10.13125/2039-6597/1386
Film noir is known for its duplicity. Industry censors considered 1940s noir cinema provocative, salacious and ‘sordid.’ Hollywood studios walked a fine line between appearing to comply with Hays office Production Code censorship while simultaneously pushing the envelope of its moral constraints, then hyping and sensationalizing censorable sex, violence and hard-hitting themes to sell noir films to the public. In fact, studios capitalized on the racy explicit nature of noir pictures in publicity contradicting assurances of censorial compliance. For instance, censor Joseph Breen was “shocked” when MGM purchased James Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice. It was banned for a decade. Yet, ten years later as filmmakers adapted hardboiled fiction, Breen assured religious groups it would “not be offensive.” Yet, it was promoted as “torrid,” “too hot to handle” with Lana Turner in a bathing suit finding “Love at Laguna Beach” with hunky John Garfield who clamored, “You must be a she-devil,” suggesting far more sex, skin and “savage boldness” than is shown in the film. Film noir responded to Production Code censorship and other regulatory factors, including Office of War Information Bureau of Motion Pictures restrictions on Hollywood screen depictions of the domestic American home front (or overseas combat front), and Office of Censorship strictures such as a wartime ban on screen gangsters as ‘un-American’ for propaganda purposes in World War II-era noir films centering on criminals. These multiple censorship entities often collided. This regulatory climate catalyzed the development of film noir, a dark cycle of shadowy 1940s-50s crime films that boomed by World War II and evolved over the postwar era. I will investigate extensive primary archival research—including scripts, memos from industry censors, writers, directors, producers, and publicity records—to compare how film noir was censored and sold.
application/pdf
2039-6597
1386
9
en
urn:nbn:it:unica-16967
Sheri Chinen Biesen
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0
Between
Film
Censoring and Selling Film Noir
Text.Serial.Journal
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Walls, Screens, Photographs - Planes of Censorship
2015-05-14
2015-01-12
2015-05-31
2023-11-18
1
Sheri Chinen Biesen
2015/05/14
10.13125/2039-6597/1386
Rowan University
2039-6597
9
Film
en
urn:nbn:it:unica-16967
Censoring and Selling Film Noir
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/between/article/download/1386/1411
5
         Censoring and Selling Film Noir
                           Sheri Chinen Biesen



      Analysed retrospectively, film noir is not a genre, but a style
influencing many different genres1. French critics Nino Frank and Jean-
Pierre Chartier coined the term film noir (black film) in 1946,
recognizing a series of American crime pictures notable for their
censorable nature and violent eroticism. In the United States, by 1944
industry analysts observed the “red meat” crime cycle, not yet called
film noir (Stanley, 1944: X1; Biesen, 2005: 1). Archive records indicate
censors considered these films provocative, salacious and “sordid”.
Hollywood studios walked a fine line between appearing to comply
with Hays Office Production Code censorship while simultaneously
pushing the envelope of its moral constraints, then hyping and
sensationalizing censorable sex, violence and hard-hitting themes to
sell noir films to the public2. In fact, studios capitalized on the explicit


     1
         Because historians and critics defined the ‘film noir’ category
retrospectively, we are analysing the film context from a retrospective point
of view, and in the 1940s noir films were not classified as a single genre (that
is, Alfred Hitchcock thought of Suspicion as a psychological thriller, Warner
Bros marketed White Heat as a gangster film, moviegoers attended Double
Indemnity expecting a melodrama). French critics Nino Frank (1946), Jean-
Pierre Chartier (1946), Raymonde Borde and Etienne Chaumeton (1955, 2002)
were influential in coining the term film noir widely adopted in the 1970s by
cineastes such as Paul Schrader in “Notes on Film Noir” (1972). Like Schrad-
er and Alain Silver, I consider film noir a style rather than a single genre.
      2 Censorship mediated the production of film noir. Louis Althusser

suggests the seamless, sutured, realist cinematic text (classical Hollywood
style with seamless, invisible editing in narrative films without gaps, fis-


Between, vol. V, n. 9 (Maggio/ May 2015)
Sheri Chinen Biesen, Censoring and Selling Film Noir



nature of noir pictures in publicity contradicting assurances of
censorial compliance. Film noir responded to Production Code
censorship and other regulatory factors, including Office of War
Information (OWI), Bureau of Motion Pictures restrictions on
Hollywood screen depictions of the domestic American home front (or
overseas combat front), and Office of Censorship strictures such as a
wartime ban on screen gangsters as ‘un-American’ for propaganda
purposes in World War II-era noir films centering on criminals3. This
regulatory climate catalyzed the development of film noir, a dark cycle
of shadowy 1940s-50s crime films that boomed during World War II
and evolved over the postwar era. I will investigate primary archival
records – scripts, publicity, memos from writers, directors, producers
and censors – to compare how film noir was censored and sold.
     Hollywood’s moral blueprint for industry censorship, the
Production Code, written in 1930, discouraged sex, violence and illicit
activities in crime pictures such as gangster yarns and film noir.
Loosely followed in the early 1930s, the Production Code was enforced
by 1934 when Hollywood’s trade association, the Motion Picture
Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA) led by Will Hays,
founded the Production Code Administration (PCA), known as the
Hays Office headed by chief censor Joseph Breen.
     Violence and political content shunned by the Production Code
was allowed during the war to promote propaganda in Casablanca




sures, contradictions) as the most insidious form of ideological dominance
(Althusser 1970, 1971). Post-structuralist film theory thus calls for a self-
reflexive display of the process of film construction to highlight this media-
tion to distance, defamiliarize and encourage spectator disengagement from
indoctrinating cultural production as ideologically inscribed subjects from
texts through the dominant mode of representation.
      3 These multiple censorship entities often collided. For more on OWI

propaganda, see Clayton Koppes and Gregory Black (1987); for more on Of-
fice of Censorship banning gangsters, see Biesen (2005).


