Just watched the Humphrey Bogart movie, “Knock on Any Door ” (1949).
It was an example of the many movies Hollywood started putting out after World War II that today would be called “woke.”
Bogart not only starred in it, he formed a company called Santana Productions to actually make the film. In doing so, he infuriated the big shot Hollywood studio heads like Harry Cohn at Columbia, Adolph Zukor and Barney Balaban at Paramount, and Darryl F. Zanuck at 20th Century-Fox who were scared to death that other major movie stars would start forming their own production companies and weaken their iron grip on the industry.
Hollywood had flirted with liberal, socially-conscious movies in the 1930s, during the Great Depression. Before the War, audiences saw “message” movies like “Dead End,” “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,” “Our Daily Bread,” and the most left-leaning, almost socialist of all, “The Grapes of Wrath.” Those movies were often called “populist,” back when the term meant something other than adoration and fealty for a bronzed, combed-over oaf. Hollywood became, more or less, a propaganda arm of the US government during the War and then, once the Axis Powers had been defeated, began inching its way back to throwing shade at the inequities and oppressions of capitalist America.
“Knock on Any Door” was the story of a first-generation Italian-American hood named Nick Romano (John Derek in his first screen role). He’s been running afoul of the law since he was a teenager and has consistently made the wrong decisions in his life. Then one night, after a cop has been shot and killed point blank in a dark alley, all the known hoods, punks, reprobates, smart alecks, and hooligans are rounded up. The cops decide one of them, Nick Romano, was the killer.
Panicky, he reaches out to a lawyer named Andrew Morton (Bogart). Morton grew up in the same neighborhood Romano did but resisted temptations and turned himself into a respected attorney. He believes Nick Romano when the young man swears he didn’t kill the cop and goes on to defend him at trial. Morton tells the story, in flashbacks, of how an innocent kid could be turned into a delinquent when forced to grow up in abject poverty, where the cops assume the worst about him, where jobs are scarce even for people with clean records, and where toughs have money cars, and nice clothes.
The “message” of the film is it’s society’s fault young guys go bad. Nicholas Ray directed “Knock on Any Door” and revisited the theme, in part, six years later with “Rebel Without a Cause.”
It’s funny to watch how some of these themes evolved through the years in Hollywood movies. In the 1960s and ’70s, starting with “Bonnie and Clyde” and “Easy Rider,” criminals became heroes (or anti-heroes). Then, by the 1980s, White people, dipping their toes into “bad” neighborhoods and “rescuing” punks and dropouts from their fate became so prevalent the trend was turned into a punchline.
Now, of course, socially conscious movies are passé. There are only Marvel superhero movies and money-losers. And on television, for the last couple of decades-plus, bad guys, criminals like Tony Soprano, Walter White, Dexter Morgan, Tommy Shelby, Nucky Thompson, and Dwight Manfredi have become male role models. You doubt me? Try reading the comments under YouTube clips from those shows.
In any case, back to “Knock on Any Door.” It was heavy-handed and offered facile observations about life in the slums. Nevertheless, I loved it because it tried to delve into the complexities of our Greatest Country on the Face of the Earth. It didn’t have to be right. It just had to try.
Now, the movie was based on the 1947 novel of the same name written by newspaperman Willard Motley. He wrote a column called “Bud Says,” for children, using the pen name Bud Billiken.
Throughout my childhood, every August there’d be a big shebang on the South Side of Chicago called the Bud Billiken Back-to-School Parade. It celebrated the end of summer vacation and featured floats, marching bands, politicians wearing sashes, choreographed majorettes, huge banners for local businesses, and was always telecast live on a Saturday morning on WGN.
All the marchers in the parade were Black. As was Bud Billiken. As was Willard Motley. The newspaper he qwrote the column for, the Chicago Defender, was the leading Black daily in America.
“Knock on Any Door” was only the second major motion picture ever based on a novel written by a Black person. I don’t know of the novel was similarly heavy-handed and offered facile takes on life in the slums because I haven’t read it. Motley had founded the Hull House magazine and was part of FDR’s Federal Writers Project so I’ll bet his book was more nuanced and penetrating. And I do know Hollywood had to make the characters White in order for the movie to be shown around the country.
It reminds me of how the murder victim in “Crossfire” (1947) had to be made a Jew and the evil to be overcome was anti-semitism when the book the movie was based on had a homosexual being beaten to death and the then-gay demimonde was explored.
We’ve come a long way since then.
I have to keep repeating that, otherwise I’d get awfully depressed reading today’s headlines.