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https://archive.org/details/blackoutworldwarOOOObies
BLACKOUT
BLACKOUT
World War II and the Origins of Film Noir
Sheri Chinen Biesen

The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore

Thomas J. Bata Library

TRENT UNIVERSITY
PSTERSOROUGH. ONTARIO
 © 2005 The Johns Hopkins University Press

All rights reserved. Published 2005

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

123456789

The Johns Hopkins University Press

2715 North Charles Street

Baltimore, Maryland 21218-4363

www.press.jhu.edu

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Biesen, Sheri Chinen, 1962-

Blackout : World War II and the origins of film noir /

Sheri Chinen Biesen.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-8018-8217-6 (hardcover: alk. paper) —

ISBN 0-8018-8218-4 (pbk.: alk. paper)

1. Film noir—United States—History and criticism.

2. World War, 1939-1945—Motion pictures and the war.

I. Title.

PN1995.9.F54B53 2005

79i.43'6556—dc22

2005001866

A catalog record for this book is available

from the British Library.

For my uncle and my grandparents
and all who survived the war
with courage and spirit
 Contents

List of Illustrations ix
Acknowledgments xi

1 Introduction 1
2 The Elements of Noir Come Together 15
3 Hollywood in the Aftermath of Pearl Harbor 59
4 Censorship, Hard-Boiled Fiction,
and Hollywood’s “Red Meat” Crime Cycle 96
5 Rosie the Riveter Goes to Hollywood 124
6 Hyphenates and Hard-Boiled Crime 156
7 Black Film, Red Meat 189

Notes 221
Index 237
Illustrations

Brother Orchid lobby card 21

Stranger on the Third Floor publicity still 28
The Maltese Falcon publicity still 47
This Gun for Hire publicity still 51
This Gun for Hire lobby card 56
Searchlights and antiaircraft fire over blacked-out Los Angeles 62
Lights dim in Los Angeles blackout 64
Street of Chance publicity still 87
Ministry of Fear publicity still 91
Double Indemnity lobby card 111
Murder, My Sweet lobby card 113
The Postman Always Rings Twice lobby card 122
Mildred Pierce lobby card 144
Gilda publicity still 153
Laura lobby card 163
Detour lobby card 166
Scarlet Street publicity still 173
To Have and Have Not publicity still 182
The Big Sleep publicity still 186
The Blue Dahlia lobby card 200
Acknowledgments

r 1 or years I have been fascinated by many questions about film noir.

When and how did noir films evolve to become so shrouded and
shadowy in their visual design and cinematography? When did
full-blown film noir definitively come into its own, and what was
film noir before the term was coined overseas in 1946? In other words, why
were there so many brooding and distinctively noir crime films prior to
1946, during a time when America, and the world, was at war? In response
to these questions this book began twelve years ago, in 1993, when I was re¬
searching a master’s paper at the University of Southern California School
of Cinema-Television. That paper eventually grew into my 1998 doctoral
dissertation, “Film Noir and World War II: Wartime Production, Censor¬
ship, and the ‘Red Meat’ Crime Cycle,” at the University of Texas at Austin.
I am indebted to many people over the course of this journey. I thank
my editors and the staff at the Johns Hopkins University Press for their ef¬
forts and support of this project. Special thanks to Mahinder Kingra,
Michael Lonegro, Linda Forlifer, Joe Abbott, Jennifer Gray, Kathy Alexan¬
der, Amy Zezula, and Melody Herr. I also thank especially my doctoral ad¬
viser, Thomas Schatz, at the University of Texas at Austin and my master’s
adviser, Richard B. Jewell, at the University of Southern California School
of Cinema-Television. I am grateful to the archives and archival staff who
assisted with the research for this book. Special thanks to Ned Comstock
and the staff at the USC Cinema-Television Library Special Collections,
Noelle Carter at the USC Warner Bros. Archive, Dace Taube in the USC Re¬
gional History Center Special Collections, the Academy of Motion Picture
Arts and Sciences Margaret Herrick Library and Center for Motion Picture
Study, UCLA Young Research Arts Library Special Collections, the Harry
Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas, the New
York Public Library for the Performing Arts Special Collections, Janet
Xll Acknowledgments

Lorenz and Kristine Krueger at the National Film Information Service, and
the Library of Congress.
1 received support from the University of Texas at Austin, the University
of Southern California, the University of California, the University of
Leicester, and Rowan University to conduct research for this book.
I thank many friends, colleagues, and teachers and my students for their
encouragement and support over the years. Special thanks to Brian Taves,
Brian Neve, Thomas Doherty, Michael Anderegg, Charles Maland, Robert
Sklar, Peter Rollins, James Welsh, Felicia Campbell, Charles Ramirez Berg,
Joseph Kruppa, Drew Casper, Marsha Kinder, Michael Renov, Leonard Leff,
Cynthia Baron, Nicholas Cull, Scott Curtis, Walter Metz, Fred Metchick, Ju¬
dith Bushnell, Martin Vego, Githa Susan Srivatsa, Karah Ladd, Kelly Colla,
Julia Hall, my family, Nate, John, and my grandparents.
BLACKOUT
Introduction

Hl^he camera slowly zooms in on a silhouette of a man on crutches

until blackness fills the screen. Automobile headlights zigzag
through a dark city street, where fog obscures the few dim street
'S lamps. Tires screech, and a horn blares in the darkness as the
car veers into an intersection, nearly colliding with a truck. A shadowy fig¬
ure in a trench coat and fedora staggers out of the car. He enters a building
and rides an elevator, trailing blood into an office. Its black interior swal¬
lows him. He snaps on a desk lamp, loosens his tie, pulls out a cigarette,
fumbles for a match, and strikes a light. A disheveled, wounded Fred Mac-
Murray slides his chair over to the office Dictaphone and recites a murder
confession beginning with the date: July 16,1938. Filmed in fall 1943 and re¬
leased in 1944, Double Indemnity makes no explicit reference to the Second
World War, but its cynical tone, brutal violence, and shadowy visual style
all suggest the bleak realities of a world at war.
Dark, brooding, obsessive—Double Indemnity reversed an industry¬
wide ban by Hollywood Production Code censors on James M. Cain’s hard-
boiled fiction, a ban that had been in place for nearly a decade. Provoking
great controversy, the moody screen adaptation of Cain’s book, scripted by
director Billy Wilder and novelist Raymond Chandler, paved the way for a
new trend of films in Hollywood. From its first shot, even as the opening
credits roll, the picture is undeniably film noir. Double Indemnity was one
of a vanguard of Hollywood films emerging in the 1940s. Striking for their
sophisticated “black” visual style and thematic duplicity, these films would
be labeled dark cinema. In 1946 French critics viewing these wartime Amer¬
ican films for the first time coined the term film noir (black film). The ori¬
gin of film noir is linked to serie noire (and later, fleuve noire) or “black” de¬
tective fiction, French translations of American hard-boiled novels by
authors like Dashiell Hammett, James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler, and
Cornell Woolrich. In this unique breed of Hollywood cinema, stars such as
2 Blackout

Humphrey Bogart, Alan Ladd, and Robert Mitchum embodied hard-bitten

cynicism in shadowy images depicting a fateful universe onscreen. Classic
films noir such as Double Indemnity, Laura (1944), and Murder, My Sweet
(1944) portrayed a world of menace and urban deviance, featuring rain-
slicked city streets and murderers lurking in back alleys, seductresses bathed
in the haze of cigarette smoke, detectives covered in the barred shadows of
Venetian blinds, crooked cops, and the sound of gunfire. Enhancing the dis¬
tinctive look and cinematography of film noir, moody lighting and camer¬
awork emphasized heavy expressionistic shadows, stark visual design with
low-key chiaroscuro pools of light, claustrophobic interiors and confined
spaces, high-contrast black-and-white photography, oblique camera angles,
and asymmetrical compositional framing. Noir filmmakers also employed
a variety of narrative techniques, such as visual flashbacks and subjective
point of view, that created complex story structures. Obsessed, guilt-ridden
characters confessed their crimes in psychological voice-over narration that
conveyed an overwhelming sense of fatalism and doom for violent self-de¬
structive antiheroes and lethal women.
Filmmakers conceived, produced, and released many films noir during
World War II. A series of visually stunning and narratively provocative
wartime pictures heralded the first definitive phase of the trend: This Gun
for Hire (1942), Street of Chance (1942), Double Indemnity, Murder, My Sweet,
Phantom Lady( 1944), Laura, The Woman in the Window (1944), Ministry of
Fear (1945), Mildred Pierce (1945), Detour (1945), Scarlet Street (1945), The
Lost Weekend (1945), Spellbound (1945), The Big Sleep (1946), The Postman
Always Rings Twice (1946), and Gilda (1946). The bleak vision in these films
grew out of wartime American culture, the realities of making films in Hol¬
lywood during this time, and the way home-front—and battlefront—au¬
diences saw these pictures. Many films were stockpiled—made during the
war and held by studios with a backlog of pictures that were not distributed
or promoted until later in the conflict. Not only were they made in Holly¬
wood under wartime circumstances, but they were also limited to predom¬
inantly domestic reception, targeting North American home-front audi¬
ences and armed forces overseas while much of international distribution
to foreign markets, with the notable exceptions of Great Britain and Latin
America, was suspended over the course of the war. In fact, the American
film industry and domestic press recognized these noir pictures as a grow¬
ing movement before they were formally acclaimed in France in 1946. By
1944 Hollywood studio publicity and critics in the United States had already
identified these innovative films as a bold new trend called the “red meat
crime cycle.” The crime and violence, particularly sexual violence, in these
Introduction 3

