The past two decades have witnessed a flurry of studies concerned with representations of racial passing. While some of these have paid due attention to cinematic narratives –Gayle Wald devotes a chapter of Crossing the Line: Racial Passing in Twentieth-Century U.S. Literature and Culture (2000) to the passing “problem” pictures of the late 1940s; Julie Cary Nerad's edited volume Passing Interest: Racial Passing in US Novels, Memoirs, Television, and Film, 1990–2010 (2014) features contributions on Chameleon Street (dir. Wendell B. Harris, Jr., 1989) and Bamboozled (dir. Spike Lee, 2000) – Projections of Passing is the first monograph to deal exclusively with passing in Hollywood cinema. The reason for the neglect is related, perhaps, to the fact that comparatively few films thematizing racial passing – when considered alongside the enormous archive of literary texts dating back to the 1830s – have been made. N. Megan Kelley's definition of passing, then, is necessarily expansive. In postwar America, “not only were there blacks passing as whites, but women passing as men, gays passing as straight, Communists passing as good Americans, Jews passing as Gentiles, and even aliens passing as humans (and vice versa)” (4). Particularly suggestive for Kelley is the rise of various intersecting trends and discourses in the postwar period – a Red Scare that focussed obsessively on “the enemy within”: “Communists infiltrating America as patriotic citizens passing undetected in society” (9); the scapegoating of, in particular, Jews and homosexuals for their perceived un-Americanness; new theories of psychology that popularized a series of terms such as “guilt complex,” “temporary insanity,” “submerged second self” and “psychopathic behavior” (69); and first steps towards the end of Jim Crow, beginning with Harry S. Truman's desegregation of the US armed forces by executive order in 1948. For Kelley, in the long 1950s (1947–1960), “Fears about passing as dangerous to the self and subversive to the nation assumed unprecedented importance” (8). Hollywood cinema became a particularly charged site for reflecting and working through these anxieties because it, too, was under suspicion for purveying covert, anti-American messages in this period of blacklisting and an active Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals.

After an introductory first chapter, the book is organized into paired chapters. The first two focus on racial or ethnic passing in problem pictures and melodramas: Gentleman's Agreement (dir. Elia Kazan, 1947), Pinky (dir. Elia Kazan, 1949), Lost Boundaries (dir. Alfred L. Werker, 1949), Imitation of Life (dir. Douglas Sirk, 1959). For Kelley, the earlier films present passing as a viable social strategy, one that is understandable given the curtailed freedoms with which African Americans have to contend on a daily basis. By the late 1950s, however, the emphasis has shifted from passing being a product of a flawed society to passing being attributed to psychological instability within the passer him- or herself. The following two chapters focus on different iterations of the “enemy-within” scenario. Chapter 4 is concerned with films dramatizing “political passing” (9): Communists passing as true Americans. Hollywood – anxious to refute accusations of leftist sympathies – produced around fifty anticommunist movies in the period Kelley discusses. In the two analysed here, The Woman on Pier 13 (dir. Robert Stevenson, 1949) and My Son John (dir. Leo McCarey, 1952), Communists are uncovered within the American family home. Chapter 5, meanwhile, focusses on “invasion-from-within” science fiction films in which “seemingly ordinary Americans were no longer who they pretended to be”: underneath “their passing exteriors lurked alien and possibly sinister impostors” (116).

The final two chapters foreground films underwritten by anxieties about gender – masculinity (in chapter 6) and femininity (in chapter 7) – anxieties that also become bound up with sexuality. It is here, perhaps, that the elasticity of Kelley's definition of passing becomes stretched beyond credible limits. “On the surface,” Kelley writes, Some Like It Hot (dir. Billy Wilder, 1959) “was the most explicit instance of passing in films of the fifties” (161). The “cross-dressing and gendered masquerades” of Wilder's film simply do not compute with the form of passing Kelley describes in the previous four chapters (161). Passing as spectacle relies on the persuasiveness of the performance: even if the spectator knows the on-screen passer is passing, s/he must believe that the passer is capable of passing within the fictional universe of the film. Moreover, the stakes are high in fictional and real-life instances of passing: exposure results in punishment and/or social ostracism. This is equally true of the conventional racial-passing films Kelley discusses, and the “enemy-within” movies. By contrast, the comedy in Some Like It Hot derives from the fact that, despite Jack Lemmon's utterly unconvincing performance as Daphne, Joe E. Brown still finds it credible.

Notably absent from the book is any substantive engagement with the formal qualities of these films. I'm thinking particularly, here, of one of the most cinematic modes during the period Kelley discusses: film noir. In his influential work on the subject, Eric Lott argues that film noir presents a universe that links blackness and whiteness to corruption and purity respectively, a moral code that is underwritten by the genre's chiaroscuro aesthetic. Implicit, though not stated, in Lott's article is the possibility that film noir is also a response to anxieties surrounding racial passing. In other words, if a “white” character can become visually “black” through the camera's play with light, darkness and shadow, and the spectator's own shifting perception, film noir betrays a lack of faith in the stability of racial categories even as it strives relentlessly to maintain them.Footnote ¹ The omission is all the more surprising given that Kelley discusses at least two films noirs – The Woman on Pier 13 and the iconic Touch of Evil (dir. Orson Welles, 1958).

Still, the book demonstrates the sheer flexibility of passing as narrative device and rhetorical strategy. Its most noteworthy intervention is its identification and juxtaposition of groups of films not usually considered in terms of their overlapping preoccupations: problem pictures, anticommunist films and science fiction movies. As Kelley demonstrates, these films were united by common concerns at a historical moment in which “the specter of passing became more threatening … because it fed anxiety about subversively hidden blacks, Communists, homosexuals, or ‘others’ who could threaten the stability and security of the white status quo” (6).