Richard Maltby—Rhetoric Without a Cause

Richard Maltby
Harmless Entertainment:
Hollywood and the Ideology of Consensus
(1983)

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REASONABLE BELIEFS

The mechanisms of displacement, by which liberalism avoided debating itself by always accepting the terms of others, were a reflection of the implicit concession it made to technological improvement. Liberals' commitment to material progress necessitated that technological advance be regarded as, in itself, a social goal . The tension in the liberal perspective was that the mechanics of technology were ideologically required to work for the betterment of man in society, and yet the imperatives of professional expertise and "pure research" insisted that they remain free from social control --for the simple reason that the machine was progressing at an ever-increasing rate towards a goal that could only be presumed, not guaranteed. It was comforting in 1950 to read Asimov's three laws of Robotics, but there was other, more tangible evidence of the dangers of technological progress. Atomic weaponry questioned the benign potential of technology, but, perversely, required the ever more fervent assertion of that article of faith. The danger was again displaced: it lay not in the technology of nuclear destruction itself, but in man's capacity to employ it. Fear

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was diverted from the fact of the Bomb, which, of course, no rational man would ever use, to the possibility of that crazy finger on the button. The existence of such totalitarian weaponry gave credence to the need for eternal vigilance, and the need to compromise liberal idealism with the realism that accepted totalitarian forms of debate. Locked into their technological ideology, liberals located the threat as coming not from the Bomb, but from the fact that someone, specifically the Russians, might use it. The ascending helix of complex technological development was based on the assumption, which did not permit of questioning, that the machine was good for man. The problem, as seen by the liberal technocrat, was whether man was good enough to control the machine.

Interesting (and answerable at all) only on the individual rather than the collective level, no?

Perhaps nowhere did the liberal technocracy express its inherently schizoid nature so tellingly as in its attempts to resolve this fundamental dilemma. One solution, covertly practiced much more than it was openly articulated, was the adoption of a behaviorist psychology, which proposed applying the principles of a mechanistic, "objective" rationality to the study of man. This was a model of displacement at its most assertive: if man could be understood as if he were a machine, then the question of control became mechanically answered. Man was rendered redundant by default. Yet while this solution was to all practical purposes adopted in the automation of industrial processes and the application of military technology, it remained philosophically unacceptable to liberal idealists.

Instead, they sought perversely to assert man's supriority over the machine by stressing his irrationality or at least his capacity for irrational action. The unpredictability of human behavior became, for many liberals, a necessary, if somewhat uncomfortable, virtue.

Well, epistemologically there are (at least) two different kinds of unpredictability .

But such a fundamental contradiction required some mediating device to disguise and displace it. To counteract its insecurities, liberalism instituted the humanitarian concept of understanding , a word whose meaning crucially blurred the distinctions between compassion and comprehension. Understanding could, at the same time, accommodate a behaviorist model of mechanistic comprehension and an assertion of human uniqueness through a capacity for shared emotional response. Understanding is perhaps the most important single term in the liberal lexicon; a catch-all word whose semantic ambivalence can cover a multitude of inexact expressions in a haze of sentimental rhetoric.

That's funny, the term can be described exactly this way as it so often appears in musicology and music criticism.

Understanding was an emotional quality

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rather than an intellectual process. To understand people meant to identify sympathetically with them; it was a form of emotional acquisition of them, or of their problems. Understanding was a sentimental placebo for all ills and all problems, for to be understood was to be absorbed into the benevolence of the liberal consensus, and to be understanding was to be an active part of that consensus. Understanding was not an analytical activity; it was the very opposite, a substitute for it which avoided the difficulties analysis might reveal in a benign harmony of the rational and the emotional. The liberal employment of the word played with the dualistic meaning it gave "understanding" so that the rational basis of human understanding could be asserted at the same time that its emotional nature could be exploited. The process of understanding aimed to be all-inclusive, since the understood object or person became predictable and consequently harmless , because that predictability permitted it to be incorporated within the system of understanding that maintained the liberal status quo. In exchange for this emasculation, the understood object was afforded a compassionate concern that revealed the centrality of a sentimental paternalism to the understanding liberal elite--that paternalism itself being a consensual inheritance from the fundamentalist tradition.

