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

prototypical reflection on the postwar malaise. The story focuses on three honoured
veterans returning home at the end of WWII who must face their personal demons and deal
with the challenges of restarting their lives anew. They feel that they have been cheated out
of their pre-war jobs and they cannot help but be destabilising elements in the
unsatisfactory jobs they get.
With film noir’s veterans the sense is much wider, however. The returning veteran
is indeed the key noir protagonist, normally identified explicitly as such, but often he is
metaphorically representing someone who, victim of dislocating forces, has to account for
a missing period in his life. These veterans brought along with them a full array of
physical, social and psychological problems (lingering issues from their military years),
which their civilian lives had to resolve. Their amnesia can easily make them victim heroes
as in Deadline at Dawn (p. 62) or Somewhere in the Night, both from 1946, among many
others. The latter is a film directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz and in my view is a
paradigmatic film, whose protagonist, George Taylor (John Hodiak), is an amnesiac
veteran. Ex-marine, Taylor wakes up in a military hospital and discovers he is a victim of
amnesia with only two clues as to his past: a bitter letter from a girl who, now dead, hated
him and whose name means nothing to him and another equally puzzling letter from a
business associate signed “Larry Cravat”. The film, a thriller with psychological overtones,
sticks closely to the war psychology of a man’s odyssey in quest of himself. The Crooked
Way is another noir that follows the same narrative pattern, that of an amnesiac hero. An
honoured veteran, Eddie Rice (John Payne) leaves the rehabilitation ward (he is a victim of
a war wound that has left him a permanent amnesiac) and tries to recover his past. In both
cases, the protagonists come from Los Angeles, they are victims of the war and are just as
isolated at the end of their narratives as they were at the beginning.
Edward Dmytryk’s Crossfire (1947) contained the broadest range of maladjusted
veterans, from the thin-skinned and susceptible falsely accused victim, Arthur Mitchell
(George Cooper), to the psychotic Montgomery (Robert Ryan) who, completely drunk and
belligerent, beats Joseph Samuel (Sam Levene) to death on grounds that he happens to be
Jewish. The film deals with the topic of anti-Semitism and digs up many sensitive postwar
issues, giving it the edge of a serious social problem film. It has an insidious sense of a
tense, dislocated society made up of desperate people with seedy dives, and thus the film
slyly turns into a vehicle for the exploration of bigotry.
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