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

political history of their moment, their Zeitgeist, and their stylistic influences that had come
before, giving rise to a new film form, the film noir.
During this period, Hollywood’s darkly psychological thrillers were often strongly
criticised not just by the Breen Office, but also by well-known leftists and Communist
Party intellectuals. John Howard Lawson, the first president of the Screen Writers’ Guild,
attempted to prove in 1935 that “the function of revolutionary drama is to circumvent a
Freudian escape from truths people wish to avoid” (Schwartz 1983:135). So films such as
This Gun for Hire (1942) or Gun Crazy (1950) were criticised by Lawson and other
members of Hollywood’s radical Left, Naremore argues, due to their “psychoanalytic
properties” and also because they used the representative image of the gangsters, turning
them into heroes, to combat fascism. 48
These battles over what was permissible raged throughout the immediate postwar
period, but became more infrequent in the fifties. Films such as The Big Sleep, The Killers
and The Dark Corner, all 1946 productions, were taken as sinister reflections of American
angst and moral decay, and yet they all passed censorship. After the war, films like these
were scrutinised by a group of liberal experts and sociologists, which illustrates that the
Code became less enforceable as time went by. With regard to the censor’s judgements,
James Agee puts it bluntly: “the function once performed by clubwomen and the nastier
kinds of church pressure groups (...) will be useless unless such opportunities are sought
by, and given to, people who are capable of taking mature advantage of them (...) rather
than by the kind of people who used most earnestly to oppose priggishness” (Agee
1958:238). Agee’s first reference is to the Legion of Decency, a Catholic group created in
April 1934, and which threatened to boycott Hollywood at a time when the MPPDA was
unable to enforce the Code. Almost immediately (but not for a very long period of time),
producers relented and agreed to a strict enforcement of the Code under the administration,
as I said, of Joseph Breen, himself a prominent Catholic layman. Whilst this challenging
censorship environment throughout World War II was a significant cause contributing to a
rich 1940s film noir style, the Code became progressively more and more recognised as
inappropriate and unfashionable. Despite this, it was not abandoned before 1968, when a
new rating system was put in place.
48 Phillip Raven (Alan Ladd) in This Gun for Hire plays the role of a tough guy who actually breaks with
1930s criminal characteristics by being given a Freudian rationale-parental abuse: he killed his vicious
stepmother who struck him with an iron, deforming his wrist.
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