FRAGILE CERTITUDE, 1929–1936

In the 1930s, art and confidence were closely entwined. Looking back at the Depression decade in 1939, Malcolm Cowley, writing for Harper's, lamented that for the American art community the 1930s closed “with a sense of defeat and disillusionment, when [artists] saw the world falling into the hands of their other enemies, the generals and power politicians.”Footnote ¹ The combination of the Depression and the attendant rise of fascism provoked significant shifts in the art community. Ezra Pound responded to the convulsions of suffering democratic countries by going over to the fascists. Tyrus Miller describes Henry Miller in the late 1930s as one of the many writers of late modernism who had become “bereft of … any calling in which they might believe.” Miller explains that “modernist fiction … is predominantly epistemological: it seeks, despite the confusing webs … to disclose a coherent knowable world.” In the late 1930s, “modernist poetics begins to hemorrhage, to leak away.” This occurs because of a failure of faith, and modernism's “desire to restore significance to a broken world [is] abandoned.”Footnote ²

When one recognizes the stakes in Frederic Jameson's description of film noir, which materialized near the end of the 1930s, as a modernist art form, one begins to see the implications of the modernist phenomenon Tyrus Miller describes and how they illuminate the genesis of film noir, especially considering the phenomenon of the emergence of noir coinciding with a modernist crisis of confidence. Jameson discusses one of the central characteristics of both literary and cinematic noir when he takes up the issue of uncertainty in Raymond Chandler's work: “Inveterate readers of Chandler know that it is no longer for the solution to the mystery that they reread him, if indeed the solutions ever solved anything in the first place.” His remark captures the loss of certitude that is at the heart of noir. He illustrates his point about uncertainty by describing an argument John Huston and Humphrey Bogart had one night over The Big Sleep. To settle things, “they finally phone Chandler himself,” with the problem result that “he can't remember.”Footnote ³ The problem of failed certainty, of not being able “to disclose a coherent knowable world,” and the anxiety that attends the problem, serves as a defining noir element.

The issue of when noir emerges on film is complicated by one of its oddities, its roots in the German Expressionist period, the high period of which ran from roughly 1919 into the early years of the international Depression (ending with the ascent of Hitler in 1933). This was an extremely anxious period for the Weimar Republic, one marked by runaway inflation, street warfare, depression, and, eventually, the impending threat of Nazism. American film noir shares with German Expressionism its emphasis on subjective psychological states and its paranoia over authority as corrupt as the criminal world.Footnote ⁴ Two of the most important Expressionist films, Caligari and Mabuse, illustrate both of these points. In both films a psychiatrist may or may not be a psychotic criminal. In Expressionist film, states of mind cohere with sets and camera techniques. Certainty is elusive. But American film noir (unlike pop fiction noir) does not emerge until the late 1930s. To understand why it does not emerge earlier and why it emerges when it does, one must first track developments during the decade in American national confidence; for film, throughout the Depression decade, participates in and thereby exemplifies America's touch-and-go communal confidence. On this point it is important to recognize that the mass audience for film, marked as it was by immigrants, minorities, and the poor, roughly corresponds to a significant portion of the New Deal voting alliance, an alliance whose confidence would be shaken, after some roller coaster surges in confidence, from about 1937 forward.

In the 1920s, American confidence outpaced that of the Weimar Republic. Until the end of the 1920s, Germany continued to strain under the debt of World War I reparations that were, as John Maynard Keynes, who was at Versailles, points out, stupidly and self-servingly engineered by the French and the British, mostly by the French. Keynes predicted, accurately, that in the wake of World War I the Germans would suffer economic and political upheaval, and this happened. Soon after Versailles, the Weimar Republic suffered runaway inflation, French occupation of the Ruhr, and persistent harassment from secret, mostly right-wing, organizations. When Wall Street crashed Germany suffered more than any other Depression-stricken country, primarily because its economy had been propped up by credit from US banks who were, after 1929, themselves in a crisis; Germany's economic crisis led directly to Nazi ascendance. At his inauguration in March 1929, Herbert Hoover had told the assemblage, “I have no fears for the future of our country. It is bright with hope.”Footnote ⁵ As late as December of 1929, two months after the market crash, Charles Schwab, chairman of the board of Bethlehem Steel, remarked, “Never before has American business been as firmly implanted as it is today.”Footnote ⁶ Shortly thereafter such confidence would be viewed with acidic irony. Paul Johnson recalls the anger the public directed at Hoover embedded as it was in popular jokes:

A year earlier, Gerald W. Johnson had remarked on the “fathomless pessimism” that had overtaken the American People: “The energy of the country has suffered a strange paralysis … We are in the doldrums, waiting not even hopefully for the wind which never comes.”Footnote ⁸ As early as 1930, people had begun hitting the relief rolls, but at that time these were local relief organizations and they soon began to crack under the strain. Out of money and out of work, “unemployed men and their entire families began to build shacks … in the city dumps there appeared towns of tarpaper and tin, old packing boxes and old car bodies.”Footnote ⁹ Many began to feel that America and even Western civilization had played out. In the spring of 1931, Africans in the Cameroons sent New York $3.77 to relieve the starving. Later that year, 100,000 Americans applied for jobs in Soviet Russia. A few days before he died in 1933, Calvin Coolidge remarked, “In other periods of depression it has always been possible to see some things which were solid and upon which you could base hope, but as I look about, I see nothing to give ground for hope.” William Leuchtenburg remarked, “Society seemed to be disintegrating.”Footnote ¹⁰

In two significant ways Americans of the 1930s experienced some fundamental shifts in how they perceived their nation. First, there was a political shift away from conservative traditional values. But in some ways this was of the surface. And developments in the late 1930s would expose the whiplash effect on people who had been moved away from the traditional political right by the force of economic trauma, with an attendant – and nasty – response from those who had stayed on the right and waited for their time to come around once more (which, in the late 1930s, it would). Second, there was an anger-provoking reconception of society's leaders, especially those in business. And this contributed to a new cynical view of national leadership and a scouring of history all the way back to World War I for villains. This paranoiac element, as a sourness set into the national bloodstream late in the decade, would materialize in a new and dark form in popular film.

