Nightmare Alley - Film Noir And The American Dream

by Mark Osteen

  29. Cyclothymia is an older psychiatric term for what is now usually called a bipolar disorder. The term does not exist in the source novel, which instead uses the term parathyroic (Truesdell 112, 165–66). “Cyclothymia” and its variations were added in early script drafts by Lyndon and the first writer hired, Allen Rivkin (Be Still 108). Frings contributed the idea of showing Dorgan reading Bill’s exam (Strange Deception 70).

  30. The two men rudely speak about her, in her presence, as if she weren’t there: “What do you do with her when she’s like this, Warren?” Dorgan asks. “Flowers, candy, a mink coat?” Dorgan’s attitude hints at the sexist assumptions female professionals faced at the time: a moody dame can surely be pacified with gifts.

  31. The boxing scenes, along with some clever ideas for “trick shots,” originated with Frings (Strange Deception).

  32. In the novel Wilma doesn’t hesitate to agree. Truesdell’s Tuttle, unlike the film’s, hates her job, loathes her students, and refers to her colleagues as “pigs” (135).

  33. Truesdell’s novel is much harsher in this respect, repeatedly suggesting that all academics are stuffy and boring and that Wilma willfully deludes herself. Frings’s screenplay tones down the novel’s anti-intellectualism.

  34. For The Accused, Frings earned $2,000 per week, whereas male writers Barre Lyndon, Allen Rivkin, and Jonathan Latimer earned $1,500, $1,500, and $1,250 per week, respectively. No doubt partly in recognition of her work on The Accused, after completing the first draft of Thelma Jordon Frings renegotiated her contract to receive $2,250 per week to complete that script (see Wallis, Contract with Ketti Frings, Dec. 21, 1948).

  35. As Pam Cook notes, Ann is repeatedly filmed “as if she is in prison” (for example, from behind her railed bedstead: 62).

  36. As Ronnie Scheib astutely observes, “it is his naming of the desired, feared, and repressed sexual relationship” with Bruce that “triggers the shutting off of his voice, and exaggerates and displaces the already multiply-displaced sexuality” (60).

  37. R. Barton Palmer aptly points out that the doctor, an “archly patriarchal figure who sees women as prisoners of their own nature,” views Louise as an enigma who can be explained only by “discourses … articulated by men” (157, 158).

  38. Richards also scripted the Fritz Lang film Secret beyond the Door, a Gothic-noir hybrid about female entrapment in marriage. She underwent Freudian therapy in the mid-1940s and credited it with saving her life (Francke 52–53). A former Communist, she was subpoenaed by HUAC in 1953; worried about her two children (she was separated from husband Robert Richards) and pressured by the men in her life, including writing partner Richard Collins and lawyer Martin Gang, she cooperated with the committee. “My decisions about HUAC were passive—those of a woman,” she later admitted (qtd. in Navasky 266). Richards retired from film work after 1952 (aside from scripting Lang’s Rancho Notorious) and became a nursery school teacher. See Navasky 264–68, who, like Buhle and Wagner, misspells her first name as “Sylvia”; her film title credits spell it “Silvia.”

  39. This ending was encouraged by Breen, who recommended to Jack Warner a conclusion in which Louise was found “incurably insane” (Breen to Warner, August 26, 1946).

  40. The PCA files demonstrate how difficult it was to squeeze in any tough material. The censors objected to any reference to “dope addiction” and to the suggestion that some of the inmates might be prostitutes. They also insisted that the film indict not the system but only “corrupt” officials (Breen to Warner, June 10, 1949, 1–2). The most absurd objection—one that delayed the granting of the film’s certificate of approval—involved the implication that inmates might actually take showers in the nude and that other inmates might see them that way! See letter from Breen to Warner July 22, 1949; see also the memo from Jack Vizzard (a Breen staffer) to Warner.

  41. Kellogg and cowriter Bernard Schoenfeld received an Oscar nomination for the screenplay. Kellogg had previously written the original stories for White Heat and the Anthony Mann/John Alton film T-Men.

  42. Ophuls, the original choice, was debilitated by an attack of shingles, so Berry was hired. But when Berry fell behind schedule, he was fired and Ophuls rehired. Production manager Robert Aldrich estimated that between a third and a half of the finished film is Berry’s work (Eyles 24–25). Laurents had previously scripted Hitchcock’s Rope and later forged a distinguished theatrical career that included the librettos for West Side Story and Gypsy.

