former member of the Hollywood Ten, suffered from a tainted reputation as a snitch and a sellout for the rest of his life, second in notoriety only to director Elia Kazan.
I’ve already made clear much more of the crucial context for this film series than is provided in the Criterion Channel’s brief description of it. This is included in its short “teaser trailer,” a nicely done montage of clips from the various films with the following on-screen commentary accompanying them:
Starting in 1947, artists considered “un-American” were purged from Hollywood. Some were convicted and jailed. Others fled abroad. Most could no longer work under their own names. In film noir, they found a genre to expose the dark side of the country that abandoned them.
Not to be ungrateful about any of the Criterion Channel’s typically stellar offerings, but it’s odd to find this vague framing of the film series, written in passive voice, that doesn’t identify who was doing the purging or who was getting purged. If ever a series required a short documentary featuring an interview with a noted scholar describing what issues are at stake in these films — and such documentaries are typical Criterion Channel fare — “Noir and the Blacklist” is that series.
Obviously, viewers need to know that those accused of being “un-American” were, of course, political leftists, and it was right-wing politicians and authority figures, specifically engaged in a “red witch hunt” for communists, socialists, and progressive liberal Democrats, trying to drive them out of their professions and American society in general.
This series is offered at a time when it’s grimly topical, when leftists are once again threatened with dire consequences for speaking out about what’s happening in America — such as the illegal abduction and/or deportation of immigrants, the US government’s heinous financial and military support for Israel as it commits genocide in Gaza, and the dismantling of the threadbare social safety net in this country. It’s hardly paranoia that makes one wonder why the description of this film series is so brief and nebulous.
Since the era of McCarthyism and the Hollywood blacklist, there’s arguably never been a more perilous time to be a leftist than right now in the United States. So it’s really worth your while to watch these films, which provide a stark tutorial about what’s happened in America in the past that is rearing its ugly head again now.
Targeted by HUAC
All the films are valuable in terms of content and their significance in the appalling political context of the time. Dmytryk’s Crossfire, featuring breakout performances by Robert Ryan and Gloria Grahame, is one of the many noirs that surged out in 1947, just as HUAC ramped up its investigations, generally portraying American society in terms of dark, violent, labyrinthian urban spaces where people wander, disoriented, seeking refuge anywhere they can find it. It’s also a landmark in American film history for its subject matter, the antisemitic murder of a Jewish man by a neurotic bigot in uniform, with Ryan giving an unsparing performance as the sneering psycho whose hatred is all dressed up in jingoistic patriotism and defense of American values.
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Just out of the marines himself, Ryan was a dedicated political progressive who campaigned for the role, claiming, “Nobody knows that son of a bitch better than I do.” He’d served in the same outfit as the author of the book the film is based on, Richard Brooks’s The Brick Foxhole. Brooks was a marine representing the problems and open prejudices of his fellow marines stationed at Camp Pendleton in California during the war. The book is centered on the homophobic murder of a gay man, which was impossible to get by the censors at that time.
And the workings of the blacklist are notable in this case, because Crossfire was a B movie sleeper hit that drew astonishingly good reviews and Academy Award nominations for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay by John Paxton, Best Supporting Actor (Ryan), and Best Supporting Actress (Grahame). However, by the time of the Oscars ceremony, the shine was off Crossfire. It had been targeted by HUAC as one of the “un-American” films churned out by an industry supposedly riddled with communist subversion. Producer Adrian Scott and director Dmytryk had both been blacklisted by then. How the prominent leftist Robert Ryan escaped a similar fate, even he was never sure.
It was a bitter irony that the other landmark film dealing with antisemitism that year was a shinier, posher, more prestigious A-budget film, Elia Kazan’s Gentlemen’s Agreement, starring Gregory Peck, Dorothy McGuire, Celeste Holm, and John Garfield. It was up for many of the same awards and won them. Crossfire was snubbed across the board.
But soon enough, Kazan and Garfield would be summoned by HUAC too.
Crossfire and Gun Crazy are both well-known noirs, but there are a few relatively unsung works of art in this series that you should see. Dassin’s Brute Force, for example, is a rightly admired, beautifully shot, tightly wound prison film that makes a desperate failed breakout attempt into an existential study of systematized human cruelty and people’s hopeless entrapment within it.
Endfield’s Try and Get Me!, originally titled The Sound of Fury, is a harrowing account of the events leading up to a lynching. Based on an actual lynching that took place in San Jose, California, in 1933 that also inspired Fritz Lang’s first American film, the proto-noir Fury (1936), Try and Get Me! is about an unemployed working-class man struggling to support his family. At a desperate point, he meets a flashy, swaggering criminal who persuades him to participate in a series of small-time robberies. These escalate to a bigger crime for one final financial windfall, the kidnapping for ransom of a rich man’s son that ends in murder.
Playing the lead, Frank Lovejoy specialized in decent working-class everyman parts and would demonstrate how poignant it is when such a man crumbles under inhuman pressure in this and another early-’50s noir, Ida Lupino’s The Hitch-Hiker (1952). Playing the charismatic hood, Lloyd Bridges (father of actors Jeff and Beau Bridges) gave a career-best performance as the macho braggart. This was right before Bridges was blacklisted, largely for having been a founding member of the Actor’s Laboratory Theater, which was a West Coast continuation of the former Group Theater; both were considered hotbeds of communist activity. (Jules Dassin was also a founding member.) It ruined the momentum of Bridges’s film career, but he went back to HUAC as a “cooperative witness” and was then allowed to return to acting in television.
