"A man alone ain't got no chance." - Harry Morgan in Ernest Hemingway's novel, To Have and Have Not

Film noir is a movie genre with roots going back to Weimar Germany and the Freudian nightmare. Classic noir revolved around the theme of an ordinary man trapped by fate, a false step or a femme fatale. Yet there was another aspect to film noir that shined a light, for those who cared to look, on the underside of the post-war American Dream. These were films that film historian Thom Anderson labeled film gris. Containing all the ingredients of noir, they avoided a sexist approach to women and used the genre as a way of addressing many social issues facing post-war America. They were filmed and released mainly between 1947 and 1951, midway between the two rounds of HUAC hearings, which represented the right's assault on left-liberal Hollywood. Ostensibly an investigation into Communist activity in Hollywood, the real aim was to ensure the removal of progressive ideas and social content from studio productions. This article will briefly examine six of these films.

The plot of Crossfire (Edward Dmytryk, 1947) turned on the investigation of a seemingly motiveless murder in Washington, DC at the end of the World War II, with the suspects consisting of a group of GI's awaiting discharge. In the course of solving the crime, the film touched on the irrational roots of racism, the problems of servicemen traumatized by combat who must now adapt to a peacetime world, and the steady, ominous retreat of New Deal progressivism (this last, personified in an exhausted, overburdened police inspector). The inexpensive film was a surprise hit for RKO, but it was singled out in the first HUAC hearings and both director and producer were blacklisted and jailed.

If the noir "everyman" was represented by such glamorous icons as Burt Lancaster and Humphrey Bogart, the heroes of film gris seemed cut closer to the average man. John Garfield (an actor not without glamor, yet definitely of the people) had already been labeled "fate's whipping boy" in a New York Times Review. In Breaking Point, a film based on Hemingway's 1937 novel, To Have and Have Not (Michael Curtiz, 1950) as a hard luck war hero with wife and kids, we have Garfield with Hollywood peeled away. A debt-ridden charter boat operator with "nothing left to peddle but guts," he goes outside the law in an attempt to save his boat from repossession. He ends up as an accomplice in a race-track robbery. Badly wounded, he manages to kill the gangsters who have commandeered his boat. An important sub-plot in this film, which doesn't shy away from portraying the daily necessities of quiet survival (Garfield's wife works nights), is his friendship of equals with his black co-worker (played by Juano Hernandez). Their relationship echoes that of Garfield and Canada Lee in Body and Soul and was mostly likely emphasized on Garfield's insistence as he had a say in the final script. While the film didn't lack for a nominal femme fatale (Patrica Neal), it was the strong relationship between Garfield and his wife (Phyllis Thaxter) that was hightlighted. (Note: other strong Film Gris women could be found in films like Body and Soul, Force of Evil, and The Lawless).

In Cy Enfield's Try and Get Me (1951), we follow the confused footsteps of Howard Tyler (Frank Lovejoy). Tyler is another vet who has dragged his family to California where he is convinced that jobs will be plentiful. It's immediately obvious that too many others had the same idea and as the film picks him up he's hitched a ride home with a trucker to the beat up trailer court where his family is living. Nobody is home. They are at a neighbors watching TV (a luxury item Howard can't provide). He meets Jerry Slocum in a beer joint. A sociopathic stickup man, Slocum persuades Tyler to be his wheelman. Tiring of knocking over filling stations, Slocum plots the kidnapping of a rich young local. During the course of the kidnapping, Slocum, his voice dripping with envy and hate, comments on the man's clothes: "You rich guys sure know how to treat yourselves!" To Tyler's horror, Slocum kills the man and dumps his body in a quarry. He still plans to collect the ransom but doesn't want to have to be bothered with a live hostage. An accomplice to murder, Tyler is swept along on a round of nightclub hopping, drunkenly blurting out his guilt, in the grimy dawn, to one of the women on the date. Enflamed by a series of editorials, a mob, seemingly led by college students in letterman sweaters storms the jail and lynches the two men. The film ends with the voice of a "European visitor" talking about violence breeding violence and the chilling sound of the off-screen mob wreaking vengeance on the kidnappers. Released at the height of the Korean War, the film was attacked for its portrayal of mob psychology and the suggestion that materialist values could lead to crime. United Artists first changed the title to The Sound of Fury and then buried the film.

