Monaco P. A History of American Movies: A Film-by-Film Look at the Art, Craft, and Business of Cinema
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Although World War II had begun in late 1939 with the German invasion
of Poland, the United States would not enter the war until December 1941.
After the nation’s entry into war, the financial fortunes of the Hollywood film
industry soared. The profits of the major Hollywood companies grew at an un-
precedented rate through 1946. Attendance at the movies grew, theaters were
filled, and the enormous popularity of movies with the American public would
last through 1947. In addition to record profits in all sectors of the movie indus-
try, movies took on an unprecedented place in the culture of wartime America.
Neither before, nor since, have movies been so clearly in line with the mood
of the country as they were during this period of public solidarity and support
for the Second World War. Just what huge movie industry profits, the broad
consensus on the war, and the popularity and cultural centrality of the movies
meant was another matter that is not so simple to unravel.
Patriotism was at a high pitch, but so was sacrifice. American stories and
themes, as they were called, were celebrated on the screen, while at the same
time Hollywood welcomed waves of writers, film directors, and movie-crafts
personnel from Europe who came to America fleeing the Nazis and fascism
in Europe. For still others, some movie stories and themes from both prior to
the war and after it would be viewed with suspicion; after all, from the end of
1941 through the summer of 1945, the government of the United States and
the Communist regime in the Soviet Union were wartime allies.
ORIGINS OF FILM NOIR
John Huston, who eventually became one of Hollywood’s most renowned
directors, released his first feature in 1941. An adaptation of the Dashiell
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Red, White, Blue, and Noir
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Hammett novel The Maltese Falcon, it starred Humphrey Bogart as the de-
tective Sam Spade and Mary Astor as the seductive and conniving Brigid
O’Shaughnessy. It was the third screen version of essentially the same story
produced by Warner Bros. in a decade. The studio had purchased rights to
The Maltese Falcon in 1930 for $8,500 and budgeted a modest $380,000 for its
production in 1941. Huston and his studio producer, Henry Blanke, actually
managed to complete the production for just over $330,000. The subsequent
public approval, and the industry’s response to the movie, elevated Bogart to
the top rung of screen actors and stimulated Hollywood’s interest in the hard-
boiled detective character. More generally, Hollywood appeared to rediscover
the mystery thriller with The Maltese Falcon.
As Spade, Bogart played a man whose idealism, although battered and
tarnished, has not been completely lost. He falls in love with the villainous
seductress O’Shaughnessy, but finally turns her over to the police for the
murder of his partner Archer (Jerome Cowan). The movie’s title refers to the
stone statue of a falcon, the continuous pursuit of which holds the movie’s
story together.
Years later, The Maltese Falcon came to be recognized by many film
historians and critics as the first identifiable film noir of the Hollywood cin-
ema. In 1941, however, no one would have recognized that term. Literally
translated from the French as “black film,” the term did not appear until after
World War II, when it was first used by French movie critics attempting to
define certain films depicting crime, set in a sordid and marginalized milieu,
that appeared to share commonalities of characterization and plot. The term
hearkened back to the so-called black novels (romans noirs) of the nineteenth
century, set in the underworld of the crime-ridden cities like Paris that were
growing rapidly because of industrialization. These novels depicted characters
driven to desperation and crime by myriad external forces and their own inter-
nal weaknesses, hence creating the genesis of modern pulp fiction. The French
film critics began to discover similar material in Hollywood crime movies of
the 1930s, and even more complex and elaborate evocations of film noir in a
number of Hollywood movies produced in the early 1940s.
Film noir was identifiable as a genre because such movies were essentially
about revealing their characters, rather than being more basically stories about
crime and crime solving. In addition to the common visual look to these
movies, they nearly always featured a seductive and villainous female lead. In
addition, they frequently relied on some sort of narrative voice or commentary
that permitted a fragmentation of the story that was not typical of the way
Classic Hollywood movies were structured. However, many of these charac-
teristics were found in other films of the 1940s that were not considered noir.
As a genre, the concept of film noir has always been slippery and elusive.
Red, White, Blue, and Noir 85
Certainly, The Maltese Falcon displays some of the elements of noir, if not
necessarily all of its characteristics. For contemporary critics in the early 1940s,
writing before the term film noir was coined, the movie did have a whirlwind
pace that tended to neglect some of the details that hold the story together.
