The Brother from Another Planet: race and immigration in America

John Sayle’s The Brother from Another Planet (1984) is explicit in its intentions, clear about the story it wants to tell, the themes it wants to explore – immigration, the immigrant experience, how a nation of immigrants has come to hate immigrants, the marginalisation and denigration of America’s black population, even though this population’s contribution to the economic, cultural and political endeavours of the country has been as profound as any other.

With his hero, a runaway chattel from some unidentified part of the universe who has crash-landed his spaceship on Ellis Island, Sayles draws our attention to the two key aspects of America’s past – immigration and African slavery.

As an immigrant, the mute Brother embodies the bewilderment, amusement, enchantment, shock, horror and fear immigrants feel towards their new homeland, the constant battle between a sense of alienation and the desire to belong, feelings of superiority that might in fact be an inferiority complex, dealing with the contempt of the opposition by developing your own contempt for them, the contempt might be mutual and felt in equal measure but it has huge ramifications for you and none for them, being defined by your foreignness, an object of curiosity at best, of loathing at worst, seeking out those who are subjected to the same experiences as you, wanting the safety and comfort of the club but also detesting it for taking you away from what you really want, which is to be invisible, an invisible part of society, constantly, at a personal and institutional level, made to feel you do not belong here, that your real place is elsewhere, a place you’ve never been to, have scant knowledge of or abandoned, somewhere even at the back of your own mind you yearn for and may even wish to return to, the splitting of your personality, the cunning you need to navigate your way through the hostility and contradictions, never giving yourself away, revealing who you are and what you think, keeping your distance, striving to maintain your dignity and sense of self and self-worth as the opposition tries at every turn to take it from you, suspicion, mistrust, always being foreign no matter what, there can only be one winner and it isn’t going to be you.

And then there is Sayle’s determination to capture early 1980s Harlem – black Harlem – on film, no-go Harlem, where white America is too scared to tread, the embodiment of all white America fears and desires, but for the indomitable locals just a place where you live and work to the best of your ability, sharing the same goals and dreams as everyone else, to extol the joyfulness, creativity and resistance of black American culture and acknowledge the other side of the coin – the violence and drugs, though Sayles says these are not inherent to the community but enter from outside, from those looking to exploit and make a buck out of alienation and despair, the system of white men in plush offices in haughty skyscrapers.

David Goodis’ The Burglar: maintaining honour in a corrupt world

David Goodis’ 1953 novel The Burglar was made into a film of the same name three years later by Paul Wendkos. Goodis himself wrote the screenplay and it follows closely the novel’s grim and seedy tone and its protagonists’ ugly fate. 

The plot involves the theft of emeralds from a wealthy family (the film innovates and makes the victim a phony spiritualist who’s been bequeathed a fortune by an eccentric industrialist) and the anxieties and travails of Nat Harbin, the leader of the gang of thieves who tries to keep it together as his comrades fall out over how to deal with the haul – ‘a package of grief’ – should they get it to a fence straight away or wait until the hot merchandise cools a little?; amid sexual tensions over Gladden, Harbin’s step-sister (this element is more pronounced in the film than in the book); and the corrupt cop on the case closes in on them looking to steal their score. 

In the film, Dan Duryea is good as the tortured Harbin aiming to be ‘honourable within oneself in a corrupt world’, as is Peter Capell as his whinging accomplice, Baylock, who wants nothing more than to 'sleep and die'; while Stewart Bradley is suitably menacing and brutal as the rotten police officer, Charlie – ‘a policeman only when he wears a uniform’. 

Goodis’ novels were overlooked as too pessimistic and melodramatic in America and it was only the interest taken in them by the French New Wave filmmakers – most notably Francois Truffaut, who turned Down There into Shoot the Piano Player – that reminded the world of Goodis’ unique voice. 

The Burglar was also filmed as Le Casse in 1971 by Henri Verneuil (an Armenian, born Ashot Malakian in Rodosto, Eastern Thrace) as a glossy Franco-Italian caper movie, starring Jean-Paul Belmondo as Harbin (Azar, in the film) and Omar Sharif as his nemesis, Inspector Abel Zacharia. 

(Watch the film with English subtitles here).  

