Dangerous Work: Cy Endfield, Film Noir, and the Blacklist

After a precredit prologue that engulfs the viewer in a mood of apocalyptic dread, the film opens with Howard Tyler (Frank Lovejoy) returning to the fictional suburb of Santa Sierra from a fruitless trip in search of a job. Home is a cramped little bungalow behind a flimsy wire fence, where he is met by his whiny young son demanding a quarter to go to a baseball game (“All the other kids are goin’!”) and his pregnant wife reminding him of the money they owe for groceries. A bartender in a bowling alley sneers at Howard when he objects to being served a more expensive imported beer. His shame and desperation set him up to fall for the line offered by Jerry (Lloyd Bridges), a preening, manic petty criminal he meets at the bowling alley. Jerry flaunts his muscles and cash and boasts of his sexual conquests, before inviting Howard to drive the getaway car for his robberies of gas stations and liquor stores. The law-abiding everyman hesitates only for a moment before signing on.

His family is elated by their sudden prosperity, which he explains with a lie about a night-shift job. Soon he’s buying shoes for his wife and toy guns for his kid with hot money, guzzling booze to dull the guilt and stress of his outlaw life. In a daze, he goes along with Jerry’s plan to kidnap a wealthy young man for ransom, then watches in horror as his partner brutally murders their trussed victim—first erupting in envy and resentment as he fingers the man’s tailor-made suit. When Howard comes home afterward, his wife wakes up and tells him about a dream she was having: she had the baby, and this time it didn’t hurt at all. “I got right up out of the hospital and took her shopping. I was buying her a pinafore.” Even in her dreams she is a consumer, conflating material goods with the fantasy of a painless life. As Howard psychologically unravels, the everyday world of diners, nightclubs, and lonely manicurists becomes a grotesque phantasmagoria.

In Lang’s Fury, the target of an attempted lynching is an innocent man. (Ditto in Losey’s The Lawless, about a racist riot sparked by a Mexican migrant being falsely accused of assault.) Pagano and Endfield made the tougher choice to show the full horror of lynching even when the victims are guilty. Filmed in the brutal heat of Phoenix, Arizona, using college students and what Endfield described as “Saturday-night drunks” as extras, the film’s climax is harrowing. The crowd surges and swirls like a firestorm; its howl of bloodthirsty joy is unforgettable.

Audiences and critics alike largely recoiled from the film, as though Endfield had burned the flag. After a private screening, an upset Joseph Cotten told the director, “Cy, we’ve both grown up in the same country, but I’m telling you, the America you know is not the America I know!”

Endfield realized that it was only a matter of time before he would be “named” and called to testify before HUAC. Like many others, he had drifted away from Communism, and left the party in 1948. He did not see why he should sacrifice his career, just as it was taking off, for a cause he no longer believed in, and he considered cooperating with the committee. However, he later recalled that when he was offered the chance to meet with FBI agents and declare his willingness to name names, he could not overcome the “personal revulsion” he felt at the “seediness” of this action. Instead, in December 1951 he bought a one-way ticket to England. Even there, the first films he directed—mostly low-budget crime thrillers—were credited to “Charles De Lautour,” “Hugh Raker,” and then “C. Raker Endfield” (Raker was his mother’s maiden name), since his name on a film would preclude its distribution in the United States. Not until 1961 would he be credited as “Cy Endfield.”

Endfield and his fellow blacklist exiles—among them Joseph Losey, Jules Dassin, and John Berry—struggled to rebuild their careers and lives abroad. Losey, who later pronounced his blacklisting a blessing in disguise because it got him out of Hollywood, was perhaps the best known of the filmmakers who settled in England. He and Endfield shared a fruitful association with the actor Stanley Baker, who appeared in four films for Losey and six for Endfield (including his biggest success, Zulu [1964], which Baker coproduced). The son of a Welsh coal miner, Baker led the way for a new generation of British movie stars who defiantly flaunted their proletarian, regional identities. It seems no accident that his career owed so much to left-wing American directors who brought an outside eye to Britain’s class system and the cultural upheaval of the postwar era. Baker’s first role for Endfield, in Child in the House (1956), gave him a break from action-movie and tough-guy typecasting, as a fugitive criminal redeemingly devoted to his young daughter. As Tom Yately in Hell Drivers, Baker has a quiet, bruised wariness, his rugged force restrained by memories of prison and the people he has hurt.

