Fear and Noir, Near and Far

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The more one studies World War 2, the more one realizes it was a much bigger deal than most people let on.

Yes, I'm joking. But you need an opening sentence that's a grabber!

World War 2 ended on Sept. 2, 1945, with the surrender of the Empire Of Japan. Japan would remain an empire for only two more years following its surrender. The Constitution of 1947, written primarily by Americans, would dispense with the Meiji Constitution, in place since 1890. America was also very busy in Europe, rebuilding the western half of the continent through The Marshall Plan, a massive investment of international aid that helped rebuild Western Europe. This also had the benefit of insuring American influence over the region for the foreseeable future. In 1945, the year World War 2 ended, America stood astride the world, a cultural and economic colossus.

In terms of its land, its cities, its infrastructure, America was largely untouched by the war, with the notable exception of Pearl Harbor of course. But the 48 contiguous states had it easy, isolated by vast oceans on the east and west and staunch allies to the north and south, the American continent was in a global sweet spot.

Roughly, 420,000 Americans were killed in the war, fewer than the casualties of Germany and Japan, and far fewer than the Russia’s twenty to twenty-seven million (!!) The broad view of history was that, at the end of World War Two, Americans dove headlong into making the baby boom and wrapping themselves in the warm and cozy conformity of the 1950’s. There, everyone lived in a Richie Cunningham wonderland until a shifty miscreant named Lee Harvey Oswald popped the balloon one ugly day in Dallas. Of course, the truth is far more complex.

To begin with, the men and women who fought in World War 2 came of age during the Great Depression. Buffeted by the horrors of childhoods spent in the shadow of crippling poverty and economic upheaval, they then dove headlong into a global military hellscape. Those lucky enough to survive returned traumatized, brimming with images of the humanity’s insatiable lust for self-inflicted atrocity.

And what to do with all these special thoughts and feelings? “Shut up about it,” was the conventional wisdom. “Have another drink, pal." PTSD hadn’t been identified yet. You were either “messed up from the war” or, if it was really bad, “shell-shocked.” Judging from the veterans I was around as a kid, most of them were content to smoke three or four packs of cigarettes a day and drink themselves ridiculous on the weekends. Keep them woes buried deep!

Sound fun?

American culture in the years after World War 2 was a psycho-social pressure cooker, and the steam started whistling out almost immediately. One way American culture processed its unease and disillusionment was to project it onto movie screens. And thus began the Golden Age of Noir.

In his brilliant essay Notes On Film Noir, writer and director Paul Shrader cites four leading factors that contributed to birth of noir.

1. War and Postwar Disillusionment – To quote Shrader directly, “A delayed reaction to the thirties. All through the Depression movies were needed to keep people’s spirits up, and for the most part, they did. The crime films of this period were Horatio Algerish and socially conscious. Toward the end of the thirties, a darker crime film began to appear…. Were it not for the war, film noir would have been at full steam by the early forties.”

2. Postwar Realism – After suffering through so much, Americans wanted a more realistic, harsher worldview on the movie screen. The films of the thirties were frothy, gaudy, highbrow fantasies set in drawing rooms, luxury liners and art deco wonderlands. These would give way to grimy crime dramas set in dark streets and seedy apartments. In the early 1950’s, after Eisenhower was elected, films would inch back towards a more clean-cut, idealized version of American culture. This pendulum swing would repeat itself twenty years later, when the country’s post-Vietnam hangover would give birth to the cynical, downbeat anti-hero cinema of the 1970’s, only to give way later to Ronald Reagan’s bright and shiny 1980’s. As Double Indemnity led to How To Marry A Millionaire, so too did Night Moves lead to Red Dawn.

3. German Expatriates – America benefitted greatly from the German Brain Drain as artists, craftsmen and technicians of conscience fled Germany during Hitler’s rise. People like Fritz lang, Billy Wilder, Karl Freund, Max Steiner and Otto Preminger. The skilled architects and practitioners of the German Expressionist movement in the 1920’s and 30’s were now plying their trade in Hollywood, and American cinema was all the better for it.

4. The Hard-Boiled Tradition – Many of the great noirs of the 1940’s were based on novels written in 1930’s. Authors like Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain and Dashell Hammett laid the literary groundwork for a seismic shift in crime fiction, on paper and on screen. Heroes abandoned their higher aspirations and became small time and seedy. There’s nothing glamorous about an insurance salesmen named Walter Neff. The down on his luck loser looking for one big score to set things right, the struggling private detective looking for redemption and a paycheck, all these characters became ubiquitous in the 1940’s. Along with, of course, the femme fatale, a new archetype brought about by yet another change in the culture.

And so, to Schrader’s list I would add a fifth factor, The Changing Role Of Women. Over 16 million American men served in the armed forces during World War 2. While they were away, their wives and sisters were called upon to stand in for them in the workplace. Women left home and became factory workers, civil servants, management. And they did, of course. When the war was over, these same women were expected to shrug, smile and get back in the kitchen. Empowerment, however, is not something people surrender without a fight, so they stayed. What’s worse, many assumed they would be welcomed to stay! The soldiers returning home from battle found a very different world than the one they left behind, one where the role of women had significantly changed.

This mistrust and unease gave birth to the femme fatale. So many of the great film noirs center around a hapless male lead being brought down by a conniving, albeit beautiful woman. Let’s look at the afore-mentioned Walter Neff. Mr. Neff may have a yawning chasm where his moral center ought to be , but its sultry Phyllis Dietrichson who lures him to throw himself down into his own abyss. Out Of The Past’s Jeff Bailey would have been fine had he never run into that damned Kathie Moffat, and the list goes on.

I am no film noir expert, and I wouldn’t pretend to be, but I’d like to take a couple articles and break down the noirest of the noirs. The nittiest, grittiest, starkly made, darkly played, Citizen Kane of the American underbelly, Edgar Ulmer’s Detour.

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Read more about Paul Shrader's Note On Noir