Class, Crime and International Film Noir

Globalizing America's Dark Art

D. Broe

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137290144
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Películas y vídeos

Class, Crime and International Film Noir argues that, in its postwar, classical phase, this dark variant of the crime film was not just an American phenomenon. Rather, these seedy tales with their doomed heroes and heroines were popular all over the world including France, Britain, Italy and Japan.

1

Une grève, sanglante et poétique (A Strike, Bloody and Poetic): French Film Noir and the Defeat of the Popular Front

French film noir is generally understood to be derived from, commenting upon, and rewriting the American movement, with the major works coming in the late 1950s and 1960s, at precisely the moment when American noir was declining.¹ ‘To be authentic roman noir [the crime novel] – and consequently film noir – had to be American’ is the way Robin Buss (1994, p. 13) presents the impulse in post-war France in the most comprehensive study of the form. This chapter, though, will instead claim that ‘authentic film noir’ is French; that the end of what is generally referred to as poetic realism constituted the beginning of film noir as it was subsequently developed in post-war Hollywood. Both moments were leftist formations that registered first, the defeat of the French Popular Front, and then in the United States the defeat of both the New Deal (the American Popular Front) and, more crucially, of the post-war strike wave, which, like the earlier French wave of strikes from 1936–38, erupted in all corners of life, including very dramatically in the film industry.

This chapter will first describe the expression of popular sentiment in the wave of strikes that commenced in 1936 dictating for three years, as part of ‘the 1000 days,’ much of the impetus of the Popular Front reforms, an impulse that was eventually defeated along with most of those reforms. The second section describes the impact of the strikes and the Front on the film industry, as well as delineating the looser, more artisanal structure of the French film industry which allowed working-class expression in the 1930s. (This looser organization might be compared to the lack of structure at RKO, the main studio engaged in film noir in the United States in the forties). The third section, on the crime film genre, follows the evolution of poetic realism, or, in Carné’s more political phrasing, the social fantastique, from a hard-bitten, but more neutral naturalism in the earlier part of the decade, to a more active alignment with its working- and middle-class protagonists, male and female, and finally, to a casting of them in a more determined outside-the-law status in which the film’s narration was preoccupied with their downfall. The last section examines in detail Carné’s Le Jour se lève and Le Quai des brumes and Renoir’s La Bête humaine to illustrate how this darker, more pessimistic tone at the end of poetic realism coincided with and gave voice to the defeat of its working-class audience and middle-class artisanal creators, and in that defeat begat the first full flourishing of the film noir style, a style then available to American directors as they found themselves facing a similar defeat in the post-war United States.

1 It is not necessary to know when to end a strike²

It is impossible to understand the Popular Front without reference to the wave of strikes – as the Popular Front Prime Minister Leon Blum described it, the ‘social explosion’ – which ‘struck the government in the face’ (Jackson 1988, p. 86) immediately after it took office in June 1936. The total of 12,142 strikes in that month made it, at that point, the greatest strike period ever in French history, to be exceeded only by the strikes of 1968. The over 1.8 million workers on strike in that month topped the previous high of over 1.3 million, which was the total for the entire year of 1920 (Jackson 1988, p. 85). In addition, over two-thirds of the strikes, 8941, were workplace occupations, protests against the increasing mechanization of the assembly line and a demand for more participation in how work was conducted. ‘The workers that day felt very much at home’ is the way one observer described this reappropriation of the workplace (Jackson 1988, p. 100). The strikes were so prominent that another observer claimed that ‘you could not circulate in the suburbs without seeing an occupied factory’ (Noguères 1977, p. 125).

