Nightmare Alley - Film Noir And The American Dream

by Mark Osteen

  Most noir jazz musicians share Al’s self-contradictions and instability. Of course, the association between musical talent and mental disturbance is hardly new to noir; musicians have long been deemed unreliable and threatening by conventional folk. Traveling from town to town, whether alone or with other suspicious types, musicians seldom establish ties to a single locale. After sleeping much of the day, they work at night inviting audiences to lose inhibitions. Musicians thus become scapegoats for audiences’ guilt, as well as focal points for their longing to escape. Further, as Susan McClary observes, “the whole enterprise of musical activity is … fraught with gender-related anxieties.” For example, the “charge that musicians are ‘effeminate’ goes back as far as recorded documentation about music, and music’s association with the body and with subjectivity has led to its being relegated … to what was understood as a ‘feminine’ realm” (17). Musicians often dress stylishly and create art that evokes emotions, yet they are also widely perceived to be sexually predatory, using their sensitivity and exoticism to entice semiwilling partners.15 Male musicians are thus viewed simultaneously as androgynous and hypermasculine. Jazz musicians carry even more baggage, since they are coded as at once black and white, gifted and disabled, stars and geeks. Hence, as jazz historian Ted Gioia writes, male jazzers are a sonata of dissonances: “world-wise yet innocent; hard-edged yet wearing their hearts on their sleeves,” they are “flip and cynical, yet firmly committed to their calling” (77). In short, the postwar jazz musician bundled together anxieties about race, masculinity, and productivity, embodying conflicting traits that appear throughout noir jazz films, where musicians’ scandalous characters and sensitive natures create what Gioia calls a “fascinating series of ‘anti-hero’ contradictions” (77).

  Midcentury Hollywood’s stereotyping of musicians and the affiliation between music and memory are both exemplified in the neglected whodunit Nocturne (directed by Edwin L. Marin and produced, like Phantom Lady, by Joan Harrison), in which music and lyrics (by Leigh Harline, Mort Greene, and Eleanor Rudolph) play pivotal roles. The film begins with a high overhead shot of composer Keith Vincent’s house, then cranes down and seems to pass through the large picture window into the room where he is playing the piano for a partially hidden woman. Vincent (Edward Ashley) cavalierly lists the various songs he has written for his paramours: a Latin number for a compliant señorita; a jolly swing tune for a Sun Valley girl, and so forth. For the listening woman he has written a piece called “Nocturne,” which he plays while talking through the lyrics—

  Nocturne, you are my nocturne

  You are the words I sing

  The notes I play

  —and ending with these lines:

  When it’s over and done

  You’re no longer the one

  For that was yesterday.

  She may be his muse, but only for about three minutes; women are fine for brief nocturnal activities, but there shall be no strings attached. Ironically, “Nocturne” is also Vincent’s swan song: as the final chords resound, a shot rings out and he falls dead.

  His death is officially called a suicide, but Lt. Joe Warne (George Raft) believes it’s a murder and becomes obsessed with solving the crime, even after being suspended from the force for doing so. The crime is linked in his mind to the melody of “Nocturne,” which, early in the investigation, he plinks out on the piano: A, A, up to C, down to F, then G, then A; A, A, D, F, G, A. On the sheet music is written, “For Dolores,” but this clue is no help, for Vincent called all his women “Dolores.” That night Joe dreams of these Doloreses, oneirically scanning the photos on Vincent’s wall as the title tune plays: it’s his nocturnal edition of Vincent’s song. Following a montage of interviews with the Doloreses, we watch a photo emerge from the developing bath, then dissolve to the face of its subject, Frances Ransome (Lynn Bari), a bit actress with a firm alibi and a soft kid sister, Carol Page (Virginia Huston), a nightclub singer who works with pianist Ned “Fingers” Ford (Joseph Pevney). Soon after they meet, Joe and Frances visit a club where Fingers essays “I Couldn’t Sleep a Wink Last Night” (too many nocturnes, perhaps). But when Joe asks him to play “Nocturne,” Carol becomes upset, arousing Joe’s suspicions. Though the sisters are hot, Warne is lukewarm: after kissing Frances, he immediately turns her off with persistent accusations.

