Jean Harlow, The Noir Forties

On film Jean Harlow often wore white satin gowns that, combined with her ivory skin and platinum hair, gave Jean Harlow an unparalleled luminous quality. Harlow glowed from the screen, reached out and grabbed the attention of the viewer, and never lost it. She was not an unreachable goddess like Greta Garbo but human with an earthy sense of humor, which made her a superb comedienne. As the original blonde bombshell, Harlow set the trend for actresses like Marilyn Monroe for decades to come. Harlow was known as "the baby" around the studio. She claimed she didn't know her real name 'Harlean' until she started school. Somehow the nickname suited her, and with her kewpie doll lips painted a deep red and her cherubic baby face, she played at being a femme fatale but with an underlying childlike quality that set her apart from her contemporaries.

No matter how tough the characters in her early films were supposed to have been, the audiences always loved her. Harlow would say about those characters: "I don't want to play hard-boiled girls. It's so different from the real me."

The crewmembers who worked in her films remembered her as being very kind, down-to-earth, and a great dice player! In those pre-Las Vegas days, one of her favorite getaway spots was Agua Caliente, a high-end Tijuana gambling resort. Harlow, with her heart of gold, was known to help out crewmembers who needed support financially.

There were two men that Mama Jean found to be formidable opponents: mobster Abner 'Longie' Zwillman and the love of Harlow's life William Powell. She met Zwillman when she was just twenty years old in Chicago. Harlow was appearing at the Oriental Theatre, and her con-artist stepfather Marino Bello, in an effort to impress Al Capone and Zwillman, invited them backstage to meet her. In David Stenn's book 'Bombshell: The Life of Jean Harlow', Lina Basquette recalled, "She loved to hang out with guys from the mob. She wanted to be a rebel herself but she didn't have the guts to go against her mother." -"True Hollywood Noir: Filmland Mysteries and Murders" (2013) by Dina Di Mambro

"In the first chapter, I will argue that the actress Jean Harlow, in her acting and bodily presence, uses her sexualized body to affect and seduce viewers away from any primary identification with those characters and their plotlines that are supposed to lead the film, and to instead identify with the kind of sexual empowerment and self-possession her characters consistently display. This sexual empowerment allows Harlow’s characters to manipulate the male characters to their own devices, thereby undermining previous feminist ideas about representations of women and audience identification in film only being constructed for the male viewer." -Jessica Hope Jordan in "The Sex Goddess in American Film, 1930-1965: Jean Harlow, Mae West, Lana Turner, and Jayne Mansfield."

"Red Headed Woman" (1932) is a famous pre-code film because Harlow's character Lil or “Red” as she is referred to, never get punished for her wrong doings. In fact, she prospers and is successful in climbing the social and economic ladder by blatantly using her sexuality. In the opening scene we see Harlow changing her hair color to a fiery red, and poking fun at the ways in which she can be sexy.

Red confides in her best friend (played by Una Merkel) that she wants to become a society woman by going after her boss, Bill Legendre, who is married. Then Red goes after Legendre’s richer partner, Charles Gaerste. Legendre hires a private eye to discover that while Red is having an affair with Gaerste, she is also sleeping around with Gaerste’s French chauffeur. Her shenanigans are discovered by all, and she ends up shooting her husband Bill Legendre. Although Legendre doesn’t press charges, Red flees town. In the closing scene, Red is seen in Paris at the horse races. Now she speaks French and dates a wealthy older man, whom she uses to her benefit. The two drive off in his limousine and the guy who drives their automobile is her French chauffeur lover.

