Blackout World War II and the Origins of Film

Noir Sheri Chinen Biesen pdf download

https://ebookgate.com/product/blackout-world-war-ii-and-the-
origins-of-film-noir-sheri-chinen-biesen/

Get Instant Ebook Downloads – Browse at https://ebookgate.com

Instant digital products (PDF, ePub, MOBI) available
Download now and explore formats that suit you...

Film Style and the World War II Combat Genre 1st Edition
Stuart Bender

https://ebookgate.com/product/film-style-and-the-world-war-ii-combat-
genre-1st-edition-stuart-bender/

ebookgate.com

Philosophy Black Film Film Noir Dan Flory

https://ebookgate.com/product/philosophy-black-film-film-noir-dan-
flory/

ebookgate.com

Yellow Crocodiles and Blue Oranges Russian Animated Film

since World War II 1st Edition David Macfadyen

https://ebookgate.com/product/yellow-crocodiles-and-blue-oranges-
russian-animated-film-since-world-war-ii-1st-edition-david-macfadyen/

ebookgate.com

The Origins of the Second World War 4th Edition Richard

Overy

https://ebookgate.com/product/the-origins-of-the-second-world-war-4th-
edition-richard-overy/

ebookgate.com
The Origins of the Second World War 3rd ed Edition Overy

https://ebookgate.com/product/the-origins-of-the-second-world-war-3rd-
ed-edition-overy/

ebookgate.com

Japanese Paratroop Forces of World War II Gordon Rottman

https://ebookgate.com/product/japanese-paratroop-forces-of-world-war-
ii-gordon-rottman/

ebookgate.com

The Origins of the Second World War 1933 1941 2nd Edition
Ruth Henig

https://ebookgate.com/product/the-origins-of-the-second-world-
war-1933-1941-2nd-edition-ruth-henig/

ebookgate.com

A Spy s Diary of World War II Wayne Nelson

https://ebookgate.com/product/a-spy-s-diary-of-world-war-ii-wayne-
nelson/

ebookgate.com

The War of Our Childhood Memories of World War II First

Edition. Edition Wolfgang W. E. Samuel

https://ebookgate.com/product/the-war-of-our-childhood-memories-of-
world-war-ii-first-edition-edition-wolfgang-w-e-samuel/

ebookgate.com
KRiS@K< Ttw

i. r ']
i
•-. t jfl

|U ! |TJ
W (ffl
Mf,

If Ma —--
 Digitized by the Internet Archive
in 2019 with funding from
Kahle/Austin Foundation

