Formation of the Ambiguous Heroic Archetype: Three Jewish-American Film Actors and the United States’ Film System, 1929-1948

As Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell note, archetypes, or general ideas of human types, strongly influence societies, particularly the heroic archetype. Since the 1890s mainstream cinema has facilitated the heroic archetype for worldwide audiences. This article argues that Paul Muni (1895-1967), Edward G. Robinson (1893-1973), and John Garfield (1913-1952) became the first important Jewish-American film actors to help develop the ambiguous heroic archetype in the United States’ studio system from 1929 through 1948 in two ways: Muni’s and Robinson’s critical performances in the 1930s and 1940s, particularly in gangster and film noir films, and Garfield’s films from 1946 through 1948.


Introduction
Before the era of televised extravaganzas, the annual Academy Award ceremonies existed as relatively small banquets held in theaters and hotels around Los Angeles. In the spring of 1937, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) held its ninth annual gathering in the Los Angeles Biltmore Hotel. The consensus about the possible winner of that night's Best Actor Academy Award centered on four-time nominee Paul Muni, considered for his depiction of the famed French biologist Louis Pasteur (Osborne, 1989, pp. 40, 44-47). This conclusion proved correct when the nearly forty-year-old actor received the honor. While the AMPAS prohibited the filming of the awards ceremony at that time, newsreel recreations later that night show a gleam of deep satisfaction on Muni's face ("Academy Awards 1936 Outtakes"). Not emphasized at that time, however, was that the actor was the first Jewish-American man to win the Best Actor Oscar for a film drama, an achievement unequaled until Dustin Hoffman's win in 1980 (Sarno, 1980, p. 8). Perhaps the contemporary failure to discuss the true cultural significance of Muni's victory signified the overall ambiguity that Jewish-American film dramatic actors faced in the early twentieth century. 1 Figure 1: Paul Muni in his Academy-Award winning performance from The Story of Louis Pasteur (1936).
As expressed by their contrasting masks of grief and laughter, the arts of drama and comedy mirror the serious and humorous nature of human existence. Since the 1890s mainstream cinema has been a key formulator of dramatic action, in which individuals struggle with, and sometimes resolve, internal or external conflicts, often in an atmosphere of heightened emotion (Konigsberg,p. 92). A term that captures the essence of cinematic dramatic acting, and the one used throughout this article, is archetype, originated by the famed Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung, who concluded that our collective unconsciousness encompasses universal forms interwoven in both internal and external realities. As Jung explained in his key work on archetypes, these forms can possess an "almost infinite variety of aspects" (Jung, 2003(Jung, [1972. The mythological scholar Joseph Campbell further extrapolated on Jung's concept by defining the heroic archetype as a process in which a person, in searching for his or her identity, the acquisition of knowledge, or a permanent home, attains access to the "generally valid, normally human [universal] forms" (Jung Campbell took special interest in the heroic protagonist's journey, who "ventures forth from the [common-day] world," eventually gains a "decisive victory," and returns home to "bestow boons with his fellow man." As several scholars have noted, moreover, cinema represents a natural medium for the expression of heroic archetypes for two reasons: the use of archetypes (or tropes, as they are known in the entertainment business) easily identifies central characters for the intended mainstream audiences, and the reinforcement of such societal norms through mass cinema's function as a source of mass entertainment, thus helping to form "the individual and collective psyche of a culture." (Campbell, 1968(Campbell, [1949, 30 (second quotation). See also Briggs, 2012, p. 28). Thus films readily reflect their respective societies' unconscious needs to present archetypes as ways of illustrating of worthy societal norms (Solomonik-Pankrashova and Lobinate, 2016, p. 133;Wessbecher, 2008, 136;Wyman and Dionisopoulos, 1999, 36).
An essential part of cinema in the early to mid-twentieth century, this article argues, centers on the development of what will be called the white Anglo-Saxon dramatic film actor archetype (hereinafter "archetype"). The entrepreneurs who controlled the Hollywood studio system from approximately 1915 onwards selected actors who could exemplify the rugged individualism and virility seen as archetypal by their predominately white Anglo-Saxon Protestant audience.
Exceptions occurred because they satisfied a certain niche among film audiences in the United States-the "exotic," in Rudolph Valentino's case--or because they embodied certain ethnic niches (or clichés), such as the Jewish-American ex-cantor in Al Jolson's The Jazz Singer (1927). After World War I. however, this archetype underwent redefinition because of the increasing ethnic diversification of film audiences, which grew from an estimated 20 million people to 50 million a week in the United States by 1929. Film studios therefore not only included more ethnically diverse characters in their dramatic films, but started hiring non-Anglo Saxon leading actors as the contemporaneous introduction of sound required stage actors with natural enunciation. Therefore, while white Anglo-Saxon actors such as Gary Cooper and Clark Gable continued the archetype, ethnic actors now possessed better opportunities of enacting the dramatic film model Bordwell, Staiger, and Thompson, 1985, p. 14;de Cordova, 1990, p. 98;Anderson, 2011, p. 16;Lawrence, 2010, pp. 87-107;Erens, 1984, pp. 42-56;Introduction, Mintz Roberts, 2010, pp. 15-16;Cohen, 2008), pp. 125-128;Sontag, 1966, p. 200; "The Dawn of Sound: How the Movies Learned to Talk." 2007).
