Nightmare Alley - Film Noir And The American Dream

by Mark Osteen

  Cleve Marshall is a willing victim. As the film opens, he is drunk, wallowing in self-pity and feeling emasculated by his wife, Pam, and her wealthy, domineering father. Thelma exploits his craving for liberation. As she sits in the driver’s seat, preparing to depart from his office, Cleve thrusts his head through the car window and declares, “I’m harmless and I’m lonesome.” Soon the car becomes the lovers’ alternate home, their amoral space where all rules are suspended. The next evening, Thelma intimates that she, too, is “tired of being on the outside looking in,” and the following night they park in the woods and make out “like a couple of teenagers.” But they can’t stay in the car forever, so Cleve, fearful of his reputation, assumes a series of phony names—Thompson, Johnson—whenever he calls on Thelma. We learn later that Thelma first mistook him for his boss, Miles Scott, who was the original target. Cleve isn’t the only person with multiple identities: after her date with Cleve, Thelma kisses a man named Tony Laredo, even though she has just told Cleve that Tony is her husband but no longer in her life.

  Cleve’s identity becomes the key missing piece in the subsequent crime—the murder of Thelma’s rich Aunt Vera—and investigation. The murder sequence, with its spidery staircase, deep shadows, nail-biting suspense, and shrewd use of sound (we hear the old lady fall but don’t see the murder) displays director Robert Siodmak’s skills. But the screenplay is ingenious in its own right, as it depicts Cleve, pretending to be Mr. Johnson, phoning Thelma, then helping her alter evidence. He believes her story that Tony, without Thelma’s help, killed Aunt Vera for her emeralds. The next day Thelma is interrogated by the police, who know about her phone call from “Mr. X”; they also inform Cleve that Tony was in Chicago that night and that Thelma was never married to him. Despite this evidence of Thelma’s mendacity, Cleve anonymously hires high-powered defense attorney Kingsley Willis (Stanley Ridges) to represent her. The canny Willis describes criminals as having split personalities so that their “left hand never lets the right hand know what it’s doing.” As the right hand to Thelma’s left, Willis doesn’t want to know if she’s guilty. Of course, these words also fit Cleve who, after giving Willis information that forces Cleve’s boss to recuse himself, now must argue the case against his own lover. His left hand defends; his right hand prosecutes.

  At the trial he works at cross-purposes, antagonizing jurors while also presenting damning evidence against Thelma. Willis exploits Cleve’s ambivalence, evoking reasonable doubt by raising the specter of Mr. X, who, he shows, could have committed the murder. Cleve’s alter ego (his defender self) thus undermines his case, and Thelma is acquitted.23 But Mr. X is guilty of a crime: Cleve is an accessory to murder after the fact. His responsibility becomes clearer in the aftermath, when Tony, pleased with his “lifelong annuity,” celebrates with Thelma. But she remains as conflicted as Cleve, first refusing to leave with Tony, then telling Cleve (perhaps to protect him) that she has always loved Tony and that she killed her aunt for her jewels. “You were the fall guy, Cleve, right from the beginning.” Cleve knew, but didn’t want to know; hence, when he threatens to indict Tony for “complicity,” he is also naming his own crime. But Thelma recognizes her own complicity (Tony remarks in an early version of the script that she is a “chameleon” who “changes colors” depending on which man she is with), and, as she and Tony drive away, she burns him with the car’s cigarette lighter, causing a wreck that kills him.24 On her deathbed Thelma describes her lifelong struggle: “Willis said I was two people. He was right. You don’t suppose they could just let half of me die.” The old Cleve—the attorney—dies as well; his divided self exposed, he is disbarred but does finally acquire integrity.

