rather Uncle Tomish performances in Lifeboat (1944) and Body and Soul (1947), was never allowed to appear in a film version of his greatest stage role, as Bigger Thomas in Orson Welles's 1940 production of Native Son. 17 Welles, in fact, was the one white director in the period who might have made racial blackness more consistently and disturbingly present for white audiences. His incomplete documentary, It's All True (1942), was abandoned by RKO largely because it paid too much attention to the black population in Brazil. At about the same time, he wanted to produce a film based on Native Son, but the project was much too controversial for the studios. For similar reasons, he was forced to put aside his fascinating adaptation of Heart of Darknesswhich, had it been produced in 1940, would probably be regarded today as the first example of American film noir.
As we have seen, Conrad's novella was already a kind of roman noir, and it served as an inspiration for Graham Greene's thrillers, especially The Third Man. Welles's screen version would have updated the African materials in the original text, placing the opening narration against the background of a sound montage and a series of dissolves that took the viewer through contemporary Manhattan at night, ending with a Harlem jazz club. When the action moved to the Congo, the exploitation and murder of the black population would have been carried out by modern-day fascists. 'This shouldn't surprise you,' one of them says. 'You've seen this kind of thing on city streets.'19 RKO executive George Schaefer wrote to Welles that the script '[lost] something'' because of these references to contemporary politics, but Welles's proposed method of shooting the film was equally troubling. He intended to use an expensive, mobile camera equipped with a gyroscope, and he organized his technically detailed, camera-specific screenplay in terms of long takes representing Marlow's point of view.21 Where the politics of spectatorship were concerned, the technique was especially controversial, because it so often brought the viewer and Marlow into face-to-face contact with black characters.
To fully appreciate what Welles's screenplay achieves, we need to understand that he did not plan to make a mere recording of what the narrator sees, as in Robert Montgomery's unintentionally comic Lady in the Lake (1947), or as in the opening sequences of Delmer Daves's Dark Passage (1947). The camera he describes is impressionistic and subjective in a more complete sense, often showing us what Marlow thinks or feels. Like Conrad's prose, it is capable of shifting its focalization within a single take, moving from literal point-of-view shots to poetic omniscienceas when it suddenly tracks backward out of the manager's office in the Congo Station, tilts down to look at a sick man on the floor, passes through the front entrance, cranes over the roof to show the jungle beyond, and then tilts up to a starry sky. Ultimately, it creates a kind of white dream or hallucination about blackness, and one of the many reasons why it might have been effective on the screen (contrary to what most people have said) is that, unlike Chandler's Marlowe in Lady in the Lake, Conrad's Marlow is a relatively passive and highly imaginative witness. Welles never treats the camera as an action hero who is periodically socked in the jaw by a gangster or kissed by a gorgeous woman; instead, he gives us an eerie narrative presence who stands by and watches, occasionally being confronted by grotesque sights and sounds. His script describes a bewildering variety of characters who bob in and out of the frame, and it is filled with precise instructions for a delirious, overlapping dialogue that helps to convey Marlow's mounting confusion and disorientation. The uncanny effect would have been enhanced by a sophisticated, expressionistic use of process screens, showing bizarre images of the journey downriver toward the Central Station. On a more immediate level, however, the camera would have administered mild shocks in the form of characters who sometimes look back at the lens, arresting Marlow's attention and making both him and the ordinary white viewer feel slightly uncomfortable or self-aware. These characters would have included not only the dictator, Kurtz, and his millions, but also the Africans themselves. Soon after Marlow's arrival at the Outer
Station, for example, the script tells us that he sees a 'big, ridiculous hole in the face of [a] mud bank. In it, frying in the sun, are about thirty-five dying savages and a lot of broken drain pipes. Into some of these pipes the natives have crawled, the better to expire. . . . As Marlow looks down, CAMERA PANS DOWN for a moment, registering a MED. CLOSEUP of a negro face, the eyes staring up at the lens. The CAMERA PANS UP AND AWAY.'
