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

Investigators in these case-history reconstructions remain disinterested. They are
professionals doing a job. Yet they are fired by goals higher than Marlowe’s –
higher, that is, than interest and pleasure in cracking a case. These hunters are
patriots, crusading journalists, lawyers determined to defeat a corrupt political
machine, FBI men bent on toppling a crime syndicate. In these hard-hitting
problem dramas, noir emerges from the fictional labyrinth to become a form of
propaganda: the crime thriller as a social pamphlet, as journalistic exposé, as
contemporary crusade. The narrative structure of these semi-documentary films is
much the same as that of private eye whodunits: an outside investigator confronts a
maze. The plotting is as complicated and gnarled as the crack questioner grills a
series of witnesses. (Hirsch 1981:177)
Normally shot on location, and featuring a narration that would later become the
signature of Jack Webb’s Dragnet television series, these noir semi-documentaries from
the forties and early fifties indeed offered meticulous accounts of the manner law
enforcement agencies, such as the FBI, operate, concentrating on the techniques and
investigation procedures used. Some remarkable examples, such as Henry Hathaway’s The
House on 92 nd Street, or its follow-up William Keighley’s The Street with No Name, or yet
Jules Dassin’s The Naked City and Hathaway’s Call Northside 777, all come from 1948.
Although there were other examples of noir semi-documentaries made throughout
the fifties, like Elia Kazan’s Panic in the Streets, Gordon Douglas’s I Was a Communist
for the FBI (1951) or Alfred Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man (1956), this form of film differ
from the earlier semi-documentaries in various ways. In fact, the earlier semidocumentaries,
also called “docu-noirs”, often set in dark, rain-swept, crime-ridden urban
areas (in other words, set in the same locales as the noir “private eye whodunits” films, as
Hirsch states) were filmed in the actual locations of real-life events. In these “new police
hero” films, the police investigators were not working for national organisations, like
Dennis O’Brien (Dennis O’Keefe) who was an undercover agent for the Treasury
Department in Anthony Mann’s T-Men or the undercover agent Gene Cordell (Mark
Stevens) who worked for the Federal Bureau of Investigation in The Street with No Name.
The policemen fighting crime in these mid-1950s noir films, such as The Racket or The Big
Combo, are now isolated heroes, that is, cops with little help from the rest of the force. For
example, Police Lt Leonard Diamond (Cornel Wilde) of The Big Combo, unlike in the case
of the team-oriented semi-documentaries of the late forties, is not an undercover agent who
has gone “rogue” in hiding from his adversaries. His identity is known to all the mobsters
right from the beginning and he operates in public – and thus a new public awareness of
organised crime was accepted and incorporated into the narrative.
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