Using a mixture of primary and secondary sources, this article examines how Paul Muni , Edward G. Robinson (1893-1973), and John Garfield (1913-1952 helped to develop the ambiguousness of the dramatic archetype, extending the form to include more than onedimensional, noble characters. (This term shall be interchangeably referred to as the "ambiguous dramatic archetype" or the "ambiguous heroic archetype"). In films such as Scarface (1932) and I Am A Fugitive from A Chain Gang (1932), Muni enacted Tony Camonte, a psychopathic Chicago gangster modeled on Al Capone and James Allen, a former World War I veteran innocently ensnared in the "chain gang" penal system. Such figures, moreover, did not emerge victorious: "Scarface" Camonte ends up riddled with police bullets in a street gutter, while Allen escapes from prison, but subsequently becomes a homeless fugitive stealing for his sustenance. Robinson  These opportunities arose with these three Jewish-American actors because they exhibited both strong acting credentials and, most importantly, readily fit within the physical model already established for dramatic archetypes, unlike their darker-colored Latino or Italian-American counterparts. Muni established his presence in both Yiddish and Broadway theater before making his first film; Robinson acquired extensive experience from his training at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and ten years of appearing on the Broadway stage; and Garfield, while not as experienced as his two previous compatriots, worked with the landmark Group Theater. Thus Muni, Robinson, and by extension Garfield did not just exist as "accidental film stars" who broke out of the "character actor ghetto" Muni received his first Academy Award nomination for Best Actor for his enacting an ambiguous archetypal character in the 1929 film The Valiant, while Garfield received his initial nod from the Academy for enacting a similar figure in Four Daughters (1938) (Fishel and Ortmann, 2009, p. 136). It is important to state, however, that the three actors considered did not make their contributions to the ambiguous dramatic archetypes without encountering some corresponding cultural ambiguities. As scholar Patricia Erens notes, Muni's and Robinson's successes occurred in part because film audiences in the United States did not realize their Judaic origins (the same could be said, by extension, of Garfield). In addition, the first two actors did attain initial stardom because of their enacting gangsters Moreover, while Muni eventually left such parts behind with noted biographical films such as The Story of Louis Pasteur (1936) and The Life of Emile Zola (1937), Robinson could only do the same by garnering lead roles in the growing film noir oeuvre of the 1940s, a factor that Garfield took advantage of from 1946 through 1948, the years of his career considered here (Ehrens, 1984, p. 136). Finally, this article also contributes to the necessary repairing of an oversight in film historiography. While a well-developed body of work exists about the inclusion of Jewish-Americans into the comedic cinema of the United States, no one has studied in similar detail how any men of the same ethnicity became leading film dramatic actors in the early 1900s, particularly the period from roughly 1930 through 1950, the apex of the United States' film studio apex of arguably critical and definitely commercial power. Henry Bial's work on Jewish-American contributions on stage and screen productions, for example, only considers the period after 1947, when the television industry began its eventually pre-eminent rise (Epstein, 2001;Greene, 1999;Jenkins, 1992;and Musser, 1991. Contrast this to cursory mentions of Jewish-American dramatic actors in Rollins, 2003and Sklar, 1975. Bial, 2005.

Contributions, 1929-1945
In 1946, a young Marlon Brando appeared in the Broadway production of A Flag Is Born, in which Paul Muni, then returning to the stage after nearly two decades of screen stardom, played the leading role. Brando later recounted how he spent every off-stage moment on marveling at Muni's ability to vanish into his part. "The best acting I ever saw in my life," Brando later stated in an unpublished section of his memoirs, Songs My Mother Taught Me. Years later the two-time Academy Award winner for Best Actor included Muni among his filmic inspirations, along with Spencer Tracy and Cary Grant (Manso, 1994, p. 184;Bosworth, 2002, 38-39;Mann, 2019, pp. 38-39 (quotation)).
Muni's acting career started from a mixture of inner determination and outer serendipity.
Born in 1895 in Lvov, a town in the then-Austro-Hungarian empire (now part of the Ukraine), Muni came to the United States at the age of six. Joining his parents in the burgeoning Yiddish theater in New York City several years later, Muni eventually moved to the seemingly all-inclusive milieu of Broadway in 1928, becoming a star in such productions as We Americans and Four Walls. A film talent scout from Fox Studios soon signed Muni to a two-picture contract, and by the spring of 1929 the actor became the above-the-title lead in the film production of The Valiant (Lawrence, 1974, pp. 1-119;Goldfarb andGrimshaw, 1970 [1945], p. 56-58).
The resulting film, expanded from the original forty-minute stage production by only another twenty-six minutes, presents a fascinating demonstration of how early Muni began his development of the ambiguous dramatic film archetype. As Joseph Campbell notes, the heroic archetype involves a person who leaves his or her ordinary milieu and enters a fantastic world where he must overcome obstacles and gain ultimate victory. This archetypal ideal flourished uninterrupted from the early beginnings of the studio system in the 1910s through the late 1960s, particularly in the western and adventure film genres. The prototypical hero, first enacted by William Hart and later by Gary Cooper and John Wayne, usually confronted hostile forces in the quintessential shootout. In adventure films (which eventually included science fiction), a usually obscure person suddenly confronts new challenges and becomes a hero through his own efforts.
