Nightmare Alley - Film Noir And The American Dream

by Mark Osteen

  During Cornell’s confession Vicky’s portrait remains in the frame between the two men: she is both the link and the wedge between them. The composition links two brands of framing, connoting that Cornell’s attempted framing of Frankie follows from his fetishistic framing of Vicky. The narrative flashbacks enact a similar process: each narrator puts Vicky together piece by piece, yet the parts never quite cohere, and she remains fragmented, two-dimensional. Through her, however, I Wake Up Screaming encourages us to reflect on its status as constructed artifact, a series of pictures mirroring the audience’s and the Hollywood production system’s forging of idealized identities. Like Grable and (as I show below) Gene Tierney, Vicky allows herself to become a commodity. As such she exists only as a function of others’ belief in her—of audience members who not only consume the creations of real-world Frankie Christophers but who also partake of Ed Cornell’s fetishizing impulses.

  Made at the same studio, Fox, and by the same producer, Darryl F. Zanuck, Laura is an elaborate repainting of I Wake Up Screaming that similarly calls attention to its own fictional status. Detective Mark McPherson (Dana Andrews) and columnist Waldo Lydecker (Clifton Webb) fall in love with competing portraits of aspiring (and murdered) advertising executive Laura Hunt (Gene Tierney). McPherson and Lydecker form two parts of a single male psyche: the investigator and the murderer, the one who will love her and the one who has loved her, the macho detective and the ambiguously gay snob.3 To Lydecker Laura was a prize objet d’art for his collection; to McPherson her mysterious death makes her intriguingly enigmatic.

  Like I Wake Up Screaming, Laura opens on the day after the subject’s murder, then presents a flashback account—in this case, Lydecker’s—of the narrator’s relationship with the victim. The framed narration again functions analogically: just as the act of narration seeks to pin Laura to Lydecker’s vision of her, so the story recounts his attempt to mold her into his desired form. They met when Laura ingenuously asked him to endorse a pen for an ad campaign. After Lydecker snidely rejected her, she chided him for his callousness and fraudulence; he replied that he was only interested in money, but Lydecker lied: he is really an obsessive romantic. Later he apologized and signed his picture with the pen, in a single gesture endorsing both the pen and the new Laura he began to fashion. “Her career began with my endorsement of the pen,” he relates. “I secured other endorsements for her.” But he actually endorses his portrait, not hers; Lydecker’s Laura is a forgery, a picture made in his image, designed to enhance his prestige and help him project a heterosexual identity. And though he fancies himself Laura’s Pygmalion, she created him as much as he created her: for her sake, he tells McPherson, “I tried to become the kindest, gentlest, most sympathetic man on earth.” As their similar apartments also suggest, the two are alter egos, mirror images, each the other’s artist and subject.

  During his investigation McPherson rifles through Laura’s drawers, sniffs her perfume, and stands before her dresser mirror while staring at the large portrait that looms over the room. Critics have argued that the portrait seems to fetishize and entrap Laura.4 Yet throughout this sequence it remains almost constantly in view, often at the center of each shot, attesting to the power her image exerts over McPherson—and the viewer. As McPherson paws and ponders, variations on David Raksin’s Laura theme play on the soundtrack, its changing arrangements reflecting the detective’s shifting moods: initially unfocused and agitated, it gains clarity when he sits beneath the portrait and a piano restates the melody against a string background; as he dozes, a muted trumpet voices his isolation and longing.5 What follows changes the tune and interrupts McPherson’s mooning: the living Laura opens the door and stands framed within it. Perhaps, as Richard Ness points out, the variations on the theme reflect “her refusal to be contained,” just as her sudden reappearance proves her capacity to escape the “fixed image created by her portrait” (60).

  Just before her reappearance, director Otto Preminger dollies toward McPherson’s face, holds, then dollies back out, using the conventional method of introducing a dream sequence (Kalinak 165). It is as if the rest of the story—in which Laura and McPherson fall in love and the killer is exposed—were a dream. Or perhaps the first half, depicting Laura’s “death,” is merely Lydecker’s, or McPherson’s, fantasy.6 Either way, as McPherson declares, “Somebody was murdered in this room.” Certainly: Diane Redfern, a model who resembled Laura, was the actual victim. Diane may have been a lesser, or forged Laura, yet the film implies that they are virtually indistinguishable.7 In a sense, then, several Lauras have been killed: Lydecker’s picture of her as his Galatea is erased, along with McPherson’s mystified icon. And though Lydecker is the one who shot Diane (mistaking her for Laura), Laura understands that by having acquiesced in Lydecker’s manipulation, she is nearly as “guilty as he is. Not for anything I did, but for what I didn’t do.” In a sense, it seems, Laura killed herself.

