by FRANK ANDERSON
Between January and October this year, the Film Noir Foundation programmed and presented its annual series of Noir City film festivals in several US cities: Oakland, Seattle, Boston, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Chicago, Detroit and Washington, D.C. Significantly, all the films featured this year were from 1948, a particularly rich year for Hollywood films that take a sharp look at postwar American life, including The Lady from Shanghai, Moonrise, Key Largo, Force of Evil, Road House, Call Northside 777 and Raw Deal.
It is no coincidence that virtually all of these socially critical films were written and/or directed by artists who would be purged from the American film industry within the next few years during the anti-communist blacklist. For these reasons, the marking this year of the 75th anniversary of these films and the enthusiastic response to the screenings by the multi-generational audiences who filled the theaters attended by this reviewer represent an important cultural event.
As WSWS arts editor David Walsh commented in “The crisis of American filmmaking & cultural life,” by 1948 “the pressing matter of the reality of postwar America … is revealing itself. … An important new theme emerges: the powerful presence in postwar society of profiteers and criminals, including criminals in business suits.” Several of the films featured in the Noir City festivals this year are among those that best exemplify this theme.
For those attending the festival, as well as for those who have yet to discover these remarkable films, it must be said that these works have stood the test of time. That is, these films from 1948 speak with urgency to the present situation and to the world we inhabit in 2023. Much has changed, but to a large degree we can recognize the world depicted in these films as our own: the ruthlessness of criminals in business suits, the harshness of life for the majority of the population, and the looming threat of a nuclear third world war, which is referenced directly in The Lady from Shanghai and which informs the sense of dread that permeates film noir after the war.
The strongest noir films of 1948 were made by artists who were responding to life in the wake of the Second World War, which produced the greatest crimes of the 20th century during which tens of millions were killed: above all, the Nazi Holocaust and the US atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Today, as millions around the world protest against the genocidal Israel-US war in Gaza, artists like Melissa Barrera and others who publicly oppose genocide and war are faced with the revival of blacklisting, making them the descendents of the filmmakers of the late 1940s and early 1950s who were purged for telling the truth about postwar American life.
It is not possible in the context of this piece to discuss in detail all of the important films screened in the Noir City festivals this year, but some brief comments are merited.
The Lady from Shanghai: “It’s a bright, guilty world.”
Direction and screenplay by Orson Welles, from the novel If I Die Before I Wake by Sherwood King.
In The Lady from Shanghai, “Black Irish” Mike O’Hara (Orson Welles), an Irish sailor and veteran of the Spanish Civil War who once killed a Francoist spy, meets the beautiful Shanghai-born “White Russian” Elsa Bannister (Rita Hayworth) in New York City. O’Hara is soon hired on as the ship’s officer by Elsa’s wealthy husband Arthur Bannister (Everett Sloane), a successful and famous criminal defense attorney, as they embark on a pleasure cruise on their yacht from New York City to San Francisco by way of the Panama Canal. O’Hara ultimately finds himself the fall guy, framed in an elaborate murder plot hatched by Bannister to enrich himself even further.
In one striking scene in Acapulco, O’Hara listens to a proposition from Bannister’s partner George Grisby (Glenn Anders), who asks O’Hara to murder him; or rather, to help fake his murder, as we later learn. Grisby, on his way to showing O’Hara “the best places,” leads the sailor past a working-class neighborhood where men, women, and children busy themselves carrying food and animals to and fro.
Arriving at a sparkling beach, a playground for the wealthy tourists and attractive women who can be seen lounging there, Grisby remarks, “Beautiful, isn’t it?” O’Hara answers, “There’s a fair face to the land, surely, but you can’t hide the hunger and guilt. It’s a bright, guilty world.”
Grisby expresses anxiety about nuclear annihilation. “It’s coming, you know,” he tells O’Hara. “First the big cities, then maybe even this.” Later, Grisby tells O’Hara just outside San Francisco, “I don’t want to be within a thousand miles of that city or any other city when they start dropping those bombs.”
Director Welles’s visual style is rich and evocative in The Lady from Shanghai. Welles’s mastery of both the blocking of camera movements and the staging of his actors within the frame results in a dynamically cinematic orchestration that brings the film’s action and themes to vivid life. The film’s climactic “hall of mirrors” scene is justly famous. Following O’Hara to an empty amusement park closed for the season, Elsa and Bannister shoot it out in the hall of mirrors.
Surrounded by the many reflections of themselves in the attraction, the married couple shoot at each other, at their own reflections, at themselves, visualizing a story O’Hara tells earlier in the film, about one of the worst sights he’s ever witnessed. While fishing off the coast of Brazil, O’Hara and his party had hooked several sharks, and the blood “drove the rest of [the sharks] mad. Then the beasts took to eating each other. In their frenzy, they ate at themselves.”
“In their frenzy, they ate at themselves.” An accurate description of sharks, of the Bannisters and of the bourgeoisie itself.
Moonrise: “I’ve never been like this before.”
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