The locations of the film are changed from gritty Philadelphia and sordid Atlantic City to sunny, vibrant Athens and the stunning Greek islands. The film is replete with car chases, stunts and fight scenes, while the gang of thieves stays in the Athens Hilton rather than in a derelict shack in the 1956 film or a dingy hotel in the novel. Gone also is the ‘quiet suffering’ of Harbin (Azar) to be replaced by a Raffles-like jewel thief, who charms and jokes his way through the film. 

Only Omar Sharif is interesting as the shabby police inspector, who resents the rich people he’s been tasked to help recover their property, deciding instead that the $300 he’s paid a month is not enough for a man of his tastes, ambition and intelligence and that securing the emeralds for himself rather than returning them to their decadent, ungrateful owners is real justice.

Jonas Mekas and the first version of Shadows

 

Above is a clip of the filmmaker Jonas Mekas talking about falling out with John Cassavetes and Nikos Papatakis over Cassavetes’ first film Shadows (1959), which Papatakis produced. The story is that Mekas, who moved in the same avant-garde and underground New York film circles as Cassavetes, was blown away by the first version of the film but that Papatakis suggested a reshoot to make it more commercial. Cassavetes agreed with Papatakis and Mekas felt betrayed.

In fact, the first version of Shadows was long thought lost, only for Cassavetes scholar Ray Carney to discover it in 2003. This is Carney’s account of that discovery. What Carney doesn’t mention in his piece is how the first version of Shadows has rarely been shown as a result of a dispute between Carney and Cassavetes’ wife, Gena Rowlands, over who owns the film. Carney has accused Rowlands of blackballing him for revealing the more unpalatable side of Cassavetes’ genius.

Carney writes:

‘There was a lot that was wonderful about Cassavetes that no one ever denied, and that I still believe to be true. There is no question that he is one of the great twentieth-century artists – in any medium. He was a visionary and a dreamer, a passionate, nonstop talker who was exciting to listen to. He was a born charmer, with the charisma of a Svengali. People loved to be around him. They basked in his energy. He inspired them and could talk people into doing seemingly anything. It took those qualities to make the movies. He had to throw a lot of magic dust around to keep people working long hours without pay. He had to play with their souls to motivate them.

‘But as I dug deeper, I was forced to recognize that you can't have the positive without the negative, the virtues without the corresponding vices. Cassavetes was a super-salesman, a Pied Piper, a guru – but he was also most of the other things that come with the territory. He was a con-man. He would say or do almost anything to further his ends. He'd lie to you, steal from you, cheat you if necessary. He could be a terror if you got in his way. If he liked you or needed you, he was a dream – kind, thoughtful, generous; if you crossed him, he was your worst nightmare.

‘To put it comically, you might say that he had a short man's complex or a Greek man's macho streak. The positive side is that he was a fierce competitor and a perfectionist. When it came to making movies, nothing could make him compromise his vision. The negative side was that he was incredibly proud and temperamental. He would turn on you if you even politely questioned his judgment or wanted to do something different from what he did. It was good he wrote, directed, and produced his own work, because no one was less of a team player. He couldn't deal with authority. He had to be the boss, the center of attention, the star of the show – on and off. If he didn't get his way he threw temper tantrums and behaved childishly.’

Amazing Grace: William Wilberforce, national hero or national vanity?

Michael Apted’s Amazing Grace purports to be an account of the trials and tribulations of William Wilberforce as he sought from the period 1789 to 1807 to pass legislation in the British Parliament for the abolition of the slave trade. Wilberforce’s campaign against the slave trade is part of British national mythology or ‘national vanity’, as CLR James puts it.

Yes, Britain, from 1640 to 1807, dominated the slave trade; yes, the First British Empire – concentrated in the Americas – was built on slavery; yes, the industrial revolution was financed by chattel slavery; yes, British cities (London, Liverpool, Bristol), boomed as a result of the trade; but all these sins are redeemed by the fact that it was a Briton – Wilberforce – who ended the trade and it was the British Navy – the West Africa squadron – that enforced the ban. The inscription on Wilberforce’s gravestone in Westminster Abbey reads: ‘His name will ever be specially identified with those exertions which, by the blessing of God, removed from England the guilt of the African slave trade.’

Amazing Grace doesn’t challenge this narrative. In fact, it seeks to reinforce it, which makes for poor drama. Not only is it tiring and tiresome to watch such a one-dimensional portrait of a man, whose personal and political flaws were legion; but the view of Wilberforce as the man who abolished slavery has for a while been challenged.

