Nightmare Alley - Film Noir And The American Dream

by Mark Osteen

  22. Amnesia stories are common in noir even when they don’t concern veterans. The lengthy list includes films such as The Long Wait, The Scarf, Man in the Dark, and Shadow on the Wall, as well as Street of Chance, discussed in chapter 2. For a list of other noir films with amnesia plots see Dickos 182–84; for an extensive analysis of noir amnesia see Santos 67–103.

  23. Further ironies about memory and knowledge crop up elsewhere in the film: many of Cravat’s former acquaintances, including Mel Phillips (Richard Conte), owner of a nightclub called The Cellar, seem to have amnesia about Cravat; Anzelmo, an ex-Nazi in pursuit of the money, runs a fortune-telling parlor.

  24. Both High Wall and Crooked Way dramatize the stigma attached to cognitively disabled or traumatized veterans, who were often suspected of faking their injuries to gain sympathy and services (see Waller 168).

  25. It seems likely that this thematic slant is the work of Cole, a Communist and future member of the Hollywood Ten.

  26. This drug was developed during the war, partly as a means to induce truthful confessions from prisoners and partly as a way to weed out malingerers (Luckhurst 58).

  27. Bernhardt and his cinematographer, Paul Vogel, frequently employ high angles on Kenet to show him belittled and crushed by the forces surrounding him. Other examples of verticality multiply as the film proceeds: Whitcombe pushes over the stool of Cronner, his building’s handyman, when Cronner tries to blackmail him; the push sends Cronner down an elevator shaft to his death.

  28. Herbert Marshall, who plays Whitcombe as an able-bodied man, lost a leg during World War I and used a prosthesis to enable him to walk and stand.

  29. As a German-born Jew who escaped from Germany in 1933 after being detained by the Gestapo, Bernhardt possessed firsthand experience of such all-powerful institutions. Like many other noir directors, he knew what it meant to be cut off from one’s past, having landed in America with almost no understanding of English. Bernhardt’s European career and escape are outlined in Brook (167–69).

  30. Robert Richards, who scripted the film, was an ex-Communist who was named by his former wife, screenwriter Silvia Richards (Buhle and Wagner, Radical 364–65). Richards adapted the script for Act of Violence from an original story by WWII veteran Collier Young, who later cofounded Filmakers, Inc., the important independent production company discussed in chapter 7. Zinnemann’s later film High Noon (1952) is also often read as an allegory of the HUAC era, though he was not a member of the radical Hollywood Left. He also focused on military men in other films of the period: his 1950 film The Men deals honestly, if somewhat sentimentally, with the tribulations of physically disabled veterans, and From Here to Eternity (1953) superbly depicts the loves and fears of American servicemen on the eve of World War II.

  31. Publicity posters for the film treated Parkson’s disability as a horror movie trope. A typical one reads: “The killer with the limp is coming your way! He may be lurking behind you at this moment! … Listen! Can’t you hear that menacing, scraping, shuffle as he approaches? Neither law, nor fear … not even a woman’s kisses can stop him as he stalks his prey in the most suspenseful screen drama of the season.” None of the ads alludes to Parkson’s motives, nor to the complicated nature of Enley’s guilt (Act of Violence posters, Fred Zinnemann Papers, MHLSC).

  32. Research suggests that many POWs suffer from PTSD. One study found that, even forty years after the fact, up to 70 percent of former POWs still displayed symptoms. See Schlenger et al. 77.

  CHAPTER FOUR: Framed

  1. Kent Minturn argues that these painting noirs display a “Romantic notion of the artist as a tortured genius” (282). In addition to the figures in the films I discuss, one could also cite sculptor Jack Marlow in Phantom Lady and Bogart’s mad artist, Geoffrey Carroll, in The Two Mrs. Carrolls, who obsessively paints his wives as the Angel of Death and then poisons them to revive his moribund muse.

  2. For a discussion of how Grable and other “pinup girls” were defined by their body measurements see Renov 184.

  3. Leonard Leff points out the homoerotic tinge in the McPherson/Lydecker relationship. For example, when they dine at Waldo and Laura’s favorite restaurant, the two men seem to be on a date (7). It is also difficult to miss the innuendos in the opening sequence, when McPherson confronts Lydecker as the latter luxuriates in the bathtub. This subtext is also present in Vera Caspary’s source novel, which hints that Lydecker’s wooing of Laura is but a set of “gestures” designed to make him appear heterosexual (Caspary, Laura 158).

