7 Political Noirs
7. Crossfire (1947)
The three Bobs in Crossfire (1947): Robert Ryan, Robert Mitchum and Robert Young.
Crossfire (1947) begins with a brutal murder. We only see the shadows of one man beating another to death in a hotel room. In due course we discover that a fascist has killed a Jewish man. Nothing new under the sun? Perhaps, but there’s a problem: we're in Washington D.C. two years after the military defeat of fascism. And that's the catch: military defeat of fascism does not mean its demise. They're here, among us. As Brecht put it: the bitch of fascism is always in heat.
How to go back to live in peace after the war? What to do with the enemy now? Peacetime is an art. Crossfire's message is clear: military defeat of fascism is not enough. The horrors which made fascism possible are quite loose at home, closer than one might expect.
During the war it was clear: shoot the fascists. Now the ordeal is subtler, diffuse, and an overwhelming angst seems to inhabit every character in the film as the very same incarnate ideas they were supposed to have destroyed at the war front reappear in the corner bar.
6. Gun Crazy (1950)
A match made in hell.
Gun Crazy might be the most uniquely American motion picture in history: there is no other country in which such a story could be so effortlessly told with such a straight face— and feel veridical. A boy grows up obsessively keen on one particular thing: guns. Eventually he recognizes their sexual appeal, as a killer blonde, wild-blooded and death-foolish, comes into his life. It’s love at first shooting. "We go together like gun and ammunition go together". A one-way ticket to Crazyville it is, with two riding shotgun
In Gun Crazy (1950) death, love and madness go in high gear, and it's hard to keep track midst all the shooting. Two lovebirds on the road, trying to make ends meet in a tough economy— both of whom happen to be excellent shooters with a taste for the trigger.
The rest is a blast. What begins as a private obsession quickly develops into a social malady. How? Easy: shooting. Theft, murder and mayhem: shoot, shoot, shoot, cowboy. What else does a gun-loving country expect of its citizens?
5. Kiss Me Deadly (1955)
Opening Pandora’s Nuclear Box.
Robert Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly (1955) turns 1950s L.A. into a Kafkaesque world of paranoia. The third-person plural pronoun is used ominously throughout the film: “They took her away”, “they tried to get in”, etc. Who are they? The government? But what does this even mean?
The film tackles the sublime un-presence of power in the nuclear age: it’s ridiculous to think of a democracy when a few man control a gadget capable of ending the world with a bang. Like in Greek tragedy, the characters in Kiss Me Deadly are constantly warned not to pursue it any further. Only here the truth does not concern the hidden horrors of personal identity, but those of a political order predicated on nuclear power.
Stop now! Don’t look back, don’t ask questions. Helping a hitch-hiking blonde is too much already: one must not get involved, but merely do as one is told, finding satisfaction in marriage, cars, vacations and other low-risk niceties. Look away, fella! –– “Curiosity killed the cat”.
4. Mildred Pierce (1945)
Lovely bourgeois family relations in Mildred Pierce (1945): envy and ingratitude.
Mildred Pierce (1945) is like a black-and-white Balzac story set in 1940s L.A.
The intricacies of bourgeois society, work, status, the interests, the families, justice, crime, marriage and divorce: everything is traversed by money and an irresistible impetus to climb that social ladder and "make it". Such a trajectory leaves blood, feuds and indelible emotional scars. You can’t make it without some irreparable tragedy.
Through Joan Crawford's title character the film focuses on the role of women in this society. Here's one tough chameleon lady: she goes from Norman Rockwell-esque housewife to hard-working single mother and, then, restaurant-chain owner. And there's something about this successful divorcée that seems to upset everyone in town. And something about being such a woman that Mildred herself cannot handle.
Mildred Pierce does in film the same vivisection of bourgeois society Balzac does in ink, only it endorses a different perspective: that of a liberal bourgeois. Whereas Balzac was notoriously reactionary, Mildred Pierce values the work ethic, the self-made (wo)man creed, pointing its critical artillery against workless decadence.
3. The Big Heat (1953)
Gloria Grahame in The Big Heat (1953)
Glenn Ford plays Bannion in the The Big Heat (1953): a good man, as decent as they come. And of course, then, he's in danger. It's corruption all the way up and down: what good will it do, then, for a man to seek truth and justice?
The Big Heat takes us back to the first book of Plato’s Republic, where Socrates and Thrasymachus dispute the definition of justice, and whether the unjust or the just life is more advantageous. Well, The Big Heat answers it: the unjust life is more advantageous and the unjust man is happier— Thrasymachus vindicated in the big city.
In its terrifying moral pessimism The Big Heat resonates not only with Plato’s political philosophy, but with much of 20th century thought: the world's gone wrong, so wrong you cannot live right.
2. Shadow of a Doubt (1943)
Incestuous tension between uncle and niece in Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt (1943)
Be careful what you wish for. Yearning to escape the dullness and alienation of adorable small town America, with its adorable conformist citizens who always use the crosswalk and conduct their affairs with most distinguished and proper manners— Little Charlie (Teresa Wright) welcomes her Uncle Charlie (Joseph Cotton), her namesake, to her "average" American home: and with him, the world's foul sty...
Hitchcock shoots the story as a tale of two worlds and Little Charlie, fully conveyed by Teresa Wright as an all-American girl who’s a bit too smart for her own good, stands in between these two worlds, unable at the end to land her feet on any of them. There is no synthesis of contradictions here: Uncle Charlie's foul sty of a world, with its urban decay and psychopathic deviations, and the priggishly innocent Santa Rosa, with its adequate citizens, are never reconciled.
Little Charlie’s morbid ennui – the girl who knew too much – and the psycho-sexual incestuous tension she has with her nihilist uncle, alongside Hitchcock’s irony of bringing hell into alleged paradise, make this 1943 masterpiece one of the finest, and most macabre, political critiques in cinema.
1. Chinatown (1974)
John Huston embodying the spirit of progress in Chinatown (1974).
Chinatown (1974) unites the western and film noir into one single catastrophe stretched in time over a long historical arc. The frontier spirit which conquered the west and made a country, establishing a law on the land and allowing economic prosperity, finally reveals itself: it was never the opposite of savagery and barbarism, but a moment of them, the other side of the same coin, call it modernity.
That the world is rotten from gutter to penthouse: that was clear from many other noirs, for instance, The Big Heat (1953). But that there was a logic to it, that it could not have been any different given how things started in the first place, with the violent subjugation of nature and labor to the purposes of a monomaniac project of domination: that was far from the scope of classic film noir.
Chinatown stands for the pessimism of post-revolutionary political expectations: the rich and powerful built this world and own it; it’s their world and we just live in it. As to the Leninist question, then, the most prominent political question of the times, "What is to be done?", we get Chinatown’s fatal answer: "As little as possible"––––.