  43. Enterprise was co-owned by Charles Einfeld, David L. Loew, and A. Pam Blumenthal. The studio produced nine features between 1947 and 1949, including Body and Soul and Force of Evil, but the box-office failure of its would-be blockbuster, Arch of Triumph, doomed it (Eyles 20–21).

  44. Originally cast as Leonora, Ginger Rogers wouldn’t approve a script, so the younger and more credible Bel Geddes took her place. Smith Ohlrig was allegedly based on Howard Hughes, who insisted on seeing the rushes every evening but never demanded changes (Eyles 23–24). Caught’s Smith is likely a latent homosexual: his relationship with his valet, Franzi, indicates his proclivities about as clearly as a Hollywood film of the period could do so. The character differs considerably from the one in Libbie Block’s novel, where he is a passive boy-man who cares little about money and really wants to collect art and is dominated by his older brother Earnest, who asks for Maud’s hand in marriage by appealing to her mother.

  45. In her brilliant reading of this scene Doane remarks that Leonora’s laugh “breaks the mirror relation between Ohlrig and his image,” and notes the reversal of Leonora’s spectatorial role (Desire 159, 162).

  46. These scenes depart widely from the novel, in which Maud’s child does not die and in which she is portrayed as a loving mother. A mildly satirical coming-of-age story, Wild Calendar depicts Maud marrying and divorcing Ohlrig, getting a humble job, then wedding hotel employee Sonny Quinada, who, unlike the film’s do-gooder doctor, is narrow-minded and rather unpleasant. The novel’s title implies that women must pass through adolescence, young adulthood, courtship, marriage, and motherhood in the proper order. If these stages occur in the “wrong” order, the woman will be stunted or regress. Wild Calendar does contain a blunted critique of marriage: at one point Maud wonders if “marriage is a cage” (Block 310), and she seems happiest, though she doesn’t seem to realize it, when single.

  47. Enterprise was in serious financial trouble by 1948 and folded before Caught was released in early 1949. Though the film was distributed by MGM, the studio had little interest in promoting it, and Caught did poorly at the box office.

  48. Coscripted by future blacklistee Paul Jarrico, Not Wanted was credited to Elmer Clifton, but he had a heart attack at the outset of the shoot, and Lupino took over. An earlier version of the script, entitled Bad Company, was considered by Enterprise before it went to Lupino. For more on the film’s production history see Donati 148–53.

  49. Lupino and company conducted lengthy negotiations with the PCA to get the story approved; for details see Waldman, “Not Wanted” 21–31. Quite grateful to the censors for working with her, Lupino was outraged when an interview she had granted to Virginia McPherson of UPI was used to mock the film in an article entitled “A Degenerate Article about a Degenerate Industry,” when it appeared in the Ashland (WI) Daily Press in February of 1949. Lupino wired Breen, expressing her shock and assuring him that the “key note” of her remarks to McPherson had been gratitude toward the code administrators (Lupino telegram). Breen wrote to the Daily Press’s editor defending the film.

  50. Wald, who had written the original story and coauthored the screenplay (with Albert Maltz) for The Naked City, also cowrote Outrage and Not Wanted.

  51. The mise-en-scènes of the two settings underline these differences: high-key lighting and a lavish apartment in San Francisco; low-key lighting and repeated shots of doors and enclosures in LA (Seiter 108).

  52. This situation gains additional resonance when one realizes that cowriter Y
oung had been married to the ambitious, glamorous, and highly successful Lupino.

  53. This sequence contains a couple of inside jokes: when the driver announces that they’ll see their “favorite stars of stage and screen,” the next shot is of Ida Lupino. And one of the homes they gawk at is hailed as the residence of the world-renowned star of The Miracle on 34th St., Edmund Gwenn—the actor playing Jordan in the film we’re watching!

  54. Scheib writes that Eve represents Graham’s “former driving, future-oriented ambition,” whereas Phyllis embodies the “take-it-as-it-comes intimacy that tempts him in middle age” (64). This reading, however, makes bigamy seem innocuous and Graham psychologically sound.

  55. Seiter writes that the film insists on marriage as a “social arrangement” (112), but that interpretation ignores the central importance of childbearing and -rearing to the story—the Grahams’ desire to adopt and Harry’s care of his baby in his other marriage.

