In these three films, as noir victim, conniver, and neurotic, Bogart was playing against the strong persona he had created earlier in the decade, that of the self-contained hero. Bogart, of course, is an accomplished actor with a flexible range, but there is a sense of strain—a sense, precisely, of “acting”—in his portrayal of characters who lose control. As Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe, Bogart’s work is seamless; but as the unbalanced screenwriter, the fiendish husband, the unlucky former con, he is on stage. The neuroticism of these later Bogart performances, though, was suggested in the private eye characters, as even in his most protected tough guy stance the actor had dark undercurrents. He invariably invested his characters, even the most seemingly adjusted ones, with a strong neurotic potential.
The actor whose record in noir most closely approximates Bogart’s is Dick Powell. Powell earned a reputation in the thirties as a song-and-dance man. He had an engaging, lightweight personality and a mellow singing style. By the mid-forties he was eager to change his image, and he sensed that the current noir phase offered an appropriate opportunity to do so. He played Philip Marlowe (before Bogey did, in fact) in the 1944 film version of Farewell, My Lovely (the title was changed to Murder, My Sweet because the producers thought the original title, especially with Powell starring, might lead audiences to expect a musical). Raymond Chandler later said that Powell came closest to his own idea of Marlowe. If anything, Powell is even dryer in the part than Bogart, erasing entirely the crooner’s geniality that had made him a popular fixture in Warner musicals. The only echo of the earlier Powell is the actor’s physical grace—he has a dancer’s flowing ease. Powell’s voice is flat, his face taut and frozen in the masklike noir vein, and he plays Marlowe as a blunt, no-nonsense professional. His work is wonderfully tight and economical; he is guarded and sardonic, but he falls short of projecting Bogart’s aura of absolute integrity. Beneath the straightforward he-man manner are flashes of shiftiness: this Marlowe might use any methods to crack the case.
Like Bogart, Powell fits so snugly into Marlowe’s character that the audience is unaware that he is acting: his is the kind of style that conceals style. As Chandler’s private eye, he is noir’s perfect tough guy, yet the toughness is never insisted on, it is simply there as a natural part of the character. Powell as Marlowe has a rough time of it: he is hit over the head, duped by a devious woman trying to hide from her notorious past, drugged, locked up, suspected of murder by the police. Through it all, Powell remains a model of the Hemingway code of grace under pressure, his irony a shield against constant mischance.
Murder, My Sweet was among the most favorably received of all films noirs, and Powell decided to stay within the noir mode for the rest of the decade. From the hired professional detective of the Chandler film, he switched to playing a more impassioned investigator in Cornered, where he is cast as an ex-soldier tracking down the gang responsible for killing his wife. Here, his search is not that of the disinterested sleuth but the personal quest of a man bent on vengeance; his performance is therefore more high-strung than in Murder, My Sweet. In Pitfall, Powell becomes a noir victim, playing a strait-laced insurance man (recalling Fred MacMurray in Double Indemnity) who makes a fatal choice to double-cross the company for which he has worked loyally.
Like Bogart, then, Powell covers the noir keyboard from detached investigator to weak-minded bourgeois who slips into crime. His work is spare and subtly stylized, regardless of the kind of character he is playing, though like Bogart, Powell is at the top of his form as the ironic observer, maintaining a skeptical distance even from his own misfortunes as he trades cracks with his adversaries the police, and with the low-down, two-timing dames that he is wise to.
Bogart’s achievement in film noir is matched by that of Barbara Stanwyck, the genre’s undisputed first lady. Stanwyck’s persona, however, is not as variable as Bogey’s; she has such a powerful screen presence that she is simply not convincing as anything other than a noir spider woman, ensnaring men in her web. In Sorry, Wrong Number, she plays a bedridden woman whose husband is plotting her murder. In prospect, the role is certainly uncharacteristic, but she plays it with such force that audience sympathy shifts to her downtrodden, would-be killer. Stanwyck turns this potential victim into a virago, and though her only weapon in her isolated Sutton Place apartment is her bedside phone, she uses it with the authority of a general dispensing orders to his men.