Certain areas of concern were, of course, more problematic than others. Those groups or individuals who refused to correspond with the liberal myth of men of goodwill had either to be forcibly placed within the orthodoxy, or to have their unorthodoxy "understood" and explained. In coming to terms with Nazism, McCarthyism or the psychopathic personality, liberalism most clearly revealed the mechanisms it employed to sustain its humanistic vision, and exposed their inadequacy. Liberal understanding wanted not merely to answer the question of how such irrational political movements or personality traits had come about, but also the question of why they had arisen, a question to which no complete answer could be provided . Answers to the question "how?" were available through the compilation of sufficient data, but the question "why?" was much more problematic, because it required the explanation of motive in terms of a rationalist psychology that could not encompass the irrational. For the liberal, the question "why?" was invariably rhetorical. When liberal historians asked how was it possible for the Nazis to exterminate nine million people, they were not primarily concerned with an explanation in terms of the mechanics of execution or the bureaucracy of the concentration camps, but with seeking to understand an

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attitude to humanity and a psychology radically and frighteningly different from the premises of their own.

The narrow limits to comprehension which their idea of understanding as a process of emotional subjugation and control afforded them inevitably prevented their coming to terms with such aberrations as Nazism except by resolving them in terms of individual psychopathology. Liberal explanations could bracket off the psychopath from "normal" society and declare him an aberration, but so long as he remained unintegrated and beyond control--so long, that is, as he evaded a rationalistic understanding--he threatened the total system of that understanding. A behaviorist psychological model might offer an explanation of irrationality and propose medical means of removing the dysfunction, but such a solution brought the liberal once more up against a central dilemma in his philosophy: attempting to establish some valid distinction between man and machine, even if only on the level by which each was treated.

This individualization of the problem was, however, the best practical solution liberalism could advance as a way out of its dilemma. It adhered to the consensual requirement of being all but all-embracing, and of labeling those it excluded as being demonstrably "different," sociopathic, less than completely human. Having philosophically rejected the idea of absolute evil, it strove all the more to accommodate, or at least explain, the psychopathic "personality disorder" in terms which denied individual responsibility and spread the blame in rhetorical gestures of sentimental sympathy. Here as elsewhere liberal orthodoxy found a precarious balance between individualism and determinism, which purported to grant free will to those who fell within the benevolent conventions of its consensual framework , and denied it to those who demonstrated an anarchic free will by rejecting the restrictions of that framework .

THE INVENTION OF STANLEY KRAMER

If Stanley Kramer had not ex-
isted, he would have had to
have been invented as the most

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extreme example of thesis or
message cinema.

Andrew Sarris

The psychopath proved as essential a figure to the post-war cinema as he was to the anti-ideologues of liberal realism. The popularization of psychiatry in the 1940s promoted the dramatic status of a character who could embody unregenerate evil in a fictional framework which sought to avoid populist conventions. Genre films might still resort to stereotypes for their Manichaean villains. For them the matter was relatively simple: just point to the nearest group of Mexican bandits, notorious gunfighters or monsters from outer space, have a couple of scenes in which they dispose of innocent civilians for their own amusement, and you have objective evil personified. But for the urban realist cinema, trading in images of paranoia it sought to explain but not to dismiss, there was a greater problem and a solution with much less precedent. The psychopath was created to avoid acknowledging a metaphysical notion of absolute evil that would have been contrary to the principles of understanding. The psychopath neatly provided an answer in being capable of irrational action in a rational society, and subject to a glib compassion for his inadequate humanity after he gets his just deserts in the last reel. The Adrian Scott/Edward Dmytryk tract on anti-Semitism, Crossfire (1947, RKO), ends with Robert Young looking down on the body of rabid bigot Robert Ryan. When someone asks if Ryan is dead, Young replies, "He's been dead a long time, only he didn't know it." Understanding has become contempt for a character whose crime has been his contempt for others.