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:
Another Random Scribd Document
with Unrelated Content
good omen. He lay on his back in the leaves listening to them and
wondering at their number.
“Bos hula enweer ew’n teller na,” said he in Cornish, as he rolled
over to sleep. “Truly this is the owls’ house.”
 CHAPTER IV
When John Penhale carried the gypsy girl into Bosula, he thought
she would be off again in a fortnight or a month at most. On the
contrary she curled up as snug as a dormouse, apparently prepared
to stay forever. At first she followed him wherever he went about the
farm, but after a week she gave that up and remained at Bosula
absorbed in the preparation of food.
The number of really satisfying meals the girl Teresa had had in
her time could be counted on her fingers and toes, almost. Life had
been maintained by a crust here and a bone there. She was only
half gypsy; her mother had been an itinerant herbalist, her father a
Basque bear-leader, and she was born at Blyth Fair. Her twenty-two
years had been spent on the highways, singing and dancing from
tavern to tavern, harried by the law on one side and hunger on the
other. She had no love for the Open Road; her feet were sore from
trudging it and she knew it led nowhere but to starvation; her
mother had died in a ditch and her father had been hanged. For
years she had been waiting a chance to get out of the dust, and
when John came along, knocked out the tumbler and jerked her a
florin she saw that possible chance.
A sober farmer who tossed silver so freely should be a bachelor,
she argued, and a man who could fight like that must have a good
deal of the lusty animal about him. She knew the type, and of all
men they were the easiest to handle. She followed up the clew hot
foot, and now here she was in a land of plenty. She had no intention
of leaving in a fortnight, a month, or ever, if she could help it, no
desire to exchange three meat meals daily, smoking hot, for turnips;
or a soft bed for the lee of a haystack. She would sit on the floor
after supper, basking at the roaring hearth, her back propped
against John’s knees, and listen to the drip of the eaves, the sough
of the treetops, the echoed organ crashes of the sea, snuggle closer
to the farmer and laugh.
 When he asked her why she did that she shrugged her
shoulders. But she laughed to think of what she was escaping,
laughed to think that the tumbler was out in it. But for that flung
florin and the pricking of her thumbs she would have been out in it
too, crouched under a hedge, maybe, soaked and shivering. Penhale
need have had no fears she would leave him; on the contrary she
was afraid he would tire of her, and strove by every means to bind
him to her irrevocably. She practiced all her wiles on John, ran to
him when he came in, fondled and kissed him, rubbed her head on
his shoulder, swore he didn’t care for her, pretended to cry, any
excuse to get taken in his arms; once there she had him in her
power. The quarter strain of gitano came uppermost then, the blood
of generations of ardent southern women, professional charmers all,
raced in her veins and prompted her, showed her how and when. It
was all instinctive and quite irresistible; the simple northern yeoman
was a clod in her hands.
Martha had found Teresa some drugget clothes, rummaging in
chests that lay, under the dust of twenty years, in the neglected
west wing—oak chests and mahogany with curious iron clasps and
hinges, the spoil of a score of foundered ships. Teresa had been
close behind the woman when the selection was made and she had
glimpsed many things that were not drugget. When she gave up
following John abroad she took to spending most of her time,
between meals, in the west wing, bolting the doors behind her so
that Martha could not see what she was doing.
John was lurching home down the valley one autumn evening,
when, as he neared Bosula, he heard singing and the tinkling of
melodious wires. There was a small grove of ashes close ahead,
encircling an open patch of ground supposed to be a fairy ring, in
May a purple pool of bluebells, but then carpeted with russet and
yellow leaves. He stepped nearer, peered round an oak bole and saw
a sight which made him stagger and swear himself bewitched. There
was a marvelous lady dancing in the circlet, and as she danced she
sang, twanging an accompaniment on a little guitar.
 “Then, Lovely Boy, bring hither
The Chaplet, e’er it wither,
Steep’d in the various Juices
The Cluster’d Vine produces;
The Cluster’d Vine produces.”
She was dressed in a straight-laced bodice stitched with silver
and low cut, leaving her shoulders bare; flowing daffodil sleeves
caught up at the elbows and a cream-colored skirt sprigged with
blue flowers and propped out at the hips on monstrous farthingales.
On her head she wore a lace fan-tail—but her feet were bare. She
swept round and round in a circle, very slow and stately, swaying,
turning, curtseying to the solemn audience of trees.
“So mix’t with sweet and sour,
Life’s not unlike the flower;
Its Sweets unpluck’d will languish,
And gather’d ’tis with anguish;
And gather’d ’tis with anguish.”
The glare of sunset shot through gaps in the wood in quivering
golden shafts, fell on the smooth trunks of the ashes transforming
them into pillars of gold. In this dazzle of gold the primrose lady
danced, in and out of the beams, now glimmering, now in hazy and
delicate shadow. A puff of wind shook a shower of pale leaves upon
her, they drifted about her like confetti, her bare feet rustled among
them, softly, softly.
“This, round my moisten’d Tresses,
The use of Life expresses:
Wine blunts the thorn of Sorrow,
Our Rose may fade to-morrow:
Our Rose—may—fade—to-morrow.”
The sun went down behind the hill; twilight, powder-blue, swept
through the wood, quenching the symphony in yellows. The lady
made a final fritter of strings, bowed to the biggest ash and faded
among the trees, towards Bosula. John clung to his oak, stupefied.
Despite his Grammar School education he half believed in the
crone’s stories of Pixies and “the old men,” and if this was not a
supernatural being what was it? A fine lady dancing in Bosula woods
at sundown—and in the fairy circle too! If not a sprite where did she
come from? There was not her match in the parish, or hundred
even. He did not like it at all. He would go home by circling over the
hill. He hesitated. That was a long detour, he was tired and his own
orchard was not a furlong distant. His common sense returned.
Damme! he would push straight home, he was big and strong
enough whatever betide. He walked boldly through the woods,
whistling away his fears, snapping twigs beneath his boots.
He came to a dense clump of hollies at the edge of the orchard
and heard the tinkle-tinkle again, right in front of him. He froze solid
and stared ahead. It was thick dusk among the bushes; he could see
nothing. Tinkle-tinkle—from the right this time. He turned slowly, his
flesh prickling. Nothing. A faint rustle of leaves behind his back and
the tinkle of music once more. John began to sweat. He was pixie-
led for certain—and only fifty yards from his own door. If one
listened to this sort of thing one was presently charmed and lost
forever, he had heard. He would make a dash for it. He burst
desperately through the hollies and saw the primrose lady standing
directly in front of him on the orchard fringe. He stopped. She
curtsied low.
“Oh, Jan, Jan,” she laughed. “Jan, come here and kiss me.”
“Teresa!”