pictures grew out of changing patterns of censorship during the war, which
was affecting American culture and Hollywood studio filmmaking.
Emerging out of the austerity, populism, and social critique of the De¬
pression era and responding to the immediate challenges, concerns, and
anxieties of wartime, World War II-era films noir would in turn inspire a
cycle of postwar crime movies reflecting new fears about the cold war and
nuclear war. Indeed, film noir is often identified as a predominantly post¬
war trend preempted by the war. Paul Schrader, for example, has suggested
that “were it not for the war, film noir would have been at full steam by the
early forties. The need to produce allied propaganda abroad and promote
patriotism at home blunted the fledgling moves toward a dark cinema ...
film noir thrashed about in the studio system, not quite able to come into
full prominence.”1
Studio records, the films, and the history of how they were produced tell
a different story. Wartime productions such as Double Indemnity, Phantom
Lady, and Murder, My Sweet represent the most expressionistic, stylistically
black phase of film noir.2 Wilder’s Double Indemnity is darker in visual style
than his 1950 film Sunset Boulevard; Fritz Lang’s Ministry of Fear and Scar¬
let Street are darker than his 1950s films noir, such as The Big Heat (1953).
The noir aesthetic derived from wartime constraints on filmmaking prac¬
tices. Brooding, often brutal, realism was conveyed in low-lit images, recy¬
cled sets (disguised by shadows, smoke, artificial fog, and rain), tarped stu¬
dio back lots, or enclosed sound stages. In the postwar period filmmakers
redefined noir realism, having more flexibility in location shooting and
lighting. Wartime film noir is important to our understanding of culture
and society during the World War II era because these films reflect a differ¬
ent set of anxieties from those we see in the films noir of the postwar era
and result from a different set of circumstances in the Hollywood produc¬
tion system. These early noir films created a psychological atmosphere that
in many ways marked a response to an increasingly realistic and under¬
standable anxiety—about war, shortages, changing gender roles, and “a
world gone mad”—that was distinctive from the later postwar paranoia
about the bomb, the cold war, HUAC, and the blacklist, which was more in¬
trinsic to late 1940s and 1950s noir pictures.
The global conflict affected American culture in unprecedented ways.
The darker side of wartime permeated the home-front experience, charac¬
terized by agonizing uncertainty and fears—of German spies, Japanese sub¬
marines, and loss of American lives overseas, as well as on U.S. soil. These
experiences culminated in an anxious combat and home-front mentality,
in a cultural psyche obsessed with grave concerns about the conflict and
4 Blackout

possible invasion, and about the bleak hardship of everyday life, such as
government rationing of basic daily items, war-related shortages, and the
sheer deprivation of the war. Home-front worries certainly made audiences
more receptive to the darker visions depicted in film noir. As city factories
hired workers away from small towns, the urbanization that took place dur¬
ing the war made the urban milieu of film noir more familiar than it would
have been a decade before. The after-hours setting was also familiar, given
that military production required twenty-four-hour shifts. And the dark¬
ened backgrounds in film noir resembled the shadowy abysses of blacked-
out wartime cities at night.
Wartime anxiety also found cultural expression in other forms of pop¬
ular culture—in radio dramas, comic books, and dime novels. By the 1930s,
with tensions increasing in Europe, radio dramas like Orson Welles’s War
of the Worlds and the pulp adaptation of The Shadow featured bleak themes
of invasion and mass chaos. The popularity of radio, comics, and new mass-
market paperbacks had eroded some of the pulp and dime-novel market
and even hit publications like Black Mask by 1940, and the rationing of pa¬
per during the war years was a severe blow to a pulp industry that had
thrived earlier in the Depression years. As early as 1938, in Marvel comics
pulp mysteries, publisher Martin Goodman conceived of taking stories
from real life to combat fascism and demonize the Nazi menace. Marvel
launched its war against the Axis powers in February 1940; then in March
1941, as the United States watched from the sidelines events abroad, super¬
heroes the Sub-Mariner and the Human Torch teamed up to fight with the
Allies in World War II. After Pearl Harbor Captain America, Miss America,
and the Young Allies battled Hitler and the Japanese. Violence splashed
across pages in graphic images. By June 1943 the Human Torch, simulating
the fireball of aerial bombing, was destroying German super planes. Holly¬
wood was also churning out popular serials. Batman battled the Axis in
comic-book serials and on the big screen in Columbia’s 1943 crime serial
Batman, featuring the sinister enemy Doctor Daka, who kidnaps Ameri¬
cans, uses mind-control transmitters to “reprogram” them into zombie
spies, feeds uncooperative agents to his pet alligators, and steals radium
guns to develop a secret weapon to bomb U.S. cities. Pulp fiction writers
similarly explored darker themes inspired by the war. Fears were even ex¬
pressed in dime mystery novels like the September 1942 issue of The Avenger
and the spring 1944 issue of Black Book Detective, both of which featured
grisly crimes of torture and brutality.
During Production Code enforcement in the mid-i930s, censorship had
intervened and delayed Hollywood’s embrace of dark themes in American
Introduction 5

cinema. But the war changed film industry regulation, enabling Hollywood
to target an increasingly sober home front with bolder content, which had
a grittier edge and seedier visual style. The seductive world of film noir cap¬
tured wartime fears and anxieties through violent action in unglamorous or
disreputable working-class settings. A somber war-related Zeitgeist grew out
of harsh realities in America. As life on the home front became increasingly
hard-boiled, so too did American film. America’s involvement in the war
penetrated every facet of daily life. Nearly everyone knew someone killed or
wounded in combat. Pearl Harbor had stunned the nation. Everyday neces¬
sities were rationed and unavailable for the duration. Hollywood newsreels
brought overseas combat to domestic audiences. These newsreels reflected
a cultural perception of the war as America’s morale took a hard knock. In
1989 World War II veteran Paul Fussell remembered this perception:

For the past fifty years the Allied war has been sanitized and romanti¬
cized almost beyond recognition by the sentimental, the loony patri¬
otic, the ignorant, and the bloodthirsty ... Watching a newsreel or
flipping through an illustrated magazine at the beginning of the
American war, you were likely to encounter a memorable image: the
newly invented jeep, an elegant, slim-barrelled 37-mm gun in tow,
leaping over a hillock. Going very fast and looking as cute as Bambi,
it flies into the air, and behind, the little gun bounces high off the
ground on its springy tires ... This graceful duo conveyed the firm
impression of purposeful, resourceful intelligence going somewhere
significant, and going there with speed, agility, and delicacy—
almost wit.3

Originally countered by optimism early in the war, the grim circum¬

stances eventually took shape in documentary images with graphic violence
and an uncompromising style of realism. As the realities of combat, death,
and destruction became more readily apparent, nonfiction and narrative
films represented grisly actuality on theater screens. A bleak cultural terrain
evolved during the war, as millions lost loved ones and casualties multiplied.
The impact of this new cultural and social milieu was soon felt in the na¬
tion’s film capital, affecting motion picture censorship and the industry’s
creative personnel. As Hollywood reacted to war, elements vital to the
growth of film noir began to coalesce. Wartime Hollywood fused several
noir influences, including cultural disillusionment, German expressionism,
trends in realism, and hard-boiled fiction traditions. The Second World War
created a complex array of social, economic, cultural, political, technolog-
6 Blackout

ical, and creative circumstances and was, in effect, a catalyst for film noir.
Merging essential elements—such as the growth of documentary realism,
studio-bound production, urban blackouts in Hollywood, filmmaking re¬
strictions, new talent and artistic experimentation, Production Code lapses,
and technological advancement—the war contributed to film noir’s defin¬
itive style.
World War II influenced key aspects of Hollywood film production and
shaped the unique conditions for the way film noir was created and shown
to audiences. At the most practical level World War II accelerated film noir’s
development because essential materials such as lights, electricity, and film
stock had been rationed, and other materials needed for sets and props were
often in short supply. Citywide blackouts, enclosed or tarped sound stages,
limits on location shooting, censorship of film content, and a severe labor
shortage, as employable men departed for military duty, constrained pro¬
duction in unprecedented ways. At the same time, the war spurred techno¬
logical advancements in lightweight camera equipment, with better lenses
and high-speed light-sensitive film stock to enable night-for-night filming
(often capitalizing on the expediency of wartime documentary newsreel re¬
alism conventions). World War II created opportunity for new talent in the
Hollywood studio system. The film industry’s wartime labor need gave
greater creative (and executive) authority to talented European emigre film¬
makers (for example, Michael Curtiz, Billy Wilder, Fritz Lang, and Rudolph
Mat£), women (for example, executives like Phantom Lady writer-producer
Joan Harrison and Gilda producer Virginia Van Upp), and older men—that
is, those who were over the age for combat (for example, hard-boiled writ¬
ers Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain, stars Humphrey Bogart and Ed¬
ward G. Robinson).
Working women in America’s home front also affected how women were
portrayed in film noir. Sexualized female roles targeted, and were influenced
by, working wartime women, capitalizing on strong gender models while
appealing to combat-hardened military men via a tough psyche and realis¬
tic violence toward the opposite sex. In the era of a bold “Rosie the Riveter”
wartime female, Hollywood images such as the introductory close-up of
Rita Hayworth’s fabulous flip of the hair in Gilda and Lana Turner’s en¬
trance as blonde siren in a halter, hot pants, and high heels in The Postman
Always Rings Twice exploited female sexuality to target a viewing audience
of overseas GIs, returning veterans, often exposed to combat, and independ¬
ent working women who had toughened up as the end of World War II
drew near.
Less benign than Rosie the Riveter—but perhaps no less inspirational—
Introduction 7

an iconic female arose with the war and the burgeoning noir series: the
femme fatale. French critics Raymonde Borde and Etienne Chaumeton ob¬
served the stylized images that combined sensational violence with “a man
who’s already middle-aged, old almost, and not particularly handsome” and
the bold emergence of a new type of woman, “masterminding crime, tough
as the milieu surrounding her, as expert in blackmail and vice as in the use
of firearms—and probably frigid—has left her mark on a noir eroticism
that is at times an eroticization of violence.” The femme fatale was deviant,
a spider woman, “frustrated and guilty, half man-eater, half man-eaten,
blase and cornered, she falls victim to her own wiles.”4 Despite her strength,
independence, and irreverence, however, the noir femme fatale was defined
by the needs of the central male character. She was typically either a sexual
threat or an innocent redeemer, the embodiment of male fears and fantasy.
Often brutally treated, she still exuded sexuality and looked fully capable of
emerging on a dark street to destroy the ill-fated protagonist. Stylish, loose,
and unpredictable, this beautiful woman was, as Janey Place explains, “com¬
fortable in the world of cheap dives, shadowy doorways and mysterious
settings.”5
The wartime American sociocultural and Hollywood filmmaking cli¬
mate also allowed more latitude in film content—endorsing more crime
and violence, particularly sexual violence, in these motion pictures. The cul¬
tural, production, and censorship climate in the United States changed as
the war progressed. Eventually, newsreels and other propaganda openly de¬
picted combat violence, war crimes, and atrocities, undermining Holly¬
wood’s moral patrol of the screen. It was no coincidence that studios
adapted stories of domestic murder, illicit affairs, and crime. The sex, vio¬
lence, sensational crime topics, and tabloid-style cinematic realism of
wartime noir films benefited from changing patterns of censorship—and,
indeed, helped cause those changes. Since 1934 Joseph Breen, chief censor
for the Production Code Administration (PCA), presided over a compli¬
cated give-and-take with studio producers in the complex process of nego¬
tiation and compromise inherent in the film industry’s self-regulation. Ef¬
forts to regulate onscreen sex, crime, cleavage, and violence were somewhat
inconsistent owing to an overriding concern about a film’s moral stance.
Breen often negotiated with filmmakers, allowing some latitude on vio¬
lence, for example, if conventional morality triumphed in the end. (Film¬
makers craftily padded scripts with outrageously salacious material so that
they could bargain for what they absolutely wanted Breen to approve in the
final cut.) Violent crime films certainly were being produced by the 1930s,
but their content was constrained by Production Code censorship. By the
8 Blackout

