Success is a Racket
The room is windowless and bare except for a table under a low-hanging lamp with a naked bulb. It’s the kind of room where only bad things can happen. A pack of tough cops gathers around the table, encircling a hapless innocent whom they plan to frame for a murder. One cop reaches up and shoves the hanging lamp so it swings back and forth, round and round, making shadows of men lunge and shudder on the walls and hot light pulse on the pale, nervous forehead of the victim. No one speaks.
Karl Freund, already the cinematographer of Metropolis and The Last Laugh, may not have invented the swinging lamp effect here, in the pre-Code Afraid to Talk (1932), but he exhibits near-total mastery of noir lighting almost a decade before the noir cycle would begin. (Swinging lamps would reappear in Crossfire, Desperate and other films, always evoking the menace of imminent violence.) This relentless drama of civic corruption—which can hardly be called an exposé, since it assumes a general knowledge that everyone in power is a crook—deserves the label of proto-noir, though it also illustrates the gaps between pre-Code and noir.
Afraid to Talk is almost gleeful in its boundless cynicism, almost sadistic in the way it dwells on men of power smirking and chortling as they torment their powerless pawns. The bad sleep well, and they have a lot of fun, too. There are few scenes in either pre-Code or noir as shocking as the one in which boyish Eric Linden—one of the “Gee, that’s swell” brand of male ingenues—is beaten to a pulp until he finally offers a false confession. The beating takes place off screen: we hear it while watching a couple of men taking a break from pounding the kid (they turn out not to be real cops, but hired thugs of the District Attorney) washing their hands, Pilate-like, and complaining that their coffee is cold. Afterward, we hear that the victim is spitting blood, has internal injuries, and was beaten on the soles of his feet. (Not too smart, since the D.A. tries to claim he was injured resisting arrest!) When one of the more squeamish thugs expresses discomfort at what they’ve done, the others sneer at him: “Are you turning pansy on us?” and dismiss his guilt with a shrugging, “It’s all in the game.”
Linden is Eddie Martin, a bellboy who had the bad luck to be in the room when a racketeer was bumped off, and the worse luck to be a convenient fall guy when the corrupt party bosses need to convict someone, but can’t touch the real culprit because he’s blackmailing them with evidence of their colossal malfeasance. While Eddie’s fate is cruel, the film is anything but glum. It’s full of wild parties, drunken women in evening gowns dancing on table tops, and fractured, swirling montages of speakeasy life. The big boss of the party doesn’t just have a bar behind a swiveling bookcase—when he pushes a button, a panel slides out of the wall and there’s a bartender standing behind it, already shaking a cocktail. (Does the man live in this cubbyhole? Anything for a job, presumably.) And in the film’s most memorable image, racketeer Jig Skelli (Edward Arnold), celebrating his release from jail at a party in a private room, draws aside the deco-patterned curtains of a picture window to reveal the floor of a nightclub, where a line of chorus girls enters dressed as chain gang prisoners, a delirious conflation of two of the Depression’s iconic images. I Am a Fugitive from a Floor Show.
Where Afraid to Talk falls short of noir is not in its mood, but in its black-and-white morality. Straight through the film, the virtuous are divided from the vile; we see civil servants who resign rather than do the dirty work demanded of them, and we never see a glimmer of shame in the villains. The bellboy and his wife are a wholesome, childlike pair. (Linden, despite his doll-faced juvenile looks, gives a spirited performance, aided by his honking New York accent. The same year, he played Cagney’s kid brother in The Crowd Roars, and you buy it.) As District Attorney Wade, Louis Calhern displays his underappreciated talent for loathesomeness. Repellently unctuous, Wade can scarcely contain his delight in his own rotten cleverness, and he wears hypocritical sentiment like too much cologne. Arnold, whose alternation between playing gangsters and tycoons revealed the scant difference between them, keeps grinning and chuckling at his invincibility, looking like a grizzly bear that’s just eaten a whole boy scout troop.
In addition to lacking shades of gray, Afraid to Talk, like most pre-Code movies, is devoid of interiority. It’s not superficial, but keenly focused on how people react to events and surroundings. The concern with psychology that would come with the postwar Freud craze is distant; when your stomach is empty, who cares about excavating childhood trauma? Stoicism and defensive joking are the order of the day. It’s as though, in pre-Code, people are so consumed by the fight to survive, or by the determination to forget their worries, that they have no time for private emotions. Society itself is so anxious, so hysterical, so compulsively bitter, that it takes the place of individual psyches. Everyone is part of one big nervous breakdown.