She pressed close against him and held up her full, tempting
mouth. He kissed her over and over.
“Where did you get these—these clothes?” he asked.
“Out of the old chests,” said she. “You like me thus? . . . love
me?”
For answer he hugged her to him and they went on into the
kitchen linked arm in arm. Martha in her astonishment let the
cauldron spill all over the floor and the idiot daughter threw a fit.
 The drugget dress disappeared after that. Teresa rifled the chests
and got some marvelous results. The chests held the hoardings of a
century, samples of every fashion, washed in from wrecks on the
Twelve Apostles, wardrobes of officers’ mistresses bound for the
garrison at Tangier, of proud ladies that went down with Indiamen,
packet ships, and vessels sailing for the Virginia Colony. Jackdaw
pickings that generations of Penhale women had been too modest to
wear and too feminine to part with. Gowns, under gowns, bodices,
smocks and stomachers of silk, taffeta, sarsenet and satin of all hues
and shapes, quilted, brocaded, embroidered, pleated, scalloped and
slashed; cambric and holland ruffs, collars, bands, kerchiefs and
lappets; scarves, trifles of lace pointed and godrooned; odd gloves
of cordovan leather, heavily fringed; vamped single shoes, red
heeled; ribbons; knots; spangled garters; feathers and fans.
The clothes were torn and faded in patches, eaten by moth,
soiled and rusted by salt water, but Teresa cared little; they were
treasure-trove to her, the starveling. She put them all on in turn (as
the Penhale wives had done before her—but in secret) without
regard to fit, appropriateness or period and with the delight of a
child dressing up for a masquerade. She dressed herself differently
every evening—even wearing articles with showy linings inside out—
aiming only at a blaze of color and spending hours in the selection.
The management of the house she left entirely to Martha, which
was wise enough, seeing she knew nothing of houses. John coming
in of an evening never knew what was in store for him; it gave life
an added savour. He approached Adam and Eve, his heart a-flutter—
what would she be like this time?—opened the low door and stepped
within. And there she would be, standing before the hearth waiting
for him, mischievous and radiant, brass earrings winking, a knot of
ribbons in her raven curls, dressed in scarlet, cream, purple or blue,
cloth of gold or silver lace—all worn and torn if you came to examine
closely, but, in the leaping firelight, gorgeous.
Sometimes she would spend the evening wooing him, sidling into
his arms, rubbing with her cheek and purring in her cat fashion; and
sometimes she would take her guitar and, sitting cross-legged
before the hearth, sing the songs by which she had made her living.
Pretty, innocent twitters for the most part, laments to cruel Chloes,
Phyllises and Celias in which despairing Colins and Strephons sang of
their broken hearts in tripping, tuneful measures; morris and country
airs she gave also and patriotic staves—
“Tho’ the Spaniards invade
Our Int’rest and Trade
And often our Merchant-men plunder,
Give us but command
Their force to withstand,
We’ll soon make the slaves truckle under.”
Such stuff stirred John. As the lyrics lulled him, he would inflate
his chest and tap his toe on the flags in time with the tune, very
manful.
All this heady stuff intoxicated the recluse. He felt a spell on the
place, could scarcely believe it was the same dark kitchen in which
he had sat alone for seventeen years, listening to the stream, the
rain and the wind. It was like living in a droll-teller’s story where
charcoal burners fell asleep on enchanted barrows and woke in fairy-
land or immortals put on mortal flesh and sojourned in the homes of
men. Reared on superstition among a race that placed balls on their
roofs and hung rags about holy wells to keep off witches, he almost
smelt magic now. At times he wondered if this strange creature he
had met on the high moors under the moon were what she held to
be, if one day she would not get a summons back to her own
people, the earth gape open for her and he would be alone again.
There had been an authentic case in Zennor parish; his own
grandmother had seen the forsaken husband. He would glance at
Teresa half fearfully, see her squatting before the blaze, lozenges of
white skin showing through the rips in her finery, strong fingers
plucking the guitar strings, round throat swelling as she sang—
“I saw fair Clara walk alone;
The feathered snow came softly down . . .”
—and scout his suspicions. She was human enough—and even if she
were not, sufficient for the day. . . .
As for the girl, with the unstinted feeding, she put on flesh and
good looks. Her bones and angles disappeared, her figure took on
bountiful curves, her mouth lost its defiant pout. She had more than
even she wanted to eat, a warm bed, plenty of colorful kickshaws
and a lover who fell prostrate before her easiest artifices. She was
content—or very nearly so. One thing remained and that was to put
this idyllic state of affairs on a permanent basis. That accomplished,
her cup of happiness would brim, she told herself. How to do it? She
fancied it was more than half done already and that, unless she read
him wrong, she would presently have such a grip on the farmer he
would never throw her off. By January she was sure of herself and
laid her cards on the table.
According to her surmise John took her forthwith into St.
Gwithian, a-pillion on the bay mare, and married her, and on the
third of July a boy was born. It was a great day at Bosula; all the
employees, including Martha, got blind drunk, while John spent a
delightful afternoon laboriously scratching a letter to Carveth
Donnithorne apprising him of the happy event.
Upstairs, undisturbed by the professional chatter of wise women,
Teresa lay quietly sleeping, a fluffy small head in the crook of her
arm, a tired smile on her lips—she was in out of the rain for good.
It is to be presumed that in the Donnithorne vault of Cury Church
the dust of old Selina at length lay quiet—the Penhales would go on
and on.
 CHAPTER V
The first boy was born in 1754 and was followed in 1756 by
another. They christened the eldest Ortho, a family name, and the
second Eli.
When his younger son was three months old John died. He got
wet, extricating a horse from a bog-hole, and took no heed, having
been wet through a hundred times before. A chill seized him; he still
took no notice. The chill developed into pneumonia, but he struggled
on, saying nothing. Then Bohenna found him prostrate in the muck
of the stable; he had been trying to yoke the oxen with the intention
of going out to plow.
Bohenna carried him, protesting, up to bed. Only when he was
dying would he admit he was ill. He was puzzled and angry. Why
should he be sick now who had never felt a qualm before? What was
a wetting, i’ faith! For forty odd winters he had seldom been dry. It
was ridiculous! He tried to lift himself, exhorting the splendid, loyal
body that had never yet failed him to have done with this folly and
bear him outside to the sunshine and the day’s work. It did not
respond; might have been so much lead. He fell back, betrayed,
helpless, frightened, and went off into a delirium. The end was
close. He came to his senses once again about ten o’clock at night
and saw Teresa bending over him, the new son in her arms. She was
crying and had a tender look in her tear-bright eyes he had never
seen before. He tried to smile at her. Nothing to cry about. He’d be