The psychopath personified liberalism's anxieties about its own rationality. In the immediate post-war period these anxieties revealed themselves mainly in the urban melodramas of film noir, but in the late 1950s the ideological function of the cinematic psychopath became increasingly clear as the cinema of social messages reached its zenith. Stanley Kramer, whose independent productions in the years around 1960 made him the arch-exponent of the film with the detachable theme, and won him the Irving Thalberg Award "for consistently high quality in filmmaking" in 1961, returned repeatedly to the psychopathic personality as a trigger for the liberal conscience. Kramer sought to elevate the cinema through its social significance, and while his relent-

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less promotion of "meaningful" content over form has ensured the rapid demise of his critical reputation he is nevertheless a figure central to the emergence of the liberal consensus, both in its thematic preoccupations and in its acquisition of industrial power.

Kramer's habitual technique is to present an issue in terms of an individual confrontation of characters the film determines to be representative of opposed viewpoints, at the same time purporting to dramatize a social problem and tell a story. Pressure Point, produced by Kramer for United Artists in 1962 and directed by Hubert Cornfield, exemplifies this process in its handling of Kramer's recurrent topic of racial conflict. Inside a framing device in which Peter Falk plays a young prison psychiatrist unable to communicate with a black prisoner, Sidney Poitier points a moral of goodwill by narrating in flashack the story of his wartime failure to cure an imprisoned Nazi racist, played by Bobby Darin. While Darin is not reduced to a position of complete inarticulacy, this is no more than a device to conceal the film's Manichaean characterization of good and evil. Darin's speeches may well work to make white audiences uncomfortable by their closeness to their own unarticulated attitudes. But by putting them in the mouth of an overtly unsympathetic character, the spectator is not led to a position in which such ideas can be openly raised and confronted. On the contrary, they must be dismissed because they are depicted as part of the intellectual property of a man persistently described and pictured as a psychopath. The film posits a few individuals as representative of general social positions, and then individualizes their problems, so that they no longer function satisfactorily either as representatives of social groups or as individuals in their own right. This form of audience involvement operates as a kind of emotional blackmail; a sympathetic Negro and an unsympathetic white are presented in order to make the white liberal audience for whom the film is presumably designed readjust their thinking on the subject emotionally, not intellectually. Pressure Point reveals its thematic opportunism more clearly than other films of the liberal consensus because it matches it with an equal opportunism towards spatial relationships.

Pressure Point is filmed theatre. This much is apparent in the contrived use of sets, and in the dissolution of the boundaries of spatial delineation. Sidney Poitier's office, for example, can contain an elephant ridden by the twelve-year-old Darin. Darin's fantasies are acted out in a non-

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naturalistic manner designed to emphasize the fact that they are fantasies, which reinforces Poitier's plot role as psychiatrist and narrative role as interpreter of the action for the audience. The sets are constructed to make it possible to pan from Poitier's psychiatrist's room to Darin's father's butcher's shop through a pool of darkness, a proposition of theatrical space that echoes Arthur Miller's design for Death of a Salesman. Composition, too, becomes a functionary of the drama, which is concentrated, through the use of deep-focus low- or high-angle medium close-ups, on the actors' delivery of dialogue. This emphasis on the actors, together with the artificiality of the settings, stresses the theatricality of the film, as well as its intention to make a significant statement. In the scene in Darin's cell, where the walls disappear with the ease of theatrical flats, the film most clearly reneges on the contract it has established with its audience over the presentation of space. Our guarantee of normative spatial perception is established by the conventional perspective in which we view recognizable objects like desks, walls or people, as delineators of space. Pressure Point offers us this guarantee, through the solidity of such objects, and then rejects that solidity while continuing to depict space under the terms of that guarantee. The contractual relationship between film and audience applies only when it is convenient for the film. The unilateral nature of the film's negotiation with the audience over the terms of its depiction of space precludes the possibility of the democratic presentation of a theme.

The crux of that presentation is Poitier, not only because he is the central figure in the narrative, but also because he is the narrator, and the interpreter of the events we are shown. He is, further, proven right in his analysis by the end of the story, when we learn that Darin was finally hanged for an ostentatiously psychopathic act. In placing Poitier in the position he occupies in the plot, fundamental aspects of the question of race relations have already been side-stepped, for here, as ever, Poitier represents the small minority of blacks who have escaped from the socio-economic oppression of their race to be accepted on a professional level with whites. The conflict has, by Poitier's education, been reduced purely to one of color, to the fact that he is black. This is to avoid, as blatantly as Kramer does in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?, the question of Poitier's racial heritage. The social context to which the film refers is only that of the white world, and the racial problem is seen as entirely one-sided, a question of white men

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accepting Negroes as their equals,* because, as portrayed by Poitier, they self-evidently are.