mid-i930S the PCA wielded considerable power, banning sordid screen

adaptations of hard-boiled fiction such as James M. Cain’s Double Indem¬
nity and The Postman Always Rings Twice. Yet film noir flourished by the
1940s, particularly during and just after World War II, when PCA enforce¬
ment was still in place but was neither as draconian as it had been in the
mid-i930S nor as liberal as it would be in the 1950s and 1960s. One reason
for this development was wartime federal censorship, which complicated
and often contradicted the conventional strictures of the Production Code.
Midway through the war, by 1943 to early 1944, the government’s patriotic
political agenda motivated the federal Office of Censorship to lift its ban on
depicting atrocities and war-related crimes in newsreels, in effect endors¬
ing and promoting screen violence for propaganda purposes and establish¬
ing a precedent for narrative films, despite the film industry’s PCA censor¬
ship of crime, violence, and political content.6 Such complex industrial
circumstances during World War II effectively compromised Production
Code enforcement, enabling the screen adaptation and production of
wartime noir films. The government’s Office of War Information (OWI)
and Office of Censorship banned Hollywood gangsters as un-American and
regulated screen stories depicting the combat front or domestic home front
to promote the war effort. The complexity of this wartime censorship en¬
vironment led to hard-boiled film adaptations that initially depicted re¬
formed gangsters and permitted—even promoted—patriotic crime, then
avoided mentioning the war altogether to evade government regulation
during World War II and anticipate postwar industry reconversion with
nonwar narrative strategies. This complex, competing censorship environ¬
ment throughout World War II was an important factor contributing to a
rich 1940s film noir style. Censorship mediated the production process and
influenced how these films were made. Ironically, the national effort to pro¬
mote uplifting World War II propaganda did not preempt film noir. Instead,
federal censorship regulation ultimately contributed to the growth of the
dark trend. The drive for patriotic films actually paved the way for an in¬
creasing tolerance of violence and heralded a new type of Hollywood film.
The idea that film noir was a wartime phenomenon, however, has been
largely dismissed or ignored by critics and scholars who have debated its
nature and origins in American filmmaking. Since the 1946 inception of the
term in France, scholarship on film noir has proliferated, but most studies
emphasize its postwar development—possibly because the term film noir
was coined after the war, when this dark trend was clearly apparent in Hol¬
lywood films. A long-standing critical debate has evolved over the nature
of film noir as a postwar phenomenon or “period style.” In his influential
Introduction 9

“Notes on Film Noir,” for example, Schrader has argued that America’s en¬
try into World War II interrupted the development of film noir that had be¬
gun with the definitive Maltese Falcon (1941) but was then stalled by the con¬
flict, that upbeat wartime censorship regulation preempted the trend, and
that film noir was essentially a postwar movement growing out of a “de¬
layed reaction to the thirties.” He explained:

In 1946 French critics, seeing the American films they had missed
during the war, noticed the new mood of cynicism, pessimism, and
darkness that had crept into the American cinema ... Hollywood
lighting grew darker, characters more corrupt, themes more fatalistic,
and the tone more hopeless. By 1949 American movies were in the
throes of their deepest and most creative funk. Never before had films
dared to take such a harsh uncompromising look at American life,
and they would not dare to do so again for twenty years.

Schrader defined the noir series as “Hollywood films of the forties and early
fifties that portrayed the world of dark, slick city streets, crime and corrup¬
tion” in wartime (1941-46), postwar realistic (1945-49), and psychotic ac¬
tion and suicidal impulse (1949-53) films, followed by Robert Aldrich’s Kiss
Me Deadly (1955) and Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil (1958), which rounded
out the last of the classic noir cycle.7 Although Robert Sklar and Thomas
Schatz note the influence of the war on noir, many scholars—including
Borde and Chaumeton, Robert Porfirio, Alain Silver and Elizabeth Ward,
David Cook, Robert Ray, Frank Krutnik, Brian Neve, and James Nare-
more—refer, like Schrader, to noir as a decidedly postwar phenomenon.8
James Naremore, for instance, examines film noir as a distinctively
French cultural construct of the literary and intellectual climate in Paris im¬
mediately following World War II, noting that “indigo moods, smoky jazz
clubs, American fiction, [and] romantic isolation” were particularly rele¬
vant to the French critical conception of noir. He contextualizes film noir
in relation to issues of French cultural reception. “In one sense, the French
invented film noir, and they did so because local conditions predisposed
them to view Hollywood in certain ways.” Naremore references the sophis¬
ticated cine-club art culture pervading the pivotal “years between the post¬
war arrival of Hollywood movies in Paris and the beginnings of the French
New Wave.” He links noir to European avant-garde modernism, crime,
“blood melodrama,” and Gothic romance narratives.9 Frank Krutnik pro¬
vides a psychoanalytic framework, examining how masculinity and cultural
issues influenced the postwar development of film noir. He suggests that
10 Blackout

film noir grew out of postwar realism and a decidedly postwar male psyche
destabilized by shifting gender roles, by changing notions of masculinity,
and by new rules of sexuality after World War II.10
In their benchmark 1955 study, Panorama du film noir Americain,
1941-1953, Borde and Chaumeton consider why American audiences had
“become sensitized to films of violence and murder” and explain that by
1941 to 1942 “war affects the nation. Instantly, the documentary in all its
forms (propaganda films or newsreels) assumes much greater importance
in cinema programming, and the public acquires a taste for them. In the
United States and England, as in the USSR, and later in Italy and France,
the hostilities trigger the prodigious rise of cinematic realism. In the case
of America, this realism engenders three new genres: the war film, the po¬
lice documentary, and from a certain angle at least, film noir.” Yet they ar¬
gue that from 1941 to 1945 “the series is not yet a constituted genre” and con¬
sider 1946 to 1948 the glory days of film noir. They suggest that the war and
the “discrepancy with official ideology” delayed the development of noir,
which “lay dormant for five years,” and that “the real advent of the series”
did not occur until 1946. Borde and Chaumeton were keenly aware of the
uncanny realism of American film noir. They noted the stylistic and narra¬
tive elements of violence and erotic metaphor in relation to psychoanaly¬
sis and sexual repression and referred to the noir cycle as a “series,” with a
definitive style, atmosphere, and subject matter, characterized by realistic
settings, well-developed supporting roles, scenes of violence, and exciting
pursuits. “The point of departure is realistic and, taken on its own, each
scene could pass for a fragment of documentary,” they observe. “It’s the ac¬
cumulation of these realistic shots on a bizarre theme that creates a night¬
marish atmosphere” in a forbidden, complex underworld of blackmail,
bribery, and organized crime depicting an ambiguous, confusing, criminal
milieu where corrupt police inhabit a web of intrigue among a “whole host
of angelic killers, neurotic gangsters, megalomaniac gang bosses, and dis¬
turbing or depraved stooges.” Whereas the “documentary considers the
murder from without, from the official police viewpoint,” however, the dis¬
tinctive cinematography and innovative narrative design in noir films are
“from within, from the criminals’ ” point of view, employing a “different
angle of vision.”11
The French critics who first identified the noir series in 1946 were cer¬
tainly aware that these pictures were products of the war years. Nino Frank
wrote “Un Nouveau genre ‘policier’: F’Aventure criminelle” (A New Kind
of “Police” Drama: The Criminal Adventure) in L’Ecran Franfais. Jean-
Pierre Chartier penned “Fes Americains aussi font des films noirs” (Amer-
Introduction 11

icans Also Make Noir Films) in Revue du cinema, a precursor to Cahiers du

cinema. Viewing these American films in France following the Occupation,
Frank noted their distinctive visual style, complex narration, and psycho¬
logical characters. He called films like Double Indemnity “harsh,” “misogy-
nistic,” and “true to life,” observing the “criminal psychology” and “dy¬
namism of violent death” in “dark mysteries” on the “fringe of the law”
where volatile criminals die at the end of a tortured journey, reinforcing the
idea that crime does not pay.12 Chartier recognized noirs “forbidden” cen-
sorable nature, “pessimistic” first-person point of view, human despair, and
“monstrous” women exploiting sex as a weapon tantalizing doomed crime
victims.13
Other scholars briefly mention the war within more general film stud¬
ies. In Movie-Made America, for example, Robert Sklar describes films noir
as the “psychological thrillers that emerged at the time of the war,” noting
the “claustrophobia,” “psychology,” “look,” and “pervasive tone” in 1940s
films, where a “dark and constrictive mood derives in part from the mate¬
rial limitations of wartime filmmaking: restrictions on travel virtually elim¬
inated location shooting where interior sets could serve, and stringent
budgets seem to have cut down on lighting as well. Yet the gloom and con¬
striction were not merely an accommodation to forced economies; their
film-makers intended them that way.” Influenced by Alfred Hitchcock’s
thrillers like Suspicion, with “its fascination with guilt and the ambiguous
play of identities,” he observes, the “hallmark of film noir is its sense of peo¬
ple trapped—trapped in webs of paranoia and fear, unable to tell guilt from
innocence, true identity from false. Its villains are attractive and sympa¬
thetic, masking greed, misanthropy, malevolence. Its heroes and heroines
are weak, confused, susceptible to false impressions. The environment is
murky and close, the settings vaguely oppressive. In the end, evil is exposed,
though often just barely, and the survival of good remains troubled and am¬
biguous.”14 In Hollywood Genres Thomas Schatz links film noir to the hard-
boiled detective genre and Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane; in Boom and Bust
the same author suggests a connection to Hitchcock’s female gothic thrillers
such as Rebecca and Suspicion. He proposes that cinematic realism during
World War II created “an on-screen dynamic utterly unique to the war era.
Meanwhile, a stylistic countercurrent developed in what came to be termed
film noir, which explored the ‘darker’ side” of America’s wartime psyche and
experience.15 In A History of Narrative Film David Cook considers that the
war may not have interrupted the development of film noir and mentions
the possibility that its “antiheroic vision” may have been a response to the
“actual horrors of the war and the multiple hypocrisies of postwar Ameri-
12 Blackout

