White Supremacy Rots the Brain

A Contemporary History Approach to No Way Out (1950)

Poster for No Way Out (1950) via IMDb

No Way Out (1950) – Contemporary History

For my dissertation, I am currently working on a chapter about the decline of social problem and psychological films in the mid-century. Hollywood, I hope it doesn’t need saying, is not anywhere near a monolith, however, and so a large part of this research is making sure that I am aware of the other types of films made in this period, keeping track of what social problem and psychological films were released around 1950. So, this week, I thought I’d watch one of those that defies the trend in this period. My partner also rightfully helped me realise that Review Roulette has featured films with predominantly white casts and/or creators, and I want to actively start correcting that record for the future by diversifying my own viewing habits. Hollywood is not a monolith, and the most perfect film to meet both of these criteria is Sidney Poitier’s debut film No Way Out (1950).

Coincidentally, I did not plan for this to be a contemporary history post, but the Review Roulette wheel chose it to be so, so let’s dive in to where we are in this Hollywood moment in 1950. Within Hollywood, the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) is still breathing down the necks of studio heads after the first round of testimonies and charges of the Hollywood Ten took place in 1947. In November 1947, the blacklist was created by 50 Hollywood executives inspiring fear among creatives in the industry that all it took was a phone call to Reagan (then president of SAG) or one of his “patriotic” cronies and you’d be labelled guilty by suspicion alone. It was no secret either that because of the purposeful widespread misunderstanding of what “communism” actually is, racists and managers had creative freedom to extend its definition to those seeking labour rights or civil rights or, simply, equality.

Earlier the same year, outside of Hollywood but within the entertainment industry, Jackie Robinson started playing for the Brooklyn Dodgers on April 15, 1947, as the first black man in organised baseball. The following year in 1948, President Truman integrated the armed forces and then only two years later after a spate of films depicting racism in American, Sidney Poitier makes his debut in a Joseph Mankiewicz Twentieth Century Fox film. According to Aram Goudsouzian in his book Sidney Poitier: Man, Actor, Icon, these events feel incongruous when looking within the US at the growing social conservatism and internal vitriol of inane investigations into communist infiltration of American institutions. However, after black Americans served in World War II and died on the battlefield defending the values of democracy and freedom, and with the world watching, these steps towards civil rights were natural progressions forward despite the intense pressure trying to pull them back.

Goudsouzian also suggests a logical financial element to the four films from 1949 – Home of the Brave, Lost Boundaries, Pinky, and Intruder in the Dust – and Mankiewicz’s No Way Out from 1950, films he labels as “message movies” rather than “social problem films”: a bit of white flight and a dash of United States v. Paramount in 1948. This SCOTUS decision made it so, among other things, Hollywood studios could not own their own cinemas, meaning they could not control the exhibition of their own films or refuse to screen those of other studios in their own picture houses. White flight was the fleeing of white Americans from cities to the suburbs and subsequently away from downtown cinemas. Among other economic concerns for the film industry at the time, Goudsouzian suggests that studios saw an opportunity to draw a new audience by producing some “Negro problem films”, ultimately realising that catering to an audience directly can be extremely beneficial to the studio. Pinky, for example, was Twentieth Century Fox’s highest earner in 1949.

So, this brings us up to 1950 when Poitier debuts in a major motion picture from a major studio with a major director in a film that is boldly about racism in the US. No Way Out is a film about Dr. Brooks (Poitier) who is treating two white gunshot victims when one of them dies suddenly. The other, Ray (Richard Widmark) is a violent racist and believes that Brooks killed his brother purposely. For much of the film, Brooks and his white supervisor Dr. Wharton (Stephen McNally) seek an autopsy to prove Brooks’s diagnosis of a brain tumour as the cause of death. Ray’s anger and hatred is so powerful that he convinces his brother’s ex-wife Edie (Linda Darnell) that Brooks is guilty and that an autopsy would allow them to lie about the cause of death while cutting up his brother. Edie then, whipped up by his hatred does his bidding and stirs up a race riot, immediately feeling remorse for her action and eventually trying to correct it. Ultimately, an autopsy does prove Brooks’s diagnosis was correct and that he is not a murderer.

