Into the Dark

CHAPTER 1

SHADOWED

(1941–1943)

1941

REPORTS ON THE CRIME STORY CYCLE

“Reader interest in mystery novels, always high, has recently doubled. Instead of an average printing of 3,500 copies, an edition will run as high as 7,000 and 10,000. The screen, on the other hand, has been notoriously lax in exploring this field of drama. For too long Hollywood has contented itself with the childishly obvious in crime yarns. They have fallen into three groups: the pseudo-horror, clutching exponents like Karloff, Lugosi, and Lorre; the spook comedy, as exemplified by The Cat and the Canary; and the detective-crook ‘school’ of Charlie Chan and the Lone Wolf. The producers have completely ignored the moviegoing equivalent of the public that dotes on the intelligent, well-told mystery novel.”

PHILIP K. SCHEUER, Los Angeles Times, October 12, 1941

CITIZEN KANE

RKO RADIO PICTURES

RELEASED MAY 1, 1941

A MAGNATE’S DYING WORDS INSPIRE A SEARCH FOR THE TRUTH BEHIND HIS LEGEND.

PRODUCTION QUOTE

“Well, this afternoon at the old Pathé studio, where this town has seen a lot of history made, we’ll witness the formal start of Citizen Kane, the first picture to be helmed by Orson Welles. I wouldn’t miss the christening for the world. ‘Little Orson Annie’ is occupying the bungalow dressing room which was once used by Gloria Swanson.”

HEDDA HOPPER, Los Angeles Times, August 1, 1940

Gloria Swanson used this bungalow in 1928 while filming Queen Kelly, the film she watches in Sunset Boulevard. Coincidentally, Swanson attended the gala premiere of Citizen Kane.

In Citizen Kane, Orson Welles both directed and acted the first film noir antihero. Charles Foster Kane is alienated, obsessed, and doomed. Welles was a twenty-five-year-old émigré from radio when he played the eponymous publisher, aging from twenty to seventy in the course of the story. Photographs by Alex Kahle.

REVIEWS

“Citizen Kane is far and away the most surprising and cinematically exciting motion picture to be seen here in many a moon. As a matter of fact, it comes close to being the most sensational film ever made in Hollywood. Mr. Welles has put upon the screen a motion picture that really moves. It is cynical, ironic, sometimes oppressive, and as realistic as a slap.”

BOSLEY CROWTHER, The New York Times, May 2, 1941

“Citizen Kane, the one incomparably fine film of 1941, can be held up as a shining example of almost anything. For instance, it is a great mystery story, one told with mathematical precision. This may have been lost sight of in the excitement over its more controversial aspects.”

PHILIP K. SCHEUER, Los Angeles Times, October 12, 1941

LETTERS FROM REGIONAL THEATER OWNERS

“Stay away from this. A nightmare. Will drive ’em out of your theater. It may be a classic to you, but it’s plumb nuts to your public. Some swell acting and production wasted. Way too extreme.”

J. K. BURGESS, Iris Theatre, Velva, North Dakota, Motion Picture Herald, January 3, 1942

“Don’t try to tell me Orson Welles isn’t a genius. Herein he has produced a mighty fine picture. Herewith he has established for me the lowest gross I have ever experienced. I hurt all over.”

DANIEL KORMAN, Palace Theatre, Ontario, Canada, Motion Picture Herald, February 28, 1942

In this shadowy scene from Citizen Kane are: (l. to r.) Dorothy Comingore, Orson Welles, Ruth Warrick, and Ray Collins.

Citizen Kane was the vanguard of film noir. The film’s visual innovations—deep shadows, unorthodox camera angles, nightmarish montages—would become film noir conventions.

ARTIST COMMENT

“I had this terrible sense that a film was dead—a piece of film that would just be run through a projection machine. I didn’t want that. That is why my films are strongly stated. I can’t believe that people won’t fall asleep unless my films are theatrical. For myself, unless a film is hallucinatory, unless it becomes that kind of an experience, it doesn’t come alive.”

ORSON WELLES in Barbara Leaming’s Orson Welles

In this scene from Citizen Kane, Ruth Warrick defies Ray Collins (in silhouette) in order to save herself and her son. Photograph by Alex Kahle.

THE MALTESE FALCON

WARNER BROS. PICTURES

PREMIERED OCTOBER 18, 1941

WHILE INVESTIGATING THE MURDER OF HIS BUSINESS PARTNER, A DETECTIVE IS PULLED INTO A QUEST FOR A FABULOUS WORK OF ART.

PRODUCTION QUOTE

“I know now why most of the camera ‘business’ I wrote in my scenarios wasn’t followed. It couldn’t be!”

JOHN HUSTON, Los Angeles Times, October 19, 1941

REVIEWS

“John Huston sets the mood in this picture with suspenseful long shots, ceilings on sets to create a feeling of confinement, and extra wide-angle lenses—tricks used by Orson Welles.”

