Nightmare Alley - Film Noir And The American Dream

by Mark Osteen

  One of those “groves” was the Gothic, and in this grove resided Harrison’s first post-Hitchcock script (cowritten with Marian Cockrell), Dark Waters, a moody piece about a woman named Leslie Calvin (Merle Oberon), who recovers from posttraumatic stress after a shipwreck kills her family, and later must fight off criminals impersonating her relatives with the help of Franchot Tone’s Dr. Grover. The success of Dark Waters gave Harrison the clout, when Universal asked her to adapt Phantom Lady, to insist that she be allowed to produce the film as well. More typical of Harrison’s productions, Phantom Lady offers a somewhat more enlightened, though still conflicted, view of gender, as represented by Ella Raines’s protagonist, Carol “Kansas” Richman, who, in becoming a sleuth, plays an array of roles that test and enhance her strength and flexibility. Grossman proposes that Carol embodies the “resourcefulness, flexibility and aggressiveness of the femme moderne” and enacts the “subversive potential of the hard-boiled female protagonist” (35).12 But not too subversive: at the end she happily receives employer Scott Henderson’s marriage proposal via Dictaphone. The film thus challenges gender norms only to reinstate them at the end. If Carol’s roles mirror those played by the writer-producer who helped create her, the film’s conclusion points to the compromises she had to make to achieve success.

  A child of Hollywood (her mother had been an editor for Ince), Virginia Van Upp rose from assistant casting director to secretary for writer Horace Jackson at Pathé and Paramount, where her gifts (she reportedly finished some of Jackson’s scripts when he was too drunk to work) were soon recognized (Francke 62). Working mostly with director E. H. Griffith, she specialized in crafting sharp parts for actresses such as Madeleine Carroll. By 1941 she was one of only five screenwriters in Hollywood earning more than $75,000 per year (Ceplair and Englund 3–4).13 Seeking someone to propel newcomer Rita Hayworth to stardom, Harry Cohn wooed Van Upp to Columbia, where she wrote Cover Girl for Hay-worth and oversaw her performance. Their relationship culminated in Gilda, the career-defining role for Hayworth, which she accepted with the condition that Van Upp produce the film (Francke 63). The screenplay, credited to (male writer) Marion Parsonnet but supervised (and much of it written) by Van Upp, displays a skeptical perspective on gender and relationships and mocks the sexism that permeates noir. Gilda is indeed a key film in the noir canon, for it reveals how men create femmes fatale out of femmes vital and use marriage to regulate female sexuality.

  Down-and-out gambler Johnny Farrell (Glenn Ford) is saved from a mugging in Argentina by casino owner Ballin Mundson (George Macready), with the help of Mundson’s “faithful and obedient” friend, a phallic cane-cum-knife. When he hires Farrell as his right-hand man, Mundson warns him that “gambling and women do not mix”; Farrell swears that he is “no past and all future.” Presumably, Johnny would kill for Mundson, just like his other little friend, so the three form a tight little trio. As this scene’s dialogue and blocking imply (Farrell is placed below Mundson or seems to grow from his body), their relationship is sadomasochistic as well as (at least latently) homosexual.14

  But the geometry changes once Mundson marries Gilda. In the scene of her introduction to Farrell, she quips that Johnny’s name is “so easy to forget,” but in fact she can’t forget her earlier failed relationship with him (so much for Johnny’s “no past and all future”). She married Mundson on the rebound, or perhaps to torture Farrell, who angrily reminds Mundson, “I thought we agreed that women and gambling didn’t mix,” to which Mundson replies, “My wife does not come under the category of women.” No, she comes under the category of property. As Doane remarks, in Gilda women and money are “substitutable objects within the same system and logic of exchange” (Femmes 99). But Mundson hasn’t won Gilda; he has merely bought her. Only when Farrell enters the picture does Gilda become a chip. Throughout the film, indeed, she serves as a medium for the men to work out their conflicted relationship: a stand-in for Johnny to simultaneously disguise and express his sexual attraction, his love/hatred, for Mundson; a means for Mundson to whet and cloak his sadistic feelings for Johnny. Farrell despises the man he works for and loathes himself for kowtowing, yet through Mundson he can inflict revenge on Gilda. Thus after that first meeting, Farrell says in voice-over that he wants to “go back up in that room and hit” both of them, yet he also wishes to “see them together with me not watching.” He craves humiliation, and maintaining his attachment to Mundson keeps him harnessed in hatred to the couple. A bit later, Mundson proposes a toast to “the three of us,” but Farrell refuses. The original “three,” adds Farrell, included a “her” (the knife/cane). How does he know? “Because it looks like one thing, then right in front of your eyes it becomes another thing.” Another thing, indeed: Mundson’s blatantly phallic cane hardly seems female, yet the line suggests that Farrell has conflated Mundson and Gilda and remains attached to them so he can be repeatedly pricked.

