Violence



WORLD WAR II AND AFTERMATH

World War II brought the War Information Office, a collaboration between the US government and Hollywood that produced not only newsreels that functioned as propaganda for the Allied effort, but also a variety of fiction and nonfiction films that portrayed the Axis powers as monstrous while overlooking entirely the economic origins of the war. War films such as Bataan (1943) were allowed a surprising amount of sanctioned and savage violence because they demonized the evil "Jap." Postwar films such as The Sands of Iwo Jima (1949) portrayed violence as rather bloodless and painless as they lionized sacrificial violence and heroism; at the time, this was Hollywood's standard approach to the subject. The war years saw changes within other genres too, such as the crime film. Raoul Walsh's High Sierra (1941) took on the PCA by portraying the gangster as a hero of the people who sympathized with victims of the Great Depression. The gun violence of the alienated gangster in High Sierra was tolerated since he is brought down by the police at the end, although it is clear with whom the film's sympathies rest.

World War II was a transitional moment in Hollywood's portrayal of violence, as the industry and the nation began to think through the implications of the war and what instructions it offered about humanity. Crime films such as Henry Hathaway's Kiss of Death (1947) and Walsh's White Heat (1949) focused on the criminal psychopath, suggesting the influence of Freudianism on mass consciousness as well as the more general notion that social ills could not be attributed to a few "bad boys," as in previous renderings of criminal violence. Kiss of Death features a scene showing the crazed hoodlum Tommy Udo (Richard Widwark) shoving a wheelchair-bound old woman down a staircase; Cody Jarrett (James Cagney) in White Heat brutally dispatches his enemies, and ends his own life in an apocalyptic gun battle that results in a Hiroshima-like explosion at an oil depot. Again, a touch of crime-doesn't-pay moralism allowed these films to be screened. Psychotic menace and catastrophic violence became emblems of an increasingly unstable society showing signs of the trauma of the Depression and the war years.

Despite the ostensible conservatism of the 1950s, portrayals of violence became more graphic, as if to complement the darkened and uncertain mood in the United States. During this period the Production Code was steadily weakened by increased public demand for more realistic cinema; at the same time, the Hollywood studio system began to decline due to court challenges to Hollywood's monopoly practices, the demise of studio bosses, and the selling off of parts of the system itself. The circumstances provided a favorable backdrop to films noir such as Fritz Lang's The Big Heat (1953) and Robert Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly (1955). The noir thriller, influenced by the bleak vision of German expressionist cinema, was filled with acts of sadistic savagery, such as a villain throwing boiling coffee into a young woman's face in The Big Heat , or Kiss Me Deadly 's nominal hero slamming a helpless man's hand repeatedly in a desk drawer as the camera cuts to the hero's grinning face. Kiss Me Deadly and Robert Wise's Odds Against Tomorrow (1959) also conclude with massive explosions that recall the A-bomb, emphasizing the pervasive anxieties of the age.

The 1950s saw a reevaluation of history that became manifest in the rendering of violence. The westerns of Anthony Mann, including Winchester '73 (1950), The Man From Laramie (1955), and Man of the West (1958), contained often grueling scenes of violence that seem part of a general assessment of the conventions of the genre, in particular its function in portraying the hero's hidden psychological motives and the real underpinnings of the American expansionist process. The war film also took part in generic reevaluation, with films such as Aldrich's Attack! (1959) showing shocking violence (in one scene a man's arm is crushed by a tank) within narratives that questioned the military command structure and the reasons for war. To be sure, such films were answered, in a fashion, by flagwaving fare such as To Hell and Back (1955), a biopic about Audie Murphy (1924–1971), the most decorated soldier of World War II, who plays himself in the film. Films with such conservative agendas tended to gloss over the effects of violence rather than show its consequences, or the reasons for warfare and other violent conflicts in the first place, while also challenging PCA standards.



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