Richard Maltby
Harmless Entertainment:
Hollywood and the Ideology of Consensus
(1983)
CHAPTER 5
DOUBLE MEANINGS
...
[129] The definition of "controversial" grew broader as blacklisting procedures became more institutionalized.* The appearance of one's name in a list published by the Legion's Firing Line, Counterattack, the publications of AWARE, Inc., or any of the even more obscure Red-baiter groups was all that was needed. Figures without studio protection who had past "controversial" allegiances found it increasingly difficult, and finally impossible, to obtain work. The studios were careful to avoid providing grounds for any possible charges of conspiracy, so that there was never an industry-wide "blacklist" as such. There were almost certainly minor variations in policy between studios, with less pressure on independent producers. These inconsistencies as well as the lack of written evidence on the subject, the general pattern of declining employment in the industry, and the reluctance of any but the victims to discuss the issue, make it almost impossible to determine accurately how many people were affected by blacklisting, or the resulting impact on film production.
The studios' adoption of blacklisting practices can, however, be explained, and largely in non-political terms. The economic crisis provoked by falling audiences and the
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*By 1952 the "controversial" category covered not only the 324 names cited by cooperative witnesses at the H.U.A.C. "mass hearings, " but also brief membership of the 194 organizations deemed "subversive" by Counterattack, or a listing in the notorious Appendix IX of the 1945 H.U.A.C. report, which even the Committee had ordered destroyed on the grounds of its inaccuracy.
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Paramount decrees left the majors anxious to avoid any further criticism that might have repercussions on their financial position. They conceded to the anti-Communist lobby for the same reasons that they had conceded to the Legion of Decency in 1934, and if the influence of the anti-Communists was disproportionate to their numerical strength, the financial crisis facing the industry was more severe. Moreover, the increase in relative authority that the crisis had given distribution executives in New York encouraged the timid solution. After 1947 the position of the studio production heads was seriously and permanently weakened. Louis B. Mayer was forced out of M. G. M., Darryl Zanuck was pressured into resigning from Twentieth Century-Fox, and two of the Warner Brothers sold their interest in the company. Hughes' sale of R. K. O. to a branch of the General Tire and Rubber Co. in 1955 may have predated by ten years the submergence of other film companies in disparate conglomerates, but it did indicate in dramatic terms that the era of the all-powerful production head was over, and that the dominant voice in studio policy would from now on belong to those in charge of distribution and finance.
The changed nature of the right-wing attack on liberalism in the early 1950s also encouraged the institutionalization of blacklisting. Earlier attempts to rescind hated pieces of New Deal legislation through Congress or the courts had failed, and the enormous success of the Alger Hiss case had shown the reactionaries that the most effective way to destroy Rooseveltian influence was through victimization of individuals. This policy was applied to Hollywood in the "mass hearings" of 1951 and 1952. The Committee's new line of attack permitted the industry the face-saving rationalization that they were not abandoning the freedom of the screen, which had been the primary issue during the 1947 hearings. The situation in the early 1950s, it was argued, was that certain specific individuals were no longer acceptable to sections of public opinion because of their private politics. The more stringent policies adopted by radio and television companies and their sponsors in the name of the political purity of their consumer products forcibly affected the employment policies of the majors. A studio employing an actor too "disloyal" for television would be bound to come under heavy fire from the anti-Communists who had secured his original unemployment. And, as ever, but particularly as in any period of financial crisis, the industry executives were unwilling to alienate any section of the public who might decide to boycott, picket, or refuse to show their product .
Note to p. 130:
Hate to say it, but the account here does indeed invite comparisons with what has happened in the wake of Me Too. Leaving aside the actual principles at stake in Communism, Sexism, etc., the unique kind of public scrutiny invited by the very existence of an Entertainment Industry is comparable to few other sectors, perhaps only to Politics itself. On an industry-wide level this is apt comeuppance for much which is toxic and unethical in The Biz...but of course RM's thesis throughout is well-taken: it is isolated individuals who, rightly or wrongly, become scapegoats, which is all about maintaining the status quo as much as possible.