In his discussion of the San Domingue slave rebellion (1792-1805) that led not only to the emancipation of the island’s slaves but the end of colonial rule, Paul Foot stresses the role rebellious slaves played in their own liberation and ridicules the role of Wilberforce in the abolition of the slave trade.

‘Who abolished slavery? And in a great roar the answer will come back, William Wilberforce abolished slavery. One of the most heroic and greatest feats in the history of Great Britain is that this grand old Christian gentlemen and Tory MP, from Hull, somehow, struggling himself from factory to factory, which he owned and treated the workers there like slaves, somehow, himself, by prodigious effort and enormous amount of prayer managed to abolish one of the great obscenities in the whole history of the human race.’

Wilberforce was motivated by – and widely mocked for his – Evangelical Christianity in his campaign to end the slave trade. He and his cohorts were disparagingly referred to as The Saints. Wilberforce regarded slavery not as a political but as a moral issue. For him, the conditions in which slaves were transported from Africa to the New World and, then, the conditions in which they lived and worked, were wicked and degrading, an affront to Christian values; but there was no effort to go beyond moral outrage and penetrate into the political and economic roots of a system reliant on the brutal exploitation and repression of one set of humans for the benefit of another set.

Thus, in one of the most politically turbulent and radical periods in British history – the ideas of the American and French revolutions, the social and economic turmoil that resulted from the wars against France (1792-1815) and culminated in the Peterloo Massacre (1819) and the Cato Street conspiracy (1820) – Wilberforce was a Church and Crown reactionary, a staunch defender of the establishment against those who sought to challenge it or even overthrow it.

Wilberforce’s detractors also point to the fact that the same Christian values that informed his anti-slave trade crusade also inspired his campaign against permissive Georgian manners and ushered in the moral repression and hypocrisy associated with Victorian society. Wilberforce was, along with Dr John Bowdler, the inspiration behind the Society for the Suppression for Vice and Encouragement of Religion.

For E.P. Thompson, Wilberforce’s moral zeal was in reality a means to detach the poor and working classes from baleful Jacobin influences.

By getting the working classes to read the Bible and not Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man, Wilberforce hoped that the poor would realise ‘that their more lowly path has been allotted to them by the hand of God; that it is their part faithfully to discharge its duties and contentedly to bear its inconveniences; that the present state of things is very short; that the objects, about which worldly men conflict so eagerly, are not worth the contest.’

A more discerning reader of the time’s history would also object to Amazing Grace’s depiction of William Pitt – whose close personal and political friendship that went back to Cambridge University days (the two men are buried side by side in Westminster Abbey) – as a man equally committed to the abolition of the slave trade.

Is this the same William Pitt who, as prime minister in 1793, amid the chaos of the French revolution and slave revolt on San Domingue (Haiti), catastrophically sought to conquer the island – the wealthiest colony in the world – for the British Empire, a plan that involved reinstating the slave regime that its victims had just overthrown, which would have the added advantage of sending a message to the slaves in the British West Indies not to seek emancipation?

Paul Foot argues that Wilberforce did not support the slave revolt in Haiti and disparaged its leader, Toussaint Louverture; while for CLR James, Wilberforce’s campaign to end the slave trade had less to do with moral righteousness and more to do with British economic and geopolitical interests.

Thus, James argues, having failed to seize France’s West Indian colonies by force, Pitt decided that the best way to undermine and challenge the French Empire in the Caribbean was by depriving the colonies of their workforce, the slaves which Britain merchants were largely responsible for supplying, and for this task Pitt turned to his old friend, William Wilberforce who, James says ironically, ‘had a great reputation, all the humanity, justice, stain on national character, etc, etc’ to serve the imperial purpose.

Toussaint Louverture: criticising a flawless human being

 

As leader of the slave revolt in San Domingue that led to the emancipation of the island’s slaves and successfully challenged not only the interests of the three main European empires in the region – the British, French and Spanish – but also consigned the racist trope that justified slavery – that Africans were racially inferior to Europeans – to the dustbin, it’s almost become an act of blasphemy to criticise Toussaint Louverture.