Her face frozen in a perpetual mask of scorn, Stanwyck is noir’s ultimate Gorgon. She is hardly more mobile than Veronica Lake, and she is far more intimidating. Her posture is as rigid and defensive as her taut face and voice. She has no curves, no flowing lines; everything about her presence is sharp, angular, hard-bitten. Her greatest noir role, that of the murderous wife in Double Indemnity, is the embodiment of menace: a woman who dispenses death without any feelings whatsoever. She plays Phyllis Dietrichson—a grotesque in woman’s clothing, a character conceived by men who hate and fear strong women—with an icy, poisonous sexuality that is unsurpassed in the noir canon.
With a smile like a surgeon’s incision and a voice of steel, Stanwyck brutalizes men. She is often cast against softies, tantalizing genial Fred MacMurray in Double Indemnity, skillfully courting and deceiving weak-willed Wendell Corey in The File on Thelma Jordan, dominating Burt Lancaster (in his passive, noir victim phase) in Sorry, Wrong Number. And in Clash by Night, she is a knowing woman of the city who returns to her small home town and marries a sweet-natured and gullible man (Paul Douglas) while carrying on an affair with a loner (Robert Ryan) whose nastiness and selfishness match her own.
Noir’s masochistic femme fatale: pumpkin-faced Gloria Grahame, with Lee Marvin, in The Big Heat, after he has thrown coffee in her face; and with Robert Ryan, in Odds Against Tomorrow.
In noir, women for the most part are either devouring fiends, or else supportive wives like Jane Wyatt (with Dana Andrews, in Boomerang) or Coleen Gray (with
Victor Mature, in Kiss of Death) who seem to function onlyas adjuncts to their embattled husbands.
Stanwyck’s powerful women were a new element in American films. Following her lead, the genre presented a string of dominating females whose toughness may well have reflected a change of status produced by the war; but noir, characteristically exaggerating and distorting the realities of American life, had no use for a straightforward presentation of the newly enfranchised woman. The genre portrayed female strength as brazenly sexual, madly aggressive. Filtered through noir’s transforming lens, the decade’s New Woman became the femme fatale in whose presence no man was safe.
Noir is the product of men, and the recurrent, indeed obsessive image of women as ravenous, castrating, demonic creatures is after all a male fantasy. What woman in her right mind would create a character like Phyllis, who is the product of the woman-hatred of James M. Cain transcribed through that of Billy Wilder and Raymond Chandler (collaborators on the screenplay of Double Indemnity)? The role of women in noir reveals male fantasies at a time when women in large numbers not only ventured beyond the home but also ran the home. As figments of male anxieties, women in noir deploy their power almost exclusively in sexual terms. The genre’s three most striking femmes fatales—Stanwyck in Double Indemnity and Joan Bennett in Scarlet Street and The Woman in the Window—have nothing to do except to brandish their sexual allure in order to destroy men. The Bennett characters float around the city, their sexual attractiveness kept at the ready, a lethal force lying in wait for the repressed, unsuspecting males played in both films by Edward G. Robinson. The noir femme fatale has no occupation; sex is her full-time job.
Stanwyck is the most vivid of all the temptresses in noir, the most relentless and unsparing. Yet other actresses who made notable impressions as noir’s cracked version of the New Woman are very much in the Stanwyck mold: Joan Crawford in Mildred Pierce and Sudden Fear; Lauren Bacall; Lizabeth Scott in Dead Reckoning, Pitfall, and A Stolen Face. With their set expression and low voices, all project hardness and
sexual ambiguity; at times, their sexual presence is exaggerated, at other times ridiculed. These noir anti-heroines often seem to be mocking the men who fall into their net: Joan Bennett’s taunting laughter at a woebegone Edward G. Robinson in Scarlet Street, when she tells him that her “love” for him has been a mockery, echoes throughout the canon. There is something fatally missing in these firm-jawed, grim-faced women who regard men (and the world in general) with faintly concealed distaste.
Ida Lupino (in The Man I Love) was one of the few actresses in noir to transcend stereotype: she was neither a black widow nor a simpering wife.