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In spite of the commercial triumph of innocuous entertainment signaled by The Sound of Music in 1966, the M. P. A. A. in that year conceded that the existing Production Code was unworkable, and abandoned it for a much shorter and less specific formulation that could be adapted to changing circumstances, in the legal definition of obscenity, for example. In itself, the redrafting of the Code was more significant symbolically than materially: it evidenced the industry's final and reluctant acceptance that it could no longer profitably purvey a specified form of harmless entertainment to an undifferentiated mass audience. In one particular, however, the 1966 revision made that acceptance concrete. It specified that some films should be labeled as "suitable for mature audiences," and thereby introduced a system of classification which the majors had consistently resisted much more vehemently than they had opposed censorship. Film classification had been the main issue of dispute between the M. P. A. A. and censorship boards since 1952. Boards had taken more and more to restricting certain films, including some of the majors', as unsuitable for children. Their right to do so had been upheld by the Supreme Court, and some boards were operating exclusively on this practice, rather than attempting to enforce bans. The industry had fought any attempt to restrict audiences, particularly in the light of its knowledge that a large and growing proportion of movie audiences were under
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17. As before, the producers accepted classification only in the face of a growing censorship lobby, pressure from exhibitors who were concerned that they might again fall prey to community protest, and the forceful arguments of M. P. A. A President Jack Valenti that such a system was in their long-term self-interest. Even so, the system introduced in 1966 was, at best, half-hearted. It went no further than requiring that some films carry the label "Suggested for Mature Audiences" (abbreviated to S. M. A.) on their first- run advertising. This minimalist system did not quell the censorship lobby either inside or outside the industry, and was replaced in 1968 by a four-category classification sys- tem that finally abandoned the Code altogether.
The revisions of the Code during the 1960s amounted to a belated and reluctant acknowledgment by the member companies of the M.P.A. A. that a significant change had taken place in the composition and tastes of the movie audience. The classification system represented the institutional abandonment of the myth of the undifferentiated mass audience. But the tardiness and hesitancy with which these changes were implemented indicated even more clearly the extent to which distributors and major producers clung to a conservative economic definition of their product. The P. C. A. was replaced by the Code and Rating Administration (C.A.R.A.), but the philosophy with which the new organization operated did not differ from that of its predecessor. Instead of excising material by declaring it prohibited, the new administration achieved the same result by threatening producers with an X rating, which the major companies were not prepared to have attached to their product. Although some independent producers consciously pursued the publicity value of an X rating, the majors, committed as they were to blockbuster economics, continued to ensure that with very few exceptions their films were accessible to audienes under eighteen. Despite the increasing evidence to the contrary, they persisted in practicing the restrictive and conservative attitude to their product that the classification system appeared to have breached. That attitude continued to predominate because neither the political nor the economic events of the post-war period, disturbing as they were for the industry, caused the majors to alter their fundamental assumptions about the nature of film as a commercial commodity.
Note to pp. 135-136:
Pair with S.Ewen's observations about children being more susceptible to marketing. Also Zukin and others on teen purchasing power. The irony being that it's tough to crack down on the targeting of youth without flirting with censorship of a different kind. A crazier irony, also, is that the legal case for overturning censorship and granting film status as speech rests on what might be called a strong theory of media effects; in one sense a contravention of McLuhan's dictum.
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INTERLUDE
I WAS A COMMUNARD FOR THE F. B. I.:
GENRE AND POLITICS--ANTHONY MANN
"There's a revolution going on.
Don't stay out late."