  Detective McPherson (Dana Andrews) dreams of the eponymous Laura (Gene Tierney). Kobal Collection / Art Resource, NY.

  Nor is her resurrection complete. For although she announces to Lydecker that “no man is ever going to hurt me again,” her attitude and actions are ambiguous or inconsistent. As Liahna Babener observes, Laura remains “caught in a series of contradictions: claiming to want freedom from overbearing men but clinging to” them anyway (92). The film depicts her plight in the climactic sequence, as the camera focuses on her brushing her hair before a large mirror: the two Lauras—living woman and dead icon—remain inseparable yet never truly merge. But Lydecker cannot allow a new Laura to be born and, having failed to frame both Carpenter and Laura for Diane’s murder, tries to kill Laura again. As a radio recording of his voice rhapsodizes that “Love is stronger than life. It reaches beyond the dark shadow of death,” the incarnate Lydecker enters the apartment bent on murder. He has become his own double, his life a deck of lies. As the recording intones Ernest Dowson’s “Vitae Summa Brevis”—

  They are not long, the days of wine and roses;

  Out of a misty dream

  Our path emerges for awhile, then closes

  Within a dream

  —the bodily Lydecker is killed. His dream is over.

  Is Laura’s? Does she escape her frame? It’s possible to read the film as silencing her and thereby replicating the male characters’ reifications. Babener argues that because Caspary’s Laura narrates the fourth section of the novel, she “assumes authority over her life—she constitutes herself as subject” (85).8 It is true that Caspary’s Laura is more devoted to her work and generally a stronger, though equally complex, character than the movie’s ethereal presence. But Laura doesn’t get the last word, even in the novel: McPherson ties up the loose ends and concludes by quoting Lydecker. Nor does the film endorse Lydecker’s version of the story: his narration ends a third of the way through. Hence, Laura escapes Lydecker’s narrative frame—his attempt to control and silence her—just as she defeats his attempt to frame her for murder and thereby silence her again.

  Nevertheless, as Sheri Chinen Biesen reminds us, “Laura’s character is … manufactured not only by the men in the narrative but also by the male production executives involved in making the film” (160). Just as each male character believes his Laura to be the true one, so did the filmmakers who altered Caspary’s novel to fit their vision. They, too, are Lydeckers—tricksters who let us believe Laura is dead and imply that part of their film is only a dream. Their Laura is perhaps as much a forgery—a falsely endorsed picture—as Lydecker’s or McPherson’s Lauras. These reinventions of Laura were eerily recapitulated in the life of Gene Tierney, an emotionally fragile woman who had just given birth to a multiply disabled daughter but was pressured by the studio to accept the part of Laura. Tierney became identified with the role; indeed, her performance as what she calls “the movie’s key prop” overshadowed her later career just as Laura’s portrait overshadows her living self (Tierney 113). In Tierney’s autobiography (enti
tled Self-Portrait) she admits that her “problems began when I had to be myself” (114). Laura’s plot foreshadows how Tierney was elevated and then effaced in favor of an unchanging, two-dimensional icon (Rita Hayworth was similarly oppressed by the constant conflation of herself and Gilda). Laura thus presents a disturbing portrait of the mystification and reification of women’s images in Hollywood films. Alas, Tierney’s afterlife—which included several hospitalizations, a suicide attempt, and electroconvulsive treatments—was even more troubled than Laura’s.