The effect of the strikes was that workers were catapulted from their role as ‘socially on the margin of society’ (Hobsbawm 2010, p. 3), to playing a central role in the politics of the Popular Front. The Front itself was a coalition of the Communist, Socialist and Radical (bourgeois liberal) Parties, but more presciently, was founded on a coalition of the CGT (Socialist influenced) and the CGTU (Communist influenced) trade unions. This new collectivizing of the country originating in the workplace spread to the rest of civil society. André Gide described the atmosphere on the streets of Paris as one in which groups formed spontaneously, echoing the moment of the strikes: ‘People come up to each other in the street, passers-by stop and join in the discussion; a large group forms under the bemused eye of the police’ (Jackson 1988, p. 100). Thus, rather than the strikes being an ancillary action subordinate to the formation of the Popular Front, as most histories describe it, the opposite was true, with the Popular Front being ‘the highest expression of the ideology of a whole period of crisis in the working-class movement’ (Fofi 1977).

The Depression had hit less hard in France than in the United States and Germany, though still in 1929 the stock market had crashed and in the early 1930s the country was saddled with a chronic rate of 8 percent unemployment. (It was at this point that poetic realism made its appearance, in the 1930s La Petite Lise, about a couple who have almost no recourse but murder in order to make their place in the world.) The country stagnated, due partly to a failure on the part of successive center or center-right governments to tackle the problem of a sagging economy. Worse than unemployment for the workers was the problem of underemployment, the infamous furloughs, so prominent in the 2007 Recession. This forced unemployment was coupled with falling wages, made worse by the fact that much of the work was partial and seasonal, with factories closing for two weeks for the summer without paying the workers while the owners went on vacation: The Citroen Plant, for example, site of a major strike, closed for three days a week (Noguères 1977, p. 97). One of the areas hardest hit, and one of the key strike sectors, was retail sales, the grands magasins or department stores where the 45-hour working week yielded the mostly female employees 300 to 550 francs per month (roughly $43 to $78). Here, this inability to survive, to earn a living wage, was claimed by a noted criminologist to ‘account for 40 percent of the total prostitution in France’ (Noguères 1977, p. 105).³

The strikes were also a reaction to the mechanization of factories and workplaces as a result of the ‘scientific’ application of management techniques known as Taylorism. Workers were subjected to predetermined production targets and docked pay if the targets were not met; ‘harder work’ as the employers saw it, ‘maintained by stricter discipline’ (Jackson 1988, p. 98). This situation is described cinematically in René Claire’s À Nous la liberté (1931), where the entire society, workers and employers, has taken on a machinic quality. This drive toward efficiency resulted in: a near doubling of the amount of fatal accidents from 1932 to 1935 (Jackson 1988, p. 98); increased surveillance by hated timekeepers, whose name chronometreurs implied their robotic function; and the use of paid informers (mouchards). The result was the creation of almost a police state within the factory, often patrolled by ‘work police in peaked caps,’ to the point where the Renault factory, site of the key opening and closing strikes of the period, was known by the workers as a bagne or penal colony. Île Seguin where the factory was located was renamed Devil’s Island (Jackson 1988, p. 98),⁴ equating it to the colonial site to which shackled revolutionaries from the 1871 Commune were sent and from which there was supposedly no escape.⁵

The predominance of the prison-like factory suggests a new intertext and reading of the various images of penal colonies in the poetic realist films, beginning with the old man’s incarceration in Guinea in La petite Lise and continuing in Grémillon’s L’Étrange Monsieur Victor (1938), where the unjustly accused shoemaker is sent to this Taylorized prison colony as well. This comparison of the prison and the factory is also a point of contact between the Gabin character, at odds with the law who feels himself everywhere hounded and pursued and will do anything to escape being sent to prison and the structure of feeling of workers in the prison-like factories. The occupations that characterized the strikes were viewed as liberations, workers freeing themselves from these conditions, famously described by Simone Weil as ‘une joie. Une joie pure. Une joie sans mélange’ and elsewhere as ‘La plus grande fête popularisée que j’aie connue’ (qtd. in Noguères 1977, p. 129), loosely, ‘the best party I’ve ever been at.’ However, this pure unmixed joy was always tempered by the possibility of catastrophe, or as one striker put it, ‘the sudden rumors that the police were about to charge’ (Jackson 1988, p. 110).

