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Rosie the Riveter Goes to Hollywood

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mages of the hard-boiled femme fatale crystallized in such classic noir I films as Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity, Tay Garnett’s The Postman I Always Rings Twice, Edgar Ulmer’s Detour, Fritz Lang’s Scarlet Street, * and Howard Hawks’s The Big Sleep. Embodying the evil, alluring “spi-der woman,” Barbara Stanwyck’s deadly cool Phyllis Dietrichson calls the shots, disposes of her husband and his first wife, manipulates and shoots her lover, and generally raises the bar on female badness in Double Indemnity. Stanwyck’s Phyllis, as well as Lana Turner’s lethal Córa in James M. Cain’s other “sordid” and censorable novel, The Postman Always Rings Twice, was based on a real-life femme fatale, Ruth Snyder, who conspired with her lover to brutally murder her husband for cold, hard cash—tabloids had a field day as her unforgettable image in the electric chair splashed across the front page of the New York Daily News. Joan Bennett’s un-abashedly irreverent, double-crossing Kitty in Scarlet Street is the ultimate duplicitous temptress. These images of women were often created and de-veloped by men in a historically male-dominated industry. But women, both as characters and as a force behind the camera, grew increasingly in-fluential during the war years. The World War II labor shortage created a need in Hollywood that women (and men who were unable to serve in the military) filled. As the war progressed, female screen images eventually co-incided with women’s acquisition of greater power in creative and execu-tive positions in Hollywood—and in many classic film noir productions.

Dęfense assembly-line worker “Rosie the Riveter” was an empowering icon transcending gender stereotypes throughout World War II for the pur-pose of promoting a much-needed female workforce to aid in military pro-duction.¹ As millions of men departed for military duty overseas, millions of women held down the home front—taking traditionally małe jobs, work-ing in factories and elsewhere to support the war effort. Women and mi-norities became essential to American military production as employment-

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aged white males left the domestic labor force. (Taking the hint front Washington, Hollywood even promoted a multiethnic national workforce in wartime industries—federal incentive for studios to mobilize African Americans for the war effort led to the production of all-black musicals Stormy Weather and Cabin in the Sky, which were encouraged by the gov-ernment and specifically aimed at targeting morę active, less peripheral de-pictions of ethnicity for propaganda purposes.)² Hollywood relied on keen efforts by men unable to serve, like European ćmigres, and women con-tributing vital roles in the film industry throughout the conflict. It is not that studios and małe production executives necessarily wanted greater numbers of women for creative positions; rather, they needed them to fili the talent void resulting from the large numbers of men who were away. By July 1944 the New York Times noted the film industry’s “shortage of małe acting talent”—Clark Gable had been gone, Mickey Rooney and Red Skel-ton left to enlist, and no małe stars or creative talent at 20th Century-Fox had returned from the war.³ As women played important roles behind the scenes and onscreen, many wartime noir motion pictures featured stronger, active female characters. The representation of independent, transgressive femme fatales and complex career women coincided with a wartime female labor force, nationally and inside the film industry. Phantom Lady, Mildred Pierce, and Gilda offer notable examples of women becoming morę cre-atively involved in the studio production process, often gaining executive authority, in wartime Hollywood films noir.

These films targeted motion picture audiences stratified by gender (female home front / małe combat front) during wartime, a demographic that changed as the war ended. America’s mobilization for the war involved a tremendous cultural and industrial transformation. At home and abroad World War II labor needs redistributed the U.S. population, geographically and demographically. The absence of millions of men serving in the armed forces shifted demographics as women dominated the domestic market. In the patriotic effort to bolster military morale abroad, a massive wartime distribution network facilitated an industry-wide operation to internation-ally screen films to troops overseas. By February 1942 the government’s War Activities Committee (WAC) worked with the army, the War Department, and Hollywood studios to send 16-mm film prints free of charge to soldiers at the front.⁴ This worldwide distribution and exhibition became a vast sup-plemental parallel industry aimed at Allied forces and coinciding with the domestic release and exhibition of Hollywood films at home. Dual home-ffont versus military-front distribution operations coincided with an effort by the studios to initiate narrative strategies that targeted a World War II