By placing the Darin story in the Falk framing device, the film asserts that the important element in the racial problem is merely one of skin pigmentation. Falk is dealing with a Negro who hates all whites because his mother was a prostitute who brought whites home, and his father was lynched by whites for killing one of his mother's tricks. The framing device presents this as being a parallel situation to Darin's, whose hatred of Negroes is based on a set of political assumptions which Poitier is allowed to define as psychopathic. Focusing on racial hatred rather than its cause obliges the audience to assume, with the film, that all causes are equally valid, or invalid, because of the reduction of the issue to the level of individual manifestation of the effect. Thematic causality is reversed on the assumption that the causal logic of the narrative will sustain the thematic argument through its logical weaknesses. The solution Falk proposes to adopt towards his Negro patient is to put on blackface, and Poitier agrees, announcing that all human problems are simply ones of communication, thereby asserting the myth of the man of goodwill and retaining the liberal analysis within an optimistic interpretation of bourgeois individualism. There is no irony in Poitier, or in his proposed solution in terms of individual personalities. For while he fails with Darin, it is only because Darin is an extreme case.

Darin is a Nazi in 1942, in prison as a subversive, and psychopathic. Thus anything he says is not only wrong but dangerous to the fabric of American ideals, which Poitier is forced to defend without context and in terms so vague as to be meaningless:

There's something so great about this country that you don't even know about it.

This does not engage Darin's argument that the ideal America is created on, that "all men are created equal," is a self-evident lie. Poitier's response, and the ideology he asserts (which applauds success, family, and the intellect),

__________
*In Guess Who's Coming to Dinner? the same question is given slightly different expression; that of a Negro accepting that white men can accept Negroes as their equals.

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wins by default--a default made possible by the framework of the debate, which individualizes out of the general, and then generalizes out of the individual, allowing two stages for the omission of problematic areas, and a complete divorce from social context. By placing Poitier in a position in which he may analyze Darin's racism on the individual level of the film's dime-store psychology, he is reinforced and Darin is undercut.

More than I wanted to kill you, I wanted to help you, and that makes me more than a good man, that makes me a doctor.

Poitier is a black white liberal, whose ideal is that of the doctor, the saver of lives without regard to his personal feelings. But because he is speaking from a position of historical confidence, telling the story which is in the past, the danger and the physical confrontation that might be involved are circumscribed by our knowledge that Poitier lived to tell the tale. The film uses history to its own ends. By imposing its analytical chronology on the events it depicts, it dictates the audience's attitude to those events. He who controls the present (presentation) controls the past (history), and he who controls the past controls the future (audience response).

Poitier is the mediator of the film's paternalist analysis in his position as narrator, and its beneficiary in the plot, from the prison doctor, Carl Benton Reid. "I fought hard to get you this job," says Reid, "don't let me down." It is Poitier who adds, "Because you're a Negro," a statement which he can reverse at the end of the film to Falk, on the film's presumption that there is no difference between their situations. But Poitier has been appointed prison psychiatrist not only by Reid in the plot, but in his casting by the makers of the film who, in common with Reid, are white liberals making the Negro in their own image. Poitier's analysis of Nazism, couched in terms of an individual psychopath manipulating others, is reinforced not only by Darin's characterization, but by the film's inclusion of newsreel footage of the Nazi entry into Paris. His social analysis goes only so far as to refer to "The discontented--socially, economically, or psychologically," returning to an emphasis on the problem as lying with individuals rather than with social institutions, whose values are asserted throughout. In this context it can be noted that the only act of violence in the film is violence against property: the

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Tick Tack Toe scene in the bar, where the violence perpetrated against the hostess is humiliation, not physical injury, a violation of her being rather than her body. However, the film regards what happens to her as an outrage of greater significance than any act of physical violence which Darin commits. Not only is it emphasized by the amount of screen time given to it, but also by the script. After it, Poitier narrates,

That's when I realized that this man was not only sick but dangerous.

This emphasis given to an act of personal and not political violence serves again to individualize and depoliticize a problem whose roots have initially been determined as political by the film; Darin is in prison because he is a menace to society.

