FROM PERIPHERY TO FOREGROUND: THE REPRESENTATION OF AFRICAN AMERICANS IN FILM NOIR By Phillip M. Calderwood Submitted to the Faculty of College of Arts and Sciences of American University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts In History Chair: Robert Peter J. Kuznick Dearn&f the College K e39oy Date ° 2007 American University Washington, D.C. 20016 AMERICAN UNIVERSITY LIBRARY Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. UMI Number: 1445557 Copyright 2007 by Calderwood, Phillip M. All rights reserved. INFORMATION TO USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. Broken or indistinct print, colored or poor quality illustrations and photographs, print bleed-through, substandard margins, and improper alignment can adversely affect reproduction. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if unauthorized copyright material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. ® UMI UMI Microform 1445557 Copyright 2007 by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. ProQuest Information and Learning Company 300 North Zeeb Road P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. © COPYRIGHT by PHILLIP M. CALDERWOOD 2007 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. FROM PERIPHERY TO FOREGROUND: THE REPRESENTATION OF AFRICAN AMERICANS IN FILM NOIR BY PHILLIP M. CALDERWOOD ABSTRACT This paper examines the representation of African Americans in classic American film noir, both in front of and behind the camera. Employing numerous film reviews and first-hand accounts, as well as a sample of 272 noirs, I discuss the production, content, and receptionDouble of Indemnity (1944), Crossfire (1947), Body and Soul (1947), No Way Out (1950), The Breaking Point (1950), The Phenix City Story (1955), Kiss Me Deadly (1955), Odds against Tomorrow (1959), and many other noteworthy noirs in the context of industry-wide political, economic, technological, and stylistic trends. While acknowledging that African Americans actors were absent from or relegated to marginal roles in the majority of noirs, I argue that the people behind many of these films contributed to and sometimes hastened gradual improvement in the representation of African Americans in Hollywood, not only as actors but as writers, composers, and producers. ii Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. PREFACE A WORKING DEFINITION OF FILM NOIR Originally, film noir was a term completely foreign to Americans. Right after World War II, when French audiences got their first glimpse of Hollywood’s wartime productions, many felt they were witnessing a dramatic change in American cinema. Movies like The Maltese Falcon (1941), This Gun for Hire (1942), Double Indemnity (1944), Laura (1944), and Murder, My Sweet (1945) had a pessimistic tone and a fixation with social and psychological disorder that set them apart from the typical, glamorized fare Hollywood produced throughout the 1930s. The disheartening and vaguely nightmarish quality of these pictures resonated particularly well in France, a country that had not only suffered under German occupation but also engendered the traditions of surrealism and existentialism. From the summer of 1946 on, critics writing in French journals and magazines labeled these pictures “film noir”—literally, dark (or black) film. The label stuck, and by 1955 Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton gave the subject its first book-length treatment, A Panorama of American Film A/o/r.1 1 For further information on the French origination and application of the term “film noir,” see Raymond Borde and Etienne Chaumeton, A Panorama of American Film Noir, 1941-1953, trans. Paul Hammond (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 2002), 1; Barton R. Palmer, “Introduction,” in Perspectives on Film Noir, ed. Barton R. Palmer (New York: G.K. Hall/Simon & Schuster Macmillan, 1996), 3-5; James Naremore, More than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998) 13, 15-19; Andrew Spicer,Film Noir (New York: Longman/Pearson Education, 2002), 2. iii Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Meanwhile, in the United States, the moviegoing public and even the Hollywood community were largely unaware of the term. Few Americans had ever heard of film noir until the late 1960s and 1970s, when film studies became a legitimate academic program, and critics such as Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg, Raymond Durgnat, Paul Schrader, and Janey Place and Lowell Peterson produced the first scholarly works on film noir in the English language.2 By the end of the 1970s, however, American filmmakers and critics were applying the term to The Long Goodbye (1973), Chinatown (1974), The Conversation (1974), and other contemporary movies that harked back to the noirs of the 1940s and 1950s.3 Overtime, artists, intellectuals, advertisers, and consumers have applied “noir” even more loosely, making it much more than simply a cinematic descriptor. Nowadays, as James Naremore has rightly argued, noir evokes such a flexible and forceful set of ideas that it can refer to almost any artifact of our globalized, postmodern mediascape, including an advertisement, a comic book, a musical arrangement, or a television show.4 Noir is a problematic term, even when one uses it specifically to discuss the very movies that inspired French critics to write about film noir. Of course, 2 For ample demonstration that the producers, technicians, and artists associated with film noir were not aware of the term, see the numerous interviews in Robert Porfirio, Alain Silver, and James Ursini, eds.,Film Noir Reader 3 (New York: Limelight Editions, 2002). One possible exception is director Robert Aldrich, who apparently owned a copy of A Panorama of American Film Noir as early as 1956. See Naremore, 4. Works by Higham and Greenberg, Durgnat, Schrader, and Place and Peterson, are anthologized in Alain Silver and James Ursini, eds., Film Noir Reader, (New York: Limelight Editions, 1996). 3 Because film noir is a French term, the proper plural is films noirs. However, since double­ plural nouns generally look awkward to readers of English, I will refer to these films simply as “noirs" or “dark movies.” 4 Naremore, 38-39, 255-56, 259, 276-77. iv Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. those who are familiar with these movies usually have a general sense of what makes them noirs. Many of these movies were adaptations of novel, stories, and scripts by W.R Burnett, James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler, David Goodis, Dashiell Hammett, Horace McCoy, Jim Thompson, and other hard-boiled writers.5 For this reason, noirs usually had certain characters types (e.g., crooked cops, case-hardened detectives, and femmes fatales), settings (e.g. exotic nightclubs, cramped apartments, and dead-end alleys), and plot elements (e.g., crime, deception, mental disorder, and social corruption). Noirs also benefited from the influence of European emigres, including cinematographers John Alton and Rudolph Mate, as well as directors Michael Curtiz, William Dieterle, Alfred Hitchcock, Fritz Lang, Anatole Litvak, Otto Preminger, Robert Siodmak, Andre de Toth, Jacques Tourneur, Edgar G. Ulmer, and Billy Wilder. Partly because of these emigres, noirs often shared a signature visual style, involving black-and-white images, high-contrast lighting, and oblique angles.6 Still, few noirs contained all of these hallmarks, and scholars have spent decades arguing whether these movies constitute a genre, cycle, style, or movement. 5 All of the authors mentioned above appeared in publisher Marcel Duhamel’s Serie noire, a collection of paperback translations of American mystery and crime novels. When French critics designated certain movies as noirs, they were implicitly comparing these movies to this collection. See Borde and Chaumeton, 4 n.3; Naremore, 12-13; Palmer, ed., 5-6; Spicer, 2. 6 More than contributing to a signature visual style, these emigres brought elements of prewar European cinematic conventions, particularly German Expressionism, Weimar “street films,” and French Poetic Realism, to Hollywood. For a brief discussion of the European influences on film noir, see Spicer, 11-16. V Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Even if the creators of these movies were unaware of the term, and no one can satisfactorily define it, film noir has become an appellation too popular to dismiss. Such popularity has prompted many scholars to try to identify every film noir ever made, a somewhat arbitrary endeavor that has nevertheless resulted in several useful catalogs of film noir.7 Some of these works include examples of film noir from other countries and from the silent era to the present, but most scholars agree that a classic period, a creative peak in terms of both productivity and innovation, occurred in the United States in the 1940s and 1950s.8 (Scholars, in fact, sometimes set apart the films that