10.2 Social Themes: Law & Order
This first of the so-called “docudramas” to be shot entirely on location, The House on 92nd Street
would influence a number of contemporary productions, including The Naked City.
Andrew Spicer explores themes and narrative strategies of film noir in his book, Film Noir. The following excerpt highlights Pickup on South Street's significance and position.
If social themes came to dominate later noirs, they were also present in early examples. It is possible to identify both right and left-wing responses to an 'age of anxiety:' the upheavals of the Second World War and the transition from service to civilian life. As discussed in Chapter 1, this mutated into the threat of the Atomic Bomb and the Cold War's preoccupation with the Communist menace abroad and its subversion of the 'American way of life' at home.
(1) Law and Order in the conservative version, the overriding theme is the enforcement of law and order where government agents or policemen root out and destroy 'the enemy.' The semi-documentaries were, as has been noted, usually informed by right-wing ideology that celebrated the vigilance, hard work and courage of American institutions. The early examples - The House on 92nd Street (1945) and Rue Madeleine (1946) - are still preoccupied with fascism; but, as Nazis operate like gangsters, this shifts seamlessly into a concern with crime lords. Joseph H. Lewis' The Undercover Man (1949) was a re-run of the Capone indictment. Frank Warren (Glenn Ford) is the tireless Internal Revenue agent who uncovers a web of intimidation, murder, fraud and tax evasion organized by the shadowy 'big fellow.' He finally persuades a judge that the assembled jurors have been suborned and, granted a fresh jury, is able to punish those responsible for the graft and corruption that have infected every level of society.
Law and order films of the 1950s are obsessed with corporate crime, with takeovers by ever more powerful and well-organized syndicates. The Racket (1951), set in an anonymous midwestern city, looked back to the prohibition era (an earlier version had been released in 1928), but its struggle between honest cop Captain McQuigg (Robert Mitchum) and mobster Scanlon (Robert Ryan) is framed within an overarching corruption which reaches the highest levels of government: it is clearly hinted that the real crime lord is the state governor. Both Scanlon and McQuigg are old-fashioned individualists in an age of dishonest corporatism.
The Enforcer (UK Title Murder Inc., 1951) was a more paranoid film in which tireless DA Martin Ferguson (Humphrey Bogart) battles a murder syndicate run by Mendoza (Everett Sloane) which is both ruthlessly efficient and the sinister creation of a deranged 'evil genius.' The opening scene, in which the key witness Rico is so frightened, even in the confines of the police station, that he throws himself from a window, captures the intensity of the paranoia that is sustained throughout in what is a peculiarly dark and claustrophobic film even by noir's standards. This visual style, as noted in the previous chapter, often undercuts the right-wing ideology as a paranoia and fear it evokes are often much more memorable than the efforts of the law enforcers.
YouTube of
The Enforcer (1951) Humphrey Bogart -
Link Here
The early 1950s generated a sub-cycle of noirs that was explicit about the Communist threat. Walk East on Beacon (1952) was Louis de Rochemont's anti-Communist equivalent to The House on 92nd Street. I Was a Communist for the F.B.I. (1951), in which an ordinary citizen (Frank Lovejoy) is recruited to infiltrate the Communist Party and The Thief (1952), a film entirely without dialogue, where Dr. Allan Fields (Ray Milland) plays an Atomic Energy Commission scientist who is selling secrets but finally gives himself up, show different aspects of the Communist threat together with its defeat by the vigor of American democracy.
Suddenly (1954) is a deeply paranoid film where even in a tiny, sleepy town like Suddenly, the President's life is vulnerable. John Baron (Frank Sinatra), a disaffected veteran who found his true identity in the war because he was good at 'chopping,' killing repeatedly and with relish,
now makes his livelihood as an assassin. He never discloses who his paymasters are, but the inference is obvious.
YouTube of The Thief (1952) - Almost Caught - scene.
Link Here
YouTube of Suddenly (1954) - Trailer - Frank Sinatra, Sterling Hayden, James Gleason
Link Here
Samuel Fuller's Pickup on South Street (1953) is more complex because its right-wing premise is complicated by Fuller's sympathies with the 'low life' protagonists: the aging tie-seller Moe (Thelma Ritter) who supplements her meagre living by selling information; Candy (Jean Peters), the fundamentally decent 'good-time girl;' and the central figure, pickpocket Skip McCoy (Richard Widmark), who inadvertently discovers a secret microfilm during one of his routine 'dips.' The three form a strange, shifting alliance which ultimately brings down the Communist spy ring, in which each discovers a basic patriotism even if, as Skip avers, they do not care to have the flag waved in their faces. It is Moe's death and her subsequent funeral that are the film's most poignant moments. The latter is photographed in a stationary long shot, which gives the scene a quiet dignity after the violence of her killing. These aspects shift attention away from the defeat of Communism towards sympathy for the detritus of the modern city, the outcasts from the American dream, a concern which is at the heart of left-wing films.
- Andrew Spicer, Film Noir pgs. 69-70
NOTE: (2) Corruption and Outsiders excerpt will be included in the next module highlighting Touch of Evil (1958)
Comments
Post a Comment