If the thesis of populism and the jeremiad is accepted for the hard-boiled novel and film noir, a great consistency in themes treated from the end of the 1920s through to the Cold War can be noted.44 The overly vast systems reacted against include the justice system and the police as well as the mafia, unions, nazi networks within the country and, later, communists: all of them are felt to threaten free enterprise and free competition. A film like Racket Busters (Lloyd Bacon, 1938) is symptomatic in this respect: Bogart plays a racketeer who organizes strikes whilst George Brent plays a small shopkeeper who wants to keep his independence.45 The essential point here is not whether it is a question of detective films, gangster films, or propaganda films. The point in common must be that it is always a question of a fight to the death between an individual and a network that threatens fundamental freedoms (among which that of commerce is not, in this system, the least important). Thenceforth it is no longer necessary to isolate the private detective from his immediate cousins, whose position and function he shares. He is no different from the lawyer of the 1930s who, tempted by the easy money held out by a gangster in need of his services, ends up turning against his employer in the name of morality in order to bring about the triumph of the law: the best example is doubtless The Mouthpiece (Elliot Nugent and James Flood, 1932), with Warren William in the main role (an actor who, by the internal logic of events, is to be found in the second version of The Maltese Falcon). Nor is he different from the journalist who exposes a conspiracy or an abuse of power (The Big Clock, John Farrow, 1948), the isolated polIceman who fights alone against all (The Big Heat, Fritz Lang, 1953), or the victim who has to make his own way out of the trap in which he has got himself caught (Double Indemnity, Billy Wilder, 1944). On a small or on a grand scale, the idea is that of the 'combo' dominating and exerting its influence, it being understood that the combo is undemocratic and (it is the same thing) un-American. It can, then, be seen that paranoia is not an American malediction consequent upon some unspecified spell cast over the whole country, that would then allow a magical explanation of film noir: on the contrary, it is a matter of a contradiction inherent in the economic and political system of the United States, in which the citizen must constantly be reassured of his rights in the face of economic concentrations and federal power, the inhabitant of the small town in the face of the big city, the wage-earner in the face of the rich. The advent of the private detective in its modern American form at the moment of the Depression indicates the urgency with which these contradictions pressed at that time. In the films of the 1950s, traces of these contradictions can still be found in the form of the grotesque and the poor (often they are one and the same, as in The Enforcer, Windust-Walsh, 1950), who help to situate the hero at an equal distance from the proletarians and those living in misery, on the one hand, and, on the other, from the rich bourgeoisie, these two extremes being presented as two symmetrical traps into which he risks falling. We may then understand that film criticism repeats the gesture of the films noirs themselves, for in granting them the status of a Hollywood genre, it sees the films as playing the same role in the Hollywood system as the private detective plays in American society.