The complete and gruesome scene of the lynching couldn’t be represented in the film due to censorship. In real life, a San Jose mob of thousands dragged the men from their jail cells, beat them furiously, and hanged them from trees in the local park — all of it documented live by reporters, photographers, and newsreel filmmakers, with the express approval of California’s governor. The scenes in Try and Get Me! representing only the events leading up to the lynching, to the point of the mob violently hauling the two screaming and pleading men out of their cells, are the stuff of nightmares.
Perhaps the most obscure of these great films is He Ran All the Way (1951), based on a 1947 novel of the same name by Sam Ross but a vehicle for stage and film star John Garfield. Hugo Butler, later blacklisted, was credited as the main screenwriter, though he was also fronting for Dalton Trumbo, who wrote the original script. It’s a haunting tale of impoverished small-time hood Nick Robey (Garfield), arm-twisted into a payroll robbery by a slicker partner in crime who rats him out after the robbery goes wrong and Robey has killed a security guard. Hiding out from the cops at a public pool, Nick meets a vulnerable working-class young woman (Shelley Winters) and uses her obvious crush on him to take her family hostage so he has a place to hole up until the heat is off.
It’s an intense thriller in which everyone’s desperation, both economic and emotional, keeps rising to an unbearable point, where violence and tragic death is bound to be the result. Hauntingly shot by James Wong Howe and featuring a roiling emotional Franz Waxman score, He Ran All the Way was well reviewed but got lost in the ongoing drama of Garfield’s blacklisting.
By far the biggest star who’d ever been targeted by HUAC, Garfield was practically the poster boy for blacklistees. He checked so many of the boxes that typified those vulnerable to right-wing harassment — Jewish children of urban immigrants, active in left-wing theater groups like the Orson Welles’s Mercury Theater, the Group Theater, or the Actors’ Laboratory Theater, and involved in leftist causes, whether as a member of communist or socialist parties or as a progressive liberal Democrat.
Never very political beyond donating his money generously, Garfield claimed to be a “Roosevelt Democrat,” but he was surrounded by communists. His wife Robbe was for several years a member of the communist party and remained a fierce left-wing organizer. Among his best friends from the Group Theater days was Clifford Odets — later blacklisted — who wrote the incendiary plays Waiting for Lefty and Awake and Sing! that put the Group Theater on the map.
This made it an absurdity when Garfield claimed in his testimony before HUAC that he knew no communists in the film industry, when he probably knew every communist in the film industry. According to the 2003 biography by Robert Nott, He Ran All the Way: The Life of John Garfield, Robbe Garfield had held communist party meetings in their home. But Garfield’s absolute determination was to name no names while somehow saving his own film career — a virtual impossibility.
Soon it became clear that HUAC would not accept Garfield’s claims and intended to pursue perjury charges against him. Already finding himself unemployable going forward, Garfield was driven to increasingly desperate acts, such as writing articles for major publications denouncing communism. This ploy had worked for other stars trying to dodge investigations by HUAC, such as Humphrey Bogart. But Robbe Garfield was incensed at what she regarded as her husband’s craven attempts to placate the blacklisters, which broke up their long marriage.
All of this was going on behind the scenes of He Ran All the Way. According to the director John Berry, who also got blacklisted after the film came out, the movie was all about the feeling of doom, and “that was no coincidence.” At age thirty-nine, Garfield died of a stress-induced heart attack in May 1952, a month before the movie premiered.
The “Noir and the Blacklist” series could be two or three times as extensive as it is and still not cover its subject, because every film noir made in Hollywood in the main period when the genre was thriving, from roughly 1945 to 1960, was produced in circumstances of appalling political strife and persecution. A good example of such a film that isn’t included in the series is Robert Aldrich’s The Big Knife (1955), a harrowing noir long recognized as being loosely based on John Garfield’s tormented life as an American film star.
What’s not generally known is that the source material for the film is the 1949 stage play which Garfield cowrote, uncredited, with his friend Clifford Odets. By that point, Odets was in a career tailspin and suffering from severe writer’s block. Garfield, ever loyal to his friends, dedicated himself to helping Odets personally and professionally.
Garfield also starred in the play, after having imbued it with aspects of his own life, including the character of a principled wife demanding more from him than he could deliver. Garfield even foretold an early death for his character, driven to the edge by his own frailties and the brutally corrupt, hypercapitalist nature of the movie business. The film makes clear that Garfield knew his own infatuation with being a Hollywood star — no matter how he felt it had demeaned his talent, no matter how his wife argued that it would mean his ultimate destruction — would bring him down in the end.
Let theater critic Brooks Atkinson offer the final words on what he regarded as the failure of the play The Big Knife as a “moral crusade” taking on Hollywood but also implying that Hollywood stood for America:
The characters in “The Big Knife” are not worth so much of Mr. Odets’ indignation on so cosmic a plain. As in a soundly motivated melodrama, they get what they deserve in the last act. There is no point in crying doom for the entire nation.
By 1949, there was every point in crying doom for the entire nation. Such a clueless reaction from the top theater critic in America shows what talented and perceptive leftists were up against then — and points forward to what we’re up against now.