The shift away from traditional values materializes at all levels of American life early in the decade. At the primal level of family, in Pennsylvania a father wrote to Governor Pinchot, “I don't want to steal … but I won't let my wife and boy cry for something to eat.” This also occurred at the class level. Speaking to the Senate Agriculture Committee in 1932, A. N. Young, President of the Wisconsin Farmers' Union, asserted,

Young warned the committee that if the farmers could “buy airplanes, they would come down here to Washington to blow you fellows up.”Footnote ¹¹ Oklahoma ranchers would have seemed the least likely group to talk about revolution, but in the early 1930s they embodied explosive anger. One told a congressman, “We have got to have a revolution here like they had in Russia … I just want to tell you that I am going to be one of them, and I am going to do my share in it.” He then proceeded to outline a plan to capture a fort, seize its munitions, and cut the West off from the hated Northeast.Footnote ¹²

At the level of state politics, talk of revolution came from the least likely places. Governor Theodore Bilbo, the sort of southern governor one would expect to be leading communist witch hunts, told an interviewer, “Right here in Mississippi people are about ready to lead a mob. In fact, I'm getting a little pink myself.”Footnote ¹³ Yet these remarks do not mean exactly what they seem to suggest, that a communist revolution was a likelihood. Rather, as Leuchtenburg notes, “There was less an active demand for change than disillusionment with parliamentary politics, so often the prelude to totalitarianism in Europe … Many Americans came to despair of the whole political process, a contempt for Congress, for parties, for democratic institutions.”Footnote ¹⁴

On the second point, that of a new disgust for leadership, it was business leaders, and especially the bankers and stock speculators, a group notable for their conservatism, who early in the 1930s caught the main force of the nation's ire. The economic crisis provoked a close examination of financial practices and then a new anger toward leaders of finance. Calvin Coolidge had unwittingly participated in setting the nation up for an abrupt and painful loss of faith. He had remarked, “The chief business of the American people is business.” And he had virtually sanctified business leaders: “The man who builds a factory builds a temple … The man who works there worships there.” William Allen White saw Coolidge as being “as persuaded of the divine character of wealth as Lincoln had been of the divine character of man, ‘crazy about it, sincerely, genuinely, terribly crazy.’”Footnote ¹⁵ Coolidge's remarks are just pieces of evidence supporting the oft-repeated assertion that the banker and stock investor had been the heroes of the 1920s. With the crash, all eyes were on them. Soon the investigations that followed undermined the mythology that had grown in the 1920s. A 1932 Senate investigation into Wall Street practices “revealed that the most respected men on Wall Street had rigged pools, had profited by pegging bonds artificially high, and had lined their pockets with artificial bonuses.”Footnote ¹⁶ The once-confident Charles Schwab was soon revealing a distressing uncertainty, which he connected to the way the economic crisis undermined American values: “I'm afraid, every man is afraid. I don't know, we don't know, whether the values we have are going to be real next month or not.” When, in 1932, “one of the supposed miracle workers of international industry and finance,” Ivar Kreuger, shot himself, it slowly became apparent that “Kreuger's operations had been fraudulent, and that he had readily deceived with false figures and airy lies one of the most esteemed American financial houses.”Footnote ¹⁷ Intensifying the collapse of prosperity was the sense that the reputations of society's pillars had been illusory; intensifying the dissolution of respected reputations was a fear that fundamental American values had themselves been an illusion. At a sudden confidence-deflating moment, the criminal and the paragon, what was admirable and what was repulsive, were indistinguishable.

The sense that somehow accepted values and respected personages had all been a mirage made its way into the American mind. In John Dos Passos's 1919, Woodrow Wilson becomes Satan. The character Savage describes him as “A terrifying face, I swear it's a reptile's face, not warm-blooded.”Footnote ¹⁸ Attacking Wilson, Senator Gerald Nye's committee investigating arms profiteering during World War I charged that “Wilson had ‘falsified’ when he had denied knowledge of the secret treaties” between American businessmen and European war allies.Footnote ¹⁹ The vitriolic language of the committee, which operated in the mid-1930s, illustrated the deep distrust of formerly respected leaders that had materialized in the first half of the 1930s. It also revealed the effect the Depression was having on something like national paranoia. Conservative Paul Johnson describes the congressional investigations into Wall Street that took place in 1932 as a “witch hunt.” But even the more liberal David Kennedy characterizes the later Nye investigation's indictment as “grossly overdrawn.”Footnote ²⁰ The search for someone to hold accountable, to punish – the party or parties responsible for the Depression – was creating a culture with a concrete inquisition element, an element that would crystallize as inquiry in the House Un-American Committee investigations which began in the late 1930s and which would ironically turn the focus of hostility away from the captains of capitalism and back onto the liberals.

The complexities of communal confidence in the 1930s find their center in Franklin Roosevelt. To understand Roosevelt's place in the bumpy history of national confidence, one must start with his being afflicted by polio in 1920. Robert McElvaine remarks, “In searching for the basis of Roosevelt's compassion and his rapport with the downtrodden, the importance of this dream-shattering disease deserves heavy emphasis … This was absolutely critical to Roosevelt's later relationship with victims of the Great Depression.”Footnote ²¹ As a victim of polio, New England aristocrat Franklin Roosevelt got a severe dose of what it was like to be an outsider. He acquired a new insight into what it meant to suffer, one typically foreign to his class. When he later talked about suffering he did so with the legitimacy of one who had experience in the matter. This acquired empathy gave him a status with commoners that set him apart from the bankers and investors, and it served him in good stead as he embarked on social welfare reforms.

The final months of Hoover's time in office, prior to Roosevelt assuming the presidency, represented a low point in American spirits during the Depression. Leuchtenburg remarks that in “Hoover's last days the old order tottered on the brink of disaster.” Roosevelt wondered if the country would make it to inauguration day.Footnote ²² In his inauguration speech most of what Roosevelt said Hoover had been saying for the previous three years. Nevertheless, by one historian's account, “Roosevelt had made his single greatest contribution to the politics of the 1930s: the instillation of hope … in the people … He had made an impression … of a man who … had faith in the future.” Faced with a bank crisis, which was at heart a crisis of investor confidence, Roosevelt declared a bank “holiday,” convened a special session of Congress, and set forth an emergency banking measure, which “with a unanimous shout” the House passed “sight unseen.” The bill, in fact, was as conservative as had been Hoover's proposals; the difference was in the new confidence FDR inspired. The success of the bank measures is reflected in their having been closed to stave off bank runs and massive withdrawals; after they reopened, “Nothing so much indicated the sharp shift in public sentiment as the fact that people were now more eager to deposit cash than to withdraw it.” Raymond Moley expansively announced, “Capitalism was saved in eight days.” Just “two weeks after Roosevelt took office the country seemed a changed place.” Confidence had been, if not fully restored, at least reintroduced into the national bloodstream.

What is notable about the early, jubilant period of the New Deal is how often, at the beginning of Roosevelt's presidency, conservative politicians voted against their own political values, an action they repeated many times out of a sense that the country was in a war-like crisis and they had to back the President. This meant the rash of programs passed during the first New Deal were rife with internal friction in the body politic. The models used by New Dealers for how they wished to proceed and what they wished to achieve came from a business–government cooperation plan that had been used during World War I and from Progressive theory. But this did not mean that conservatives had been converted to a liberal position. They simply choked back their feelings. Illustrating the paradox in New Deal strategy, FDR would call bankers the “money changers” who had been “driven from the temple” in his inaugural address, then as his first act pass a banking act that should have made even conservative bankers happy. Thus his first term was marked by contradictory realities, first that he refused to give up the concept of working with business on a managed economy rather than treating business as an opponent, and second that he could not shake his politically conditioned suspicion that the monopolists were responsible for the economic crisis. When the tide, and the Supreme Court, turned against a New Deal centerpiece, the National Recovery Act, internal dissonance became more pronounced, and external attack became more likely.