Thus, the French TV mini-series Toussaint Louverture (in French, above) portrays the great man as an almost flawless human being, an intelligent, moral, courageous visionary, whose downfall and demise – which came in a French jail, where he was transported for defying Napoleon Bonaparte’s attempt to reconquer San Domingue and re-establish slavery on the island – was also a result of his superior nature; his humanitarian desire to put an end to war on San Domingue – a war degenerating into massacre and counter-massacre – and his belief that his powers of persuasion, his French patriotism, his moral rectitude, his devotion to the Roman Catholic faith, would bring the French colonists to see reason.

Where there is criticism of Louverture, it comes from those, like CLR James, that blame him for a lack of revolutionary zeal and for not being as willing as his lieutenants – such as Hyacinthe Moise (who Louverture had executed for taking part in massacres of white colonists) and Jean-Jaques Dessalines – to finish with the white presence on San Domingue and to seek complete independence from France: aims Louverture resisted because he thought Napoleon could not seriously believe that slavery could be reintroduced to island; that the white colonists – even if they were supporters of the ancien regime – were the economic backbone of the island, had skills and expertise the country needed; and that the thirst for revenge behind the anti-white massacres committed by his followers was immoral.

As James says: ‘Toussaint could not believe that the French ruling class would be so depraved, so lost to all sense of de­cency, as to try to restore slavery. His grasp of politics led him to make all preparations, but he could not admit to himself and to his people that it was easier to find de­cency, gratitude, justice, and humanity in a cage of starv­ing tigers than in the councils of imperialism.’

Rather than trying to convince Bonaparte that slavery on the island could not be reconstituted and that he could be trusted to govern the colony with justice and moderation, James says Louverture should have realised that the French metropolis was never going to accept the rebel leader’s role in running San Domingue or the elevation of the former slave class to rulers or co-rulers of the island. Having revolted a decade earlier asserting ‘liberty or death’, the African former slaves were now in a predicament where this was no longer a slogan but the choice Napoleon’s colonial vision was presenting them with.

Lydia Bailey: race, colonialism and slavery come to Hollywood

 

 

Lydia Bailey is an interesting film, more interesting than expected, somewhat ahead of its time for 1952 even though, for the modern viewer, there are elements of it which stick in the throat. 

The film is set during the French attempt to reconquer the island of San Domingue (the San Domingue expedition,1801-1803), which, since 1793, had been in the hands of slave rebels led by Toussaint Louverture. 

Under the leadership of Louveture, the revolutionaries had ended slavery on the island, achieved semi-independence from metropolitan France, and seen off Spanish and British attempts to take over. 

In the film, lawyer Albion Hamlin (played by Dale Robertson) is sent from Baltimore to San Domingue to secure the signature of Lydia Bailey (played by Anne Francis) so that her recently deceased American father’s legal affairs can be put in order. 

The naive Hamlin is warned that his arrival on the island couldn’t have come at a worse time, with 30,000 French troops having just been despatched by Napoleon to end black emancipation and their self-rule experiment – ironically inspired by the ideas of the French revolution – and restore full colonial rule over the island. 

With the arrival of French troops imminent, there is ferment among the white colonists, eager to restore their pre-revolution privileges, and among blacks, ready to fight tooth and nail to preserve their freedom. 

Hamlin falls in with King Dick (the star of the film, played by William Marshall), a super-smart and brave Louveture loyalist, interested in the manoeuvrings of Lydia Bailey’s French fiancé, the slippery Colonel Gabriel D’Autremont (played by Adeline de Walt Reynolds). To survive in the febrile political and racial atmosphere, Hamlin has to pass off as a black man, while Lydia Bailey has to pass herself off as a black woman. 

The film is generous to the plight of the black rebels led by Louverture – portrayed (by Ken Renard) as a dignified and intelligent statesman (there is reference to him as Haiti’s George Washington). 

Even the more bloodthirsty Maroons, whose motivations are shown as less noble than the Louveture rebels, have their hatred of whites justified by Hamlin, when he remarks: ‘If I were a native today whose liberty was threatened by Napoleon’s cut-throats I’d kill every white man I could lay hands on.’ 

Not that it is inaccurate to inject into the Haitian revolution an element of race war. 

