Monaco P. A History of American Movies: A Film-by-Film Look at the Art, Craft, and Business of Cinema
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92 Chapter 5
Wilder more respected and recognizable within Hollywood, so Double In-
demnity served his personal agenda. Wilder’s stock as a director rose, and that
ascendancy was cemented by his Best Director selection by the Academy the
following year for The Lost Weekend. Over time, moreover, the reputation and
recognized significance of Double Indemnity has grown. Serious consideration
of film noir really did not enter into academic circles or become common
among serious film critics in the United States until the 1970s, and it was
one of the leading film critics of that era, Andrew Sarris, who labeled Double
Indemnity “the juiciest and most adult of noir movie classics.”
Since then, Double Indemnity has been widely categorized as a noir classic
for its look, its inept leading male character who is seduced by a villainous
woman into crime, and its bleak and cynical portrayals of both these characters.
Some movie critics have maintained that film noir appeared in Hollywood as
an expression of the worldview of the movie directors who had fled from
Central Europe to Hollywood in the 1930s to escape Nazism and fascism, and
who brought with them an understandably cynical perspective on humanity
and its weaknesses. Such speculation, however, is difficult to document con-
vincingly. There are contradictory indications that the personal experiences of
several significant directors do not so clearly determine the choice of subject
and style for their movies, especially since the Hollywood studio system still
was so strong in the early 1940s.
Even more speculative is the claim that the female villains of these film
noirs in the early 1940s were created as a reflection of a national subconscious
that feared women in the American workforce at the time. Many women dur-
ing the war had taken jobs in the industrial sector typically held by men, but
the idea that resentment against this came to be reflected in the representation
of female leads in a relatively small number of the Hollywood movies of the
era that are categorized as film noirs is problematic. Any genuine explanation
of just how this particular representation of the villainous female made its way
into some movies from a basis in an interpretation of the sociology and eco-
nomic history of the later years of World War II is lacking. Moreover, even
if such representation were there, this particular interpretation of its presence
runs contrary to the historical record in the sense that support for the war
effort was nearly universal in the United States. Since the value of women’s
industrial labor to that effort was widely acknowledged and appreciated, to
whom in the audience was the negative representation of female characters
in early Hollywood film noir appealing? Additionally, with so many younger
men in uniform and overseas in combat from the end of 1941 through 1945,
the percentage of moviegoers in the United States who were women was at
an all-time high between 1942 and 1946.
Red, White, Blue, and Noir 93
SINGING OUR WAY TO AN OSCAR
The Academy Award–winning best picture for 1944 came from the same
studio as Double Indemnity, Paramount, but it was about as different a movie
as one could imagine. Going My Way was light and sentimental, starring Bing
Crosby as a crooning parish priest in New York City named Father Charles
Francis Patrick O’Malley. He likes a drink or two and loves playing golf, and
his personal charm is full of whimsy. He can turn around the lives of way-
ward juvenile gang members with a few stanzas of lilting melody, and with
his gift for gab, he can persuade the mortgage holder on the church property
to forgive his parish’s indebtedness. Going My Way was written and directed
by the veteran Leo McCarey, who was well known for his work with screen
comics including Laurel and Hardy and the Marx Brothers. He was on loan to
Paramount from RKO, where he was under contract. McCarey won Oscars
for Best Screenplay and Best Director that year.
Going My Way is often paired with The Bells of Saint Mary’s, also directed
by McCarey and also starring Crosby, with its similar themes and sentiments,
which was an RKO release in 1945. The latter picture is often mistakenly
identified as a sequel to Going My Way, when actually production on The Bells
of St. Mary’s was completed earlier.
BILLY WILDER TRIUMPHANT
Over time, Double Indemnity found a place in cinema history because of its sig-
nificance as film noir. With his next movie, The Lost Weekend, winner of the
1945 Academy Award for Best Picture, Billy Wilder found peer recognition
for his work in collaboration with the director of photography, John Seitz. For
this feature, Wilder returned to collaboration on the screenplay with the man
who had been his guardian angel and collaborator at the studio for almost a
decade and a half, Charles Brackett. Brackett also served as the picture’s pro-
ducer at the studio.
