Raising Cain with the censors, again: The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946)

Shifting Enforcement: Censorship, Film Noir and Wartime Production

While tremendously complicated and restrictive, the wartime environment also surprisingly enabled a broader array of subject matter to make its way to Hollywood screens. In Boom and Bust: American Cinema in the 1940s, Thomas Schatz discusses Hollywood's wartime industry and the "massive transformation" of operations in the conversion to a "war economy." Schatz notes that the government initiated its "defense buildup" by orchestrating a "network of agencies," such as:

the War Production Board (WPB), the civilian agency which coordinated the wartime economy and the production of war goods; the War Manpower Commission, which coordinated and allocated the overall human resources required for military, industrial, agricultural, and other civilian needs; the War Labor Board (WLB), which handled all labor-management disputes in defense-related industries; the Office of Price Administration (OPA), which controlled prices and regulated the production and availability of civilian goods, including the rationing of virtually all the necessities of day-to-day life; and the Office of War Information (OWI), which handled all government news releases to the press, served as liaison between press and government, and supervised the dissemination of information and propaganda through the media, notably motion pictures and radio. (Schatz 1-5)

Moreover, as an outgrowth of the war, Schatz argues that a new trend toward "realism" pervaded both fictional and documentary films by 1944-45, "creating an on-screen dynamic utterly unique to the war era. Meanwhile, a stylistic countercurrent developed in what came to be termed film noir, which explored the 'darker' side of America's wartime psyche" (3).

In Movie-Made America, Robert Sklar cites the influence of industrial wartime culture and restrictions on the emergence and development of film noir. He writes:

no less products of their culture . . . many of Hollywood's wartime movies, particularly those with contemporary American settings, convey. . an overwhelming aura of claustrophobia. They seem contained, enclosed, shadowy, explorations of an interior landscape of mind and emotion quite novel in the extroverted American cinema. Undoubtedly, their dark and constrictive mood derives in part from the material limitations of wartime filmmaking: restrictions on travel virtually eliminated location shooting where interior sets could serve, and stringent budgets seem to have cut down on lighting as well. (252-253, emphasis added)

These definitive claustrophobic and paranoid psychological components of film noir are indeed symptomatic of constraints on the production environment during the war.

The unique industrial context of wartime filmmaking in Hollywood and the influential adaptation of Cain's hard-boiled fiction as non-war-related subject matter signaled a shift in Production Code enforcement. The Office of War Information (OWI) sanctioning of newsreel and narrative screen violence for propaganda purposes ironically also conflicted with and mitigated against industry PCA censorship-encouraging controversial material and a flourishing trend of films noir.