  CHAPTER EIGHT: Left-Handed Endeavor

  1. For a helpful account of the Popular Front’s rise and fall see Ceplair and Englund 83–199.

  2. See Ceplair and Englund 268; Navasky xiii; and the Dassin interview in Mc-Gilligan and Buhle 209.

  3. The roster includes A Walk in the Sun and Edge of Darkness (both directed by the radical Lewis Milestone and scripted by Rossen); A Guy Named Joe, Tender Comrade, and Thirty Seconds over Tokyo (scripted by Trumbo); Cornered and Crossfire (directed by Edward Dmytryk, produced by Adrian Scott); Destination Tokyo, This Gun for Hire, and Pride of the Marines (scripted by Albert Maltz; the last-named film starred John Garfield); Action in the North Atlantic and Sahara (written by John Howard Lawson); Objective: Burma (scripted by Lester Cole); and The Master Race (written and directed by Herbert Biberman). Except for Milestone, Garfield, and Rossen, these artists were all members of the indicted Hollywood Ten.

  4. Lawson and Irving Pichel contributed many articles; Polonsky wrote for HQ as well. See Buhle and Wagner 291–300.

  5. For a summary of Hollywood labor struggles in the 1940s see May 180–95; for a more expansive account see Ceplair and Englund 209–53.

  6. The journal that Trumbo edited, the Screen Writer, unwittingly helped to bring on the reaction by publishing James M. Cain’s proposal to found an American Authors Authority, which would oversee credits and copyrights for screenwriters. His idea—which aimed to protect the intellectual property of writers and was therefore thoroughly capitalist in spirit—was quickly and viciously attacked as “communistic.” See Tim Palmer (65–66) and the Dassin interview in McGilligan and Buhle (211).

  7. Lawson, Dmytryk, Cole, Trumbo, Maltz, Biberman, and Scott, along with writers Samuel Ornitz, Alvah Bessie, and Ring Lardner Jr.—the so-called Hollywood Ten—all went to prison. For a brief list of the Ten’s credits before the hearings see Navasky (80–81). Bertolt Brecht, who also testified, left the United States and never served jail time. The others subpoenaed were Milestone, Rossen, and director Pichel; actor Larry Parks; and writers Richard Collins, Gordon Kahn, Howard Koch, and Waldo Salt.

  8. The best and most thorough account of the hearings remains that of Ceplair and Englund (254–98).

  9. The full statement is printed in Appendix 6 of Ceplair and Englund (455).

  10. The red scare was not, of course, confined to Hollywood. Broe notes that more than 20 percent of the workforce in the early 1950s was subjected to loyalty oaths; workers risked investigation or loss of employment if they failed to sign (84).

  11. Earl Browder was the general secretary of the CPUSA in the 1930s, and Henry Wallace, who was President Franklin Roosevelt’s vice president during the war, ran for president as a Socialist in 1948.

  12. Kemp asserts that noir offers “far too many … examples of left-wing slant to be credibly attributed to a handful of individuals” (268), adducing as his test case Where Danger Lives, a product of the reactionary Howard Hughes’s era at RKO. Although Kemp seems to conflate all social criticism with “leftism,” he nonetheless makes a persuasive case that noir as a whole critiques the “cash nexus,” condemns the “wealth-based class system,” and dramatizes how rampant individualism shatters communities (Kemp 269).

  13. It is not an accident that ten of the sixteen films on Hirsch’s list were independent productions. Nor is it a surprise that among their makers, eleven directors and nine writers were either blacklisted or deemed politically suspect by HUAC (J. Hirsch 91). Hirsch also declares that “after 1951, the blacklist rendered the social critique of films gris not only inconceivable, but impossible” (91).

  14. Hirsch writes that the 1930s gangster films presented a “symptomatic” critique, while the later films offer a “systematic implicit critique” (85). By symptomatic he means that the critique must be extracted by critics; by implicit he means that the critique is deliberate. But these terms seem misleading (implicit actually means “explicit”) and rely on too much speculation about the earlier filmmakers’ intentions; hence I have substituted different terms.

  15. In his interview in Tender Comrades, Dassin calls it a “really dumb picture” (207).

  16. The original script, by Malvin Wald and Albert Maltz, swooped through the working and impoverished classes of New York City, pointedly contrasting street sweepers and homeless people with upper-class citizens. Dassin and producer Mark Hellinger, a former investigative journalist who had also produced The Killers and Brute Force for Universal, aimed to imitate the documentary aesthetic they admired in Italian neorealism (see Prime 145–47). Their decision to shoot on the streets of New York was as radical as the content, which, Dassin feared, would be challenged by the studio heads, particularly after Maltz was subpoenaed by HUAC. And it was.