That pacing could also be interpreted as compromising the claustrophobic
visual feel created by the movie’s dependence on interior shots. Yet, as critic
Bosley Crowther, writing in the New York Times in 1941, offered:
Much of the quality of the picture lies in its excellent revelation of char-
acter. Mr. Bogart is a shrewd, tough detective with a mind that cuts like a
blade, a temperament that sometimes betrays him, and a code of morals that
is coolly cynical. Mary Astor is well-nigh perfect as the beautiful woman
whose cupidity is forever to be suspect. . . . It’s the slickest exercise in cer-
ebration that has hit the screen in many months, and it is also one of the
most compelling nervous-laughter provokers yet.
THE OFFICE OF WAR INFORMATION
Not long after the United States entered World War II, the government set
up the Office of War Information (OWI) in 1942 to assist in coordinating
Hollywood’s production with the nation’s war effort. Much of that coordina-
tion had to do with the production of informational and documentary films
contracted by government agencies, as well as monitoring the content of the
weekly newsreels produced by the studios and by independent production
companies like Time, Inc.’s monthly magazine series for the screen, The March
of Time. With its officers assigned to every Hollywood production studio, the
OWI also took an interest in seeing to it that fiction films did not inadvertently
suggest defeatist themes or reference the war effort in any way that could be
interpreted as negative or derogatory.
Such caution and supervision toward Hollywood production, however,
was most likely unnecessary. The war effort had quickly won and maintained
nearly universal support among Americans. This situation was an exception
to the history of the wars that the United States has entered. During World
War II, the country avoided the protests and impassioned debates that have
accompanied the conduct of every other war in the nation’s history. There is
scant reason to believe that Hollywood would have misread its audience. Even
without the coordinating efforts and encouragement of the OWI, Hollywood
feature production would have taken up patriotic themes and combat movies
on its own. The coordination offered by the OWI did no harm, of course, and
the agency greatly facilitated the working relationships for filmmakers with the
86 Chapter 5
military for the use of equipment and facilities for productions. Even before
the United States entered the war, Warner Bros. had gotten well ahead of the
other Hollywood studios in releasing features that contained anti-Nazi mes-
sages and themes. The other major studios, however, were not far behind.
Even the Academy Award–winning best pictures for 1941 and 1942,
respectively, could be interpreted as Hollywood efforts at movies that were
intended to encourage viewer sympathy toward Great Britain. The 1941 Best
Picture, How Green Was My Valley, was produced by Darryl F. Zanuck and
directed by John Ford. Although Ford was best known in Hollywood as an
outdoor director with a special affinity for the vast landscapes of the American
West, this 1941 film was set in a gritty, sooty mining village in Wales (the vil-
lage, of course, was built on the back lot of Warner Bros. in Burbank). With a
screenplay written by Philip Dunne, based on Richard Llewellyn’s recollections
of his Welsh childhood, it provided Ford with material for which he had an
affinity. Here the director’s sense of history, as expressed through the theme of
respect for struggles of the common man, was given full vent. Starring Walter
Pidgeon, Maureen O’Hara, and Roddy McDowall, the movie portrays the ar-
duous and painful disintegration of a traditional way of life that finally gives way
to the only sliver of hope for the future being leaving for the United States.
How Green Was My Valley was an elegant film, distinguished stylistically by
the use of off-screen voice narration. It was made in a Hollywood where opin-
ion sympathized greatly with Great Britain, which was holding off Nazi Ger-
many, even though the United States had not yet actually entered the war.
The 1942 Best Picture, made after the U.S. declaration of war at the end
of 1941, was a tribute to the valor of the British home front, represented by
an average British couple living in a small town. Directed by William Wyler,
who himself was soon to enter the military and serve on the European front,
Mrs. Miniver was woven from the stuff of melodrama and Hollywood’s ste-
reotypical ways of treating British culture. The couple’s penchant for reserve,
propriety, and understatement is constant. Mrs. Miniver herself, for example,
captures an errant German parachutist, disarms him, and hides his gun in her
cupboard behind the teacups. While carrying on his husbandly chores and
enjoying the annual local flower show that continues bravely as the Germans
bomb Britain, Mr. Miniver demonstrates his courage and his resolve. In time,
he is off to help with the evacuation at Dunkirk.
