Acts of Violence: The World War II Veteran Private-Eye Movie as an Ideological Crime Series

Abstract

According to Gramsci, serial tales are ‘a powerful factor in the formation of the mentality and morality of the people’. ‘The serial novel’, he suggests, ‘is a real way of day-dreaming’ whose heroes ‘enter into the intellectual life of the people […] and acquire the validity of historical figures’ (1991, 34, 349–50). The cultural power Gramsci attaches to fiction might be claimed with even more authority for film. During and immediately after World War II average weekly cinema attendance in the US reached an all-time high: between 1941 and 1945 it numbered 85 million; between 1946 and 1948, 90 million (Schatz 1999, 462). From 1944 onwards, the figure of the war veteran appeared as protagonist in increasing numbers of films watched by huge audiences. Demobilized servicemen and women were leading characters in films of all genres, but it was in a cycle of dark, violent private-eye crime thrillers released between 1945 and 1949 that the returning veteran most vividly entered the popular imaginary, taking on the validity — and the complexity — of Gramsci’s ‘historical figure’.¹