In the American cinema, the problem of dealing with political questions has consistently been one of the manner of the individualization of the issue. Kramer's approach posits a universal truth that may be individually exemplified, but such a method requires a predetermined definition of what constitutes a political subject. The political subject is distinguished as separate from the individuals whose story presents an attitude towards it. The film exists as a linear development of the predetermined attitude which has governed its construction. An aesthetic split in the film's structure, between the determining but independent attitude and the dramatic logic which derives from the narrative individualization of that attitude, emerges. The attitude appears as a detachable message--in Pressure Point that the racial prob- lem is soluble through the application of the myth of men of goodwill, which is tantamount to saying that it doesn't exist--located in the speeches the characters make to each other. Political attitude may become a mechanism by which to examine personality, but it can only function as such within the framework of an assured political perspective. Both inside the cinema and in its wider manifestations, liberalism secured that framework by defining itself as an idealist, pragmatic reaction to situations it claimed to deplore, and by insisting, as a result, that it could never be more than a compromise with imperfection.

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MARTYRS TO COMPROMISE

The notion of compromise was as central to the functoning of liberalism as the concept of understanding. Those mechanisms of displacement by which liberalism avoided confronting itself were geared to producing a compromise solution, the best result possible in unfavorable circumstances. Compromise disguised the real location of power, even from those who held it. It preserved the appearance of an effective democratic political system, whose checks and balances could be seen to operate because no one was getting his own way. It gave authority to the voice of moderation. But as a political objective, compromise was of more fundamental importance than merely being the sum total of its superficial effects. Liberal realism sought compromise as a means of avoiding a confrontation with its insoluble fundamental dilemma: the opposition between individualism and determinism expressed in the technological terms of man's relationship with machines. To continue functioning, liberal realism required both forces to be in play at the same time; hence it required that they not confront each other. Ultimately, the liberal had to seek the liberal compromise not because of his humanitarian beliefs, but for his own preservation, since his sense of self-identity was founded on the notion of ra- tional understanding which gives a human being dominance over the machine. The preservation of that non-mechanistic, non-determinist illusion became in effect the liberal definition of peace, for war was the subjection of humanity to the destructive logic of the machine. To slip from the knife-edge balance of the liberal compromise was to destroy the illusion of independence from technology.

Progress and balance were the aims of the liberal consensus; understanding and compromise were its tools; failure was both its prime mover and its unconscious goal. Compromise inherently acknowledged the failure of idealism; Liberal Realism postulated it as an initial premise. Because liberalism refused systematically to define its goals, it could not hope to measure its success except in the already compromised terms of its "limited objectives." Failure, on the other hand, was much more readily quantifiable, since it could be determined by the success of others. Liberalism sought failure as a protective cloak; it maintained the illusion, necessary to its political preservation, that it was not in possession of political power. In needing failure as its final, covert goal, liberalism acquired for itself the

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role of permanent underdog. It is, for example, the success of this defeatist strategy that has prevented recognition of the dominance of the post-war liberal consensus in Hollywood. As pursued by liberal directors, producers, stars or politicians, liberalism practiced martyrdom as fervently as Christianity ever had, and by doing so it secured its rationality as being beyond dispute. Through its martyrs and through its eager annexation of hopelessly lost causes liberalism sentimentally registered its faith in a vision of rational humanity at the same time that it protected that vision from scrutiny.

Any system of consensual politics seeks stability as its primary goal. The predominant post-war liberal consensus sought stability through the institutionalization of its own inactivity , whether it chose to call that refusal to take assertive action "containment" or "consolidation." In asserting its own rationality , liberalism elevated the notion of debate to the point where it substituted for action . For the liberal, debating an issue became sufficient in itself; open-mindedness came to replace decision-making , while events might be allowed to run their course. The tensions within liberalism thus never needed to be resolved. Contemplating the irrational served at the same time to validate liberal social analysis and to provide a way out of liberalism's greatest dilemma; it accommodated what it could not encompass within its rationalist vision by endlessly debating it , thus formulating it in its own terms. What could not be accommodated in practice was displaced into theory in a quintessential liberal movement, a shifting of the pieces around, like castling in chess, which preserved the appearance of activity witnout accomplishing anything that was positive in itself. The particular was always referred back to the general, which was never precisely defined, but rather assumed as common ground.

