Mexico and the Blacklist. Postscript : A 'Touch' of the Red Scare. Part 1

 
Despite his rather well-known liberal political views, Orson Welles was never a victim of the Blacklist [1]. Though he had already been denounced as a Communist sympathizer by the Hearst press, the official targeting of Welles was hardly necessary, given his (more or less) self-imposed Hollywood exile during the Blacklist’s peak years of 1947 to 1957. Welles’s absence during these years might have been partially due to his discomfort with the prevailing tenor of the times, but the more likely explanation was his reputation for not playing the filmmaking game by the established Hollywood rules, his supposed transgressions being, among others, extravagance and unpredictability. The result was a paucity of directorial engagements. Thus Welles’s was a political sort of blacklisting, but not of the ideological kind.

Elsewhere in this blog we’ve discussed Touch of Evil as a prime example of border-noir, in particular focusing on its border/racial issues and the complexly textured character of Capt. Quinlan. In this posting we’ll consider Touch of Evil in the context of the Red Scare of the 1950s. The film indeed reeks of a malodorous if rather unfocused malevolence [2], created and sustained by its sounds, bumpy narrative, character grotesques, sleazy music, low rent settings, and murky – even by noirish standards – look.

More specifically, Touch of Evil is about – among other things – racism and American supremacism, and the corresponding haves and have-nots on both sides of the border. But it’s also about the police, police corruption, state terror and the abuse of official power, all themes that resonate within a McCarthy-esque gestalt in the film’s context of the 1950s.

On one level Evil can be read as a Red Scare parable where Quinlan and the entire ‘Los Robles’ police apparatus stand in for HUAC/McCarthy-like forces of official heavy-handedness, where the Mexicans, small time criminals, and otherwise powerless and marginalized individuals - for whom questionable associations and even suspicion of wrongdoing were tantamount to guilt - represent the victims of the Cold War’s most egregious paranoiac excesses. The apt setting is the phantasmagoric, border town universe of Los Robles, which nicely fills in as an extreme manifestation of American society in the 1950s. “If border towns do bring out the worst in countries, perhaps, then, they are metaphors for what those countries really are.” (Krueger, p. 57).

Filmed in 1957 and released the following year, Touch of Evil is often cited as the book-ending apotheosis of the noir era [3]. It’s also fair to think of the years 1957-1959, or thereabouts, as the unofficial end of the Blacklist. The late Fifties’ more progressive bent was further evidenced by the growing momentum of the Civil Rights movement. But perhaps most important, 1957 also witnessed the passing of Sen. Joseph McCarthy, and it’s perhaps no accident that the character of Quinlan - scowling, unkempt, singularly un-photogenic - bears a strong metaphorical (and physical) resemblance to McCarthy.  
'Touch' of the Red Scare Part 2 here

Mexico and the Blacklist. Postscript : A 'Touch' of the Red Scare. Part 2

'Touch' of the Red Scare Part 1 here

   Thus, in Touch of Evil, a McCarthy-esque Quinlan bullies, accuses, cajoles and generally hogs the spotlight, but ultimately his fate is that of gradual self-destruction, and by the end of the film he has been duly pilloried and dispatched. And to be fair, the resemblance extends to Welles himself, as is witnessed by the frequent critical commentary on similarities between Welles and the Quinlan character [4]. This is underscored further in that the character of Quinlan, and  McCarthy, lacked the discipline, plodding methodology, and intellectual rigor for sustained and meaningful results; instead they relied on a few brilliant flourishes buttressed by theatrical bombast, half-baked intuition, and the convenient stage management of facts [5]. Both surrounded themselves with fawning toadies who would not dare question their brilliance, extending in Quinlan's case to even his nominal superiors. (As for Welles, the admirers continue to this day in the form of critics, academics, and other devotees).

