Blackout: World War II and the Origins of Film Noir

by Sheri Chinen Biesen

Challenging conventional scholarship placing the origins of film noir in postwar Hollywood, Sheri Chinen Biesen finds the genre's roots firmly planted in the political, social, and material conditions of Hollywood during the war. After Pearl Harbor, America and Hollywood experienced a sharp cultural transformation that made horror, shock, and violence not only palatable but preferable. Hard times necessitated cheaper sets, fewer lights, and fresh talent; censors as well as the movie-going public showed a new tolerance for sex and violence; and female producers experienced newfound prominence in the industry. Biesen brings prodigious archival research, accessible prose, and imaginative insights to both well-known films noir of the wartime period— The Maltese Falcon , The Big Sleep , and Double Indemnity —and others often overlooked or underrated— Scarlet Street , Ministry of Fear , Phantom Lady , and Stranger on the Third Floor .

Genres: Film, History, Media Tie In, Noir, Nonfiction, World War II

258 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2005

Reviews

[Bill Wallace · Rating 2 out of 5]

There's about 20 pages of good book here and almost 200 of repetitive jargon as the author belabors her points obsessively. The phrase "red meat," a term I'm not even sure the author understands, is repeated to the point that palilalia is a possibility. The book also suffers from the academic season in which it was written but brushes past ideas like "gender tension" without even attempting to explain their meaning in the context of the 1940s. I picked this up mostly to find films I might have overlooked and it did point me to a couple of early 40s efforts I hadn't seen, but that's not much recompense for slogging through the rest of it.

[Steven · Rating 4 out of 5]

Deserves highest marks for demonstrating that the Noir style actually originated pre-World War II and that the stylistics were heavily influenced by the economics, rationing, and censorship during war-time film production. Loses a star because some of the supporting research bogs down the prose and would have been better as footnotes or as an appendix.

[Linda Robinson · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is the culmination of research in support of a dissertation, and reads like one, which worked for me because I need new information told more than once. If this was fiction, we'd be informed early on that the west coast was blacked out for the duration of the war, which puts the kibosh on beachfront location shooting at night and grandiose studio shooting that leaks out windows, and because the OWI (Office of War Information) trumped the Production Code, violence creeped into the movies as the OWI was showing patriotic battle violence in newsreels for the duration. The 40s witnessed the decline of the studio factories and the rise of the independents, and "hyphenates," writer-director, writer-producer. Take away the lights, elaborate sets and absence of beautiful leading men away at war, and we get James Wong Howe shadows and contrasts, borrowed and cobbled together sets, Humphrey Bogart and film noir. Robert Mitchum quipped the sets were lit by cigarette butts. The term film noir was recorded in 1946 by a French reviewer, who took that long to notice because the movies we made in the USA were not shown overseas during the war. France had no idea what we were up to cinematically. Chinen Biesen includes background on how the books were acquired (Chandler, Cain) and how many typewriters the screenplay clicked through for years until shooting began. Double Indemnity was a book that even Cain said could never be done. MGM missed the film noir boat because it was a glitzy, patriotic, razzmatazz production values studio. Too bad for MGM, great for Warner and Columbia and the new production companies. The filmmaker emigres from the Nazi regime's terror left Germany to France, then to the US and brought new art sensibilities and independent thinking to the USA. Billy Wilder, Fritz Lang, Joseph von Sternberg. The man who played the bartender in Casablanca saw his face on a Nazi recruitment poster. Terrifying, and this piece of information adds a new tension to the next time I watch that movie. Billy Wilder is revealed to be a genius beyond what shows on screen: his methods to outwit Mr. Been and the PCA are trickster god-worthy. Readers who love film noir and have an obsessive need to know more will relish this book for its clarity. Film noir aficionados get tangled up in what film noir is, and the author takes out the knots without favoring personal choices. It's a dissertation, defended to professors in an academic setting, and those folks don't play with facts. I'm satisfied this is a definitive book on the genre, so I can stop compulsively searching for the definitive book on film noir. And I've seen all the movies she mentioned (screening The Stranger on the Third Floor while I was reading this.) I'm free to move on to my next obsession. One star went missing because of the relentless repetitive use of hard-boiled. Hundreds! Relief is applied by details that spice the prose: Veronica Lake's peekaboo hairstyle didn't work for the women running machines in the factories, and quickly ended Lake's career and brought in the upswept hair in later 40s' movies.

[Zoë · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a really fascinating read which outlines the historical influences and contexts which gave rise to the film noir genre.

[Sean Wicks · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sheri (who has a great blog and has one of my favorite twitter accounts) chronicles how wartime Film Noir was affected by wartime conditions such as blackouts, perceived enemy invasions on the West Coast, Joseph Breen and the infamous Hays office who were dedicated to keeping Hollywood "clean" through censorship. The book covers Noir films from the attack on Pearl Harbor in the December of 1941 through to the end of the war, and discusses the impact beyond wartime. The key film at play in her thesis is DOUBLE INDEMNITY and she makes a great case for that (she also makes a fantastic one for post-war noir with THE BLUE DAHLIA). Definitely worth checking out.