can society.”16 In The Kings of the Bs Tom Flinn calls film noir “an essential
part of the 1940s outlook, a cinematic style forged in the fires of war, exile,
and disillusion, a melodramatic reflection for a world gone mad.”1'
Indeed, the proliferation of the noir series began during—and, in many
ways, because of—World War II, as a trend spurred by Double Indemnity
and enabled by the distinctive wartime factors that created the brooding
1940s period style. By investigating the actual production conditions of
wartime Hollywood, this book looks at film noir before the term was coined
and explores the war’s role in creating it. Drawing on extensive archival re¬
search, it presents case studies of individual films and takes a behind-the-
scenes look at the 1940s American film industry that produced these pic¬
tures by closely examining studio records of how and why they were made,
as well as the impact of the war on filmmaking, censorship, and the way
films were promoted and received by audiences. These bleak films evolved
from unique filmmaking conditions during World War II and were a dis¬
tinct product of wartime production and reception circumstances.
Prototypes for noir films began appearing before America’s entry into
the war in December 1941. Influenced by earlier traditions, noir style was
emerging by 1940 and 1941 in such films as RKO’s low-budget Stranger on
the Third Floor (1940), Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941), Alfred Hitch¬
cock’s Suspicion (1941), and John Huston’s adaptation of Dashiell Ham¬
mett’s The Maltese Falcon (1941)—preludes to Paramount’s adaptation of
Graham Greene’s This Gun for Hire, which straddled the wartime transi¬
tion in late 1941 and early 1942. This Gun for Hire was tailor-made for
wartime America and benefited from conditions leading up to the war and
lapses in censorship that enabled proto-noir crime and violence to be pro¬
duced with Code approval.
In the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, noir elements coalesced. Hollywood
felt the impact of World War II on filmmaking conditions, motion picture
censorship, the studio industry, and the cultural climate by 1942-43.
Wartime preludes to film noir showcased paranoia, tough guys, espionage,
and patriotic crime to support the war effort in prototype films such as This
Gun for Hire, Casablanca (1942), and Ministry of Fear, where filmmaking
constraints, documentary realism, and graphic violence influenced cine¬
matic style. A decreased use of lighting is readily evident in these films, and
in wartime noir pictures like Moontide (1942) and Street of Chance (1942),
culminating in a definitive, full-blown exemplar of the noir crime cycle’s
steady emergence over several years in Double Indemnity.
By 1943 and 1944 true film noir emerged. Filmed during the blackouts
and rationing and amid the fear and anxiety of wartime Los Angeles, Dou-
Introduction 13

ble Indemnity is a fascinating case study that shows how home-front cul¬
ture, institutional constraints, and economic conditions affected noir pro¬
duction. The film provided an influential model for gaining PCA approval
of stories dealing with taboo crime material, using wartime realism and a
psychological framework. Murder, My Sweet and The Postman Always Rings
Twice show how in many ways Hollywood’s growing noir crime trend re¬
sponded to the success of Double Indemnity.
These films also targeted a wartime audience segregated by gender via
industry' filmmaking strategies and distribution systems aimed at a dual,
parallel domestic home-front and military combat-front market. Phantom
Lady, Mildred Pierce, and Gilda illustrate how noir pictures included increas¬
ing female involvement in the filmmaking process. These films reveal the
distinctive female “authorship” and creative control by women in the mo¬
tion picture industry' (such as writer-producer Joan Harrison at Universal,
writer Catherine Turney at Warner Bros., and production executive Virginia
Van Upp at Columbia), specifically in the production of films noir. How
gender played out on Hollywood screens, and how women were represented
as “transgressive” noir femme fatales opposite tormented male masculinity,
corresponded to a wartime female labor force inside the film industry, as
well as in other areas of the domestic home front.
Film noir related to American motion picture industry' trends such as
the move toward independent and “hyphenate” production and the increas¬
ing role of writer-producer-directors like in-house studio producer-direc¬
tor Howard Hawks at Warner Bros., Fritz Lang and Nunnally Johnson at
RKO, and Lang with Walter Wanger and Joan Bennett at Universal. In mak¬
ing and publicizing many of these noir pictures, filmmakers capitalized by
1944 and 1945 on sensational Hollywood promotional strategies exploiting
sex and violence (in the guise of so-called realism) and evaded censorship
constraints. The global conflict also refined the roles of stars in these films.
Humphrey Bogart is the perfect example of this—recast from gangster and
hard-boiled detective to undercover counterespionage agent, from inde¬
pendent isolationist to reluctant patriot and conflicted combat squad leader,
then back to hard-boiled noir antihero. Benefiting from the gritty wartime
era, Bogart rose during these years from supporting player and villain to
star and hero. The war also made his non-leading man looks more palat¬
able to wartime audiences. Another World War II-era film star, Edward G.
Robinson, was also far from leading-man handsome (and also moved from
playing gangsters to playing home-front everymen). As independent (and
quasi-independent) production rose during the war, such films as Laura,
Detour, The Woman in the Window, Scarlet Street, To Have and Have Not,
14 Blackout

and The Big Sleep reinforced and perpetuated the wartime noir style and
were prime examples of more autonomous filmmakers gaining greater cre¬
ative and executive control within Hollywood’s studio system.
Before the conflict concluded, as early as 1943—shortly before Para¬
mount filmed Double Indemnity—through 1944 and 1945, Hollywood’s noir
crime trend also related to studios anticipating the end of the war. In an
American film industry transitioning from a wartime economy, film noir
flourished as a popular and visionary business strategy by studios to pro¬
duce non-war-related crime pictures in the final war years. The influence
and legacy of the wartime noir series can be seen in later productions, such
as The Blue Dahlia (1946) and Orson Welles’s The Stranger (1946), and in
the postwar proliferation of films noir. In the aftermath of World War II, as
Hollywood faced myriad challenges from competing leisure activities and
government regulation of the studio system, national politics moved in¬
creasingly toward a new cold war ideology as America’s political and cul¬
tural imperative shifted from fighting the Nazis and the Japanese in open
combat to containing communism, both on the international stage and on
the home front. Hollywood filmmakers responded by reinventing the noir
genre. Indeed, changes in the postwar era would ultimately modify the
unique wartime filmmaking environment—including motion picture cen¬
sorship, creative talent, and narrative film conventions—that had produced
these definitive films and contributed to their extraordinary visual style and
in turn affected the evolution of this dark trend after the war years. The cy¬
cle of films forged in the hot war of the 1940s evolved to support, protest,
or simply reflect the cold war of the 1950s.
The Elements of Noir Come Together

A shaft of white light used properly can be far more effective than all the color in the world.
The extensive range of black and white with its ... variations is capable of producing all
the visual drama ... the greatest art... to give life to the dead space that exists between the
lens and the subject... Smoke, rain, fog, dust, and steam can emotionalize empty space, and
so can the movement of the camera.
— Josef von Sternberg, Fun in a Chinese Laundry, 1965

r 1 ilm noir certainly had roots in earlier dark films, many of which
involved crime. Innovative preludes—in the United States, Ger¬
many, France, and Britain—advanced its evolution, fusing expres¬
sionism with hard-hitting realism. Silent-era American gangster
pictures included D. W. Griffith’s The Musketeers of Pig Alley (1912), which
was recognized for its documentary style based on newspaper accounts of
real crime. The visual design of Cecil B. DeMille’s adulterous melodrama
The Cheat (1915) was applauded for its low-key chiaroscuro pools of Rem¬
brandt or Lasky lighting. Starring Sessue Hayakawa and Fanny Ward, it fea¬
tured an illicit rendezvous, an interracial love triangle involving a married
woman, a branding, a graphic struggle, a near-rape, a shooting, and swap¬
ping money for sex and brutality. As in later noir films like The Big Sleep, its
sexual violence and shadowy, exotic Oriental mise-en-scene visually con¬
veyed a mysterious world of perverse evil and taboo, explicit, or scandalous
subjects.
After the First World War, German filmmakers produced a series of
moody psychological horror films, among them Robert Weine’s The Cabi¬
net of Dr. Caligari (1919); F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922); and Fritz Lang’s
Der Mude Tod (1921), Dr. Mabuse, The Gambler (1922), Metropolis (1926),
and M (1931). The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari used claustrophobic studio inte¬
riors (even for outdoor settings), distorted spatial relationships, highly styl¬
ized sets, extreme makeup and costumes, skewed camera angles, and
chiaroscuro lighting to subjectively portray a deranged narrator’s point of
view. Caligari influenced later films in its expressionist visual style, which
capitalized on postwar material restrictions. As in wartime Hollywood,
Weimar Germany’s shortages of film stock, rationing of materials and light¬
ing, and severe economic constraints contributed greatly to its images and
design. Artificial backdrops were “pragmatic as well as thematically appro¬
priate since, in the economic recession that immediately followed the war,
l6 Blackout