The Lost Weekend is about a writer named Don Birnam (Ray Milland), a
heavy drinker who is working on a novel entitled The Bottle that tells how he
first met and courted his fiancée, Helen St. James (Jane Wyman). He plans a
weekend in the country with his brother Nick (Philip Terry), ostensibly as a
time to help him get off his heavy and habitual drinking and to sober up for
good. Instead, he winds up in a steady descent into drunkenness and despera-
tion. He steals from a money jar meant for the maid, and by the next day finds
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himself in a state of panic as he careens through the city in a drunken search
for an open pawn shop so that he can get more cash for booze.
Seitz’s camerawork gives the entire urban milieu everything but a Classic
Hollywood treatment. The cityscape of this movie is grimy and gritty and cre-
ates an urban world that is brutal and without redemption. Birnam suffers delir-
ium tremens, fantasizing about becoming a helpless mouse attacked by bats, and
is taken in a stupor to Manhattan’s famed psychiatric hospital Bellevue, where
a male nurse belittles and taunts him. His nightmarish slide into the depths of
his alcoholic haze is terrifying, and this sequence in the motion picture is fre-
quently recognized as a seminal work of American cinematic “realism.”
As an aesthetic convention, realism in American film has been character-
ized by attention to the bleak and psychologically distorted situations of char-
acters brought on either by their own doing or the hostility and indifference
of others. In Hollywood, this aesthetic tended toward portraying pathologies,
but such movies almost always resulted in developing viewer empathy for such
suffering souls. That The Lost Weekend captured the Best Picture Oscar for 1945
marked an acceptance of screen realism by the Hollywood establishment.
This was clearly not the same realist aesthetic to be found in the neoreal-
ism of Italian movies that had been identified the previous year (1944) with
the release of Rome, Open City, directed by Roberto Rossellini. Neorealism,
which would be evident as a movement in Italian cinema for the next decade,
and which proved highly influential on post–World War II cinema globally,
was of a very different nature. Its political and social orientations were entirely
distinct from what Wilder and Seitz had put on the screen in Hollywood’s
Best Picture of 1945.
Nonetheless, The Lost Weekend was the kind of Hollywood studio film
that pushed American screen realism in new directions. For the next three
decades, this screen realism would gradually take its place alongside more tra-
ditional approaches to studio production. While Hollywood cinema was never
so monolithic, nor its movies so standardized as products of a dream factory
as many critics have suggested, the Brackett-Wilder-Seitz collaboration on
The Lost Weekend did provide a different kind of film from most productions
of Hollywood’s Classic Era. Not in the least, this was because the production
utilized location shooting, with much of the footage shot on New York City’s
Third Avenue and at the actual Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan.
It is well documented that Paramount executives, after a preview screen-
ing of the movie, seriously considered shelving it. It was a bleak and terrifying
story of a man’s addiction, of the sort that Classic Hollywood normally had
avoided. Nonetheless, the screen story had been reworked from the original
screenplay in the process of filming, so that the movie did reach a (somewhat
forced) resolution of recovery and love when Don reconciles with his fiancée.
Red, White, Blue, and Noir 95
This was most likely the main reason that The Lost Weekend could earn a seal
of approval from Joseph Breen’s Production Code Office.
Still, The Lost Weekend was a provocative movie for its day. There was
even a Hollywood rumor that a consortium of whiskey distillers pressured
Paramount to shelve the movie, although the truth of this assertion is not
well documented. There was enough that was unsettling about the film and
its aesthetic to give ample pause to the studio’s leadership, but Paramount did
release the picture on time, and it won high critical praise as well as the winner
of the Hollywood establishment’s Best Picture Oscar.