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                                          Between, vol. V , n. 9 (Maggio/ May 2015)



(1942), This Gun For Hire (1942) and Ministry of Fear (1945)4. By 1943-44
Washington’s Office of Censorship allowed newsreels of atrocities to
further propaganda aims, setting a precedent that paved the way for
grislier, hard-hitting content in noir films. Double Indemnity (1944) was
set before the w ar to avoid fed eral OWI censorship . As the war ended,
Raymond Chandler’s original idea for The Blue Dahlia (1946), where a
brain-injured returning serviceman commits murder but experiences
psychotic amnesia, was censored. Instead, the murderer was changed
to a house detective who was a former cop, violating the Production
Code’s preference for respecting law authority figures.
      Censorship/propaganda aims shaped Hollywood noir films and
how they were sold to filmgoers5. What was shown on screen was
usually not nearly as suggestive as the way noir motion pictures were
promoted. Movie attendance boomed during the war and peaked in
1946, coinciding with the apex of film noir production. Film-going
crowds did not magically appear: studios relentlessly promoted their
films, using trailers, posters, print ads, lobby cards, press books, radio
spots, promotional tie-ins, gossip, and planted stories about the stars
and pictures. In the case of film noir, these promotions often ran
counter to the spirit of the Production Code values supposedly
embraced by the studios. The objective here was to sell the film
through sex, violence – often sexualized violence – and exploit the fact
that the industry’s Advertizing Code for publicity was far more lenient
than the Production Code. The result was a series of salacious “red
meat” publicity campaigns.
      Ads for Paramount’s 1942 Graham Greene noir adaptation This
Gun For Hire pondered «Kiss Her or Kill Her… Wich will he do?»,
suggesting star Alan Ladd’s assassin Raven might murder alluring
blonde Veronica Lake rather than romance her. Publicity quoted Lake:

     4
        The promotion of propaganda in wartime classical Hollywood films
seems to validate Althusser’s theories regarding the censorial mediation of
films (1970, 1971).
      5 This censorship/propaganda mediation also suggests Althusser’s

analysis (1970, 1971).


                                                                                 3
Sheri Chinen Biesen, Censoring and Selling Film Noir



«24 hours in an abandoned shack with a professional killer with a gun
and without a conscience… A guy with ice where his heart should be».
      This hard-boiled misogyny in This Gun For Hire invoked a more
brutal combat mentality as men, including Ladd, went off to serve in
World War II. In fact, Paramount promoted This Gun For Hire as a
patriotic gangster film that featured cold violence and a criminal
antihero who aids the Allied war effort. Moreover, early noir films like
This Gun For Hire, The Maltese Falcon (1941), Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane
(1941) and Alfred Hitchcock’s Suspicion (1941) were produced when
Breen temporarily left the PCA for a year from 1941-42 and shifted
from censor to RKO studio executive publicizing Suspicion.
      After directing his first Hollywood film, the female gothic thriller
Rebecca (1940), Hitchcock adapted Frances Iles’ novel Before the Fact,
retitled Suspicion, about a young wife Lina who is murdered by her
mysterious husband Johnnie with a poisoned glass of milk. The book’s
ending violated the Production Code and censor Breen’s
‘Compensating Moral Values’ clause, requiring justice and retribution
for cinematic crimes. That is, if screen characters engaged in crime,
they had to be punished, die or go to prison, often awaiting their fate at
the electric chair. This contributed to some gruesome noir and gangster
crime picture resolutions, adding to the downbeat finales seen in film
noir. In Hitchcock’s early female gothic thrillers, as World War II
ramped up, these crime films often set their story in an earlier period
overseas (as in Rebecca’s and Suspicion’s English Cornwall coast) to
avoid censorship depicting the American home front during war.
Hitchcock casts comedy star Cary Grant as a dangerous antihero in
Suspicion, opposite naïve ingénue Joan Fontaine, star of Rebecca.
Hitchcock shot multiple endings for the picture to appease censors. In
an alternate patriotic war-related finale, Johnnie joins the RAF rather
than killing Lina.
      Suspicion’s topical propaganda ending was shot instead of the
original novel’s murder and then changed (to one unrelated to the war)
just months before the United States officially entered the conflict
abroad. Film viewers in June 1941 previews of Suspicion may have felt
that the ending in which Cary Grant goes off to war to die was less


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than satisfying. Instead, Hitchcock created ambiguity that suggested
Lina’s suspicions were paranoid machinations. Her subjective point of
view is presented as the imaginings of an obsessed wife who suspects
that her mysterious husband will murder her.
      Breen worked as censor on the film’s production in spring 1941,
but became executive vice president at RKO making publicity
decisions by the fall. RKO was concerned the film would not be
successful at the box-office. Preview viewers were resistant to seeing
Grant in a role that implied he was a scoundrel, killer or reprobate.
Suspicion publicized Grant as “strange,” “frightening” and “sinister,”
invoking “fear,” “agony” and “terror” in Fontaine who suspects he is a
“murderer.”
      Homicide and fatale attraction were the stuff noir was made of—
and studio publicity departments reveled in. For instance, although the
Production Code censored excessive violence, ads for The Maltese
Falcon emphasized brutality and sexuality, featuring Humphrey
Bogart’s earlier High Sierra gangster persona rather than his fedora-clad
detective Sam Spade. Unlike the private eye he portrays in the film, the
poster image resembles a mean hoodlum as he holds a pair of guns
beside a caption «He’s a Killer when he Hates!». Dashiell Hammett’s
tough tale is described as «A story as Explosive as his Blazing
automatics!». Like This Gun For Hire, it resonated with the violence of
war. Noir femme fatale Mary Astor is clad in much more revealing
gowns than she actually wears in the film.
      The noir film cycle and its source material, such as James M.
Cain’s hard-boiled stories, caused controversy for their immoral
violation of the Production Code and were not initially endorsed by
the PCA. It took years for censorial resistance to subside and make it
institutionally feasible and industrially lucrative to adapt these noir
stories during World War II. Even when noir subjects were produced,
they were provocative. Breen was so powerful during the mid-1930s
that he was able to ban Cain’s gritty novels such as his 1934 The
Postman Always Rings Twice and 1936 Double Indemnity outright from
being adapted onscreen. This situation changed as the war years
progressed. By 1944 Cain’s pulp fiction, prohibited earlier for explicit