   And to be sure, Evil's flawed hero Quinlan – warts and all in the form of his racial prejudice and physical repulsiveness – on a superficial level fits the stereotype of a Southern redneck sheriff. Indeed, In the Heat of the Night’s iconic good old boy sheriff of a decade later, played by Rod Steiger, might well have been based on the Hank Quinlan template. [Moreover, as a symbol of heavy-handed 1950s officialdom, Quinlan bears more than a passing resemblance to J. Edgar Hoover.]

  But on the other hand Quinlan is, disquietingly, a surprisingly sympathetic character, partially due to his prowess as a detective, but mostly for the fact that it’s his  methods which are objectionable, not his motivations or results. As a contrast we have his nemesis, the Mexican good cop Vargas, who despite his nobility and insistence on legal process, remains a curiously unlikable character, in part because of his self-righteousness, but also because his methods eventually descend to Quinlan-like levels of unsavoriness.

  These multilayered character touches are reminders that there are no easy interpretations or answers in Touch of Evil. Everything about it – especially its look and characters – are posited in innumerable shadings, creating a moral and physical universe that’s ambiguous at best and irretrievably corrupt at worst. With its uneasy synthesis of sordidness, redemption, corruption and compassion, and especially through its themes of border tensions, racial prejudice, and fear of the Other, Touch of Evil has an uncanny prescience, and continues to fascinate and resonate – and grow in popularity – in our own unquiet times.

[1] A counter point of view is provided by Joseph McBride’s What Ever Happened to Orson Welles? : a Portrait of an Independent Career [Lexington, University Press of Kentucky, 2006], which forcefully makes the case for Welles as victim of McCarthyism and the Blacklist, citing Welles’s genuine commitment to social causes in the 1930s and 1940s, as well as the FBI files collected on Welles from 1941 to 1954.

[2] In this context we note Eric M. Krueger’s perspicacious analysis of Touch of Evil’s garbage and filth-infested motifs, as metaphor for the story’s all-pervasive corruption and decay (and perhaps as a metaphor for a touch of the Red Scare?). E. M. Krueger, “Touch of Evil : Style Expressing Content,” Cinema Journal, Vol. 12, No. 1 (Autumn 1972), pp. 57-58.

[3] Kemp points out that it's no coincidence that the decline of the classic noir cycle follows closely on the fall of McCarthy. Philip Kemp, "From the Nightmare Factory: HUAC and the Politics of Noir," Sight & Sound v55, 1986, p270.

[4] By the late 1950s Welles was no longer the dapper figure of his Boy Wonder days. True, he had not quite descended to Quinlan-esque levels of bloated grotesqueness, but he was showing the first signs of the extreme overweight that would make him a self-caricature in his later years.

[5] It’s perhaps no accident that Welles, in additional to being a great director, was also a talented, near professional-caliber magician. Accordingly, there's a goodly amount of magic present in his directorial style, with more than it's share of sleight-of hand conjuring tricks.

Mexico and the Blacklist

For all its vaunted black & white visuals, film noir was not a unique phenomenon; there were scores of movies being made in the 1940s, and even earlier, that, shadow for shadow, angle for angle, had all the look of noir but could hardly be called film noir [1]. What makes the genre black is something more elusive -- a mood, angst, or zeitgeist, call it what you will [2]. Perversely, then, a defining feature of noir is a certain undefined menace, always lurking subliminally in the background, overlaying every scene with a larded sense of dread. The smell of fear, perhaps, as one writer so famously put it.

And while it may be an oversimplification to invoke the much-used term paranoia [3], certainly the Red Scare which coincided with the noir heyday of the late 1940s and early 1950s was a major contributing ingredient, ubiquitously fanning the flames of suspicion, recriminations and counter-recriminations, and in the process infusing the noir universe with its own special brand of pungent atmospherics.

To wit - and in one of the more infelicitous coincidences in film history - it happened that many of the artists who came to be associated with what we today call film noir tended toward the Left in their political sympathies [4]. Suffice to say that the Congressional investigations into ‘subversive’ elements in the film industry had an especially telling impact on the writers, editors, directors and actors who worked in film noir [5], in the process ruining, shortening or compromising entire careers, and in some cases, shortening lives.

