From Out of Town

Now on BBC News, it is time for From Out of Town.

For decades, our country has lived through the greatest jobs left in

the history of the world. You know it better than anybody in

Pennsylvania. Our factories were shuttered, our steel mills closed

down, and our jobs were stolen away and shipped far away. How did Donald

Trump pull off his surprise victory? He did it partly by appealing to the

feeling that across the USA, small towns have taken a battering. Main

street. There is plenty of room here. Room for the individual to

expand, to plan for himself and his children. The small towns of

America, where once life was good. The less densely populated the place

you lived, the more likely you were to back Trump for president. While

they celebrated in our nation's capital, there was little to

celebrate for struggling families all across our land. Washington

versus real America, Wall Street versus Main Street. The small town

has long been the home of sunny American innocence. While the big

bad city was the source of all corruption. If only, Trump seemed to

say, the innocence of the small town could be recaptured, we could make

America great again. It is still a powerful story, but was it ever

really that simple? In the 1940s and 1950s, big bad city 's really came

to dominate and overshadow America. And, as they did so, they inspired a

whole new style of cinema. In film noir, the American city is dark, and

anonymous, and frightening. People are not what they seem. You can

trust no one. Everyone is out for themselves. It is no place for the

innocent. Yes, I know, I am... I am being foolish. In DOA, dead on

arrival, Frank Bigelow makes the mistake of leaving his small home

town and his girlfriend for a sneaky vacation in San Francisco. Within

hours, he has been fatally poisoned, and is tearing around the city

trying to find his killer. I am Adam Smith, a historian of America, and

in this programme, I am going to investigate what film noir and its

sharp contrast between corrupt city and innocent small town can tell us

about America today. After 1945, Americans moved to the cities, and

especially the booming suburbs, in huge numbers. Many of them found

what they were looking for, but there was also this sense that they

had lost the sense of the community they had had in the small towns

they'd left behind. So film noir is not only about the city. It also

plays on the contrast with the small town. Against this innocent

background, the dodgy, sophisticated incomers from the cities standout.

In some film noirs, the small town is the place you run to the try to

escape your past. And it is where your enemies from the city catch you

running a gas station. That is what happens to Robert Mitchum's

character, Geoff Bailey, in Out of the Past. In the 1940s, America was

becoming the land of the car, and that meant it was getting harder and

harder for small towns to be the isolated islands they had once been.

If you wanted to avoid marauders from the cities, a gas station was

about the last place in a small town to work. Long time. Hello, Joe. Wish

it was nice to see you. Everyone sure miss you, Jeff. Bailey

discovers that even hiding in the eternal innocence of Bridport, his

urban past will finally catch up with him. I had to find you? I owe

you something? Geoff Bailey clearly hadn't watched Burt Lancaster in the

Killers, where more or less the same thing happens. Pay you! Look at the

oil, will you? Driving into the small town where he is hiding comes

the man he really didn't want to meet again -- hey, you!

In the Killers, a man's big-city past comes to him in the shape of

two hitman hired by the man he once doublecrossed. They tracked him to

that centre of smalltown life, Diana -- hitmen.