RED, WHITE, AND BROADWAY
Typical of a very different kind of production that became popular in the
era of the Second World War was the feature directed by Michael Curtiz
Red, White, Blue, and Noir 87
for Warner Bros. in 1942, Yankee Doodle Dandy. It was based on a screenplay
by Robert Buckner and Edmund Joseph and taken from an original story by
Buckner. James Cagney starred in the role of Broadway music master George
M. Cohan. Hal B. Wallis was the house producer for the movie at Warner
Bros., and James Wong Howe was the film’s director of photography. Cohan
himself, in granting the rights for the story to Warner Bros., indicated that his
preference was for Cagney to play him. Cohan also demanded the right to
final approval of the shooting script.
As a house director at the Warner studio who had taken on sundry projects
and different types of movies with equal success, Curtiz had just finished direct-
ing Cagney in a $2 million wartime feature about the Royal Canadian Air Force
entitled Captains of the Clouds. Also in the cast were Joan Leslie and Cagney’s sis-
ter, Jean. The star’s brother, William Cagney, was named an associate producer
on the project. Walter Huston played Cohan’s father. The sets had to represent
forty years of changing styles in stage architecture in the United States. Warner
Bros. actually arranged for the choreographer and dance director LeRoy Prinz
to receive a short deferment from reporting for active military duty in order to
stage the big patriotic numbers in this flag-waving feature. Based on the long
Broadway career of George M. Cohan, the film used his own lyrics and music,
as arranged by Leo Forbstein and orchestrated by Ray Heindorf.
On the home front, distribution of Yankee Doodle Dandy was coupled
directly to the war effort. The only way to purchase seats to the movie’s
premiere in New York City was by buying war bonds. Comedian and singer
Eddie Cantor put down $25,000 for bonds in exchange for two seats. The to-
tal contribution committed for the movie’s first night came to $5.8 million in
war bonds, and a similar premiere was run for the movie in Great Britain. As
movie critic Sidney Skolsky wrote in the Hollywood Citizen-News: “The war
continues to have a direct bearing and influence on the pictures being made
in Hollywood. Even the escapist films.” The Motion Picture Herald called the
movie “a wartimely inspiration. The pace is maintained for two hours, which
is no easy task with a biography that yields no surprises.”
Positive praise was nearly universal from contemporary critics. The Mo-
tion Picture Herald review continued: “It has been correctly calculated to play
not only upon every normal emotion, but also to rouse the patriotic fervor
of any American,” citing “Grand Old Flag” and “Over There” as the songs
that were real showstoppers. Nearly every contemporary critic recognized
that, although the movie’s story was more fantasy than biography, Cagney’s
performance had so much energy that he managed to be all over the stage and
to mug, sing, and dance with a verve and style that carried the movie beyond
all its flaws of biographical inaccuracy. Yankee Doodle Dandy is one of the most
successful patriotic films ever made in the United States.
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PLAY IT, SAM
Michael Curtiz’s next directing effort at Warner Bros. was on a movie that had
been taken over in development by producer Hal B. Wallis just after the Japa-
nese attack on Pearl Harbor had provoked American entry into World War
II in December 1941. This picture was a screen adaptation of a moderately
successful New York stage play entitled Everybody Comes to Rick’s. Over the
next year, Wallis nurtured it from its inception as a movie into the triumph
that became a classic of the American screen: Casablanca.
Casablanca was named the Best Picture for 1943 by the Academy. In
1983, the British Film Institute cited it as the best film ever made. In 1986,
researchers at Siena University in Loudonville, New York, conducted a survey
of film critics and historians teaching in American universities and found that
they ranked Casablanca with Citizen Kane and Gone with the Wind as America’s
three best-liked movies. In 2002, a public opinion poll published in News-
week found it to be number one among the most beloved American movies.
Casablanca’s odyssey from being a standard studio offering to becoming one of
the most highly regarded movies of all time was a story reflecting the ins and
outs of making a movie, along with some lucky choices, that reflects how the
collaborative genius of Hollywood often crafted its success.