all right in the morning—after a night’s sleep—go plowing—
everything came right in the morning. Towards midnight Martha,
who was watching, set up a dreadful screech. It was all over. As if
awaiting the signal came a hooting from the woods about the house,
“Too-whee-wha-ho-oo-oo!”—the Bosula owls lamenting the passing
of its master.
 Fate, in cutting down John Penhale in his prime, did him no
disservice. He went into oblivion knowing Teresa only as a thing of
beauty, half magical, wholly adorable. He was spared the years of
disillusionment which would have pained him sorely, for he was a
sensitive man.
Teresa mourned for her husband with a passion which was
natural to her and which was very highly considered in the
neighborhood. At the funeral she flung herself on the coffin, and
refused to be loosened from it for a quarter of an hour, moaning and
tearing at the lid with her fingers. Venerable dames who had
attended every local interment for half a century wagged their
bonnets and admitted they had never seen a widow display a
prettier spirit.
Teresa was quite genuine in her way. John had treated her with a
gentleness and generosity she had not suspected was to be found
on this earth, and now this kindly cornucopia had been snatched
from her—and just when she had made so sure of him too! She
blubbered in good earnest. But after the lawyer’s business was over
she cheered up.
In the first flush of becoming a father, John had ridden into
Penzance and made a will, but since Eli’s birth he had made no
second; there was plenty of time, he thought, years and years of it.
Consequently everything fell to Ortho when he came of age, and in
the meanwhile Teresa was sole guardian. That meant she was
mistress of Bosula and had the handling of the hundred and twenty
pounds invested income, to say nothing of the Tregors rents, fifty
pounds per annum. One hundred and seventy pounds a year to
spend! The sum staggered her. She had hardly made that amount of
money in her whole life. She sat up that night, long after the rest of
the household had gone to bed, wrapped in delicious dreams of how
she would spend that annual fortune. She soon began to learn.
Martha hinted that, in a lady of her station, the wearing of black was
considered proper as a tribute to the memory of the deceased, so,
finding nothing dark in the chests, she mounted a horse behind
Bohenna and jogged into town.
A raw farmer’s wife, clutching a bag of silver and demanding only
to be dressed in black, is a gift to any shopman. The Penzance
draper called up his seamstresses, took Teresa’s measure for a silk
dress—nothing but silk would be fitting, he averred; the greater the
cost the greater the tribute—added every somber accessory that he
could think of, separated her from £13.6.4 of her hoard and bowed
her out, promising to send the articles by carrier within three days.
Teresa went through the ordeal like one in a trance, too awed to
protest or speak even. On the way home she sought to console
herself with the thought that her extravagance was on John’s, dear
John’s behalf. Still thirteen pounds, six shillings and fourpence!—
more than Bohenna’s wages for a year gone in a finger snap! Ruin
stared her in the face.
The black dress, cap, flounced petticoat, stiff stays, stockings,
apron, cloak of Spanish cloth and high-heeled shoes arrived to date
and set the household agog. Teresa, its devastating price forgotten,
peacocked round the house and yard all day, swelling with pride, the
rustle of the silk atoning for the agony she was suffering from the
stays and shoes. As the sensation died down she yearned for fresh
conquests, so mounting the pillion afresh, made a tour through the
parish, paying special attention to Gwithian Church-town and Monks
Cove.
The tour was a triumph. Women rushed to their cottage doors
and stared after her, goggling. At Pridden a party of hedgers left
work and raced across a field to see her go by. Near Tregadgwith a
farmer fell off his horse from sheer astonishment. She was the sole
topic of the district for a week or more. John’s memory was duly
honored.
In a month Teresa was tired of the black dress; her fancy did not
run to black. The crisp and shining new silk had given her a distaste
for the old silks, the soiled and tattered salvage of wrecks. She
stuffed the motley rags back in the chests and slammed the lids on
them. She had seen some breath-taking rolls of material in that shop
in Penzance—orange, emerald, turquoise, coral and lilac. She shut
her eyes and imagined herself in a flowing furbelowed dress of each
of these colors in turn—or one combining a little of everything—oh,
rapture!
She consulted Martha in the matter. Martha was shocked. It was
unheard of. She must continue to wear black in public for a year at
least. This intelligence depressed Teresa, but she was determined to
be correct, as she had now a position to maintain, was next thing to
a lady. Eleven months more to wait, heigh-ho!
Then, drawn by the magnet of the shops, she went into
Penzance again. Penzance had become something more than a mere
tin and pilchard port; visitors attracted by its mild climate came in by
every packet; there was a good inn, “The Ship and Castle,” and in
1752 a coffee house had been opened and the road to Land’s End
made possible for carriages. Many fine ladies were to be seen
fanning themselves at windows in Chapel Street or strolling on the
Green, and Teresa wanted to study their costumes with a view to
her own.
She dismounted at the Market Cross, moved about among the
booths and peeped furtively in at the shops. They were most
attractive, displaying glorious things to wear and marvelous things to
eat—tarts, cakes, Dutch biscuits, ginger-breads shaped like animals,
oranges, plum and sugar candy. Sly old women wheedled her to buy,
enlarging ecstatically on the excellence and cheapness of their
wares. Teresa wavered and reflected that though she might not be
able to buy a new dress for a year there was no law against her
purchasing other things. The bag of silver burnt her fingers and she
fell. She bought some gingerbread animals at four for a farthing,
tasted them, thought them ambrosia and bought sixpennorth to take
with her, also lollipops. She went home trembling at her
extravagance, but when she came to count up what she had spent it
seemed to have made no impression on the bag of silver. In six
weeks she went in again, bought a basketful of edibles and replaced
her brass earrings with large gold half-moons. When these were paid
for the bag was badly drained. Teresa took fright and visited town no
more for the year—but as a matter of fact she had spent less than
twenty pounds in all. But she had got in the way of spending now.
The tin works in which John’s money was invested paid up at the
end of the year (one hundred and twenty-six pounds, seventeen
shillings and eight-pence on this occasion), and Tregors rent came in
on the same day. It seemed to Teresa that the heavens had opened
up and showered uncounted gold upon her.
She went into Penzance next morning as fast as the bay mare
could carry her and ordered a dress bordered with real lace and
combining all the hues of the rainbow. She was off. Never having
had any money she had not the slightest idea of its value and was
mulcted accordingly. In the third year of widowhood she spent the
last penny of her income.
The farm she left to Bohenna, the house to Martha, the children
to look after themselves, and rode in to Penzance market and all
