He Walked By Night

Alfred A. Werker’s “He Walked By Night” (1948) is a highly influential film that spawned a new genre of crime film – the police procedural – and added to the growing list of what were called “semidocumentaries.” (Anthony Mann is listed as an uncredited director on imbd.com and the film is often credited to Mann although I have no further information as to who did what.) The first semidocumentary film of this type is credited to Louis de Rochemont’s “The House On 92nd Street.” Rochemon produced “The March of Time” newsreels that occasionally re-created news events. Rochemont expanded that sensibility to a new form that began with “The House On 92nd Street” (1945) and followed it with “Boomerang” (1947). “The Street With No Name” – complete with an introduction by J Edgar Hoover – appeared in 1948.

“He Walked By Night” is loosely based on the story of Erwin “Machine Gun” Walker. One liberty taken with the true story is that Walker was taken alive. For the strange history dealing with his slated execution and his last days in an asylum, go here. Although it’s buried in the script, this is the only “film noir” where an ex-GI is a murderer. Walker did return from the war psychologically – or whatever term is now being used – damaged and turned to crime. Of the seven films by Anthony Mann in this series, five deal with the death of police officers or government agents.

In 1975 – just a few years after Schrader and the other “noirists” began publishing articles about film noir in cinema magazines – A Panorama of American Film Noir 1941-1953 (“Panorama”) written by Raymond Borde and Étienne Chaumeton was published in English in the United States. Originally published in France in 1955, Panorama would further muddle and confuse what defined “film noir.”

Instead of nitpicking the fractured and almost incoherent content of Panorama, it’s more illuminating to focus on two concepts that the authors introduced about the work of Anthony Mann and John Alton who are considered so essential to “film noir” by the noirists that almost every film they worked on – whether jointly or singly – is considered a “film noir.”

In Panorama, Borde and Chaumeton state at the beginning of the chapter Toward a Definition of Film Noir, “a film noir is not a ‘police documentary.’” Yet they write that “He Walked By Night” is a film noir because of the “ambivalence” of the killer and because of the “ambiguity” of the criminal milieu and the new kind of criminal that has emerged replacing the old “Scarface-type thug.”

There is no doubt that a “new kind of criminal” entered Hollywood films after World War II and sadists and psychotics became part of the crime film scenery. The new and demented criminals showed up in films such as “The Big Heat,” “The Big Combo,” “Kiss of Death,” “White Heat,” “Raw Deal,” “Women’s Prison” and others. Roy Martin of “He Walked By Night” certainly fits the description. These criminal demons may be the result of the law of unintended consequences as it was the Hays Office that demanded that criminals be made as unsympathetic as possible. Hollywood screenwriters had a field day cooking up bent personalities.

Roy Martin – the cop-killing thief of “He Walked By Night” – has nothing ambivalent or ambiguous about him nor does the milieu of the movie. Panorama qualifying this procedural as “film noir” based on “ambiguity” and “ambivalence” is completely unsupported by the film. “He Walked By Night” may be a typical example of the semidocumentary police procedural and may incorporate influences from the newsreels yet there is nothing “ambivalent” or “ambiguous” about anything in “He Walked By Night.” There is nothing existential – or Marxist or Freudian – about cop killer Ray Martin or any of the policemen. This lack of ambiguity didn’t occur accidentally or haphazardly. It was – if you watch the films – a consistent theme of the postwar movies that brought the police force to the fore and actively worked on rehabilitating their image.

The most glaring example of the need to restore faith in the police occurs in John Huston’s “The Asphalt Jungle” where the police commissioner tells the assembled press reporters:

“It's not anything strange that there are corrupt officers in police departments. The dirt they're trying to clean up is bound to rub off on some of 'em but not all of 'em. Maybe one out of a hundred. The other ninety-nine are honest men trying to do an honest job.”

In “The Asphalt Jungle” the lines are clearly drawn and the message is explicit. Yet, that same message about a few corrupt police officers is a theme that runs through many of the so-called “film noirs.” The institutions are strong and a few people are weak. One interesting example is Lewis Seiler’s “Woman’s Prison” (1955) where a sadistic warden (Ida Lupino) is finally brought down after kicking a pregnant inmate in the stomach. (The script contortions to make an inmate pregnancy acceptable to the Hays Code are hysterical to watch.)

There are numerous American “film noirs” where there are one or two corrupt policemen. Whether it’s a corruption of the soul (“On Dangerous Ground,” “Where The Sidewalk Ends,” “I Wake Up Screaming”) or a corruption of greed (“The Asphalt Jungle,” “Private Hell 36,” etc), the corruption is never endemic as it would be in post-Hays Office films such as “Chinatown,” “LA Confidential” or “Serpico.” These corrupt cops are always caught or killed and the police department involved continues on serving the public as if nothing has happened. In “Call Northside 777” the innocent man in prison is the result of the corrupt cops of a bygone generation. In “Fallen Angel” the corrupt and brutal cop isn’t even a cop. He’s a former cop from New York City tossed off the force for brutality. And in “Rogue Cop” we see the strength of family winning – once again – over the evil forces.

The one exception could be Fritz Lang’s “The Big Heat” and that could be considered unusual in that it involves at least three corrupt public officials and two of them are highly placed. Even so, at the end of the film, the hero separates the pariahs from the herd and rejoins the now clean police force to continue protecting the public.

It is in the assertion about the film being “ambiguous” where the influence of Panorama gets interesting. As there is nothing ambiguous or ambivalent about the police or the criminal, the ambiguity must reside in the “criminal milieu” of the film. Roy Martin is a loner so the “criminal milieu” must exist independent of him and all that remains are the shadows and nightscapes that predominate as atmosphere in the Los Angeles of the movie so vividly captured by John Alton.

This reference by Panorama seems to have given birth to the idea that the shadows in Hollywood “film noirs” are ambiguous and an indicator of the noir of the film. Taken in tandem with the misinformed idea that film noir – as used by the French critics in 1946 – meant “black film” and that blackness created not only ambiguity but also by definition the presence of noir and no manner of happy endings or jingoism or postwar propaganda would change that.

The fact of the content of the “film noirs” is that there is almost no ambiguity – whether in the shadows or the light – and there is never any ambivalence.

There is a bizarre poetic justice in how Hollywood co-opted and repurposed (as they say) film noir for its own ends and whether those ends were political or economic makes no real difference. The exact same process occurred in Berlin in the 1920s and it was there that the form began.

And that leads to chasing shadows in Berlin . . .