(FULL DISCLOSURE: My parents, Communist Party members, were blacklisted out of show biz in L.A. at this time. I'm 61: I was there and I lived through those years. The others theorize, I know. )
That this film was a box office flop is not only predictable---it was inevitable. Noir as a style & theme with b.o. legs had a 3-year run, '45-'46-'47, the way horror films did '31-'32-'33. The film school professors have tried to blame forces of reactionary social repression---the Production Code in '33, HUAC in '48. These events were but tombstones for film cycles that had run out steam at the box office.
In my time working in movie theaters (hardtop & drive-in) '60s-70s, I saw many cycles come and go, most in 3 years: *Spaghetti westerns *Kung Fu *Biker *Drugs as "cool" *Trucker/hot car/backwoods *Blaxploitation *Euro heist
That's the way the cookie crumbles in the movie biz; audiences are fickle. No more complicated than that.
It is emblematic of the delusional university apparatus that the BUSINESS aspect of film-making---THE DOMINANT element---is ignored in books on "film noir". After all, these characters not only have no private sector work history, they view business the same as FOE---*Capitalism is a racket*. That's not something Americans will pay to see, and MGM gave this film "the big build-up": I saw the '48 press-book.
It is even more telling that that these professors, lefties all, only quote reviews and coverage in the generic press but NEVER EVER feature the "trades"--- publications catering to exhibitors such as Box office, MOTION PICTURE EXHIBITOR, MOTION PICTURE HERALD, etc. Coverage was from the theater operator's viewpoint---a world away from film school fantasists.
These film school wackos only interview the creative types and NEVER the studio exec in charge of Exhibitor Relations---the man who reports to the top on b.o. performance. They NEVER interview the producers, as if these films somehow were made with money from Santa Claus. They never banked a box-office take or met a payroll or dealt with distributors---they never even ran a lemonade stand as kids.
FOE was a flop because Americans of the post-WWII era took strong exception to those who believed to their last nerve that America would be better off as a Communist police state. Americans are funny that way: we got rid of one tyranny in 1776 and weren't about to lie down for another.
FOE is a fine production defeated by its view of American business as a criminal conspiracy--- putting the JG character's law firm on Wall Street is too crude, typical lefty device. And the sickeningly sanctimonious Beatrice Pearson character is typical Group Theater/1930s---the "little people" waif, a type which disfigured drama right into the 1960s. Many actors sank themselves with this type (Salome Jens comes to mind), even many major stars tried it on: Natalie Wood, for instance.
The blacklistees, their acolytes and the film-school nuts have tried to paint a picture of the blacklistees abrupt demise as the result of "hysteria". That they'd say this shows how clueless they are, and remain, about the country of their birth.
There was NO "hysteria": it was a foregone conclusion among wide-awake grown-ups that communism=enslavement, a view verified, abundantly, by the historical record. But they weren't "hysterical" about it---they pulled the plug on the Left and moved on without a backward glance or second thought.
And what was there to think about? The equation was communism=death just as nazism=death, and Americans had had it with these police state isms. The U.S.A. had the body count to point to erasing the Nazis and weren't up for a rerun fighting another ism. Which they did anyway in Korea.
So yeah, the lefties got stepped on, hard, and kicked to the curb, right into the gutter. It's the blacklistees who were hysterical---they'd hung themselves on a meat hook, HUAC just provided the footstool.
FOE's star John Garfield, the finest actor of his generation committed seppukku at his HUAC hearing saying he wouldn't say anything about his "friends".
NOW HEAR THIS: Political extremists have NO friends, only accomplices and co- conspirators. And J.G. had been snitched off by his good "friends": HUAC knew everything already anyway.
All apolitical people, like me(70% of any population) know this---Political extremists at BOTH ends of the political spectrum, right OR left, meet in the SAME PLACE: Secret police dungeons, barbed wire camps, mass graves. Only partisans of either ism see a difference, those of us outside the political nut ward see only bloody devastation. This was the future envisioned by the blacklistees---"friendship" had nothing to do with it.
The blacklistees weren't believed because they simply weren't credible. They married a political philosophy that was nothing but lies and were caught out. They wanted it BOTH ways: to live the Hollywood high life while slandering the nation that made it possible. OF COURSE America reacted with revulsion and rejected them, harshly.
That the blacklistees are romanticized by the film school apparatus merely shows the enduring resilience of the leftist lie.
My parents were party members, knew Garfield as "Julie", and I grew up hearing them & their CP buddies spout the party line. I loved my mom & dad in life and more than ever since their death, in '83. I miss my parents terribly---every day. They gave me the internal resources to survive, endure and even triumph. And because I had the BEST mom & dad it baffled and infuriated me that they were so clueless, so lacking in self awareness when it came to the Party. They were true police state cheerleaders and I am their son.
>>>TO BE CONTINUED under "Nobody Lives Forever", "Postman Always Rings Twice", "Fallen Sparrow", and "The John Garfield Story". Also posts in "Asphalt Jungle", "Nightmare Alley" deal with the blacklist, and films known as "noir".