over the hundred, to parish feasts, races and hurling matches, a
notable figure with her flaming dresses, raven hair and huge
earrings, laying the odds, singing songs and standing drinks in ale
houses like any squire.
When John died she was at her zenith. The early bloom of her
race began to fade soon after, accelerated by gross living. She still
ate enormously, as though the hunger of twenty-two lean years was
not yet appeased. She was like an animal at table, seizing bones in
her hands and tearing the meat off with her teeth, grunting the
while like a famished dog, or stuffing the pastries she bought in
Penzance into her mouth two at a time. She hastened from girlish to
buxom, from buxom to stout. The bay mare began to feel the
increasing weight on the pillion. Bohenna was left at home and
Teresa rode alone, sitting sideways on a pad, or a-straddle when no
one was looking. Yet she was still comely in a large way and had
admirers aplenty. Sundry impecunious gentlemen, hoping to mend
their fortunes, paid court to the lavish widow, but Teresa saw
through their blandishments, and after getting all possible sport out
of them sent them packing.
With the curate-in-charge of St. Gwithian it was the other way
about. Teresa made the running. She went to church in the first
place because it struck her as an opportunity to flaunt her superior
finery in public and make other women feel sick. She went a second
time to gaze at the parson. This gentleman was an anemic young
man with fair hair, pale blue eyes, long hands and a face refined
through partial starvation. (The absentee beneficiary allowed him
eighteen pounds a year.) Obeying the law of opposites, the heavy
dark gypsy woman was vaguely attracted by him at once and the
attraction strengthened.
He was something quite new to her. Among the clumsy-limbed
country folk he appeared so slim, so delicate, almost ethereal. Also,
unable to read or write herself and surrounded by people as ignorant
as she, his easy familiarity with books and the verbose phrasing of
his sermons filled her with admiration. On Easter Sunday he
delivered himself of a particularly flowery effort. Teresa understood
not a word of it, but, nevertheless, thought it beautiful and wept
audibly. She thought the preacher looked beautiful too, with his clear
skin, veined temples and blue eyes. A shaft of sunlight pierced the
south window and fell upon his fair head as though an expression of
divine benediction. Teresa thought he looked like a saint. Perhaps he
was a saint.
She rode home slowly, so wrapped in meditation that she was
late for dinner, an unprecedented occurrence. She would marry that
young man. If she were going to marry again it must be to some
one she could handle, since the law would make him master of
herself and her possessions. The curate would serve admirably; he
would make a pretty pet and no more. He could keep her accounts
too. She was always in a muddle with money. The method she had
devised of keeping tally by means of notched sticks was most
untrustworthy. And, incidentally, if he really were a saint her
hereafter was assured. God could never condemn the wedded wife
of a saint and clergyman to Hell; it wouldn’t be decent. She would
marry that young man.
She began the assault next day by paying her overdue tithes and
throwing in a duck as makeweight. Two days later she was up again
with a gift of a goose, and on the following Sunday she presented
the astonished clerk with eightpennorth of gingerbreads. Since
eating was the occupation nearest to the widow’s heart she sought
to touch the curate’s by showering food upon him. Something edible
went to the Deanery at least twice a week, occasionally by a hind,
but more often Teresa took it herself. A fortnight before Whitsuntide
Teresa, in chasing an errant boar out of the yard, kicked too
violently, snapped her leg and was laid up for three months.
Temporarily unable to reduce the curate by her personal charms she
determined to let her gifts speak for her, doubled the offerings, and
eggs, fowls, butter, cheese and hams passed from the farm to the
Deanery in a constant stream. Lying in bed with nothing to do, the
invalid’s thoughts ran largely upon the clerk. She remembered him
standing in the pulpit that Easter Sunday, uttering lovely, if
unintelligible words, slim and delicate, the benedictory beam on his
flaxen poll; the more she pictured him the more ethereally beautiful
did he become. He would make a charming toy.
As soon as she could hobble about she put on her best dress
(cherry satin), and, taking the bull by the horns, invited her intended
to dinner. She would settle matters without further ado. The young
man obeyed the summons with feelings divided between fear and
determination; he knew perfectly well what he was in for. Nobody
but an utter fool could have mistaken the meaning of the sighs and
glances the big widow had thrown when visiting him before her
accident. There was no finesse about Teresa. She wanted to marry
him, and prudence told him to let her. Two farms and four hundred
pounds a year—so rumor had it—the catch of the district and he
only a poor clerk. He was sick of poverty—Teresa’s bounty had
shown him what it was to live well—and he dreaded returning to the
old way of things. Moreover he admired her, she was so bold, so
luscious, so darkly handsome, possessed of every physical quality he
lacked. But he was afraid of her for all that—if she ever got really
angry with him, good Lord!
It took every ounce of determination he owned to drive his feet
down the hill to Bosula; twice he stopped and turned to go back. He
was a timid young man. His procrastination made him late for dinner.
When he reached the farm, the meal had already been served. His
hostess was hard at work; she would not have delayed five minutes
for King George himself. She had a mutton bone in her hands when
the curate entered. She did not notice him for the moment, so
engrossed was she, but tore off the last shred of meat, scrunched
the bone with her teeth and bit out the marrow. The curate reeled
against the door post, emitting an involuntary groan. Teresa glanced
up and stared at him, her black eyebrows meeting.
Who was this stranger wabbling about in her doorway, his watery
eyes popping out of his podgy face, his fleshy knees knocking
together, his dingy coat stretched tightly across his protruding
stomach? A lost inn-keeper? A strayed tallow chandler? No, by his
cloth he was a clerk. Slowly she recognized him. He was her curate,
ecod! Her pretty toy! Her slim, transparent saint developed into this
corpulent earthling! Fat, ye Gods! She hurled the bone at his head—
which was unreasonable, seeing it was she had fattened him.
The metamorphosed curate turned and bolted out of the house,
through the yard and back up the hill for home.
“My God,” he panted as he ran, “biting bones up with her teeth,
with her teeth—my God, it might have been me!”
That was the end of that.
 CHAPTER VI
In the meanwhile the Penhale brothers grew and grew. Martha
took a sketchy charge of their infancy, but as soon as they could
toddle they made use of their legs to gain the out o’ doors and
freedom. At first Martha basted them generously when they came in
for meals, but they soon put a stop to that by not showing up at the
fixed feeding times, watching her movements from coigns of
vantage in the yard and robbing the larder when her back was
turned. Martha, thereupon, postponed the whippings till they came
in to bed. Once more they defeated her by not coming in to bed;