Here is another of the biggest divergences between pre-Code and noir. In Afraid to Talk, we are never allowed to forget about society. A recurring narrative device has plot points spelled out on a news ticker scrolling around the face of an art deco skyscraper. We see the crowds commenting on each turn of events: construction workers digging up the streets, hookers strolling through the crowds in search of customers, newsboys brandishing headlines, rich snobs in taxi cabs. We see the smarmy mayor’s re-election parade, complete with brass bands and flaming torches, and the camera zeroes in on the bums toting placards extolling the mayor’s virtues. “I’m just doing this for a feed,” one says. Another—don’t blink: it’s Walter Brennan—sighs, “It’s a hell of a long walk for one feed.” In the film’s opening moments, a group of men cradling cups of coffee in a breadline (one of them is Jerome Cowan) talk about the times. Things can’t go on this way. “It’s comin’, I tell ya, it’s comin’!” one keeps insisting ominously. And always in the background are the reporters: every time the doors open in the big boss’s office they’re there, coming in a mob to get a statement. As the politicians spout their phony, lying speeches, the reporters roll their glazed eyes and guzzle their free drinks. They see all, they know all, and they’re not going to do a damn thing about it.
Pre-Code movies cheerfully portrayed a country where everyone is looking for an angle, and anyone who has made it to the top must be crooked enough to hide behind a corkscrew. But they never plumbed the depths of alienation, fatalism and misanthropy that noir exhumed. For all their cynicism, Depression-era movies invoke a sense of cameraderie, a shared body heat from people huddled and jostling together—cheating each other maybe, but also sharing jokes and boxcars, Murphy beds and stolen hot dogs. There is nothing like noir’s chilling sense of isolation and social atomization, its view that not only insitutions but personal relationships are treacherous and predatory. While the Citizens’ Committee in Afraid to Talk turns out to be a wholly decent and even capable bunch (the evil-faced Gustav von Seyffertitz shows up to save the day as an idealistic lawyer), in noir functioning communities are wholly absent. The possibility of collective action is never entertained: if it were, it would be hauled before HUAC.
In the end, Afraid to Talk has its cake and eats it too. The bellboy survives unscathed, thanks to the incompetence of two hit men who don’t bother to make sure he’s really dead, and almost all of the bad guys come to sticky ends. But the film closes with the big boss extolling the virtues of his slain D.A., still the top man in town and not going anywhere.
Though their characters bite the dust, Arnold and Calhern would both resurface years later in noir: Arnold as the deliciously named tycoon Penrod Biddell in City That Never Sleeps (1953), married to the magnificent Marie Windsor, who’s cheating on him with William Talman. Calhern, of course, would bring his patrician sleaze to The Asphalt Jungle (1950) as the double-crossing snake Alonzo D. “Uncle Lon” Emmerich.
They belong to a a small but invaluable group of actors whose careers spanned pre-Code and film noir, those two upwellings of darkness in sunny Hollywood, fed by the same underground reservoir of disenchantment. Foremost among these repeat offenders are Barbara Stanwyck and Edward G. Robinson, indispensable in both canons. Cagney, the king of pre-Code, made only one significant noir, but in it he left his searing brand on the cycle. Warren William and Lee Tracy were neutered by the Code, but made obscure, offbeat appearances in noir (the same could be said of Ann Dvorak); while Humphrey Bogart, a sleekly nasty minor player in pre-Code, only came into his own in the noir era. Some actors are all but unrecognizable in their different incarnations: Dick Powell, Robert Montgomery, Joan Bennett, Ida Lupino. Others are unchanging, like George Raft and Joan Blondell. Many of the male stars of pre-Code were still going strong in the forties and fifties but shunned noir (Spencer Tracy, Gary Cooper, Clark Gable, etc.), while quintessential women stars Joan Crawford and Bette Davis, and the equally enduring Mary Astor, demonstrated the advantages of women’s less secure images, the fact that they were never called on to represent moral or social authority.
Longevity and luck are involved in the winnowing of this group, but their varied paths and metamorphoses also offer maps on which to explore the relationship between pre-Code and film noir. The two share a skeptical view of human nature, a conviction that society is irredeemably corrupt, and a fascination with misbehavior. Both concur with Raymond Chandler’s famous assertion that “success is always and everywhere a racket.” But where noir broods on this “cold, clear fact” and follows it to the conclusion that ambition—the American dream of getting ahead, of being “somebody”—is fatally tainted, pre-Code shrugs and says, “Then hey, here’s to the rackets!”
by Imogen Sara Smith