The original play, written by Murray Burnett and Joan Alison, was much
more cynical than the film version, and the character of Ilse (played in the
movie by Ingrid Bergman) had to be extensively reworked for the movie in
order to accommodate the strictures of the industry’s Production Code. In
the play, Ilse was an American woman named Lois who had gone through
a number of romances, including one with Rick in Paris that had caused his
divorce. Moreover, in the play, Lois arrived in Casablanca on the arm of anti-
Nazi crusader Victor Laszlo not as his wife, but as his mistress. Reconstructing
the character of the sexually promiscuous Lois of the stage play for the respect-
ability required by the Motion Picture Production Code was only the first of
many challenges for the screenwriters assigned to the project by Wallis.
Howard Koch wrote one complete version of the script, while the famed
twins who worked at Warner Bros., Julius and Philip Epstein, wrote another.
Wallis cobbled the two screenplays together, while relying on the talents of
still other writers at the studio to fill in material for certain characters, for lines
of dialogue, or for the development of different plot points. The character of
the corrupt prefect of police, Louis Renault (Claude Raines), for example,
was lightened and given comic touches to poke fun at his corruption, cheat-
ing at the illegal gambling going on at Rick’s and womanizing that included
demanding sexual favors in exchange for permissions granted to desperate
refugees to flee Casablanca for safety.
Red, White, Blue, and Noir 89
Even at that, however, when actual filming began in June 1942, the
script was not yet finalized. Several different endings for the movie were
still possible right up to the actual filming of the final scene. As the filming
progressed, Bergman kept asking both director Curtiz and producer Wal-
lis what her character’s fate was: did she stay in Casablanca with Rick with
whom she had rekindled her love, or did she depart for the United States
with her husband, the Nazi fighter Laszlo? When each told her that he didn’t
know, she thought that she was being deceived by them. They were not
being dishonest with her, though; neither of them knew, because the ending
had not yet been decided!
The actual ending—in which Rick delivers a speech that rises to the level
of heroism, puts Ilse and Laszlo on the plane (and hence honors the institution
of marriage, and more than satisfies the movie industry’s Production Code
guidelines in this regard), shoots the Nazi Major Strasser who has arrived at
the airport, and finally disappears into the fog with his buddy Louis to the
strains of the “Marseillaise”—draws the movie tightly together in a manner
that may be called implausible. It does so, however, in a way that audiences
have found dramatically satisfying ever since the movie’s premiere in 1943. As
the program notes for a screening of Casablanca at the UCLA Film Archives
in 1990 pointed out:
Casablanca is justly criticized for its stock characters, contrived situations
(including a wildly improbable ending), and lines like Ilse’s to Rick, “Was
that cannon fire or my heart pounding?” as the Germans entered Paris
. . . yet Casablanca combines so many elements of popular mythology so
adroitly that it rests secure on a peak where criticism is reduced to mere
carping.
By the end of 1943, Casablanca had earned $3.7 million for Warner
Bros. In that improbable, but ennobling, final scene Louis had managed to
deftly suggest that he and Rick should head for a Free French garrison lo-
cated in the Congo at Brazzaville, where they could take up the fight against
the Nazis. Producer Hal Wallis was thinking of that wording in the dialogue
in a commercially farsighted way. Not long after Casablanca was released in
movie theaters, Warner Bros. announced a coming feature entitled Brazza-
ville, intended as a sequel, in which Louis (Raines) and Rick (Bogart) would
fight against the German troops under General Rommel in North Africa.
Actual military history, however, outpaced Warner Bros.’s plans; the Allied
forces quickly drove the Germans out of North Africa. So with the premise
for the story of Rick and Louis in combat side by side against the Nazis
in North Africa gone, Brazzaville was dropped from Warner’s production
schedule and never made.
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THE LOOK OF NOIR AND ITS DEPTH PSYCHOLOGY
As an industry during World War II, Hollywood understood its patriotic role
while continuing to see its primary duty to American audiences as providing
high-quality screen entertainment. Nonetheless, Double Indemnity, released in
the autumn of 1944, reflected a deep and brooding pessimism. The movie was
a production for Paramount Pictures, which its director and co-screenwriter,
Billy Wilder, shepherded through development. Wilder was an Austrian-born
Jew who had worked in the German film industry in Berlin, but fled, first
to France and then to Hollywood via Mexico in 1933. For the next decade,
Wilder found work as a screenwriter on a number of Hollywood movies and,
after 1942, increasingly as a director.