Aggravating what was already an anxious national mindset were international events. Back in 1931, Japan had invaded Manchuria, and even at that early point some in the State Department believed war with Japan was inevitable. Almost at the moment of Roosevelt's first inauguration, Hitler first secured the German chancellorship, then began using secret police to expunge his enemies. By 1934, Germany was a totalitarian police state. Soon the Germans and Italians were aiding Franco in Spain. In Germany, Jewish civil rights were being disregarded, their property confiscated. In 1936, Hitler abandoned the terms of Versailles and remilitarized the Rhineland. Meanwhile Italy invaded Ethiopia. Frederick Lewis Allen characterizes the effect on the American sense of certainty: “Truly it was a new world upon which Americans were looking in 1936: a world full of the wreckage of the verities not merely of 1929 but even of 1932.”Footnote ²³

FALLEN-WOMEN AND GANGSTER FILMS, 1930–1937

True film noir does not emerge until late in the 1930s, although one can spot noir moments in films throughout the early part of the decade. What defines the difference, however, is pretty clear. In true noir two core elements must be present: moral certainty must be somehow obscure (a pillar of society turns out to be a criminal, a detective is nearly as much a part of the underworld as he is a part of enforcing the law, and so on), and certainty itself must be thrown into question (voice-over narrators speak with confidence only to wind up telling us a story of how wrong they were all along, as in Dead Reckoning). But films from 1929 to the late 1930s participate in a concerted national effort not to give up faith in “the old verities,” even though such faith is sorely tested by the ongoing economic crisis. To the extent that this giving up of old verities happens in film noir, it happens nationally, and more and more recognizably, after 1937. One can support this assertion by examining some films in genres recognized as those from which noir emerges, the fallen-woman and gangster movies.Footnote ²⁴

If one considers the ways in which liberalism grows out of progressivism, the reason for the popularity of the notion that such things as poverty, immorality, and crime are sociological phenomena in the early 1930s comes into focus. Sociology as a discipline was still relatively new in the early twentieth century; it was still in the process of being introduced by Durkheim and Weber. By the 1930s, social science had acquired a confidence that social problems could be “managed,” once they were understood. The political manifestation of such logic was that they could be managed by government. What had up until the nineteenth century been treated as natural conditions – ghettos, poverty – were by the late 1920s being viewed by liberals as solvable problems. Illustrating this point, and, paradoxically, since it is neoconservative Paul Johnson speaking, Hoover (whom he calls derisively “the Great Engineer”) is criticized for being too liberal, for not sticking to strict laissez-faire logic, instead giving in to a belief that government can “manage” its populace: “The new fashion of social engineering – the notion that action from above could determine the shape of society and that human beings could be manhandled and manipulated like earth and concrete – had come into its own in World War One.” For this way of regarding government's relationship with the governed Johnson blames the pernicious influence of social theorist and economist Thorstein Veblen.Footnote ²⁵

In spite of the oppressive conditions of the Depression, films of the early 1930s continued to share a logic with prevalent sociological theory of the first three decades of the twentieth century. Politically such faith was enabled by the injection of hope Roosevelt had supplied. Therefore such figures as the noir femme fatale and the detective with one foot in the underworld are staved off by popular film for much of the 1930s. Part of the reason for this has to do with the ways film differed from theater and print fiction during the period. The same interests that engineered a degree of censorship in film feared the potential effect film might have in stirring up immigrants and the working class (and the latter was already making gains through new union legislation, as soon demonstrated by the Wagner Act). Thus ideas and characters which were appearing in other art forms were partially staved off by the forces of censorship. This occurred because it was believed that ideas critical of mainstream America might incite resentment and, worse, action from the lower denizens. This had implications for film noir. With the implementation of the censorship code in March 1933, a number of film projects were rejected, including an adaptation of James M. Cain's noir novel The Postman Always Rings Twice (though when American ideological dynamics changed, it was made in the 1940s).Footnote ²⁶ And the thoroughly noir novel (which opens by describing its protagonist as resembling Satan) The Maltese Falcon was filmed twice (in 1931 and 1936, each time with distinctly non-noir endings) before it finally became a film noir in 1941.

But the primary interest of the fallen-woman film was not in the fatal woman of the noir film, but in a sociological rescue of the woman. The continuity of a logic with roots in the literary version of the social engineering that Paul Johnson finds objectionable – that is, naturalism – shows up in a 1921 Eugene O'Neill play, Anna Christie, which was filmed in the 1930s (1931) and illustrates a confidence, in identifying moral issues that might make a woman appear to be immoral, which evaporates in the later noir films. Anna Christie and many subsequent films like it are purely sociological in their inquiries into right and wrong. They demonstrate a confidence that the causes of poverty and moral behavior can still be uncovered and that individual responsibility must be considered within social and economic environments. Clearly such logic touches a communal nerve during the Depression. In the film, we first see Ann (Greta Garbo) as a worldly-wise barfly, who encounters Marthy, a drunk in a bar, and answers the remark about having Anna's number “the minute [Anna] stepped in the door” by responding, “You're me forty years from now.” Starting with this image of Anna, the film peels away the layers of Anna's history to revise the concept of her tragedy as resulting from either choice or the natural immorality of the underclass. Anna had been shunted off on relatives by her father at a young age and raped by a relative. She was unsuccessful in her effort to escape from sexual abuse. She has been a prostitute, but the film makes clear its view that she had no choice. This is a liberal rather than conservative interpretation of individual responsibility. One can see its attractiveness to audiences who were themselves trapped or threatened with being trapped by traumatic economic circumstances. What the film resists is any failure of certainty concerning its ability to explain Anna. Unlike later noir treatments of women in similar circumstances it exhibits a sociologist's confidence that it can delve into environment and explain economic and class-related phenomena. In pre-noir circumstances, people are often excused of immorality by our understanding the responsibility their environments bear in making them.

Perhaps the quintessential exhibition of sociological confidence in the fallen-woman film occurs in Midnight Mary (1933). It opens by showing us a criminal woman, Mary (Loretta Young), who is sitting in court awaiting sentencing. Soon she begins explaining her life, and, through a series of flashbacks, we see the environmental forces that have made Mary. Our first impression of Mary as criminal slowly gives way to a redefinition of her moral character. We see she began life in a slum. Her mother died when she was nine. When a girl steals and then drops a stolen pencil in a store, Mary picks it up and is falsely accused of theft. Typical of the harsh criminal justice system presented in films of the early 1930s (I am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, Paid, Hell's Highway, and so on), which is disinterested in the causes of human behavior, she is given a sentence of three years in reform school.