  Farrell’s line also points to the film’s second extended trope: masquerade. The metaphor becomes explicit when the casino throws a costume ball (Gilda is a cowgirl, complete with whip; Mundson appropriately dresses as a vampire). Earlier, Mundson explained that “hate can be a very exciting emotion”; it’s “the only thing that has ever warmed” him. It also warms Farrell and Gilda, whose frequently expressed mutual hatred barely masks their passion: Farrell hates her so much that he can’t “get her out of [his] mind for a minute”; she “hates” him so much that she would “destroy [herself] to take [him] down” with her. When Gilda begins to date other men, Farrell monitors her activities, fetching and carrying her for Mundson, “exactly the way I’d take and pick up his laundry.” He tells himself he is protecting Mundson, but Gilda snidely notes that “any psychiatrist would tell you that your thought associations are very revealing. … Who do you think you’re kidding, Johnny?” She recognizes that Farrell is jealous of Mundson and of her, that he punishes himself by obsessing about her lovers, hiding his guilty masochism and loathing for Mundson inside his “hatred” of Gilda.

  The script thus deftly exposes Farrell’s self-deceptions, Mundson’s cruelty, and Gilda’s pain. Director Charles Vidor also presents the triangle’s complexities visually. Perhaps the most telling scene occurs when Mundson, catching the two returning after Gilda’s date with another man, appears as a featureless silhouette, his head cut off by the top of the frame. Farrell, looking much smaller than Gilda and Mundson, is placed between them. As the dialogue (in which swimming substitutes for sex) continues, Mundson walks left, so that Gilda is placed between the two men. At the end of the scene Gilda, in shadow, walks upstairs, leaving the men alone. A cut then places the two men on the same level, with Mundson still a silhouette.15 This brilliantly staged scene reveals their shifting allegiances and power relations: if initially Farrell is the third party between Mundson and Gilda, by the end Gilda mediates the relationship between the males. Yet the emotions can be read in opposed ways. Gilda and Mundson are vying for Johnny, yet he also interferes with their connection; the two men duel for Gilda, even as she enables their friendship. While Mundson remains in the foreground, his feature-lessness (and the dialogue) imply that he is no more than a chip in Farrell and Gilda’s game. Yet Mundson seems to hold the trump card, since he is her husband, and he shows what that means on the night of the costume ball by forcing her to close her window, reminding her that she remains his property.

  Farrell and Gilda’s relationship comes into focus when Mundson catches them in a kiss (“I hate you so much,” she tells Farrell, “I think I’m going to die from it. Darling!”), then fakes his death by flying his plane into the ocean. Johnny “inherits” all of Mundson’s property, including Gilda, whom he marries; but, like an adolescent boy, Johnny confuses himself with his father-figure—mistakenly calling Gilda “Mrs. Mundson”—and emulates Mundson’s imprisonment of her. Though Gilda flees Buenos Aires for Montevideo, where she lands a performing gig, it’s not clear whether she truly desires freedom or only wants to make Farrell jea
lous. In any case, after Farrell fetches her back, Gilda slaps him and begs him to let her go. Falling at his feet, she restages, as Doane notes, Johnny’s position in regard to Mundson at their first encounter (Femmes 114–15). Johnny has become Mundson. At last Gilda taunts him with a legendary mock-striptease (only a single glove is removed) while singing “Put the Blame on Mame,” whose lyrics explain how men attribute all the world’s evils to women.16 The song also exposes Farrell’s “thought associations”: he scapegoats Gilda for his own masochism, self-delusion, and confused sexuality. “Now they all know what I am,” Gilda exults. “The mighty Johnny Farrell got taken and that he married a—” (the line is interrupted by his slap). What is the difference between a wife and a prostitute? Answer: nothing.

