Nightmare Alley - Film Noir And The American Dream

by Mark Osteen

  When Sam, who left Iverstown the night of the murder, returns eighteen years later, he finds Martha married to Walter, who is running for reelection as district attorney.23 Hearing about his campaign, Sam addresses the poster of O’Neil: “You still look like a scared little kid to me.” Beneath the poster is his own reflection in a mirror. Is he referring to Walter or to himself? Sam is also scared, and he is, moreover, divided about his class allegiances, his feelings for Martha, his attitude toward money—about everything. His ambivalence is embodied in Toni Marachek (Lizabeth Scott), an ex-convict who shares his working-class background and with whom he becomes romantically involved. Yet Sam also remains fascinated by Martha, even after she and Walter get Toni arrested and try to scare Sam away with a beating. Martha, too, is divided: she wants Sam because he represents her father’s working-class origins and her innocent childhood, but she also hopes to prevent him from spilling the beans about her childhood crime.

  Walter and Martha believe that Sam plans to blackmail them; in fact, they seem to want him to blackmail them, for doing so would assuage their guilt and reinforce their belief that everyone is as dishonest as they are. To test him, Martha brings Sam to her office overlooking the factory. Sam sardonically remarks that when he was a kid, he couldn’t even get past the gate. Surveying her domain, she recalls that her father was a mill hand there before marrying her wealthy mother and boasts that she has expanded the business tenfold “all by myself.” But now Sam wants half of it. Later, during a hilltop tryst above the city (Martha is invariably shown looming over others or perched above the town), she tells Sam of the sensation of power she feels from owning all this, and, ignoring his warning (“you know what happened to Lot’s wife when she looked back, don’t you?”), she professes to wish that she had married him instead of Walter. Sam then reveals his secret: he wasn’t even present during the murder and only that day investigated the killing and trial. Enraged at her self-incrimination, Martha tries to brain Sam with a fiery stick, then pleads with him to stay with her, admitting that she feels trapped. This is Martha’s “strange love”: she loves money and power but hates herself for having them; she loves Sam but hates him for making her feel guilty.

  In the film’s final confrontation at her mansion an intoxicated Walter tells of Martha’s affairs, her soulless immorality, and his own cowardice. Stumbling drunkenly, he falls down the stairs, as if to reenact—or undo—the original crime and the class elevation he received as a result of it. Martha urges Sam to finish Walter off, to “set both of us free.” A wide shot shows her gazing down the stairs at the men, like a puppeteer with her marionettes. But Sam carries Walter to a chair. “Now I’m sorry for you,” he says to her. “Your whole life has been a dream.” Taking up a pistol, Martha sneers, “What were their lives compared to mine? … A mean, vicious, hateful old woman who never did anything for anybody” is worthless compared to Martha, who has donated to charity, built schools and hospitals, and put thousands of people to work. Martha here reveals her true nature: she is a fascist. “And what was he?” she continues, referring to the man she framed. Sam’s answer to both questions: “a human being.” After Sam departs in disgust (Martha having been unable to shoot him), Walter excuses them. It’s nobody’s fault, he tells her. “It’s just the way things are. It’s what people want and how hard they want it. And how hard it is for them to get it.” Broe calls this speech a “direct concentration on the structure of class inequality” (66), but it isn’t that, for it blames their crimes on universal appetites rather than on economic circumstances. In the end Martha induces Walter to shoot her. Dying, she utters her birth name, “Martha Smith,” and then Walter kills himself. Thus do the capitalists—their wealth a product of murder—dig their own graves, as Marx and Engels promised. When Sam and Toni leave Iverstown (passing the sign for “America’s Fastest Growing Industrial City”), he quips, “Don’t ever look back. You know what happened to Lot’s wife, don’t you?”

  As is so often the case in noir, individuals are fated to repeat the actions that entrapped them. Milestone alludes to the specters haunting Iverstown through setting and mise-en-scène. For example, both the opening sequences and the scene of Sam’s return take place during rainstorms, as if to suggest that he personifies the past. The concluding scenes on the stairway also replay the murder scene, as if to imply that Martha’s and Walter’s lives have been irrevocably molded by that single childhood act. In these images and in the concluding lines we may also sense postwar Americans’ ambivalence about their Depression past and, perhaps, the filmmakers’ fears that their own pasts, their own secrets, might return to make them pay. Overpowering these themes, however, is the film’s argument that wealth is criminal and capitalism a brand of soul murder. These sentiments lie at the heart of red noir, as Body and Soul further reveals.