when trouble loomed they spent the night in the loft, curled up like
puppies in the hay. Martha could not reach them there. She dared
not trust herself on the crazy ladder and Bohenna would give her no
assistance; he was hired to tend stock, he said, not children.
For all that the woman caught the little savages now and again,
and when she did she dressed them faithfully with a birch of her
own making. But she did not long maintain her physical advantage.
One afternoon when Ortho was eight and Eli six she caught them
red-handed. The pair had been out all the morning, sailing cork
boats and mudlarking in the marshes. They had had no dinner.
Martha knew they would be homing wolfish hungry some time
during the afternoon and that a raid was indicated. There were two
big apple pasties on the hearth waiting the mistress’ supper and
Martha was prepared to sell her life for them, since it was she that
got the blame if anything ran short and she had suffered severely of
late.
At about three o’clock she heard the old sheep dog lift up its
voice in asthmatic excitement and then cease abruptly; it had
recognized friends. The raiders were at hand. She hid behind the
settle near the door. Presently she saw a dark patch slide across the
east door-post—the shadow of Ortho’s head. The shadow slid on
until she knew he was peering into the kitchen. Ortho entered the
kitchen, stepping delicately, on bare, grimy toes. He paused and
glanced round the room. His eye lit on the pasties and sparkled. He
moved a chair carefully, so that his line of retreat might be clear,
beckoned to the invisible Eli, and went straight for the mark. As his
hands closed on the loot Martha broke cover. Ortho did not look
frightened or even surprised; he did not drop the pasty. He grinned,
dodged behind the table and shouted to his brother, who took
station in the doorway.
Martha, squalling horrid threats, hobbled halfway round the table
after Ortho, who skipped in the opposite direction and nearly
escaped her. She just cut him off in time, but she could not save the
pasty. He slung it under her arm to his confederate and dodged
behind the table again. Eli was fat and short-legged. Martha could
have caught him with ease, but she did not try, knowing that if she
did Ortho would have the second pasty. As it was, Ortho was
hopelessly cornered; he should suffer for both. Ortho was behind the
table again and difficult to reach. She thought of the broom, but it
was at the other side of the kitchen; did she turn to get it Ortho
would slip away.
Eli reappeared in the doorway lumpish and stolid; he had hidden
the booty and come back to see the fun. Martha considered, pushed
the table against the wall and upturned it. Ortho sprang for the door,
almost gained it, but not quite. Martha grasped him by the tail of his
smock, drew him to her and laid on. But Ortho, instead of squirming
and whimpering as was his wont, put up a fight. He fought like a
little wild cat, wriggling and snarling, scratching with toes and finger
nails. Martha had all she could do to hold him, but hold him she did,
dragged him across the floor to the peg where hung her birch (a
bunch of hazel twigs) and gave him a couple of vicious slashes
across the seat of his pants. She was about to administer a third
when an excruciating pain nipped her behind her bare left ankle. She
yelled, dropped Ortho and the birch as if white-hot, and grabbed her
leg. In the skin of the tendon was imprinted a semi-circle of red
dents—Eli’s little sharp teeth marks. She limped round the kitchen
for some minutes, vowing dreadful vengeance on the brothers, who,
in the meanwhile, were sitting astride the yard gate munching the
pasty.
The pair slept in the barn for a couple of nights, and then,
judging the dame’s wrath to have passed, slipped in on the third.
But Martha was waiting for Eli, birch in hand, determined to carry
out her vengeance. It did not come off. She caught Eli, but Ortho
flew to the rescue this time. The two little fiends hung on her like
weasels, biting, clawing, squealing with fury, all but dragging the
clothes off her. She appealed to Teresa for help, but the big woman
would do nothing but laugh. It was as good as a bear-bait. Martha
shook the brothers off somehow and lowered her flag for good. Next
day Ortho burnt the birch with fitting ceremony, and for some years
the brothers ran entirely wild.
If Martha failed to inspire any respect in the young Penhales they
stood in certain awe of her daughter Wany on account of her
connection with the supernatural. In the first place she was a
changeling herself. In the second, Providence having denied her
wits, had bequeathed her an odd sense. She was weather-wise; she
felt heat, frost, rain or wind days in advance; her veins might have
run with mercury. In the third place, and which was far more
attractive to the boys, she knew the movements of all the “small
people” in the valley—the cows told her.
The cows were Wany’s special province. She could not be trusted
with any housework however simple, because she could not bring
her mind to it for a minute. She had no control over her mind at all;
it was forever wandering over the hills and far away in dark,
enchanted places.
But cows she could manage, and every morning the cows told
her what had passed in the half-world the night before.
There were two tribes of “small people” in the Keigwin Valley,
Buccas and Pixies. In the Buccas there was no harm; they were poor
foreigners, the souls of the first Jew miners, condemned for their
malpractices to perpetual slavery underground. They inhabited a
round knoll formed of rocks and rubble thrown up by the original
Penhale and were seldom seen, even by the cows, for they had no
leisure and their work lay out of sight in the earth’s dark, dripping
tunnels. Once or twice the cows had glimpsed a swarthy, hook-nosed
old face, caked in red ore and seamed with sweat, gazing wistfully
through a crack in the rocks—but that was all. Sometimes, if, under
Wany’s direction, you set your ear to the knoll and listened intently,
you could hear a faint thump and scrape far underground—the
Buccas’ picks at work. Bohenna declared these sounds emanated
from badgers, but Bohenna was of the earth earthy, a clod of clods.
The Pixies lived by day among the tree roots at the north end of
Bosula woods, a sprightly but vindictive people. At night they issued
from a hollow oak stump, danced in their green ball rooms, paid
visits to distant kinsfolk or made expeditions against offending
mortals. The cows, lying out all night in the marshes, saw them
going and coming. There were hundreds of them, the cows said;
they wore green jerkins and red caps and rode rabbits, all but the
king and queen, who were mounted on white hares. They blew on
horns as they galloped, and the noise of them was like a flock of
small birds singing. On moonless nights a cloud of fireflies sped
above them to light the way. The cows heard them making their
plans as they rode afield, laughing and boasting as they returned,
and reported to Wany, who passed it on to the spellbound brothers.
But this did not exhaust the night life in the valley. According to
Wany, other supernaturals haunted the neighborhood, specters,
ghosts, men who had sold their souls to the devil, folk who had died
with curses on them, or been murdered and could not rest. There
was a demon huntsman who rode a great black stallion behind
baying hellhounds; a woman who sat by Red Pool trying to wash the
blood off her fingers; a baby who was heard crying but never seen.