the film studios, like all other German industries, were allocated electric
power on a quota basis.”' Stylization could be efficient, as David Cook ex¬
plains. “In a film like Caligari that required many dramatic lighting effects,
it was cheaper and more convenient to simply paint light and shadow onto
the scenery itself than to produce the effect electrically (in fact, the Decla
studio had nearly expended its power ration when Caligari was produced
in late 1919).”2 This was “yet another instance of the way in which techno¬
logical necessity can foster aesthetic innovation in the cinema”3—as it
would in Hollywood some decades later. Germany’s state-run studio, Uni-
versum Film Aktiengesellschaft (UFA), produced many expressionist pic¬
tures in the post-World War I Weimar era. Filmmakers in Berlin benefited
from the creative synergy of the Bauhaus, which, like the artistic commu¬
nity in Paris, was a burgeoning center of modern arts in Europe.
In 1926-27 American studios Paramount and MGM infused substantial
capital into UFA under the ParUfaMet international distribution agree¬
ment, providing the German film industry with financial relief and sup¬
porting film production in the economically unstable Weimar era. ParU-
faMet’s transatlantic alliance also enabled Hollywood to tap into Germany’s
vulnerable film industry and raid UFA’s creative talent. By the late 1920s and
early 1930s German films showed signs of change toward an increasingly re¬
alistic style. Unsavory, shadowy, and downbeat “street pictures,” known as
Kammerspielfilm, such as G. W. Pabst’s The Joyless Street (1925) and Pan¬
dora's Box (1929), combined stark realism with expressionist style—an aes¬
thetic melding that influenced film noir. As the Third Reich rose to power,
the Nazis—regarding expressionism, along with depictions of sex and crime
in brooding realistic films like Fritz Lang’s M, as the unhealthy, degenerate
art of the Weimar era—took control of the state-run UFA studio from 1933
to 1945. (After the Nazis banned his 1933 crime picture The Testament of Dr.
Mabuse, Lang left Germany. Goebbels had offered him—and he rejected—
an UFA position producing films for the Third Reich. As Goebbels launched
a campaign to purge Jews from the German film industry, escapist musical
comedy features like Viktor Viktoria complemented documentaries like Leni
Riefenstahl’s 1935 propaganda masterpiece Triumph of the Will.) Talented
Germans and Europeans from the Filmmaking environment of pre-Nazi
UFA fled to other countries in Europe or to the United States. Those who
sought refuge in Paris joined a large emigre community. This migration of
German talent to the French film industry coincided with “poetic realism,”
an important influence on film noir, and an established tradition of stylis¬
tically dark French films on unsavory urban topics—as in Russian emigre
director Dmitri Kirsanov’s Menilmontant (1924), produced in Paris; Jean
The Elements of Noir Come Together 17

Renoir’s La Chienne (1931) and Les Bas-fonds (The Lower Depths) (1936);
lulien Duvivier’s Pepe le Moko (1937); and Marcel Carnes Quai des brumes
(Port of Shadows) (1938), Hotel du Nord (1938), and Le Jour se leve (Day¬
break) (1939).
By the 1930s and early 1940s Hollywood’s low-budget horror cycle was
benefiting from this new immigrant talent—especially at Universal and
Paramount studios. Seminal American horror films included Tod Brown¬
ing’s Dracula (1931), shot by former UFA photographer Karl Freund. Brown¬
ing’s film initiated the cycle, which included James Whale’s Frankenstein
(1931), The Old Dark House (1932), The Invisible Man (1933), and Bride of
Frankenstein (1935), as well as with Karl Freund’s The Mummy (1932), Robert
Florey’s Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932, shot by Freund), Edgar Ulmer’s
The Black Cat (1934), Roland Lee’s Son of Frankenstein (1939), Arthur Lu-
bin’s Black Friday (1940), George Waggner’s The Wolf Man (1941), and Ed¬
win Marin’s horror-spy hybrid Invisible Agent (1942)—all produced at Uni¬
versal. Rouben Mamoulian’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1932), designed by
UFA-alumnus Hans Dreier, and Robert Siodmak’s Son of Dracula (1943)
were produced at Paramount. Hollywood crime films also benefited from
the aesthetic cross-fertilization between Germany and the United States as
a result of ParUfaMet and, later, the war in Germany. As expatriate talent
flocked to Hollywood, films tackled crime and critiqued social problems.
Throughout American popular culture—radio dramas, hard-boiled
crime novels, magazine serials, short stories, comic books, dime novels, and
gangster films—artists and hacks alike portrayed Jazz Age crime with gritty
realism that relied on tabloid and pulp fiction sensation. Cultural expres¬
sions of crime included popular radio dramas like Orson Welles’s The
Shadow; comics characters such as Dick Tracy, Secret Agent X-9 (originally
written by Dashiell Hammett), and The Spirit; Marvel comics and pulp
mysteries; detective mystery serials in Black Mask, Dime Detective Maga¬
zine, Detective Story, Detective Fiction Weekly, and Dime Mystery (even crime
stories in mainstream publications like Liberty magazine); and The Avenger
and Black Book Detective dime mystery novels. Hard-boiled fiction prolif¬
erated in America in the grim Depression years. Hammett, James M. Cain,
Raymond Chandler, and Cornell Woolrich contributed crime yarns with
tough characters and graphic violence. Like pulp stories and contemporary
newsreels on actual gangsters, crime films showed sadistic violence (toward
women and even animals) with a distinctive fast-paced style and shadowy
look to convey their seedy atmosphere of speakeasies, cabarets, jazz, and
booze. Drawn from sensational tales of real street crime in 1920s and 1930s
America, early crime films—often depicting the gangster as an urban Robin
i8 Blackout

Hood—coincided with Prohibition (1919-33), when the public regarded

gangsters with some ambivalence. Gangster pictures enjoyed popularity
during the Great Depression—a bleak era when many felt helpless to effect
any economic or social change and when the system seemed on the verge
of collapse. Hollywood antiheroes took action, tried to beat the system, did
something with their lot in life, and seemed to articulate cultural issues in¬
trinsically embedded in American society. Tracing the criminal’s poor be¬
ginnings, profit from the rackets, rising prominence, and inevitable demise,
these tough male-oriented films dealt with working-class struggles, por¬
traying the common man or ethnic immigrant seeking success or accultur¬
ation in mainstream America. Set on the streets of a magnetic, corrupt
American city, crime pictures featured visual iconography—guns, car
chases, cops, crooks, nightclubs, swanky apartments, urbane clothes—doc¬
umenting the gangster’s wealth and power, but they marginalized women,
relegating them to peripheral roles as mothers, sisters, or molls.
The Hollywood gangster genre developed an innovative visual style at
Paramount and Warner Bros. At Paramount director Josef von Sternberg,
a sensuous pictorialist, collaborated with designer Dreier on silent-era films
like the influential gangster classic Underworld (1927, written by former re¬
porter Ben Hecht), The Drag Net (1928, now lost), and The Docks of New
York (1928). Sternberg’s atmospheric crime pictures anticipated noir crime
melodramas with what Rudolph Arnheim called “uncannily lewd detail” as
a prostitute “lustfully strokes” a sailor’s “naked arm with indecent tattoo
marks all over it, as he ripples the muscles on it for her amusement... This
woman sees nothing of the man but power, nudity, muscle.”4 In the lax cen¬
sorship climate of pre-Code Hollywood, suggestive visual innuendo height¬
ened rough, raw, working-class sex and crime in the shadows—achieved
without dialogue. Stylized mise-en-scene metaphorically captured a for¬
bidden, sordid milieu.
In the sound era, crime films gained immense sensory appeal and enor¬
mous popularity—reproducing sirens, screams, and gunfire, while relying
on tough, urban dialogue. Warner Bros, became known for its gangster pic¬
tures such as Mervin LeRoy’s Little Caesar (1930), starring Edward G. Robin¬
son, and William Wellman’s Public Enemy (1931), starring James Cagney,
and for realistic “social problem” films like LeRoy’s powerful I Am a Fugi¬
tive from a Chain Gang (1932). Scarface (1932), directed by Howard Hawks,
adapted by Hecht, produced by Howard Hughes, and released through
United Artists, starred Paul Muni as the quintessential gangster antihero.
Its lethal finale (one of several endings shot to appease censors) shows Muni
gunned down by authorities—riddled with machine-gun bullets—falling
The Elements of Noir Come Together 19

dead on a shadowy rain-soaked city street. Scarface was controversial for

the Hays Office because it sympathetically portrayed crime and criminals
and suggested an incestuous relationship between the gangster (Muni) and
his sister (Ann Dvorak). Negotiations with censors delayed the 1931 produc¬
tion an entire year before a revised ending was finally created and the film
released in 1932. Many crime films like Public Enemy, I Am a Fugitive from
a Chain Gang, and Heroes for Sale (1933) depicted World War I veterans,
scarred by the brutality of war, returning to a Prohibition (and, later, De¬
pression) era America where violence, social injustice, and corruption is
rampant and basic day-to-day survival is a challenge.
Like the tough moll in gangster pictures, unruly “fallen” women antici¬
pated the noir femme fatale. Married Fanny Ward (The Cheat), salacious
Jean Harlow {Red Headed Woman, 1932), and lethal Bette Davis (Marked
Woman, 1937; The Letter, 1940) draw guns and blow their male costars away.
Like dangerous enchantress Lulu (Louise Brooks) precipitating the anti-
hero’s ruin in Pabst’s Pandora’s Box or Maria’s (Brigitte Helm) evil robotic
alter ego stirring up mayhem in Lang’s Metropolis, Sternberg’s pictures with
Marlene Dietrich—The Blue Angel (1930), Morocco (1930), Shanghai Express
(1932), and Blonde Venus (1932)—provide a template for the seductive
femme fatale of the 1940s. In Blonde Venus mother/diva Dietrich’s inde¬
pendence, androgynous and masculine attire, cabaret career, and sexuality
are such transgressive threats to her estranged husband (Herbert Marshall)
that he has her hounded by police. After an adulterous affair with million¬
aire Cary Grant she ends up on the run, frequenting destitute dives and se¬
ducing a police detective to her bedroom while posing as a prostitute. Stern¬
berg’s stylized lighting caresses Dietrich’s features, as Marshall, wearing a
fedora that completely shadows his face, informs her he’ll be taking away
her five-year-old son (Dickie Moore).
Another pre-Code film, RKO’s What Price Hollywood? (1932), starring
Constance Bennett and Lowell Sherman, produced by Pandro S. Berman
and executive producer David O. Selznick, directed by George Cukor,
showed innovative pre-noir style in its powerful climax. An elaborate mon¬
tage sequence with impressive special effects by Slavko Vorkapich and Lloyd
Knechtel featured extreme skewed low angles, rapid cutting, slow motion,
superimposed prison bars, and moody sound effects, depicting a self-de¬
structive alcoholic director’s suicide in the unlit bedroom of a married star¬
let (whom he had “discovered” and who just bailed him out of jail). In fine
noir fashion he searches in the dark for a match to light a cigarette, finds a
gun instead, and looks in the mirror. His washed-up life and career flash
before him (expanding time in a dazzling series of slow-motion montage
20 Blackout