  17. When the script was first submitted to the censors (as Hard Bargain) on November 1, 1948, the Breen Office objected to the implication that Rica is a prostitute (Breen to Jason S. Joy). This letter specifies several other objections to the sexual suggestiveness in the scenes between Conte and Cortesa. The producers agreed to re-shoot the scenes to eliminate suggested nudity and sex. A letter to Joy from Robert Bassler of the PCA (Feb. 24, 1949) notes that Rica would be given a job as a fortune teller. The film was approved on June 20, 1949. Despite these alterations, Variety enthused about its “torrid sex” and “no-holds barred love sequences” (Rev., Sept. 7, 1949). Its reviewer was quite aware that Rica is a prostitute.

  18. In his review Bosley Crowther, no Communist, recognized the leftist implications of the story, writing, “you will never be able to eat an apple or tomato again without calling up visions of trickery, mayhem, vandalism and violent death.”

  19. In the interview accompanying the DVD Dassin relates how Zanuck shot the ending while he was away and, earlier, had forced him to add the Polly character, whom Dassin calls “useless.” But Dassin himself had lobbied for the casting of Cortesa instead of Shelley Winters, whom Zanuck wanted for the role. Bezzerides comments: “I had [to deal with] the producer’s chickenshit changes, the director’s girlfriend, and Zanuck’s ideas” about the beginning and ending, all of which, he believes, weakened the final product (qtd. in Server, “Thieves’ Market” 120).

  20. Their evaluation is hardly to be trusted, since among the other films singled out as “communist” was the hugely popular and adamantly liberal Best Years of Our Lives.

  21. The first version of the story is a “treatment”—a 132-page prose narrative—called Love-Lies-Bleeding, by Jack Patrick. Patrick’s story is much less concerned with class than is Rossen’s finished script.

  22. Broe asserts that the stairway represents the passage from one class to another (67), but it more likely stands for the class hierarchy itself, and Milestone uses verticality throughout the film to represent class relations.

  23. Neve argues that the film presents political life largely as a “front, thinly disguising the determining material forces” (“Red” 191), a reading that suggests a vulgar Marxist perspective. But this interpretation fails to acknowledge the characters’ mixed emotio
ns about wealth, class, and each other.

  24. Davis’s name is spelled two different ways in the film. On the brush he gives to Peg it is spelled “Charlie,” but in many of the boxing posters it is spelled “Charley.” I’ve chosen the former since, presumably, Davis would know how to spell his own name. Roberts was given his name—the same name as the coproducer—to avoid the possibility that his name was that of a real crook (Eyles 16). Actor Lloyd Gough’s name was then spelled “Goff,” but I have used the spelling by which he was best known. Gough, too, was blacklisted and unable to work in Hollywood from 1952 until 1964.

  25. Garfield, whom Andersen calls the “first axiom” of “film gris” (258), was among the first “Method” actors to become a Hollywood star. Born Jacob Julius Garfinkle in New York’s Lower East Side in 1913, Garfield was a committed leftist who emerged from New York’s Group Theatre and often played roles that evoked his own early years as a slum kid who fought his way to the top (Andersen 258).

  26. Polonsky allegedly came up with the story during a short walk from Paramount to Enterprise and “made a present” of it to Enterprise co-owner Charles Einfeld (Polonsky, qtd. in McGilligan and Buhle 485). The original concept for Body and Soul was based on the life of boxer Barney Ross; when Ross was arrested on a drug charge, Einfeld wanted to cancel the picture, but Rossen insisted on carrying it through (Eyles 16); see Eyles for an informative history of Enterprise’s brief moment in the sun.

  27. Robert Wise’s The Set-Up also portrays a boxer directed to take a dive, but its protagonist, aging pug Stoker Thompson (Robert Ryan), isn’t in on the fix. Though admirable in his uncompromising devotion to his dream, Stoker is more pathetic than heroic: he believes he is just a fight away from a title shot, but it’s clear that he is really one fight away from brain damage or death. This strikingly directed fable is set in a place called Paradise City, near a club called Dreamland, and depicts its boxers as innocents pursuing delusions of success, unaware that they are pawns in a game of profit-taking. Even more than Body and Soul, The Set-Up shows how the boxers enact their fans’ appetites for violence, fame, and success. In the end Stoker wins his fight but is beaten so severely afterward that, luckily for him, he will never fight again. Champion seemed so similar to The Set-Up that RKO sued its producers (Stanfield, “Monarch” 79); see Stanfield’s “Monarch” for a fine survey of the postwar boxing movie.