BLACKOUT: WORLD WAR II AND THE ORIGINS OF FILM NOIR

Abstract

BLACKOUT: WORLD WAR II AND THE ORIGINS OF FILM NOIR Sheri Chinen Biesen. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005, 243pp. In Blackout, Sheri Chinen Biesen explores the relationship between the production conditions of World War II-era Hollywood and the body of work subsequently called film noir. She offers case studies of major studio films such as This Gun for Hire (1942), Double Indemnity (1944), and Gilda (1946), as well as of B movies such as Stranger on the Third (1940), Street of Chance (1942), and Detour (1945). Relying extensively on archival materials (including audience-response cards, advertising campaigns, and censorship debates between filmmakers and the Production Code Administration), Biesen argues that wartime circumstances were crucial to the development of film noir. In this she strongly disagrees with critics who consider a fundamentally postwar phenomenon; rather, Biesen contends that films reflect distinctly wartime concerns. Biesen colorfully describes the wartime constraints on film production, from executive directives to conserve nails in set building to military restrictions on the filming of coastal locations. However, Biesen does not clearly explain in what way these general production constraints uniquely influenced the films she studies. Often she draws such connections by implication rather than directly. For instance, she notes that war-related international market closures, reduced revenue, necessary cost-cutting, and material shortages began to be a concern in Hollywood as early as 1940, coinciding with RKO's production of Stranger on the Third Floor (71). But she does not explain why those conditions did not similarly affect other films in production at the same time as Stranger. Given the slipperiness of the question of what does and does not qualify as a film noir, illustrative counter-example or two would have helped to clarify the boundaries of Biesen's discussion. The same holds true for her thematic analyses: the relationship between Walter Neff and Barton Keyes is said to add an intimate male-bonding camaraderie that would have appealed to men in military units (106)-but, again, Biesen does not distinguish between the depiction of male camaraderie in Double Indemnity from that in, say, Air Force (1943). Organized chronologically, the book is at its most evocative when Biesen situates her chosen films within their historical context. She helpfully frames hard-boiled fiction against other Cultural expressions of crime in radio dramas, comic books, newsreels, and the photographic style of Life magazine (17). Her account of how cinema reflected changing gender roles branches out to include the iconography of advertisements for kitchen products and cosmetics. Occasionally Biesen seems to overstate the importance of particular details from this context-did the fact that it was unusually rainy in southern California in 1940-41 really contribute significantly to the aesthetic?-but overall she augments her readings of individual films with instructive cross-section of war-time popular culture. Indeed, Biesen's punning title epitomizes this aspect of the book, arising from her claim that Blacked-out wartime cities at night resembled the black surroundings and shadowy abysses in film noir (62). Whether or not any filmmaker consciously intended such association, Biesen suggests that the pervasiveness of wartime anxieties made it inevitable. At the same time, Biesen's strong emphasis on the social issues of the early 1940s tends to distort her view of the 1930s. …