Popular Culture Review Vol. 13, No. 1, January 2002 | Page 39
Bogart, Bacall, Howard Hawks and Wartime
Film Noir at Warner Bros.:
To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep
The studios have gone in for these pictures because the Hays
office is becoming more liberal...okaying treatments now which
they would have turned down ten years ago, probably because
they feel people can take the hard-boiled stuff nowadays. Of
course, people have been reading about murderers, cutthroats and
thieves in the newspapers...for years, but only recently has the
Hays office permitted the movies to depict life as it really is.'
Raymond Chandler, 1945
During World War II, women made unprecedented professional strides in
the wartime American workforce, even in Hollywood. As a booming motion picture
industry faced an immense (male) labor shortage, women gained tremendous
behind-the-scenes creative opportunity in film narratives depicting stronger, sexually
transgressive femm e fatales in wartime Hollywood film s noir. Female creative
production involvement in these film s noir during World War II corresponded to
female representation on-screen depicting pronounced, shifting gender and sexual
polemics coinciding with a changing wartime-postwar audience. (Women writer/
producers included Columbia’s production executive Virginia Van Upp, Universal
producer and Hitchcock protege Joan Harrison, and Warner Bros, writers Catherine
Turney and Leigh Brackett.) Yet, late in the war, Hollywood crime films became
more masculine. Simulating combat and targeting an increasing returning veteran
audience, tough wartime noir crime films promoted misogynistic violence. In fact,
war-related conditions enabled a dark crime trend (cited by 1940s industry trade
papers as Hollywood’s hard-boiled ‘Ted m eaf’ cycle) before the term "film noir '"
originated in France in 1946.^
By 1943 Hollywood studios began anticipating the end of the war and
producing screen narratives depicting a “seedier” American homefront involving
crime, corrupt detectives and former-GIs, tapping into the psychic identity of tough
“destabilized” males exposed to inordinate violence in wartime combat. Screen
violence was heightened as federal regulation changed and gender representation
shifted— from weapons to women. Encouraging male camaraderie (though
homosexuality was censored) and reformulating gangsters (censored as “un-