BOB HALL, “Dad’s Boy,” Hollywood magazine, August 1942

“Critics have found The Maltese Falcon to be the freshest and most original film seen in New York since Citizen Kane [which opened the previous May]. It is also the most cynical, depraved, and brilliantly melodramatic. There isn’t an honest motive in the entire cast—which is why we accept the characters as real people.”

RICHARD GRIFFITH, Los Angeles Times, October 14, 1941

The Maltese Falcon crystallized the film noir antihero, a slightly tarnished detective who works from a slightly rundown office. We see Jerome Cowan and Humphrey Bogart in their native milieu.

Lee Patrick plays the detective’s secretary, as excited as her boss when the fabled “black bird” arrives.

LETTER FROM REGIONAL THEATER OWNER

“The picture is too long and talky. Its title is meaningless. Bogart is miscast. My patrons tell me they like him best as a crook.”

E. M. FREIBURGER, Paramount Theatre, Dewey, Oklahoma, Motion Picture Herald, January 17, 1942

ARTIST COMMENT

“It was Huston’s script, Huston’s picture. He had the wit to keep Hammett’s book intact. His shooting script was a precise map of what went on. Every shot, camera move, entrance, exit was down on paper, leaving nothing to chance, inspiration, or invention. Of course you don’t know you’re making history while you’re in there making it.”

MARY ASTOR, A Life on Film

The Maltese Falcon cost $375,000. It grossed $1.7 million.

Humphrey Bogart got the role of Sam Spade after George Raft turned it down, telling studio boss Jack Warner that The Maltese Falcon was “an unimportant picture.” Bogart told Photoplay: “All I ask is that Paul Muni and George Raft be given the good roles here. In that way I get to do them eventually.” When Raft saw what the film had done for Bogart, he said, “There, but for the grace of me, go I.

As a film noir protagonist, Bogart was able to menace everyone: Elisha Cook Jr., Mary Astor, Sydney Greenstreet, and Peter Lorre. There had never been a film with so many rotten characters. “There wasn’t one decent person in the whole picture,” said Cook in 1986. “And look what a film it was.”

Mary Astor as Brigid O’Shaughnessy and Humphrey Bogart as Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon.

I WAKE UP SCREAMING

TWENTIETH CENTURY-FOX

RELEASED OCTOBER 18, 1941

THE MURDER OF A WAITRESS-TURNED-MODEL PITS HER PROMOTER AGAINST A SADISTIC DETECTIVE.

REVIEWS

“Most murder mysteries are Bs regardless of budget, but this one is an exception to the rule. H. Bruce Humberstone has obtained results that are all that may be asked of a murder meller with a romantic strain of more than ordinary strength.”

Variety, October 22, 1941

“In spite of the fact that it embodies many perceptible tricks of quality melodrama—flashbacks, sharp photography, menace music, and a water-torture pace—I Wake Up Screaming is a pretty obvious whodunit and a strangely unmoving affair. Incidentally, the picture never does make clear who it is that wakes up screaming.”

BOSLEY CROWTHER, The New York Times, January 17, 1942

This comment on screaming may refer to the offbeat casting of Betty Grable, who was usually singing—not screaming—for Twentieth Century-Fox.

Police lieutenant Cornell (Laird Cregar) grills Betty Grable about the murder of her sister in a scene from H. Bruce Humberstone’s I Wake Up Screaming.

THE SHANGHAI GESTURE

UNITED ARTISTS

PREMIERED DECEMBER 25, 1941

THE QUEEN OF THE CHINESE UNDERWORLD TRIES TO DESTROY A BRITISH INDUSTRIALIST BY CORRUPTING HIS DAUGHTER.

PRODUCTION QUOTE

“Josef von Sternberg is shooting a scene. ‘My children,’ Joe says to the hushed mob, ‘we’re all together in a strange house in Shanghai. It’s the gambling hell of Mother Gin Sling. It exists only in my mind. Nothing like it ever existed anywhere. But don’t let that cramp you. Try to act like human beings.’”

HEDDA HOPPER, “Looking at Hollywood,” Los Angeles Times, November 9, 1941

REVIEW

“Yesterday The Shanghai Gesture opened before an attendance at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre that was bewildered, bored, or impressed, according to individual reaction. This writer confesses to an intermittent combination of all three. When Poppy (Gene Tierney) arrives at the gambling den of Mother Gin Sling (Ona Munson), she says, ‘Anything could happen here. Any moment.’ The moment is too long delayed.”

PHILIP K. SCHEUER, “Shanghai Gesture Bids for Shocker Laurels,” Los Angeles Times, January 30, 1942

In Joseph von Sternberg’s The Shanghai Gesture, Ona Munson plays the mysterious Mother Gin Sling. Portrait by Ned Scott.

Gene Tierney plays a wealthy young woman who succumbs to the blandishments of the underworld. Portrait by Ned Scott.