Most importantly, this process served to reinforce and validate that acquisitiveness which liberalism displaced from the material world into the world of sentiment. Liberalism strove to "understand" any attitude outside itself, in order to include it within its accommodating world. What was "understood" was not just rendered harmless, it was acquired and thus made available as an alternative position within the diverse liberal perspective. The goal was to pour oil on troubled waters, to calm issues down so that they could be acquired by men of goodwill for rational debate, and if pollution ensued, that, too, had its advantages, since the energy and pace of anger or ideological confrontation

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were slowed down and slurred in the thicker waters of procedural, theoretical, or semantic disputation. Displacement of confrontation was the liberal objective; like an octopus it spread its tentacles to enclose and suffocate any fundamental set of oppositions.

It delighted most of all in revising the past. History was subject to its sentimental acquisitiveness, serving to reveal the benefits of liberal management to the present generation by comparison, and also permitting liberal rhetoric to maintain in its tone a sense of lost innocence, a regretful nostalgia for a past presumed simpler. Liberals could in this way see themselves as martyrs not only to the terminology of others, but also to their own rationality, which prevented them adopting the simplistic viewpoints their opponents survived with, and which had also been available to earlier generations not burdened with the administration of such complex social institutions. Isolationism had been replaced with a reluctant eternal vigilance, which required that the innocent optimism of earlier American dreams be sacrificed to the continuing need for self-protection. The blue skies of Carvel were now never without the vapor trails of B-52s--just in case. The liberal professional guardians were aware of their own unwanted but necessary protective role.

The emphasis in American foreign policy from 1941 onwards was on the necessary sacrifice of American isolationist self-interest to the preservation of fundamental ideals and the inalienable human rights upon which American democracy had been postulated. Liberal paternalists, who could not recover their own innocence, sought to preserve it elsewhere, above all in their image of the apolitical Vietnamese or South American peasant who wished only to till his land in peace, while benevolent humanitarians made his political decisions for him. The self-validating circle of liberal martyrdom completed itself in this ideal image of simple men pursuing a happiness no longer available to the technocratic elite who sacrificed their own contentment in order to provide the stability these simple men required. Government was a heavy burden willingly shouldered in hopes of a better future for all.

Thus liberalism concentrated its efforts on understanding the past and providing for the future, while paying as little practical attention as possible to the distasteful problems of the present, which were always seen in a perspective provided by some other viewpoint. This pervasive

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nostalgia permitted those practical problems to be solved through the application of a technological solution, whose moral virtue was always predetermined and which could always be retrospectively justified by its expedient effectiveness, and the inevitability of the compromise with imperfection. Whether intentionally or not, the liberal political perpspective was perfectly equipped to justify the assumptions of the technological imperative, and the applications of a technocratic solution, whether in the development of atomic energy or the Vietnamese defoliation program. Liberalism comprised a series of interlocking, mutually validating self-definitions which secured its own ends by admitting of its ultimate ineffectiveness, and martyring itself to its own unquestioning belief in the rationality of compromise.

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CHAPTER 9

RHETORIC WITHOUT A CAUSE:
THE LIBERAL CINEMA

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JUST DESERTS

"I'm a realist. I don't believe
in coincidence. Especially when
it happens more than once."

Hume Croyn (Humsey) in Brute
Force (1947; dir. Jules Dassin)

The perverse consequence of the liberal cinema's emphasis on character over action was that liberal "realist" narratives found themselves even more firmly attached to melodramatic structures than the populist consensus had been. The necessity for the manipulation of plot events to be conducted without disrupting the surface plausibility of the narrative--that is to say, that the characters must appear to function as independent entities and not as symbols, so that the story can be read as "realistic" and not as allegorical--enormously increases the importance of coincidence as a plot device. Coincidence is an inevitable tool of film narrative, if for no other reason than the structural limitations provided by the temporal abbreviation of any film plot. But it can be used in a variety of ways, particularly with regard to the extent to which it is emphasized as plot device. Hitchcock, for example, relies heavily in his plot construction on the most unlikely of coincidences to express both his determinist outlook and the arbitrary nature of cinematic narrative. By his equally arbitrary use of coincidence, Sirk produces in his audience an awareness of generic convention as manipulative, and offers a critique of melodrama through his

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practice of it. The liberal filmmakers, however, begin with different intentions, and consequently employ coincidence to different ends. For them coincidence is elevated to the level of moral inevitability, and in conjunction with the identification of character as the embodiment of attitude it forms the final confirmation of the system of closure which their narrative model operates. In Between Heaven and Hell, Broderick Crawford signals that he has regained sufficient self-knowledge to recognize his previous corruption by putting on his Captain's uniform. He is, of course, immediately shot by a sniper.

