Nightmare Alley - Film Noir And The American Dream Read Online Free Page A

substantial number of crime films were made by radical leftist writers, directors, actors, and producers who, I suggest in chapter 8 , deliberately set out to critique certain cherished American beliefs and values in order to awakenaudiences from their slumbers. But the anxieties, hypocrisies, and frauds illuminated by these filmmakers were part of a larger set of fears and dissatisfactions that simmered beneath the surface of the culture and exerted pressure on the daily activities of ordinary people.
    Influenced by Neale’s argument, Mike Chopra-Gant argues that noir has been overrated as a sign of postwar America’s mood. Noirs, he points out, were not among the most popular films of the era, and we should instead look to the period’s hit movies to discern the real mood of the times. In contrast to noir’s disturbing, downbeat stories, he proposes, Hollywood’s mainstream films “represent an effort to reinvigorate” American myths and to “reinstate the cornerstones of American identity” (25). But if mainstream films sought to “reinvigorate” and “reinstate” American myths, that itself suggests that those myths were perceived to be imperiled. Chopra-Gant also acknowledges the difficulties in determining how many movies were seen by how many people (see 183–88). In any case, just because a lot of people see a film does not mean that it lingers in their minds, reflects their mood, or affects their behavior. In fact, one of the most influential Hollywood films—influential, that is, for the industry and other filmmakers—was Billy Wilder’s
Double Indemnity
, a film firmly ensconced in the noir canon. I would also point out that two of the top-grossing films of 1946 (see Chopra-Gant 13) were
The Best Years of Our Lives
, a provocative, realistic story about veterans’ readjustment that contains strong noir undertones, and
Notorious
, a romance-thriller with an atomic-bomb plot. These popular films
do
deal with anxieties that troubled the postwar world. Nicholas Spencer, quoting historian William Graebner, stakes out a middle ground by observing that American culture in the 1940s was swept by two broad, conflicting trends: “On the one hand, culture was characterized by nostalgia, sentimentalism, a belief in scientific progress, and a pervasive yearning for … a ‘culture of the whole.’ … On the other hand, it was a time when irony, historical contingency, a feeling of historical exhaustion and cultural fragmentation, and an attraction to existentialism borne [
sic
] of a sense of meaninglessness were evident” (Spencer 118–19). Noir reflects that latter strain.
    Attempts to define
film noir
have generally failed to capture its complex, even contradictory, themes and manifestations. Of course,
film noir
is a retrospective critical construction; as Neale points out, most of the movies we call noir were at the time referred to simply as melodramas (180). Beyond genre concerns, the conditions of production also helped to create the cross-generic phenomenon we call noir. The bulk of the films, as James Naremore reminds us, were not Poverty Row creations but midlevel products of major Hollywood studios. In the wake ofthe
Loews v. Paramount
decision of 1948, a substantial number of noirs were made by independent companies such as Enterprise, Horizon, and Diana Productions, which offered greater creative freedom for their artists. In short,
noir
is the name we apply to a certain oppositional sensibility that was cultivated both within and at the margins of the industrial Hollywood system. Adopting and expanding genres that included the women’s picture, the gangster movie, the hard-boiled detective story, the neorealist pseudodocumentary, the romance-thriller, the psychological study, and the social-problem picture, among others, filmmakers produced a counternarrative to the story of “reinvigoration,” one that challenged not just the current practices but also the philosophical foundations of