  The policeman Obregon (Joseph Calleia), who has been covertly investigating Mundson’s (and now Farrell’s) involvement with a tungsten cartel, recognizes the truth beneath the masquerade: “You two kids love each other pretty terribly,” he tells Farrell. “Gilda didn’t do any of those things you’ve been losing sleep over. … It was just an act. … But I’ll give you credit. You were a great audience.” When at last Farrell sees the light and pleads with Gilda to return to the States with him, Mundson reappears, explains that he faked his death out of jealousy (whether for Gilda or Farrell is not clear), and advances toward the lovers holding a pistol, only to be stabbed with his other “little friend” by Uncle Pio (Steven Geray), the bathroom attendant who functions as chorus and sage throughout the film. Obregon declines to prosecute; Gilda and Johnny stay together. Many critics find this ending unsatisfying.17 I do as well, but for a different reason than others do: having exposed marriage as a method for males to control women’s sexuality, the film now wants us to accept it as an egalitarian romantic institution. How, after witnessing these lovers’ self-deception and cruel games, could one believe that honesty and compassion will suddenly prevail?

  Rita Hayworth as Gilda ironically urges us to put the blame on Mame. Kobal Collection / Art Resource, NY.

  Despite its eyebrow-raising denouement, the film forcefully exposes the femme fatale as a male fantasy. Yet Van Upp herself seems to have been conflicted about marriage and work. Before producing Gilda, she wrote and produced two films, Together Again and She Wouldn’t Say Yes, about career women who resist marriage only to accept it at the end. She resigned her position at Columbia in 1947, purportedly to focus on her marriage to Ralph Nelson, only to divorce two years later. Asked about the cause of the breakup, Van Upp remarked, “I am going to marry my work—I think that’s safer” (qtd. in Francke 65). Although Van Upp’s struggles mirror those of many postwar American women, Gilda remains as biting an analysis of marriage and gender as midcentury Hollywood ever offered. Deconstructing masculinity and the conventions of the Hollywood love story, Gilda presents a complex love triangle in which Mundson serves as the object of desire for Gilda and Farrell, Farrell the desired object for Gilda and Mundson, and Gilda the prize for men who both desire her and use her to enact their own sexual conflicts. Each character is a chip in the others’ game. Of the three, however, only Gilda is denied agency and must resort to torturing the men through (largely feigned) promiscuity. Can we really blame her? As female property, Gilda has no choice but to use her sexuality.

  Ethel Whitehead, protagonist of The Damned Don’t Cry, possesses a more hard-boiled view of feminine power than either Gilda or Mildred. As adapted by Jerome Weidman and Harold Medford from a story by Gertrude Walker, Damned seems at first a remake of Pierce, with Jerry Wald again producing and Joan Crawford reprising her leading role. But unlike Mildred, Ethel would never let a mere teenager get the better of her; instead this once-impoverished protagonist ruthlessly exploits her sexuality and reinvents herself as a socialite and underworld figure. In the end, however, she is victimized by her gender, and though she plays the males’ game remorselessly, she lacks real power. This multiauthored film also displays an ambivalent attitude toward its female protagonist, yet its documentation of the forces constraining ambitious females likely issues from Gertrude Walker, whose work is populated by strong but morally questionable women.18