Arnold Moss (Fouché) in Reign
of Terror
What constitutes a political cinema? A dissenting film within the commercial cinema may choose to make statements about politics as a force outside the institution in which it operates (plot politics), or it may expose the mechanisms of manipulation and exploitation within its economically determined forms (political narrative). In Hollywood these possibilities have consistently functioned as alternatives, obliging a conventionality in one discourse in order to permit opportunistic subversion in another. The limitations of a superficial radicalism in content are apparent: Jack Warner and Louis B. Mayer were quite justified in their claim that no Communist propaganda had ever sullied their studios' output, although it is perhaps debatable whether that was entirely due to their unceasing vigilance. The possibilities of formal subversion are more ambiguous, since such a strategy involves a side-step into areas not normally recognized as political. A challenge to conventional modes of representation is, however, a prerequisite for a politically subversive cinema, particularly in Hollywood where highly developed narrative codes circumscribed and recuperated the radical elements of a film's subject matter. To succeed in either political or aesthetic terms a dissenting film was obliged voluntarily to subjugate itself to the immediate demands of its status as a commercial product. By, for example, accepting the conventions of genre and plot development, a subversive film might create a free space for itself through its overt
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conformity. Working below the surface level of plot percepton is exactly what makes such films subversive; they genrate a tension between plot event and its performance, which offers the audience a choice as to the level on which it wishes to read the film. Manny Farber's description of these movies as "Underground Films" captures their essential quality precisely.
The generic puritanism of Budd Boetticher's Westerns, for example, so emphasizes the ritual in the patterning of plot events that the conventional moral lessons of those events, so evident in Ford, cannot be drawn except by an unreflective reading of the plot as sole text. Rather, this rigid, ruthless adherence to generic conventions uses irony to turn the usual implications of the plot on their heads. The sympathetic villain is hardly unique to Boetticher's miniaturist approach, but rarely has evil been more personably personified than by Claude Akins in Comanche Station, nor has righteousness, the central tenet of Randolph Scott's performance, seemed more absurd.
Thus the paradox: in order to create a political cinema, you have to create a non-political cinema . Which is to say, you have to create a cinema which expresses its politics in terms other than those already labeled political. The divisions within Hollywood over H.U.A.C. in a way defined this contradiction. Those people who took positions on either side of the issue were accepting the terms of the debate, even if they denied the existence of common ground between them and their opponents. Both groups were, in a sense, more fundamentally in opposition to those individuals attempting to define the political in a new manner than they were to each other. An alternative politics was not to be defined through positions on issues as such; rather, it was bound into films by their makers' attitude towards the act of filmmaking itself. For those who wished to practice an existential politics, specific issues were irrelevant. Their films contained an implicit acknowledgment that narrative cinema could not democratically present a political content before it had redefined the political implications of its style. The first task for filmmakers of Dissent was to reorganize their attitudes towards the narrative conventions within which they were obliged to work.
To make an overtly political film--a film which took politics as its subject matter--in 1949, two options were open. Either choose a contemporary subject matter in which good and evil could be readily identified, and didactically
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bludgeon the audience with the dramatic logic of the central character's corruption (All the King's Men) or redemption (I Married a Communist). Or eschew message cinema through the use of generic and stylistic conventions to create a political cinema. Reign of Terror practices what it preaches: in describing the unstable realpolitik of the French Revolution Anthony Mann employs a barrage of film noir techniques and gangster movie conventions to present his audience with a cinematic world they can comprehend. Reign of Terror is a conscious exercise in displacement: gangster archetypes in eighteenth-century dress--Robespierre the grotesque homosexual city boss making a show of opulence ("I didn't know such prosperity went with the Revolution," says DuVivier to him on their first meeting); St. Just the brutal dandy whose spiritual corruption is measured by his physical beauty; Fouché the deformed sardonic intellectual who plots to kill his master; Madeleine the film noir fatal woman (kissing DuVivier, she murmurs, "I could kill you"); DuVivier himself, the hero who is a double agent--exchange the dialogue of a hundred crime movies: "Fouché, why don't you go take a walk?" "Don't tempt me, I still have a gun."