SUMMARY
During the U.S. participation in World War II, from 1941 to 1945, the wealth
and potential cultural influence of Hollywood increased enormously. In these
years, the growth in movie attendance was phenomenal. With so many young
men in uniform and serving overseas, women became the most significant and
growing statistic of those who went to the movies. Movies provided popular
entertainment for the home front, and going to a movie theater was the only
place to see actual newsreel coverage from the war zones. Hollywood shifted
significant resources to weekly newsreel production and to the production of
documentaries. Even without the government’s Office of War Information—
the duties of which included coordinating motion picture production with
the nation’s war effort—the evidence is overwhelming that Hollywood would
have produced patriotic movies, combat movies, and feature films indirectly
celebrating the values and cultures of America and her allies and denigrating
her enemies. Of course, Hollywood also went on making movies having little
or nothing at all to do with the war. Among these were movies whose style
and content would later be described as film noir.
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Beginning with 1939, which had been a bumper crop year for significant
Hollywood motion pictures, right through the last year of World War II,
1945, the fortunes of America’s motion picture makers and exhibitors had
soared. The eight major studios (Fox, MGM, RKO, Paramount, Warner
Bros., Columbia, Universal, and United Artists) saw their net profits increase
roughly sixfold between 1940 and 1946. The nation at war had found com-
mon consensus and exhibited an unusually strong cultural cohesiveness, which
was widely expressed in the popular cinema of the war years. By 1946, after so
many young men returned home from both Europe and the Pacific, the aver-
age number of weekly admissions to movie theaters in the country per week
reached an all-time high, in excess of ninety million. Movies were pervasive.
As entertainment, but also as sources of wartime information, their place in
American life and culture would never be greater than during the years of the
Second World War.
TWO POSTWAR DRAMAS
The Academy Award winner for Best Picture for 1946, The Best Years of Our
Lives, was a project that began when independent producer Samuel Goldwyn’s
wife Frances, a former stage actress, read a 1944 article on GIs returning home
from the war. In addition to its recognition from the Academy of Motion
Picture Arts and Sciences as the Best Picture of 1946, the movie also gathered
five additional Oscars: Best Director to William Wyler, Best Actor to Fred-
eric March, Best Supporting Actor to Harold Russell, Best Editing to Daniel
Mandel, and Best Screenplay to Robert E. Sherwood.
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Postwar Triumphs and Reversals
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After World War I, Hollywood had waited seven years before a major
feature film dealt with the war and its effect on the men who fought it. Much
the same would be true half a century later, with regard to the first major Hol-
lywood movie set among returning veterans from the Vietnam War. Not so
with World War II. Almost immediately after the war ended, Goldwyn com-
missioned a screenplay to be written about veterans returning from the war
and hired novelist MacKinlay Kantor for the job. Goldwyn wound up with
a massive manuscript, four hundred pages of blank verse, that the producer
promptly deemed unusable. William Wyler, a veteran himself whose time in
uniform included making a famed documentary on Allied bombing missions
over Germany, The Memphis Belle, had already signed on to direct for Gold-
wyn, and he suggested to the producer that he offer the writing responsibilities
to the playwright and screenwriter Robert Sherwood.
From the outset of development on the project, Wyler kept insisting that
he wanted an “honest portrait” of returning veterans. To capture that goal,
Sherwood wrote a screenplay that came out on the screen with a running time
of nearly three hours. The production on The Best Years of Our Lives meshed
with the emerging postwar aesthetic of motion picture realism. The produc-
tion design called for costumes bought off the rack from department stores, as
well as the minimal use of makeup for all the roles.
Most of the cast members were Hollywood names: Myrna Loy, Frederic
March, Dana Andrews, Teresa Wright, Virginia Mayo, and Cathy O’Donnell.
Harold Russell, however, who had no experience as an actor, but had lost
both his hands in a training accident at his military base in North Carolina in
1944, was cast as Homer Parrish. Russell won a Supporting Actor Oscar for
the role and also received a special award from the Academy “for bringing
hope and courage to his fellow veterans.” Russell later sold his Oscar statuette
for $55,000, which was more than five times what he had been paid for his
performance in the movie. The cinematography for The Best Years of Our Lives
was under the able direction of that veteran Hollywood genius, Gregg Toland.
