Hollywood Riots

Violent Crowds and Progressive Politics in American Film

Doug Dibbern

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781780766324
• eBook ISBN: 9780857729910
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

The large literature about the politics of Hollywood in the period of McCarthy and the blacklist has largely overlooked political filmmaking during those agitated years. "Hollywood Riots" examines the most vibrant cycle of independently produced political films made while House Committee on Un-American Activities was investigating communists in the film industry. In doing so, it shifts the focus from the politics of Washington to the politics of Los Angeles and from the films of the Hollywood Ten to the more politically complex films of the progressive community at large. Dibbern shows how the movies produced by progressives at the end of the 1950s, including "The Lawless", "The Sound of Fury", "The Underworld", were the logical cinematic parallel to their political and journalistic advocacy fighting the conservative newspapers. In these films they were recasting political events from California's recent past as politically-engaged narratives that were inflected with their own fears of persecution."
Hollywood Riots" re-views the work of notable directors like Joseph Losey and Cy Endfield, as well as introducing unheralded political screenwriters and directors such as Daniel Mainwaring, Jo Pagano, and Leo C. Popkin.

Part One
Postwar Anxieties, Independent Aspirations: Political Filmmaking and the Economics of the Film Industry

Chapter 1
Violent Crowds on American Screens: Reporters, Racism, and Riots

In MGM’s production of William Faulkner’s novel Intruder in the Dust (1949), an old woman sits in a rocking chair inside the front door of the county jail. Outside, a crowd of white men lingers in the afternoon sun, hesitant and curious, but itching at the possibility of a lynching. Rumours have spread through town; they know that they’re holding a black man in a cell upstairs who’s accused of shooting a white man in the back. The dead man’s brother, by rights the leader of the mob, steps up to the front door with a can of gasoline in his hands. “Get out of the way, Miss Habersham,” he says from the porch, but she barely lifts her eyes as she continues her sewing. “I’m very comfortable where I am,” she tells him. He opens the door, tips the can, and pours the gasoline so that it rolls across the floor to her feet. She eyes the liquid cautiously, then looks up as he pulls a match from his shirt pocket and lights it demonstratively. “Please step out of the light so I can thread my needle,” she tells him. He pauses, blows out the match, takes the can of gasoline, and retreats to the porch. From behind the screen door he tells her, “Miss Habersham, I ain’t gonna touch you now. You’re an old lady, but you’re in the wrong. You’re fightin’ the whole county. But you’re gonna get tired, and when you do get tired, we gonna go in.” Their idle banter belies the apprehension in the air. The accused’s lawyer told the woman that lynch mobs only form at night, but this is the South, after all. Outside the courthouse, the crowd of men seems resigned, but their hardened faces give the scene a sense of heightened realism that magnifies the tension. As the movie unfolds, the threat of mob violence hangs over every scene.

The threat of mob violence in Intruder in the Dust was not unusual at the time. In the opening moments of the Warner Bros. picture Storm Warning (1951), Doris Day turns a street corner at night in a small Southern town to see a mob in Ku Klux Klan robes drag a man from the county jail, beat him, then shoot him in the back as he runs away. She discovers later that the victim was a reporter who was working on an article denouncing the Klan. In Republic Pictures’ anti-communist exploitation flick The Red Menace (1949), a Communist agitator working for the party newspaper watches a line of protestors picketing a corrupt housing company from the safety of her car. The narrator intones about the methods of “the worldwide Marxist racket intent on spreading dissension” as underground Party members hand out pamphlets to proselytize their dupes. As emotions rise, the Communists’ leader inflames the mob: “Quickly, boys!” she bellows at them through a loudspeaker. “Let’s see some action! Show ‘em what we’re here for! Come on! Tear down the place! Break it down! Go on! Throw that brick!” A man in the crowd then dutifully steps forward like a puppet and throws a brick through the company’s window. In Twentieth Century-Fox’s No Way Out (1950), a white man tells anyone who will listen that a black doctor has killed his brother. Rumours spread through the white part of town, and black people in town start spreading the news that a race riot is about to happen. Before too long, mobs of white men and mobs of black men converge on a junkyard, weapons in hand, intent on inflicting as much pain on their enemies as they can. In Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole (1951), Kirk Douglas plays an amoral newspaper reporter down on his luck who finds himself in a small New Mexico town. When he hears of a man trapped in a local cave, he smells a story. His articles become a sensation and curious onlookers arrive at the scene. Over the course of the next few days, the onlookers grow into a crowd. More newsmen flock to the scene. Douglas conspires with the man’s wife and the local sheriff to prolong the rescue so that they can all make money off the mob, which grows larger and ever uglier, turning into a carnival scene as they leave the man to die alone in the cave. That all of these films – and many others dealing with the issue of violent crowds – were all released between 1949 and 1951 is not a coincidence.

