The Noir Forties. The American People from Victory to Cold War by Richard Lingeman

Films Noir, more faithfully than other kinds of films, reflected the personal anxieties of the late forties.  They vacuumed up the psychological detritus swirling in the air, the velleities, secret wishes, criminal thoughts, unspoken fears, dream images of the time.
Richard Lingeman, The Noir Forties (Nation Books, 2012).

Lingeman's use of the somewhat unusual word velleities here (from the Latin for "wish") is just a small example of how Lingeman takes the intelligence of his readers for granted, even in a day when fewer and fewer people study Latin.  The opening and closing chapters of this book are the most personal, as Lingeman tells us of his time in Army Counter Intelligence in Japan, during and after the Korean War; they read almost like a Samuel Fuller film of East/West confrontation. In between he gives us a political and cultural history of the forties, with examples from radio producers such as Norman Corwin, pulp writers such as David Goodis and Cornell Woolrich (both of whom had a big influence on films), musicians such as Spade Cooley and Lionel Hampton and even Abstract Expressionists such as Jackson Pollock (who paradoxically was mocked by conservative critics but touted abroad as an example of American freedom).  But his primary cultural reference is films noir, many directed by German and Austrian emigres:  Siodmak, Wilder, Ulmer, Lang.  Lingeman is particularly good at demonstrating the fears of death and fate found in such under-the-radar films as Ulmer's Detour and Mate's D.O.A.  In the latter film Frank Bigelow has discovered that he is dying from a slow-acting poison and when he dashes into the street he sees a little girl playing with a ball and lovers kissing, and he knows that he will never have a lover or children (this is beautifully shown with just his facial expression, no dialogue necessary).  This embodies the anxiety of the time (1950): we have just lost 400,000 Americans in a war and are now under the shadow of the atomic bomb; it might even be a metaphor for the internal communist threat.

Again, Lingeman trusts the intelligence of the reader to realize how much of what happened just after the war led to the troubles of today, as the same mistakes continue to be repeated; though now we are afraid of Islamic terrorists rather than Nazis or Communists and we are still afraid of the tabs the NSA and the FBI are keeping on us.  When I was in elementary school we were told to behave or else many years later the FBI could keep us from getting a job when they found out about our 4th grade defiance! The union-busters in Congress led to the gradual weakening of unions and the increasing of inequality today; the red-flag term "socialized medicine" (and "socialism equals communism") keeps us from having decent health care even now; the Truman Doctrine of the forties is still essentially in force today, as we continue to try to use military force -- in Vietnam, Iraq, et al. -- instead of supporting economic and military reform.

Lingeman is one of our best cultural historians, with biographies of Dreiser and Sinclair Lewis and the perceptive Small Town America.  I hope his incisive exploration of films noir and the forties is followed with The Red-Baiting Fifties,  including film directors such as Nicholas Ray and Douglas Sirk, who dug beneath the surface of those not-so-placid years.