  The next morning he visits Fingers and Carol as they rehearse “Why Pretend?” and Fingers admits that after he cowrote three songs with Vincent, the latter dumped him. However, the key clue comes from another set of fingers—those of Joe’s mother and her friend Queenie, as they discuss how powder burns showed up on Vincent’s head and hands.16 While demonstrating, Mrs. Warne accidentally fires Joe’s gun, leaving powder burns on the head of her son, who has intervened at the last moment. Fortunately, the pistol was loaded with blanks, which explains Vincent’s powder burns: someone fired blanks at him after his death. Two other incidents provide further clues: Joe finds Charles Shawn, the man who photographed every Dolores, hanged in his own studio; then at Frances’s place he discovers the gas on and Frances lying unconscious. In the latter sequence “Nocturne” plays, as it should, for the scene reenacts the first murder. Indeed, all three deaths are staged suicides, melodramatic tableaus designed to be misinterpreted. “Nocturne” plays again when Joe finally confronts Carol and Frances: a long pan left reveals Fingers, who confesses that he is married to Carol and was cuckolded by Vincent. He murdered the composer, then set up the fake suicide. The pianist’s fingers pull out a gun, but Joe has already removed the slugs.

  The title tune is associated with murder as well as with the promiscuous lifestyle of Keith Vincent, who used women and then tossed them away, as his lyrics describe. “Nocturne” is also the aural emblem of Fingers’s dirty hands. More interesting than these associations, perhaps, is the triangular relationship among Vincent, Fingers, and Warne, each of whom plays the theme song on the piano: Vincent sardonically, Fingers passionately, Warne haltingly. Each man’s ability to play mirrors his ability to “play”: Vincent, though portrayed as an epicene dandy by Edward Ashley, is an inveterate womanizer; Fingers is ineffectual, perhaps impotent (his gun was, remember, loaded with blanks). But what of Warne? What did he do to be so black and blue? Why does he risk his career on this case? Perhaps he gets a thrill from vicariously living Vincent’s decadent life. After all, he only halfheartedly romances Frances, and we can’t help but wonder about the sexuality of a man in his forties who lives with his mother and can’t stir up ardor for any woman. In this regard George Raft’s wooden performance is appropriate, for Warne’s stiffness may signify either a man married to his job or a closeted homosexual. Or perhaps Joe would like to be Vincent but actually resembles Fingers: his gun may also be filled with blanks. In any case, though Joe tries to stay clean, he is dirtied by the black powder burns that indicate his noir impulses. The title song, then, not only symbolizes the fake suicides, but, as its occurrence during Joe’s “Dolores” fantasy sequence implies, also represents the inauthentic life of Joe Warne, who seems doomed to remain his own nocturnal companion.

  Though the songs in Nocturne are closer to 1940s-era pop than to jazz, the film exemplifies how jazz is represented in early film noir: as evidence of decadent sexuality, as a reminder of forgotten trauma or violence, as an instrument of “noiring” that darkens even those charged with regulating those impulses. A similar set of motifs characterizes Black Angel, a film made concurrently with Nocturne and adapted, like Phantom Lady, from a Cornell Woolrich novel. Its narrative also resembles that of Phantom Lady: a man—this time it’s pianist Marty Blair (Dan Duryea)—can’t remember the night his estranged wife (singer Mavis Marlowe [Constance Dowling]) was murdered; again the wrong man (this time it’s one Kirk Bennett) is arrested and convicted of the crime, despite the attempts of a woman—Bennett’s wife, a singer named Cathy (June Vincent)—to clear him. As in Nocturne, a melody signifies a murder: in Black Angel the tune is “Heartbreak,” a song Marty wrot
e for Mavis, and which is playing on her phonograph when Bennett enters her apartment and finds her dead. A moody beguine, the song is the musical correlative to the other major clue, a heart-shaped brooch that Marty presented to Mavis the night she died. “Heartbreak” is not just a song; it captures the tortured identity Marty assumed after his marriage failed and he became an alcoholic.