In the last three years before the final imposition of the blacklist, Hollywood’s major distribution companies released a cycle of films that dealt with three interconnected issues: mob violence, race and class prejudice, and the conservative control of the media. In most of these movies, a reactionary newspaper instigates an angry crowd; occasionally, ugly rumours unchecked by a progressive newspaper help foster an ugly mob. In almost every one of these movies, the violent crowd attacks a minority victim: African-Americans, Mexican-Americans, or working class white men. These recurring themes came from real-world concerns. Progressives in the film industry had witnessed acts of mob violence and the persecution of racial, class, and ideological minorities in Los Angeles throughout the 1940s. In 1942, the federal government began the internment of Japanese-Americans, decimating the Little Tokyo neighbourhood in Los Angeles. In 1942 and 1943 the city was riveted by the mass trial of 22 young Mexican-American men falsely accused of murder in what came to be known as the Sleepy Lagoon murder trial; in 1943 white servicemen attacked Mexican-American youths in what the local newspapers dubbed the Zoot Suit Riots; in 1945 and again in 1946 riots erupted in front of several Hollywood studios when workers in the film industry went on strike or were locked out and in 1947, the House Committee on Un-American Activities held its first hearings investigating Communists in the film community. In each of these incidents, progressives in the film industry believed that Los Angeles’s uniformly conservative daily newspapers had lodged false accusations against persecuted, defenseless minority groups, accusations which eventually led to mass violence or mass persecution. In most of these cases, liberals in Los Angeles banded together to fight these injustices, publishing their own pamphlets and newspapers to fight the conservative press and to publicize their side of the story.

Some of the movies in this cycle – like Ace in the Hole, No Way Out, and Intruder in the Dust – are still well known today to scholars and cinephiles alike, partly because they were big budget studio projects made by directors who later came to be known as auteurs. But I examine, instead, four other movies in the cycle: The Lawless, written by Daniel Mainwaring, directed by Joseph Losey, and produced by the independents Pine & Thomas; The Underworld Story, written by Cy Endfield and Henry Blankfort, directed by Endfield, and produced by FilmCraft Productions; The Sound of Fury, written by Jo Pagano, directed by Cy Endfield, and produced by Stillman Productions; and The Well, written by Russell Rouse and Clarence Greene, directed by Russell Rouse and Leo C. Popkin, and produced by Cardinal Pictures. These movies have been largely overlooked, partly because they were low-budget independent films made by directors whose names, apart from Losey’s, are not revered today. But their origins on the fringes of the Hollywood film industry gave them a degree of latitude that the studio pictures weren’t allowed. I have chosen to write about these movies not just because they have been forgotten, but because I think they were the most politically astute films made in the series about violent crowds and thus, about the political situation in America at the time.