In his classic Black Jacobins, CLR James notes that not only was Napoleon partly motivated by a hatred of blacks – ‘I am in favour of the whites because I am white’ – and outraged by the African rebels’ entreaties to be seen as having the same inalienable rights as Europeans; but also that the slave rebels carried out indiscriminate massacres of whites, both as blind acts of vengeance for the sadistic indignities the island’s white ruling class subjected them to during bondage and to make sure that the white dream of resurrecting the slave regime on the island could never materialise. 

For the film, the villains are the French, portrayed as decadent, deceitful and depraved. It’s a typical Hollywood depiction of Europeans, though, of course, as we watch the film we can’t help but wonder at the hypocrisy of having an American – from Maryland, if you will, a quintessential plantation colony and slave society – joining a slave revolt and singing the praises of the rebels. 

We assume director Jean Negulesco – a Romanian educated in France, (and responsible for some of the most notable film noirs, including The Mask of Dimitrios, Road House, Nobody Lives Forever) – had in mind during the making of the film American, not European attitudes towards race and racial justice but the brewing uprising of African Americans, whose struggles for rights and dignity was a continuation of the struggle Louveture epitomised 150 years earlier.

Dial 1119: film noir misanthropy

 

It’s not unusual to find in a film noir a depiction of post-war America as a place of cynicism, brutality and ruthless self-interest. 

It’s in the nature of the genre to follow our hero as he (and sometimes she) navigates such a world while trying to hold on to his sense of right over wrong, good over evil, battling against his moral, spiritual or physical death. 

What is rare is a film noir in which there exists no opportunity for redemption, where there is no chance for the protagonists to show their better side or find an escape from a corrupt society and the corruption of those who inhabit it. 

Dial 1119 is such a film. 

The plot involves a psychopathic killer, Gunther Wyckoff, who has been released early from the insane asylum and makes straight for the psychiatrist who he believes got him locked up. The madman embarks on a killing spree before holing up in a neighbourhood bar. There, he is recognised, but before the bartender has a chance to alert the police, the killer’s suspicions are aroused and he shoots his would-be betrayer in the back. 

The sounds of gunfire bring the police, too late to arrest the murderer as he barricades himself inside the bar and takes hostage an assortment of customers and staff. 

What follows is not heroic camaraderie among the hostages or crafty work by the police to end the siege without further bloodshed, but a fulsome display of misanthropy – human idiocy, hysteria and selfishness – as each character under duress unravels and shows us the ugliest versions of themselves. 

Thus we have Freddy (played by Virginia Field), the ageing lush; Helen (played by Andrea King), the jittery woman worried that her life is rushing by and her chances of romance and marriage are diminishing; Skip (played by Keefe Brasselle), the young barman, who believes the fact that his wife is in hospital about to have a baby should trump the predicament he and the others find himself in; Harrison D. Barnes (played by James Bell), the verbose newspaper man, who has quit the job he hates for the hundredth time only to find himself right in the middle of the biggest story of his career; Earl (played by Leon Ames), a sleazy, middle-aged salesman hitting on Helen; Dr John Faron (played by Sam Levene), the psychiatrist who believes he can rationalise with the insane gunman; and Captain Henry Keiver  (played by Richard Rober), the gung-ho cop who wants to storm the bar and do what should have been done to Wyckoff when he first came to the attention of the police, before do-gooding psychiatrists got involved.

The Irishman, Jean Gabin and Céline

In discussing the making of his elegiac masterpiece The Irishman, Martin Scorsese tells Spike Lee of the films he screened for Robert De Niro to prepare the actor for his role of Frank Sheehan, the eponymous mob hitman.

The films Scorsese mentions are French crime and gangster films of the 1950s and 1960s and are Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Doulos and Le deuxième souffle (both starring Jean-Paul Belmondo); Jules Dassin’s Riffifi (starring Jean Savais); and Jacques Becker’s Touchez pas au grisbi.

Regarding Touchez pas au grisbi, Scorsese says: 

‘I showed a film called Touchez pas au grisbi, which means “Don’t touch the loot”, which is a very famous early ’50s French gangster film with Jean Gabin. When I was shooting [Robert De Niro] in Casino I felt he was taking on the stature of a late-to-middle-age Gabin. He had a lot of power to him but he had a serenity to him too and a coolness. Bob I felt was getting that way in Casino. Grisbi has a similar [theme] in the sense that they are older gangsters in Paris and they are getting involved in stuff they don’t want to get involved with. It’s really the tone, but I like the Gabin feeling of his deportment, how he presented himself.’