"She was gay and humorous, always. Her vivacity and sincerity remain to inspire those of us who knew her and admired her as one of the most truly beautiful of all Hollywood's beauties." -Robert Taylor on Jean Harlow

"Personal Property" (1937) turned out to be the last full film Jean Harlow ever did. She had poor health throughout her life, beginning at the age of five when she contracted meningitis. Director Woody Van Dyke was nicknamed 'One Take' and "Personal Property" was completed in all of two weeks. At one point, Jean lapsed into a coughing spasm, possibly a precursor to the graver illness to overtake her later. There were other reasons behind the rush. The crew had been invited to Washington to celebrate President Roosevelt's birthday (the event was a way to raise money for the polio foundation). Attendance at the president's party was only part of the "Personal Property" press junket.

Jean Harlow during a visit to Washington for President Frankin D. Roosevelt’s Birthday (photo by Thomas D. McAvoy), 1937.

On the evening of January 30, 1937, the stars appeared at seven hotels hosting Presidential Birthday Balls, going from one, to the next. Prior to the main event in which the week of activities culminated, they were taken into Roosevelt's 'fireside chat' room, and introduced to the President and First Lady. This in particular was a trial for Taylor, who could not stand Roosevelt or his politics. The day after, Jean and Bob climbed wearily on the train and headed back to Hollywood. Jean seemed to get more ill with each mile traveled. Taylor periodically looked in on her to offer help and sympathy. She continued to fail, and by the time they reached home, she took to her bed. Jean Harlow died on June 7, 1937. -"Reluctant Witness: Robert Taylor, Hollywood and Communism" (2008) by Linda J. Alexander

Two popular films of 1946, 'Blue Skies' and 'The Blue Dahlia,' similar in titles but opposing in genre, caught the ambivalent public mood of the times, which more or less oscillated between faith in the future and worry about problems that lay ahead. 'Blue Skies,' a musical, was realistic in its way. The plot hinged on marital troubles vaguely reflecting the real-life ones of returning vets. Jed (Fred Astaire) and Johnny (Bing Crosby) are song-and-dance men who vie for the love of Mary (Joan Caulfield, a placidly beautiful blonde). Crosby wins her, but they have marital problems.

A grimmer take on this theme was 'The Blue Dahlia.' In the script by crime novelist Raymond Chandler, Lt. Cmdr. Johnny Morrison (Alan Ladd) comes home angry and violence-prone to find his wife has been cheating on him. Blue Skies, The Blue Dahlia: two films that offered an almost manic-depressive vision—one, skies of blue (following a light rain); the other, stormy weather.

They were templates of the ideology of the postwar cinema, but 'The Blue Dahlia' presaged a series of crime films, later dubbed films noir, that would more deeply echo the American unconscious between 1945 and 1950. Paul Fussell writes in 'Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War' that people in America hadn’t been told about even 10 percent of the horror of this war: “The real war was tragic and ironic, beyond the power of any literary or philosophic analysis to suggest, but in unbombed America especially, the meaning of the war seemed inaccessible. As experience, thus, the suffering was wasted... America has not yet understood what the Second World War was like and has thus been unable to use such understanding to re-interpret and re-define the national reality and to arrive at something like public maturity.”

As a Marxist, Polonsky preferred to attribute the sense of jeopardy, uncertainty [of film noir], to capitalism. French critics like Frank, Borde, and Chaumeton, writing more from an aesthetic or philosophical perspective, tended to see it as a surreal or existential state of humankind. It produced the popular mood of those early postwar years, 1945–50, which I call “the noir forties” and other historians have labeled “the age of anxiety,” “the age of doubt,” “postwar blues,” “triumphalist despair.” These moods and emotions were the mass psychological subsoil in which sprouted the nation’s politics and culture at the time. But during and after the war, leading jazz musicians like Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Charles Mingus moved into bebop, a more cerebral, avant-garde form.

'The Lost Weekend' (1945) was shot by Charles Seitz in the documentary style he had used in 'Double Indemnity' mixed with subjective scenes of horror using expressionistic techniques. Harrowing shots of Third Avenue, which was then a drab street in the shadow of elevated tracks lined with pawnshops and sleazy bars, are used as a backdrop for Birnam’s agonized odyssey.

