By Ryan Fallon
When the Stock Market crashed in 1929, and subsequently led to the greatest economic collapse in American history, it did so in the midst of a steady climb of audience admissions for a burgeoning movie industry at the beginning of the 1930s. In addition to the financial turmoil that America was now steeped in, the advent of sound in motion pictures and the disappearance of silent films that had been universally popular in the 1920s led to a slowdown in admissions. However, beginning in 1934, admissions to films began to steadily climb again, and continued to do so throughout the rest of the decade and into the wartime years. Despite the widespread financial ruin the Depression had inflicted upon the country, American audiences returned to the movies in the mid-1930s in search of the escapism that cinema offered, primarily in the form of comedy films, westerns and musicals.
Amidst the Depression-era blossoming of American cinema, both as an industry and an artform, a new genre formed: film noir. Recognized now for its aesthetic features, such as minimal lighting and use of darkness and shadows, as well as its depictions of the more nefarious aspects of American society, film noir has come to be associated with America’s postwar socio-political anxieties. Inner-city crime, atomic-age paranoia, the Communist threat, urban decay, postwar suburbanization, drug and alcohol abuse, mental illness and the criminal underworld became staples of the noir films that came to define the genre from the late 1940s to the early 1960s, as depicted in films like The Killers (1946), The Big Sleep (1946), Criss Cross (1949), Kiss Me Deadly (1955), Touch of Evil (1958) and Shock Corridor (1963).
However, while film noir can be seen as both an exorcism of the collective trauma sustained during and after World War II and a reflection of the country’s paranoid psyche at the onset of the Cold War, the roots of these films can be traced back almost two decades prior, where, as film historian Eddie Mueller states, the noir genre was born in response to the economic turmoil of the early 1930s: “Frankly, I think the Depression was a bigger influence [on film noir] than World War II…the writers that influenced the more adult content and attitude found in film noir created their essential work in the thirties.”
With the economic suffering that moviegoing audiences experienced in the wake of the Depression, elements of early film noir, or what historian Joel Dinerstein calls “emergent noir”, became more pervasive in American cinema from the early 1930s until the mid-1940s. proceeding chronologically, this essay examines how these early films reflected the fears and social anxieties of American audiences amidst the country’s economic downfall, as well as breaking down what these films had to say about the crisis of capitalism during the Depression era.
The genesis of the noir genre began in the pre-code years of the early 1930s (1930-1934) with the production of “gangster” films. Released directly after the 1929 Crash and at the onset of the Depression, gangster films like Little Caesar (1931), The Public Enemy (1931), The Secret Six (1931), Quick Millions (1931), City Streets (1931), Scarface (1932), I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932) and Picture Snatcher (1933) were instrumental in establishing the criminal “protagonist” that operated in society without a moral code.
The gangsters in these films occupied two different roles in the early crime cinema of the 1930s. Firstly, gangsters were interpreted by moviegoing audiences as stand-ins for corporate capitalists that had been to blame for America’s financial freefall. Within this context, audiences equated criminal gangdom with the gross overindulgence and corporate corruption inherent in capitalism, and in doing so, associated the idea of the businessman with that of a violent criminal. Often portrayed by Paul Muni, Edward G. Robinson and James Cagney, the capitalist/gangster subtext was further compounded by the depictions of characters describing their criminal syndicates as “businesses” and “organizations” that used crime to turn “profits”, often ending with the gangster’s grisly demise, which was seen by audiences as a come-uppance for banks and financial institutions that had allowed for the crash to happen.
However, as the gangster films progressed in the early 1930s, a second role which the gangster occupied developed: the anti-authoritarian revenge character. Seen by audiences as a justified, vigilante figure, rather than a capitalist thug, Joel Dinerstein writes that this change in character provided “a revenge narrative…it provided a vicarious outlet for those who felt cheated of their savings, hopes, and future, without sacrificing the myth of upward social mobility.” It is in these films that the noir trope of the alienated, morally ambiguous protagonist, that would come to be a staple of the postwar noirs, was established. The anti-authoritarian attitude of the gangsters in the early 1930s crime films was also critical to the molding of this new noir character, one who acted in desperation and used violence as “the cinematic language of resistance” and “emerged as an inquiry into a fallen national mythos” in the wake of the failure of American industrial capitalism.
The implementation of the Hays Code in 1934 ended the gangster film boom in the mid-1930s. The Hays Code sought to censor depictions of overt violence and sexuality, and censors feared that the depiction of the criminal antihero who resorts to organized crime to take from capitalists would serve as too much of a role model to a nation that, in the wake of the crash and Depression, had already turned on conservative political values, as described by Hanson Philip as “…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.”
This public hostility towards bankers and businessmen also coincided with a robust labor movement, one that sought to organize support for industrial unionization and mass participation in strikes and protests during the 1930s. The crime films produced during the Depression-era gave credence to the audience’s notions of resistance, especially to the political powers that had destroyed the economy. The Popular Front movement that became synonymous with labor-rights and strikes was intertwined with a blossoming creative movement in art culture, in what Michael Denning calls “The Cultural Front.” Although by the late 1930s the gangster film had been phased out, the core themes and elements, namely the anti-authoritarian attitude towards power and the protagonist without a moral code, were manifested in a new iteration of crime film: the prewar “emergent” or early noir.