The phrase that emerged from early June 1936 was ‘Tout est possible’ and indeed, with workers from every sector and from all levels (unionized and non-unionized, the biggest factories down to the Parisian artisanal workshops) uniting and formulating demands, there was at least a pre-revolutionary situation, or what Julian Jackson terms ‘revolutionary élan.’ (This formation was depicted in the community of laundresses, printers, and creative workers who come together in Batala’s publishing house to form the collective in Le Crime de Monsieur Lange.) The strikes resulted in the following: a growth in the union movement in 1936–37 from 1 million to 5.3 million (Ehrmann 1947, p. 51), the largest union enrollment in any country; the mass adoption of collective bargaining agreements in workplaces such that between 1930 and 1935 there were 22 such agreements and by the end of 1936 there were 2336 with that figure more than doubling again so that by 1939 there were 5620 (Ehrmann 1947, p. 45); and the Secretary General of the CGT, Leon Jouhaux, installed as one of the board members of a newly nationalized Bank of France. The bank itself was described by the workers in the language of the Revolution as ‘another Bastille to be taken’ (Ehrmann 1947, p. 14).

The momentum of the strikes led first to the Matignon Agreement with employers which sanctioned collective bargaining and then to the Blum government passing 24 major reforms in the first 12 weeks of its existence, including: the 40-hour working week, reduced from 48, with the workers receiving the same amount of pay; mandatory two-week paid vacations, the congés payés; semi-nationalization of the Bank of France; nationalization of the railroads and the arms industry; a public works program; and the banning of the fascist leagues who had engaged in street conflict with the Republic in the opening moment of the formation of the Front on 6 February 1934.

The paid vacation was the lasting achievement of the Blum administration. The most popular response to a poll in 1986, asking what the Popular Front meant to its constituents, was: ‘Thanks to the Popular Front we were able to see the sea’ (Jackson 1988, p. xii). This was not a trivial event; as Jackson puts it, the workers who had taken possession of their factories in June 1936, in August took possession of their country in an exodus to the mountains and the seaside that was, as Henri Noguères editor of the pro-Front journal Populaire termed it, ‘massif et spectaculaire’ (1977, p. 153). This democratization of the beaches was widely disdained by the ruling elites and their mouthpiece Le Figaro. One cartoon from the left depicted this reaction in a panel where a properly upright couple, out with their dog for a constitutional in the countryside, spy some workers in a tent. La madame warns her dog Kiki not to ‘go near those people, you’ll catch fleas’ (Jackson 1988, Figure 22).

Cinematically, the victory is evident in the change from the absolute segregation Jean Vigo points to in the seaside, where the waiters and various attendants remain a palpable presence but always in the background as attachés to the rich in À propos de Nice (1930), to the triumphal entry of the workers into the countryside on their day off in Renoir’s Partie de campagne (A Day in the Country [1936]). Their poses in this film suggest the middle-class poses the impressionists captured a half-century earlier in paintings like Le déjeuner sur l’herbe and, perhaps most appropriately, Renoir père’s Le déjeuner des canotiers (Luncheon at the Boating Party) with its multiple character presentation of an upper-middle-class sojourn.⁶

The opposition to the workers and the combined socialist, communist, and progressive bourgeois government included the Catholic Church, elements of the army, foreign backing from the fascist Italy and Germany, and the employers and the very rich, branded by the Front as the ‘200 families’ who hid behind the mur d’argent, the wall of money. The slogan of the 200 families was, as Noguères (1977, p. 243) describes it, ‘a myth but corresponding to a living reality … felt by all,’ a clever way of describing what we would term interlocking directorates. The term drew attention to the fact that 150 persons held more than 1900 seats on the boards of the most important corporations in the key fields of ‘coal, power, steel, oil, chemicals, railroads, banking and insurance’ and that, while in the Depression small business profits were down 66 percent, in, for example, the large private utilities, profits by the time of the strikes were 29 percent higher than in 1929 (Ehrmann 1947, p. 13). As the Communist writer Aragon described it, it was the 200 families, what we now call the ‘1 percent,’ ‘who run the banks, the gaming houses and the brothels’ (Jackson 1988, p. 120).