Even the gray druid stones she invested with periodic life. On such
and such a night the tall Pipers stalked across the fields and played
to the Merry Maidens who danced round thrice; the Men-an-Tol
whistled; the Logan rocked; up on misty hills barrows opened and
old Cornish giants stepped out and dined hugely, with the cromlechs
for tables and the stars for tapers.
The stories had one virtue, namely that they brought the young
Penhales home punctually at set of sun. The wild valley they roamed
so fearlessly by day assumed a different aspect when the enchanted
hours of night drew on; inanimate objects stirred and drew breath,
rocks took on the look of old men’s faces, thorn bushes changed into
witches, shadows harbored nameless, crouching things. The creak of
a bough sent chills down their spines, the hoot of an owl made them
jump, a patch of moonlight on a tree trunk sent them huddling
together, thinking of the ghost lady; the bark of a fox and a cow
crashing through undergrowth set their hearts thumping for fear of
the demon huntsman. If caught by dusk they turned their coats
inside out and religiously observed all the rites recommended by
Wany as charms against evil spirits. If they were not brought up in
the love of God they were at least taught to respect the devil.
With the exception of this spiritual concession the Penhale
brothers knew no restraint; they ran as wild as stoats. They arose
with the sun, stuffed odds and ends of food in their pockets and
were seen no more while daylight lasted.
In spring there was plenty of bird’s-nesting to be done up the
valley. Every other tree held a nest of some sort, if you only knew
where to look, up in the forks of the ashes and elms, in hollow boles
and rock crevices, cunningly hidden in dense ivy-clumps or snug
behind barbed entanglements of thorn. Bohenna, a predatory
naturalist, marked down special nests for them, taught them to set
bird and rabbit snares and how to tickle trout.
In spring they hunted gulls’ eggs as well round the Luddra Head,
swarming perpendicular cliffs with prehensile toes and fingers
hooked into cracks, wriggling on their stomachs along dizzy foot-
wide shelves, leaping black crevices with the assurance of chamois.
It was an exciting pursuit with the sheer drop of two hundred feet or
so below one, a sheer drop to jagged rock ledges over which the
green rollers poured with the thunder of heavy artillery and then
poured back, a boil of white water and seething foam. An exciting
pursuit with the back draught of a southwesterly gale doing its
utmost to scoop you off the cliffside, and gull mothers diving and
shrieking in your face, a clamorous snowstorm, trying to shock you
off your balance by the whir of their wings and the piercing
suddenness of their cries.
The brothers spent most of the summer at Monks Cove playing
with the fisher children, bathing and scrambling along the coast. The
tide ebbing left many pools, big and little, among the rocks, clear
basins enameled with white and pink sea lichen, studded with
limpets, yellow snails, ruby and emerald anemones. Delicate fronds
of colored weed grew in these salt-water gardens, tiny green crabs
scuttered along the bottom, gravel-hued bull-cod darted from
shadow to shadow. They spent tense if fruitless hours angling for
the bull-cod with bent pins, limpet baited. In the largest pool they
learnt to swim. When they were sure of themselves they took to the
sea itself.
Their favorite spot was a narrow funnel between two low
promontories, up which gulf the rollers raced to explode a white puff
of spray through a blow-hole at the end. At the mouth of the funnel
stood a rock they called “The Chimney,” the top standing eight feet
above low water level. This made an ideal diving place. You stood on
the “Chimney Pot,” looked down through glitters and glints of
reflected sunshine, down through four fathoms of bottle-green
water, down to where fantastic pennants of bronze and purple weed
rippled and purled and smooth pale bowlders gleamed in the
swaying light—banners and skulls of drowned armies. You dived,
pierced cleanly through the green deeps, a white shooting star
trailing silver bubbles. Down you went, down till your fingers
touched the weed banners, curved and came up, saw the water
changing from green to amber as you rose, burst into the blaze and
glitter of sunlight with the hiss of a breaker in your ears, saw it
curving over you, turned and went shoreward shouting, slung by
giant arms, wallowing in milky foam, plumed with diamond spray.
Then a quick dash sideways out of the sparkling turmoil into a quiet
eddy and ashore at your leisure to bask on the rocks and watch the
eternal surf beating on the Twelve Apostles and the rainbows
glimmering in the haze of spindrift that hung above them.
Porpoises went by, skimming the surface with beautiful, lazy
curves, solitary cormorants paddled past, popping under and
reappearing fifty yards away, with suspicious lumps in the throat.
Now and then a shoal of pilchards crawled along the coast, a purple
stain in the blue, with a cloud of vociferous gannets hanging over it,
diving like stones, rising and poising, glimmering in the sun like
silver tinsel. Sometimes a brown seal cruised along, sleek, round-
headed, big-eyed, like a negro baby.
There was the Channel traffic to watch as well, smacks,
schooners, ketches and scows, all manner of rigs and craft; Tyne
collier brigs, grimy as chimney-sweeps; smart Falmouth packets
carrying mails to and from the world’s ends; an East Indiaman,
maybe, nine months from the Hooghly, wallowing leisurely home,
her quarters a-glitter of “gingerbread work,” her hold redolent with
spices; and sometimes a great First-Rate with triple rows of gun-
ports, an admiral’s flag flying and studding sails set, rolling a mighty
bow-wave before her.
Early one summer morning they heard the boom of guns and
round Black Carn came a big Breton lugger under a tremendous
press of sail, leaping the short seas like a greyhound. On her
weather quarter hung a King’s Cutter, gaff-topsail and ring-tail set, a
tower of swollen canvas. A tongue of flame darted from the Breton’s
counter, followed by a mushroom of smoke and a dull crash. A jet of
white water leapt thirty feet in the air on the cutter’s starboard bow,
then another astern of her and another and another. She seemed to
have run among a school of spouting whales, but in reality it was the
ricochets of a single round-shot. The cutter’s bow-chaser replied,
and jets spouted all round the lugger. The King’s ship was trying to
crowd the Breton ashore and looked in a fair way to do so. To the
excited boys it appeared that the lugger must inevitably strike the
Twelve Apostles did she hold her course. She held on, passed into
the drag of the big seas as they gathered to hurl themselves on the
reef. Every moment the watchers expected to see her caught and
crashed to splinters on the jagged anvil. She rose on a roaring wave
crest, hung poised above the reef for a breathless second and
clawed by, shaking the water from her scuppers.
The Cove boys cheered the lugger as she raced by, waving strips
of seaweed and dancing with joy. They were not so much for the
French as against the Preventive; a revenue cutter was their
hereditary foe, a spoke in the Wheel of Fortune.
“Up the Froggy,” they yelled. “Up Johnny Roscoff! Give him
saltpeter soup Moosoo! Hurrah! Hooroo!”
The two ships foamed out of sight behind the next headland, the
boom of their pieces sounding fainter and fainter.