Program notes published by the UCLA Film Archive for a screening of a print
of The Best Years of Our Lives assert that Wyler’s concept for the movie, as well
as the look that he and Toland collaborated on for it, was influenced by Ital-
ian neorealism long before most Americans—even those knowledgeable about
film—had even heard of that movement.
The movie’s story focused on three veterans, Al Stephenson (March),
Fred Derry (Andrews), and Homer Parrish (Russell), who return home from
war to the fictional Boone City. They spend a fair amount of time hanging out
together at Butch’s Place, whose owner is played by bandleader, songwriter,
and sometime actor Hoagy Carmichael. Fred looks unsuccessfully for a job. Al
returns to his job at the bank, where he is soon made a vice president, but finds
Postwar Triumphs and Reversals 99
himself discontented. Homer, who lost both his hands in military service and
now wears prosthetic hooks, is warmly welcomed by his kid sister Luella and
his sweetheart Wilma (O’Donnell), but is still too self-conscious and skeptical
to accept their love and support.
Al invites his wife Milly (Loy) and daughter Peggy (Wright) for a night
on the town. The movie’s story really begins when Fred and Homer also ar-
rive at Butch’s that evening, reuniting the trio of veterans who had met coin-
cidentally while waiting for a military airplane to fly them back to Boone City.
Each of them is now discovering the cracks in the façade of what appears to be
bucolic postwar small-town life. Fred has been out looking through the town
for his wife, who had moved away from his parents while Fred was in combat.
He is unable to find her and winds up spending the night at the Stephensons’,
where the next morning he and Peggy Stephenson begin a flirtation.
Fred has returned from service only to learn from his drunken father and
stepmother that his wife Marie (Mayo) has moved away during the war and
taken a job in a nightclub. Eventually, he finds her. Somewhat tentatively,
they reunite. Marie had never thought that Fred’s job as a counterman in a
drugstore coffee shop was sufficient to support the way of life she craved, but
it is the only job he can find. The drugstore has been bought out from its local
owner and is now a part of a chain. He even loses that job, however, when
he jumps in between an abrasive and obnoxious customer and Homer and
knocks out the fellow who was making negative comments about America’s
role in the war. After that, Fred returns to their apartment only to find Marie
entertaining a strange man and realizes that she has been unfaithful to him. He
tells her to get a divorce and leaves.
Al’s situation is the best of the trio’s. He has a job waiting for him at the
bank where he worked before he went into military service. Indeed, he is
even given a promotion and is placed in charge of approving bank loans for
veterans to purchase property. This gets him into trouble at the bank when he
is perceived as being too lenient about granting a loan to a veteran who the
bank considers a poor risk. Eventually, however, that situation is resolved with
the bank officers, and although he is still uncomfortable with some attitudes
toward veterans, he is reconciled with his position.
Ever since his return, Homer has been tortured by the idea that Wilma
only pities him, rather than truly loves him. His self-doubt becomes more
and more a burden to him than the actual loss of his hands. In the end, how-
ever, Homer gets beyond these feelings and finally sees that Wilma’s love for
him is genuine. At their wedding, Fred is his best man and the Stephenson
family is there. Al has become guardedly reconciled to the idea of Fred and
Peggy’s romance, while Milly is fully accepting of it. Butch plays the wed-
ding march, and, as Homer slips the ring on his bride’s finger, Fred’s glance
100 Chapter 6
catches Peggy’s, indicating that she is welcoming him back into her life. Still
jobless, Fred wanders the streets and eventually finds himself at an airport full
of discarded B-17 “Flying Fortress” bombers. He climbs into one, takes the
bombardier’s seat, and relives in memory one of the battle scenes in which
he had risked his life during the war. When he comes back to the present, he
finds that materials from the planes are to be salvaged and used to build houses,
and he is offered a job in their construction.
Sketched in brief, The Best Years of Our Lives is melodrama lifted as screen
entertainment to a higher plane of cinematic achievement because of Holly-
wood craftsmanship. Each of the acting performances is exceptionally strong,
and Toland’s camerawork, in particular his selective use of deep focus, is mas-
terful. Perhaps the review published at the time of its release in 1946 by Life
magazine best summed up the assessment that has caused the movie to survive
so long as a highly regarded one:
The Best Years of Our Lives . . . has, of course, certain flaws: there is hoakum
stirred up with its drama; its 172 minutes are considerably overlong; its
finale is miraculously happy. But it is an honest, adult, and absorbing film.