The attractiveness of this heroic capacity received popular confirmation from the series of films headed by Douglas Fairbanks in the 1920s (such as The Thief of Baghdad) to the Star Wars films (Brunel, 2015 andBroughton, 2020;Palumbo, 2014 andSchubert, 2014;Taylor, 2015).
But as this genres gained strength and popularity throughout the 1920s and 1930s, a corresponding counter-development in the archetype developed in the film system. Dramatic actors began portraying heroes whose actions exhibited an ambiguousness in both character and eventual results. The flawed, ambiguous hero naturally did not originate with film; characters as Oedipus Rex existed from ancient Greek times. The international stage milieu, however, exhibited a multifaceted process during the nineteenth century. Playwrights as Henrik Ibsen and August Strindberg developed protagonists who, while not always self-defeating, sometimes failed to win positive resolutions. This ambiguousness continued in the early twentieth century in the plays of Eugene O'Neil and George Bernard Shaw. Actors such as Muni and Robinson received their practical thespian training in the 1920s on the Broadway stage as these influences solidified and dominated the theatrical milieu in the United States. They therefore became the natural conduits for the further expanding and refining of the ambiguous heroic archetype in film (Misra, 1992;Robinson, 2009);and Alexander, 1992).
In The Valiant, this ambiguous archetype receives interesting, if limited, development (Screenplays, 1929, Muni Papers). The film begins quietly but effectively. After the title sequence plays with somber organ music, a card announces, "A city street-where laughter and tragedy rub elbows." The camera slowly enters the building and climbs a flight of stairs towards an apartment door. Suddenly we hear a shot. A few seconds later the door opens and out walks a man in a shabby-looking suit and grimy fedora. He stumbles down the stairs and walks out into the city street. Walking through the surrounding area, he encounters the usual scenes of such a milieu, such as children playing baseball. The man briefly helps a fallen child, then resumes his somber expression. He eventually enters a police station and confesses to the murder. Convicted and sentenced to death, Muni's character, now calling himself James Dyke, refuses to reveal either his real identity or his motive for the murder. An elderly Ohioan woman, Mrs. Douglas, sees Dyke's picture in the newspaper and notices that the condemned man resembles her long-missing brother, Joseph. In a subsequent scene, she recalls how Joseph would recite dialogue from Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet to his sister, Mary, before her bedtime. Mary Douglas and her fiancé eventually decide to travel to New York's Sing Sing prison and see Dyke, who convinces her that he is not her brother. The truth is finally revealed in a haunting monologue.
Throughout the relatively short film, Muni impressively conveys the parameters of his ambiguous archetypal hero. In the first scenes he deftly evokes his protagonist's weariness after the mysterious murder, particularly during his voluntary surrender to the police, then demonstrates Dyke's determination to face his fate without revealing his true identity. Muni's most effective moments, however, come at the end, when he first denies to Mary Douglas that he is her brother, and then convinces Mary that he personally witnessed James Douglas's death on the Western Front. After Mary leaves, Muni, now all alone, powerfully recites the previously noted Shakespearean passage from Romeo and Juliet, proving that he is Mary's brother. He then returns to his prison cell to await execution. In a short epilogue, we first see Mary and her fiancé happily making plans to marry, then Douglas's mother sitting outside her home, clutching the package given to her daughter by Dyke. An imaginary formation of soldiers files by her, including Muni's character (The Valiant, 1929).
Muni's characterization of the James Dyke/Joseph Douglas characters thus encompasses one of the essential heroic archetypes: the person who selflessly sacrifices himself to atone for previous misdeeds. The major difference between previous sacrificial heroes, such as Charles Dickens's Sydney Carton in A Tale of Two Cities, and Muni's protagonist, lies in the ambiguousness of the latter figure. Carton may be a weak, even pusillanimous character in the early stages of Dickens's novel, but his heroism does stem from his native English culture and elite education. In contrast, Dyke/Douglas stands as a convicted murderer whose reasons for his crime remain tantalizingly mysterious throughout the film. In addition, he comes from a rural milieu in Ohio. The character, moreover, echoes the later description of the murderer in Albert Camus's 1942 novel The Stranger-he is a man who stands apart from society, willing to follow some, but not all, of societal strictures, particularly the most restrictive of all, murder of one's fellow human. In addition, one is struck by Muni's relatively naturalistic performance. One can tell that Muni did not feel entirely comfortable with the camera, for he tends to look away and enunciate his dialogue slowly. The contrast between this performance and his acting in I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, shot approximately three years later, can be striking; in the latter film, Muni works with the camera,  (Lawrence, Actor, pp. 130-131, 156-158. Wiley, Bona, and McCall, 1993, pp. 13-18).