Brute Force (Jules Dassin, 1947) resembles a wartime Anti-Fascist film, in which the Nazis (Captain Muncey and his guards) occupy a state penitentiary rather than a country. The "citizens" (in this case, the inmates) suffer a series of increasingly intolerable indignities, finally rising in an attempt to overthrow their oppressors, choosing to "die on their feet rather than live on their knees". These parallels are heightened when the convicts adopt a plan presented by "Soldier" (Howard Duff) identical to the one used in taking hill from the Germans in Italy.

Asphalt Jungle (John Huston, 1950) also has parallels in the resistance film or the combat film. It focuses on the coming together of a gang (a "Squad") to carry out an intricate and dangerous robbery (or mission). Each man has his own motives, strengths and weaknesses. Welded together as a team they plan a jewelry heist. The "brains" behind the job are Emerich (Louis Calhern), a crooked lawyer who sees crime as only "a left-handed form of human endeavor" and Doc, "The Professor" (Sam Jaffee), a dapper European who detests violence. Chief among the gang is Dix (Sterling Hayden) a declassed Southerner who hopes to use the money from the job to buy back his family farm, forfeited in the Depression.

Key Largo (John Huston, 1948) seemed to be made in direct defiance of HUAC. Huston, Bogart, Edward G. Robinson and Lauren Bacall starred and all had been highly visible members of the Committee to Defend the First Amendment (though Bogart later buckled under pressure, writing an article stating that the Committee's trip to Washington had been "ill-advised"). Bogart, also nicknamed "Soldier" by Robinson and his gang, is a disillusioned vet come to pay his respects to the family of a fallen buddy. He finds himself forced to take sides again against a fascist evil, now on American soil. Huston admitted the parallels were no accident. The writer, Richard Brooks, had also scripted Brute Force. The climax again borrowed from To Have and Have Not.

Frank Enley (Van Heflin) in Fred Zinnemann's Act of Violence (1949) has parlayed an undeserved reputation as a hero into a successful post-war career as a building contractor. When we first see him, surrounded by wife and baby, he is dedicating the opening of a new "vets welcome" housing development. But we soon find Enley has a dark past, made visible in the ominous presence of Joe Parkson) played by Robert Ryan. As a POW Enley informed on a group of his men who had planned an escape. All of the men, save Ryan, were killed by the Germans in the escape attempt. Enley first claims that he did it "to save lives," thinking that none of the men would go through with the attempt if they knew that the Germans had been tipped off. He comes to the realization that his motive was more selfish: "I was hungry. They gave me food and I ate it!" Desperately trying to hang on to his comfortable post-war existence, he hires a killer to knock off Parkson but at the last minute Enley's soul-sickened conscience flares up; he warns Parkson and takes the bullet himself. The film creates two parallel worlds: the sunny sterility of the tract where Enley lives and the seedy, deserted skid row of LA Nighttown.

A few of the films were popular in their time although most suffered from neglect and ostracism. The subtext was clear. Winning the war against fascism abroad represented a great, though not total victory. The forces of progressivism were being isolated and scattered to the winds. Attacks on gains made during the New Deal and the war were being rolled back daily and the military industrial complex had begun to turn their guns on the Soviet Union before the last shots had been fired in the "People's War. Thus, while nearly all the films end in defeat, it is not an unbeatable fate or a femme fatale which defeats the protagonist so much as it is an aloneness, a dissolution of solidarity. The gang in Asphalt Jungle accomplishes its goals as a unit. Their separation leads to their isolation and destruction. Bogart and Garfield, ex-soldiers in the war against Fascism, battling alone, hoping to survive the uncertain peace, come to the realization that, to quote the briefly class-conscious Hemingway, "A man alone ain't got no chance." These films, by artists destined for jail and ostracism, were warnings to a complacent citizenry that the struggle to win the peace could not be forgotten.

By Michael Shepler