Brooks faces extreme discrimination in his line of work from his patients, but not really any from his fellow doctors. This aspect of the film is less believable, but we can see how this plot and these friendly white colleagues is a filmic depiction of Jackie Robinson’s introduction to the Dodgers in 1947. We can see the echoes of wanting to believe that the organisation was backing the desegregation of the game as we get the same sense from the doctors within the film, and truly in its production the same sense of all of the actors within the film as though in lockstep towards integration across the entertainment industry. This film was also the debut of Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee performing together in a film.

No Way Out spoke to more than just racial tensions in its time, too. This film can be seen as intersectional as we see solidarity among classes and gender, primarily with the Edie character and her arc. Edie is a woman feeling trapped by the confines of the poverty and abusive men with whom she was raised, trying to better her condition but being torn down by Ray’s stubborn grudge against society keeping him poor while Brooks, a black man, could go to school to be a doctor. The film makes every effort to present Ray’s perspective as a real one while also dispelling it as a fantasy made to comfort himself (and much of society) by discounting Brooks’s hard work, brilliance, and sacrifices to get where he is.

This film presents a scenario asking what beyond shallow hate drives behaviours, and ultimately, the conclusion is stupidity. The film is more graceful than that, but one of the most striking things about this film, for me watching it today in 2024, is that it felt so familiar. The contemporary world in which No Way Out was made is painfully similar to ours today in so many ways. The rise of insane political figures lashing out about indoctrination and “woke” subversion as the new catchall for Republicans when “communist” needed a refresh; the vicious racism and hatred towards other groups that disguises stupidity and unfounded fears whipped up by abusive leaders; the white supremacy underscoring all of it.

When the autopsy reveals Brooks was correct and that he did not murder the man, Ray refuses to believe it and accuses the independent third party who performed the autopsy of fixing the results in Brooks’s favour. Ray lashes out: “stop with that doctor’s doubletalk”, “who’d he prove [his innocence] to? Not to me”, “I believe what I see, I seen you killed Johnny”. When offered to see the tumour himself, Ray reacts even harder, “You guys stick together- black and white- like some kind of a mob.” When Wharton tells Brooks he has done all he can and ahs convinced everyone in the city “but one sick mind”, Ray quips “Not everybody, doc. There's a lot more like me.” The thing that jumps out to me the most in this scene specifically is the failure of the US to provide for its citizens. Ray is so terrified of authority figures and institutions being “against” him because he has been failed from childhood having grown up in the slums of the city – the white slums, but still the slums. For a moment he even forgets he’s a white supremacist when he contends that every doctor is out to get him, black or white.

And this, I think, is one of the most important lessons films like No Way Out can teach us: white supremacy rots the brain. Wharton says multiple times that Ray has a sick mind; Edie, when feeling remorse for her actions in inciting the race riot by bringing Ray’s orders to their gang of racists, says she is sick mentally; one of the white supremacists organising the race riot intends to rape Edie before she alerts someone for her safety, reminding her that she has no agency in his eyes and he too is mentally sick. Until the last minute, the white supremacists in the film are depicted as increasingly erratic, feeling as though they are backed into a corner without acknowledging that they are pushing themselves into it. Ray’s fantasies about the world being against him as a poor white man who turned to crime for survival and his view that the world must have advantaged a black man from the same economic background who turned to education for survival is something we see constantly now. It’s ignorance that feeds white supremacy and white supremacy that feeds ignorance. Even Ray’s voice-wavering scream that he won’t know what he sees when he looks at the tumour, or the multiple times in the film he throws out the word “doubletalk” as a way to say the people in authority positions are twisting things in a secret code he doesn’t understand are admissions that he feels intellectually inferior, and therefore he is being left behind in this world while others, including people he believes he is superior to, progress.

White supremacy rots the brain. Holding onto that much shallow hatred in the face of evidence that your opinions are baseless and coming up with conspiracy theories as to how that evidence has been manipulated rots the brain and it leads us to where we are now, 74 years after the release of No Way Out. For my own sanity, I have to believe that we are capable of confronting these people who have been so manipulated and abused by the people they see as leaders (i.e. Trump, Fox News, MAGA politicians, etc.). I have to believe, like Brooks throughout and particularly in the final moments of the film, that sticking to your own values and character when challenged to abandon them is integral to fighting back. I have to believe that there is a way out, and I do believe that turning to the cinema and culture and history and ideas of leaders and icons of the Civil Rights movement is a large part of that way out.