According to Frank Brady, Welles planned to hire three thousand 'very black' extras, and he resisted all of RKO's suggestions that he save time and expense by putting greasepainted figures in the distant background. Two of the black characters would have been especially significant: a solitary, 'half-breed' employee of the European ivory traders (scheduled to be played by Jack Carter, the star of Welles's Harlem stage production of Macbeth), and an extremely dark-skinned woman who is Kurtz's lover at the Central Station. The half-breed is described as 'an expatriate, tragic exile who can't remember the sound of his own language,' and he is repeatedly given the opportunity to look Marlow in the eye. The dark woman is seen only once, near the end, when she stands on the bank of the river, looking toward Marlow and stretching out her arms in grief. Here and elsewhere, relatively marginalized black people provide important dramatic momentsas when one of them looks at the camera and makes the famous announcement, 'Mister Kurtz, he dead.'
All of the black characters in Welles's film are racial stereotypes, and the script as a whole never escapes from the ideological contradictions at the heart of Conrad's story. As Patrick Brantlinger observes, the original novella 'offers a powerful critique of at least certain manifestations of imperialism and racism, at the same time that it presents that critique in ways that can only be characterized as imperialist and racist.' 22 Where the film is concerned, Welles's liberalism is frequently undercut by his use of primitivist and racist fantasies. Notice, too, that his camera would have represented a mixture of three exclusively white subjectivities: an 'average' male in the audience; the fictional Marlow; and Welles himself, who not only plays Marlow but also, in the manner of Citizen Kane, fills the story with autobiographical details. Even so, Heart of Darkness would have been unique, providing the only occasion in the history of classic Hollywood when the white gaze was troubled by a returning black gaze and the imaginary spectator was made sharply conscious of racial difference.
By comparison, the ordinary run of films noirs in the 1940s made black people almost invisible, like the briefly glimpsed figures who carry Walter Neff's bags or wash his car in Double Indemnity. Close-ups of these figures were especially rare, except in brief scenes involving jazz in such pictures as Out of the Past, D. O.A., and In a Lonely Place. There were, however, occasional attempts to give brief speaking roles to black people, and a conscious effort was made to avoid depicting them as the minstrel-show caricatures or comic illiterates of the 1930s. One scene in Out of the Past illustrates the new trend: Jeff Bailey visits a black dance club, where he locates Kathie Moffat's former maid, Eunice, and asks her if she knows anything about Kathie's whereabouts. The role of Eunice is acted by Theresa Harris, who had previously given a fine, unstereotypical performance in Jacques Tourneur's I Walked with a Zombie (1942). She responds to Jeffs questions without a trace of subservience, all the while conveying a wry intelligence. Her male companion (Caleb Peterson) is an unusually dignified presenceunsmiling, silent, and slightly on guard. The scene as a whole is played without condescension, and whether it intends to or not, it makes a comment on racial segregation.
Theresa Harris and Caleb Peterson in Out of the Past (1947).
Here and in several other films of the kind, black extras or bit players also give the protagonist an aura of 'cool,' so that he resembles what Norman Mailer once described as the 'White Negro.' This effect is especially apparent in Robert Aldrich's 1956 adaptation of Kiss Me Deadly, which, as I indicate in chapter 4, seems to have a divided and somewhat incoherent attitude toward Mike Hammer. In some respects Aldrich criticizes Mickey Spillane's hero, but in others he slightly revises the character, making him a relatively sympathetic embodiment of urban liberalism. Thus when we first meet Hammer, he is listening to Nat Cole on the radio; later, we discover that he is a regular customer at an all-black jazz club, where his friendship with a black singer (Madi Comfort) and a black bartender (Art Loggins) helps to indicate his essential hipness.
At about this time, Hollywood began to produce films that involved a full-scale 'buddy' relationship between male blacks and whites, thus allowing the black actors to become true characters. The phenomenon originated as early as Casablanca, but it became a formula after the 1950s, influencing such postclassical, quasi-noir pictures as In the Heat of the Night (1967), Lethal Weapon (1987), and The Last Boy Scout (1991), all of which are instances of what Thomas Bogle identifies as the 'huckfinn fixation.' Bogle remarks that, traditionally, 'darkness and mystery