When Mary is seventeen she and a girlfriend are out riding in a car with two boys who tell them to wait in the car while they go into a store. Without the girls' knowledge of their intentions, they rob the store. When one of the boys forces fifty dollars of stolen money onto Mary she gives it to the Salvation Army. Without money herself, she is soon evicted from her home. The camera follows her as she walks the streets searching for work. In one employment line a girl faints. Businesses feature signs that read “No Help Wanted.”

Driven by desperation, Mary looks up her old friends, who operate as a gang. Its leader, Leo (Ricardo Cortez) tells her she belongs to him. When the gang holds up a club, at which Mary works as a hatcheck girl and serves as a lookout for the gang, she meets a wealthy man, Tom (Franchot Tone), and leaves the gang for him. She starts secretarial school in an effort to escape her old life. When her past threatens to disgrace her new boyfriend she goes to the police and turns herself in to protect him. Once Mary is released, Leo tries to regain control of her and threatens to kill Tom. As Temple does in The Story of Temple Drake (1933), the film version of Faulkner's Sanctuary, Mary attempts to seduce Leo to keep him from going off to murder Tom. Both films seek to make the point that true morality is more complex than society makes it out to be. When the film finally returns its audience to the point at which it opened, Mary's trial, Tom now has allied himself with her and the film ends with his assuring her that they will win. By this point the film has completely constructed an argument that Mary's environment has led to society's falsely labeling her immoral and criminal. We have been shown that repeatedly she does the moral thing, even when society fails to correctly define her actions that way, a point that would have been popular with the heavily represented working class and immigrant audiences of the 1930s, who saw these films under the shadow of economic crisis. Nevertheless, the progressive, liberal faith that the environment can be overcome survives to the end of the film, just barely.

The gangster films present a slightly different aspect of the same issue. But they present a more persistent threat to faith in authority. They often make the same claims the fallen-woman films make concerning the relationship between environment and character, but in the process they threaten to make the criminal so attractive he could become a role model, especially in a country which has suffered a major blow to its confidence in leaders of industry and government. In his study of gangster films, Jonathan Munby points out that the gangster films were so popular with the public that they “had a profound influence on 1930s fashion codes … Showcases for imitators of Cagney and Robinson were held before screenings as part of publicity campaigns for their movies.” Munby concludes, “we don't get a criminal as such, but a new hero whose way of life corresponds more accurately to the problems of modern urban-American everyday life.”Footnote ²⁷

Like the fallen woman, this new hero could gain sympathy by a 1930s audience seeing the unfair environmental circumstances from which he had emerged. This may explain why the gangster films do not go as far as the fallen-woman films in assigning antisocial behavior to environment. In The Public Enemy (1931), slum children Tom Powers and Matt Doyle steal watches to gain the approval of a neighborhood thug. But the film stops short of making environment responsible for Tom Powers's (James Cagney) gangsterism. Tom has a brother who goes to night school and holds a job. The film argues that Tom's criminality results from choices. He is not the victim of an environment that cannot be overcome; if his brother can do it then he can do it. Typical of the gangsters, he chooses his behavior. In The Doorway to Hell (1930), gangster Louis Ricarno (Lew Ayres) tells a girl he was born in a slum, and his brother and sister died of typhoid from bad milk sold to poor children. But, like Powers, Ricarno has a brother who has gone straight – he is in a military academy – again insisting that life offers choices. As will happen in Little Caesar and Scarface, Doorway to Hell settles on a psychiatric explanation of Ricarno, who, like Rico in Caesar (1931) and Tony in Scarface (1932) suffers from a Napoleon complex. Lest we miss this point, the film offers a picture of Napoleon on the wall of the room where Ricarno makes his last stand before he is killed.

The aversion in the gangster films, even in those which feature slums, to offering the sort of complete sociological explanation offered in fallen-woman films like Midnight Mary arises from a fear of the effect of an antisocial hero who lashes out at society or who takes from capitalists when he may be otherwise blocked from responding to society's prompts to acquire, a fear that he may become too much of a role model, especially given the film gangster's frequent ethnic proximity to immigrants. A starting place for understanding the core difference between the gangster films and film noir comes from an unexpected characterization of the James Cagney gangster persona by film critic Richard Schickel many years ago. Schickel called Cagney's gangster “the first existential antihero of the American films.”Footnote ²⁸ What makes Schickel's language of interest is that it matches that of two influential theorists of noir, Raymond Durgnat and Robert Porfirio. Durgnat sees “nihilism,” and Porfirio “existentialism,” as noir's defining characteristic.Footnote ²⁹ One might then think that Public Enemy must be an early example of film noir. And it certainly has some noir features: notably it demonstrates identifiable connections to German Expressionism in its imagery. At the film's end, when Tom Powers is delivered back to his family by rival gangsters, he is wrapped up mummy-style, placed in the door frame, and allowed to fall on his face. The image, with his terrified eyes just peeking out through the hospital bandages, captures his psychological state, and the bandages, which prevent all movement, capture his real and psychological circumstance: he is powerless in all ways, a tremendous irony since he got into this fix as a result of his hunger for power.

But no one thinks Public Enemy is an example of film noir. Schickel's revealing language, however, demonstrates the connections between gangster films and noir, even as it also demonstrates that gangster films are not noir. What separates Public Enemy from noir is a matter of significant degree. If Schickel is right that Cagney's Tom Powers is an existential antihero, he is one, nevertheless, in a clearly defined moral universe. He does not have one foot in the moral world and one in the criminal world (which is one of the defining characteristics assigned by Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton in the first significant effort to explain and name the cultural cinematic phenomenon of film noir). They found that the detective of film noir was partly of the world of established morality and partly of the criminal underworld; from this point of departure one finds that noir itself is characterized by the evaporation of a clear line marking decency and criminality. One could say that the line, given the characteristic imagery of noir, gets lost in the fog (as in While the City Sleeps (1956), in which the newspaper executives and their women are morally indistinguishable from the serial rapist–murderer they cover in their morning editions).