  Capital Crimes

  “Ya gotta be businesslike, Charlie. … Everybody dies.” The speaker is Mr. Roberts (Lloyd Gough), a gangster who owns boxer Charlie Davis (John Garfield) and wants him to throw his next fight so Roberts can make a killing by betting against him.24 Business is not only Roberts’s creed; it’s his only reality, as he declares in one of many memorable lines in Polonsky’s script for Body and Soul: “Everything is addition or subtraction. The rest is conversation.” Like Garfield a working-class Jewish kid from the inner city, Charlie believes in the American Dream of upward mobility, which he hopes to achieve through boxing, but in the course of the film he is transformed from an aspiring young man into a thing.25 This sharply written fable of a young man who sells his soul was the only hit for Enterprise Studios, which teamed with Roberts Productions (co-owned by Garfield and Bob Roberts) to produce the picture. Strongly invoking 1930s social realism (Naremore, More Than Night 103; Buhle and Wagner 390), the film is among red noir’s finest achievements, as well as a tribute to the collaborative, artist-first ethos of the short-lived Enterprise.26 It also initiated a new round of boxing pictures, including Champion and The Set-Up, as the ring proved a useful setting for tales of moral combat, as well as a handy way to depict the symbiosis of crime and “legit” businesses.27

  In Charlie’s dressing room, just before his title fight, Roberts speaks the lines quoted at the beginning of this section and then reminds Charlie that he must lose in fifteen rounds. Not only has Roberts bet against him; Charlie has wagered on his own defeat. Tortured by second thoughts as he lies on his pallet awaiting the opening bell, he flashes back to the beginning of his career when he met his girlfriend, Peg (Lilli Palmer), an art student, and shared his dreams with her. “You mean you want other people to think you’re a success?” she asked. “Sure,” he replied. “Every man for himself.” Charlie’s response reveals a confusion that becomes deeper as the film proceeds. To illustrate it, early in the film Rossen and cinematographer James Wong Howe place Charlie in small, cluttered spaces surrounded by others to show how he is defined by his friends and relatives: Shorty (Joseph Pevney), who first promotes him; Peg; his mother and father; his neighborhood. Yet Charlie clings to the fantasy that he is an individual striver—a “tiger,” as Peg calls him, quoting Blake’s poem and drawing him with fur on his legs.28 Yet this trait also stems from his environment, as his mother (Anne Revere) laments: because they live in a jungle, he can only be a “wild animal.” Above all, Charlie dreads becoming his father (Art Smith), who runs a dinky candy store before being killed in gang-battle crossfire. His mother exhorts Charlie to “fight for something, not money,” and encourages him to go to night school, but the only thing Charlie values is money. In a scene just after his father is killed, Charlie stands before the empty store, a “for rent” sign behind his head: he is available for lease or purchase, a piece of merchandise like the Coca-Cola advertised beneath the rental ad. Charlie’s conflict between financial goals and emotional ties is also invoked after Alice (Hazel Brooks), one of Roberts’s hangers-on, claims to be “nobody.” Peg quips, “Nobody is anybody who belongs to somebody. So if you belong to nobody, you’re someb
ody.” What does it mean to belong? To be the property of someone, or to be emotionally attached to someone? Charlie’s dilemma revolves around these conflicting connotations: does he belong to Peg and his family and friends, to Roberts, or to himself?

  Offended when a social worker interviews them to determine if they qualify for welfare, Charlie, with a push from Shorty, sells himself to Quinn (William Conrad), Roberts’s underling, and starts to box in earnest. Bursting with magnanimity after winning several fights, he brings his entourage to a lavish hotel room. There Shorty implores Peg to marry Charlie right away to save him from becoming “a money machine, like gold mines, oil wells.” Roberts, he warns, is “cutting him up a million ways.” Sure enough, shortly afterward Charlie agrees to give 50 percent of his earnings to Roberts, who has promised a bigger pie, with “more slices, more to eat for everybody.” But not for Shorty, who is cut out—he’s now one of Charlie’s “expenses”—and will get only Charlie’s crusts. Despite his fantasy of independence, Charlie has become an alienated laborer whose talent and effort are surplus value for Roberts. He’s not the only one: African American boxer Ben Chaplin (Canada Lee) has already passed through this stage. Left with a head injury from his previous fight, he has been warned not to box again but agrees to fight Charlie with the understanding that he (Ben) will lose. Unfortunately, Roberts and his partners don’t let Charlie in on the plan, and he pummels Ben mercilessly. Celebrating his tainted victory, Charlie learns that his opponent threw the fight and has been severely injured. No matter, says Roberts: “Everybody dies.” Shorty is enraged: “We didn’t win. He [Roberts] won.” Charlie is not “just a kid who can fight; he’s money. And people want money so bad, they make it stink; they make you stink.” When Shorty is killed by a speeding car, Charlie’s conscience seems to die as well; Peg also urges him to quit, but he won’t give up the dream. “I can’t stop now,” he tells her. “It’s what we wanted. … I’m the champ!” “You mean Roberts is,” she answers. “I can’t marry you; that’d just mean marrying him.” The Johnny Green title song plays in the background: Charlie belongs to Roberts, body and soul.

