12. The history of this important cultural formation is described by Michael Denning in The Cultural Front (London: Verso, 1997). Denning observes that the American Left was interested in gangster narratives but was divided over the problem of whether serious writers could work in Hollywood. According to the naturalistic novelist James T. Farrell (author of Studs Lonigan), any writer who experimented with thrillers could not avoid capitulation to a 'movietone realism' and 'a melodramatically simplified conception of good girls and bad girls' (quoted in Denning, 257).
13. It should be emphasized that atmospheric crime movies of the 1940s and 1950s were always open to different political inflections. Robert Montgomery's Ride the Pink Horse (1947), scripted by Ben Hecht and Charles Lederer, has been described as ' 'Republican noir.' In most cases, however, Hollywood tried to avoid any clear-cut party allegiances.
14. To see how the prototypical film noir narrative could be made to suit conservative interests, consider the style and technique of Whittaker Chambers's famous memoir, Witness.
15. John Houseman quoted in Richard Maltby, 'The Politics of the Maladjusted Text,' in The Book of Film Noir, ed. Ian Cameron (New York: Continuum, 1993), 41. Maltby offers an especially intelligent commentary on the dubious, circular nature of zeitgeist criticism. He also notes that the tendency to relate film noir to a 'postwar malaise' seems to derive from the mostly conservative sociological critics of the McCarthy years, who were worried about the political implications of certain movies. For another effective critique of historical generalizations about noir, see David Reid and Jayne L. Walker, 'Strange Pursuit: Cornell Woolrich and the Abandoned City of the Forties,' in Copjec, Shades of Noir, 5796.
16. Chandler quoted in William Luhr, Raymond Chandler and Film (Tallahassee: Florida State University Press, 1991), 136.
17. John Houseman, Front and Center (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979). Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically in the text.
18. For other accounts that tell the same story of Chandler's work on The Blue Dahlia, see Frank MacShane, The Life of Raymond Chandler (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1976); Luhr, Raymond Chandler and Film; and Raymond Chandler, The Blue Dahlia: A Screenplay, ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1976). Hereafter, this last work is cited parenthetically in the text.
19. Raymond Chandler, 'The Blue Dahlia: Treatment,' manuscript collection, Margaret Herrick Library of the Motion Picture Academy, 87.
20. Unless otherwise noted, all quotations regarding the production background and scripts of Crossfire are taken from the files of the John Paxton collection at the Margaret Herrick Library in Los Angeles.
21. At about this time, Orson Welles, who had already suggested that Charles Foster Kane was anti-Semitic, was approaching the same theme from another angle in The Lady from Shanghai, treating it more subtly and slightly in advance of either Darryl Zanuck or Dore Schary.
22. In the completed film, the date of Thomas Finlay's death has been changed to 1848. Keith Kelly and Clay Steinman suggest that this change enabled the filmmakers to allude to a crucial year in the prehistory of Marxism. See 'Crossfire: A Dialectical Attack,' Film Reader 3 (1978): 120. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically in the text.
23. Schary's copy of the script, together with other materials related to the production, is in the Special Collections department of the University of California, Los Angeles, library.
24. Kelly and Steinman interpret the 'mystery man' as a self-conscious commentary on the unreliability of the film's narration ('Crossfire,' 117). In my own view, Crossfire is a realistic text, quite different from a radically ambiguous art movie such as Michelangelo Antonioni's Blowup (1966). Notice, however, that the Antonioni film contains a scene that operates according to exactly the same principle as the 'mystery man' in Crossfire: during a conversation with Vanessa Redgrave, David Hemmings receives a telephone call from another woman; he gives Redgrave various explanations of his relationship to the caller and then systematically denies all of them.
25. See Louis E. Raths and Frank N. Trager, 'Public Opinion and Crossfire,' Journal of Educational Sociology (February 1948): 34569.
26. The literature on this topic is vast. Andersen, whose work I discuss later in more detail, offers an incisive review of the major writings. In addition to his 'Red Hollywood,' I recommend Schwartz, Hollywood Writer's Wars; and Larry Ceplair and Stephen Englund, The Inquisition in Hollywood: Politics in the Film Community, 19301960 (Garden City, N.Y.: Garden City Press, 1980).
27. Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg, Hollywood in the Forties (New York: A. S. Barnes, 1968), 38. Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically in the text.
28. For an eloquent defense of Andersen's position and a fine commentary on the politics of Nicholas Ray, John Berry, and Cyril Endfield, see Jonathan Rosenbaum, ''Guilty by Omission,' in Placing Movies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). Hereafter, Rosenbaum's Placing Movies is cited parenthetically in the text.
29. Big Jim McLain was preceded by several examples of anticommunist noir, including I Married a Communist (1950, a.k.a. The Woman on Pier 13); I Was a Communist for the F.B.I. (1951, directed by 'reformed' leftist Gordon Douglas); and The Thief (1952, a technical experiment, filmed entirely without dialogue). These films were neither artistically nor commercially successful, although I Was a Communist for the F.B.I. spun off into a widely syndicated television series entitled I Led Three Lives.
30. For more commentary and details on the production of this film, see Dana Polan, In a Lonely Place (London: BFI, 1994).
31. Quotations of The Asphalt Jungle scripts are taken from the John Huston collection at the Margaret Herrick Library.
32. One of the most interesting documents in The Asphalt Jungle file at the Herrick Library is a letter to Huston, addressed 'Carissimo Gianni' and signed 'Hugh,' which offers sympathetic and intelligent criticism of the completed film. After praising Huston's work, the writer goes on to say, I am not impressed by Hardy's statement that the police send assistance calls for help, as if there were something magnificent about that. This is what they exist for and what they are prod to do. . . . Hardy's remark, 'Suppose we had no police force,' stokes me as very naive and irrelevant to the point under discussion. Nobody thinks in terms of 'a police force or no police force.' The whole problem is 'a good police force or a corrupt police force.'
33. I have discussed the FBI investigation of Welles in 'The Trial: Orson Welles vs. The FBI,' Film Comment (JanuaryFebruary 1991): 2227.
34. Jules Dassin's and Joseph Losey's best European films are clearly in the noir tradition. Immediately after moving to France, Dassin made a commercially successful and influential 'caper' movie, Rififi (1956). Losey's early credits in England included The Sleeping Tiger (1954, directed under the name 'Joseph Walton'), The Criminal (1960), and The Servant (1963). For an interesting conversation with Dassin regarding his blacklist experience, see Patrick McGilligan, ''I'll Always be an American': Jules Dassin Interviewed,' Film Comment (NovemberDecember 1996): 3448.
35. The film version of The Big Knife belongs to a cycle of quasi-noirish movies about Hollywood that were released in the early 1950s. (Notice also that the Hollywood novel had long been a favored genre of the American modernists and the literary left.) The cycle was initiated by Sunset Boulevard (1950), and it included such films as The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), A Star Is Born (1954), and The Barefoot Contessa (1954). These pictures coincide not only with the blacklist, but also with the loss of studio-owned theater chains and the rise of television. They seem to reflect Hollywood's guilty conscience and its sense that an era was ending.
36. In this period, John Frankenheimer was responsible for two other highly effective movies that might be read as films noirs: Seven Days in May (1964), a tense, underrated thriller about a fascist coup in Washington, D.C.; and Seconds (1966), a darkly satiric 'Twilight Zone' story about