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Sheri Chinen Biesen, Censoring and Selling Film Noir



sex and violence, was produced with promises from filmmakers and
studios that the noir film versions would tastefully comply with the
Code. Remarking on the censorable nature of Hollywood hard-boiled
adaptations, Fred Stanley of the New York Times reported that studios
were making “red meat” productions involving stories of «illicit
romance and crime» for non-war-related projects, a filmmaking trend
catalyzed by Wilder’s adaptation of Double Indemnity, at Paramount,
promoted as «the chilling masterpiece from the pen of James M. Cain»
(Stanley, 1944: X1; Biesen, 2005: 1).
      Murder and adulterous affairs (for cash) were recurring themes in
these noir films. Their sexual innuendo provided ample intimation of
what was censored. Embedding its moral retribution into promotional
ads, Paramount publicity for Wilder’s Double Indemnity warned, «You
Can’t Kiss Away a Murder!». The trailer for Double Indemnity opened
with a fierce tagline against the blackened nocturnal crime scene of the
railroad tracks: “It’s MURDER!” Miklos Rozsa’s ominous score blares.
A bloodied dying criminal, insurance agent Walter Neff (Fred
MacMurray), confesses into his Dictaphone about committing the evil
deed: «Yeah, I killed him. I killed him for money and for a woman». As
Neff flashes back to remember his past sordid activities, his point of
view subjectively envisions blonde married femme fatale Phyllis
Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwick) in a towel backlit at the top of the stairs
looking down at him. Neff explains, in iconic hard-boiled noir style, «I
was thinking about that dame upstairs and the way she looked at me».
In an atmospheric comingling sex and violence that heightens
censorable connotation, he grabs her in the smoky shadows and she
kisses him as they lay on a couch, reflecting in voice-over, «How could
I have known that murder could sometimes smell like honeysuckle».
When they plot to knock off her husband and make off with the
insurance loot, he tells the femme, «They’re not gonna hang you,
baby… ’cuz you’re gonna do it and I’m gonna help you». A voice-over
announcer provides commentary: «Yes! From the Moment they met it was
Murder!». Edward G. Robinson as insurance investigator Barton Keyes
simulates a private detective by trying to solve the crime. He pursues
them with his “devilish” hunches, but the narrator alerted, «They get


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                                           Between, vol. V , n. 9 (Maggio/ May 2015)



away with Murder!». Phyllis grips Neff with a black glove. As Neff
hides her behind a door, Keyes threatens the “Dietrichson dame”: «I’d
have the cops after her so quick it’d make her head spin». Taglines
shout: «Three Great Stars… Clash… Fred MacMurray. Barbara
Stanwick. Edward G. Robinson… ‘Double Indemnity’! Paramount’s
Shocking… Suspense-Filled Masterpiece Of Love… And Murder!».
     Billy Wilder’s collaboration with Raymond Chandler in adapting
Cain’s Double Indemnity was a censorship milestone and a definitive
example of film noir. Frank Krutnik describes how Cain’s novels were
«secured by the studios because of their success», although they waited
for a favorable «representational context» to adapt them (Krutnik 1991:
36). Leonard Leff and Jerold Simmons observed that studios «could
never resist a potential blockbuster, much less one that smelled of
scandal», so executive Louis B. Mayer «sensed the wind shifting in
Hollywood» and MGM resubmitted Cain’s story The Postman Always
Rings Twice to the PCA in October 1944 (Leff and Simmons, 1990: 130).
     In 1944 Cain complained about Production Code censorship and
called it “nonsensical” in «its effort to establish a list of rules on how to
be decent», arguing that «a studio can obey every one and be salacious
– violate them and be decent» (in Hanna, 1944: 11-13). Censorship and
a transgressive violation of the Code were a key aspect of film noir’s
immense popularity. In fact, the publicity campaigns for both films
advertised that they derived from Cain’s fiction rather than, for
example, in the case of Double Indemnity, referencing director-writer
Wilder or co-writer Chandler.
     When Warner Bros. submitted Mildred Pierce to the PCA for
production consideration in February 1944, Breen insisted that there
were «so many sordid and repellant elements» in James Cain’s 1941
story that it was «highly questionable» (Breen, 1944: 1). Michael
Curtiz’s film managed to satisfy the Hays Office by toning down
objectionable aspects in the story, emphasizing the struggle of its
heroine, solving a murder mystery, and including a moral resolution
that ensures the guilty killer is sent to jail.
     For many noir films, publicity reprimanded characters and
seemed to emulate the scorn of censors. This only added to their