The nightmare vision was of  "‘domineering’ women and economic insecurity, all waiting to overwhelm the returning veterans hoping to get their jobs and their ‘girls’ back," writes the feminist historian Elaine Tyler May. This negative image infiltrated popular culture. In films noir she is a femme fatale; while in the best-selling adventures of Mickey Spillane’s private eye Mike Hammer, she is the sexy temptress who turns out to be a Communist spy.

If men’s fashions were aimed at the new company man, women’s fashions affirmed the glamorous but nonworking wife. Because of fabric shortages, women’s wartime fashions had been comparatively simple, eschewing frills and furbelows. But after the war the image of the patriotic, cloth-saving working woman who still looked pretty for her soldier boy gave way to conspicuous consumption, decked out in the “new look,” a style created by the Paris designer Christian Dior. He swathed women in voluminous fabrics, long skirts with amphora waists.

A rare film with an identifiable working-class hero was 'The Long Night' (1947), directed by Anatole Litvak with a script by John Wexley, a veteran noir writer with leftist views. Rather than simply reviving Carné’s saga, however, Litvak revealingly transformed it into a story of hope and (very subtly) struggle.

What is generally called the 'blacklist' —referring to a policy of not hiring Communist sympathizers —was adopted by the eight largest studios in a meeting at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in late 1947 presided over by Eric Johnston (head of the Motion Picture Producers of America). An idea of Johnson’s standards can be gleaned from his statement to a group of screenwriters not long after the 1947 HUAC hearings: “We’ll have no more 'Grapes of Wrath,' we’ll have no more 'Tobacco Roads,' we’ll have no more films that deal with the seamy side of American life. We’ll have no more films that treat the banker as a villain.” Films noir were also on the list. Average weekly attendance fell from its 1946 peak of 90 million [moviegoers]. In that year an average of 80 percent of the public attended a movie at least once weekly; that number would decline to around 36 percent in 1950 (with only 3.6 million TV sets in homes).

The atmosphere of suspicion and distrust created by HUAC and the blacklist also played a role in the rise of Hollywood noir. 'Naming Names' author Victor Navasky commented, “The blacklist itself has a noir quality since there was no literal, physical blacklist, and you can add in the role played in enforcing it by ex-FBI guys and clearance mechanisms, Red Channels, etc. and the so-called graylist.” In 'Force of Evil' (1948), Polonsky went beyond existential dread to depict a city of corruption exemplified by the numbers racket but represented by the street sign flashed at the film’s beginning: Wall Street. In the ending, Joe (John Garfield)  finds in himself a nub of humanity and starts climbing back up to redemption.

-Kathleen (Lucille Ball): "But, remember I can get any new tough guy for a dime."

-Bradford (Mark Stevens): "I felt all dead inside. I’m backed into a dark corner and I don’t know who’s hitting me." —The Dark Corner (1946)

Janey Place writes that the noir era “stands as the only period in American film in which women are deadly but sexy, exciting, and strong, not static symbols... intelligent and powerful if destructively so.” The emergence of this type of woman (different from the usually good-hearted gold diggers of the thirties) was unique to films noir. A typical noir with a poisonous female, Gilda (1946) was produced by Virginia Van Upp, the foremost woman movie executive of the postwar years. Like many women in movies and journalism, Van Upp had been given a chance because of the wartime manpower shortage.

The femmes fatales, like Joan Bennett, Jane Greer, Ann Savage, Yvonne De Carlo, and Rita Hayworth, -who exhibited varying degrees of destructiveness- reflect male ambivalence toward independent working women, an attitude compounded of their insecurity upon finding themselves back in a competitive civilian world, perhaps working for a large corporation.

California noir tended to show the visions of the German émigré filmmakers in Hollywood. The New York films, in contrast, emulated the [Richard] de Rochemont documentary model. -"The Noir Forties: The American People From Victory to Cold War" (2013) by Richard Lingeman