At the same time another Jewish-American actor arrived to perform in a Paramount Pictures "talkie," Hole in the Wall. Edward G. Robinson's origins echoed those of Muni's in some significant ways, but his path to filmic stardom followed a different and a more difficult direction.
Born in 1893, Robinson (originally Emmanuel Goldenberg), like Muni, journeyed to the United States as a child. He originally entered the City College of New York, but eventually transferred to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. Graduating in 1915, Robinson then entered the hurlyburly of Broadway. In the next ten years he became a noted stage actor, essaying everything from Ibsen to an adaptation of Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov (Robinson with Spiegelglass, 1973, pp. 1-94).
In 1928 Robinson's career changed when he accepted a leading part as a mobster in the Broadway production The Racket. Rave reviews attracted the attention of a Paramount film studio scout and the offer of the standard one-year contract. While Robinson eagerly encamped in Hollywood, his subsequent experiences dampened that initial enthusiasm. The Hole in the Wall, proved neither a critical nor a commercial success, and Robinson's second short-term contract with MGM proved just as frustrating. But when Robinson's agent successfully negotiated a seven-year contract with Warners Brothers ("Warners"), Robinson stayed in California. Within a year studio producer Hal Wallis approached him with a part that proved his commercial breakthrough (Robinson with Spiegelglass, 1973, pp. 100-107).
While gangster films have become an important oeuvre within American film, most critics and scholars agree that the genre's most influential period occurred from 1927 through 1933, when Hollywood studios released such pictures as Underworld (1927), The Racket (1928), and The Public Enemy (1932) ("Beer and Blood," 2007). Robinson became a key part of this germane period when he first agreed to the part of Otero, the main character's chief lieutenant, in Little Caesar. But, sensing a better opportunity, he successfully lobbied to garner for the leading role of Caesar Enrico ("Rico") Bandello. The film, released in late 1930, became a box office smash, not least because of Robinson's extraordinary range in enacting this ambiguous archetypal part. He is both ferocious (particularly in one scene where he almost physically assaults the telephone receiver with his snarls) and restrained (where he delicately parades off his new suit in front of his overly fawning assistant, Otero.) Robinson's performance helped establish the ambiguous dramatic archetype, particularly because the lead character, instead of emerging triumphant after internal struggles to receive confirmation of his newly acquired self, dies in a hail of bullets. Rico Bandello echoes his ancient Greek counterparts in that their initial rises become downfalls through the very factors that apparently made him a protagonist in the first place. He acquires ultimate control of the criminal syndicates in the film's unnamed city, only to lose everything by film's end. This ambiguous gangster archetype soon received further confirmation from other actors such as Muni and James Cagney. But Muni would go on to portray more traditional, more attractive aspects, while Robinson remained typecast, despite his increasingly desperate efforts to the contrary (Robinson with Spiegelglass, 1973, pp. 115-116;Little Caesar DVD, 2005;McDonald, 2000, pp. 60-61).
Muni's re-entry into the Hollywood movie establishment came by sheer happenstance. As Warners readied the release of Little Caesar, nascent film producer Howard Hughes developed his own scenario for a gangster film, based on the life of Al Capone. Hughes then contacted Muni's wife and de facto agent, Bella Muni, about her husband's availability. The reasons for Hughes's inquiry remain somewhat vague; while recognizing Muni's established acting abilities, the Texan multimillionaire perhaps secretly hoped to cheaply acquire the failed film star. Bella immediately accepted Hughes's offer, then telegraphed her traveling husband. "I have sold you down the river," the telegram melodramatically proclaimed, "We're leaving for Hollywood tomorrow." Muni at first balked at playing a gangster, particularly as his slim, slight figure did not easily convey menace. Noted director Howard Hawks cleverly overcame these fears by providing the actor with a screen test involving padded shoulders and shorter fellow actors. A now confident Muni returned to the Los Angeles area, three years after his seemingly ignominious retreat (Lawrence, 1974, pp. 157-158;Grimshaw, 1970Grimshaw, [1945, p. 59 (quotation)).
Although Scarface encountered nationwide objections due to its inflammatory subject matter, and suffered extensive cuts upon its delayed release in 1932, the resulting, resounding box office success established Muni as a star. When considering this film, moreover, one becomes struck by the sharp, even dark differences between the ambiguous dramatic archetype presented in The Valiant and Scarface. Although he is a murderer, Douglas accepts full blame for the crime until his execution. In Scarface, however, Tony Camonte, Muni's character, is an increasingly immoral monster who effortlessly assassinates a major crime boss in the first few minutes of the film, recklessly sprays bullets while testing automatic machine guns, and ruthlessly eliminates any contenders for ultimate mob control. Muni's performance does suffer from a certain excess; while not attaining the histrionic heights of Al Pacino's later, more notorious performance in the 1983 remake, the actor's broad characterization of an Italian-American through a "thatsa-nice" accent and the constant eating of spaghetti eventually pales against the relative restraint of George Raft, who plays Camonte's doomed lieutenant. Cultural historian Morris Dickstein's criticism of Muni's "stagy antics" thus seems particularly apropos (Dickstein, 2009, p. 313. Ebert, 2008).