shots), revealing a nightmare hallucination of shame and guilt as he pulls

the trigger and then falls to the floor.
Despite the popularity of crime in American popular culture, mid-i930s
film censorship banned Hollywood from adapting hard-boiled fiction sto¬
ries and diluted the sexual content and excessive violence in crime pictures,
delaying noir film trends. While tough-guy heroes and corrupt urban set¬
tings dominated screens in early gangster films, once the Hollywood mo¬
tion picture industry established the Production Code Administration and
began enforcing censorship by late 1934, censors were more inclined to dis¬
courage promiscuity, brutality, and romantic portrayals of gangsters in¬
volved in unsavory or illegal activity (such as labor racketeering and pros¬
titution). After Public Enemy made Cagney a star as a gangster in the
pre-Code era, Warner Bros, recast him as a crime-fighting FBI enforcer in
G-Men (1935); gangster-turned-cop Robinson went undercover to break up
the mob opposite tough-guy Humphrey Bogart in Bullets or Ballots (1936).
Shadowy social-problem “message” pictures like Lang’s Fury (1936) and You
Only Live Once (1937, starring Henry Fonda as an ex-con), William Wyler’s
Dead End (1937), Michael Curtiz’s Angels with Dirty Faces (1938), and Ana-
tole Litvak’s Confessions of a Nazi Spy (1939, based on an actual spy case)
featured crime themes. Moody visuals evolved in Robert Florey’s Daughter
of Shanghai (1938), designed by Hans Dreier and Robert Odell, starring
sleuth Anna May Wong; The Face Behind the Mask (1941), coscripted by Paul
Jarrico, starring Peter Lorre as an immigrant turned disfigured crime boss;
and Sternberg’s The Shanghai Gesture (1941), starring Gene Tierney. Pre-
noir B crime films included German-emigre John Brahm’s Rio (1939) and
Let Us Live (1939), recasting Fonda as an innocent “wrong man” framed by
circumstances on death row, and Charles Vidor’s Blind Alley (1939), star¬
ring hoodlum Chester Morris, moll Dvorak, and psychology professor
Ralph Bellamy. (Brahm later directed the 1944 noir gothic thriller The
Lodger.) Proto-noir style is seen in John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939), shot by
veteran silent-era cinematographer Bert Glennon (who filmed Sternberg’s
Underworld, Blonde Venus, and Scarlet Empress), and in The Grapes of Wrath
(1940) and The Long Voyage Home (1940), both shot by Gregg Toland. Welles
studied Stagecoach before directing Citizen Kane.
World War I veterans adapted their combat skills and turned to a vio¬
lent life of crime in W. S. Van Dyke’s They Gave Him a Gun (1937) and Raoul
Walsh’s The Roaring Twenties (1939), which simulated March of Time news¬
reels, starred Cagney and real-life World War I veteran Bogart, and nostal¬
gically critiqued Prohibition-era crime and the gangster genre itself with
the film’s final line, “He used to be a big shot,” describing murdered veteran
The Elements of Noir Come Together 21

Tough guys Johnny Sarto (Edward G. Robinson, right) and Jack Buck (Humphrey
Bogart) engage in hand-to-hand combat in Brother Orchid.
Warner Bros., 1940.

and reformed gangster Eddie Bartlett (Cagney). Lloyd Bacon’s Brother Or¬
chid (1940) parodied Warners’ gangster cycle; rival Bogart nearly kills off
mobster Robinson, who is revived and then reformed into a monk at the
serene Monastery of the Little Brothers of the Flowers. (Little Caesar’s con¬
version from a kingpin to a divine pacifist—resembling Friar Tuck—com¬
bines gangster-comedy and social drama, seemingly paying homage to PCA
piety.) Walsh’s High Sierra (1941) featured Bogart in his first lead and fit¬
tingly wrote the epitaph for the gangster genre, initiating a new kind of
crime trend and offering a new image of screen masculinity.
In this new era fresh talent with innovative and provocative ideas would
gain greater creative control over the filmmaking process as the motion pic¬
ture industry neared wartime. In 1939 writer-director-star Orson Welles and
British producer-director Alfred Hitchcock (who had worked at UFA early
in his career) came to Hollywood as John Huston was rising up the ranks
from writer to writer-director. All three would exert powerful influence on
1940s films widely regarded as noir prototypes. Huston’s The Maltese Fal¬
con (1941) recast Warner Bros.’ 1930s gangster-crime tradition in a more
hard-boiled 1940s style with a faithful rendering of Dashiell Hammett’s
tough detective fiction. Alfred Hitchcock’s suspense films translated British
22 Blackout

roman noir novels into gothic thrillers. Orson Welles’s collaboration with
cinematographer Gregg Toland introduced visual flourishes and narrative
techniques that tioir filmmakers would seize on later in the decade. It was,
however, an unheralded director and a largely forgotten film that first an¬
ticipated film noir.
Directed by former writer and Russian emigre Boris Ingster, RKO’s B
picture (produced by Lee Marcus, written by Frank Partos and an uncred¬
ited Nathanael West) Stranger on the Third Floor fused the expressionist aes¬
thetic of earlier horror films with a journalistic investigative murder story
in a style evoking Fritz Lang’s M and recast its psychopathic murderer, Ger¬
man expatriate star Peter Lorre. RKO historian Richard B. Jewell calls it a
“B-unit curiosity... a premature film noir, a picture that should, by all his¬
torical rights, have been produced in 1944 or 1945—not 1940.”5 Produced in
the summer of 1940, the film features baroque, low-key cinematography by
Nicholas Musuraca, which captured the claustrophobic mise-en-scene of
famed RKO art director Van Nest Polglase and Albert S. D’Agostino. Known
for the art deco style in Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers musicals, Polglase
would design Citizen Kane the next year. Also of note is outstanding special
effects montage work by Vernon L. Walker.
Stranger on the Third Floor producer Lee Marcus ran RKO’s B unit, su¬
pervising all the studio’s low-budget releases. In 1938, then corporate pres¬
ident Leo Spitz encouraged Marcus to “produce some ‘exploitation’ pic¬
tures—films dealing with subject matter of a topical and slightly sensational
nature. Marcus’ initial response was Smashing the Rackets... inspired by
the career of New York district attorney Thomas E. Dewey,” in which
Chester Morris “blasted his way through a morass of skulduggery and cor¬
ruption, sweeping the city clean in 80 minutes [of] ... breathless, pugna¬
cious entertainment, bursting with a vitality often lacking in programme
pictures.”6 Writer Frank Partos, a newspaperman educated at New York
University, began at MGM and Paramount, serving on the Screen Writers
Guild board. Fie worked on Brahm’s pre- noir B film Rio, The Uninvited
(1944), And Now Tomorrow (1944, with Raymond Chandler), The Snake Pit
(1948), and Night without Sleep (1952). Writer Nathanael West, whose Re¬
public B pictures The President’s Mystery (1936) and It Could Happen to You
(i937) featured what Brian Neve calls “unusual political awareness,” pol¬
ished the script for Stranger on the Third Floor.7 As B-movie historian Don
Miller observes:

Out of nowhere in 1940 came Stranger on the Third Floor, a highly

original, brooding little gem directed by Boris Ingster, a Russian with
The Elements of Noir Come Together 23

no ear for American speech patterns but great facility with story con¬
struction who had labored for several years as a writer. His directorial
debut was auspicious, especially for a low-budget film ... The Partos
script, obviously a homage to Dostoyevsky ... is narrated in stream-
of-consciousness dialogue by the reporter. It’s a carefully wrought
screenplay, but it’s likely that, good as it is, it would be far less effective
in the hands of an ordinary director. Ingster contributes immeasur¬
ably to its success ... for some striking camera images, all the more
unusual to be on display in a limited budget B film.8

Ingster had come to America from Russia sometime after the Revolu¬
tion (immigration Americanized his name from Azar). Assistant director
on Romance sentimentale (1930), a short film directed in Paris by Sergei
Eisenstein and Grigori Aleksandrov and considered an early surrealist
avant-garde classic, Ingster’s writing credits included The Last Days of Pom¬
peii (1935), Dancing Pirate (1936), Song of Russia (1944), which he rewrote
to tone down wartime communist themes, and Fritz Lang’s Cloak and Dag¬
ger (1946). He also served as writer-director on The Judge Steps Out
(1947-49) and the B noir classic Southside 1-1000 (1950), before moving to
television as a producer on Wagon Train, The Roaring 20s, and The Man
from UNCLE. Although not a member of the Communist Party, Ingster
sometimes served as executive officer for the Screen Writers Guild and was
involved in its battle for recognition in the late 1930s. Stranger on the Third
Floor cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca was a specialist in what came to
be known as noir style.9
Ingster’s film presents a cynical view of justice and uses multiple flash¬
backs to depict the nightmares, paranoia, and psychotic impulses of its tor¬
mented antihero, rookie newspaper reporter Michael Ward (John
McGuire). Ward witnesses a murder and furthers his career by covering the
story and testifying in court. Consumed by guilt, he faces a crisis of con¬
science after finding he has wrongly accused an innocent cab driver, Joe
Briggs (Elisha Cook Jr.), of the crime while the real killer, “the Stranger”
(Lorre), stalks the night, slashes throats, and prowls Ward’s shadowy apart¬
ment building. Ward imagines that his loathsome neighbor, whom he has
threatened to kill, is murdered and that he is framed for the crime. Pan¬
icked, Ward awakens to discover that his nightmare has actually occurred,
and he is arrested. Like a female crime detective, the reporter’s fiancee, Jane
(Margaret Tallichet)—a decent, working noir heroine rather than a sexual
temptress—investigates the murder to clear his name and save Ward from
the electric chair. She solves the case by finding—and nearly becoming vie-
24 Blackout