The censorship codes of the period speak directly to this point, and they do so as a form of participation in a larger American communal resistance to collapsing the distinction between established morality and that of the underworld that later in the decade would begin to materialize in film noir and separate it from its cinematic ancestors. In other words, for most of the thirties Hollywood resisted the sort of assault on confidence in traditional verities that would later emerge in film noir. In 1921, A. T. Poffenberger, a Columbia University professor, made the argument that movies possessed the power to create role models that could influence children and categorical morons in a negative manner, especially if crime was modeled on the screen. His core argument emerged periodically during the twenties and thirties. In one entry in a series of codes designed to regulate what appeared on the screen, in 1927 the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors declared that films should avoid any appearance of offering “sympathy for criminals.” Echoing this point, The Motion Picture Production Code of 1930 stated, “The treatment of crimes against the law must not … make criminals seem heroic and justified.” Lest the distinction between accepted morality and criminality be confused, Public Enemy opens with a written prologue which informs its audience that the film does not glorify hoodlums. It ends with a written epilogue which reminds its audience that hoodlums are a social problem. Little Caesar offers a similar disclaimer in its written prologue, and Scarface, which was subtitled “The Shame of a Nation,” in its prologue blamed the government for a “callous indifference” to gangsterism and claimed the purpose of the film was to “demand of the government … what are you going to do about it?” Motivated in large part by a desire to escape government regulation which was being called for by religious organizations and others, Hollywood set out to regulate itself. The external pressures on the movie industry explicitly condemned presenting a dark world that denied the certainty of traditional moral distinctions. This would change late in the decade when the culmination of cynicism afflicting national confidence and deepening skepticism about the morality of established power would meet in film noir.

A political manifestation of the connection between Hollywood resistance to representing an existential universe and an unwillingness in the movies to give up traditional certitude, or national confidence in traditional verities, materialized early in the New Deal era. In spite of a mindset which was hostile to anything resembling a monopoly, the Roosevelt administration made an exception for the movie industry. As Thomas Schatz points out, “Hollywood was a Depression-era success story, and it owed its resurgence largely to Roosevelt's economic recovery measures … The NIRA strategy … was to promote recovery by sanctioning certain monopoly practices among major U.S. industries.” One of these industries was the film establishment. In 1933, the NIRA (National Industrial Recovery Act) atypically sanctioned “collusion among the big eight [studios] to control the marketplace … committing to paper such unwritten laws as blind and block booking, whereby the nonaffiliated theaters were forced to take the studios' output, sight unseen.”Footnote ³⁰ In other words, New Deal confidence in Hollywood as an enterprise in bleak times converged with New Deal confidence in being able to solve the Depression and, more generally, in widespread public confidence in Roosevelt. Less obviously, the censorship codes, which represented an effort by the studios to control their own destiny, rather than leaving their fate in the hands of various straitlaced morality groups, participated in a concretely defined national confidence in the Roosevelt administration to alleviate the economic crisis.

FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT'S DARK PERIOD

Two works (one a three-volume set) by major twentieth-century historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. illustrate the abrupt shift in national confidence that occurs in the late 1930s, especially from 1937 onward. Schlesinger's short nostalgic essay on movies of the 1930s, written from the vantage point of 1963, comments on the crisis of national confidence experienced by Americans in the 1930s, but Schlesinger reaches the conclusion that national confidence followed an upward trajectory until the end of the 1930s, when the crisis was over. Contemporary historians, however, do not agree with him. Rather, they see a political crisis for liberals emerge in 1937, which translates to a new crisis of confidence. Schlesinger's own three-volume work, The Age of Roosevelt, unwittingly explains all of this. Temporally speaking, The Age of Roosevelt starts with the stock market crash, but oddly enough the third volume ends with Roosevelt's re-election in 1936 and assumption of office in 1937. One might think the third volume would end either with the end of the Depression in 1941 or with Roosevelt's death near the end of World War II. Since the focus of the three volumes is the Depression, 1937 does not really mark the end of anything, unless one wants to make Roosevelt the unequivocal hero of the narrative. This, however, is Schlesinger's goal. The year 1937 marks Roosevelt's triumphant re-election and an apparent indemnification of New Deal policies. One thing one learns from Schlesinger's otherwise penetrating study of the period is that the years from 1937 to 1941 present a complication if one's goal is to make Roosevelt the hero of a 1930s narrative. The nature of this problem is closely entwined with jolts to national confidence that begin in 1937 and with a loss of stature for liberals.

Nevertheless, for the Roosevelt people 1937 began very auspiciously. Going into the 1936 election “there was a heady sense of a nation once more in the money. Not only had gains been made, but Roosevelt's measures had the curious effect of driving poverty out of sight. The applesellers disappeared from the streets, the breadlines from the cities.” Roosevelt campaigner Jim Farley predicted Roosevelt would carry every state but two, and he did. FDR was re-elected “by the most sweeping electoral margin of any candidate since James Monroe. The staunchly Republican state of Pennsylvania had gone democratic for the first time since Buchanan's triumph in 1856.” But Alan Brinkley points out that the optimism prevalent at the time of Roosevelt's inaugural address “was difficult to sustain even a few months later.” “By the end of the year liberals were expressing bafflement at the New Deal's rapid demise.”Footnote ³¹ Brinkley explains this political nosedive as resulting from too successful a re-election. Southern Democrats had originally supported Roosevelt because they believed he was an establishment man who would not rock the boat, which in the South meant the racial boat. They became alarmed after the election at what appeared to be a mandate for liberal reform. Several shifts in the demographics of who Democratic voters were contributed to this alarm. Because New Deal work and social programs were more color-blind than previous government programs, African Americans, who had voted for the party of Lincoln in 1932, shifted to Roosevelt in 1936. They had also been migrating out of the South during and after World War I; as a result they began to have new voting clout in northern cities. Responding to union-friendly legislation, labor also supported Roosevelt. And “newer ethnic groups in the cities swung to Roosevelt, mostly out of gratitude for New Deal welfare measures.” Finally, ominously, given what was soon to follow, “a mass exodus of Socialists from the garment unions” also went to FDR. In sum, “at the 1936 convention, northern cities demonstrated their new power in the party when delegates wiped out the century-old two-thirds rule, long one of the chief defenses of Southern Democrats.”Footnote ³²

This latter point is of considerable importance in understanding the shift in cinema to the mood of film noir, for the aesthetic rupture results from a larger political rupture. By 1937 Roosevelt had recognized that he needed more than traditional Democratic Party unity to rewrite America as a social democracy. He needed a liberal coalition that would work for social change. He had been facing opposition in the Supreme Court to earlier New Deal initiatives (the National Recovery Act, for example), and he faced trouble in his own party due to its dependence on southern Democrats from a solid South (called by Dewey Grantham “the one-party system”) that remained solid out of antipathy for Lincoln.Footnote ³³ He attempted to beat the judiciary by “packing the Supreme Court” and he attempted to weed out southern Democrats in the Senate and Congress who were increasingly forming a “conservative coalition” with Republicans by taking a step that would seem unthinkable today: he went into the South and campaigned against powerful incumbents in his own party. He failed with both the court and the southern Democrats. The glum mood in the Roosevelt White House became the glum mood of the New Deal coalition of blacks, labor, liberals, and women – and, in class terms, of the down-and-out.