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Muni's performance, however, lies in the exploration of how seemingly sacrosanct cultural principles become twisted in the pursuit of criminal power.  (Bergman, 1972, p. 607;Warshow, 1962).
Muni wasted no time after Scarface's release to establish a permanent foothold in the Hollywood establishment. Signing the usual seven-year contract with Warners, he worked with the studio's chief executives to find a film that could continue his newfound stardom. The choice became a version of the recent bestseller I Am A Fugitive from A Georgia Chain Gang, a real-life memoir penned by an escapee. Released in November 1932, the film not only became a considerable commercial success, but secured Muni his second Academy Award nomination for Best Actor. In his enactment of the protagonist James Allen, Muni returned to the ambiguous archetypal parameters previously encountered in The Valiant: a man who struggles to find both personal worth and redemption under very difficult circumstances. The major differences lie in two key character facets of the protagonists: while Joseph Douglas is an aimless drifter before his crime, and never denies his guilt, Allen dreams of becoming a noted architect and is innocent.
Thus not only does Allen remind one of Jean Vajean in Victor Hugo's novel Les Miserables, he also becomes a more sympathetic figure. In the film Allen returns from World War I a decorated soldier, only to find his hopes frustrated by familial expectations and the economic frustrations of a post-war recession. Driven to search for work across the country, the drifter wanders into an obviously Southern city and meets a fellow drifter. He goes with his new companion to a local diner, only to be corralled into an unsuccessful robbery attempt that ends with his being sentenced to seven years in prison at hard labor. For a few years Allen stoically endures the horrors of chain gang life, from whipping punishments to execrable food. Eventually escaping from prison, Allen flees to Chicago, where under an assumed name he succeeds in becoming a noted architect. His real identity is eventually revealed, and Allen reluctantly agrees to return to his former penal state in exchange for a promise of eventual release. But when that promise is broken, a desperate Allen escapes again from the chain gang, and by the hauntingly memorable ending, he becomes a wandering, stealing fugitive. This gritty, Dickensian outcome no doubt resonated with a public suffering through the fourth year of an increasingly deepening Great Depression. Robinson did get another opportunity to expand his ambiguous dramatic archetypal persona when he starred in Dr. Ehrlich's Magic Bullet (1940). But although Robinson enjoyed enacting the excellent script (co-written by aspiring director John Huston), audiences ignored the film, and only one Academy Award nomination (Best Screenplay) resulted. Robinson could therefore only sit in his palatial Hollywood home, ruminating on his artistic non-fulfillment (Robinson with Spiegelglass, 1973, pp. 162-177. 181, 211-216;Osborne, 1989, p. 68).
Several years later, as Robinson continued to despair about playing "parts with substance-characters with maturity," as he later described it, he now encountered a quandary natural for aging stars: the acceptance of either supporting ones or relatively minor leading parts.
The first film he accepted a supporting part in did assuage, at least temporarily, Robinson's qualms.

His performance as the anal-retentive insurance claims investigator Barton Keyes in Billy Wilder's
Double Indemnity is a tour de force that for some reason never led to an Academy Award nomination as Best Supporting Actor. The most important long-term consequence, however, became Robinson's initial immersion in the growing film-noir genre. In the same year he acted in two important films directed by Fritz Lang. Now considered a leading auteur in such genres as science fiction (Metropolis (1925)) and psychological thriller (M (1931)), Lang's career after fleeing Nazi Germany in 1933 followed a disparate path in the United States in the 1930s through 1950s. Through such productions as Fury (1936) and especially You Only Live Once (1937), Lang helped initiate the genre known as film noir, which usually centers on a protagonist faces a seemingly implacable fate. Robinson's two efforts with Lang, The Woman in the Window (1944) and Scarlet Street (1945), made important contributions to this film oeuvre. In the first film, Robinson plays a college professor seemingly content with his bourgeois lifestyle, yet in reality feeling more suffocated. When his wife and children embark on a vacation, Robinson's character makes a seemingly fortuitous encounter with a young woman that leads to murder and blackmail.
Scarlet Street is a more evocative experience as Robinson's middle-class milquetoast, this time a painter, evades responsibility for the murder of his demanding muse and subject, only to forever haunted by memories of his crime. Although now regarded as landmark films, the tepid box office performance of both films forced Robinson to return to the gangster milieu in John Huston's Key Largo (1948). His new subordinate status in the Hollywood filament received further confirmation, moreover, when star Humphrey Bogart killed him during the film; twelve years earlier, the exact opposite occurred in Bullets vs. Ballots (Robinson with Spiegelglass, 1973, pp. 235, 238-239;Crowther, 7 September 1944;Silver, et al., 1992;Biesen, 2005;Hare, 2003;Bingham, 1994. For Lang, see McGilligan, 2013and Smith, 2014. For contemporary assessments of the two Lang films considered here, see Crowther, 16 February 1946 andCrowther, 26 January 1945).

