ABSTRACT
If any issue in American film historiography seems fully explored, it is the experience of leftist writers and directors in the producer-oriented milieu of mid-twentieth-century Hollywood. Film-as-history historians have tackled the occasional trends toward social problem and political filmmaking, while social and oral historians have chronicled the blacklist and its effect on a generation of artists. Where other areas of film historiography suffer from a paucity of empirical details (or access to these details) with the left-leaning artists, historians have amassed a collection of interviews, archival material, and production histories. However, the scholastic thoroughness of Brian Neve’s Film and Politics (1992) or Paul Buhle and Dave Wagner’s Radical Hollywood (2003) has blinded the field to a central explanatory problematic: why, exactly, did the major studios hire leftist artists and finance projects with left-leaning content? The historiography on the period tends to take the perspective of individuals who, understandably, bristled at the constraints on their work and their politics. However, this focus on the artist exposes only one half of the social game; instead of seeing producers and the studios as mostly an obstacle to the writers and directors for hire, one can ask under what conditions each came to share goals. From this explanatory perspective, media history explains not only individual agency, institutional structure, or economic environment but also the coordination or divergence of social interests. The social problem features that RKO produced in the late 1940s provide a useful case study for revisiting the leftists in Hollywood problematic. The number of features is finite: Crossfire (Edward Dmytryk, 1947), Boy with the Green Hair (Joseph Losey, 1949), and a couple of secondary examples like The Farmer’s Daughter (H.C. Potter, 1947) or So Well Remembered (Dmytryk, 1947). Key figures who faced HUAC and eventually the blacklist worked on these films, and for this reason the RKO problem films point to key contributing roles of leftist talent. Yet the studio underwent a rapid succession of owners and production heads and a similarly abrupt evolution of studio direction. As
such it can also present the case for a studio-and producer-centric understanding of liberal-left content. The studio’s social problem dramas, I hypothesize, came about in part because of the industry’s changing economics and in part because of the studio’s place in what Pierre Bourdieu calls the field of cultural production (1992). This dual explanation helps make sense of certain stubborn empirical details-why, for instance, the social problem film continues well after the HUAC trials-at the same time as it provides a new agenda for film and media historians trying to connect the practices of culture industries to larger ideologies. Both postwar observers and subsequent film historians use the term the “social problem film” for entertainment narrative features that contained strong, often didactic themes about conflicts larger than the character or story. While film scholars have become adept at understanding all entertainment cinema as in some nature political and socially meaningful, problem films laid explicit claim on the public sphere and contained some formal markers of didactic address. To take as an example Crossfire, RKO’s polemic against antiSemitism, the third-person noir narration of the story frame and flashbacks gives way in the film’s turning point to a lengthy monologue from Detective Finlay (Robert Young), who talks about the “real American history” of bigotry in a long take, nearly two minutes long and conspicuously absent of reverse shots. Whatever the formal means of achieving it, this strategy of didactic address cuts across much of the genre, from Twentieth-Century Fox’s cycle (Gentleman’s Agreement (Elia Kazan, 1947) or Pinky (Kazan, 1949)) to Stanley Kramer’s independent production Home of the Brave (1949).
