Nightmare Alley - Film Noir And The American Dream

by Mark Osteen

  In the finished film it is ultimately proven that Steve was killed by gamblers over a debt, which gets Mother Harkness off the hook. The real killer is never revealed in the novel, but Bill and “Patrice” allow the gamblers to take the rap anyway.20 In other words the film erases the lovers’ secret, which in the novel remains a permanent blot on their union. Woolrich’s vision, then, is much darker, implying not only that this marriage is a lie but that marriage itself is a tissue of formalities, the American Dream a counterfeit. Even the film’s unlikely coincidences and hastily wrapped-up happy ending leave intact its critical analysis of marriage and its warning about the dream of social mobility. Helen gets away with her subterfuge, but several people die. All versions thus imply that you may change your identity, but the price is steep: the loss of your moral and existential center and the sacrifice of anyone who knows who you are—including yourself.

  New Faces

  An escaped convict rolls off a truck in a barrel, buries his clothing, and is picked up by a man in a convertible, who asks probing questions about his background. The escapee knocks the driver out and steals his clothes. Suddenly he is approached by a beautiful young woman who knows who he is and wants to help him. A dark passage through a tunnel takes them to San Francisco and the promise of a new life, because the woman, Irene Jansen (Lauren Bacall), believes the escapee, Vincent Parry (Humphrey Bogart), to be innocent, perhaps because her own father was unjustly accused of a similar crime. What makes these opening scenes of Dark Passage (written and directed by Delmer Daves) so striking is that they are shot largely from Parry’s vantage point, a device that continues for the first third of the film. We never see his face in these scenes; indeed, we don’t see it for forty more minutes.

  This technique places the viewer in an unusual position. Dana Polan argues that it intensifies the “aggressiveness of the camera and the aggressiveness of the outside world against that look,” thus creating a “claustrophobia of sight,” while also denying us (or at least deferring) the satisfaction of seeing Bogart’s face (195). Usually a first-person shot is followed by a shot of the person looking outward, or vice versa; when viewers are denied that payoff, we feel trapped or unfulfilled. Hence, we experience our own dark passage upon entering the theater and occupying Parry’s point of view: the first driver’s insistent, close-quarters stares and persistent questions make us feel as though we are being interrogated. This film plays constant changes on motifs of recognition, sight, and surveillance, since Parry, as an escaped convict, must avoid being recognized. Ironically, although he has slipped the confines of the penitentiary, he remains imprisoned by the fear of being seen (Telotte, Voices 123): thus when Irene leaves her apartment, he remains locked inside. Constantly talking to himself (a habit he picked up in prison), Parry is another self-divided soul, existing both as a convicted murderer and as the innocent man he claims to be. Likewise, the viewer is split between the self seeing the world through Parry’s eyes and the person outside the film’s reality, squirming because he or she wishes to see more. J. P. Telotte further suggests that the subjective camera not only “develops a crucial relationship between seeing and identity” but also renders Parry invisible, so that, despite our privileged sharing of his perspective, he remains distanced from us (123, 122). Trapped in his first-person point of view and barred from seeing Parry’s face, viewers share his imprisonment, and as Parry disappears, so do we. We can see, but only with his eyes. The subjective-camera device, then, isolates and entraps not only Parry but the viewer as well.

  The technique also captures the city into which Parry passes—a domain filled with isolates. Virtually everyone Parry meets professes to be lonely. Irene admits that she was “born lonely,” and Sam (Tom D’Andrea), the cabbie who refers Parry to the physician who will perform plastic surgery on him, also complains of loneliness. Parry responds, “You see people,” to which Sam replies, “They don’t talk to me.” In fact, they don’t see him—though he sees them and judges their characters by their faces. And although Sam does see and recognize Parry, he doesn’t find the possibility that he murdered his wife shocking, for his own sister and her husband also fight constantly (but “she duck[s]”). When Parry tells the cabbie his wife “hated [his] guts,” the cabbie responds that theirs was a “nice, happy, normal home.” Others enact this worldview. Madge (Agnes Moorehead), Parry’s dead wife’s friend (who also happens to know Irene), and her sometime boyfriend, Bob, argue so frequently and vehemently that Irene remarks, “Causing her unhappiness is the only thing that gives him happiness.”21 They hate each other but can’t be apart. In this world every husband is a potential murderer, every wife a shrew, and marriage merely leavens loneliness with strife. Dr. Coley, the creepy surgeon who performs Parry’s operation, presents an even more chilling world-view. After playing with Parry’s mind (“If a man like me didn’t like a fella, he could surely fix him up for life. Make him look like a bulldog or a monkey. Ha ha. … I’ll make you look as if you’ve lived”), he concludes, “We’re all cowards. There’s no such thing as courage. There’s only fear, the fear of getting hurt, and the fear of dying. That’s why human beings live so long.” We cling together because the only thing we hate and fear more than each other is the dark, lonely passage to death. Parry has merely moved from one prison to another: he has died and been reborn in hell.