  Like Phyllis Dietrichson, Thelma Jordon elicits the antisocial impulses lying dormant in her victim. But unlike Phyllis, Thelma is herself under the sway of a powerful man and therefore not completely responsible. An embodiment of complicity, she doesn’t know what she wants.25 The same is true of Dr. Wilma Tuttle, the psychology-professor protagonist of The Accused. In that film’s opening sequence we watch a guilty-acting Wilma return to her apartment (staring into the mirror, she seems not to recognize herself), then recall administering a quiz, the previous day, about conditioned reflexes.26 “Think of your needs, your hungers, your fears,” she advises her students, for these “rule most of us.”27 One student, Bill Perry (Douglas Dick), needs no encouragement to think of his hungers: he ogles Wilma, copies her gestures, and violates her space. She agrees to meet him in her office (along the way speaking with another student, Susan, whom Bill is harassing), but when he doesn’t show, she leaves him a note, then encounters him outside. Their chat causes her to miss her bus—a pretext for Bill to give her a lift home in his convertible. On the drive she analyzes him as a divided soul: overindulged by one parent and overdisciplined by the other, he lacks balance. The drive leads to a drink, Bill’s sharing of his passion for hunting abalone (“it’s the fight they give you that’s important”), then to parking at the palisades above the beach, where he proposes a moonlight swim. “You’re even more unbalanced than I thought,” Wilma declares. Bill manhandles her, tries to kiss her; Wilma flees, briefly resists, then kisses him back. “You little firecracker. Don’t pretend you don’t like it!” he exults. But when Bill squeezes her arm and hurts her, Wilma grabs a metal spring (used for opening abalone shells) and beats him to death.

  The screenplay contains no hint that Wilma returns Bill’s kisses; nonetheless, it’s clear that Wilma’s diagnosis of Bill applies to herself, for she too is conflicted, unable to recognize her sexual feelings: at first passive, she becomes willing, then abruptly turns aggressive.28 As the investigation, led by Lt. Dorgan (Wendell Corey), proceeds, the police read Bill’s exam, in which he describes a certain woman as a “cyclothymiac” who “swings wildly from one side to the other” and whose long hair comes undone “because her emotions are coming undone. She’d like to break loose but she can’t.”29 His diagnosis of her (like his earlier comparison of her to a shell-bound abalone) is as accurate as hers of him. Although she tells herself in voice-over that the killing was justified and that she has nothing to feel guilty about, she covers up her actions, writing a second note to Bill when the first one vanishes and changing her hairstyle so as not to fit Bill’s description. Like that other psychologist/killer, Prof. Wanley of The Woman in the Window, Wilma “accidentally” incriminates herself by arguing with the forensic expert investigating the case, Dr. Romley (Sam Jaffe). He speaks so callously about Bill’s body that Wilma bursts out with “you miserable ghouls!” (the harsh lighting on Jaffe reinforces the description) and accuses them of falsifying evidence. In short, Wilma acts guilty.

  Bill’s guardian, attorney Warren Ford (Robert Cummings), aids the investigation and begins a relationship with Wilma. Dorgan, too, is attracted to her but nevertheless begins to suspect Dr. Tuttle once he rereads Bill’s exam.30 But she is “so nice, so intelligent!” Romley adds, “so tense, so emotional.” After researching cyclothymia Dorgan realizes that Wilma fits the bill, and plans to trap her by inciting her anger. Ford does it for him, however, by bringing Wilma to a boxing match where one of the pugilists resembles Bill and the bloodthirsty crowd evokes memories of the crime. As a woman behind Wilma screams, “Kill him, kill him, kill him!,” a shot from Wilma’s point of view shows the young fighter being pounded into submission, his face dissolving into Bill’s. “Bill, you’re hurting me,” Wilma shouts, then dazedly adds, “I didn’t mean to!”31 Though Ford suspects the truth, he protects her, then asks her to go away with him. He can’t comprehend why she demurs: why would a woman’s “two-penny job” matter?32

  The next morning, Dorgan asks her to play the role of “juror number one,” while he restages the murder with miniatures and a mannequin. After Wilma grabs the spring and whacks the mannequin Bill’s head viciously and repeatedly, Dorgan reveals that her attempt to hide the crime by writing a second note confirmed her guilt: only the murderer would have known that Bill didn’t se
e the note and would have written a second one. In other words Wilma incriminates Dr. Tuttle. But both of them have a good lawyer in Ford, and their case is compelling: it was self-defense, her only crime being concealing evidence. Ford helped her conceal it: like Cleve Marshall he is complicit, an accessory after the fact. In his closing statement Ford intones, “Out of fear she killed. And out of fear she concealed and evaded. But if we’re to hold Wilma Tuttle accountable in fear, then the world must be held accountable. For these fears are not born in us; they are man-made.” This speech, devised by Frings (it doesn’t exist in the novel or in others’ drafts: see The Accused final draft), seems to excuse Wilma, yet its “fears” remain vague. Does he mean her fear of sex? Rape? Lost reputation? We can’t be sure because, like Thelma Jordon, Wilma Tuttle doesn’t testify at her own trial; a man speaks for her. Indeed, though Warren wins Wilma by rescuing her, his insistence that she quit her job and marry him seems only a gentler version of Bill’s brutal advances. Speaking for her, using the force of the law to save her from herself, Warren is like a father curbing his daughter’s sexuality through marriage. He is his nephew’s counterpart—a Bill who won’t bite. This denouement also squashes the fascinating questions that the film has raised about Wilma’s conflicted character and her complicity in her own victimization. Bill would have raped her, so her violent response was justifiable. Yet we sense that the murder was as much a reaction to her own repressed sexual feelings as to her fear of Bill, for a part of her was flattered by, and welcomed, Bill’s attentions.