  In the ensuing montage Charlie fights and spends in a fury; Roberts is in every shot, sometimes superimposed over the action, and Alice has supplanted Peg. No longer a tiger, Charlie has become a prize horse that Alice rides to win her own animal—the mink coat Peg once wore. Human relations, as Marx warned, have devolved into relations between things. Aware that his animal will soon wear out, Roberts gives Charlie a final job: accept $60,000 to lose to Jack Marlowe. “Why not live the easy life?” he cajoles. “You got a million friends, Charlie; you can’t miss.” He backs this soft-soap with a hard punch: “Nobody backs out now.” Charlie goes along, but Ben, who has become his trainer, refuses Roberts’s patronizing payoff. “Take the money,” Charlie urges him. “It’s got no memory. It don’t think.” Charlie should know: he is money. However, he does have a memory, and it prompts him to beseech Peg to take him back; after all, he’ll be rich. “Don’t tell me what you can buy,” she says. “You’ve got nothing to buy.” Against Roberts’s cash nexus Peg represents Charlie’s soul bonds. Guilt pangs further buffet Charlie after a neighbor praises him as a credit to Jews, and even Charlie doesn’t seem to believe his explanation to Peg and his mother that throwing the fight is “an investment, a sure thing.” But the turning point comes in the next scene, when Roberts fires Ben, who falls backward over the ring ropes, then goes berserk, collapses, and dies. His sacrifice revives Charlie’s moribund conscience.29 Perhaps, as Buhle and Wagner state, Ben’s death forces Charlie for the first time to glimpse “something beyond himself and [he] comes to terms with the pain of another human being” (Dangerous 115). But he also realizes that Ben’s fate is likely to be his own.

  The frame closes as Charlie opens his eyes on his pallet. He was “dreamin’,” he says, but now he has awakened. And so the climactic fight begins. Or rather, the match begins, but no fighting happens for several rounds, as the athletes stall, following Roberts’s plan. Then, in round thirteen, after being knocked down four times, Charlie decides to defy Roberts, and his frantic comeback scares even his opponent. “Like a tiger stalking his prey,” according to the announcer, Charlie chases Marlowe around the ring until he knocks him out. Afterward he throws Roberts’s words back at him: “Whaddaya gonna do? Kill me? Everybody dies.”30

  Even more directly than Thieves’ Highway, Body and Soul equates crime and business, with sweating bodies replacing golden apples as fungible objects. Roberts, who speaks solely in terms of business and mathematics, turns people into commodities. Desperate to rise out of the ghetto, Charlie jumps at the chance to earn big money but instead becomes it. Yet the film doesn’t really scorn the American Dream: it endorses the version voiced by Charlie’s mother—the same one pursued by Polonsky himself. How, the film asks, does one navigate the path between individual achievement and social/communal obligations? It suggests that Charlie’s most grievous error is replacing his loved ones with parasites like Quinn and Alice; when he is finally all alone, he must decide to whom he will belong and in what sense. In this respect Body and Soul’s values are not leftist so much as humanist. What really matters, it implies, is not money but one’s soul—not wealth but honor and loyalty. These latter values were hard to find in HUAC-era Hollywood, where many witnesses, as Dassin starkly put it, chose career over honor (“Jules Dassin” 213). Although the trials and blacklist were still in the future (the film was shot in April 1947 and released that August: Silver and Ward 38), Body and Soul adumbrates the choices that would soon face Hollywood progressives.