A major way the effects of the strike were held in check was by the rise in inflation. The Blum government, employing a politique du pouvoir d’achat, saw the economic crisis as one of underconsumption and was determined to raise workers’ purchasing power. Programs of public works, combined with the wage gains the workers won in the strikes, contributed to a rise in wages of 52 percent between 1935 and 1938. Business countered, though, by raising prices by 55 percent in the same period to pass along the increases, giving rise to feelings in the workers of being trapped in a system where even if they won, they lost (Ehrmann 1947, p. 72). The Senate, bastion of the 200 families, continued to oppose the Popular Front government and Blum resigned in 1937 in frustration. Successive governments, including Blum’s second administration, moved to the right until, under the government of Edouard Daladier, the finance minister Paul Reynaud broke off the partnership with the workers and threatened to drive them ‘back into the ghetto’ (Jackson 1988, p. 188).

What followed were worker strikes in protest, met by violent state action, culminating in the November 1938 strike at the Renault plant, where the strike offensive had begun in June 1936. The government and company assault on the workers to forcibly evict them from the factory they were occupying consisted of 3000 mobile guards and 1500 police employing tear gas, leaving 46 police and 24 strikers badly injured in a way that, as one worker in a previous occupation described it, was more like a war than a civil action (Jackson 1988, p. 109). One of the moments of triumph in 1936 had been the castigation of a hated supervisor at the department store La Samaritaine, who, after first having been locked in his office, was spat on by his workers as he was led out of the store. Here the reverse happened. The Renault workers were forced to march out of the factory past the police, who made the fascist salute, cried ‘Long live the Police,’ and mocked the attempt at a workers’ government with cries of ‘One for Blum … One for Jouhaux’ (Jackson 1988, p. 111). This moment broke the workers and their government, and constituted a violent about face from one worker’s expression of power in 1936: ‘I had a pleasant feeling of being one of the lords and masters of Renault’ (Jackson 1988, p. 104). This demobilization

of the workers contributed as well to the right-wing government’s failure to mobilize against the coming Nazi invasion.⁷

2 The (peculiarly French) genius of the system

In the 1930s as a whole – and more so in the latter part of the decade – the French mode of production was freer and looser than the Hollywood studio system but with some of the characteristics of both the Studio Era ‘B’ Film and the post-war Independent Production moments of that system. French film production, structured and conditioned initially by the Depression and later by the effects of the strikes and the Popular Front, precipitated a corresponding ‘social’ aesthetic that, in its later phase, bore striking similarities to that set of stylistics which were to coalesce in Hollywood after the war as film noir.

The most salient characteristic of French film production in the 1930s was its artisanal nature. Closely knit film teams sprang up sometimes for multiple films, or just as often for only a single film, to produce projects that rather than rolling efficiently off the genre assembly line of oligarchical Hollywood or the somewhat less rigid but just as monolithic Rank Corporation in Britain and UFA in Germany (Crisp 1997, p. xvi), instead materialized out of the camaraderie of sets of actors, directors, and producers. The films were in some cases imbued with the collectivist politics of these artisans, partially because they were less preoccupied with the immediate money imperative of a Hollywood that, after 1933, was being run at the very top by the New York banks which had taken over the bankrupt studios (Wasko 1982).

France also was severely constricted by the Depression, but the effect on the French film industry was entirely different than in Hollywood. In Hollywood the studios, prosperous at the beginning of the Depression, were failing by the early 1930s and went one after another into receivership, with the result that they became more centrally controlled by the banks in New York that had bailed them out, and production became more rationalized, regulated, and conformist. The sign of this repression of content was the 1934 Production Code which limited the possibilities of expression and prescribed set narrative outcomes in order to reach a larger, family, aud...