  Yet unlike Thelma Jordon, The Accused places us inside its female protagonist, evoking sympathy for her plight while exposing her lack of self-knowledge. Frings’s early drafts take pains to analyze and empathize with Wilma’s self-contradictions (though they don’t make it into the film; see Strange Deception, 20). Like the novel, albeit more subtly, the film suggests that Dr. Tuttle relies too much on her brains, so when her emotions are aroused, she has no idea what to do with them. These implications echo the patronizing assumptions made about Spellbound’s Constance Petersen and reflect the mistrust of intellectuals (especially psychologists) evident in the films discussed in chapter 1.33 But though the key situations and events are found in Truesdell’s novel, Frings’s screenplay not only improves the story’s narrative (by changing the flashback’s placement and cutting extraneous material); it also nudges the story in a more progressive direction by showing respect for Dr. Tuttle’s career and by loosening the novel’s traditional views of gender. In the finished film Wilma is mostly guilty of not knowing herself. Frings, by contrast, did know her worth: she not only earned more for her work than any of the male writers who contributed to the script. She deserved it.34

  It is useful to compare The Accused to another movie about rape made the following year—Outrage, cowritten and directed by Ida Lupino, who effectively uses overhead shots and silence to depict the entrapment of Ann Walton (Mala Powers) by the rapist. Ann does nothing to encourage the rapist, and Outrage portrays more explicitly than The Accused the sexist culture in which she lives.35 Her controlling father, for example, loathes her fiancé, Jim (Robert Clarke), and objects to their marriage plans, and Jim can’t understand why Ann, after being raped, finds his too-insistent advances “filthy.” In the aftermath Ann is subjected to rude stares and whispered comments. The stamping of papers and the drumming of nails at her workplace seem unbearably loud, and her shame compels her to run away. The message is clear: rape merely exaggerates the oppressive sexism that underwrites her world.

  The second half of the film, however, retreats from this provocative opening and repeats the trajectory of The Accused: Ann is rescued and sent back to her parents by a man, Bruce Ferguson (Tod Andrews), a minister who seems immune to sexual feelings. But after Bruce has helped Ann recover, another man, Marini (Jerry Paris), makes a pass at her and insinuates that Ferguson just wants her for himself. As Marini plays with Ann’s hair, Lupino moves to a close-up of his mouth, which, from her POV, becomes the rapist’s mouth. Because Marini’s mouth uttered the unspeakable—that she and Ferguson may harbor sexual feelings for each other—Ann grabs a wrench and brains him.36 Certainly Marini is too aggressive, but the traumatized Ann overreacts because sexual feelings have become anathema to her. Like Wilma Tuttle in The Accused, at her judicial hearing Ann doesn’t speak for herself; Bruce makes the case that she suffered from “temporary insanity” and blames society for not providing help for the rapist, who has spent half of his life incarcerated, and for its “criminal negligence” toward Ann. He pleads for better methods of turning “human scrap back into useful human beings.” After the prosecutor drops the charges, and a psychiatrist recommends that Ann undergo treatment, she returns to Jim and her parents. Thus, as Pam Cook comments, “every move Ann makes to take control of her destiny is punished or refused” (66). Moreover, what Ronnie Scheib calls the “juiceless, deadpan Army” of male doctors, ministers, judges, and lawyers absolve themselves of guilt (61) by attributing the blame to a vague entity called “society,” without recognizing their own complicity in the silencing of women.

