censorship,

Censorship, Hard-Boiled Fiction,

and Hollywood s “Red Meat” Crime Cycle

Hollywood, according to present indications, will depend on so-called “red meat” stories of illicit romance and crime for a major share of its immediate non-war dramatic productions: The apparent trend toward such materiał, previously shunned for fear of censorship, is traced by obseryers to Paramount’s successful treatment of the James M. Cain novel, “Double Indemnity” which was described by some producers as “an emancipation for Hollywood writing.”

—Fred Stanley, New York Times, 1944

I think the whole system of Hays censorship, with its effort to establish a list of rules on how to be decent is nonsensical. A studio can obey every one and be salacious—violate them and be decent.

—James M. Cain, Daily News, 1944

Documentary technique—what noir cinematographers John Seitz and James Wong Howe and director Billy Wilder called “newsreel style” to achieve greater “realism” and production economy during the war—influenced the definitive visual design and stark camerawork of Double Indemnity. This dark, newsreel style employed deep shadows to facilitate wartime filming amid urban blackout and dimout regulations in Los Angeles and effectively functioned as a sawy production strategy, creating a sordid milieu while technically complying with the Production Codę, thus enabling censorship approval. Banned for a decade, the screen adaptation of James M. Cain’s fiction, particularly Double Indemnity (followed by The Postman Always Rings Twice and Mildred Pierce), would be a milestone for censorship endorsement of film noir in this wartime setting and initiate interest in Raymond Chandler’s hard-boiled novels Farewell, My Lovely and The Big Sleep. Double Indemnity pro-vided a model for advancing a new “red meat" crime cycle in Hollywood during and after the war, a trend that would later be known as film noir in France in 1946.

Censorship and Double Indemnity.

Adapting James M. Cain during the War In Double Indemnity American audiences finally saw full-blown film noir on Hollywood screens. Industry trade publications and archival records from the 1940S reveal that Double Indemnity started a trend of Hollywood crime pictures during the war and indicate that it was a pivotal film in the

Censorship and the “Red Meat” Crime Cycle

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evolution of Production Codę censorship and wartime production restric-tions, providing the enabling conditions for the dark style and paranoid thematics of film noir. In 1944 Fred Stanley of the New York Times wrote that Double Indemnity initiated the dark, “red meat” trend noted for its “re-newed interest in certain types of storied sordidness and ultra-sophistica-tion.” In accordance with official PCA policy the article assured those con-cerned with Hollywood’s morał decline that the controversial James M. Cain adaptation “has not promptęd any easing of Hays office or State censorship regulations. There have been nonę and nonę is expected. It is just that Hollywood is learning to use finesse in dealing with a variety of differ-ent plot situations which, if treated ... obviously, would be unsuitable.”¹ Such finesse would be a hallmark of wartime films noir. -

Contrary to the Hays Office’spress spin in 1944,Hollywoods industrial self-censorship by the PCA certainly eased during (and after) World War II, evident in studios producing racy Cain stories. The adaptation of Double Indemnity was influenced by the Production Codę, but the film itself influenced, in tum, how the Codę was (or was not) applied to films that fol-lowed. In a sense it opened the floodgates for a darker cinema, accommo-dating what industry censor Joseph Breen termed “Iow tonę and sordid fla-vor.”² Double Indemnity enabled a proliferation of Code-approved films noir. In its wake came Murder, My Sweet (1944; an adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s novel Farewell, My Lorely), James M. Cain’s Mildred Pierce (1945), Chandler’s The Big Sleep, and Cain’s scandalous The Postman Always Rings Twice (both produced in 1944-45, released in 1946). The box-office revenue for Double Indemnity (some $2.5 million in North American rentals) offered studios tangible incentives for jumping on the noir band-wagon.³

Nonę of the key players had predicted the success of Double Indemnity, nor could they have anticipated its influence; at the outset neither studio nor star nor PCA censor Joseph Breen wanted to be involved with it. “I like to set Hollywood back on its heels,” director Billy Wilder remarked; “my own studio said I was crazy to attempt it... [Even] George Raft turned the role down fiat. We knew then that we’d have a good picture.”⁴ In Wilder’s adaptation of Cain’s novel married femme fatale Phyllis Dietrichson is out for money and murder in cold blood. Barbara Stanwycks Phyllis uses her sexuality as bait. Accomplice Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) is an insurance salesman with a roving eye—for Phyllis and for a little cash. The two have an affair and then plan to murder her husband so they can run off together with the insurance money. (They “get away” with the crime in Cain’s book by committing suicide while making a getaway on a boat to Mexico.) Tena-