Paraphrasing Raymond Chandler yet again, American society in the late 1940s and early 1950s had become dark with something more than night. As a result, Mexico and France in particular became popular alternatives for those who wished to escape the accusatory atmosphere of the times, especially those who found themselves under the watchful eye of the Red Scare police. The refugees on the Hollywood blacklist, as well as intellectuals and artists in other contexts, who ‘escaped’ to Mexico [6], continued to eke out a living, as screenwriters, ghostwriters, actors, directors, etc., or they worked in related fields, in any case under varying, usually greatly reduced circumstances (Gordon, p. 33).

There’s a further, rather cruel irony in that a common theme in American films noirs, to the point of cliché, is the notion of escape to Mexico. For the blacklistees, however, the flight to Mexico was a transmogrified, real-life variation on the noir formula. Their crime had been ideological incorrectness, and - however imperfect - Mexico represented a welcome refuge in an ever-unforgiving, indeed, noirish universe.

[1] Just a few examples : Casablanca, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, Uninvited, The Black Cat, The Song of Bernadette, The Razor’s Edge, 39 Steps, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Cat People, Since You Went Away, Brief Encounter.

[2] As one source puts it : "Film noir reflected an existential dread far deeper than politics could encompass. ‘The death of God’ gets closer to expressing this than ‘the corruption of Capitalism’." (Film noir and the Death of God and More on Film Noir and the Death of God).

[3] For more on Cold War nuclear paranoia in particular and its connection to film noir, see : Mark Osteen, “The Big Secret : Film Noir and Nuclear Fear,” Journal of Popular Film and Television 22(2), Summer 1994, pp79-90; and Walter Metz, ''Keep the Coffee Hot, Hugo” : Nuclear Trauma in Lang's The Big Heat, Film Criticism, 21(3), Spring 1997, pp43-65.

[4] The resultant House Un-American Activities Committee's persecution of progressive actors, directors and especially writers has been dealt with in detail elsewhere. The many books include : Thomas Doherty, Cold War, Cool Medium : Television, McCarthyism, and American Culture, New York, Columbia University Press, 2003; Patrick McGilligan and Paul Buhle, Tender Comrades : a Backstory of the Hollywood Blacklist, New York,  St. Martin's Press, 1997; "Un-American" Hollywood : Politics and Film in the Blacklist Era, edited by Frank Krutnik [et al.], New Brunswick, N.J., Rutgers University Press, 2007; Paul Buhle and Dave Wagner, Hide in Plain Sight : the Hollywood Blacklistees in Film and Television, 1950-2002, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2003; Reynold Humphries, Hollywood's Blacklists : a Political and Cultural History, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2008. See also : Philip Kemp, "From the Nightmare Factory : HUAC and the Politics of Noir," Sight & Sound v55 (1986), pp266-270.

[5] Two good analyses of film noir and the Blacklist can be found here and here. And there’s a nice collection of articles and posts at The Hollywood Left and the Blacklist Era. Two good books on film noir and its connection to the Red Scare are : Wheeler Winston Dixon, Film Noir and the Cinema of Paranoia (New Brunswick, N.J., Rutgers University Press, 2009); and Ray Pratt, Projecting Paranoia : Conspiratorial Visions in American Film, (Lawrence, University Press of Kansas, 2001). See also : Handwringing Over Mass Culture 1950-1959, a Chronology, by Richard Keller Simon.

[6] There’s an extensive literature on Mexico exiles and the prevailing culture of the times. The best source is Rebecca M. Schreiber’s richly detailed Cold War Exiles in Mexico : U.S. Dissidents and the Culture of Critical Resistance (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2008), which covers visual artists and writers as well as filmmakers, and in addition examines African Americans fleeing racial prejudice. Other sources include Bernard Gordon, Hollywood Exile, or, How I Learned to Love the Blacklist : a Memoir, Austin, University of Texas Press, 1999; and Diana Anhalt, A Gathering of Fugitives: American Political Expatriates in Mexico 1948-1965 (Archer, 2001).