The war was over, soldiers were returning to civilian life, and governments were beginning to rebuild. Beneath the euphoria, though, the Cold War was gathering steam, and a peculiar mood–a mix of relief, ennui, and alienation–was taking hold in the minds of survivors. Out of this cauldron of emotions came film noir, which critic Nicholas Christopher has called “the dark mirror reflecting the dark underside of American urban life.” That noir sensibility not only imbued many films and novels created in the postwar years, but it also continues to fascinate contemporary artists, who keep returning to the late 1940s as a setting rich in the ambiguities that lurk in the gap between external prosperity and internal despair.
That disconnect was much more apparent in affluent America than it was in the bombed-out moonscape of late-1940s Europe, but noir thrives as well in the rubble of destroyed buildings as it does in the neon-lit naked city. Novelist Joseph Kanon has made a fine career out of exploring the postwar mood on both sides of the Atlantic. He did so most notably in The Good German (2001), in which an American journalist returns to Berlin to cover the Potsdam Conference in late 1945, hoping to find the German girl he left behind. What he finds as well is a struggle between Americans and Russians to snatch German rocket scientists. What Carol Reed’s film The Third Man did for postwar Vienna, Kanon’s superb novel does for Berlin in the same period, combining a labyrinthine thriller plot with an involving love story that rises, phoenix-like, from the post-apocalyptic landscape.
In Stardust, set in 1946 Hollywood, Kanon shows he’s equally adept at finding noirish despair among the palm trees. Ben Collier, still in the army, arrives in Los Angeles to oversee a documentary on the death camps and to attend to his brother, in a coma after either an accident or a suicide attempt. Soon Collier is dealing with labor unrest on movie sets and the seeds of what will soon be the McCarthy era. Like James Ellroy’s postwar Hollywood novels, Kanon’s work proves once again that the wounds of war fester even where the bombs don’t fall.
But it continues to be in the postwar urban landscape of the American industrial city where noir finds its true breeding ground. Steve Monroe’s too-little-known ’46, Chicago (2002) is a perfect example. Postwar malaise weighs heavily on the shoulders of Gus Carson, who, while he isn’t the dirty cop he was before the war, still can’t stay out of trouble. In the wrong brothel at the wrong time, he intercedes when a gunman shoots up the place, getting himself suspended in the process and eventually landing the role of fall guy for a cabal of crooked politicians. The plot is prototypical noir—poor sap gets played for a loser and attempts to fight bac–but it’s the mood that holds us entranced. The conclusion isn’t as dark as it probably should be, but Monroe hits all the blue notes perfectly.
It’s unlikely we’ll ever see another year like 1946. In this century, our wars never end.
BILL OTT is editor and publisher of Booklist magazine.