He moves through surroundings even bleaker than those in The Sound of Fury: gravel pits, quarries, grimy garages, dingy rooming houses, and raw, damp English weather. Endfield, who cowrote the script with John Kruse, said that he was thinking about Warner Bros. movies from the thirties and forties about men doing dangerous blue-collar jobs—but that in those films the jobs tended to be just backdrops to dramatic stories, while he wanted to focus on the work itself. There is the usual love triangle in Hell Drivers, with two male friends torn when a woman comes between them, but it is very much a sideshow. (The woman in question is played by a spirited and sexy Peggy Cummins, whose greatest role, in Gun Crazy [1950], was written by the blacklisted Trumbo.)

When Tom comes to work at Hawletts, a company that employs drivers to haul gravel over short distances, we learn exactly how many shillings they earn per load and how many loads they are expected to complete in a day. We get to know the roads, the machines, the sounds and textures of this world—you can all but smell the grit and asphalt and petrol, the grease in the “pull-in” where the drivers all eat. “There have been a lot of dramas on the rarified psychological plane,” Endfield said. “But with the survival jobs, the basic jobs, the contact with reality is reduced to simple, basic terms. And that is essentially cinematic.”

It is not that Endfield’s films ignore psychology, but that they express it through physicality and action. He excelled at capturing the dynamics of groups under pressure, and the tension between communities and individuals. Hawletts’ drivers form an insular society, and the only one who sees through their macho posturing is an outsider, an Italian former POW known as Gino (played by Czech British actor Herbert Lom), a sensitive and homesick stranger who befriends Tom. The others are caught up in endless joking, jockeying, and roughhousing, hazing newcomers and toadying to their self-appointed leader, Red (a terrifying Patrick McGoohan), the road foreman and “pace-setter.” The men’s huge, lumbering trucks, all blaring horns and grinding gears, are vehicles for their frantic need to be first in something, however petty. They compete to drive the most loads in a day, unaware that that they are colluding in their own exploitation, risking their lives so that the corrupt management can skim off extra profits.

British reviewers fixated on Endfield’s Hollywood touch, praising (or occasionally chiding) the film for its American-style red-blooded action. Few seemed to notice that this visceral thrill ride was loaded with radical messages about how profit-driven systems use competition and illusory rewards to blind their victims. This was just the kind of film that the red-baiters in Congress and Hollywood had tried to stamp out. It still hits hard today, but Endfield was disappointed that the Rank Organization, in addition to cutting some of his favorite scenes (due at least in part to censorship), did not effectively push the film’s release in the United States. He was increasingly frustrated with his career prospects, and bitter about seeing good projects slip through his fingers while the film industry clandestinely—and hypocritically, he felt—employed blacklisted writers working under fronts. In 1958, he contacted HUAC, asserting his rejection of Communism and pleading for a chance to clear himself without naming names, an act for which he still felt “emotional repugnance.” The committee refused.

His experience spotlights one of the most poisonous aspects of the HUAC hearings and the blacklist. It was not enough to declare oneself anti-Communist; the only way to obtain a clean bill of health was to rat on your colleagues, performing a ritualistic act of informing as a show of submission. Those who refused faced not only blacklisting but FBI surveillance, the confiscation of their passports, and even jail time. Many decided the price was too high. In 1960, Endfield flew to Washington and testified, naming associates, in order to get off the blacklist. He reaped some reward, securing funding and distribution from Paramount for his largest-scale and most acclaimed film, Zulu, but never reestablished himself in Hollywood.

Those who reversed their initial resistance—among them Edward Dmytryk and Robert Rossen—often justified the choice by citing their disenchantment with Communism. Abraham Polonsky had an answer to this. He had likewise become a skeptic about the party yet still defied HUAC; while blacklisted, he wrote the scripts for Odds Against Tomorrow (1959) and numerous episodes of the educational television program You Are There. “To betray your friends is a moral crime,” Polonsky said. “Not to believe in something you believed before is an act of liberation. There is a difference between the two things.” Others warned against passing judgment. Reflecting on those affected by the blacklist, Trumbo insisted: “It will do no good to search for villains or heroes or saints or devils, because there were none.”

Film noir is finely and indelibly shaded with moral ambiguity; those who commit monstrous acts, like Howard Tyler, may not be monsters, and those determined to do right, like Tom Yately, may still cause harm. The enforcers of the blacklist relied on crude demonization, painting Communism as a force so evil and dangerous that battling it justified bullying, guilt-by-association, and suppression of free expression. We will never know what films weren’t made because artists were driven from the industry or frightened into silence. But the films we do have by blacklistees are warning flares that have lost none of their urgency, to their credit and to our shame.