  It’s not clear whether Lupino et al. mean this denouement to be as ironic as it may seem to contemporary viewers. Several of the Lupino/Filmakers’ pictures, including The Bigamist (see below), feature similarly wishy-washy endings. But we may read the film as indicting not just rapists but patriarchy’s continuing violations of Ann: in the end the rapist’s gaze is merely replaced by the equally invasive surveillance of legal and mental health institutions, which will decide when, if ever, she is to be freed. To compare this film to The Accused, then, is to understand the degree to which women artists’ perspectives on female victimization were constrained by prevailing attitudes about sexuality and gender, and by a trust in institutions that more radical films might condemn. There’s no hint of complicity in Ann’s conscience, but complicity exists—on the part of a society that cannot integrate female sexuality, and by filmmakers who cannot conceive of alternatives.

  Inside, Looking Out

  Early in Possessed, a catatonic Louise Howell (Joan Crawford again) is admitted to the hospital. As a machine scans her body, the doctors speak of her in the third person. He hasn’t even talked to her, but Dr. Willard (Stanley Ridges) already knows that she is “frustrated, just like all the others we’ve seen,” and he is “thrilled” to use “narcosynthesis” (that familiar noir treatment) to induce her to tell her story. As he did in High Wall, director Curtis Bernhardt exposes how psychiatry steals patients’ agency. But it matters that this patient is a woman, for, even more than Ann Walton, Louise is a victim of patriarchy.37 As adapted by Silvia Richards and Ranald MacDougall from a Cosmopolitan novelette by Rita Weiman, Possessed presents a “schizoid” America that hides behind legal and clinical discourses while it turns women into objects.38 As in High Wall, the asylum is not separate from the world outside but an extension of it.

  Louise’s flashback is prompted by the memory of a Schumann piece that her former lover, David Sutton (Van Heflin), loved to play on the piano. Louise confesses to Sutton that she “just existed” before she met him, but he gets defensive the minute she mentions marriage: “I like to play solo,” he protests. Louise pleads, “I just can’t go back [to] being on the outside of people’s lives looking in.” He replies, “We’re all on the outside of other people’s lives, looking in.” These lines evoke both our voyeuristic role as spectators of Louise’s gradual dissolution and the film’s master trope of barriers and bars. We don’t know why Louise clings to Sutton so tightly, for no background is provided, but clearly she has learned that her worth depends on being valued by a male. Louise is already doubly in thrall, being further tyrannized by Pauline Graham (Nana Bryant), the invalid for whom she works as a live-in nurse. Not only does Mrs. Graham constantly ring Louise’s buzzer, but she is certain that Louise has designs on her wealthy husband, Dean (Raymond Massey). Ironically, before long Louise becomes Mrs. Graham—both literally, for she marries Dean after Pauline�
��s death, and metaphorically, in that she too becomes disabled by jealousy and paranoia.

  After a pause the flashback resumes with Louise’s memory of Mrs. Graham’s suicide by drowning. The doubling of Louise and Pauline begins at the coroner’s inquest, when Graham intones, “She did it deliberately” (the two “shes” seeming to blend) and Graham’s daughter Carol (Geraldine Brooks) angrily charges, “She killed herself because of you,” then announces to her father that “Miss Howell has taken my place, just as she took mother’s place!” Months later, Louise has become Graham’s son’s nanny and moved to Washington with them. When Sutton visits them, she is at first cordial, then shaky, and finally, as he boasts of his conquests, nasty: “Your love affair with yourself has reached heroic proportions,” she declares, before slapping him. Mortified, she resigns. But Graham proposes marriage on the spot, and Louise accepts. If, like Julia Ross, Louise seems to have everything a woman could want, in becoming Mrs. Graham, she, like so many other noir escapees, merely swaps one form of servitude for another.

  Louise mends fences with Carol, but their relationship is strained again when Sutton begins to woo the girl. Carol invites him to a piano recital, where the soloist plays the Schumann piece, sending an upset Louise back to the mansion. Alone in the house, she is tormented by sounds real and imagined—echoey piano music, high-pitched shrieking, a loud clock, even her own heartbeat. Louise shuts the barred window, but her enemies are not outside; they are inside her own mind. When Carol returns and again accuses Louise of killing her mother, Louise admits it; the women struggle, and Louise knocks Carol down the stairs to her death. Then, as the perspiring Louise gazes down in horror, Carol’s body vanishes, and Carol, quite alive, reenters the house: the argument and murder were all Louise’s fantasy. This waking dream reveals that Louise’s jealousy of Sutton is tangled up with her guilt over Pauline’s death. Her motives and pathologies converge in the “murder” of Carol: she at once eliminates a rival for Sutton’s affections, enacts her own guilty wish to have murdered the first Mrs. Graham, and—since Pauline is her alter ego—kills herself.