Some Dead Peasant Policy Holders. From Capitalism: A Love Story (2009)

In the United States many large corporations take out secret ‘dead peasant’ or ‘dead janitor’ life insurance over the lives of rank-and-file workers for a tax-free payout on the death of an employee. Insurers have sold millions of these policies to companies such as Dow Chemical and others.  Michael Moore in his documentary film, Capitalism: A Love Story, recounts the story of one young middle-manager who died of cancer, and whose employer received a payout exceeding US$1.5 million. His widow learned of this when the payout letter was mailed to her by mistake.

In Moore’s film no-one was aware of the origin of the term ‘dead peasant’.  As I was watching the film, Nikolai Gogol’s 1842 novel, Dead Souls, came immedately to mind.  In Gogol’s novel, a savage social satire of pre-revolutionary Russia, the protagonist, Chichikov, an aspiring bourgeois con-artist, has hatched a get-rich scheme.  His plan is to ingratiate himself  with landowners and buy dead serfs, dead souls.

At the time the Russian government taxed landowners based on how many serfs they ‘owned’, as determined by the most recent census. As census were infrequent, landowners often had to pay taxes on dead serfs.

Once Chichikov had accumulated enough dead souls, his plan was to make massive borrowings against these phantom assets.

Sound familiar?  How about if we substitute sub-prime mortgages for dead serfs?

Similarly, at times of war, there is no shortage of criminals and the unscrupulous who will seek to line their own pockets through corruption and profiteering.

Two films noir I have reviewed here at FilmsNoir.Net use war racketeering as plot elements. In April last year there was Allotment Wives (1945), the story of a woman who uses her social status and ill-gotten wealth to front a bigamy racket where women marry multiple GIs during WW2 to skim the allotment support paid by the Defense Dept to spouses of men on active duty. Last week I looked at Ride the Pink Horse (1947), where a disillusioned war vet wants to blackmail a war racketeer using a check made out to a crooked govt. official signed by the hood.

In Ride the Pink Horse, the hood when cornered at the end tries to talk his way clear by appealing to the vet’s bitter resentments.  This spiel resonates just as strongly today and the argument has power because it is sadly still true:

Edited clip from Force of Evil (1948) directed by Abraham Polonsky,?and screenplay by Abraham Polonsky and Ira Wolfert from Wolfert’s novel “Tucker’s People”:

Extracted and edited from an article by Richard Teitelbaum at Bloomberg.com
Secret AIG Document Shows Goldman Sachs Minted Most Toxic CDOs:

“Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose… “

Universal International Pictures
Director: Robert Montgomery
Cinematography: Russell Metty
Cast:
Robert Montgomery as Lucky Gagin
Thomas Gomez (AAN) as Pancho
Wanda Hendrix as Pila
Andrea King as Marjorie Lundeen
Fred Clark as Frank Hugo
Art Smith as Bill Retz
Screenplay: Ben Hecht, Charles Lederer, and Joan Harrison
Based on the novel Ride the Pink Horse by Dorothy B. Hughes (New York, 1946)
Music: Frank Skinner

A bitter disillusioned WW2 vet, Lucky Gagin, arrives in a New Mexico town aiming to blackmail a high-stakes racketeer, and with the help of two locals and a federal agent, he finds more than he bargained for. From the wistfully up-beat Latino rhythm that accompanies the opening credits over a desert vista, you know this movie will take you places beyond noir. This is a film imbued with a deep humanity so rare and moving that you don’t want it to end – the final scene of departure is wrenchingly personal – ‘so long? ah is a sad word, but you make me happy if is not too long’.

The great script from Ben Hecht, elegant direction by star Robert Montgomery, and accomplished photography from DP Russell Metty, are suffused with an aching regret for the loss of a better simpler world, tempered with an idealism and optimistic faith in the integrity and wisdom of ordinary people .  The cast is very strong with impressive turns by all the major players. An 18-yo Wanda Hendrix is beguiling as a young peasant girl on her first visit to a big town, who attaches herself to Gagin, and Gomez is superb as Pancho, the poor merry-go-round operator who befriends Gagin.