In Joan Crawford’s case, at least, the on-screen hardness mirrored her true personality. Child-torturer and castrating wife, Crawford was a vicious woman. The toughness and fundamental meanness that spilled over into her screen image is especially apparent in the archetypal Crawford vehicle, Sudden Fear, where she plays a scorned woman who discovers her husband’s plan to murder her and who then sets out with a brutal will to ensnare him and his paramour. The single-mindedness, indeed the diabolical ferocity with which she goes about catching her enemies, bespeaks a will of iron. Like Stanwyck in Sorry, Wrong Number, Crawford converts a potential victim into an avenging tyrant; these women cannot bear to lose, and the men who fall into their devouring, annihilating embrace are to be pitied.
Women in film noir are presented in a narrow range. Either they are masked malevolence in the Stanwyck-Crawford vein or desperately conventional housewives, like Jane Wyatt in Pitfall, or Teresa Wright in The Steel Trap, whose primness drives their husbands not to drink but to crime. In noir, sunny, bland housewives are covert castrators. In The Reckless Moment, Joan Bennett is a housewife fiercely determined to keep up appearances. When her daughter accidentally kills a no-good boyfriend in a heated argument, Bennett acts quickly on her own to preserve the family name by covering up the crime. Her zeal for defending her middle class status is so powerful that she trafficks fearlessly with an assortment of criminals. This otherwise conventional American matron proves as wily and as emasculating as noir’s most determined femmes fatales.
One of the most vivid of noir’s spider women: Gloria Swanson as Norma Desmond, ministering to William Holden, in Sunset Boulevard.
Positive images of women are indeed rare in the noir canon. Ida Lupino plays two of them: a torch singer in The Man I Love and a blind woman in On Dangerous Ground. Lupino projects an intelligence and emotional generosity that are just right for the singer, a wise woman of the city who solves everyone’s problems but her own. The film operates on the male fantasy that such a knowing woman is destined to be unlucky in love. At the end, in the kind of romantic and sentimentalizing touch that prevents the Raoul Walsh film from being a full-fledged noir, Lupino is alone, looking up tearfully at the moon. Like many of the forties actresses, Lupino has a tough veneer, but she also radiates warmth and vulnerability. Her astringency and common sense cut across the maudlin role of the blind woman in On Dangerous Ground. In this film, as in the earlier High Sierra, she plays a character whose loyalty and capacity for love help to regenerate an embittered hero. Lupino thus provides an unusual note infilm noir in her portrayals of women who are truly supportive and yet who have a sense of their own worth as well—women who are not mean and who are also not fools.
Sweeter, more pliant than Lupino, Cathy O‘Donnell in They Live By Night and Side Street and Coleen Gray in Kiss of Death and The Killing are other likable heroines. O’Donnell and Gray may well be the only actresses in the genre who are pleasant without being either sticky or hypocritical. Both are good at playing nice, normal women who fall for hard-luck guys, and who remain loyal once their men slip into the noir quicksand.
But noir has little interest in wholesome characters, male or female, and its footage is packed with a variety of sexual psychopaths rather than with women like Lupino or O’Donnell. The noir mauler is not always as hard-bitten as Stanwyck or Crawford, but she is always just as dangerous. Sweet-faced Gene Tierney plays a soft-spoken obsessive in Leave Her to Heaven who aborts her child and watches her husband’s brother drown. The healthy-looking Peggy Cummins moll in Gun Crazy incites her man to a spree of looting and killing. Although Joan Bennett’s attractive ladies of the evening in Scarlet Street and The Woman in the Window really care for and rely on the dapper heels played in both films by Dan Duryea, they end up wrecking the lives of men they enchant.