All the stylistic devices used to create the insecure urban landscape of the film noir are employed to endow eighteenth-century studio Paris with an instability of circumstance and morality: cross-lighting; the threatening use of extreme close-ups; the expressionist play with shadows (several characters talk to shadows); persistent composition against the natural balance of the subject; the definition of space as solid and three-dimensional through the use of high-or low-angle shots, but still capable of sudden distortion by a cut to an unexpected camera position. Mann carefully sculpts his space, using deliberately positioned people and objects to establish depth in detail and precisely define the space in any shot--frequently to prove to the audience how deceptive appearances are: mirrors conceal doors, a book which turns out to be hollow then turns out to be no more than a container for dog food. His use of camera movement stresses his ambiguity; violence is directed either at or from the camera, implicating the audience or threatening it. In beginning the film with an extreme high-angle long shot, which pans down to a direct overhead shot of the first scene, and cutting occasionally to similar long shots throughout the film, Mann establishes a distance between himself and the audience. He reserves the power to withdraw from the action when he wishes, but forces his audience into participation, bewilderment and suffering with the characters.
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Mann' manipulation of the audience parallels Robespierre's and Barrat's manipulation of the crowds. "I created the mob ... where else would they find a leader?" declares Robespierre. This is a world of realpolitik, where the issue at stake is the control of the elements of power (here the mob, but also an object, the Black Book). What makes Reign of Terror's politics so distinctive is that it assertively defines the difference between good and evil as lying not in tactics but in purpose. The Barrat faction manipulates the mob at the Assembly to destroy Robespierre at the end of the film in precisely the same manner as Robespierre manipulated it to destroy Danton. Mann reinforces the point by the similarity with which he shoots the two scenes, in the same set with the same lighting, using the same camera setups.
Hero and villain are closely related: at one level of the plot, Barrat and Robespierre; at the other DuVivier and Fouché. At one point the latter are paired in a two-shot, facing each other in profile on either side of the frame, making a partnership by their mutual occupation of space, their mutual acceptance of each other's role and their mutual respect for each other's competence. They share the same aim, to find the Black Book and use it for their own ends. They share the same willingness to discard the other when he ceases to be useful. And they share the same duplicity: neither intends to fulfil the bargain they have just struck. By the end of the scene they are trying to kill each other. The moral distinction between them is offered to the audience only on a purely iconic level: DuVivier (Robert Cummings) is the film's ostensible hero because of his physical stature, because of his involvement in the romantic subplot, and because the plot draws us into his conspiracy--we can comprehend its motivation as well as its purpose. Fouché (Arnold Moss) is the villain because of his appearance--crooked, beak-nosed, invariably dressed in black--and because he is a natural dissembler. But almost the first thing we see DuVivier do is to murder a man with his bare hands. Significantly, Fouché has others perform all his butchery.
Mann's political methodology thus involves taking a conventional form and displacing its conventions. But in displacing them he does not violate them--unlike, for example, Abraham Polonsky in Force of Evil, where film noir criminal protagonist John Garfield turns renegade in the final scenes, reneging on his relationship with the audience and perhaps providing a model for the ex-Communist witnesses to H.U.A.C. Reign of Terror uses its generic
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and stylistic borrowings to create a world which is familiar enough for its unfamiliarities to be disturbing. The sets are made familiar by their lighting, the costumes by their inhabitants. What is unfamiliar is the extent of the film's realpolitik ambivalence. By making its hero a political assassin who will, at the film's end, compromise in a balance of power with its personification of evil, it persistently denies that a fixed morality of action exists. That denial is made generically possible by the film's position, at the same time inside and outside the conventions of the film noir.
Reign of Terror's narrative fits the pattern of Mann's later Westerns. The action of the film is a neutralizing movement towards compromise and control. But it is more explicit in its discussion of power as morally ambiguous than the Westerns were to be. They assume the territory Reign of Terror travels, and employ more independent reified symbols of the ambivalence of power--the rifle in Winchester 73. They also seek resolution at a different point. By concentrating on the obsession or dilemma of a single character, they articulate the politics of an introverted individualism, and at the plot's conclusion leave the central character a good deal less interesting than he was at its beginning. Reign of Terror, because it is not so clearly focused, can abandon its characters in the middle of a balance of forces no more stable than that with which it began; the untenable joint governance of Barrat, the "honest man," and Fouché, the "disloyal, unscrupulous, deceitful, treacherous, cunning" embodiment of studied malevolence. It is an apt enough commentary on the two worlds of Hollywood politics it describes.
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