  Suspecting that nightclub owner Marko (Peter Lorre) is behind the murder, Cathy enlists Marty’s help, and the two audition to become the club’s featured entertainers.17 Marko hires them. Convinced that Cathy has enabled him to stay sober, Marty tries to woo her with a song called “Time Will Tell.” But she brushes him off, prompting a binge, and during the bender montage, dissonant strains of “Heartbreak” are heard, as if Cathy has become Mavis. During his spree Marty spots a bargirl wearing the heart-shaped brooch; a fight starts, and Marty lands in a prison hospital. There he flashes back to the night of the murder and recalls that he wasn’t passed out in bed that night as he’d believed but had returned to Mavis’s apartment and strangled her. During Marty’s flashback the images swim and sway to reflect his drunken perspective, and dissonant fragments from “Heartbreak” swirl through the score: she broke his heart, so he broke her neck. Marty escapes, only to collapse in Cathy’s apartment (“Time Will Tell” is heard on the soundtrack). As he awakens, a shot from his point of view dissolves Mavis’s face into Cathy’s: the bad wife gives way to the good wife, each one representing a side of Marty’s tortured psyche. He confesses in time to save Bennett’s life, and at the end “Time Will Tell” plays over a shot of the sheet music.

  At first the key to Marty’s buried memory, “Heartbreak” is then transposed from a lament over lost love to a symptom of mental illness. As the symbol of Marty’s alcoholism, ruined marriage, and capacity for violence, it is counterpointed with “Time Will Tell,” the theme song of his redemptive relationship with Cathy: Marty murdered his wife out of heartbreak, but time will tell if he proves himself worthy of his good angel. Marty’s duality is deep: his angelic talent is inextricable from the “blackness” of his addiction, self-pity, and rage. Marty, then, is the black angel of the title, another sensitive white artist noired by jazz, a performer whose talent seems only marginally more useful than that of Nightmare Alley’s chicken-biter.

  The patterns found in Nocturne and Black Angel are amplified in Maxwell Shane’s Nightmare, a 1956 remake of his earlier Fear in the Night, both adapted from “Nightmare,” another Cornell Woolrich story.18 In the later film’s striking opening sequence, New Orleans jazz clarinetist Stan Grayson (Kevin McCarthy) experiences a nightmare—all canted angles and eerie music—in which he is trapped in a mirrored room and about to be strangled; a woman hands him an icepick with which he stabs his assailant to death. Upon awakening, however, he finds evidence—a button, a key, his own bruises and scratches—that he actually committed the crime. Equally potent is his memory of a dissonant melody—D, up to B, down to G, then G, A, played over a D augmented chord, a “slow, crazy melody, like a tune from another world”—that convinces him of his guilt.

  Music is essential to the story. This nightmarish jazz melody again represents objects, particularly a key Stan finds; indeed, the tune is the key to the crime, and in an effective montage sequence Stan roams Bourbon Street, playing the tune for every musician (some of them black) he encounters. No one recognizes it. Stan then flirts with a woman who resembles his dream’s icepick lady while a black pianist plays for them. As they retire to her apartment, the couple are serenaded by an unseen female singer’s rendition of “A Woman Ain’t a Woman (Unless She’s Got Herself a Man).” But this woman ain’t really got one, for once Stan gazes at himself in her mirror, he finds himself unable to play his part in the promised sexual duet, as if the icepick has replaced his clarinet.

  In other scenes Stan’s steady girlfriend, Gina (played by singer Connie Russell), belts out the bluesy jazz numbers “What’s Your Sad Story?” and “The Last I Ever Saw of My Man.” The latter includes these lines: “Keep one eye open as you sleep / Or your man will get away.” The former, arranged New Orleans style, is heard during Stan’s later flashback to the night of the murder, which occurred on the same night that their band leader, Billy, rejected Stan’s arrangements for the upcoming recording session as “far out” and “not commercial.” Obviously Stan is too imaginative, too sensitive for his own good. As his brother-in-law, homicide detective Rene Bressard (Edward G. Robinson), observes, Grayson is a “high-strung” man with an “artistic temperament”; or as Billy more bluntly puts it, he is a “screwball.” Stan exemplifies Hollywood’s jazz musician: passive, unstable, and easy to manipulate, a geek tortured by his talent and unable to adapt to the workaday world.