tim to—the throat-slashing Stranger, who turns out to be an insane asylum

escapee.
Like social proto-noir 1930s films M, You Only Live Once, and Let Us Live,
Stranger on the Third Floor reveals a corrupt and ineffectual criminal jus¬
tice system. In the courtroom jurors and even the judge doze off, seeming
not to care about the testimony that will determine an innocent man’s fate
and send him to the electric chair. Political officials, district attorneys, and
law enforcement officers are bumbling and inept. Seasoned crime reporters
indict the legal process, mocking justice yet complicitly tolerating its bla¬
tant lack of accomplishing any fair or effective solutions to crimes. Fram¬
ing innocent victims and letting criminals go free, the system shows that
justice does not prevail and provides no hope that this miserable state of af¬
fairs will ever change. The system’s futile injustice reinforces Ward’s guilt.
Like later classic noir films, Stranger on the Third Floor presents a bleak view
of its urban environment. Shadowy and cramped, its claustrophobic city is
a dangerous and ruthless place where bureaucratic law-and-order institu¬
tions have broken down and will inhumanely bring about the demise of,
rather than protect, its individual inhabitants. Even the heroine’s solution
to the case by finding Lorre’s maniac occurs by chance—as does his sudden
demise when a truck swiftly skids and accidentally mows him down.
Though much discussed, violent crimes are never shown. Simulating
tabloid sensation, Ingster uses the nonfiction journalistic and courtroom
investigational proceedings as a “realistic” ruse to justify vividly brutal con¬
tent—dialogue describes grisly murder details in graphic accounts of blood,
knives, and sliced throats. On the witness stand accused murderer Briggs
recalls, “It wasn’t very nice. His throat was cut. Blood was still dripping into
the open drawer of the cash register.” Another witness notes “a great deal of
violence—the head was almost severed from the body.” Filmmakers hag¬
gled with PCA censors about a variety of objections—including drinking,
nudity, and sexual affairs—from early May 1940 well into the summer. The
most controversial aspect of Ingster’s film, however, was not the gory vio¬
lence of its premise or its criminal brutality but rather another matter: “the
business of the voices talking to the hero, Michael, throughout a great deal
of this story, and Michael’s reactions hitherto, suggest that Michael is suf¬
fering from some form of insanity ... This same point applies in a lesser
degree to the Stranger who is described as having ‘an almost maniacal glint
in his bulging eyes.’”10 PCA censors had issues about depicting insanity in
both Lorre’s criminal stranger and hero McGuire’s guilt-ridden fears—wor¬
rying about his capacity to actually be the murderer or be framed for the
crime by circumstantial evidence—brilliantly rendered in shadowy psycho-
The Elements of Noir Come Together 25

logical nightmares. The fact that Ward, in his voice-over narration, actually
questions his own sanity in the dreams, flashbacks, and premonition se¬
quences only added fuel to the censors’ fire.
Insanity had long been a concern for censors. For instance, although set
in a pastoral lakefront country home, the pre- noir picture Blind Alley and
its title referred to gangster Chester Morris’s psychotic criminal mind, cor¬
rupted by the city, revealed in vivid style through reverse-exposure images
of his recurring nightmares. MGM originally tried to adapt the play on
which the story was based, Smoke Screen, in 1935, but censors nixed the proj¬
ect and told the studio to “dismiss it entirely from further consideration”
because its gangster hero was “thoroughly unacceptable,” insisting the story
violated the Code “so bad ... that it was irrevocably beyond its pale,” espe¬
cially “the suicide of the gangster, as a means of escape from the conse¬
quences of his crimes.”11 Because it depicted crime, suicide, and psychosis,
Blind Alley was shelved for several years until Columbia filmed it in 1939,
just before RKO produced Stranger on the Third Floor, when the PCA ad¬
vised against displaying weapons or showing crime details and warned that
British censors would reject “any material dealing with insane characters
and the use of an asylum as a background.”12 In 1938 Selznick’s effort to
adapt Daphne du Maurier’s novel Rebecca—a masterwork of infidelity, dys¬
functional sexual relationships, and domestic murder, with eerie first-per¬
son narration (“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again... ”)—drew
fire from censors for its immoral crimes, its hero getting away with mur¬
der, and its depiction of the protagonist’s psychological instability. Female
hysteria, crimes of passion, and insanity, hallmarks of Alfred Hitchcock’s
roman noir thrillers, were highly censorable. Although the PCA discouraged
depictions of insanity and illegal activity onscreen, the popularity of psy¬
choanalysis encouraged psychological themes in Blind Alley, Dark Victory,
Stranger on the Third Floor, Rebecca, Suspicion, Citizen Kane, This Gun for
Hire, King's Row, Street of Chance, Now Voyager, Shadow of a Doubt, Spell¬
bound, and many wartime noir pictures. Censors reiterated concern over
the depiction of insanity in Stranger on the Third Floor for three months,
from May 7 to July 24, and even added a P.S. to its PCA seal: “The British
Board of Film Censors will delete scenes of Peter Lorre if they regard him
as insane. Other political censor boards will probably delete the [psycho¬
logical nightmare] scenes of the [imagined] death march, and of the death
chamber, and Ward being strapped in the electric chair.”13
The film’s proletarian social critique is significant and even more dis¬
tinctive than that in many later noirs. Two major themes emerge in the
film—its emphasis on social injustice, money, poverty, and Depression-era
26 Blackout

anxieties, and the overwhelming feeling of guilt suffered by its protagonist.

Social and cultural changes taking place in the United States between World
War I and World War II influenced 1920S-30S American popular culture,
including social-realist theater and working-class fiction, and dealt with the
dashed hopes and meager existence that so many endured in the Great De¬
pression. Like hard-boiled detective fiction, these working-class themes
flourished during a time when many were down on their luck and survived
because they were willing to do the humblest work. Championing individ¬
uals, the working-class hero—or antihero like the gangster, ex-con, tough
everyman turning to crime just to survive, or the streetwise hard-boiled de¬
tective—was a man who lived by his wits and challenged corrupt institu¬
tions in a hardscrabble world. Emerging from the Depression, many ordi¬
nary people surviving the 1930s could identify with such working-class
themes. Like later noir pictures, Ingster’s film critiques the American Dream
to suggest it is an unpredictable urban nightmare of gloom and futility.
Ward’s struggling protagonist mutters how his low-rent boardinghouse is
a dive. Commenting on the very noir visuals that surround him in the black
stairway of the apartment building, he complains: “What a gloomy dump.
Why don’t they put in a bigger lamp?” The film suggests that if he had more
money to “move up” in the world, he’d live in a big, bright house with an
abundance of light, ensuring his comfort and safety. If his landlord had, or
spent, more money—and if the B picture was a more lavish A film—im¬
ages would be bathed in the high-key radiance of bigger, brighter lamps.
The low-budget production constraints in Stranger on the Third Floor
aided the film’s ominously shrouded visuals in depicting a shady working-
class milieu. Ingster and Musuraca created a black abyss, achieving striking
film noir images on an economical budget. As material concerns and film-
making constraints tightened by 1940, with the war ramping up overseas
and the U.S. becoming more directly involved, Stranger on the Third Floor
was a top-tiered B picture filmed on a small budget put to good effect with
shooting confined mainly to contained sound stages. Drawing from expres¬
sionist horror films, Ingster and Musuraca used camerawork to portray a
nightmarish world, framing characters and action from skewed angles. A
series of montages conveys the disturbed state of Ward’s psyche, most strik¬
ingly when out-of-kilter, oblique “Dutch” angles highlight a hallucination
in which a mob encircles him and accuses him of murder in a cramped in¬
terrogation room. The walls behind Ward seem to come alive with elabo¬
rate weblike patterns to reveal his delirium, while bars of doom and criss¬
crossing shadows emphasize his entrapment and inner turmoil. Harsh
“demon” lighting (lit from below to contort facial features, as in horror pic-
The Elements of Noir Come Together 27

tures) and twisted close-ups expose vicious characters indicting him for the
crime. The sound track amplifies Ward’s dislocation from reality. Eerie mu¬
sic, ominous voices, and his distraught conscience haunt Ward, providing
a desperate narration as he talks to himself and signaling a spiral of hyste¬
ria closing in on him. As Tom Flinn observes:

The dream sequence itself is so completely expressionistic in style that

it resembles an animation of one of Lynd Ward’s woodcut novels
(God’s Man, Madman’s Drum) with strong contrasts in lighting, angu¬
lar shadow patterns, and distorted, emblematic architecture; in short,
a kind of total stylization that manages to be both extremely evocative
and somewhat theatrical. The use of [a] tilted camera destroys the
normal play of horizontals and verticals, creating a forest of oblique
angles that recalls the unsettling effects of expressionist painting and
cinema. The tilted camera was a favorite device of horror.14

On May 16,1940, Edwin Schallert of the Los Angeles Times announced

that “Margaret Tallichet (Mrs. William Wyler) has been signed for ‘Stranger
on the Third Floor,’ [a] murder mystery tale by Frank Partos at RKO. Since
her marriage she has seldom done screen work.”15 The next day the Los An¬
geles Times reported that “John McGuire will have the lead opposite Mar¬
garet Tallichet in ‘Stranger on the Third Floor.’ Boris Ingster, RKO writer
will direct.”16 On May 29 the Los Angeles Times ran Schallert’s article under
the headline “RKO Signs Lorre for Two Leading Roles”:

Peter Lorre, who did such interesting work a few years ago in pictures
like “M,”“The Man Who Knew Too Much” and “Crime and Punish¬
ment,” will again be returning to thrillers. He will play the title part in
“Stranger on the Third Floor” at RKO, and has further signed a two-
picture deal with the studio ... Radio-Keith-Orpheum has hopes for
restoring Lorre to his former pre-eminence in the special field in
which he made such a hit several years ago. Later he was sidetracked
by the “Mr. Moto” films, which were never too popular.

Schallert added, “Margaret Tallichet and John McGuire will have romantic
leads, while Elisha Cook Jr., Ethel Griffies, Charles Judels and Frank Faylen
are to act in the support.”17 One month later the Los Angeles Times wrote
that “Margaret Tallichet is discussing a term contract with RKO all because
she looks good in the rushes of‘Stranger on the Third Floor.’”18 On June
30 Los Angeles Times columnist Philip K. Scheuer reported:
28 Blackout

Elaborate shadows convey Ward’s nightmare of the electric chair in Stranger on the
Third Floor.
RKO, 1940.