  4. Kathryn Kalinak observes that the picture frame “serves to contain the power of her threatening sexuality” (168). Liahna Babener similarly argues that the portrait is “quarantined inside the pictorial space” and usually “sandwiched between men” (95) to signify Laura’s domination by males.

  5. Royal Brown comments that the theme represents Laura’s absence (90); yet it also betokens her continued presence, at least in McPherson’s thoughts and senses, as each restatement reinforces “the feeling that he is trying to get it [or her] out of his mind” (Ness 62).

  6. Nicholas Spencer asserts that the “prior murder narrative was simply a dream” (137); later in the film McPherson urges Laura to “forget the whole thing like a bad dream.” The lyrics Johnny Mercer added to the musical theme make this possibility explicit: “but she’s only a dream.”

  7. In Caspary’s novel Diane was having an affair with Laura’s fiancé, Shelby Carpenter. The novel’s Diane Redfern was born with the name Jennie Swobodo (Caspary, Laura 95); thus, this fleshing out of Diane’s background adds heft to the doubling motif.

  8. Babener concludes that the filmmakers “defeminized” the novel by erasing Laura’s voice in order to advance a “misogynist agenda” (86). Caspary herself praised the film but disliked the way it transformed Laura into a “Hollywood version of a cute career girl” (Secrets 209). In Jay Dratler’s original script, according to Biesen (161) and Kalinak (162–63), Laura was given voice-over narration, which Zanuck urged Preminger to remove. According to Preminger, however, Laura’s voice-over was added later, at Zanuck’s request, then deleted (Bogdanovich 619). For Preminger’s recollections about the production see Bogdanovich (614–21).

  9. The Dark Corner was also produced by Zanuck at 20th Century–Fox, and was coscripted by Jay Dratler, who cowrote Laura.

  10. Though allegedly by Raphael, the portrait looks nothing like Raphael’s females, instead resembling a touched-up twentieth-century photograph. As Richard Dyer notes, the painting also provides a “grim undertow” to Cathcart’s earlier quip that “the enjoyment of art is the only remaining ecstasy that is neither illegal nor immoral” (Dyer, “Postscript” 124).

  11. The sculpture most closely resembles Donatello’s Fountain Figure of a Winged Angel (ca. 1440), though that sculpture is bronze, not marble like the film’s piece, and much smaller as well: see Metropolitan Museum, “Fountain Figure,” www.metmuseum.org/TOHA/hd/dona/ho_1983.356.htm.

  12. For versions of this argument see Renov 174–91; Belton 240; and Hanson 1–17.

  13. For example, when Christopher wakes in his apartment to find Cornell sitting in a chair near his bed, the camera angles and blocking are nearly identical to those in the 1941 version. Several sequences are absent, however, including a sexually suggestive scene in which Jill saws off Christopher’s handcuffs. Crain and Peters also resemble each other more than do Grable and Landis.

  14. These shots are virtually identical to the camera movements Preminger uses when McPherson dozes in Laura’s apartment.

  15. The Woman in the Window’s principal photography was completed in June 1944 and Harry’s a year later. It is possible that the makers of Uncle Harry were imitating Woman, but it is more likely that a major motivation for both endings was to satisfy the requirements of the Production Code administrators, who frowned on suicide.

  16. In Nunnally Johnson’s original script (adapted from a novel by J. H. Wallis), Wanley kills himself. But Lang and produce
r William Goetz insisted on the dream twist. For more on how the scene was created see McGilligan, Fritz Lang (310).

  17. As E. Ann Kaplan comments, Legrand is placed within internal frames throughout the film to expose how he is “bounded by, trapped in, bourgeois culture” (“Ideology” 43).

  18. Near the beginning of Woman, Lang dissolves a clock over Wanley’s body to express the same idea.

  19. Chris’s works were actually painted by John Decker (see McGilligan, Fritz Lang 322).

  20. This moral, and the fact that Cross ends in a living hell, permitted Scarlet Street to pass muster with the Breen Office. It didn’t, however, prevent the film from being banned in several cities. For an account of this controversy see Bernstein.

  21. Minturn (306) notes that the film alludes to the notorious case of Han van Meegeren, who forged a number of works in the manner of Dutch masters (especially Vermeer) that were sold to the Nazis for large sums. For a fuller account of the Meegeren forgeries see Arnau 242–65.