The Complexities of the Ambiguous Dramatic Archetype, 1937-1939
While Muni and Robinson helped to expand the ambiguous heroic archetype in the 1930s and 1940s, they also needed to deal with cultural ambiguities. As film historian Vincent Brook points out, the studio system, primarily overseen by such Jewish-Americans such as Louis B. Mayer and Jack Warner, still needed to not only satisfy censorship authorities such as the Production Code

Administration, usually dominated by white Anglo-Saxon Protestants and Irish-American
Catholics, but also the proclivities and prejudices of a predominately non-Jewish public consumer audience. Studio heads also needed to consider the ramifications of the rising fascist movement in Europe, particularly in the financially important countries of Germany and Italy. As scholar Patricia Erens points out, moreover, these same studio heads proved correspondingly reluctant to highlight Jewish-American ethnicity in their films, unless it resulted in popular (and naturally lucrative) productions such as music film shorts or, particularly, comedies. Thus, even as the circumstances of increasingly diverse audiences and the demands of the new sound film system allowed these studio owners to expand archetypal opportunities to ethnic actors, Hollywood titans still needed to remain aware of the deep-seated prejudices held in rural areas, particularly in the South (Gabler, 1989;Brook, 2017, 7;Erens, 1985, pp. 126-163.) This sensitive situation became even more complicated with the rise of fascism, and a corresponding anti-Semitism, in the lucrative European film market. Ben Urwand's recent, controversial study of the Hollywood film studios' relationship with the Nazi regime, The Collaboration: Hollywood's Pact With Hitler, directly charges people like MGM's Louis B.
Mayer and Samuel Goldwyn with at least implicit collaboration with Nazi Germany. As other scholars have subsequently pointed out that such a conclusion ignores the complex factors in such a relationship, such as the fact that major studios such as Warners found their assets frozen in Nazi Germany by the mid-1930s. Perhaps the best assessment of the foreign situation can be found in David Denby's conclusion that the Hollywood response to Nazism in the 1930s constituted a complex mixture of "half-boldness, half-cowardice, and outright confusion." Thus, the studio heads' reactions reflected their constant need to balance moral considerations against commercial successes (Urwand, 2013;Doherty, 2013);and Denby, 2013) Two films made by Muni and Robinson andreleased, respectively, in 1937 and reflect these central ambivalences: The Life of Emile Zola and Confessions of A Nazi Spy. Zola still emerges today as a well-made product of Warners' "A-Picture" production process, smoothly interweaving in its first two-thirds running time an interesting story about the (admittedly halffictionalized and dramatized) early and middle life of its protagonist, the famed French writer Emile Zola, in the subject's mid-and-late nineteenth century Paris milieu. We witness the young, struggling Zola living in the prototypical Paris garret with painter friend Paul Cezanne; we commiserate, then celebrate with Zola when he encounters first failure, then success with the novel Nana, and we feel further satisfaction as Zola further emerges as a leading novelist and social critic. But the film stumbles when it depicts the important part Zola played in helping to exonerate the French Jewish army captain, Alfred Dreyfus, from false accusations of treason. While the fiery performance of Joseph Schildkraut as Dreyfus won a well-deserved Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, not one scintilla of the French Army's anti-Semitism emerges, except for an entry in an army detail book (seen for just a few seconds) identifying the captain as Jewish. Muni especially shines in the sequences where Zola defends himself against criminal libel and eloquently declares his faith in Dreyfus, but the film's continuing elision of the real reason for the Dreyfus crisis becoming an annoying factor by its conclusion. Thus a Jewish-American actor at the apex of his career unwittingly, but definitely, becomes a primal player in the denial of anti-Semitism in the film which won the Academy Award for Best Picture of 1937 (Life of Emile Zola DVD; Baron, 2017, 30).
While Muni struggled with these complexities, Robinson more directly confronted the issue in Confessions of A Nazi Spy (1939). While this film never directly addresses anti-Semitism, it does portray Nazism negatively. Robinson  Welles's film came in the victorious aftermath of the world's greatest conflict and the stunning revelation of the heinous extermination camps (The Stranger arguably became the first Hollywood film to show the extermination camp newsreels, albeit briefly.) Robinson later remembered how "scared" the studio was about releasing the film, even though Hitler's government had already banned Warners films in the Third Reich (Confessions of A Nazi Spy DVD, 2010; Robinson with Spiegelglass, 1973, pp. 204-205).
As previously noted, Muni's and Robinson's major contributions to the development of the ambiguous dramatic archetype ended by the mid-1940s. The resulting gap would be soon fulfilled, albeit only temporarily, by the rise of a new, dynamic Jewish-American successor.

Continuing The Ambiguous Dramatic Archetype: John Garfield and Film Noir, 1946-1948
In May 1952 actor John Garfield suddenly died of a heart attack a few days before he reached the age of thirty-nine. Perhaps Garfield's sudden coronary did not come as a total surprise; the actor had faced continued questioning about his supposed Communist sympathies from the House Un-American Activities Committee, and saw his once-substantial film career effectively end because of the continuing controversy. A few days later, Garfield's still shell-shocked, disoriented wife and children prepared for the funeral services. The doorbell rang. Garfield's wife answered, half-expecting Federal Bureau of Investigation agents. Instead, two somewhat abashed New York City policemen stood at the door. They informed her that long lines of fans now waited outside the funeral home containing Garfield's remains. Would the family consent to allowing an open casket? Garfield's wife allowed the request. By the time that the last viewing took place, an estimated 10,000 New Yorkers saw the handsome, if deceased, visage of John Garfield, an ironic coda to his tumultuous and ill-fated career (Prologue, Nott, 2003, pp. 3-5).