                                                                                  7
Sheri Chinen Biesen, Censoring and Selling Film Noir



appeal. Marketing insinuated that Mildred was more of a bad girl than
her working redeemer in the film. For example, taglines for Mildred
Pierce read «The kind of Woman most men want – But Shouldn’t Have!»
and «She knew there was trouble coming – trouble she made for
herself – a love affair and a loaded gun… She had no right playing
around with either!».
     Moreover, even during the war, critics and industry watchers like
Stanley recognized the “high mark” of Hollywood’s “red meat” trend
in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s intention to film Cain’s The Postman Always
Rings Twice after shelving the project for ten years. Showcasing stars
John Garfield and Lana Turner in a lustful crime yarn, the property
was «kept in the studio’s archives until now because (to use a favored
Hollywood expression)» of MGM’s «inability to clean it up». Stanley
observed, moreover, that this hard-boiled noir trend was proliferating
throughout the industry as studios challenged screen censorship
(Stanley, 1944: X1).
     Noir filmmakers defied and complied with Code censorship in a
variety of ways. In adapting Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice,
MGM struck a careful balance in its efforts to appease the demands of
censors while testing the limits of Code regulation. Cain’s The Postman
Always Rings Twice was considered scandalous in 1934 when
syndicated columnist Herschel Brickell called it «strong men’s meat
and not for those who mind blood and raw lust. It has vigor and
economy of method… But its artistic merit won’t keep it from giving
the sensitive nightmares» (Brickell 1934, 1982: 596). In the wake of
Double Indemnity (1944), MGM finally decided to adapt The Postman
Always Rings Twice (1946), although it was necessary to tidy the book’s
content for censors.
     Originally, censor Breen had been “shocked” when MGM
purchased Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice in May 1934. Yet, a
decade later as filmmakers adapted hard-boiled fiction in wartime,
Breen actually assured religious groups it would “not be offensive”.
The film’s femme fatale Lana Turner was clad in white to denote
angelic purity. The sets were flooded with an abundance of brightness.
MGM director Tay Garnett washed the screen with light to suggest a


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more wholesome setting, unlike the chiaroscuro mise-en-scène Billy
Wilder used to convey a dark atmosphere of censorable actions in
Double Indemnity, which evoked a shady milieu with its pitch-black
interiors and night shots. However, a married blonde femme fatale still
uses sex to lure an antihero to kill her husband for money. Censors
made sure they didn’t get away with murder and would pay for their
evil deeds. Nevertheless, the studio also endeavored to heighten and
call attention to the censorable nature of its subject matter. This
strategy contradicted its earlier pledges that Cain’s story would be
«watered down» into a tame cinematic adaptation (Leff and Simmons,
1990: 130-135).
     Unlike the censor’s mild description of the project to religious
leaders, the film version of The Postman Always Rings Twice was shot to
display abundant skin of femme Cora with tight hot pants, a plunge
neckline, bare midriff, high heels and smoldering look in her eye. It
was also promoted differently as “torrid” and “too hot to handle”.
Lana Turner wore a scanty two-piece bathing suit (resembling intimate
apparel) and found “Love at Laguna Beach” with hunky, bare-chested
John Garfield (in snug swim trunks) who insisted «You must be a she-
devil», as he grabs her and she arches back above the crashing surf, a
scenario that hinted at far more sex, flesh, and “savage boldness” than
is shown in the film. What Breen would reproachfully call “sexually-
suggestive” ads and photo spreads were splashed across Life magazine
to promote MGM’s production of The Postman Always Rings Twice.
Publicity included lobby cards with color photo images of the
adulterous near-naked couple in a heated embrace of Life’s “Love at
Laguna Beach” article with the cautionary warning: “Suitable Only For
Adults”. Posters featured Garfield strangling Turner as he caresses her
alongside an insert of the cover of Cain’s book and the bold caption:
«The Novel They Said Was Too Daring For Hollywood!» (“Love at Laguna
Beach”, 1945).
     While the film showed hamburgers scorching on the grill to
allegorically convey the sexual chemistry between the stars, publicity
could be more explicit about their toxic relationship with taglines
«Their Love was a Flame That Destroyed!» describing James Cain’s


                                                                              9
Sheri Chinen Biesen, Censoring and Selling Film Noir



«Sultry Novel of Love and Violence!». MGM’s trailer for The Postman
Always Rings Twice introduced Turner in hot pants and Garfield with
the fiery caption: «He had to have her love… If he hung for it!».
Turner’s femme fatale Cora tries to convince Garfield’s antihero to
knock off her husband, declaring: «I’m not what you think I am! I
made a big mistake in my life and I’ve got to be this way just once to
fix it».
      Such film noir advertising campaigns show how studios utilized
the censorable material of these productions to amplify controversy
and play up their sex and violent content to lure filmgoers. Leff and
Simmons assert that, «The Seal on The Postman would close the
parenthesis on an era of Code enforcement; it would tell Hollywood to
purchase the most salacious books and anticipate Production Code
certification» (Leff and Simmons, 1990: 134-135). Ads exploited their
taboo concerns and hard-hitting topics to tantalize theatergoers in
hopes of attracting a wider audience.
      Noir films and their publicity revealed a distinction between
major studio releases and lower-budget independent productions that
had a different relation to the Production Code Administration and
different publicity strategies. In stark contrast to noir releases at major
studios, low-budget noir B films such as Poverty Row PRC’s Detour
(1945) did not have the lavish resources for a splashy publicity spread
in Life magazine or the huge stars of MGM’s more expensive
production of The Postman Always Rings Twice. Noir films like Detour
and Scarlet Street (1945) included an abundance of censorable content.
      As gender roles changed from wartime to postwar, gender images
shifted in noir films’ depictions of violence against women, whether it
was the sexually independent femme fatales in Scarlet Street, Gilda
(1946), Ace in the Hole (1951) and Affair in Trinidad (1952), or the more
passive ‘redeemers’ in gothic thrillers like Suspicion and My Name is
Julia Ross (1945). 1949 noir Act of Violence channeled women from
‘transgressive’ femme fatales or gangster molls into nurturing domestic
partners of tormented veterans while reimagining World War II-era
crimes as an allegory for the Cold War.