  And now he dies again, as the surgery montage implies. Under anesthesia he sees face after face—three mannequin faces cut in half, Irene, Madge, his friend George, Sam, and, worst of all, the doctor in multiple superimpositions invoking the bulldog and monkey, then laughing maniacally. Only Irene’s face and voice are reassuring. When Parry awakens, the doctor warns him not to speak or return. “You’re through with me and I’m through with you”: even changing a man’s face is merely a brief, impersonal encounter. The way Parry’s face has been physically cut and altered, moreover, mirrors the way his visage is manipulated by the camera and editing. Dark Passage, that is, identifies doctor and director, each of whom “operates” by cutting on Bogart/Parry to change his identity. We see Parry’s “real” face only in brief shots of newspaper photos, but these images are never connected to his voice. Thus, even before surgery, he is cut into pieces, his head figuratively amputated from his body. The doctor further manipulates our vision by altering Parry’s face into Bogart’s. The film’s self-reflexive point-of-view shots draw viewers into this matrix as well, severing us from our comfortable viewing position and resculpting us into paranoid watchers. Once these operations are complete, we finally see Parry from the outside. Yet we are still denied satisfaction, because Bogie’s face is covered with bandages. In short, we can believe only some of what we see—and we can’t see everything. In reminding us that faces can be changed, and that what we see is not to be believed, the filmmakers enclose us within a paradox: what lies before us on film seems a genuine depiction of our world, but we know the camera can lie, because we have seen how it is subject to the ministrations of editors and directors and because we know that Parry is really Humphrey Bogart. The film thrusts us away even as we enter it, so we end up more alone and disoriented than ever.

  Parry does have one true friend: George (Rory Mallinson), a forlorn trumpet player who claims that Vincent is “the only guy who ever liked me.” He offers Parry a place to stay while he recovers, but after Parry wakes up, he finds George murdered. Afterward, confined to Irene’s apartment, unable to speak, and forced to sleep with his hands tied, Parry has become more constricted than he was in prison. But then comes the moment we have been waiting for—the unveiling.22 As Parry walks down the stairs wearing his new face, Irene’s phonograph plays “Someone to Watch over Me”—whose title both captures the film’s atmosphere of spying and conveys Irene’s caregiving role. For the first time since the operation, Parry is able to speak, yet his transformation seems, according to the other side of Irene’s record, “Too Marvelous for Words” (this tune also played during their first romantic encounter). What he tells her
, however, isn’t marvelous: he must leave her and acquire a new name, which she then gives him—Alan Linnell. Yet her power to make him over comes not from surgery but from love.

  Alas, Parry’s conversion fools no one. As soon as he leaves Irene’s apartment, he is accosted by a policemen who wonders why he has the shakes and carries no identification (“Alan” claims he’s hiding from his nasty wife). After eluding him, Parry checks into a hotel under this “very unusual name” (according to the registrar), only to be found by Baker (Clifton Young), the man in the convertible. Aware of Irene’s wealth, Baker shakes “Alan” down, reminding him that she, as an accessory to his crime, will go to prison if he is found. That should be worth sixty grand, decides Baker, who recognized Parry by his suit. Soon Parry learns that another car has been following him around: an orange convertible driven by Madge. Then, beneath the Golden Gate Bridge, the two men wrestle and Baker is knocked off a cliff to his death, freeing Parry to confront Madge at her apartment. Despite his new face, she also quickly recognizes him. She also admits that she, coveting Vincent’s affections, killed his wife and George so that nobody else could have Parry. This twisted “love” starkly contrasts with the one shared by Parry and Irene: they part because they love each other, whereas Madge hates Parry but can’t let him alone. Yet Madge refuses to confess to the police, and without her confession Parry has no proof. “In every paper in the country I’m a killer,” he growls, but “I never thought it possible to kill anybody until this minute.” He vows that she’ll “never get out of [his] sight.” But as he draws near, Madge falls from her window to her death.23

  In Dark Passage the face of Vincent Parry (Humphrey Bogart) is covered with bandages after his plastic surgery, and he is confined to the apartment of Irene Jansen (Lauren Bacall). Kobal Collection/Art Resource, NY.

