© 2014 William Ahearn
The hero-centric hard-boiled school was far more malleable and when the war ended, the private detectives were replaced by returning servicemen to be heroes on the home front and then as the Red Scare took a deeper hold, the servicemen were replaced by government law enforcement agents rooting out the enemies of the state. To see Anthony Mann’s films such as “T-Men” or “Border Incident” as anything other than Red Scare propaganda is to be totally taken in by the notion of noir by association.
In “The Blue Dahlia,” Johnnie Morrison returns from service in WWII to an unfaithful wife who had killed their child years ago in a drunken accident and then she is murdered and Morrison becomes the prime suspect and goes on his own to solve the case and clear his name. The film becomes an innocent-man-on-the-run story colliding with a golden age mystery. There is nothing remotely “noir” about it and the former naval commander proves his innocence and gets the girl, or, as Hollywood would have it, serves as a hero.
Whatever the merits of the film – and there are many – there is nothing to suggest that “the whole society [is] something less than worth fighting for” or displaying “a new viciousness toward the American society itself.” As with “postwar disillusionment,” these qualities are figments of an imagination.
Schrader’s assertion of postwar disillusionment or antagonism may seem intuitive, but the facts as portrayed in the films don’t support the idea. There is no scene, inflection of an actor, line in a script or any other indication that the American ex-soldier in any Hollywood crime film of the time thought that the war was “something less than worth fighting for” and there is also nothing to support a “new viciousness” toward American society.
“Dead Reckoning,” is the story is of two paratroopers who are friends and being transported to Washington DC. One is to receive the Medal of Honor and the other is to be awarded the Distinguished Service Cross. En route, one of them goes missing and the other (played by Humphrey Bogart) follows what little he knows to Gulf City to solve the mystery. What he finds out first is that his friend joined the Army under an assumed name because he was wanted on a murder rap.
While it’s a very nice start to a mystery film, it isn’t even remotely clever in how it lifts – in some cases almost verbatim – from other films. Coming a year after “The Blue Dahlia,” it uses the exact same formula of turning a returning service man into a detective. Or as The New York Times review put it: “Coming home as a paratrooper captain, Rip Murdock becomes an unwitting detective when his sergeant buddy, who is to receive the Congressional Medal, leaps off the train at Philadelphia and disappears.” As it turns out, the ex-serviceman’s friend was innocent and the deadly dame reeking of jasmine (the honeysuckle must not have been in season) gets her just desserts. There is no indication of the hero’s “disillusionment” or any “viciousness” toward American society.
The last film in Schrader’s list – “Ride The Pink Horse” – appears to support his premise although appearances – especially in Hollywood films – can be deceiving. James Agee makes an interesting observation about this film. “As for the central quarrel of the story, it is so carefully vague you can hardly follow it. [Robert] Montgomery, for so many motives so dimly stated and so contradictory that you can believe in none of them, is trying to blackmail a war profiteer (well played by Fred Clark) whose exact crime we never learn.” Bosley Crowther also echoed this vagueness of evil in his review of Fritz Lang’s “The Big Heat”: “No matter about the implications of shady cops and political goons. The script is so vague in this department that no specific allusions may be found.”
This film has a vagueness of concern or lip service to the notion of WWII veterans having a hard time adjusting to postwar life with characters citing various situations and yet none of those lines of dialog come from the protagonist and nowhere does he display disillusionment or viciousness toward American society.
The story is that Lucky Gagin got a job with a Navy buddy named Shorty after the war. Shorty was running a blackmailing scheme and it got him killed. Gagin ended up with the information that the blackmail is based on and goes to San Pablo, New Mexico, to shake down the mobster named Frank Hugo who was the target of the scheme. The blackmail scheme is the check Frank Hugo wrote to someone in the US Government. Gagin is approached by an FBI agent – who knows that Gagin has the check – and as they have coffee the agent says “you fought a war for three years and all you got was a dangled ribbon.”
In another conversation between Gagin and the FBI agent, Gagin says that, “the government worked for Hugo all during the war” and that someone was on the take “while I was getting a tan in the Pacific.” Gagin also tells the FBI agent, “don’t wave any flags. I’ve seen enough flags.” That is it for Gagin and being disillusioned or suggesting that the war wasn’t worth fighting and neither rise to the level that Schrader proposes.
Later in the film Frank Hugo says that he was helping Shorty get over his “post-war problems” and that Gagin is a “disillusioned patriot” and one of those “haywire veterans.”
“Ride The Pink Horse” raises the idea of post-war problems of war veterans, yet the film has the typical Hollywood ending and Gagin comes through for the red, white, and blue and becomes pals with the FBI agent. There is no viciousness directed toward American society in this film and no indication of disillusionment.
If one watches films that do contain “postwar disillusionment” such as Roberto Rossellini’s “Germany Year Zero,” Wolfgang Staudte’s “Murderers Among Us,” Kon Ichikawa’s “Fires on the Plain,” or Yoo Hyeon-Mok’s “Aimless Bullet,” one would be hard-pressed to even consider “The Blue Dahlia” (or any of the others) as examples of “postwar disillusionment.”
In these postwar US films we have vets coming home to a situation they didn’t expect. Yet the response isn’t disillusionment; it’s heroics and in every case the hard-boiled ethic was co-opted from the mythic detective to the returning serviceman as a form of valentine’s card.
The issue here is not Paul Schrader. Schrader is a scriptwriter and director and not an historian, film historian, or even a critic. We expect fanciful tangents from scriptwriters, and the real issue isn’t the fanciful nature of Schrader’s essay; the real issue is how it was accepted at face value by other writers and academics writing about film noir without – it seems – any serious considerations of Schrader’s validity. Schrader’s assertions of a nonexistent postwar disillusionment, mythic acute downers and an imagined viciousness toward American society inspiring these films is ridiculous on its face and yet – apparently – it has become the basis for much of what is seen as “film noir.”
It would be humorous if it wasn’t so destructive to film history and the perception of the postwar years in Hollywood that were far more concerned with Communists, the atomic bomb, flying saucers, crime commissions, and labor struggles than a re-imagined post-World War One Berlin somewhere on the Santa Monica Freeway filled with émigrés nostalgic for German expressionism.
The style and content of these films were created before the end of the war and it had nothing to do with postwar disillusionment, acute downers or viciousness toward American society and everything to do with Billy Wilder’s “Double Indemnity.”