  Lydecker’s resurrection was more prompt, though no happier: he was reborn less than two years later as art collector Hardy Cathcart (again played by Clifton Webb) in Henry Hathaway’s The Dark Corner.9 This reiteration is perhaps fitting, for The Dark Corner’s plot is all about self-reinvention. It tracks private investigator and ex-convict Bradford Galt (Mark Stevens) through his attempts to foil Cathcart’s plan to frame him for the murder of Galt’s former partner Tony Jardine, who once framed Galt for manslaughter and is now having an affair with Cathcart’s wife, Mari (Cathy Downs). Cathcart fetishizes Mari to the point of purchasing an expensive painting only because it resembles her. Thus, although this film does not include a frame narrative, it dramatizes framing in a number of ways. First, Cathcart’s attempts to dominate his wife are shown by the way he tries to frame her as a painting he can possess—an expansion of his incarceration of her within his luxurious marital prison. Second, he tries to frame Galt for a murder that he himself commits. Third, the film employs numerous internal frames—boxes created by doors, windows, and the like—to embody Galt’s and Mari’s entrapment in Cathcart’s machinations. The film’s visual tropes thus illustrate its themes of identity and possession.

  Early in the film, for example, Galt is reflected in a mirror, the two images of himself sandwiching his loyal secretary, Kathleen (Lucille Ball), who is helping him fashion a new self-portrait as an honest man. A little later he is visited by Cathcart’s agent, a mysterious man in a white suit (William Bendix); after Galt roughs him up, the two are shown in a balanced, split-frame composition, with Galt to the right in silhouette, and White Suit to the left: framer and framed as doubles. Later, when White Suit kills Jardine with a poker and places it in the unconscious Galt’s hand, these visual frames are enacted on the level of plot.

  Cathcart’s attempted framing of his wife emerges early in the film, when he tells her, “I never want you to grow up. You should be ageless, like a Madonna, who lives, breathes, smiles, and belongs to me.” Mari understandably feels stifled, lamenting to Jardine that Cathcart “gives me everything a man can give a woman. It still isn’t enough. … I just keep sitting, listening to his paintings crack with age.” As she delivers these lines, the soundtrack plays the Warren/Gordon standard “The More I See You,” whose lyrics could be Cathcart’s credo:

  The more I see you

  The more I want you. …

  My arms won’t free you

  And my heart won’t try.

  To possess her more fully, Cathcart has purchased a painting he has long and ardently coveted, a portrait of a woman gazing seductively at the viewer. Its resemblance to Mari “isn’t pure accident,” he admits. “It was as if I’d always known her. And wanted her.”10 The more he sees her …

  As for Galt, he understands after he wakes up beside Jardine’s body that “I could be framed easier than Whistler’s mother.” To escape this frame, he visits Cathcart’s gallery and pretends to buy a Donatello sculpture.11 Cathcart emerges from the shadows holding a gun, and then Galt tells him he’s really interested in a piece of modern art “finished the night before last” but now “stiff as a statue. … A Tony Jardine.” Cathcart: “Nonsense. I never handle anything as worthless as a Jardine. … It was found in your apartment.” Galt: “Actually, this Jardine really belongs to you. You paid to have it done. … Somebody had to pay that muscle artist to brush him off.” As the dialogue indicates, Cathcart cannot distinguish between human beings and objects: if his murders are a form of collecting, likewise his collecting is a form of murder. The sequence ends with Galt standing on one side of a door frame, Cathcart on the other; between them, at the far end of the room, hangs Cathcart’s beloved portrait. A reverse shot shows Cathcart, gun in hand, framed by the doorway. All the frames break when Mari (offscreen) shoots her husband, leaving Galt free to remake himself as a law-abiding citizen.

  In The Dark Corner, Hardy Cathcart (Clifton Webb) tries to control his wife, Mari (Cathy Downs), through a painting that resembles her. Kobal Collection / Art Resource, NY.

  These three films all portray forged identities, not only those of the women whom the males mold into objects but of the males themselves, who use these female images to fabricate or reinforce their identities as lover, worthy husband, or intellectual. Yet the males don’t merely define themselves against femininity; they also try to incorporate it. They recreate themselves, in other words, as women in order to become men. The films’ power struggles and gender crossings may signify what many film historians have detected in noir’s femmes fatale: the likelihood that, as I noted earlier, they embody anxieties about wartime and postwar gender roles.12 Yet these characters—both framers and framed, victims and killers—also represent the deeper questions about American values that noir repeatedly poses: is the American Dream of self-reinvention, of playing a new role in life’s second act, still viable? And does such reinvention ever occur without violence, exploitation or commodification?