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                                        Between, vol. V , n. 9 (Maggio/ May 2015)



     Intent on suggesting illicit censorable content, horror conventions
were invoked to promote noir films. Stranger on the Third Floor (1940)
featured ‘demon lighting’ on mysterious sociopath stranger Peter Lorre
that hinted at censurably horrific murderous delights. Horror style ad
campaigns were also used for gothic murder thrillers like Suspicion, My
Name is Julia Ross, and masculine noir melodrama Act of Violence. My
Name is Julia Ross, for instance, was called an eerie mystery with a
haunted mansion and a «nightmare of terror».
     However, there were limits regarding noir publicity: 1947’s Kiss of
Death shows a dead body on the poster, but it avoids the most
notorious scene where Richard Widmark viciously murders an elderly
woman in a wheelchair by pushing her down the stairs as she pleads
for her life. While ads applied horror conventions to a stylized
chiaroscuro-lit Victor Mature as the film’s tortured detective, studio
publicity doesn’t highlight breakout star Widmark who steals the
picture as the cackling psychopathic hoodlum. After the war, in the
absence of Hollywood’s wartime censorship of gangsters, noir pictures
resurrected crime narratives where flawed antiheroes mingle with the
mob.
     Even social-realist noir productions showcased censorable
brutality or sexual innuendo in selling the films with provocative
promotions. Postwar message pictures included Edward Dmytryk’s
acclaimed 1947 film Crossfire in which the PCA censored
homosexuality and a lethal homophobic hate crime. Accordingly, the
story was changed to revolve around a brutal anti-Semitic murder
committed by a bigoted veteran, which was especially topical in the
context of the Nazi holocaust in the aftermath of World War II. While
publicity images for Crossfire revealed gun-toting tough guys in
fedoras and Gloria Grahame’s cigarette-smoking dance-hall dame to
connote hard-boiled noir, ads heralded: «Sensational?… No, It’s
Dynamite!». RKO gave hate crime violence a social-realist spin with
the tagline: «Hate is like a loaded gun».
     Similarly, posters for social-realist 1947 noir Body and Soul
featured star boxer John Garfield and an array of beautiful women in
sexually alluring poses with such taglines as «The story of a guy


                                                                              11
Sheri Chinen Biesen, Censoring and Selling Film Noir



women go for! Body and Soul!». With sexy dames and lawyer-turned-
racketeer Garfield firing a gun, ads for 1948’s Force of Evil promoted
«MGM’s Inside Story of Gambling on Numbers! John Garfield puts his
Body and Soul into Force of Evil!». In Robert Wise’s 1947 noir Born to
Kill, murderous Lawrence Tierney, a smoldering cigarette hanging
from his grim lips, and dangerous sexualized femme Claire Trevor are
labeled, «Bullet-Man and Silken Savage…». Wise’s masculine 1949 noir
The Set-Up was called “Sensational” and “Muscular.”
      MGM’s title for Fred Zinnemann’s 1949 Act of Violence implies
more censorable violence than in the film, which is more
psychologically haunting with its social-realist message about World
War II-era war crimes that provide an allegory about the Cold War Red
Scare. The publicity also taps horror and suspense thriller conventions.
Loew’s Criterion ad for Act of Violence reads, «The Killer with the Limp
Arrives Today!! Night and day he stalks his prey. Slowly, surely his
shadow of doom darkens the life of his terrified victim». After
betraying his men by informing in a Nazi POW camp, Van Heflin’s
conflicted veteran has become «The Hunted! What suddenly made him
a fugitive?». Robert Ryan’s menacing disabled veteran antagonist is
«The Hunter! He came from nowhere to avenge!». Ads for Act of
Violence targeted war veterans and their wives in the suburbs, as
depicted in the film, with mysterious taglines: «One morning Frank
kissed me goodbye… and everything was as it always had been. That
evening, he came home with horror in his eyes… and told me things
that changed my life forever».
      As a World War II veteran stands in the night on the tracks before
a blaring oncoming train and attempts suicide, a trailer roars: «‘Act Of
Violence’! Van Heflin Clashes With Robert Ryan…». Heflin punches a
limping Ryan in a trench coat, «and Three Women Cross Their Evil
Path!». Nonetheless, the noir film was a male melodrama where the
female roles are sidelined as redeemers rather than sexually
independent femme fatales. The noir setting has moved from the urban
jungle to suburban main street USA.
      Selling rough sex and weapons, lobby cards for Joseph Lewis’
low-budget 1950 noir Gun Crazy, independently produced by the King


