The
Film Noirs
of Anthony Mann
“Desperate” and “Railroaded” (both 1947) are similar films in that ex-servicemen who work as truck drivers are implicated in a robbery that involved a cop killing. As in all “film noirs,” there isn’t any indication of “postwar disillusionment” or an inability of the vets to adapt to postwar life. Inducting the vets into mainstream life is the point of many of these films.
With the exception of a fight scene filmed in the dark with a swinging lamp chained to the ceiling in “Desperate,” these are typical crime yarns of – in “Desperate” – an innocent man on the run – and in “Railroaded” – an amateur sleuth out to save the jailed innocent man. This “innocence” is exactly that. These men aren’t the usual saps that get led by their noses by a femme fatale to kill or steal and then fall into the gaping jaws of doom.
If you stop watching the fedoras and the shadows, what will emerge are films about family. In “Desperate,” it is the story of several families from the dysfunctional and criminal Radak brothers to Steve Randall’s family to the “simple” Czech farmers that are Steve’s in-laws. In “Railroaded,” it’s a lower middleclass family just trying to get along until the police arrive to question the son recently discharged from the US Navy.
What also separates these films from the true film noir is the role of the police. In both films, we are presented with police officers that first doubt and then champion the hero. This benevolent aspect of the police is present time and again in Hollywood “film noirs.” In “Somewhere In The Night” where an amnesiac ex-GI (George Taylor played by John Hodiak) believes he may be a killer, the police officer (Lt. Donald Kendall played by Lloyd Nolan) pooh poohs the idea when “good” girl and nightclub singer Christy Smith (played by Nancy Guild) brings them together. The only doubt in the film is the hero’s self-doubt and that is resolved so he can find and turn in the loot and marry the good girl.
Also note the role of the washed up and corrupt private eye. After World War II ended, the free French got to see “The Maltese Falcon” that had been unavailable to them during the Nazi occupation. The Germans in the US-occupied section of Germany didn’t. The rationale behind banning “The Maltese Falcon” in occupied Germany was that the film “made the police look stupid.” That idea also occurred to Hollywood. Whether it came from the studios, the Hays Office, or was a predictable byproduct of the Red Scare really makes no difference. The movies set out to dump wiseacre reporters and gentlemen detectives who made the police “look stupid” and concentrate on rehabilitating law enforcement. Pete Lavitch, played by Douglas Fowley, is a far cry from Nick Charles or Gay Falcon (both to disappear after 1949) and it’s quite unlikely that he will make the police “look stupid.” The same can be said of Jeff Baily in “Out Of The Past” and Hardy Cathcart (Clifton Webb) in “The Dark Corner.”
By 1949, Sherlock Holmes, Nick and Nora Charles, Philip Marlowe, Charlie Chan and numerous other “brilliant detectives who helped the baffled police” would disappear from US theater screens. Some of these franchises had run their course; even so, no attempt was made to replace them. Philip Marlowe starred in four films in the 1940s and two were major hits (“The Big Sleep” and “Murder, My Sweet”). The last Marlow film of the era was “Lady In The Lake” in 1947 and Marlowe wouldn’t return until 1969 in “Marlowe.”
Many postwar crime films are thinly disguised tales of re-socializing vets to finding wives and raising families. While the darkness in the form of crime and murder washes in from the horizon, it always ebbs to a bright sunny ending. The vet may think he’s murdered or the authorities may suspect him – “The Blue Dahlia,” “The High Wall,” “Somewhere In The Night,” etc – yet there is only a single film (that I have found) where an American ex-GIs from World War II commit any serious crime and that’s “He Walked By Night.” In the typical Hollywood “film noir” instead of facing a judge in a high-walled court, the hero usually ends up facing a justice of the peace with the good girl and a smile.
These films have a “jingoism” of a different sort and they consider the family as important an institution as the custom bureau, the treasury department, the FBI and the police. In “Railroaded” it’s apparent that family is important and that “good” families will survive (and have a daughter marry a policeman) while in “Desperate” bad families have brothers who die in the electric chair or are shot to death on a dimly lit staircase and “good” families survive to go on and have children.