really defeated. That is why no later books satisfy us like those which were read to us in childhoodfor those promised a world of great simplicity of which we knew the rules, but the later books are complicated and contradictory with experience.
52. Ivan Moffat, 'On the Fourth Floor of Paramount: Interview with Billy Wilder,' in The World of Raymond Chandler, ed. Miriam Gross (New York: A and W Publishers, 1977), 49.
53. PCA report, December 1, 1943, Margaret Herrick Library of the Motion Picture Academy, Los Angeles.
54. Two of Cain's hard-boiled stories had been filmed in Hollywood prior to this time. She Made Her Bed (Paramount, 1934), starring Richard Arlen, was a loose adaptation of his famous satire of California road culture, 'The Baby in the Icebox.' Money and the Woman (Warner Brothers, 1940), starring Jeffrey Lynn, was a B-budget version of Cain's novella of the same title and might be described as a sentimental precursor of Double Indemnity.
55. Cain worked briefly for the Baltimore Sun, where H. L. Mencken became his mentor. His first short story, 'Pastorale,' a grotesquely comic tale of murder in the Appalachian backlands, was published in Mencken's American Mercury in 1928the same year as Ernest Hemingway's Men without Women, and a year before Hammett's Red Harvest.
56. Edmund Wilson, 'The Boys in the Back Room,' in Classics and Commercials (New York: Farrar, Straus, 1950), 21.
57. Cain was seldom assigned film noir projects, but he received screen credit for Algiers (1937), a Hollywood remake of Pepe leMoko. He also worked on The Shanghai Gesture (1941), which Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton regard as an important early instance of noir. Later, he performed uncredited and apparently insignificant labor on an adaptation of Daniel Mainwaring's Build My Gallows High, which eventually became Out of the Past.
58. H. L. Mencken, Prejudices: A Selection, ed. James T. Farrell (New York: Vintage, 1958), 24748.
59. James M. Cain, Double Indemnity (New York: Vintage, 1978), 8. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically in the text.
60. Jacques Barzun, 'The Illusion of the Real,' in Gross, 162.
61. Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep, in Raymond Chandler: Stories and Early Novels (New York: Library of America, 1995), 612.
62. As we have seen, Weimar intellectual lifeincluding movies, cabaret, literature, and cultural criticismwas obsessed with industrial America, which seemed both seductive and frightening. (Consider the theory and criticism of figures like Sigfried Kracauer, Theodor Adorno, and Max Horkheimer.) Wilder is demonstrably preoccupied with this theme, but he also resembles such Americans as Mencken and Hecht, especially in his contempt for the populist masses. Interestingly, Horkheimer and Adorno's famous essay on the culture industry was written in California at almost the same time that Double Indemnity was made.
63. The Double Indemnity house is located at 6301 Quebec Street in Los Angeles, and today it costs considerably more than the '30 thousand bucks' estimated by Walter Neff.
64. Present-day viewers of Double Indemnity are seldom aware that the film is set in the recent past. When Walter Neff begins his Dictaphone message to Keyes, he announces the date as 'July 16, 1938.' This enables the filmmakers to show a market like Jerry's without wartime rationing. Throughout, the Los Angeles locales are free of any sign of military activity. Thomas Doherty has suggested that one reason for the night-for-night photography at the Glendale train station was the government's desire to keep reformation about such places secret.
65. In another famous film noir, The File on Thelma Jordan (1949), Wendell Corey discovers that Barbara Stanwyck has a dark past: he finds a photograph of her as a hard-boiled blond who looks just like Phyllis Dietrichson.
66. Richard Schickel, Double Indemnity (London: BFI, 1992), 64. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically in the text.
67. More than a decade passed before Hollywood attempted a similar scene again. In 1958, Robert Wise filmed a blow-by-blow account of a gas-chamber execution for I Want to Live!, which won Susan Hayward the Oscar. In 1961, Irvin Kershner and Don Murray devised a harrowing execution sequence for Hoodlum Priest, in which Keir Dullea plays the criminal.
Chapter 3 1. Cobbett Steinberg, Reel Facts: The Movie Book of Records (New York: Vintage Books, 1978), 464. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically in the text.
2. Will Hays quoted in Nancy Lynn Schwartz, The Hollywood Writer's Wars (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982), 192. Hereafter, Schwartz's work is cited parenthetically in the text.
3. For more detailed discussions of figures such as Joseph Breen and Martin Quigley, see Leonard Leff and Jerrold L. Simmons, The Dame in the Kimono: Hollywood Censorship and the Production Code from the 1920s to the 1960s (New York: Anchor Books, 1990). Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically in the text. See also Gregory D. Black, Hollywood Censored: Morality Codes, Catholics, and the Movies (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
4. Unless otherwise noted, this form and all other Breen Office correspondence are quoted from the PCA files at the Margaret Herrick Library of the Motion Picture Academy in Los Angeles.
5. Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier, trans. Celia Britton, Annwyl Williams, Ben Brewster, and Alfred Guzzetti (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 254.
6. Notice, however, that the Breen Office had been created partly in response to protofilms noirs such as The Story of Temple Drake (1933), Paramount's Bowdlerized adaptation of William Faulkner's Sanctuary (a novel that, as we have seen in chapter 1, was also an inspiration for Boris Vian's scandalous roman noir of 1946).
7. Marc Vernet, 'Film Noir on the Edge of Doom,' in Shades of Noir, ed. Joan Copjec (London: Verso, 1993), 24.
8. Even with these precautions, films were always subject to local censorship restrictions. In Ohio, censors cut the scene of Wilmer kicking Spade in The Maltese Falcon. They also cut the famous line about crime as a 'left-handed form of endeavor' from The Asphalt Jungle. For additional information on such matters, see Matthew Bernstein's 'A Tale of Three Cities: The Banning of Scarlet Street,' Cinema Journal 35, no. 1 (1995): 2752. Bernstein's research suggests that film noir in the 1940s was aimed primarily at 'adult' and relatively cosmopolitan audiences and that it encountered resistance from review boards in the Midwest and South.
9. From 1947 to 1953, Mickey Spillane was the best-selling author in the United States, his success far exceeding anything ever achieved by Dashiell Hammett or Raymond Chandler. Even so, his sales came mainly from paperbacks, and Hollywood regarded him as a low-end vulgarian. Films based on his work tended to come from the fringes of the industry. For a discussion of his impact on American publishing, see Geoffrey O'Brien, Hard-Boiled America (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1981). See also Lee Server, Over My Dead Body: The Sensational Age of the American Paperback: 19451955 (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1994).
10. James Agee, Agee on Film, vol. 1 (New York: McDowell, Obolensky, 1958), 217. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically in the text.
11. I take the term Browderite from Thom Andersen, 'Red Hollywood,' in Literature and the Visual Arts in Contemporary Society, ed. Suzanne Ferguson and Barbara
Groseclose (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1985), 14196. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically in the text. Andersen has elaborated his argument in a recent book, coauthored with Noel Burch: Les Communistes de Hollywood: Autre choses que les martyrs (Paris: Presses universitaires de la Sorbonne Nouvelle, 1994). See also Brian Neve, Film and Politics in America: A Social Tradition (London: Routledge, 1992).