This comparison between Gabin and De Niro is a wonderful insight from Scorsese that changes the way we look at Frank Sheehan and De Niro’s depiction of him. 

Gabin is, of course, the greatest actor of French cinema. His reputation was established in films of the 1930s poetic realism movement – Jean Renoir’s The Lower Depths (based on the Maxim Gorky play); La Grande Illusion; and La Bete Humaine; Julien Duvivier’s Pépe le Moko; and Marcel Carné’s Le Jour se Léve – before the Nazi occupation of France forced him into Hollywood exile.

Gabin made two films in Hollywood.

In Moontide (1942), he plays Bobo, a dock worker prone to drunken violence who wanders the seedy ports of California taking employment when and where he can. One night, he saves a woman (Ida Lupino) from drowning herself. At first, he is non-plussed by his heroism, but then falls in love with the would-be suicide. Bobo begins to doubt his aimless drifting and contemplates the virtues of a domestic life. Will Bobo’s buddy, who has shared his gypsy life and taken advantage of Bobo’s self-loathing and belief that he needs a buffer to prevent his brutal temper from getting him into trouble, allow Bobo to escape his influence and make a better life for himself?

Moontide bridges French poetic realism with American film noir, though this is not a drama of the city but of the sea, set amid the shacks, barges and dives of San Pablo bay. But the film is a failure. It lacks tension, is grim to the point of depressing – more grim noir than film noir – and suffers from some incredulous plotting. It would have been interesting to see what Fritz Lang – who left the film early on because of a conflict with Gabin over the Frenchman’s affair with Marlene Dietrich, who Lang was also involved with – would have done with the material.

Gabin’s second Hollywood film, The Imposter (1944), is more successful. Directed by fellow-exile Julien Duvivier, Gabin gives an intense and restrained performance as a convicted murderer (Clement) about to be guillotined for his crime. A priest accompanies Clement to his execution imploring the sneering prisoner to accept God and open the way for his salvation only for bombs to fall from the sky like thunderbolts from Zeus as the Nazis invade France. The bombs destroy the prison, massacre the executioners and God’s apologist and the criminal escapes.

A liberated Clement stumbles across a ragtag of French soldiers retreating south from the invading German army. The truck they are travelling in is strafed by German planes. Again, Clement is unscathed by the attack and takes the opportunity to rob one of the killed soldiers of his uniform and identity papers. As Lt Maurice LaFarge, Clement is able to escape France and find obscurity among the Free French Forces in French Equatorial Africa. Gradually, Clement’s cynicism and dedication to self-preservation at all costs is replaced by a sense of belonging and loyalty to the men who have been entrusted to his command, men who come to adore their leader’s stoicism and fearlessness in the face of adversity. Will Clement be allowed to continue with his new identity as Lt LaFarge and appreciation of life or will it be revealed that he is an imposter, a fraud, a murderer masquerading as a hero?

Clement’s anarchic loathing for authority, for country, his tendency to individualism and self-reliance to the point of misanthropy, could come from Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s classic anti-war, anti-flag novel, Journey to the End of the Night (1932).

‘People, countries, and objects all end up as smells.’

‘I had no great opinion of myself and no ambition, all I wanted was a chance to breathe and to eat a little better.’

Céline and Journey to the End of the Night are mentioned by Scorsese to Lee as one of the novels that informed his view of The Irishman.

‘There’s a quote towards the end [of the novel] where the main character gets killed. He’s talking with his girlfriend. She says, “What happened to you?: He says, “What happened to me is a whole life has happened to me”, and she shoots him. It’s a tough book. It’s ugly. When he says that, it hit me, he’s right. A whole life. Something I can never explain to you. You had to live it with me. You had to be me. That’s what we were trying to go for in the film.’

* Gabin didn’t take to Hollywood and its rigid studio system. Like Clement, he decided to fight for his country and left to join the Free French Forces. He fought in North Africa and then was part of the French 2nd Armoured Division that liberated Paris after D-Day.

Shock Corridor: American society going mad

In Samuel Fuller’s Shock Corridor, Johnny Barrett is a brilliant journalist who feigns sexual perversion to get committed to a lunatic asylum where a murder has been committed, which he wants to solve and win the Pulitzer Prize.