Bosley Crowther’s review in the New York Times recognized the movie as the
stuff of cinematic greatness, as he enthused:
It is seldom that there comes a motion picture which can be wholly and
enthusiastically endorsed not only as superlative entertainment but as food
for quiet and harmonizing thought. Yet such a one is Samuel Goldwyn’s
The Best Years Of Our Lives.
The review in Boxoffice, a trade journal aimed at movie theater owners, pro-
claimed:
It’s priceless—one of those pictures every producer hopes to make. It’s
close to the everyday lives of millions of men at present—their postwar
adjustment problems: it’s as human as your next door neighbor.
At the time, Robert Warshow was practically the only major American
critic who didn’t like it, denouncing it for “its denial of the reality of politics,”
by which he meant that he thought it reduced society’s postwar problems
to issues of individual psychology that could be solved by the application of
old-fashioned American virtues such as hard work, patience, and cheerfulness.
Later criticism, however, turned out to be more negative. Ten years later,
writing in Commentary, Manny Farber dismissed The Best Years of Our Lives as
“a horse-drawn truckload of liberal schmalz.” Soon after, critic Andrew Sarris
labeled it “a work of humanitarian blackmail.”
Postwar Triumphs and Reversals 101
The other film of that year that has been highly regarded by Hollywood
professionals is It’s a Wonderful Life. Beginning with its title, which some
people might confuse with The Best Years of Our Lives, this movie directed
by Frank Capra is sometimes thought of as being complementary to it.
Capra’s film, released through RKO, received five Oscar nominations—Best
Picture, Best Actor (for Jimmy Stewart), Best Director, Best Film Editing,
and Best Sound Recording—but won none. The other parallel included the
fact that Capra himself, like Wyler, had spent much of the Second World
War in uniform.
The protagonist of It’s a Wonderful Life, played by Jimmy Stewart, is
George Bailey. George has grown up in, and never left, his hometown of
Bedford Falls. He has taken over his father’s building-and-loan business and
married his high school sweetheart Mary (Donna Reed), and they have four
children. But George’s aspirations and expectations clash harshly with the
far duller and limited reality in which he sees himself mired. Bailey believes
himself to have been a complete failure at life. He questions all the sacrifices
he has made and descends into a state of mind in which he contemplates sui-
cide. George has a good heart, but he has been living a life burdened by civic
responsibilities and haunted by an enemy named Henry Potter (Lionel Bar-
rymore), a greedy banker-investor who threatens to destroy George.
During a routine bank audit, George forthrightly discovers that his own
dear but bumbling uncle Billy (Thomas Mitchell), who is as unreliable as he
is incompetent, has evidently misplaced $8,000 and that financial ruin faces
George. Seeing his opportunity, Potter swears out a warrant (falsely) accusing
George of malfeasance and demanding that he be removed from his office.
Potter is more than just a nasty curmudgeon. He personifies the absolute
rejection of traditional notions of high-mindedness, idealism, honesty, and
civic responsibility. “Most people hate me . . . but I don’t like them either,”
he intones. And he consistently ridicules “idealists,” who are dangerous in
their constant appeal to the better side of the human heart: “What does that
get us?” asks Potter rhetorically. “A discontented lazy rabble instead of a thrifty
working class. And all because a few starry-eyed dreamers like Bailey stir ’em
up and fill their heads with a lot of impossible ideas.”
Wishing that he had never been born, George plunges into a nightmar-
ish fantasy of what Bedford Falls would have been like had he never lived.
In his imagination, he finds himself wandering through the desolate town of
“Pottersville,” with all its warped and empty values personified by the greedy
Mr. Potter.
This odyssey of George’s imagination is in search of someone who can
confirm his past identity and help him resurrect the families, homes, and busi-
nesses of his beloved Bedford Falls that now appear to have been obliterated.