  22. Steele’s quasi-expressionist aesthetic ignores the likelihood that the socialist Millet was probably trying to portray the poverty and spiritual desperation of the peasants among whom he was raised.

  23. Diane Waldman notes that many postwar American films affirmed an “illusionist” aesthetic and viewed modern art with “hostility and suspicion.” Among modernism’s alleged offenses were elitism, ugliness, incomprehensibility, and political subversiveness (54, 53).

  24. Not only did Dalí write a long analysis of the painting, but he created several variations on it, incorporating its two figures into his 1932 painting Angelus, into his El Ángelus arquitectónico de Millet (1933)—where the praying peasants become two white stones—and into his Reminiscencia arqueológica de El Ángelus de Millet (1935). These multiple versions bear out Schwartz’s description of the history of art as “the history of copy rites, of transformations that take place during acts of copying” (248). For images see “Art of Europe”: www.artofeurope.com/dali/dal26.htm; and “Meeting Dalí!”: http://meetingdali.blogspot.com/2011/06/dalis-obsessions-revealed-in.html.

  25. In his analysis of the train wreck scenes Miklitsch similarly describes the aural effects as an “exquisite sonic trope for the psychic dislocations of the postwar world” (78).

  26. Rolling up the real Dürer work would be impossible, since it was painted on wood.

  27. Although the “Scola copy” is an invention of the filmmakers, Dürer forgeries have long been commonplace. Indeed, in the sixteenth century, according to Arnau, there were far more Dürer forgeries in circulation than genuine Dürer works (119–20). For an analysis and reproduction of Adoration of the Magi see Web Gallery of Art, “Dürer, Albrecht,” www.wga.hu/frames-e.html?/html/d/durer/1/04/2adorat.html.

  28. This copy was bequeathed to the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the original is in London’s Victoria and Albert Museum. Sometime after 1831 the original of this painting was cut vertically, but the parts were reunited before John Forster bequeathed it to the museum. See Metropolitan Museum, “The Painter’s Daughter Mary” for further details.

  CHAPTER FIVE: Noir’s Cars

  1. Double Indemnity was among the first group of American films screened in France after the war (a collection that also included The Maltese Falcon and Murder, My Sweet), which prompted critic Nino Frank to coin the term film noir.

  2. Fotsch observes that insurance company profits expanded immensely as car accidents became common (105), and Double Indemnity exploits this trend, deriving its premise from an insurance policy clause. Drivers need insurance, and insurance encourages the desire to “crook the system,” as Neff declares: murder and insurance are part of the same game. Further, in the James M. Cain novel on which the film is based, there is an elaborate auto-switching scheme in which Neff (named Huff in the book) attempts to murder Phyllis and pin it on her step-daughter Lola’s boyfriend (and Phyllis’s lover) Nino Sachetti, by using Sachetti’s car as a sign of his identity. See Cain, Double Indemnity 87–95.

  3. Twin Oaks is one of the innumerable roadside diners in noir films, establishments that, like full service “filling” stations, are now obsolete features of highway culture.

  4. Wieder and Hall’s The Great American Convertible and Vose’s The Convertible illustrate how the convertible was branded to appeal to a sense of youthful rebellion and was depicted in contemporary advertisements as an emblem of upward mobility.

  5. Recall, for example, Out of the Past, in which Jeff Markham (now known as Bailey) relates the story of his compromised past to his girlfriend, Ann, during a long drive from Bridgeport to Whit Sterling’s home at Lake Tahoe.

  6. The used-car dealer in lam films epitomizes the law-abiding thieves who judge others. Selling overvalued or worthless autos, they also indicate the sellers’ market that dominated the immediate postwar period (when, because of wartime production curbs, anything on wheels could fetch a price) and prey on the belief in automobility as a path to social mobility. For a discussion of the postwar automobile market see Rae, American Automobile 161–77; and Rae, American Automobile Industry 99–109.

  7. Swede in The Killers and Jeff Markham/Bailey in Out of the Past also express this desire. Jeff is, however, the only one who achieves it, albeit not for long, as we have seen: when Joe Stefanos drives into Jeff’s gas station in his shiny convertible, he pulls Jeff back into his restless past.

