A new Criterion series of McCarthy-era noir films is a timely collection for an era of rising government repression — though you wouldn’t know it from Criterion’s oddly subdued promotion.
The riveting new Criterion Channel film series “Noir and the Blacklist” is distressingly timely. It’s a sampling of film noir made by Hollywood directors, writers, and actors who were targeted as communists or broadly left-wing “subversives” by their own government in the post–World War II era by a punitive right-wing body called the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC).
The typically bleak noirs showcased here span a range of terrifying developments for leftists working in the film industry during and after World War II. Two offer harsh critiques of fascism when it was on the rise in 1930s Europe, clearly as a form of American wartime propaganda: Fritz Lang’s Hangmen Also Die! (1943) and Andre De Toth’s None Shall Escape (1944). Both were made by directors who had actually fled the Nazis to establish careers in Hollywood. Pervasive racism and antisemitism in the United States are examined in Edward Dmytryk’s Crossfire (1947), Clarence Brown’s Intruder in the Dust (1949), and Joseph Losey’s The Lawless (1950). Empty and twisted machismo is excoriated in Dmytryk’s Crossfire, Cy Endfield’s Try and Get Me! (1950), and Joseph Losey’s The Big Night (1951). And America’s sick obsession with guns is portrayed in electrifying ways in Joseph H. Lewis’s Gun Crazy (1949).
Almost all the films find ways to expose the cruel perversities of capitalism and the entrenched class war waged against the working poor that drives people toward crime and violence while dividing them by class and race in America. The most forceful of the series films to…
Auteur: Eileen Jones