Mother Gin Sling helps the finishing-school graduate degrade herself.

LETTERS FROM REGIONAL THEATER OWNERS

“Different! Interesting! Pleased all!”

ELINA A. BOLDUC, Majestic Theatre, Conway, New Hampshire, Motion Picture Herald, April 4, 1942

“This is the world’s worst. More patrons panned this than any picture I have run in seventeen years. I noticed a few fairly good reports on this. There must be a great difference in people within our borders!”

L. V. BERGTOLD, Westby Theatre, Westby, Wisconsin, Motion Picture Herald, August 8, 1942

ARTIST COMMENT

“The Shanghai Gesture was released to devastating reviews. What had seemed dramatic and crisp on the soundstage struck the critics as hollow and absurd. Years later, in France, strangers would ask me about The Shanghai Gesture as if it were a work of art. I learned that the picture was very well regarded.”

GENE TIERNEY, Self-Portrait

By the end of The Shanghai Gesture, Victoria has become Poppy, an opium-addled nymphomaniac.

“One shudders to think of the career which Paramount must have in mind for Alan Ladd,” wrote Bosley Crowther in the New York Times. “Obviously, they have tagged him to be the toughest monkey loose on the screen. For not since Jimmy Cagney massaged Mae Clarke’s face with a grapefruit has a grim desperado gunned his way into cinema ranks with such violence.” Portrait by A. L. (“Whitey”) Schafer.

1942-1943

REPORTS ON THE CRIME STORY CYCLE

“The shortage of story material and writers has film companies seriously ogling the pulp mag scripts and scripters. It marks the first time Hollywood has ever initiated a concerted drive to replenish its dwindling library of supplies and its scripter ranks from the twenty-cents-a-word authors of the weird-snappy-breezy-argosy-spy-crime-detective-mag school.”

Variety, November 10, 1943

THIS GUN FOR HIRE

PARAMOUNT PICTURES

RELEASED MAY 13, 1942

A HIRED KILLER IS PULLED INTO AN INTRIGUE OF FIFTH COLUMNISTS WHEN HE IS TREATED KINDLY BY A DETECTIVE’S GIRLFRIEND.

REVIEW

“This gangster film with a patriotic twist was tradeshown at the Ambassador Hotel Theatre, to an audience of exhibitors and critics which pronounced it excellent entertainment. Its script is a demonstration of skill and artifice in the maintenance of tension, withholding disclosures only until they mean the most to the picture and indulging in no routine deceptions for the sake of the finale.”

WILLIAM R. WEAVER, Motion Picture Herald, March 21, 1942

LETTER FROM REGIONAL THEATER OWNER

“Our audience was so hushed during the runoff of this that one might have supposed that they had ceased to exist. They liked it that much.”

Palace Theatre, Penacook, New Hampshire, Motion Picture Herald, October 17, 1942

Alan Ladd in a scene from Frank Tuttle’s This Gun for Hire.

In This Gun for Hire, Raven (Alan Ladd) treats a little girl (Virita Campbell) with kindness while completing a homicidal assignment.

ARTIST COMMENT

“Sitting there in that theater for the preview, I heard every cough in the house. I saw every head turn. I watched every kid fidget. When anybody got up to go out, my heart flopped to my socks. My heart raced like a P-38’s engine. I didn’t even know what the picture was about.”

ALAN LADD in Kirtley Baskette’s “Killer Diller,” Modern Screen, October 1942

After years as a dress extra and bit player, Alan Ladd became a star by going into the shadows.

“Whitey” Schafer made this poster art of Veronica Lake and Alan Ladd to publicize This Gun for Hire.

THE GLASS KEY

PARAMOUNT PICTURES

RELEASED OCTOBER 23, 1942

THE LOYAL ASSISTANT OF A CORRUPT POLITICIAN MUST PROVE THAT HIS REFORMED BOSS DID NOT COMMIT A MURDER.

REVIEW

“When it comes to writing neat mystery thrillers, no one can touch Dashiell Hammett. In case you’ve forgotten, Paramount’s The Glass Key will jog your memory. Hammett characters are always audacious. In The Glass Key there are some that get over beautifully. Others tend to irritate. Director Stuart Heisler has confused ‘hard-boiled’ with ‘acrimonious.’ No one dreams of seeing a Hammett type—man or woman—portrayed as saintly; at the same time, caution must be exercised to keep them from rubbing us the wrong way.”

PHILIP K. SCHEUER, Los Angeles Times, January 15, 1943

LETTER FROM REGIONAL THEATER OWNER

“Did fair business despite gas rationing, cold weather, and war-depressed minds. Guess it would have taken more than that to keep the women from coming to see Alan Ladd—oh, and what a ‘lad’!”

TERRY AXLEY, New Theatre, England, Arkansas, Motion Picture Herald, January 30, 1943

Eliot Elisofon made this portrait of Veronica Lake to publicize Stuart Heisler’s The Glass Key.