  “At Enterprise, I was God, thanks to Body and Soul,” remembered Polonsky in 1997 (“Abraham Polonsky” 486). As the writer of the studio’s sole hit, he was afforded a chance to direct his first film, Force of Evil, which he adapted from Ira Wolfert’s novel Tucker’s People. Whereas Body and Soul traces the commodification of an individual and crime’s parasitic relationship to sports, Force of Evil attempts a more sweeping indictment. As Polonsky observed, the film uses the numbers racket to represent the entire American system of business (qtd. in Neve, Film 133)—a system that oppresses its workers, corrupts its leaders, and hides its depredations behind patriotic platitudes and “everybody’s doing it” excuses.31 The evil force in Force of Evil is capitalism itself. Yet the film is far from a dull didactic tract. Its crisp cinematography (George Barnes modeled the mise-enscène after the paintings of Edward Hopper; “Abraham Polonsky” 489), powerful acting, and poetically evocative dialogue make it one of the most thoughtful, incisive noirs in the canon. These features also render its critique of American values all the more persuasive.

  The film’s exposure of capital’s crimes begins from its opening overhead shot of Wall Street, where Joe Morse (Garfield, in a riveting performance) explains in voice-over that he will make his first million dollars tomorrow, July 4, as the lawyer for Ben Tucker’s numbers racket. Every “sucker” will bet on the number 776 out of sentimental attachment to the American Revolution. There’s one born every minute: according to Morse, citizens spend over $100 million daily betting on numbers. Ordinarily, all of these sentimental bettors would lose, but this year Tucker plans to fix it so the number wins, thereby driving out of business all the “banks” (the betting concerns are “like banks because money is deposited there” but “unlike banks because the chances of getting your money out were a thousand to one”). This scheme will not only give Tucker’s “combine” a monopoly; it will also increase public sentiment to make the numbers racket a legal lottery and vastly increase Tucker’s—and Joe’s—earnings. The only problem is that the scam is “slightly illegal”—but no more so, Joe implies, than Wall Street’s other activities. He dismisses a colleague’s warning about a new prosecutor, Hall, insinuating that working with criminals is just business and that his own hands are not dirty because they’re merely hired.

  Joe does retain the vestiges of a conscience. His brother, Leo (Thomas Gomez), whom he ha
sn’t seen in years and who sacrificed to put Joe through law school, operates one small bank, which will go broke along with the others on July 4. Against Tucker’s wishes Joe warns Leo and offers to bring him into Tucker’s fold, only to be met with Leo’s hostile response: “I’m an honest man here, not a gangster. … I do my business honest and respectable.” His brother scoffs: “Don’t you take the nickels and dimes and pennies from people who bet just like any other crook? … They call this racket ‘policy’ because people bet their nickels on numbers instead of paying their weekly insurance premium. … It’s all the same, all policy.” According to Joe, Leo is a hypocrite, the numbers racket being no different from the racket called “insurance.” Since all business is robbery, why not make it more efficient? According to Leo, Joe is a soulless, amoral shill; unlike Tucker’s employees, Leo’s are members of his family—closer to him, indeed, than his brother. Leo believes his “legit” brother to be more crooked than he; Joe believes all crooks are the same. As Joe later explains to an associate, Tucker lends money to those he likes and lets the rest go belly-up: “we’re normal financiers.” Their plan to create a monopolistic conglomerate conforms, indeed, to postwar trends among lawful corporations, which bought out or overwhelmed small businesses to increase profits and eliminate competition.32 The trend continues: is there really much difference between Tucker’s tactics and those of, say, twenty-first-century Walmart?

  What happens next seems to confirm Marx and Engels’s contention that capitalism degrades family relations by turning them into money relations (Marx and Engels 476): Joe tips off the police to raid Leo’s bank, hoping to force him to join Tucker’s combine. But instead Leo vows to quit the business—tomorrow, which will be too late to salvage his bank. “People have bets in my bank. That’s a debt,” he declares. He wants to be able to “look in the mirror and see my face, not [Joe’s].” As becomes clear during the raid sequence, Leo is a kindhearted man who tries to spare his employees. The blocking also suggests that he may be morally superior to his brother: during the scene in which Leo vows to quit the business, for instance, he is constantly placed above Joe—reversing the arrangement of their first scene together, in which Joe tries to muscle Leo. But Leo soon echoes Joe’s views. When Leo’s wife reminds him that he used to own legitimate businesses, he sputters, “Real estate business: living from mortgage to mortgage, stealing credit like a thief. And the garage! … Three cents overcharge on every gallon of gas. … Well, Joe’s here now. I won’t have to steal pennies anymore. I’ll have big crooks to steal dollars for me.” Real estate, numbers, a gas station: just different forms of theft. Munby observes that Leo’s speech reveals the “hallowed American space of individual private enterprise … to be just another form of graft” (129). But Leo’s screed isn’t cynical, as Munby’s reading implies; rather, it expresses the Marxian dictum that private property ineluctably leads to oppression (Marx and Engels 484–85).