  But Bressard doesn’t believe he’s guilty, and the two begin to piece together the facts when—with Gina and Stan’s sister Sue (Virginia Christine)—they seek shelter from a deluge in a large mansion. In the house Gina puts on a record, inadvertently switching the turntable setting from 33⅓ to 16rpm; abruptly the lighthearted tune becomes Stan’s nightmare melody. It is (coincidentally!) the same house where the murder took place. Stan enters the mirrored room where his key opens a closet door; inside the closet is a blood stain. Convinced of his guilt, he passes out at the police station, then tries to commit suicide by jumping from a window—variations of the “nightmare” theme stabbing in the background—before Bressard wrestles him back into the room. Ultimately, through a series of flashbacks, Stan realizes that Dr. Belknap, the psychiatrist who owns the mansion, had hypnotized him to kill Belknap’s wife and pin it on her lover.19 Wearing a wire, Stan returns to the scene and gets Belknap to confess: just as sound once condemned him, it now sets him free.

  Nightmare’s highly melodramatic plot boldly colors in the outlines sketched in Phantom Lady, Nocturne, and Black Angel; like the latter two films, it places an unstable jazz musician at the heart of a half-remembered murder and uses a melody as the residue of a violent trauma. But if the hazy details of the murder are eventually explained, Stan is never cleared, for his association with jazz and the African American musicians who chaperone his encounter with the bargirl indelibly “noir” him. Like those of Phantom Lady’s Cliff, his hands have been appropriated by a more cunning artist—the hypnotist. This pattern suggests that beneath the jazz musician’s racial attributes lies another stain: that of disability. Jazz musicians, indeed, share many traits with noir’s disabled veterans, and their emotional and cognitive dysfunctions resemble nothing so much as posttraumatic flashbacks. These musicians permitted Hollywood filmmakers to transpose into another key the anxieties about readjustment, masculinity, and productivity at play in the vet films.

  Though Stan’s nightmare is over, the dark cloud Hollywood casts over jazz is not. Indeed, jazz melodies represent guilt even in films where musicians play minor roles. For example, in Fritz Lang’s The Blue Gardenia the title song represents the guilty, fractured memory of its female protagonist, Norah Larkin (Anne Baxter). After receiving a “Dear Joan” letter from her soldier boyfriend, Norah rashly accepts a date with the wolf Harry Prebble (Raymond Burr). We first hear the title song suavely performed by Nat “King” Cole in the Blue Gardenia restaurant during Norah’s date with Prebble. An inebriated Norah (having drunk too many Polynesian Pearl Divers) then accompanies Prebble to his apartment, where he spins a record of “The Blue Gardenia” and tries to rape her. Norah fights back, and as she struggles, the soundtrack switches from the diegetic recording to a nondiegetic arrangement that turns the tune into a discordant whirl of confusion and fear. The visual elements are equally disorienting: we see Norah grasp a poker, then images of a shattered mirror, after which she passes out. Awakening, she flees, and the next morning Prebble is found dead, his head bashed in with a poker, surrounded by “petals” from a broken mirror.

  The film is a scathing portrait of the sexual marketplace. Every man keeps a little black book and treats every woman as a number; every woman (not coincidentally,
Norah and her roommates work for the phone company) seems desperate to capture a man—any man. The double standard is ubiquitous: everyone (including Norah) assumes that any woman who would enter Prebble’s apartment is a slut. Hence, as Krin Gabbard observes, the song signifies “Norah’s status as a fugitive and a fallen woman” (248). But its lyrics suggest not rampant sexuality but rueful memory:

  Love bloomed like a flower.

  Then the petals fell.

  Blue gardenia,

  Thrown to a passing breeze,

  But pressed in my book of memories.

  The song also represents memory in the film. Thus, as Chronicle columnist Casey Mayo (Richard Conte) exploits the case by writing an open letter to the “unknown murderess” whom he has dubbed “The Blue Gardenia,” phrases from the song are heard whenever the murder is mentioned: orchestrally when Norah first listens to a radio report of the crime, again in a rhumba arrangement during the “blue gardenia” newspaper montage, again when Norah reads Mayo’s open letter urging her to trust him, and again when she phones him. After she agrees to meet Mayo, he plays the tune on the jukebox at Bill’s Beanery, and a portion of the melody is detectable when Norah’s roommate, Crystal (Ann Sothern), guesses the truth about her. It is last heard just after Norah is arrested.