Those were good days for the Penhale brothers, the days of early
boyhood.
 CHAPTER VII
Ortho and Wany were in Penzance looking for cows that had
been taken by the Press gang, when they met the Pope of Rome
wearing a plumed hat and Teresa’s second best dress. He had an
iron walking stick in his hand with a negro head carved at the top
and an ivory ferrule, and every time he tapped the road it rang
under him.
“Hollow, you see,” said His Holiness. “Eaten away by miners and
Buccas—scandalous! One more convulsion like the Lisbon
earthquake of fifty-five and we shall all fall in. Everything is hollow,
when you come to think of it—cups, kegs, cannon, ships, churches,
crowns and heads—everything. We shall not only fall in but inside
out. If you don’t believe me, listen.”
Whereupon he gathered his skirts and ran up Market Jew Street
laying about him with the iron stick, hitting the ground, the houses
and bystanders on the head, and everything he touched rumbled like
a big or little gong, in proportion to its size. Finally he hit the Market
House; it exploded and Ortho woke up.
There was a full gale blowing from the southwest and the noise
of the sea was rolling up the valley in roaring waves. The Bosula
trees creaked and strained. A shower of broken twigs hit the window
and the wind thudded on the pane like a fist. Ortho turned over on
his other side and was just burying his head under the pillow when
he heard the explosion again. It was a different note from the boom
of the breakers, sharper. He had heard something like that before—
where? Then he remembered the Breton with the cutter in chase—
guns! A chair fell over in his mother’s room. She was up. A door
slammed below, boots thumped upstairs, Bohenna shouted
something through his mother’s door and clumped down hurriedly.
Ortho could not hear all he said, but he caught two essential words,
“Wreck” and “Cove.” More noise on the stairs and again the house
door slammed; his mother had gone. He shook Eli awake.
 “There’s a ship ashore down to Cove,” he said; “banging off guns
she was. Mother and Ned’s gone. Come on.”
Eli was not anxious to leave his bed; he was comfortable and
sleepy. “We couldn’t do nothing,” he protested.
“Might see some foreigners drowned,” said Ortho optimistically.
“She might be a pirate like was sunk in Newlyn last year, full of
blacks and Turks.”
“They’d kill and eat us,” said Eli.
Ortho shook his head. “They’ll be drowned first—and if they ain’t
Ned’ll wrastle ’em.”
In settlement of further argument he placed his foot in the small
of his brother’s back and projected him onto the floor. They dressed
in the dark, fumbled their way downstairs and set off down the
valley. In the shelter of the Bosula woods they made good progress;
it was comparatively calm there, though the treetops were a-toss
and a rotten bough hurtled to earth a few feet behind them. Once
round the elbow and clear of the timber, the gale bent them double;
it rushed, shrieking, up the funnel of the hills, pushed them round
and backwards. Walking against it was like wading against a strong
current. The road was the merest track, not four feet at its widest,
littered with rough bowlders, punctuated with deep holes. The
brothers knew every twist and trick of the path, but in the dark one
can blunder in one’s own bedroom; moreover the wind was
distorting everything. They tripped and stumbled, were slashed
across the face by flying whip-thongs of bramble, torn by lunging
thorn boughs, pricked by dancing gorse-bushes. Things suddenly
invested with malignant animation bobbed out of the dark, hit or
scratched one and bobbed back again. The night was full of mad
terror.
Halfway to the Cove, Ortho stubbed his toe for the third time, got
a slap in the eye from a blackthorn and fell into a puddle. He wished
he hadn’t come and proposed that they should return. But Eli
wouldn’t hear of it. He wasn’t enjoying himself any more than his
brother, but he was going through with it. He made no explanation,
but waddled on. Ortho let him get well ahead and then called him
back, but Eli did not reply. Ortho wavered. The thought of returning
through those creaking woods all alone frightened him. He thought
of all the Things-that-went-by-Night, of hell-hounds, horsemen and
witches. The air was full of witches on broomsticks and demons on
black stallions stampeding up the valley on a dreadful hunt. He could
hear their blood-freezing halloos, the blare of horns, the baying of
hounds. He wailed to Eli to stop, and trotted, shivering, after him.
The pair crawled into Monks Cove at last plastered with mud,
their clothes torn to rags. A feeble pilchard-oil “chill” burnt in one or
two windows, but the cottages were deserted. Spindrift, mingled
with clots of foam, was driving over the roofs in sheets. The wind
pressed like a hand on one’s mouth; it was scarcely possible to
breathe facing it. Several times the boys were forced down on all
fours to avoid being blown over backwards. The roar of the sea was
deafening, appalling. Gleaming hills of surf hove out of the void in
quick succession, toppled, smashed, flooded the beach with foam
and ran back, sucking away the sands.
The small beach was thronged with people; all the Covers were
there, men, women and children, also a few farm-folk, drawn by the
guns. They sheltered behind bowlders, peered seawards, and
shouted in each other’s ears.
“Spanisher, or else Portingal,” Ortho heard a man bellow.
“Jacky’s George seen she off Cribba at sundown. Burnt a tar
barrel and fired signals southwest of Apostles—dragging by her
lights. She’ll bring up presently and then part—no cables won’t stand
this. The Minstrel’ll have her.”
“No, the Carracks, with this set,” growled a second. “Carracks for
a hundred poun’. They’ll crack she like a nut.”
“Carracks, Minstrel or Shark’s Fin, she’m ours,” said the first.
“Harken!”
 Came a crash from the thick darkness seawards, followed a
grinding noise and second crash. The watchers hung silent for a
moment, as though awed, and then sprang up shouting.
“Struck!”
“Carracks have got her!”
“Please God a general cargo!”
“Shan’t be long now, my dears, pickin’s for one and all.”
Men tied ropes round their waists, gave the ends to their women-
folk and crouched like runners awaiting the signal.
A dark object was tossed high on the crest of a breaker, dropped
on the beach, dragged back and rolled up again.
Half a dozen men scampered towards it and dragged it in, a
ship’s pinnace smashed to splinters. Part of a carved rail came
ashore, a poop-ladder, a litter of spars and a man with no head.
These also were hauled above the surf line; the wreckers wanted
a clear beach. Women set to work on the spars, slashing off tackle,
quarreling over the possession of valuable ropes and block. A second
batch of spars washed in with three more bodies tangled amongst
them, battered out of shape. Then a mass of planking, timbers,
barrel staves, some bedding and, miraculously, a live dog. Suddenly
the surf went black with bobbing objects; the cargo was coming in—
barrels.
A sea that will play bowls with half-ton rocks will toss wine casks
airily. The breakers flung them on the beach; they trundled back
down the slope and were spat up again. The men rushed at them,
whooping; rushed right into the surf up to their waists, laid hold of a
prize and clung on; were knocked over, sucked under, thrown up and
finally dragged out by the women and ancients pulling like horses on
the life-lines. A couple of tar barrels came ashore among the others.
Teresa, who was much in evidence, immediately claimed them, and
with the help of some old ladies piled the loose planking on the
wreck of the pinnace, saturated the whole with tar and set it afire to
light the good work. In a few minutes the gale had fanned up a royal
blaze. That done, she knotted a salvaged halliard about Bohenna,
and with Davy, the second farm hand, Teresa and the two boys
holding on to the shore end, he went into the scramble with the
rest.
Barrels were spewed up by every wave, the majority stove in, but
many intact. The fisher-folk fastened on them like bulldogs, careless
of risk. One man was stunned, another had his leg broken. An old
widow, having nobody to work for her and maddened at the sight of
all this treasure-trove going to others, suddenly threw sanity to the
winds, dashed into the surf, butted a man aside and flung herself on
a cask. The cask rolled out with the back-drag, the good dame with
it. A breaker burst over them and they went out of sight in a boil of
sand, gravel and foam. Bohenna plunged after them, was twice
swept off his feet, turned head over heels and bumped along the
bottom, choking, the sand stinging his face like small shot. He
groped out blindly, grasped something solid and clung on. Teresa,
feeling more than she could handle on her line, yelled for help. A
dozen sprang to her assistance, and with a tug they got Bohenna
out, Bohenna clinging to the old woman, she still clinging to her
barrel. She lay on the sand, her arms about her prize, three parts
drowned, spitting salt water at her savior.
He laughed. “All right, mother; shan’t snatch it from ’ee. ’Tis your
plunder sure ’nough.” Took breath and plunged back into the surf.
The flow of cargo stopped, beams still came in, a top mast, more
shattered bodies, some lengths of cable, bedding, splinters of cabin
paneling and a broken chest, valueless odds and ends. The wreckers
set about disposing of the sound casks; men staggered off carrying
them on rough stretchers, women and children rolled others up the
beach, the coils of rope disappeared. Davy, it turned out, had
brought three farm horses and left them tied up in a pilchard-press.
These were led down to the beach now, loaded (two barrels a
horse), and taken home by the men.
Welcome to Our Bookstore - The Ultimate Destination for Book Lovers
Are you passionate about books and eager to explore new worlds of
knowledge? At our website, we offer a vast collection of books that
cater to every interest and age group. From classic literature to
specialized publications, self-help books, and children’s stories, we
have it all! Each book is a gateway to new adventures, helping you
expand your knowledge and nourish your soul
Experience Convenient and Enjoyable Book Shopping Our website is more
than just an online bookstore—it’s a bridge connecting readers to the
timeless values of culture and wisdom. With a sleek and user-friendly
interface and a smart search system, you can find your favorite books
quickly and easily. Enjoy special promotions, fast home delivery, and
a seamless shopping experience that saves you time and enhances your
love for reading.
Let us accompany you on the journey of exploring knowledge and
personal growth!

ebookgate.com