Two of my favorite films have twin characters at their center: Petey Brown in Raoul Walsh’s The Man I Love (1947) and Rachel Stein in Paul Verhoeven’s Black Book (2006). Both women are singers—Petey (played, in her finest performance, by Ida Lupino) works the nightclub scene to make enough dough to get by in the post-war United States, while Rachel’s singing days are already behind her, forced into hiding as a Jewish woman in Nazi-occupied Holland. Both women actively code switch to get by, with Petey putting on a hard facade for her seedier nighttime settings whereas she takes on a more casual and affected tune at home. Meanwhile, Rachel (brilliantly realized by Carice van Houten) makes herself plastic, whether that’s as simple as pretending to be whatever the men around her want, trying to integrate into the Protestant-dominant Resistance, learning Bible verses to appease the conservative family hiding her, or even dying her hair blonde and adopting a new persona to infiltrate the local SS headquarters. What makes these two films as interesting as their mirrored leads, is how one film is of a time, the other about a time; one film of a set of genres, the other about their influence.
Something so stark about watching post-war American films is just how bitter the victory seems. In the Boomer hagiography of New Hollywood and beyond, WW2 was unequivocally a victorious moment—it was the triumph of their parent’s genre, in contrast to the confused and polarizing war in Vietnam. Some would analyze that in the present, others would look to history for a parallel, but usually only extending as far back as Korea. A film like Maria’s Lovers (1984), made by Soviet emigre Andrei Konchalovsky, is a total fluke in American cinema of the time. Yet that film, about a broken WW2 veteran returning home, pulls footage from John Huston’s previously banned Let There Be Light (1946), which documented soldiers candidly expressing their hardships with PTSD. Those coming home were not the same as the ones who left.
When John Ford got back, he made They Were Expendable (1945), about the American military failure in the Philippines, and Frank Capra, who headed the War Department’s propaganda efforts, made It’s a Wonderful Life (1946) on his first venture back to Hollywood, a film about a man who was so bogged down and broken at home he couldn’t go to the war in the first place. The immediate post-war world that Petey navigates in The Man I Love is one that we forget about—it’s a world made up of some veterans, but it's a society that went through the Depression only to find itself in the most destructive conflict in human history. People in 1947 are barely getting by.
The recent memory of the war looms just off-screen in The Man I Love, with Petey’s brother-in-law institutionalized for PTSD and mostly existing as an off-screen presence. But there’s a heaviness, a humidity pervading the atmosphere of the film, one which drenches its night-soaked world with sadness. There’s prolonged sequences of music practiced in the wee hours or played at swinging clubs, to the point where the film borders on musical, the same way it exists just on the fringes of gangster and romance pictures. These sequences are more than just interstitial or filler, they’re raw emotion. Sand Thomas (Bruce Bennett), the shattered, trying-to-be-reformed drunk piano man, practically communicates through the keys, saying more than he ever could to Petey just by how hard his hands crash into the ivory.
It’s the same as how Walsh will communicate the tone first through the music, opening with a band rehearsal full of lonely solos, or having Petey and Sand meet at a crummy bar filled with an exuberant act. It’s interesting, then, that what makes Lupino’s performance so compelling isn’t just the unsaid, but how she says—Petey’s accent practically changes depending on if she’s talking to her sister, her potential employer, or a man she might love more than anyone else. Her tone moves from cool and considered in clubs to ripping fast and girlish at home. Petey’s hard to pin down, a woman who we can’t quite grasp as being shaped by her environment, or merely masking herself to it. There’s no place for Petey.
Black Book bookends itself in Israel, a place where our heroine has ostensibly found peace in. As it slips into her memories of the war—of the false starts of security in hiding places and the Resistance, of her unlikely undercover romance with a disillusioned SS officer, and the mystery plot that’s tying this thriller together—we learn that Rachel is never who she says she is, whether her alias of Ellis de Vries or even “Rachel Stein” herself. She molds to please for life-or-death survival, trying to stay in the good graces of people giving her begrudging Christian charity or using her to forward the goals of Dutch nationalists in the face of German occupation. These same people will complain about their communist comrades, or doubt Rachel’s loyalty because she’s Jewish. Verhoeven, in his typical sort of smug-but-true subversion, shows the victorious Dutch to themselves be harboring their own fascist tendencies, which they let spill out like a bucket of shit once they have power over their own country again. WW2 wasn’t the war of ideological victory it’s been made out to be, but instead a more complex conflict regarding power and nationalism.
Rachel Stein believes there’s no real place for her in the Netherlands, as it’s implied she leaves sometime soon after the war before we find her again (at the start of the film) on a kibbutz which (we realize at the end of the film) bears her family name, paid for with the loot that was stolen from so many murdered Jews in Holland. The ostensible refuge, with its crystal blue water and cute little schools, is ultimately shown to be a prison—not one she has been forcibly herded into, but one she’s created, complete with barbed wire fences and guard towers. Conceptually these are to keep people out, yet the overall purpose of a kibbutz is as a kind of frontier outpost, a milestone of expansion.
When I first wrote about Black Book for Splice Today, I couldn’t have realized the (perhaps unintentional) prescience of this conclusion, as that piece was put out a few weeks before October 7th and Israel’s genocide in Gaza which has been going on now for some 20 months. In the Western world’s mind’s eye (at least since the Yom Kippur War normalized and solidified Israel’s alignment with the NATO side of the Cold War), the state of Israel exists as a homeland for Jews in the wake of the unconscionable tragedy of the Holocaust. Yet that guilt for one genocide enabled the machinery for another, and instead of reconciling antisemitism in Europe, the consensus became that Jews in Europe would be better off taking someone else’s land, which created a state that’s in a forever war until it can ethnically cleanse its way into domination, like the American settlers did to their continent.
What makes Black Book such an unconventionally effective WW2 film is its embrace of fluidity: in character, ideology, and allegiance all depending on the situation. Armies are made up of bureaucracies with weird rules as the end of the war causes breakdowns, and people built upon preconceived notions and histories that defy the simple explanations for the war. For Verhoeven, Nazism is not a unique phenomenon but an instance, and fascism is something which is already stewing in all of us, like how in the Netherlands he shows us its roots before the war in Soldier of Orange (1977) or its immediate outburst after in Black Book. Finally, this is left inferred again with the mere image of Israel which is a state built on racial and religious dominance manifesting in apartheid and violent assertion of authority. It’s a cycle unbroken in Verhoeven’s world, because it’s a cycle unbroken in our own.
Since we don’t get to spend much time with Rachel in Israel, we don’t know how much more “real” this is a version of her compared to the one we got to know in Holland. Her hair takes on a natural kink, but she also conforms to the styles of the time and place, as we’ve seen her do a number of times to get through the war. There’s no firm place for her, so, like Petey in The Man I Love, we struggle to know who she really is except for the glimpses we get between the lines and the looks, except to an even further extreme with Rachel, as her internalization and compartmentalization is under such more extraordinarily circumstances. What we see instead is the impossibility of themselves given the world wrought by the 1940s, one whose consequences we’re still dealing with today. Yet there’s beauty in Petey and Rachel’s attempts to actualize, to get enough cash to try to get by, survive, or be lucky enough to find someone as fucked as you are, even if you know it can’t last.