Brinkley traces the vitriolic atmosphere of conservative disdain for liberalism in the wake of Roosevelt's late-1930s defeats: “The assault continued over the next several years. Conservatives in congress worked to frustrate what remained of the President's domestic agenda and even to dismantle earlier achievements … many were astonished by the intensity and bitterness of the opposition.” A new House Special Committee to Investigate Un-American Activities (later known as HUAC) chaired by southern Democrat Martin Dies “was launching a series of investigations of liberals and reformers in an effort to discredit the New Deal by tying it to radicals and communists.” Dies made an effort to charge New Dealers Harold Ickes, Frances Perkins, and Harry Hopkins with being communists and to dismiss “dozens of federal employees.”Footnote ³⁴ One of the committee's first acts was to attack artists by closing down the Federal Theatre Project, in part because earlier in the 1930s black participants had made common cause with communists on civil rights issues. Fears in the South, in rural areas, and in conservative quarters now matched and surpassed the investigations of banking and Wall Street that had occurred earlier in the decade. Now the investigators sought to ferret out imagined reds who were out to upend the established order.

International events contributed to a deepening national gloom. War in Europe became increasingly certain as the 1930s drew to a close. And a distrust of leadership resurfaced in connection with World War I, as Americans suspected the US might join the European conflict. A substantial number of Americans had come to believe that the same business leaders who had gotten the US into the Depression had had profiteering motives in getting the US into World War I. A 1937 poll asked if it had been a mistake for the US to enter World War I, and “70 percent … answered ‘yes.’”Footnote ³⁵ During the period Senator Nye's Congressional Committee charged major US companies with profiteering during the war. In 1935, 1936, and 1937 Congress “passed three successive Neutrality Acts aimed at preventing the United States from selling arms or munitions to any warring powers.”Footnote ³⁶ While the nation slowly grasped the inevitability of a new war, an undercurrent of resentment that had not been present at the outset of World War I could be glimpsed at the moment the US entered the war. In 1940, even as Britain was in danger of falling to the Nazis, both Roosevelt and Wendell Willkie promised, in the election of that year, to keep the US out of World War II.Footnote ³⁷ After the election, when the US did enter the war, Frederick Lewis Allen pointed out the suppressed mood of residual anger over World War I. Explaining the differing moods of the US going into World War I and Americans going into World War II, Allen writes,

THE BIRTH OF NOIR

Allen's remarks concerning Americans entering World War II point to the historical connectedness of American memory, the threat of a resumption of World War I which existed throughout the 1930s, and the sourness that materialized in the 1930s toward earlier US involvement in World War I: as a result, the attitude toward World War II is formed by a lingering attitude toward World War I, one which was shaped by charges and countercharges that took place over the preceding decade. This connection illustrates the importance of comprehending noir as a phenomenon which is part of a larger historical fabric that materialized in the 1930s. In trying to explain the sudden emergence of film noir in the late 1930s, Raymond Chandler, for example, remarked, “the Hays Office has become more liberal … I think they're okaying treatments now which they would have turned down ten years ago, probably because they feel people can take the hard-boiled stuff nowadays.”Footnote ³⁹ Attempting to answer a similar question, but as applied to the crisis of confidence he sees among modernists in the mid-1930s, Tyrus Miller sees this crisis as having its “generative matrix in the years of war [World War I].” He correctly sees the period between the world wars as “one long bout of war neurosis, in which the effects of trauma have proliferated in a general contagion.”Footnote ⁴⁰ More directly addressing the same question to the appearance of film noir, but from a quite different angle, Phil Hardy cites sociologists Edhol, Harris, and Young, who suggest “that the emerging contradiction between the sex/gender and the sexual division of labor [as World War II loomed] ‘provided a potential for struggle and questioning, for sexual hostility and antagonism,’” which they were arguing accounted for the appearance of the fatal woman of film noir.Footnote ⁴¹

None of these theories is incorrect, but they need to be considered in relation to one another, and to be read against a more intimate account of the period. On the issue of the emergence of the fatal noir woman, Lea Jacobs notes in her study of the fallen-woman genre that by 1938, with specific reference to Marked Woman, films treating women were doing so with “an atmosphere of pessimism and angst characteristic of film noir” (though generally Marked Woman is not considered film noir).Footnote ⁴² Nevertheless, she is right that well before the outbreak of World War II, shifts were occurring in screen representations of women. And even truer noir women – Brigid O'Shaughnessy in The Maltese Falcon and Velma Baughmam in High Sierra – appear in films released before 7 December 1941. Much of the decade on screen had been marked by women possessed of verbal dexterity and an assertiveness that would remain unmatched until the 1970s.Footnote ⁴³ But a number of small shifts occur. Jacobs notes that the entrepreneurial gold digger of the early 1930s (Gold Diggers of 1933, We're in the Money, 1935), in concert with toughening Hays Office censorship, gives way to women who are punished for using sexual attractiveness to climb the social ladder (Stella Dallas, 1937, and Kitty Foyle, 1940, for example). And in The Women (1939) a good many of the most assertive actresses of the 1930s (Rosalind Russell, Joan Crawford) play strong women whose assertiveness is treated as nasty predation and is contrasted with Norma Shearer's long-suffering and loyal wife who forgets about her husband's infidelities and takes him back. It would be fairly easy to construct an argument that The Women is an extended punishment lesson for women who reject traditional female dependency – as Scarlett is punished for rejecting Rhett's dominance (and accepted southern tradition) in Gone with the Wind (released the same year). Women are further redomesticated at the end of the decade by turning them into mothers, as happens to the woman in the closest thing to an equal male–female onscreen partnership when Nora Charles has a baby in Another Thin Man (1939). Since this shift occurs before the outbreak of World War II, the period typically assigned by noir analysts as accounting for a new hostility to women, what accounts for it?

At the family level, 1930s sociologist Mira Komarovsky concluded in a study of Depression effects on gender roles in the early part of the decade, “Unemployment does tend to lower the status of the husband.” She added, “In some families the hitherto concealed contempt for the husband came into the open; in others unemployment has reversed the husband–wife relation – dominance of the husband having been changed to his complete subordination.” And in some cases, “the husband suffered a loss of respect.”Footnote ⁴⁴ This loss of male power, accompanied by a gain in female power, caused resentment in conservatives who were inclined to resist any change in traditional roles.