Once inside the mental home, Barrett ingratiates himself with the three witnesses to the crime – an operatic uxoricide; a black Klansman; and a genius nuclear physicist who has regressed to childhood to escape the guilt over his catastrophic discoveries – and cracks the case but only at the expense of cracking up himself.

The film begins and ends with the famous quote from Euripides – ‘whom God wishes to destroy, He first makes mad’ – and Fuller seems well versed in Greek tragedy.

Johnny Barrett is like Oedipus, a man with a brilliant intellect, supremely confident of himself and his mental powers, trying to track down a murderer, to uncover the truth of a horrible crime, only to succumb to insanity and ruin.

Barrett like Oedipus fails to realise the dangers inherent in the obsessive pursuit and acquisition of knowledge; is oblivious to the limits of self-knowledge (know thyself/gnothi seauton does not mean acquire self-mastery but know the limitations of human nature); and aspires to the truth not for its own sake, or for the love of enquiry, but to subdue the truth and satisfy his ego.

Christopher Rocco and Bernard Knox say that, in the figure of Oedipus, Sophocles is satirising Periclean/imperial Athens – Oedipus tyrannos as Athens tyrannos – and warning of the perils for individuals and cities in love with power:

‘Oedipus embodies the splendor and power of Athens: his attempt to assert dominion over nature and his unquenchable drive for human mastery; his forcefulness of purpose, his impatience, decisiveness, and daring, bordering on recklessness; his intoxication with his own accomplishments, his liberation from the constraints of all traditional pieties; his restlessness, innovation, and ingenuity; his designs that are swift alike in conception and execution, all recall the “fierce creative energy, the uncompromising logic, the initiative and daring which brought Athens to the pinnacle of worldly power.”’

Not only do Oedipus’ attributes recall Athens, but they also recall America, and Fuller, too, in Shock Corridor is interested in unveiling America tyrannos and showing us a hubristic society, prone to self-destruction and insanity.

House of Strangers: Philip Yordan and tragic mythology

House of Strangers is an American film noir from 1949. Thematically and stylistically the film is a precursor to The Godfather. The protagonist in House of Strangers is Max Monetti – played by Richard Conte – the smartest and toughest of the four sons that belong to successful immigrant banker, Gino Monetti, played by Edward G. Robinson. Conte later portrayed Don Barzini in The Godfather but, in his heyday (1940s and 1950s), Conte specialised in depicting tough, working-class, immigrant heroes – Conte himself was the son of Italian immigrants. Notably, Conte played Nick Garcos in Jules Dassin's Thieves' Highway (1949) based on A.I. Bezzerides' classic crime novel Thieves' Market.

The plot of House of Strangers revolves around the hatred of three of the sons for their overbearing father and the misplaced loyalty that Max shows the old man that lands Max in prison for seven years, coming out of which he vows revenge on his less scrupulous siblings, who've since taken over their father's business, declaring: 'Vengeance is a rare wine. A joy divine; says the Arab. And I'm gonna get drunk on it.'

Revenge is, of course, a major theme in Greek classical culture, which regarded it as a demonstration of hubris, a move towards becoming apolis, that is someone who 'exits from the political community of men (and the concrete result cannot but be death, flight, or exile)' [Castoriadis, Cornelius: Aeschylean Anthropogony and Sophoclean Self-Creation].

These themes of revenge, hubris and becoming apolis are often present in the best film noirs and Westerns of the 1940s and 1950s, which sometimes allow the hero to accept the strictures of civilised society and rejoin it, and sometimes reveal that there's no way back for him into society and 'death, flight or exile' is all he can expect.

The screenplay for House of Strangers was written by Philip Yordan, who penned a number of significant film noirs – House of Strangers, The Chase, Edge of Doom, The Big Combo, Detective Story – and Westerns – Broken Lance, Johnny Guitar, The Last Frontier, Day of the Outlaw, The Man from Laramie – in this period. Yordan admitted the influence of Greek tragedy in his work:

'I detest a certain type of modern would-be "hero", people who are obsessed only by getting their daily bread. I have tried to react against this petty bourgeois mentality and attempted to discover again the purity of the heroes of classical tragedy. I have always wanted to re-create a tragic mythology, giving a large role to destiny, solitude, nobility.'