Nearing the age of forty, Wilder conceived of Double Indemnity as his
great opportunity for a breakthrough film that would establish him solidly as
one of Hollywood’s prominent directors. He convinced Paramount to now
act on the rights to Double Indemnity, which it had held for a number of years.
Double Indemnity was a novel by James M. Cain, who was best known as the
author of hard-boiled detective fiction, set primarily in Southern California.
Wilder’s clout with the studio was evident in this acquisition, since the origi-
nal novella had been published in serialized version in the mid-1930s, and each
time a film adaptation of it had been proposed, the Production Code Office
and its chief administrator, Joseph Breen, had opposed it. Although Wilder
had been collaborating at the studio for years with the reserved and sophisti-
cated Charles Brackett, who came from a wealthy and prominent New Eng-
land family, Wilder decided to team instead with Raymond Chandler on the
screenwriting for Double Indemnity.
The story of a bachelor insurance salesman who is seduced by a house-
wife into a scheme to murder her husband and make it look like he was the
victim of a train accident—meaning that the life insurance company would
pay double because of the nature of his death—needed substantial restructur-
ing. In Cain’s novel, the wife, Phyllis Dietrichson (played in the movie by
Barbara Stanwyck), eventually is discovered to be a sociopath and serial killer,
whose string of murders included her present husband’s first wife, to whom
Dietrichson had been a nurse. Wilder and Chandler’s version kept only one
part of that backstory intact: In their screenplay, she was revealed as having
killed Dietrichson’s first wife, but the script eliminated entirely the compli-
cated and depraved story of all her prior murders and her vast array of victims.
This helped bring the movie version toward better conformity with the Hol-
lywood Production Code.
Even more importantly, these changes from the novel permitted the movie
version to more fully develop the character of Barton Keyes (Edward G. Robin-
Red, White, Blue, and Noir 91
son), the diligent claims investigator at the insurance company who relentlessly
pursues the truth behind the case of Mr. Dietrichson’s “accidental” death by fall-
ing from a slow-moving train. The more prominent role of Keyes, as someone
whose actions are motivated solely by his pursuit of the truth, counterbalances
Phyllis’s conniving and plotting. More fully developed, Keyes also balances
Phyllis with the kind of buddy relationship that he has with Walter Neff (Fred
MacMurray). The movie goes back and forth between Neff’s relationship with
Phyllis and his friendship with Keyes. Their friendship is grounded in Neff’s
respect for the older man’s hard work, and it provides the rationale for Neff’s
confessional explanation of the crime that frames the movie.
The film begins with Neff arriving, shot and bleeding, in the wee hours
of the morning, at the insurance company’s offices. It ends when Keyes ar-
rives as Neff is finishing his tape recording that recounts all that has happened.
Keyes then watches the bleeding Neff stagger toward the doorway, collapse
from loss of blood, and die.
Wilder said that he was drawn to the story of Double Indemnity because
he found the material to be so “photographable.” In fact, the movie evokes
a great sense of Los Angeles as a place: the Dietrichson home, which is a
typical whitewashed stucco in Spanish style; the surrounding neighborhood
streets; a grocery store; a bowling alley; a drive-in diner; and Neff’s apart-
ment, with its transient look. The movie’s director of photography, John
Seitz, provided cinematography that conveyed a sense of menace with the
use of dark and light, shadows, and many night sequences. Even inside the
Dietrichson’s Spanish-style home, Seitz filled the air with finely ground
aluminum shavings to reflect the sharp beams of sunlight from the windows
when the drapes were partially drawn.
At the time of its release, Bosley Crowther, the prominent film critic at
the New York Times, called the film’s look “French Realism,” although he did
not define just what he thought that was. In later years, any number of other
film critics and historians thought that Double Indemnity’s look was imitating
“German Expressionism,” a style that influenced a select number of produc-
tions in Germany in the 1920s and early 1930s when Wilder was living and
working in Berlin, suggesting that the visual design and look of Double Indem-
nity was consciously being influenced by the director’s recollections. There
were problems with either attribution, however, which begin with a failure to
recognize that the “look” of Double Indemnity might best be understood as the
unique vision of Seitz and his Paramount studio camera department in solving
the visual problems of a particular film and its specific locations and sets.
When Double Indemnity was released in 1944, it did modest business
at the box office, making a marginal profit, and received several Academy
Award nominations, but won none. Nevertheless, the movie did make Billy