In the political sphere, it is worth noting that by the late 1930s Eleanor Roosevelt had her share of people who thoroughly hated her. And she was at the center of a group of powerful women, “the women's network,” who were politically active.Footnote ⁴⁵ Further, the Roosevelt coalition of minorities, labor, the poor, and immigrants included a strong contingent of women. Notably a shift in attitudes toward women occurs just as the New Deal begins to suffer inertia. This shift to hostility to strong women works as part of a larger dynamic that was at work at the outset of the decade and returned with the resurgence of conservative power from 1937 onward. The trajectory of American thought from the early 1930s on had been toward a feminine principle of cooperation and away from a masculine principle of rugged individualism.Footnote ⁴⁶ In 1937, after the bitter battle over Roosevelt's Supreme Court stacking plan, David Kennedy remarks, “the struggle had inflicted such grievous wounds on the president that the New Deal's political momentum was exhausted by 1937 … The way was open, but Roosevelt lacked the means to go forward.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Given Roosevelt's new weakness, conservative resentment of the feminine principle resurfaced. One way this manifested itself was in a more assertive hostility to liberals; another was in a rejection of the feminine principle and in a resurgent resentment of women who acted on their own desires rather than subordinating those desires to men. The fatal woman of noir does this.Footnote ⁴⁸

One can see a fault line in cinema treatments of women late in the decade, as good women – those who subordinate themselves to their men – are separated from those who act on their own desires. Hitchcock's Rebecca (1940), a film with a few of its own noirish scenes, and one which shares a view of domesticity with The Women, exemplifies this point. Rebecca dichotomizes women into two categories, women who desire things for themselves and women whose desires are to satisfy their men. Rebecca, and the housekeeper who loved her, Mrs. Danvers, fall into the first category, and the narrator (Joan Fontaine), whose own desires are so invisible that she is never given any name other than “the second Mrs. de Winter,” falls into the second. Rebecca desires lots of men, including her cousin (in Daphne Du Maurier's 1938 novel he is also her cousin, so her desires are made incestuous and forbidden). Mrs. Danvers desires proximity to Rebecca, even after Rebecca is dead. The narrator, presented as the good woman in both novel and film, is entirely at the mercy of economics. She is first a traveling companion to a selfish dowager, another woman with desires; hence the dowager is presented as repulsive. Then the narrator marries Max de Winter (Laurence Olivier), and she obsesses over trying to please him. In the film, at the beach, Max refers to his second wife as a child. In the novel he tells her, “just be yourself and look decorative.”Footnote ⁴⁹ The film ends with Rebecca the memory and Mrs. Danvers the apparent lesbian being immolated in a kind of mansion funeral pyre, which is the same way the movies destroy the Frankenstein monster. In Rebecca, separation of desire from wife, or from wife's desire, converges with the motherhood of Nora Charles in Another Thin Man (1939) and the bitchifying of the desiring women in The Women (1939).

The two fatal women who follow, in films released just months after Rebecca, Velma in High Sierra and Brigid O'Shaughnessy in The Maltese Falcon, are descendants of Rebecca. They desire and the movies make them pay for it. Velma, the clubfoot of High Sierra, starts out resembling the narrator in Rebecca. She is sweet and accessible and, best of all, she seems to have no desires of her own: she is there for the taking. In High Sierra, a hybrid which connects the gangster films to film noir, Roy Earle (Humphry Bogart) wants Velma, so much that he pays for an operation to fix her foot. Once Velma is empowered by having the detraction removed from her sensual self, she evolves from the dependent potential wife into a shallow, calculating, and desiring nightmare. Her choice in men is repulsive. Unlike the fallen women from earlier in the decade, she has no redeeming heart of gold. She cannot see Roy because of her ego. In The Maltese Falcon, Brigid comes as a fully developed noir woman. She desires the falcon, which represents empowerment and money. She wants to be Rebecca, assured, bankrolled, and free. Soon we see that women with that goal must be liars and murderers. In The Maltese Falcon, Brigid is as bad as the queer, Joel Cairo, and the potential queer, Wilmer. For that she has to pay.

Once one sees the economic and political underpinnings of the shift to a new hostility toward women late in the decade, one begins to see how the emergence of the fatal noir woman is part of a larger constellation of events that converge in the late 1930s. Nearing the decade's end, while the country was trying to choke back nausea over a likely second world war, conservatives started to get in their innings in the area of inquisitional congressional hearings. In 1937, Roosevelt Brain Trust man Adolf Berle remarked, “practically no business group in the country has escaped investigation or other attack … The result has been shattered morale.”Footnote ⁵⁰ The conservative–business coalition was able to start to regain its morale when the Roosevelt loss in the Supreme Court battle “destroyed the image of invulnerability that had been among the President's greatest political strengths.”Footnote ⁵¹ What goes unnoticed is the effect of such inquisition tactics and shifts in authority on the constituency shared by the politicians and the movie industry, the masses, those who voted and bought movie tickets.

For the masses, respectable leadership in the 1930s must at times have appeared to be a function of a magician's trick: now you see it, now you don't. Stable reputations quickly became unstable. Richard Whitney, Samuel Insull, Ivar Kreuger, and F. Donald Coster were all major names in American finance, heroes of the 1920s. Whitney entered the Depression as the savior during the stock market panic, when he represented bankers who temporarily halted the slide. But by the end of the 1930s he was on his way to Sing Sing for fraud. Kreuger committed suicide because his massive international business was built on a house of cards and shifty tactics. Insull, head of a “lofty pyramid of public-utility holding companies,” was pursued by the law throughout the 1930s, but, after being the subject of scandal for the decade, evaded penalty. Coster, “head of the reputable drug house of McKesson & Robbins,” not only kept fraudulent books, but turned out to be an ex-convict whose real name was Philip Musica; he had altered his appearance and carried out an extended fraud of identity.Footnote ⁵²

Of the mood of anxiety that came out of economic and international conditions in the 1930s, one man, interviewed in a bar, remarked, “If someone came along with a line of stuff in which I could really believe, I'd follow him pretty nearly anywhere.” Though his remark sounds religious, Frederick Lewis Allen explains he was speaking of “economic and political and social policy.”Footnote ⁵³ In the early 1930s, when the Depression was at its darkest, any number of people had mistaken Soviet success for a concrete answer to the Depression. At that time, it was not yet known that the Soviets were misrepresenting the effects of their five-year plans. Interest in such alternatives would come back to haunt people when conservatives, energized by Roosevelt failures over the Supreme Court and southern Democrats, would launch their own inquisition in the form of the HUAC. Suddenly interest in communist economic solutions to the Depression was represented as traitorous behavior. As, in Allen's words, the “old verities” were crumbling in the face of developments in Europe, conservatives were raising questions about who was a loyal American. You thought you could rely on American capitalism, then you couldn't. You thought American business icons were reliable, then they weren't. You thought you were a patriot, then you weren't. Moral boundaries blurred. And the HUAC took on a tone of anti-Semitism as well. So the Jewish producers, who had created “an empire of their own” in Hollywood, suddenly had reason for new anxiety, especially in the shadow of German developments.Footnote ⁵⁴ Little wonder a cinema phenomenon marked by uncertainty over moral boundaries should emerge.