  The portrait noirs suggest that identities are always in flux, always a matter of performance. In so doing, they invoke the conditions of their own making, not only reminding viewers that their characters are actors staging their own fabrication but even referring to and remaking earlier versions of the same story. Thus, I Wake Up Screaming, itself an adaptation of Steve Fisher’s hard-boiled Hollywood-insider novel, is transformed (by the same producer) into Laura, one character of which is then revived (with alterations) for the same studio’s The Dark Corner. But that’s not the end: in 1953 I Wake Up Screaming was remade by Fox as Vicki, with Jean Peters in the title role, Jeanne Crain as Jill, Elliott Reid as Christopher (his first name changed to Steve), and Richard Boone as Cornell. The story is a near-copy of the first adaptation, but the dialogue lacks its snap, and the film is missing most of the 1941 version’s witty edges. Cornell (who doesn’t kill himself in this version) is portrayed as pathetic rather than creepy. Vicki also acknowledges the first adaptation: at times Boone seems to be channeling (the by-then deceased) Laird Cregar, and several shots replicate those in the earlier version.13 Because by 1953 the theme of celebrity fabrication was less novel, Vicki is more explicit about the title character’s artificiality and more unforgiving in its ironies. For example, Christopher boasts that he can sell Vicki “like a brand of coffee,” and as Christopher and Jill enter his car on their first date, a billboard featuring Vicki’s face promoting Caress beauty products is visible behind them, at once slyly acknowledging Christopher’s creed and indicating the deceased sister’s contribution to their romance. Given the story’s self-reflexive elements—exposing how promoters and audiences create portraits of women as fantasy figures and thereby kill them—Vicki seems to undermine itself even as it unwinds, simultaneously eliciting viewers’ fascination with these processes and criticizing them. Less a forgery than a cover version of I Wake Up Screaming, Vicki adds another layer to what seems not merely a set of movies but an infinite regress of mirrors within mirrors. The next group of films brings us even closer to that condition.

  Mirror Images

  “Some dreams require solitude. … At times the illusion of love may outlast the image of a dingy room, but awaken we must.” These are the words of Maurice Legrand (Michel Simon), the protagonist of Renoir’s La chienne, but they also describe Professor Wanley of The Woman in the Window, and Chris Cross of Scarlet Street. These three films reflect one another in multiple ways. As Oliver Harris observes, because Fritz Lang’s two films employ the same lead acto
rs (Robinson, Bennett, Duryea) performing in similar stories, they induce “a kind of vertigo of déjà vu, cross-reference and pure confusion” (7). The effect is heightened by Lang’s tendency to create a “sealed-off environment,” where, in Foster Hirsch’s description, there seems to be “no world outside the frame” (6). When we add to the mix La chienne, not a film noir, of course, but an earlier adaptation of Scarlet Street’s source material (both were based on a novel by Georges de la Fouchardière), the trio becomes a hall of mirrors filled with reverberating themes and visual echoes, all illustrating plots that also involve frames, doubles, mirrors, and portraits. In all three “the project of desire discovers itself to be within a frame, in a potentially infinite mise-en-abîme”—one that even swallows the viewer (Gunning 287). Together they constitute a triangular dream text revealing their directors’ reflections on the art of filmmaking and the nature of authorship.

  Early in The Woman in the Window, psychology professor Richard Wanley (Edward G. Robinson) laments the “stodginess” that has engulfed him and his friends. With his wife and children out of town, he has a chance to break out but instead spends the evening reading the Song of Solomon. When, a bit later, he gazes through a shop window at a woman’s portrait (his friends had earlier called her their “dream girl”), his cage begins to crack. We regard the portrait from Wanley’s point of view; in the reverse shot a faint reflection of the portrait appears to emerge from his shoulder. Lang cuts back to the painting, now juxtaposed with an actual woman’s face, before returning to Wanley and the reflection. Another shot of the painting follows, and then the camera pans left to rest on a smiling Alice Reed (Joan Bennett), the portrait’s model. As the scene continues, the portrait is placed between Wanley and Alice in every two-shot: he can’t see around the portrait to the actual woman. Wanley’s painting is not a love affair; his love affair is a painting.