  This implausible event does not even resolve the story: Parry can’t clear himself, since the proof of his innocence is dead. Though he manages to escape from town, he remains a fugitive. And so, just as earlier we “filled in” Bogart’s face through his familiar voice and phrasing, we now fill in the conclusion we desire, even though the film doesn’t provide it. Parry may be technically innocent, but he was quite prepared to kill Madge, and because of him, two more people have died. And though he has been given a new face and name, his essential nature—the “me inside him,” that Emersonian “aboriginal self”—remains unaltered. Hence he remains alone in a world populated by “isolates, prisoners, and fugitives from imprisonment,” writes Telotte (Voices 127), where “one is either completely alone” or hounded by those one knows too well. “Solitude or community here are equally … disturbing conditions,” concludes Polan (197). The cynical philosophies of the cabbie and plastic surgeon, as well as the loneliness expressed by every character, imply that the pursuit of happiness via self-interest produces a world oppressed by fear and animosity.

  Yet there is a condition between these two gloomy extremes, one hinted at during Parry’s wait at a bus station, where a man laments that nobody cares about “the other fella” and recalls a time when “folks used to give each other a helping hand.” He speaks these words to an overwhelmed mother herding two young children. After she agrees with him, he adds, “We’ve got something in common—being alone.” Parry then plays “Too Marvelous for Words” on the station jukebox. Perhaps the lonely man and the harried mom will find solace together, as Irene and Vincent do in the epilogue, after she walks into the Peruvian café where he waits. This possibility of intimacy mitigates, to some degree, the film’s bitter picture of alienated urban individualism. Parry may be reborn: Irene gives him new life by believing that he is lovable, which suggests that his aboriginal self is not a murderer but a lover. Through the eyes of another person who sees beneath the face, the film implies, one may pierce the darkness to reveal and redeem one’s buried self.

  That possibility seems remote, however, in a film that rivals Nightmare Alley as the bleakest of all noirs. Hollow Triumph (also known as The Scar) is Dark Passage stripped of the possibility of love. Like Vincent Parry, John Muller (Paul Henreid) has just left prison. But he is not an escapee; rather, he is released at the film’s opening, as the warden reads his biography (Muller attended medical school, was arrested for practicing psychoanalysis without a license, is a “big spender”). Yet John Alton’s moody cinematography renders Muller’s freedom moot. Moreover, though Muller is given a decent job at a medical supply house, he immediately returns to crime by engineering the heist of a gambling den. His partners are dubious about the scheme—the casino is operated by a gangster named Stancyk, notorious for tracking down anyone who crosses him—but Muller assures them they’ll be able to walk right in: “people, they’ll never notice,” he crows, “they’re all wrapped up in themselves.” The partners are right: Stancyk vows revenge and hounds Muller, who goes into hiding.

  But Muller is also right, and his assertion is borne out repeatedly, as nearly every person in the film is too self-involved or smug even to notice when Muller takes on another man’s identity. This man, a psychiatrist named Victor Bartok, looks exactly like Muller (Henreid plays both roles). Learning this fact from a dentist who works in Bartok’s building, Muller visits the doctor’s office and fools his secretary, Evelyn Hahn (Joan Bennett), who is carrying on an affair with Bartok. After they kiss, she realizes he’s not Bartok, and Muller remarks that her “subconscious mind” exposed her as a “wild bundle rarin’ to go.” She asks, “What are you, anyway, an analyst or a patient?” He claims only to be a “bystander”—an apt term for most of the film’s characters, who stand by while others commit crimes. Muller’s other alter ego—his brother, Fred—warns him that Stancyk’s boys are still looking for him. The frightened John darkens the room as his brother reminds him, “You were everything I wasn’t, everything I wanted to be, everything we’d all like to be.” John always took risks, was always on the lookout for a big score. But Fred knows that “sooner or later, it always catches up with us.” John dismisses his brother, but “it” almost catches up with him that very evening, when he is again forced to flee from Stancyk’s men. Fred’s words describe a man who does reckless things for excitement but inspires envy in others. Perhaps that fact explains why the minor characters seem so unobservant: they actually enjoy watching others do what they themselves are afraid to do. It may also explain Muller/Bartok’s ultimate downfall: even a Freudian psychiatrist isn’t immune from Schadenfreude.