These early noirs capitalized on the notions of social and economic despair that the gangster film had previously established. Despite the influence gangster films had on the eventual formation of film noir, as they aren’t typically aren’t considered “noir” films. The early noir films of the late 1930s and early 1940s appropriated the themes of desolation and criminality and shifted the focus from the gangsters of the organized underworld and onto the alienated everyman, suggesting that engaging in criminal acts in the face of economic desperation was not exclusive to the flashy mobsters of the pre-code era. These noir films such as They Drove by Night (1940) and High Sierra (1941) recast the criminal protagonist not as a murderous mobster, but instead as a conventional citizen forced into crime by necessity. According to Winfield Fluck in Crime, Guilt and Subjectivity in Film Noir:
Both gangster film and film noir deal with crime. However, there is one major difference. In film noir, the crime is no longer committed by a “professional” criminal but by an “ordinary” citizen who is drawn- or appears to have been drawn- into crime by accident or some strange, unforeseen combination of factors.
This new Depression-era protagonist in early film noir is often depicted as isolated and hardened, often working class, and usually resentful of the corrupt nature of authoritative entities. Though these protagonists operate without a moral code, they are presented to the audience as sympathetic figures that yearn for upward economic mobility. This is best exemplified by the characters portrayed by Humphrey Bogart from the late 1930s-1940s, most notably in They Drove by Night, in which George Raft and Bogart play overworked, poverty-stricken truck drivers desperate for money. In assessing the social and political subtext of the broken protagonist, film essayist Andrea Mattacheo writes that the aim of early noir was to
…make the nation feel understood through a shared imagination of failure, radical and disturbing images in which defeat, and breakdown were not represented as sins to make amends for; an imagination in which losers weren’t to be stigmatized but to be understood, since they were just men and women defeated by an unfair system. Like the great part of the American people after 1929.
The characters featured personas and qualities rooted in Depression-era social phenomena that novelist Sherwood Anderson called the “pervasive sense of failure in the wake of the loss of ‘dignified work.’” However, as Mattacheo also points out, these films did not limit their depictions of economic turmoil to the impoverished. Films like Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane (1941) and its follow-up The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) are stories of weKalthy characters that appear as isolated and alienated as the drifters and criminals typically portrayed in film noir. Prior to the production of Citizen Kane, Welles had emerged from the progressive Cultural Front movement of the 1930s with his Federal Theatre Project (FTP).
In the 80 years since its release, Citizen Kane has been heralded not only a landmark artistic and cinematic achievement, but also as perhaps the most complete example of pre-war noir, with its nod to the German Expressionist-inspired dark shadows and minimal lighting, which had been absent in the early gangster films and slowly phased into noir in the late 1930s. Both Kane and Ambersons showcase characters that occupy the same world of Depression era despair and economic turmoil seen in earlier Depression films. Kane presents the story of Charles Foster Kane, a stand-in for the real-life business tycoon William Randolph Hearst, whose emotional downfall amidst his fortune spoke to the notions of loss and isolation felt by prewar moviegoing audiences. Similarly, Ambersons deals with the familial pitfalls of the Ambersons, whose vast fortune dwindles at the dawn of the automobile era.
As the early noir period moved in the 1940s, the last subgenre of early noir was formed: the hard-boiled private detective film. This genre was based on the works of 1930s crime writers like Raymond Chandler (Farewell, My Lovely, The Big Sleep, The High Window) and James M. Cain (The Postman Always Rings Twice, Mildred Pierce) and best exemplified by films like The Maltese Falcon (1941), The Glass Key (1942), Murder, My Sweet (1944) and Double Indemnity (1944). Although postwar detectives were generally depicted as being one class above their clients, the detectives of the prewar and wartime years exuded a Depression-era working class sensibility, as seen in The Maltese Falcon and Murder, My Sweet. Here, the private detectives share the same alienation and post-Depression dismay for society that the working-class criminals embodied in the films of the late 1930s. They see the detective world as a dark “business,” one that pits them against criminal capitalists (such as the Cairo and Gutman characters who are searching for the Falcon in The Maltese Falcon), as well as corrupt authoritative entities (The police officers in Murder, My Sweet). In the works of Raymond Chandler that were adapted for the screen in the early 1940s, the antagonists are presented as upper-class, often wealthy and entirely corrupt and authoritative, channeling the resentment towards depictions of the wealthy that had been so prevalent immediately after the stock market crash. By the end of World War II, noir films had begun to assume the political and social contexts that would become synonymous with the Atomic age and anti-communist ideology. The economic factors that had shaped the noir genre in the 1930s and early 1940s had slowly dissipated from noir cinema, as America’s wartime economy boom had put millions back to work and the labor consciousness of the 1930s was replaced by hostile anti-labor attitudes, instigated by the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) attacks on unions in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
Though the focus of noir films shifted from the Depression era themes to those of America’s Cold War climate, these films of the 1930s and 1940s provided a depiction of the economic and social fears that audiences expressed after the financial collapse, while also reflecting the public sentiment that America’s financial and political structure had failed the working-class population.
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