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Bros., released through United Artists, and originally called Deadly Is
the Female, lauded its “Bonnie and Clyde”-style fugitive noir fatale as:
«She Believes in Two Things… love and violence!» and unlike her more
scrappy androgynous garb in the film she wears a strapless split-skirt
gown. Ads blazed: «Thrill Crazy! Kill Crazy! Gun Crazy!». Peggy
Cummins’ blonde skin-tight sweater-clad femme fatale was more
masculine, wearing a black beret with a cigarette dangling from her
mouth and both hands holding loaded phallic pistols cocked and ready
to fire. As its alternate title, Deadly Is the Female, alluded to, publicity
was all about targeting men (such as an abundance of returned World
War II veterans as the nation was on the precipice of the Korean
conflict) with sex and violence and women with a strong independent,
androgynous female. As in earlier censorable “red meat” wartime
crime films, it promoted the film’s ruthless femme fatale as a blonde
bombshell – «The Flaming Life and Loves of the Most Infamous of All
Female Outlaws! From Her Crimson Lips… to the Blazing Tips of Her
Gun… She’s Boxoffice! Blazing, Blasting Life Story of Laurie Starr the
Lethal Blonde! Wanted In A Dozen States! Hunted by the FBI! Gun
Crazy. Daring! Devastating! Men Were A Dime A Dozen to Laurie
Starr!» – and noted the outlaw couple’s «tempestuous love affair»
intertwined with crime in a fusion of sex with violence. Even low-
budget 1950 B noir Quicksand promoted antihero Mickey Rooney as «A
Guy who Yields to Temptation Just Once…And Finds It’s Once Too
Often!».
      Like the bold risk-taking in independently produced noir pictures,
in the postwar era, amid an evolving Cold War culture industry and a
series of ideological propaganda objectives, film noir protagonists
increasingly shifted from the criminals of wartime 1940s noir to
beleaguered postwar antiheroes and returning veterans, and
eventually to infallible FBI crime fighters and government employees
by the late 1940s and 1950s. In 1955, Raymonde Borde and Etienne
Chaumeton regarded film noir’s defiant tendency to challenge the
strictures of screen censorship. They contrasted the iconic subjective
perspective in film noir – which was distinguished by a «different
angle of vision» concerning corruption «from within, from the


                                                                                13
Sheri Chinen Biesen, Censoring and Selling Film Noir



criminals’» point of view centering on a «whole host of angelic killers,
neurotic gangsters, megalomaniac gang bosses», and «disturbing or
depraved stooges» – with later, more documentary-oriented crime
films such as the police procedural which «considers the murder from
without, from the official police viewpoint» (Borde and Chaumeton,
1955, 2002: 6-29, 135). Earlier wartime 1940s noir films, originally about
criminals and focused on narratives told from an antiheroic point of
view, were eventually superseded by Cold War films that revolved
around crime-fighting cops enforcing the law and projected an all-
powerful federal government. Lewis’ The Undercover Man (1949) was
promoted as an “inside story” not about a crime mind but about a
“U.S. investigation” by G-man protagonist Glenn Ford (inspired by
treasury agent Elliot Ness) and documenting his method of catching a
gangster like Al Capone.
      As noir morphed into Cold war crime films and police
procedurals, films unveiled a myriad crime-fighting network of
government agencies and laboratories to crack down on wrongdoers.
In semi-documentary style, they showed the office buildings and
federal headquarters in Washington or vast metropolises like New
York City as in The Naked City (1948), The Enforcer (1951), The Thief
(1952), or Los Angeles, as in the TV series Dragnet (1951-59), adapted as
a film in 1954. The police “cop on the beat” is shown to be part of a vast
crime-fighting, scientific organization.
      In a changing studio system after the war, the film industry’s
trade organization, the MPPDA, was renamed the Motion Picture
Association of America and longtime head Will Hays stepped down in
1945. Hays’ successor Eric Johnston had no appetite for unsavory noir
pictures by 1947. In fact, in the growing Cold War climate following
the conflict, by 1950 studio executives such as Darryl Zanuck were less
enthusiastic about downbeat crime films, warning that their box-office
risk should be avoided.
      As Dana Polan argues, The Naked City, produced by Mark
Hellinger and directed by Jules Dassin, is «the flip side of film noir»
(Polan 2007). Acclaimed for its realistic documentary-style locales of
New York, The Naked City, shot on location in 1947 and released in


14
                                         Between, vol. V , n. 9 (Maggio/ May 2015)



1948, was promoted by Universal not as a story in noir tagline fashion
about lust, murder, or “red meat” criminals, but rather – in a
comparatively tame manner – as a “truthful” and “exciting” story that
depicts a safe, reassuring postwar world where the cops are the heroes
(telling the story from their point of view) and authorities ultimately
restore order by apprehending criminals – a pleasing resolution for
censors.
      By 1951, Bogart was no longer a 1930s gangster or hard-boiled
1940s noir loner, but rather a crime-fighting law man in The Enforcer,
trying to get a hoodlum to testify and inform on ‘Murder Inc.’ Bogart
was promoted in the United States Pictures production released by
Warner Bros. as an everyman beating the bad guys: «The Hero of this
story is the Fighting District Attorney of this City – and Every City!».
Lobby cards proclaimed: «They called him The Enforcer… Here is the
story of the man who matched himself against a nationwide network
of ‘killers-for-hire’… the first story of the Double-Fisted D.A. who Tore
Apart the Evil Dynasty that peddled Murder for a Price!». Mobilizing
mob slang such as “contract,” “hit,” “troop,” and “finger” as “the most
vicious words in crimedom”, one caption reads as Bogie holds his arm
out and fires a gun: «If you’re smart you’ll come in – If you’re dumb
you’ll be dead». Lobby card images included swaggering tough guy
DA Bogart next to a cop, arresting mobsters, punching criminals,
grabbing and collaring crooks, and protecting society streets while a
girl witness looks down to evade the network of hoodlums. Unlike the
censorship of the World War II years, gangsters and crime fighters
were everywhere and noir style crime films were now flooded with
light with sunny outdoor environs shot on location. Femme fatales had
become more submissive redeemers on the edges of virile masculine
melodramas involving lawbreaking.
      Noir crime films had come a long way from Ladd’s assassin
Raven in This Gun For Hire. As film censorship, the motion picture
industry, and postwar audiences changed in the Cold War, by 1959
Wise’s noir style heist film Odds Against Tomorrow foreshadowed an
apocalyptic future in the atomic era. Its trailer promoted the film as
«This is More Than a Story… It’s an Explosion!» with images of a bomb