While the movies in this cycle do portray political and social issues considered controversial at the time, many of them do seem today as if they had skirted the heart of the matter. Thomas Cripps, for instance, writes admiringly about Intruder in the Dust and No Way Out, but even these films contain an occasionally stereotyped role, and like most mainstream studio fare, they still needed to demonstrate that the racial conflicts they raised were happily resolved by the story’s end.¹ These movies’ political and racial timidity derived from two aspects of studio production that necessitated a compromised ideology: first, the films needed to earn a profit, and second, like most studio projects, the screenplays were written by committees. The production history of No Way Out serves as an example of how the studio system necessarily compromised the political subject matter it acquired. The screenplay was written by four men. Twentieth Century-Fox’s production head Darryl Zanuck purchased the original story from a little-known writer named Lesser Samuels. Zanuck then hired Philip Yordan, a liberal writer who often worked on topical material and who was later rumored to have served as a front for many blacklisted screenwriters, to revise Samuels’ story into the first draft of the screenplay. Zanuck brought in Joseph Mankiewicz as the director late in the pre-production phase and Mankiewicz, who also wrote and directed All About Eve that same year, rewrote the final draft of the screenplay. Darryl Zanuck played the leading role throughout entire process, as was usual at Fox, commenting on each draft and demanding changes as he saw fit. In his study of the development of the screenplay, Ryan DeRosa notes that Zanuck insisted that his screenwriters minimize the extent of the racial violence, partly because he was worried that possible censorship in Southern states and in Northern cities like Chicago and Detroit with recent histories of racial violence might hurt the movie’s box office. In one memo to Samuels, for instance, Zanuck stressed that he wanted the race riot, which functioned as the film’s narrative fulcrum, to be represented merely as a “‘bar-room brawl’ or corner street fight.”² And indeed, while the final version does show organized gangs of white men and black men gathering clubs, breaking beer bottles, and testing out metal chains and whips, the film portrays the race riot itself only briefly – mostly with shots of armed black men sneaking through an alley. Mankiewicz doesn’t depict any actual attacks clearly, and only includes one extreme long shot of the riot that lasts for only a few seconds. But Zanuck’s interest in minimizing racial violence didn’t merely derive from a politically neutral accounting effort to maximize revenue; it also emerged from the politics of an emerging Cold War consensus that saw many postwar liberals abandoning the more radical politics of the 1930s that were now considered to be un-American. Efforts like these to minimize mass racial violence, DeRosa writes, “reveal that a consensus was developing among white liberals that stressed the racist individual as the cause of racial problems and imagined individualistic solutions, thus evading social and class hierarchies of race through a discourse of color-blind nationalism.”³

Figure 1.1. The brief glimpse of a race riot in No Way Out (1950), Twentieth Century Fox

But not every film minimized mass violence. Other movies that dealt with the same themes but which were produced independently on the fringes of the Hollywood studio system often evinced a more complex understanding of the nature of mass violence, and hence, of ideological conflict in the United States at the time. I have chosen to write in detail about just these four paradigmatic movies because of all the movies in the cycle, they portray mass violence at its ugliest and because they are the movies that most emphatically draw the connection between the three issues that define the cycle: violent crowds, race and class prejudice, and the reactionary press. That is, these movies are the ones that present the most intense instances of mass violence precisely because they are the movies that most explicitly explain the interconnected reasons for the mass violence. Films like No Way Out efface mass violence because they efface the causes of violence. But those movies that do explain the causes of mass violence necessarily get to the heart of some of the central political issues in American and in Hollywood at the time. By explaining the causes of race and class violence, these movies make a materialist argument about the nature of the divisions in American society based on race, class, and ideology. That is, most of them argue that right wing newspapers beholden to the profit motive were the main factor that incited the masses to attack minorities. And because the violent crowds in these films were metaphors for conservative forces in America, Hollywood liberals were also making a structural argument about their own condition: reactionary newspapers in league with reactionary institutions like HUAC made false accusations against progressives as a means of consolidating power to destroy the leftist coalition that had made possible the New Deal and which had been fighting for enhanced union power in the film industry. And, finally, because these movies delved into the nature ...

Table of contents

• About the Author
• Bookreview
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• General Editor’s Introduction
• Introduction: Political Filmmaking in the Shadow of the Blacklist
• Part One: Postwar Anxieties, Independent Aspirations: Political Filmmaking and the Economics of the Film Industry
• Part Two: Incendiary Ideologies, Reactionary Crowds
• Part Three: Creative Artists, Activist Historians
• Conclusion–Cyclical Decay: Shifting Independence and the Decline of Progressive Filmmaking in the 1950s
• Notes
• Bibliography