Garfield possessed some similarities with Muni and Robinson, particularly in his starting on Broadway. But besides his age difference, Garfield's early life proved a rougher milieu, showing the aptness of scholar Robert Sklar's description of Garfield as a "city boy." By the age of thirteen Garfield dropped out of high school and seemed effectively destined for a criminal career. His budding interest in acting, however, enticed him to join the Group Theater, an initially informal assemblage of actors, directors, and writers whose alumni eventually included Clifford Odets, Elia Kazan, Lee Strasberg, and Harold Clurman. Through such Group Theater productions as Waiting for Lefty, the actor attracted a Warners talent scout. In his first film, Four Daughters (1938) Garfield not only proved his charisma, but received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor (Nott, 2005, 10-40;Sklar, 1975;Weinraub, 30 January 2003). Now a permanent contract player at Warners, Garfield became a major star, but only by either playing variations of his Four Daughters loner character-such as in 1939's They Made Me A Criminalor a wisecracking ethnic, as in Air Force (1943). Garfield's frustration with this hardening archetypal persona led to a solution different from his two predecessors. Instead of leaving the studio system, as did Muni, or compromising, as did Robinson, Garfield sought new opportunities.
In 1945 the studio agreed to "loan" him to MGM, now readying its filmic version of James M.
Cain's controversial best-seller, The Postman Always Rings Twice, in 1945. This provided Garfield with his first opportunity to participate in the ambiguous dramatic archetype in film noir already established by such actors as Robinson, Fred MacMurray as Walter Neff in Double Indemnity, and Dick Powell as detective Philip Marlowe in Murder My Sweet (1944).
MGM, the largest and most powerful film studio in the United States, nonetheless proved to be an equivocal choice for the production of Cain's novel. The Postman Always Rings Twice is now included in the Modern Library's "Best 100 Novels of the Twentieth Century" list, but was considered "trash" upon its original publication in 1934. Given the sensationalistic elements involved-a drifter and his married girlfriend plot to kill her immigrant husband, only to encounter unexpected twists and turns-and the restrictions of the Production Code, it is no wonder that even a sanitized form of the story failed to materialize on the mainstream screen until the mid-1940s. But, perhaps emboldened by the critical and commercial success of Double Indemnity, made from a 1936 Cain novella, studio head Louis B. Mayer took a risk. Taking a risk, however, did not mean taking a needless one. Mayer prided himself on presenting glamorous films to filmgoers, and Postman only promised to sully that image, even in a censored form. Thus any hint of steamy sex between the drifter, Frank Chambers, and his girlfriend, Cora Smith, thus became excised, or barely mentioned, and filmgoers only received a tantalizingly brief glimpse of Lana Turner's famous white-shorted figure. The film did gross $5 million, assuaging Mayer's private doubts, and Garfield would further emerge himself into film noir in the upcoming years (Eyman, 2005) nor a corrupt lawyer, as in the later Force of Evil. Unlike Joseph Douglas or James Allen, however, the character is not someone, at least initially, who valiantly strives to maintain his integrity or to seek redemption. Instead, in line with the film noir archetype, Charles Davis is a morally compromised person, someone on the brink of losing everything honorable in his life. In a series of flashbacks throughout the film's first half, we see how Davis abandoned plans of marriage to his true love; allowed his best friend to slip away, and rejected his immigrant roots on his way to becoming middleweight champion of the world. The film's conclusion, moreover, present a mixed message. While Davis refuses to take a "dive" in facing his younger, more aggressive challenger in defending his title, and reunites with his fiancée and family, the film provides no clear-cut answers to some pressing questions, as whether the protagonist can remain in boxing without encountering the wrath of his former supporters The last picture of Garfield's late 1940s trio of film noir, Force of Evil, continues and reinforces the complexities of the ambiguous dramatic archetype. We see the development of two themes later promoted in the first two Godfather films and the Sopranos television series: the corporatization of crime and the moral ambiguity of persons involved in that milieu. Garfield plays Joe Morse, a slick, well-educated lawyer assisting an unnamed major crime syndicate in New York City. Morse evidently does not regard his criminal clients as any more reprehensible than other, "legitimate" persons seeking his services; as he rather bluntly tells his partner, the extensive legal fees coming in from the underworld provides munificent economic security.