                                                                               15
Sheri Chinen Biesen, Censoring and Selling Film Noir



blowing up in what resembles a huge atomic blast and mushroom
cloud that evoked nuclear trauma and a bleak Armageddon.
      After Sunset Boulevard (1950), self-reflexively promoted as “A
Hollywood Story” and “a most unusual picture” – “Sensational…
Daring… Unforgettable!”, with celluloid stars Gloria Swanson and
William Holden in a crazed embrace against a splash of scarlet red,
Paramount was unable to promote the scathing social critique of Ace in
the Hole (1951), Billy Wilder’s last film noir before moving into comedy,
even after the studio vainly changed its title to The Big Carnival
(without consulting Wilder, who produced the film). Both Sunset
Boulevard and Ace in the Hole were considered very provocative,
especially given their unvarnished portrayal of the Hollywood film
industry and a sensationalized media, despite the fact that, on paper,
they conformed to the constraints of the Production Code. In a
changing postwar motion picture industry, Supreme Court rulings,
such as the 1948 Paramount antitrust decision (a case that had been
reopened in 1944, ultimately breaking up the classical studio system
over the course of the 1950s) and 1952 Miracle Decision6 (granting
motion pictures First Amendment free speech protection), would
further weaken the Code and its enforcement as a dis-integrated
Hollywood studio system unraveled.
      In fact, PCA chief Breen left the Hays office in 1954 and the Code
itself became more lenient in 1956, during the reign of Breen’s
predecessor Geoffrey Shurlock, as film noir ebbed. Many films such as
Joseph Lewis’ 1955 The Big Combo revealed greater latitude in screen
content amid an increasingly lax era of Production Code enforcement.
Released, after Breen’s departure, by Allied Artists (formerly low-
budget “poverty row” Monogram), independently produced The Big
Combo included a torture scene, allusions to oral sex, homosexuality,
and sadistic gangsters – all of which were considered shocking

      6
       The Miracle Decision judgment passed into history spurred by Roberto
Rossellini’s The Miracle (1948), a title outside the noir tradition. These censo-
rial developments also recover Althusser’s analysis regarding the mediation
of films (1970, 1971).


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                                         Between, vol. V , n. 9 (Maggio/ May 2015)



transgressions of the Code’s moral strictures. Publicity called it: «The
most startling story the screen has ever dared reveal!». Yet, ironically,
as screen regulation eased regarding cinematic portrayals of formerly
taboo subjects, the film actually implied more censorable deeds than
the relatively subdued publicity. Ads featured gangster Richard Conte
kissing his strapless-gowned mistress Jean Wallace on the neck rather
than any tawdry sexual encounter (its star and producer was Wallace’s
husband, Cornel Wilde, who was also featured prominently in
publicity).
      In the absence of wartime censorship, postwar noir films revived
the provocative underworld of gangsters and heightened illegal
activity. Like Conte’s mobster in The Big Combo, James Cagney’s
volatile cold-blooded psychotic hoodlum Cody Jarrett stirs up brutal
mayhem until he goes down in a fiery blaze of glory in Warner Bros.’
noir gangster picture White Heat (1949), directed by Raoul Walsh.
Posters featured menacing Public Enemy fugitive Cagney looking fierce
firing his guns. Independent United Artists release, Stanley Kubrick’s
The Killing (1956), was promoted «In All Its Fury and Violence… Like
No Other Picture Since Scarface and Little Caesar!». Kansas City
Confidential (1953) was called: «The picture that hits with Bullet Force
and Blackjack Fury!». Lobby cards for Nightfall (1956) highlighted noir
sex and violence as ads proclaimed, «On a night made for Lovers…
and Killers… Between dusk and dawn… sheer terror – and rapture…
in the story of an innocent fugitive… a pick-up girl… and killers
stalking a black bag with $350,000 in loot!».
      Postwar noir films such as Fritz Lang’s The Big Heat promoted
cops, gangsters, and misogynistic violence toward their molls with
returning vet detective Glenn Ford roughly grabbing Gloria Grahame:
«Somebody’s Going To Pay… because he forgot to kill me…» and
«Vice… Dice… and Corruption!». Even in 1953 the violence depicted in
the publicity does not include hoodlum Lee Marvin’s scalding and
scarring his mistress Grahame’s face with boiling coffee or explosively
blowing up Ford’s wife as in the film. Other noir pictures sported
sensational B-movie taglines as in the ads for 1953’s Cry of the Hunted
which screamed «Two Dangerous Men Lured Into the Mysterious


                                                                               17
Sheri Chinen Biesen, Censoring and Selling Film Noir



Bayou by an Exciting Swamp Girl!» in «MGM’s drama of Love and
Thrills in the dangerous waters of the Louisiana Bayous! This is the Cry
of the Hunted!».
      Like a low-budget B-grade teen exploitation flick, taglines were
even wilder for Robert Aldrich’s 1955 noir Kiss Me Deadly, released
after Breen retired from the PCA, and considered by many to be one of
the late great noir films as the cycle declined in the 1950s. With
suggestive innuendo that would no doubt make the former-censor’s
head spin, ads raucously declared «I Don’t Care What You Do To Me,
Mike – Just Do It Fast!» and «Blood-Red Kisses! White-Hot Thrills!
Mickey Spillane’s Latest H-Bomb!». In this cocktail of sex and violence
in the atomic era, Ralph Meeker grabs and kisses his partially bare,
alluringly clad amore with a gun (and skin-tight leopard pants). While
the film was sold with hard-boiled sexual appeal, it also included
harsh violence.
      In addition to the famous explosive atomic finale recognized by
film critics as projecting nuclear fears in the Cold War era, the opening
of Kiss Me Deadly is wonderfully experimental7. Credits scroll in
reverse from the bottom of the screen toward a distant z-axis point at
the top, shot with a fish-eye lens as Meeker’s detective Mike Hammer
zooms around in the pitch-black night in his convertible sports car that
screeches to a stop and runs off the road when Cloris Leachman
appears out of nowhere running fearfully from someone. Although
Leachman is partially dressed, she is clad only in a trench coat with
bare feet on the dirt road in the dark and it is clear she has nothing on
underneath. Her heavy, breathless panting through the credits are
much louder than the thin strains of Nat King Cole on the radio and
convey sexual exertion rather than arduous running. When they stop
at a gas station, the attendant knowingly implies that they have been
having sex on the side of the road, when in fact it is revealed that she is
fleeing an insane asylum pursued by frightening entities. In fine noir
style, suggesting censorable violence, these mysterious lethal thugs


