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-