The moral inevitability of coincidence functions at its crudest in a film like Arena (MGM, 1953; dir. Fleischer). In the liberal tradition by which the hero becomes an adult during the film, while his best friend dies a moral adolescent, Arena belongs to the Western sub-genre of rodeo films. Its central character, Gig Young, is in the conventional generic position of aging rodeo star being challenged for his position of preeminence by a younger man, and being offered the choice between a declining career in the rodeo and a stable and prosperous life ranching. His best friend, Harry Morgan, is a former star now working as a clown and suffering from a knee injury that occasionally immobilizes him. Despite all the evidence the film provides, Young is unable to decide to retire until aided by coincidence. He arranges to ride the toughest Brahma bull--the conventional climax of the rodeo film--seeking proof of his continued ability. The bull throws him almost immediately, but that in itself is insufficient. Morgan, the clown, draws the bull away from Young, but as he does so his injured knee lets him down and he cannot escape from the bull's charge. In keeping with his pathetic stature in the plot, he is gored and killed, dying in order that Young, and the audience, should get the message.

Arena presents an obvious example of coincidence as the implement of resolution and the tool through which morality will assert itself to provide plot and audience with the "correct" conclusion. Morgan's knee fails him at the crucial moment because his life is wrong--the reverse of Robert Wagner's ability to assert himself at the crucial moment of Between Heaven and Hell because his life is now right. The operation of melodramatic coincidence is just as essential to liberal films of greater superficial complexity.

The crucial plot device of The Boston Strangler takes

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place in a lift. Henry Fonda and George Kennedy are leaving the hospital after interviewing the victim of the Strangler's most recent attack, having gathered two pieces of information: that her attacker left a plastic ruler behind, and that she bit his hand. The lift stops; enter an attendant and Tony Curtis, with bandaged hand and complaining of having lost his ruler. Without exchanging looks, Fonda and Kennedy get out of the lift and walk out of the hospital. Only when they have got to their car does Kennedy look at Fonda and say, "My God, I'm afraid to breathe."

The reaction of the two characters is vital to the suc- cessful operation of the scene. Only by registering their incredulity at the coincidence, and prolonging it as they silently walk through the hospital can the film convince the audience of the scene's plausibility. That plausibility is essential not only to the film's status as a fictional reconstruction of actual events, but also to the narrative function the scene has in moving the film's preoccupation from the details of police procedure to the character study of a psychopath. The coincidence is still an inevitable moral judgment on Curtis, but its construction seeks to disguise the extent to which the narrative hinges on its arbitrariness.

A CERTAIN INSECURITY

In their hostile revisions of generic structures, liberal filmmakers criticized the forms of previous American cinema without attacking the central institution on which they had been based; the relationship between film and audience. In fact, by emphasizing their own "realism," they strengthened the unilateral nature of that relationship, and did no more than substitute a new set of dramatic conventions for the earlier generic ones. Three variants of the liberal hero, open to multiple combination, emerged from this emphasis. The first, exemplified by Fonda in The Best Man, was the hero as victim and martyr, sacrificing himself for a larger principle. The second type, like Wagner in Between Heaven and Hell, became a moral adult through his education in the course of the film. The third variant of the liberal hero was the professional, the expert figure marked out by his specialized skills. In all three types, the impulse to psychological realism in the central character did more than simply distance him from the supporting

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figures. As the fundamentalist man of integrity was revised into the liberal man of principle, his natural bonds to the small community he protected changed into moral obligations to a larger society and to abstract ethical beliefs--an alteration indicated by the drift away from the Western to the contemporary urban location in the late 1940s.