  This was screenwriter Daniel Fuchs’s view; we know it was because he left detailed notes for Henreid and director Steve Sekely, describing Muller as “the superman, the intelligent outlaw, the rebel against a lumpish, indifferent society” (1). The audience, he continues, will “identify with Muller’s ambitions, will wish him well.” He is “a hero—a Napoleon in modern clothes.” But even if he represents “all the longings of the audience to rebel against their own dingy circumstances,” his ultimate failure will make the audience “feel good,” because it “confirms their resignation.”24

  Fuchs likely exaggerates the audience’s sympathy for Muller, whom Henreid plays with a chilly arrogance. The film, indeed, upsets our intuitive desire to empathize with Muller by portraying him as a cold, self-absorbed character, thereby rendering us as alienated as the other people in the film. Thus, during Muller’s first date with Evelyn, the two watch some ants at work—a metaphor for the straight life that Muller cannot tolerate. A cynic herself, Evelyn knows another when she sees one, and she sketches Muller’s character astutely: “First comes you, second comes you, third comes you, and after that comes you. You’re one of those egotistical smart alecks with big ideas. You think you’ve got a right to get away with murder.” He replies, “No woman alive could possibly resist a man as attractive as all that.” Muller’s fear of Stancyk’s men, we understand, is only one reason he decides to assume Bartok’s identity. He also does it to assert his sense of superiority and for the sheer thrill. No one else in the world matters, so why not take on another man
’s identity for a change? Yet Muller does not stand out in a city (it’s Los Angeles this time) where, as Evelyn states, everyone is trying to “take somebody.” Of all the characters in the film, only Fred seems to care for someone else—and even he envies his selfish brother. The world of Hollow Triumph is indeed hollow, a realm of radical individualists and guilty bystanders, all alike in their alienation and selfishness.

  Muller prepares to adopt the doctor’s identity by reviewing psychology texts, listening to Bartok’s clinical recordings, practicing his signature, taking up smoking, emulating the doctor’s foreign accent.25 Then he tells Evelyn he’s leaving the country. Not to worry, he assures her; someday she’ll pass him on the street and “won’t even know who I am.” Now comes the moment of transformation: using a photo of Bartok as his guide, Muller gazes into a mirror, surgical instruments arrayed before him. In one shot we see three versions of the same person: the man in the photo, the man in the mirror, and the man (seen only from behind) staring into the mirror. Muller, who has already made a career of assuming various roles—prisoner, phony psychiatrist, gang leader, and cab driver (his current cover)—will soon own three identities at once: Muller, Bartok, and a third persona created by the blend of the two. After Muller injects his face with anesthetic, the camera stays on his cigarette, which, over two dissolves, burns a “scar” into the desk. He holds a photo of Bartok as he draws a line on his own face. In the photo, as seen in its mirror reflection, the doctor’s distinctive vertical scar marks what looks to be his left side (which is, in fact, his right side, since we and Muller see only its mirror image). Therefore Muller marks and cuts his right side (he does not mark his left side, as Pelizzon and West assert: 7).26 Yet when he returns to the photo shop where the picture was developed to pick up the negative, the clerk doesn’t have the time (or the courage) to inform the curt Muller that the photo was flopped: Bartok’s scar is actually on the left side of his face. Muller has scarred himself on the right (that is, the wrong) side! The other clerk says it’s no problem; he has flopped hundreds of negatives and “they never notice. … Instead of being on the left side of the face, the scar is on the right. Well, is that so terrible?” It’s terrible for Muller, who now attempts to appropriate Bartok’s identity while wearing a mirror image of the doctor’s scar. His mistake is telling: although he has seen Bartok in person, he has nevertheless confused the doctor’s mirror image with his real face. In short, Muller is as unobservant as everyone else. But his “mistake” may not really be a mistake; perhaps, as Santos suggests, it is a “Freudian slip” indicating that Muller wants to “assert his own identity” (33). Muller’s handiwork is like that of a forger, whose success depends on its not being recognized as such. Perhaps this “egocentric smart aleck” wishes his work to be noticed; or perhaps he unconsciously wishes to be caught. In any case, the scene demonstrates that only by careful observation can we distinguish the dexter from the sinister—whether they appear in a mirror, in a photo, or in real life.