      7
          For more on Kiss Me Deadly, see Schrader (1972), and Silver (1996).



18
                                       Between, vol. V , n. 9 (Maggio/ May 2015)



intercept Mike and Christina, knock him out and viciously beat her to
death off-screen as she screams her lungs out kicking wildly while they
torture her. Who are they? Gangsters? The government? Authorities
from the asylum? A Cold War enemy? It is not clear, but it is a deeply
disturbing sequence. Something is clearly wrong in this troubling Cold
War noir universe which is lacking any of the compensating moral
values Breen championed during his 20-year tenure as Production
Code censor from 1934-54. Kiss Me Deadly is highly visceral, modernist
in its provocative nature, challenging the audience while exploring
stark lapses in PCA censorship in a new post-Breen Cold War era a
decade after the war years.




                                                                             19
Sheri Chinen Biesen, Censoring and Selling Film Noir




                                     Works cited
Althusser, Louis, “Idéologie et appareils idéologiques d’État (Notes
    pour une recherche)”, La Pensée, 151, 1970: 3-38, Eng. tr. Ben Brew-
    ster, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards
    an Investigation)”, Lenin and Philosophy and other Essays, London,
    New Left Book, 1971: 121–176.
Biesen, Sheri Chinen, Blackout: World War II and the Origins of Film Noir,
    Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005.
Borde, Raymonde – Chaumeton, Etienne Panorama Du Film Noir Ameri-
    cain (1941-1953), Paris, Editions du Minuit, 1955, Eng. tr. Paul
    Hammond, A Panorama of American Film Noir, San Francisco, City
    Lights, 2002.
Breen, Joseph, AMPAS Library, 2 February 1944, 1.
Brickell, Herschel, “This is strong men’s meat”, 19 February 1934, Cain:
    The Biography of James M. Cain, Roy Hoopes, New York, Holt, Rine-
    hart & Winston, 1982, 596.
Chartier, Jean Pierre, “Les Americains Aussi Font des Films Noirs”, Re-
    vue Du Cinema, 1 (1946): 66-70.
Frank, Nino, “Un Nouveau Genre ‘Policier’: L’Adventure Criminelle”,
    L’ Ecran Francais 61 (1946): 8-9, 14.
Hanna, David, “Hays Censors Rile Jim Cain”, Daily News, 14 February
    1944: 11-13.
Koppes, Clayton – Black, Gregory, Hollywood Goes to War, New York,
    The Free Press, 1987.
Krutnik, Frank, In a Lonely Street: Film Noir, Genre, Masculinity, New
    York, Routledge, 1991.
Leff, Leonard – Simmons, Jerold, The Dame in the Kimono: Hollywood,
    Censorship, and the Production Code, New York, Grove, 1990.
“Love at Laguna Beach,” Life, 20 August 1945: 123.
Polan, Dana, The Naked City, Commentary for Criterion DVD, 2007.
Schrader, Paul, “Notes on Film Noir,” Film Comment 8: 1 (1972): 8-9.



20
                                          Between, vol. V , n. 9 (Maggio/ May 2015)



Silver, Alain, “Kiss Me Deadly: Evidence of a Style”, Film Noir Reader, Eds.
    Alain Silver – James Ursini, New York, Limelight, 1996: 209-35.
Stanley, Fred, “Hollywood Crime and Romance,” New York Times, 19
    November 1944, X1.



                             Filmography
Double Indemnity, Dir. Billy Wilder, U.S.A., 1944.
The Postman Always Rings Twice, Dir. Tay Garnett, U.S.A., 1946.



                               The Author

Sheri Chinen Biesen

      Dr. Sheri Chinen Biesen is an associate professor of Film History
at Rowan University and author of Blackout: World War II and the
Origins of Film Noir (2005) and Music in the Shadows: Noir Musical Films
(2014) at Johns Hopkins University Press. She received a BA and MA at
the University of Southern California School of Cinema, PhD at the
University of Texas at Austin, and has taught at USC, University of
California, University of Texas, and in England. She has contributed to
the BBC documentary The Rules of Film Noir, Film and History, Film Noir:
The Directors, Literature/Film Quarterly, Film Noir Reader 4, Historical
Journal of Film, Radio and Television, Film Noir: The Encyclopedia,
Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Gangster Film Reader, Popular Culture
Review, The Historian, Television and Television History, Turner Classic
Movies Public Enemies for the Warner Bros. Gangster Collection, and
edited The Velvet Light Trap.

      Email: biesen@rowan.edu




                                                                                21
Sheri Chinen Biesen, Censoring and Selling Film Noir



                                        The paper

Date sent: 15/01/2015
Date accepted: 01/04/2015
Date published: 15/05/2015



                              How to quote this paper

Biesen, Sheri Chinen, “Censoring and Selling Film Noir”, Censura e
auto-censura, Eds. A. Bibbò, S. Ercolino, M. Lino Between, V.9 (2015),
http://www.betweenjournal.it/




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