They don’t make movies like this any more. As John Fawell says in his book , THE HIDDEN ART OF HOLLYWOOD: In Defense of the Studio Era Film (2008):  “Hollywood aimed at idealism, it’s true, but its idealism is subsumed under its larger aesthetic of understatement. The best Hollywood directors thought of idealism as they did of sex and violence, all potent ingredients that needed to be doled out carefully. And they had the sense that idealism, to be effective, had to give room to a certain degree of pessimism.” (p 111).

Blues in the Night (1941) … a very young Elia Kazan as a dizzy jazz clarinetist
Director  Anatole Litvak  |  DP  Ernest Haller

I Love Trouble (1948): Roseanne Murray as Fanny (uncredited) in her last bit part…

Laura (1944)

I recently started reading a ‘heavy’ tome by feminist academic Susan Felleman, Art in the Cinematic Imagination (University of Texas Press, 2006), and found her discussion of the portrait as a central motif  in certain films noir worth sharing.

“The portraits, too inert and non narrative to realistically inspire such identification within a realist scenario, threaten the viewer with awareness of the magic of the mimetic and narrative devices employed by the film itself to engage him or her. This is very much a danger in a number of movies in which the portrait assumes a more explicit role and is incorporated into narratives whose realism is strained by, if not abandoned to, psychological or supernatural treatment of mortal desire. In Otto Preminger’s Laura and Fritz Lang’s The Woman in the Window, both from 1944, the male protagonists fall in love with portraits of beautiful women. In Laura, it is ambiguous, at first, when Detective McPherson (Dana Andrews) falls asleep beneath the portrait of Laura (Gene Tierney)—his desire for which has been established—and then awakens to the ‘‘real’’ Laura, presumed dead, whether or not he is dreaming. This ambiguity is a function, as [scholar] Reynold Humphries has indicated, of the uncanny: ‘‘The irruption of Laura the woman into the privileged space of Laura the portrait is not just a question of a return from the dead but rather of a return of the repressed.’’   Humphries aptly relates this to the even more explicit scenario of The Woman in the Window, in which the entire narrative, stemming from Professor Wanley’s fascination with the portrait, is revealed—only finally—as a dream: a dream in which mortal terror and death are conceived as the inevitable outcome of his desire.

Film noir’s peculiar amalgam of sexual angst,morbidity, and the portrait may well find its apogee in another Fritz Lang film, Scarlet Street (1945), in the painfully ironic scene in which the defeated and dispossessed portraitist (Edward G.Robinson) witnesses the sale of what might be called his ‘‘self-portrait as femme fatale,’’ that is, the portrait Chris painted of Kitty ( Joan Bennett) that was exhibited as her self-portrait. The cadaverous image of the woman who stole his meager self-respect, along with the authorship of the painting, and whom he murdered in a fit of sexual jealousy, is borne, funereally, out of the gallery and past the painter, as he shuffles past in a schizophrenic oblivion. The pathological possibilities of mimesis and its subject-object confusions reach so fevered a pitch in Scarlet Street that it’s hard to imagine a sicker scenario…” (pp 17-18).

On reading this passage, the thought came to me, and I don’t claim that I am the first to have had this ‘revelation’,  that in Laura, Detective McPherson doesn’t actually wake-up to be greeted by the living Laura but dreams what he subconsciously desires – that Laura is not dead but alive.   To this ambiguity challenged by necromancy, add Felleman’s bizarre description of  “[his ]self-portrait as femme fatale”!

A gem that sparkles like the eyes of the hot dames that swagger, pout, smolder, and snap their high heels across the screen… I Love Trouble (1948): Hot-jive noir

Down city streets at night looking for love, or something like it. A squalid chance for momentary bliss.

Love or something like it.

Under the lurid glow of neon planets, in a firmament of gasolean fumes and hard luck.  The pavement meets my empty gaze and tiny stars of mica shine in an inverted gray sky. My shoes shuffle and drag me on to nowhere. This is my universe.  All the shadows are mine.  Not strangers nor intimate friends, but sordid extensions of my damned to hell soul.

The soft laughter of a woman somewhere off in another universe a stab to the heart.  Whispers and intimacy I ache for and never have.  For others.  Not for me the easy familiarity of a life worth living.  Somewhere not alone, not broken, not sad beyond sadness.

My shoes sill shuffle dragging me nowhere.