This is not to say that noir moments had not crept into film off and on during the 1930s. They just did not become a dominant stream in American filmmaking until decade's end. As early as 1931, Rouben Mamoulian's City Streets offered several noir elements. A young woman stands up for her crooked father, only to learn that he has used her, and she winds up in prison. Once there, Mamoulian uses Expressionistic techniques to demonstrate her psychological stress, as when she lies on her cot and hears a myriad of voices from the past, a scene resembling the knife murderess in Hitchcock's Blackmail hearing echoes of the word “knife” at the family dinner table. And Mamoulian's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, released the same year, contains an Expressionistic treatment in its exploration of the much-discussed noir interest in split personality, as do Frankenstein, Dracula (both 1931), and Stranger on the Third Floor (1940). Fog over Frisco (1934) offers an early glimpse of the fatal noir woman, in the form of Bette Davis's Arlene Bradford, who, unlike Davis's Marked Woman character and the women of many early 1930s fallen-women films, has no heart of gold. And both Heroes for Sale (1933) and Meet John Doe (1941) contain quite noirish nightmare scenes.

If one goes back to the early Borde and Chaumeton effort to define noir, one can see how much a crisis of national confidence has played into noir's development. They sum up noir as a result of “moral ambivalence … contradictory complexity of the situations and motives [which give] the public a shared feeling of anguish or insecurity.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Discussing the crisis of modernism in the late 1930s, Tyrus Miller remarks that the late modernist text abandons modernism's “desire to restore significance to a broken world.” Brian McHale asserts that when late modernist “poetics begins to hemorrhage … it is still (barely) possible to recuperate these contradictions by invoking the model of the ‘unreliable narrator.’”Footnote ⁵⁶ This is why film noir so often relies on an unreliable narrator in the form of voice-over, or more generally why it ironizes subjective certainty. In an unstable universe, we can see characters who feel certainty discover their subjective error as they discover the ambivalent universe. Noir characters start out certain, a subjective mistake, then events overtake them.

The shift from a universe with its moral lights in place to one characterized by ambivalence materializes in the 1937 film You Only Live Once. In film noir, the much-discussed voice-over is part of a broader shift to ironizing subjective certainty. And this film does that by confining its audience to the perspective of ex-con Eddie Taylor (Henry Fonda). Borde and Chaumeton saw the result of presenting the noir universe as “the state of tension created in the spectators.” This seems to be the central goal of You Only Live Once. Because the Depression had moved into its later stages, early noir films – or films with strong noir elements – focus on people who have been assigned an identity which they do not accept, as the economic crisis had rewritten identity for many Americans. By the latter part of the decade, many had moved past fighting the effort to reidentify themselves and into a mindset of living with the irony. Eddie is identified as a criminal, but until the end of the film we do not see that he is one. Nor is it ever clear why he was in prison in the first place. Furthermore, the priest he meets in prison takes the position that the prison authorities are wrong in their treatment of the men. Eddie spends most of the film trying to fulfill the American dream of marrying his soul mate and holding a job, while trying to get past the irony of his identity as criminal other. The moral ambiguity spreads when his wife (Sylvia Sidney), the ideal spouse and mother, chooses to join him as he is on the run from the law. When they are both gunned down at the film's end the universe seems empty and the audience, having identified with the young couple, is suddenly alienated. Apparently this ending was too hard-core for the early noir period, and Expressionist director Fritz Lang tacked on a few seconds of film in which the pair are called to heaven (thereby contradicting the film's title). But the few seconds of running time the tack-on takes cannot counter all of what has preceded it.

This shift to an uncertain universe can be further illustrated by noting the way noir treated the modern city. One of the most discussed elements in film noir, and in the 1930s, is the new urban world.Footnote ⁵⁷ Louis Brandeis, T. S. Eliot, and Franklin Roosevelt all felt that one problem of modernity was the new industrial city.Footnote ⁵⁸ One difference between the earlier detective of crime films and the later detective of noir is in his relationship with the modern urban world. One of the identifying features of this new urban center was its living quarters, the apartment. When the building of apartments hit Chicago in the late nineteenth century, William Dean Howells complained that an elevator flat provided “no room … where the family can all come together and feel the sweetness of being a family.” In New York, the Architectural Record warned of the threat of ethnic mixing apartments represented: “Some day there will elude the vigilance of the janitor or the real estate agent a hook-nosed tenant.”Footnote ⁵⁹ These anxieties aside, apartments, along with skyscrapers, took over urban America. They characterize the city. The traditional detective can master this city; the detective of noir finds in it a revelation of his own inability to know.

This point is illustrated by William Powell's Philo Vance in The Kennel Murder Case (1933). Vance is presented with an apartment house murder, which the police have ruled a suicide. To support his belief it was murder, Vance constructs a model of the apartment building. The screen image presents Vance looming over the doll's house-size model apartment, its master, as he deftly shows the police why they are wrong. In 1933 the film detective can still “own” the city. When the noir detective exhibits such confidence regarding the city, he usually finds himself brutally beaten in a dark alley somewhere.

In several ways, the apartment of noir is quite a different place. Is is the heart of the new urban anonymity and disconnectedness from tradition. In it traditional gender lines are uncertain, friends are bought and sold, romance is abandoned, and apparently knowable value is destabilized. This is what happens in the noir apartment in The Maltese Falcon where Sam Spade, Brigid O'Shaughnessy, Kasper Gutman, Joel Cairo, and Wilmer Cook wait together through the night for the arrival of the priceless falcon. Gutman describes Wilmer as being like his own son, then sells him out as the fall guy for earlier murders; Cairo's homosexuality is foregrounded (which is regarded as sexual decadence in 1941 – if you were in the government, you could get blackmailed for it) and he demonstrates an interest in Wilmer. In a Nixonian plan, Spade fabricates possible fall guys to feed to the police. He offers to sell out his romantic soul mate, Brigid, who has lied non-stop throughout the film. And the falcon, upon which they all place their certain hopes for wealth, turns out to be a mirage. When Spade attempts to explain to Brigid why he “sends her over” at the film's end, he has finally to revert to something like primal urges. He tells her he will not lie for her, remarking, “I won't because all of me wants to.” All certainties with which the film started are abandoned in the apartment of The Maltese Falcon. Spade is no morally squeaky-clean protagonist. Unlike the detective of The Kennel Murder Case, Spade cannot even explain himself, let alone the city, with certainty. And no other character has been entirely right about anything.

The outbreak of World War II would follow on the heels of the release of The Maltese Falcon. The new demons of blurred morality released in You Only Live Once, Rebecca, Stranger on the Third Floor, High Sierra, and The Maltese Falcon would soon meet the world of Bergen-Belsen and all of the early anxiety would explode in a world which could no longer be depended upon.