Review: "Film Gris: Crime, Critique, and Cold War Culture in 1951," by Charles Maland

In “Film Gris: Crime, Critique, and Cold War Culture in 1951”, Charles Maland discusses the golden age of film gris in Hollywood cinema, articulating it as a gritty left-wing strain of film noir whose political impulse resulted in trenchant critiques of postwar capitalism. Counterintuitively, he explains, the phenomenon of film gris occurred in a period of heightened censorship by the studios and the MPPDA, spanning the years between the 1947 Waldorf Statement (the MPPDA’s official announcement of their firing the Hollywood Ten) and the resumption of the House of Un-American Activities Committee’s (HUAC’s) investigations.

Maland explains that while the political climate was clearly antagonistic for directors looking to make subversive statements, the changes within the Hollywood industry were quite favorable, production-wise. The breakdown of the studio system created space for independent filmmaking while leaving an abundance of technical talent and savvy in its wake.

Maland proceeds to explain what united the film gris pioneers in this era of filmmaking: an engagement in leftist politics and theater groups, a worldview shaped by the Great Depression and the Spanish Civil War, and a film career that began in the '40s. Maland chooses two films from 1951 as seminal case studies: Joseph Losey’s The Prowler (1951) and John Berry’s He Ran All the Way (1951.) In terms of the latter, he specifically discusses the role of John Garfield and Dalton Trumbo. Trumbo wrote the scripts for both Berry and Losey’s films, but was credited with neither as he awaited his prison sentence for being “in contempt of Congress.” These scripts, Maland notes, reveal a marked change in Trumbo’s worldview, which had grown bleaker by 1947.

Maland’s other point of focus is the relationship between film gris and film noir. As opposed to homing in on the criminal’s psychology (the domain of film noir), film gris is rooted in the criticism of the social conditions that create crime. It substitutes film noir's fatalistic outlook on human nature with a fatalistic outlook on society, where the tragedy is not some inherent flaw but the brutal economic and social inequalities that drive the protagonist to desperate and immoral acts. Film gris attacks capitalism in particular, ironically implying that “the only way to belong to the American dream is to pursue it through criminal means” (Maland).

Unlike the masochistic man of film noir who becomes the instrument of crime for the femme fatale, film gris features a man who “commits a crime to achieve his dreams" (Maland).

Much like film noir, however, a tone of doom pervades the film. This problematizes what James Naremore lays out as a “film noir tree” with the darkly cynical style of film noir on the one hand and the "milder strain" of film gris on the other. While film gris is more politically oriented than film noir, it is equally - if not more - pessimistic. (Take Christ in Concrete, for example.) More accurately than Naremore, Maland argues that film gris is better understood as a subset of noir, not a counterpoint to it.

Also striking is the difference between Maland’s understanding of He Ran All the Way as a film gris critique of capitalism and critics’ treatment of it as an apolitical gangster noir. As opposed to denouncing the gangster elements that were condemned by censors in the '20s and '30s, they praised these elements, calling the film “a thriller” and a “taut gangster” pic. As Stephen Vaughn points out in his article on Cold War censorship and the Hollywood Ten, there was a marked shift in censors' focus away from crime and toward political ideology.

~~~~~

Review: “Political Censorship During the Cold War: The Hollywood Ten,” by Stephen Vaughn

In “Political Censorship During the Cold War: The Hollywood Ten,” Stephen Vaughn homes in on one of Hollywood’s darkest periods: the targeting of the Hollywood Ten during the HUAC hearings. He first notes how the writers and filmmakers belonging to the Hollywood Ten were, with their leftist Marxist leanings, way ahead of the time’s conservatism - championing the rights of minorities and working people, and demanding an end to racism at home and to American imperialism abroad.

In their works, they demonstrated the sort of political engagement that would go mainstream only in the subsequent decades. The head intellectual of the group was John Howard Lawson, who launched a Marxist journal called Mainstream and was very involved in civil rights activism. He denounced racism, declaring it “a monstrous myth . . . rejected by social science.” One notices a marked difference between his statement and what well-known socialists were saying at the beginning of the century. As we are reminded in Ken Burns', Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson (2004), Jack London held extremely racist views of blacks based on what was then called “social science,” showing just how far socialist thinking had come since the beginning of the century. The article also notes how Herbert Biberman’s portrayal of minorities'

struggles in The Salt of the Earth (1954) in fact had a precursor during the era of the Hollywood Ten – in a 1947 film, New Orleans, directed by Arthur Lubin and produced by Biberman.

After summarizing the central tenets of the Hollywood Ten, Vaughn explores the historical and ideological context of Cold War censorship in detail. He explains that while the HUAC hearings were largely a matter of “bad publicity” for the Hollywood studios, they represented a vicious battle of ideas for censors, artists, and especially for the new head of the MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America), Eric Johnston, who wanted to use cinema to showcase and ensure the ideological dominance of capitalist democracy. This was the very political ideology the Hollywood Ten condemned, believing capitalism to be at the root of most problems in American society.

There were, however, divides within the group. Certain members were more doctrinally Marxist , insisting that cinema should go beyond the “free artist” concept and actively spread progressive Marxist ideology. Some named names, while others staunchly refused to bend to the Committee’s will. Edward Dmytryk cooperated with the investigations, claiming that some of his fellow, like-minded directors had pressured him to incorporate Communist elements into his films. Biberman, meanwhile, declined to testify before HUAC. He was subsequently blacklisted and would only produce films independently following his jail term.