  8. For details about how this scene was conceived and shot see Lewis’s interview in Bogdanovich 675–77.

  9. Trumbo worked on the script but received no credit since he was already persona non grata as one of the Hollywood Ten. Shadoian similarly reads the carcasses as “an emblem of the employees at the Armour plant and all sodden adherents to a bourgeois homogeneity” (135).

  10. Kitses aptly likens the film’s “headlong narrative design” to the loops and rolls of a carnival ride (36).

  11. Lackey notes how often the picaro figure appears in American road narratives (8). However, these American vagabonds, at least those who populate film noir, lack the wit and resourcefulness of their continental counterparts.

  12. Al’s fate bears out David Laderman’s point (24) that American naturalist fictions, in which characters are at the mercy of huge implacable forces such as the environment, heredity, or poverty, are also important precursors to noirs such as Detour and They Live by Night.

  13. Andrew Britton’s reading of Al as an “obtuse and pusillanimous egotist” (179) whom we should root against misreads Tom Neal’s portrayal of Al as a passive (albeit dim) victim of circumstance.

  14. Laderman claims that the rain is the narrative catalyst for Al’s discovery of Haskell’s death (32), but it’s more in keeping with the film’s automotive theme to see the car as the engine of fate.

  15. Osteen, “Big Secret” 84.

  CHAPTER SIX: Nocturnes in Black and Blue

  1. In the 1940s jazz was used only in incidental scenes, and the jazz was never bebop, though bop had become the dominant style by 1950. According to Butler the association between crime films and jazz began in earnest with the rise of jazz themes for TV series such as Peter Gunn and M Squad in the late 1950s; these “crime jazz” scores created the impression that earlier noirs employed jazz soundtracks as well (147–53).

  2. “Inaudibility” is the second quality Gorbman lists in her comprehensive list of film music’s properties (73; italics in original).

  3. Versions of these arguments appear throughout noir criticism. See, for example, Porfirio, “Dark Jazz” 178; Gorbman 86; Kalinak 120; and McCann 121.

  4. Jigger’s aims are in line with the Popular Front’s goals. The notion that jazz epitomizes democratic cooperation is also offered in several jazz-oriented novels of the period, including Dale Curran’s Piano in the Band, in which a character declares, “The blues are America, they are all of us, black and white, our reaction to a world made too complex for us, a world in which we are subjects of great forces we can’t face and fight directly” (16). Later in
that novel, an interracial jam session is held in the Communist Party’s meeting hall under a portrait of Lenin (120). Near the end, pianist/protagonist George Baker proposes that “we organize [musicians] into a cooperative and we play our own music. … We find a small public for that real music, we plug at it, make that public grow” (208). Ideas about jazz as a democratic force also appear in the writings of the Albert Murray/Stanley Crouch school of contemporary jazz criticism.

  5. Richard Whorf was Jewish, and, as Vincent Brook suggests, “jazz and noir [also] intersect with Jewishness in the person, and name, of Jigger Pine” (202). Nicky, played by Elia Kazan, also fills the stereotypical role of the young Jewish intellectual. The two, then, are located in a racial gray area. Krin Gabbard remarks on the conflicting representations of African Americans here: although black players’ abilities are portrayed as primitive, Leo’s solos were actually played by African American trumpeter Snooky Young (112).

  6. As Brook comments, “What better moniker than ‘Jigger’ to specify a Jewish black wannabe?” (202).

  7. One exception occurs in Appointment with Danger, a run-of-the-mill pseudodocumentary from 1951, which features a score by Victor Young. Bebop comes up during a conversation between undercover postal inspector Al Goddard (Alan Ladd) and gangster Earl Bettiger’s girlfriend, Dodie (Jan Sterling), who asks Goddard, “You like bop?” He answers, “Bop? Is that where everybody plays a different tune at the same time?” She replies, “You just haven’t heard enough of it. Have you heard Joe Louie’s ‘Oh Me, Oh My?’ … What he can do with a horn! He belts it and melts it and rides it all over the ceiling!” In the next scene she listens, transfixed, to a record that sounds less like bop than like raucous big band swing. “Get this,” she says. “Flatted fifth.” Goddard protests, “Look, I wouldn’t know a flatted fifth if they gave one away with every purchase.” The dialogue (by Richard Breen and Warren Duff) displays some knowledge of modern jazz (e.g., that the use of the flatted fifth was a bebop harmonic innovation). But it also depicts bop as a symptom of Dodie’s promiscuity and disregard for convention.