Best known for his study of the New York anti-Stalinist intellectuals grouped around the 1930s Partisan Review, University of Michigan professor and Solidarity activist Alan Wald has been writing about the intersection of art and politics for over two decades. He spoke last week at the Brecht Forum on the film and literary noir genre. The talk was based on a chapter from his forthcoming book on popular culture and concentrated on the career of long-time CP member and writer Kenneth Fearing, who died in 1961, and whose novel "The Big Clock" and the film based on it are classic noir. I will highlight points that Alan made and then make some of my own on "The Big Clock," which I viewed the following day. Fearing was part of the left wing constellation of writers grouped around the John Reed Clubs in the 1920s, many of whom identified with or joined the CPUSA. He was one of the first to break with early cultural traditions of the left, which owed much to literary romanticism. To illustrate this point, Alan described an encounter between Fearing and Floyd Dell, another left-wing poet, at a party in 1927. As was the custom of the time, Dell invited Fearing to recite some verse, to which he would then respond with his own recitation. Fearing, a heavy drinker in the Dashiell Hammett mold, spat out "Oh Shit" to Dell and walked into the kitchen to prepare another cocktail. That was Fearing's way of telling Dell that the troubadour style was passé. Defining the noir style has been a preoccupation of many leftwing cultural historians. This is not surprising since noir not only reflects the hard-boiled depression-era sensibility but the sense of disillusionment that followed it during the post-WWII period. While much of noir art was produced by left-wingers, it very rarely captured the sense of optimism and group solidarity that defined the Popular Front cultural ethos. While many of the CP'ers who wrote noir screenplays obviously believed that Ben Shahn and Mike Gold were doing the right thing, they either were prevented from producing such work in Hollywood or--more interestingly--consciously chose to depict shady and economically marginal characters cut off from society instead. So defining the link between such works as "Blue Gardenia", "Force of Evil" and "The Big Clock"--all written by CP'ers--and the politics of their creators becomes a real challenge, which Alan rose to in his lecture. The first question he spoke to was the role of women in such films and novels, where the sexist "femme fatale" character practically defines the genre. While accepting this as a liability that marks much of the noir genre, Wald pointed to another aspect which he called "feminist femme fatale". The most important example of this is found in Laura Gaspari's "Laura". Gaspari was a CP'er who moved away from the party after the Hitler-Stalin pact. "Laura" consumed much of her energies in this period, which she felt was a necessary escape valve from the intense feelings of disillusionment the pact brought on. The movie, best known now for its haunting title melody, depicts a strong-willed woman trying to carve out an identity for herself. After she is murdered, a working class detective tracks down the perpetrator in a decadent and morally-corrupt group of upper-class society types. Wald also considers Afro-Marxists a much more important contributor to the genre than is ordinarily given credit for. Since these works usually do not include major black characters, except for what is acknowledged as the swan song of the genre--"Odds Against Tomorrow"--this might seem open to debate. Wald cites the fiction of Chester Himes and Willard Motley as classic examples. Interestingly, Motley only wrote about white ethnics in his novels, such as "Knock on Any Door", but it is widely understood that such characters were stand-ins for black Americans. Wald also includes Richard Wright's "Native Son", which inspired a fairly awful movie noteworthy only for its inclusion of the author in the lead role. Another important building-block in the noir edifice is supplied by "Tough Jews." Wald reminded the audience that many of the Communists who wrote noir fiction and screenplays were Jews from Brooklyn and the Lower East Side of Manhattan who were accustomed to seeing Jewish boxers and gangsters in the 1920s. In this era, not only were the greatest boxers Jewish but organized crime was led by Jews as well, including the hit-men of Murder Incorporated. Often left-wing screenwriters such as Abraham Polonsky and actors like John Garfield belonged to gangs as youngsters or even had criminal records. This accounts for the hard-boiled quality of much of their work and performances. Turning to "The Big Clock", Wald suggests that the key to understanding such work is that it actually predates the Popular Front esthetic and owes much to the urban naturalism that was taking shape during the turn-of-the-century. It would hearken back to earlier traditions such as the fiction of Theodore Dreiser. The culture clash between Fearing and Popular Front commissars sometimes could not be repressed. John Henry Lawson denounced the "The Big Clock" as trash and probably regarded its creator Kenneth Fearing as less than stalwart Communist material. Fearing, like Hammett, was a life-long drunk who had a string of broken marriages and relationships in tow. --- So with these remarks serving as a backdrop, I sat down to watch the 1948 "The Big Clock" with great eagerness. Here are some observations. Like most noir films, much of "The Big Clock" is rather musty. In most cases, this is unobjectionable, especially for those of us who appreciate the charm of vintage films. What does not sit well is the character of Earl Janoth, who is a moustache-twirling villain with obvious homosexual mannerisms. Played by Charles Laughton (in real life, a left-winger), the overweight homosexual was frequently used as a stock figure in the noir body of work. Sidney Greenstreet in "Maltese Falcon" is another prime example. Janoth is in sharp contrast to the hero George Stroud, played by Ray Milland, a well-built, square-jawed muscular man with a wife and young son. The conflict between Janoth and Stroud unfolds as the former, a Hearst-like boss of a media empire, directs Stroud to forgo a vacation in order to make himself available for a circulation drive. Since Stroud, a character anticipating the figures depicted in Juliet Schor's "The Overworked American", has not had a vacation in many years, he decides to quit rather than oblige Janoth. After turning in his resignation, Stroud is joined at the bar where he is celebrating by Janoth's mistress, a femme fatale who both despises but is financially dependent on the magnate in true Dreiserian fashion. That evening Janoth kills her in a fit of rage at her apartment, where Stroud himself made an earlier but innocent appearance. The remainder of the film depicts Janoth's attempts to frame Stroud. As the police and Janoth's henchmen close in on Stroud in corporate headquarters, the image of the Big Clock dominates the scenes. This is the largest and most sophisticated clock ever built which Janoth insists on being 100 percent accurate, since it is a symbol of his power. Located in the lobby of the building, it is the high spot of tours. When Stroud seeks refuge inside the housing that encloses the clock's inner mechanism, he accidentally bumps against a lever that shuts it down. Up in his penthouse office, Janoth recoils from the sight of a satellite clock whose hands has stopped. Somebody go find out what's wrong with the clock, he barks. What this reminded me of was Fritz Lang's 1920s "Metropolis" which very likely inspired the vision of corporate control in "The Big Clock" "Metropolis'' employed vast sets, 25,000 extras and astonishing special effects to create two worlds: the great city of Metropolis, with its stadiums, skyscrapers and expressways in the sky, and the subterranean workers' city, where the clock face shows 10 hours to cram another day into the workweek. The city is powered by an underground plant, where workers strain to move heavy dial hands back and forth. What they're doing makes no logical sense, but visually the connection is obvious: They are controlled like hands on a clock." Close to two other left-wing émigrés Bertolt Brecht and Hanns Eisler, Lang eventually moved to Hollywood where his German expressionist esthetics helped to influence film noir, often perceived--incorrectly in my opinion--as a specifically American phenomenon. Although Lang adapted to the Hollywood prejudices against overtly political films with messages, he never was happy with these constrictions. Louis Proyect (The Marxism mailing list: http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)