And the men don't exactly hide their opinion of the place their victim

has run two. This is a hot town. What do you call it? Brentwood. Did

you ever hear of Brentwood? What do you do with your nights? They eat

the dinner. They all come here and beat the big dinner. The killers go

and kill Burt Lancaster's character, Peter Lund, but Brentwood New Jersey

can at least consoled itself that it remained on standby this viciousness

from the city. The way I look at it, this killing doesn't rightly

concerned Brentwood at all. What concerns us is protecting the lives

and integrity of our citizens. This man Lund lives here, that's all. The

killers came from out of town. It is part of an American attitude which

says that, if you want a safe, secure, comfortable life, live in

somewhere like Brentwood. And that notion persists to this day, and it

is one of the great ideas and fallacies behind Trump, that there

is an America that is settled, rural, or semirural, provincial,

let's say. Where life goes a long at a leisurely but acceptable, regular

pace, and people are good to one another. It is a myth, but it is a

very prevalent myth. And it was very prevalent than. But sometimes the

man who runs to the small town is secretly the bad guy, like Joseph

Cotton in Alfred Hitchcock's Shadow of a Doubt. Uncle Charlie appears

quite briefly as an urban character, but then -- in wonderfully telling

ways, you see him lying on his bed in a new room, in a mean building,

you don't quite know where you are, but it is urban. And there is a

sense, I think, of whatever damage he has done to others or to himself,

that it has been an expression of that urban world. And he wants to

get out, he wants to retreat. So he goes to Santa Rosa, in fact, and his

niece, Charlie, lives there with her family. And it is another America

from that city that uncle Charlie has come from. And it is in America

that is really half asleep. It is not thinking about anything very

much. It is a conflict between that darkness that uncle Charlie has seen

in the brightness that Nice Charlie likes to believe is going to sustain

America after the war -- niece. The Ariza right place a smalltown girl

who is over the moon when her urbane uncle Charlie, who she reveres,

comes to town -- Theresa Wright. Until, that is, she realises he is a

serial killer. You're just an ordinary little girl, living in an

ordinary little town. You wake up every morning of your life you know

perfectly well there is nothing in the world to trouble you. You go

through your ordinary little day, and that night you sleep your

untroubled little sleep filled with peaceful, stupid dreams. And I

brought you nightmares. And really what that seen in the diner is

saying is, this girl has got to grow up. And probably her growing up

could break down. And then you sort of save yourself, well, maybe uncle

Charlie was a nice guy wants. Whether the invader was a villain or

a victim, these movies portray the small town as a land of innocence.

And here in Sierra Madre, near Los Angeles, this place still has a

lovely smalltown feel. There is a wonderful old theatre over there,

some great cafes. It is a very good pleasant, peaceful place. You can

see why the smalltown a deal still has its appeal. But, even as it was

becoming a symbol of nostalgia, these films were already unsettling

division of the smalltown. For Hitchcock Tom I think, it is a way

of saying to that very secure, settled American attitude to itself,

don't trust it. Shadow of a Doubt. What does that title mean? It

doesn't really seem to spring out of the film, but a shadow of a doubt is

where -- what a smart viewer is going to feel about America when the

film is over. In the Stranger, another charming outsider rings per

share of evil to a small town. Orson Welles as a teacher in Harper,

Connecticut, and is about to cement his position in the little town by

marrying Loretta Young. But then Edward G Robinson tracks into the

town, and makes her confront who her new husband really is.

Surely you don't think... You might. They look like other people. The act

like other people. When it is to their benefit. A gas chamber. But if

nice Mr Rank and is really a Nazi, who can you trust, even in Harper

Connecticut? When he is exposed, the desperate Kindler hides in the

church bell tower and the people of the town come together to hunt him

down. Citizens of Hopper have come after you. The ones who have been

laughing at. You can't fall them any more. If the target is an escape

Nazi, that is one kind of story. But the smalltown mobs in these movies

were not always quite like that. Sometimes they went a big step

further. Instead of casting the smalltown as an innocent place to

show up the evils of the big city, they turned the American heartland

of self into a nightmarish landscape.

In some films, it is the smalltown itself which harbours corruption.

And these films suggest the flipside to community come together is. The

code of silence. The wall of hostility. I could punch him in the

face, I tell you. You know what they used to do to guys like that in a

place like this? They would be carried out on a stretcher. Perhaps

that vision of the world also has something darker to tell us. About

Trump's America. You see somebody getting ready to throw a potato.

Knock the crap out of them, seriously. I promise you, I will pay

for the legal fees, I promise. People coming together as a

community can be a lovely thing. But not when they come together as a

crowd against one outsider. Spreading the violent propaganda of

race hatred. In the wake of World War Two, many on the left were

worried about Aisea stick tendencies in America. Like Hitler's Yang, they

thrive on persecution, hatred and violence. If that boy isn't alive

when the troops get here, you are going to get hurt where it counts.