  At the film’s opening we learn that socialite Lorna Hansen Forbes has disappeared after the death of crime boss George Castleman (David Brian). But why does her history go back only two years? Because Mrs. Forbes is really humble divorcee Ethel Whitehead, who has fled to her parents’ small house, where she recalls her career. Ethel ended her loveless, brutalizing marriage after her son, Tommy, was killed while riding a bike Ethel bought for him against her domineering husband’s wishes. If she had only had money, she believes, her son wouldn’t have died. As in Mildred Pierce, a dead child signals the death of a marriage and the demise of the protagonist’s original identity; it also propels her to find other work.19 After a frustrating search, she eventually takes up modeling, learns that she is more valuable merchandise than the clothing, and memorizes the motto that becomes her credo: “the customer is always right.” Soon she becomes involved with meek accountant Martin Blackford (Kent Smith), pushing him to join the ruthless Castleman’s criminal gang. When Blackford, shocked by Castleman’s activities, pleads that he wants to preserve his self-respect, Ethel responds, “The only thing that counts is that stuff you take to the bank, that filthy buck that everybody sneers at but slugs to get. … You gotta kick and punch and belt your way up,” because “nobody cares about us except ourselves.” She sells this cynical version of the American Dream to Blackford. But as soon as he signs on, she dumps him for Castleman (birth name Joe Cavendy) an erstwhile smalltime hoodlum who has remade himself (through crime) into a cultured businessman. Though put off by her rough edges and cheap perfume, Castleman is impressed by Ethel’s guts and brains; aware that they are two of a kind, he offers her a place in his organization. What place? she asks. “It’s too soon to judge yet. We’ll have to see in which direction your capabilities lie,” he purrs. But she already knows her capabilities and plans to use them to “drain everything out of” the years she has left, to “squeeze them dry.” Ethel is merely doing what her education has taught her: assess her value and then sell herself to the highest bidder.

  But that education is still incomplete. Using Castleman’s money and the guidance of Patricia Longworth (Selena Royle), Ethel relearns how to dress and speak (replacing her gum-smacking “tough” lingo with broad vowels), and assumes a new identity as the mysteriously wealthy Mrs. Forbes (of course, the newly remodeled Lorna drives a convertible). In that guise she’s perfect for her new job: ingratiate herself with Nick Prenta (Steve Cochran), one of Castleman’s minions, and find out how he plans to challenge his boss. This scheme is a way for Castleman to make his “investment” in Ethel pay off. Though she protests, she knows the rules of the game: “the customer is always right.” But the plan goes awry when “Lorna” seems to fall for Prenta (Lorna/Ethel has been faking emotion for so long that she seems unable to distinguish between real and counterfeit love). Castleman sends Blackford to clarify her role: she must set up Prenta to be killed. When she demurs, the hardened Blackford brutally lays out the facts: this “isn’t a party you can leave when you get bored,” for the money that converted her to Mrs. Forbes comes from “a hundred killings.”

  Betraying Prenta is difficult for Ethel because he is, like her, a lower-class striver. So instead of setting him up, she tries to warn him. But Castleman finds out, slaps her around, and then kills Prenta as a “lesson in political science.”20 “Lorna” metaphorically dies with him, and as Ethel drives off in her convertible, we’re driven back to the beginning. The circular narrative structure indicates the lesson that noir protagonists never seem to learn: as Emerson reminds us, no matter what name you assume, you always end up in bed with yourself. Lorna/Ethel’s story is one of failed reinvention, but not just because she can’t shed her aboriginal self. No: although she can imitate the ruthless grasping of powerful males, and can change her name, she can’t change her sex. Thus she remains subject to the law
that a woman’s only real property is her body, which is transferred to the male who purchases (or marries) it. A distaff Nightmare Alley, The Damned Don’t Cry reveals how pursuing the American Dream drives the disenfranchised into criminality. But its ultimate lesson in political science is this: when a woman becomes a commodity, she relinquishes agency.

  Complicity

  Ethel Whitehead doesn’t qualify as a femme fatale, for she is, like Mildred and Gilda, as much victim as violator (the film was in fact first submitted to the Breen Office under the title The Victim: PCA file). In the work of screenwriter Ketti Frings, the lines between victim and violator are blurred even further. Frings (nee Katherine Hartley) wrote two provocative noirs for Hal Wallis at Paramount that depict strong but self-divided women hemmed in by social and gender roles and forced into crime.21 Their guilt is shared by the equally conflicted men with whom they are involved. Frings’s scripts exemplify how, according to Walsh, moral choices are typically presented in women’s films as “complex … and as embedded in a network of interpersonal relations” (43). Indeed, the key theme in the two films I discuss, The Accused and The File on Thelma Jordon, is complicity.22 In the former, Dr. Wilma Tuttle (Loretta Young) kills a man who tries to rape her and then must wrestle with her conscience and confront her sexuality; in the latter, Thelma Jordon (Barbara Stanwyck) entices assistant district attorney Cleve Marshall (Wendell Corey) into abetting a murder plot but is a reluctant party to the scheme, which is engineered by her lover, Tony (Richard Rober). Though the plan succeeds, Thelma’s emotions are torn to pieces.