Post-Depression Tragedy
Depression/Comedy Part II: Are you Being Funny?
This year, I want to look at what happened next. You might think of this as Depression/Comedy without the Comedy.
Not that this season is going to be depressing. Not remotely.
Like Depression/Comedy, this is going to be a celebration of a very specific period in the history of Cinema.
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While the war was ongoing, most of Europe had been completely cut off from American culture, and more specifically from American cinema. It was only gradually that audiences on the European mainland were able to catch up with all the Hollywood films they had been missing for the past several years, and, by seeing them all at once after a long absence, they began to notice something interesting.
Hollywood cinema had gotten very dark.
Pre-war Hollywood had certainly had its fair share of thrillers, crime dramas, whodunits etc. but the newer films were tangibly different. The tone had changed, and for a complex set of reasons.
It was ultimately the French film critics who gave this new style of American film making its name. They began to refer to it (very appropriately) as "Dark Cinema" or, in French, Film Noir.
Film Noir is a difficult term to define, partly because it isn't a genre. No writers in Hollywood sat down at their typewriters to hammer out a "noir" screenplay, and no directors pitched "noir" proposals to their studio heads. Young sweethearts on their first dates never squabbled about whether to go see the musical or the screwball comedy or the "noir".
If film noir was anything, it was an attitude of the era. It was the result of a number of social and stylistic threads all converging at a specific moment in history.
By the early 1940s, Hollywood had become well established as a "base of operations" for a whole generation of displaced European film-makers, most of whom had come from Germany or Austro-Hungary. They went to work on American films, bringing with them a very European vocabulary of cinematic techniques, particularly a visual style borne out of German Expressionism.
When budgets were tight, cinematographers learned how to paint with light. They discovered that you could do more with a shadow than you could ever do with a plywood set.
But the 1940s was also the era of very strict censorship and moral oversight in Hollywood, when nothing was allowed to get past the all-powerful Hays Office.
The Hays Office had been established a decade earlier and was, at this time, under the direction of Joseph Breen, a loud, foul-mouthed, hard-drinking (deeply anti-Semitic) Irish Catholic who had very strong opinions about what should and should not be permitted in movies.
Will Hays (the original director of the Hays Office) had been a pussycat; a timid ex-Postmaster General who always seemed a bit bewildered by the film industry.
Breen, by contrast, was a pit bull, and (by all accounts) personally and intimately acquainted with many of the depravities that were explicitly prohibited by the very code he was responsible for enforcing.
He may not have led by example, but he was no stranger to sin, and he always knew exactly what he was looking at when he cast judgement over the films that passed through his office. As a result, film-makers were forced to develop very specific techniques whenever they wanted to get close to the edge.
Sex and violence (two subjects that often feature very prominently in drama) are discussed at length in the original Production Code. It states, in part:
No picture shall be produced which will lower the moral standards of those who see it. Hence the sympathy of the audience should never be thrown to the side of crime, wrong-doing, evil or sin.
Under the all-powerful eye of Herr Breen and his Hays Office, crime was always punished, and the transgressor was never allowed to escape justice.
Modern movie buffs like to worry about "spoilers" when they see a new film for the first time. They don't want to know ahead of time whether a character is going to end happily or unhappily; whether they will know triumph or defeat. But there was no ambiguity in the era of the Hays Office. If a character did something wrong, then their story will only ever be headed in one direction, and no force in Hollywood will be powerful enough to stop it.
The Production Code had become a proxy for Divine Judgement.
Tragedy... We're talking Tragedy...
The Ancient Greeks had a very specific idea of tragedy.
Tragedy, they felt, should always come from within a character. It's not just bad things happening to random people; it should be an inexorable result of the character's identity and decisions. The French playwright Jean Anouilh summed it up very eloquently in his updated version of Antigone:
In a tragedy, nothing is in doubt and everyone's identity is known. That makes for tranquillity.
One of the hallmarks of Hollywood's "noir" era was a focus on characters who "transgress" in some way. They are not necessarily gangsters or criminals or harlots (although sometimes they are!) they are ordinary, fallible individuals who make bad decisions and must then pay the price. As Burt Lancaster memorably says in the opening scene of his debut appearance, "I did something wrong. Once."
It's easy to laugh at the Hays Office restrictions from the comfort of our 21st Century perspective (although the "Cancel Culture" generation has become a "Legion of Decency" in its own right... but that's a discussion for another time) but film-makers of the 1940s were able to put those restrictions to good use; telling stories of characters who struggled under a moral code that was immutable and immovable.
These are "tragedies" in the most uplifting sense. They are not depressing, they are not vicious and they are not cruel. As Anouilh says, they are tranquil. They are flawless.
If the good do wrong, they will end badly. That is what noir means.
Over the next few months (starting on the 16th of January) I will be screening my own personal selection of films noir at the Victoria Park Baptist Church, every Thursday at 7.30. I look forward to seeing you there!
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