Again and again, left-wing filmmakers express this through

images of that most passionate version of a community coming

together as one. The lynch mob. In trial, their target is a terrified

his to meet -- Hispanic boy wrongly branded a sex attacker. In the sound

of urea, the mob do managed to kill the murderers they are after. -- The

Sound of Fury. If the media's job is to be honest and tell the truth,

then I think we would all agree the media deserves a very, very big fat

failing grade. Looking back at these films today, it is striking to find

the mob focused on one of Donald Trump's favourite targets. Those

interfering big-city outsiders, the media. Warner Brothers's Storm

Warning was an attack on the Ku Klux Klan. As Ginger Rogers, a New York

model visiting her sister in a small town, discovers.

The victim we soon find out if an undercover reporter who had been

investigating them. Many times today on the streets, in

a restaurant in the hotel, people have come up to us and asked us not

to judge the whole town by the brutal criminal action of Woodlands

last night. Bob? Bob. These decent individuals sincerely upset...

Astonishingly, the filmmakers decided not to mention the clan's

racism, at instead, the film explicitly connects far right

extremism with smalltown hostility to outsiders, protected by a wall of

silence. Looking at the faces of the men and women this afternoon at the

courthouse, it isn't always easy to tell on which side they stand. No

wonder some people in small towns get fed up with the way Hollywood

and the media represent them. Around this time,, in The Lawless, another

boy was accused of a sex attack. The townsfolk turned on the newspaper

which has defended the boy. It would be hard to find a more vivid image

of mob hatred of the media. Where are you? What is most striking is

that the newspaper that gets destroyed is trying to be honest.

The situation has been whipped up by another paper, peddling what you

might call fake news. Now, a big hit.

Now, try and remember just what happened. We went to the bar and he

jumped out of the dark. She was a very self-conscious, very... Very

heart on his sleeve Liberal who saw not just the chance, but the needle

to make a story about racism in a smalltown community, but also of

about the general danger of vigilantes spirit taking law into

its own hands. The Lawless was written by Daniel Mannering had also

read the film who helped set the template for the smalltown love, out

of the past. Mannering gripe in a small town in northern California

and though he was brilliant at evoking their particular atmosphere,

he wasn't particularly sentimental about it. If you have never been

tempted to take part in a lynch mob, perhaps it can take these films in

your stride. But another film script of the 1950s, also written by Daniel

Mannering, shows the growth of the mob which is even more unsettling.

In Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the people of a small town in

California are not scarily angry, but scarily blank. Gradually, the

town's doctor and his girlfriend realise that the townsfolk have been

taken over by alien pods. That idea that I can barely believe in is that

the world is populated by hordes, those of vegetables and they have no

emotions -- pods. They bathe, they eat, they go to work, they eat

again, they go to sleep. They have no cultural aspirations. The local

psychiatrist thinks the advent of total conformity is just what the

town needs. Suddenly while you are a sleep they will absorb your minds.

Your memories. And you are reborn into an untroubled world. Where

everyone is the same? Exactly. I think what it is saying is the very

things that we think of as precious in a free society, like education,

like love, like differences of opinion, like sexual expression,

they may be great threats to social control. So the conformist crowd

turned on the two dissidents. It has the arrival of bank conformity come

from out of town to ruin the innocent townspeople? Is it like

communism or consumerism, or is it their own community spirit that has

made them obedient and conformist? The invasion -- Invasion of the Body

Snatchers gets under your skin, because the crowd is going to do the

right thing. Even the town's well-meaning policeman joined the

chase. They went this way! The film refuses to tell you who to

blame. Are the townsfolk villains or victims? But today, the message

coming out of the pass from those old film Nawaz is that there is no

perfect place, not even in the would-be paradise of smalltown

America. One way to keep America divided is for Trump's opponents in

the big cities to sneer at his supporters as losers left behind in

flyover country. And another is to look back to

nostalgically at the smalltown life of the real America. Before the took

over. This whole dream risks hardening the divide between the

big-city and the smalltown. Exactly the division of these old movies

more than 60 years ago tried to dissolve.