A dilemma soon arises, however, when the major capo orders the closing of small bookie operations throughout the city. This decision squarely puts Joe in conflict with his older, ailing brother, Leo, who directs a "mom and pop" operation on Manhattan's Lower East Side. Joe tries to play the middleman, constantly reassuring his bosses of Leo's fealty while assuring his brother of the continuation of his lucrative livelihood. Leo's refusal to compromise, however, leads to his kidnapping by the syndicate. Joe tries to secure his brother's release, only to be told that he can finally find Leo "down by the river." In a poetic if sometimes overelaborate sequence, Joe and his fiancée plunge down the steps near the George Washington Bridge, only to find Leo's body near the Hudson River's edge. The film then bleakly, arbitrarily ends with Joe's avowal to wreak vengeance upon his Mafia masters. Morse thus faces the darkest future confronted by any protagonist played by John Garfield: he must either continue to serve the persons who murdered his brother, or risk his life by becoming an informant for the law (Force of Evil DVD, 1948; Scorsese, 1997. Garfield's subsequent life hewed close to the fates usually confronted by his film noir protagonists. Force of Evil eventually became the subject of praise film scholars and received inclusion in the Library of Congress's National Film Registry. Its box office failure, however, ended Garfield's production company, as it declared bankruptcy. Only four years elapsed between that disastrous conclusion and the actor's death (Weinraub; Hoberman).
What one can say about Garfield is truncated, but important; film career is that he occupied a middle niche between the ambiguous dramatic archetypal personas of his predecessors, Muni and Robinson. His acting rarely strays into the solemnity (some may say pompousness) of Muni's acting, and his natural handsomeness became balanced by a certain feral charm that could turn into true romantic fervor (such as in Postman) or a sudden, sometimes literally fatal, aggressiveness (such as in Body and Soul.) It remains a topic of interest as to whether Garfield could have taken his combination of charisma and menace into further extensions of the heroic archetype.
Jewish-American actors' contributions to the ambiguous dramatic archetype did not end with Garfield's death, but they represented a transition away from the cultural ambiguities surrounding the archetype. This can be seen most clearly in the film careers of Kirk Douglas and Dustin Hoffman. Douglas's life exhibited some significant similarities to his three predecessorsextreme poverty as the scion of a Russian-Jewish emigrant and rag seller, and the need to change his name-but a major difference existed in Douglas's willingness to extend the ambiguous archetypal archetype in deeper, darker directions. In the film Champion (1949), which established Douglas's stardom, the actor plays a protagonist, the prizefighter Midge Kelly, who shows no redeeming qualities, unlike Garfield's counterpart in Body and Soul. Kelly allows nothing to stand in his way of becoming a titleholder, abandoning his first wife and even defying criminal interests when they want him to "lose" an early major fight. While Kelly at film's end overcomes his younger opponent in a title defense, he does not return to kith and kin, but dies from injuries sustained during the fight.
Douglas took this darkness even further in Billy Wilder's acerbic Ace in the Hole (1951).
Douglas's character, newspaper journalist Jim McLeod, seizes upon the incident of a man trapped in an ancient Native American tomb in New Mexico to regain his former notoriety as a New York City scribe. McLeod conspires with the local sheriff and head rescuer to delay the effort as to reap more newsprint and treats the victim's wife with increasing contempt, even unexpectedly slapping her to induce newsworthy tears. When McLeod's efforts finally fail due to the trapped man dying of pneumonia, he receives a drastic comeuppance, dramatically dying of a knife wound (Douglas, 1988;Thomas, 1972Thomas, , 1991).
Hoffman's career stands as an interesting contrast to his predecessors in two ways. First, the actor did not emerge from either a poverty-stricken background (his father actually worked as a studio prop supervisor) nor did he change his original name. In addition, Hoffman's initial performances show a diversity of subject matter unmatched in earlier periods, particularly in its inclusion of Jewish-Americans. Hoffman's cinematic breakthrough as Benjamin Braddock in The Graduate (1967) seems initially ironic because the character seems the very picture of a White-Anglo-Saxon Protestant benefited by a sun-lit Californian middle-class upbringing and a distinguished college record. As the film eventually reveals, however, Braddock's seeming privileged, confident façade hides a restlessness and anxiety about his future. Hoffman continued to diversify the ambiguousness of the dramatic archetype over the next thirteen years: the social misfit Ratso Rizzo in Midnight Cowboy (1969); the Native American centenarian who discusses his multifaceted life in Little Big Man (1970); the acerbic, influential Jewish-American standup comedian Lenny Bruce in Lenny (1974); and an urban professional struggling to raise his young son after his wife leaves in Kramer v. Kramer (1979) (Lenburg, 1983and Frankel, 2021.

CONCLUSION
As delineated by scholars as disparate as Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell, societies tend to create universal forms of human identity, or archetypes, which reflect the aspirations, desires, and goals of societal members. This tendency reveals itself very clearly in the mainstream film industry of the United States from 1900 through 1950. Responding to the commercial pressures from their film audiences in the early 1900s, the major film studio entrepreneurs of the United States accordingly formed a dramatic film archetype for their major male actors based on an Anglo-Saxon, heroic mold. With the ethnic diversification of filmgoers by the late 1920s, and the contemporaneous introduction of sound prompting a widespread search for classically trained actors, film studios needed to expand beyond previous stars that exemplified the archetype such as Wallace Reid, Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., and Richard Barthelemess. Thus, the scene was set for non-Anglo-Saxon film actors, particularly Jewish-American actors such as Paul Muni, Edward G.
Robinson, and John Garfield. Such actors garnered this opportunity because of their considerable acting skills honed on stage and perhaps most important, their ability to fit within the previously established male actor prototype, unlike their Latino and Italian-American counterparts.