Joaquim da Silva Fontes, Significação e Estabilidade do Género no ...

against any possible theft of grocery items, thus providing its own local paranoia to the
making of the film.
Many other films were produced during the war but were not released until the
whole conflict was brought to an end. However, it is possible to ascertain that these
wartime crime films were an unambiguous indication of Hollywood’s new penchant for
film noir. They in fact pushed at the limits of what was permissible; soon after the war it is
apparent that the floodgates had been opened and the films started to be released when
more and more cinemas went back into full operation. In this regard, Sheri Biesen states
that:
Cain’s tough fiction encouraged an abundance of Code-approved hard-boiled film
noir by the end of the war. Because studios had stockpiled roughly 200 films,
completed but not released, throughout the duration, these wartime production
trends also resulted in the proliferation of crime pictures in 1946, a delayed reaction
to Hollywood’s booming war industry. (Biesen 2005:123)
Biesen’s comment underlies another relevant aspect of the Production Code as an
agent of commercialism. Film’s profitability has always been (and still is) what the
industry existed to promote, even or especially if it entailed being, generally speaking,
conservative and too conformist at times. Studio executives themselves were often
watchful and traditionalist figures, feeling the need to attract and understand their
audiences, but also to comply with the boundaries of permissible representation within the
industry and to defer to external regulations at the same time.
All these aspects bring out the issue of control over Hollywood’s politics. The type
of debate and negotiation that studios, and producers or film industry people would have
with the Breen Office shows the type of coalition of liberal and socialist interests that
flourished throughout the Depression and World War II. As I have noted above, the history
of these debates is exactly inscribed in the movies themselves. Pictures such as I Am a
Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932), 47 or both Lang’s Fury (1936) and You Only Live Once
(1937) are noir social melodramas that were made self-consciously for their “social
problem” dimensions and their echoes of the New Deal populism, underlying that
alienation and angst are both personal and mass ills. These films reflect the social and
47 This entire film is actually placed within the consciousness of the disillusioned, ignored, and maltreated
veteran, which I explore in the next section “Postwar Readjustment”.
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