The principled professional hero began to emerge in the wartime propaganda films, in which his relationship to the society for which he was fighting was necessarily distant, while his involvement with the mechanisms of warfare was emphasized. In the immediate post-war period he was frequently a newspaperman, seeking either an abstract notion of truth or a more concrete act of social justice. James Stewart in Call Northside 777 (1948, Twentieth Century-Fox; dir. Henry Hathaway) is for the first half of the film in a dilemma of responsibility between his professional practice, which brought him to the story in the first place, and his growing conviction that Frank Wiecek (Richard Conte) is innocent. His loyalties, good copy and the principles of justice, find resolution in his newspaper's crusade for Wiecek's pardon, finally brought about through the agency of a newly developed technology.

Elsewhere in the semi-documentary movement, the professional hero assumed a corporate identity, being embodied in an institution rather than a crusading individual. The movement's obsession with technology encouraged this corporatism, almost always (The House on 42nd Street, Walk East on Beacon, The F.B.I. Story) attached to a federal law enforcement agency. If there was not a typical semi-documentary plot, there was at least a typical plot resolution, dependent upon the combined activities of professional guardians employing a superior technology to protect society from those who would harm it, and to defend or uphold an abstract social principle in a particular case. The role of guardian was always emphasized. The plots' representative citizens were unable to protect themselves, while the larger society was ill-defined. The city replaced the small town as principle replaced integrity, and the individual or corporate hero no longer required a generalized sense of moral justification for his actions, but rather specific skills he might employ for an accepted notion of the general good embodied in the welfare of the film's oppressed and helpless victims.

The consensual formulation defined itself with increas-

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ing clarity in the process of being constantly restated. By the time of its complete articulation in The Magnificent Seven (1960, United Artists; dir. John Sturges), for example, the hero had been replaced by a group. Bound together by their profession of mutually necessary skills and combating a force either numerically superior (in Westerns) or previously uncomprehended (in science fiction films), they could defeat it only by the application of a technological prowess--a know-how--unavailable to their opponents and incomprehensible to their audiences. Moreover, they were acting in defense of an explicitly political principle, most commonly the right to self-determination. Armed with principle, they could operate a stricter moral absolutism than the optimistic resolution of the fundamentalist consensus had ever required. The theme of lost innocence which Andrew Dowdy remarks on in the anti-Communist films of the early 1950s was pervasive. The "realistic" abandonment of Capraesque all-inclusive happy endings now meant that redemption or reform were options seldom open to the Manichaean villains of the post-war world, while professionalism by itself was an insufficient heroic quality. Those characters who most clearly understood the principles for which they were fighting were the ones most likely to survive the final denouement, along with those who most completely represented the ideals for which the battle was being fought.

In The Magnificent Seven the purely professional figures (Brad Dexter, Robert Vaughn, James Coburn), who have their own motives for fighting profit, proving their courage, or an escape from aimlessness) are killed, while the characters who understand the villagers' situation (Yul Brynner and Steve McQueen) survive the battle with their knowledge reinforced, along with Horst Buchholz, who learned the necessity of some purpose greater than professional display during the film. All the professional figures are aware of having lost a sense of community they could not recover. McQueen describes their situation as "Home, none; wife, none; kids, none; prospects, zero," and Charles Bronson explains to the village children that it takes more courage than he has to work a farm. Buchholz receives his moral education and decides to stay with his girl in the village, while Bronson's death both represents the sacrifice required of professional guardians and sentimentally exemplifies Brynner's melancholic liberal conclusion, "Only the farmers won. We lost. We always lose."

With the advent of a superior technology as an aid to

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heroism, the need for the perfection of physical abilities diminished. The elder generation of populist heroes could be allowed to grow old more or less gracefully--a development from which Stewart, in particular, benefited. His amiable bumbling became an increasing asset as he was allowed to demonstrate a shrewd mind behind it. In Call Northside 777 he spends much of his time searching through his pockets in an apparently absentminded fashion for pieces of paper, displaying a physical vulnerability--except in moments of extreme tension--that was to be the defining characteristic of the new liberal heroes of the 1950s. This element of physical insecurity was an important ingredient in the justification of the new hero. It suggested that he was capable of some self-doubt, both about his physical capacity and his moral rectitude, which served to intensify his achievement when he was successful, reinforce his moral decision when he chose to make a stand, and provide grounds for sympathy when he failed.