Filming of a potentially important “different” picture has started at

RKO. Its name is “The Stranger on the Third Floor,” and Frank Partos,
who wrote it (in complete continuity form) out of sheer enthusiasm
for the idea, peddled it for two years before Lee Marcus, at Radio, fi¬
nally decided to take a chance on it. Partos and Boris Ingster, who is
directing, regard the technique experimental. It contains flash for¬
wards as well as flash backs: and paints, to put it briefly, the ironic
predicament of a reporter who testifies against an accused murderer
and is then placed in a position where circumstantial evidence would
prove him guilty of a like crime. We’ve all imagined ourselves in a sim¬
ilar spot at one time or another—but Partos is the first to do anything
about it.19

It was an experimental time at RKO, when the studio was willing to take
chances many other studios wouldn’t. Adopting the motto “Quality Pictures
at a Premium Price,”20 new RKO president George Schaefer had just offered
Orson Welles, a newcomer with no filmmaking experience, a carte-blanche
The Elements of Noir Come Together 29

contract with unprecedented creative freedom and control over his proj¬
ects as a writer-director-star. Schaefer—interested in prestige A pictures—
was more hands-off on Marcus’s B-films unit, allowing Marcus greater cre¬
ative latitude. Perhaps in an effort to enhance his own status at the studio,
Marcus may have carved out extra resources (and meager funds) for a proj¬
ect like Stranger on the Third Floor because he could see it was trying to
achieve something far more interesting and artistic than many conventional
B movies offered at that time.21 Shot in twenty-seven days, from June 3 to
July 3, Stranger on the Third Floor was released on August 16,1940.22
RKO’s sensational ads promoted Stranger on the Third Floor like a bizarre
B movie, combining horror, crime, and mystery thrillers. The studio also
played up the psychological angle (“He dreams a killing then has to prove
his innocence!”), hyped its tabloid realism (“Haunting nightmare turns
grim reality ... as murder witness almost dreams himself into the electric
chair”), and showcased how different and shocking the film was. Taglines—
seemingly straight out of the pulps—screamed: “nightmare murderer!”

“maniac killer Stalks the Night!” “Strange! Startling! Sensational! If you

like your murderers different ... Meet the ... stranger on the Third
Floor with Peter Lorre.” Along with these lines was the shady, menacing
face of Lorre. One ad featured Lorre shot with low-angle “demon” lighting
beneath the tagline: “trailing a ‘tiptoe’ killer! murder ... in a night¬
mare that comes true ... to haunt an innocent man ... Mystery thriller to
baffle you.” All of this runs above a bare-footed Tallichet revealing a length
of bare legs, sans stockings. Another read: “killer A mystery thriller with
a baffling new slant!” “fugitive from fear! When damning evidence in
maniac killing switches from suspect... to star witness!” “Suppose your

worst dreams came true!! Wouldn’t it be awful?... This man’s did ...
and he faces the same false murder charge he visioned!... A New Slant on
a Murder Story . .. With a Swell Romance to Help It Along!” A lobby card
showed Lorre about to strangle Tallichet, with McGuire looking on beneath
the tagline, “nightmare of crime! Stranger on the third floor.”23

RKO’s press book began: “Few murders are committed in the presence
of witnesses—yet men and women die in the chair for them! The answer—
circumstantial evidence! Here’s an astonishing picture that deals dramati¬
cally with this problem of justice—is it justice blind or justice true-seeing?
Filmed in a manner that makes it a screen novelty, this arresting story has
Peter Lorre featured in one of his telling characterizations, and an engag¬
ing couple of youngsters in the romantic roles.” One of the press book’s pro¬
motional pieces, “Eccentric Camera Work Marks Drama,” noted the film’s
“striking and unusual camera angles,” “light-and-shadow effects never be-
3« Blackout

fore seen” onscreen, and lighting with “reflected sets” that “transforms”
everyone in “sinister, distorted guise.” The piece continued: “Reflections of
sets thrown on an off-white panorama are utilized as backgrounds instead
of actual sets,” so everything “is exaggerated, just as it is in a nightmare.
Through the use of fog, an invisible paint that blends with the fog to oblit¬
erate the floors, and small pieces of scenery erected on huge, empty stages
lined with hazy cycloramas, the sense of fantasy and unreality is created and
preserved.”
In another piece, “Makes Miniature of Movie, Then Actual,” the press
book publicized Ingster’s working method for planning and designing the
film:

At the request of the director, Boris Ingster, each of the 243 scenes in
“Stranger on the Third Floor” was sketched in detail and then built in
miniature before the picture went into production at the RKO Radio
studios. In addition, trick lighting effects were developed and tested
and tiny figures of the principal actors were arranged and moved
about to determine the most effective positions and camera angles to
be used. When everything was completed, the miniature sets were
photographed, and any necessary changes made before the first scene
was shot.

Ingster explained that “this advance work saves time when the actual shoot¬
ing begins” and “leaves the director’s mind free from most of the mechan¬
ical problems and permits him to devote his attention and energy to his
players.”
RKO called the film a “crime drama novelty,” “out of the ordinary,” an
“unusual romance” that “flourishes in the somber shadow of a maniac’s ter¬
ror campaign ... Drama, suspense and exceptional realism ... in a web of
circumstantial evidence over a murder case.” In “Screen Drama Has Girl
Steno-Detective” the press book promoted the female sleuth: “A pretty sec¬
retary who turns amateur detective and thus saves her reporter sweetheart
from the electric chair, pursues a danger-filled course in RKO Radio’s
‘Stranger on the Third Floor.’ Margaret Tallichet is seen as the courageous
heroine, while John McGuire plays her boy friend. Peter Lorre tops the cast
as an unbalanced man of mystery whose crimes involve the reporter on a
murder charge until the girl exposes him.” Adding a bit of sexual violence,
beneath a photo of Lorre grabbing the starlet (titled “It’s the Menace!”) a
caption read, “Margaret Tallichet dares not express the fear she feels when
Peter Lorre’s fingers fasten, talon-like, on her shoulders.” The press book
The Elements of Noir Come Together 31

also promoted Lorre’s “European photodrama‘M’ in which he won world¬

wide recognition” and called Lorre an “eerie stranger” and “menace in the
mystery,” whose “presence mysteriously coincides with two sensational
crimes for which innocent men are condemned.”24 Although the film’s re¬
markable dream sequences, special effects depicting Ward’s guilt-obsessed
nightmares, haunting voice-over, and brooding antihero flirting with in¬
sanity are truly unforgettable and influential to noir, it is curious that Lorre
wasn’t given more screen time—especially since he received top hilling, was
a known international star, and featured so prominently in RKO’s public¬
ity. The romantic leads were fine for B-player performances, and Elisha
Cook Jr. is wonderful as the taxi driver framed for the crime, but Ingster’s
low-budget picture—lacking a star—could only have benefited from more
fully utilizing Lorre’s spine-tingling talent. In was certainly clear which ac¬
tors shined (Lorre, Cook) to reappear in later noir features.
By August 30 the Hollywood Reporter cailed Stranger on the Third Floor
“interesting on a number of counts. It misses being an outstanding picture
through almost total absence of comedy relief and a weak ending. It is no¬
table for the intense mood it builds up, for some striking montage effects
and for providing a showcase for the talent of its male lead, John McGuire.
The story is heavy psychological drama all through.” It praised Musuraca’s
photography and lighting as “a major contender for honors,” along with
Polglase’s atmospheric design, Walker’s special-effects montage work, and
Marcus’s courage in producing such an experimental film. “A good third of
the picture shows the psychosis of the reporter as he broods over his ac¬
tions, while his thoughts are spoken aloud. A large portion is also told
through flashbacks. In spite of these involved story-telling methods, Boris
Ingster has successfully built his suspense, ofttimes gripping.”25 Philip K.
Scheuerof the Los Angeles Times loved the film. In “Ingenious Film Shown”
he called Stranger on the Third F/oor“impressionistic” and wrote that “Lorre
Scores,” explaining that Ingster’s film develops an “ingenious premise”:

Adapted by Frank Partos from his own original story, the picture
makes free use of thoughts both spoken and pictured, as well as a
dream. These scenes are photographed impressionistically, with a fair
amount of imagination. They recall the halcyon era of German films
and the New York Theater Guild. The production rates as a novelty
and should exert a spell above that of the routine program effort. With
it, Boris Ingster accomplishes a promising directorial debut, although
he has been inclined to exaggerate the “real life” sequences to the pro¬
portions of the fantastic ...
32 Blackout

As the child-like paranoiac, Peter Lorre contributes his simplest and

most effective sketch of a killer since “M.” It is the same role, of course,
but one that stands repeating. Elisha Cook Jr. is swell as the convicted
man. John McGuire makes Michael just a typical “guy” and beauteous
Margaret Tallichet takes a decisive step forward as an actress ... Roy
Webb’s score is characteristically spooky.26

By September Los Angeles Times columnist Jimmie Fidler called Stranger on

the Third Floor “a whodunit sure to produce enough chills to offset early
autumn heat.”27
Other critics were not as enthusiastic. New York Times critic Bosley
Crowther chided the film’s first-time director:

Mr. Ingster, a former script-writer, obviously is a fellow who wants

to make pictures which are “different.” But from the evidence at hand,
it looks as though his inspiration has been derived from a couple of
heavy French and Russian films, a radio drama or two and an under¬
done Welsh rarebit, all taken in quick succession ... In every ... re¬
spect, including Peter Lorre’s brief role as the whack, it is utterly wild.
The notion seems to have been that the way to put a psychological
melodrama across is to pile on the sound effects and trick up the
photography.28

A few days later Harrison’s Reports wrote, “This melodrama is strictly lim¬
ited in its appeal: as far as the masses are concerned, the story is too har¬
rowing—at its conclusion, one feels as if one had gone through a nightmare
... The closing scenes, in which the heroine traps the lunatic murderer, are
a bit terrifying.”29 Variety liked how Peter Lorre put “over another of his
studies in film mania as the escaped lunatic, his very appearance on the
screen paving way for the darkest doings,” and commended the film’s effec¬
tive “premonition” dream sequences. Even so, Variety called the modest film
“too arty for average audiences” and complained that it “doubtlessly cost
more than necessary for fancy camera effects, lighting and trick dubbing
... The street sets scream their artificiality,” and Peter Lorre is wasted as a
“maniacal murderer.” Many reviewers compared the film to The Cabinet of
Dr. Caligari in combining stylized “techniques of suspense and thrill” with
realistic accounts of two New York City murders.30 Yet the dark vision and
wild aesthetics in Stranger on the Third Floor were not immediately acces¬
sible to critics or filmgoers. Viewers, it seemed, were not quite ready for film
noir.
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