Then there are the femmes fatales whose essential quality is not meanness but mystery. In The Lady from Shanghai and Gilda, Rita Hayworth clearly lacks the hardness or authority of Stanwyck. Her lush femininity shades off into vagueness: who is the lady from Shanghai? The question runs throughout the film, preoccupying the narrator-hero as well as the audience. Victim rather than instigator, Hayworth always seems a little puzzled. She has a come-hither quality, a willingness to share her acting space. Yet beneath the vaporousness, the little-girl-lost mask, she too is poisonous. Yvonne De Carlo in Criss Cross, Ava Gardner in The Killers, Jane Greer in Out of the Past, and Gloria Grahame in Crossfire, In a Lonely Place, The Big Heat, Human Desire, and Odds Against Tomorrow also share something of Hayworth’s moral ambiguity and sexual mystery. We are never sure until the climax exactly how to “read” them. Their opaqueness, like Stanwyck’s utter rigidity, is a measure of their dangerous sexuality. In Criss Cross and The Killers, Burt Lancaster is obsessed by inaccessible women. De Carlo in Criss Cross, and Gardner in The Killers, both curvaceous and womanly, play elusive temptresses with a sneaky sense of humor and a gleam in their eye, their every gesture fraught with double meaning as they dispense baffling mixed messages to the hopelessly smitten Lancaster. Unlike the hatchet-faced Crawford or Stanwyck, Jane Greer’s dragon lady in Out of the Past is charming—hence especially insidious. When she materializes, dressed in white, on the street of a lazy Mexican town, she looks like the hero’s daydream come to life, and decidedly not like the nemesis that she really is.
Gloria Grahame likewise introduced a new shading to the fatal woman type, playing her not as a victimizer, a cruel tyrant, but as a victim, whimpering and aching and even good-hearted. Grahame has a timorous, appealing, little girl quality; thin-lipped, squeaky-voiced, slit-eyed, pumpkin-faced, wrinkling up her nose and face like a mouse, she is found hiding in smoky tenement rooms waiting for her men. Abused and humiliated in her search for love, she is noir’s pre-eminent masochist, the inevitable cast-off moll. In a scene that recalls Cagney smashing a grapefruit in Mae Clarke’s face, Lee Marvin hurls scalding coffee at Grahame in The Big Heat. A bad girl who means well, a real hard luck dame, Grahame brought a note of pathos to noir. No one else projected quite the same combination of traits—dumb, sullen, devoted, available, hungry, above all steamy.
Whether hard or soft, mannish or womanly, all of noir’s fatal women seem to move in a dreamlike landscape. They are projections of male fears and fantasies who seem merely to be simulating human action. These women are acted in a remote, compressed, semi-abstract style. In The Woman in the Window, a painting of a beautiful woman inspires Professor Wanley’s fantasies; yet all noir temptresses have the remoteness of a painting seen in a window. And to embody their dreamlike otherness, the actresses who impersonate them perform in a cryptic stylized manner, sleepwalking through masculine nightmares.
Noir offered many opportunities for the character actor, just as it did for the “character” director. Richard Widmark, Jack Palance, Victor Mature, Robert Ryan, Clifton Webb, Richard Conte, Francis L. Sullivan, Peter Lorre, Sydney Greenstreet and Edward G. Robinson all had the most rewarding roles of their careers playing an array of noir weaklings, misfits, dictators and victims. Noir capitalizes on the actors’ unusual qualities, of face and voice and physique. The performers all project an unsettling sexuality; playing either sexual tyrants or outsiders, they suggest anything but wholesomeness.
All noir temptresses have the remoteness of the painting of the woman in the window. (Edward G. Robinson and Joan Bennett, in The Woman in the Window.)
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In his excellent performances in film noir, Edward G. Robinson made extravagant departures from his gangster image. Yet in playing a repressed and very sedate professor in The Woman in the Window and a meek husband in Scarlet Street, he suggests noir menace beneath the characters’ masks as law-abiding citizens. Victims of ironic circumstance, both characters commit murder, and Robinson, with the image of the thirties gangster trailing him, and his own swarthy, dyspeptic appearance, captures the characters’ underlying rage, their capacity for twisted passion and violence. In Double Indemnity, he plays a shrewd claims investigator for an insurance company, a character who is married to his job and who pursues his research into questionable claims with zealous persistence. Even when he is impersonating seemingly normal characters then, Robinson radiates emotional unhealthiness. There is something not quite right about his professor, his Sunday painter clerk, his claims investigator—and it is precisely that hint of imbalance that noir requires. His characters look like people to whom something bad or unexpected is going to happen. As the professor and the clerk, he is clearly a born victim, yet there is a residual underlying strength that lingers about the actor’s persona; and the embattled imagery of strength and weakness, of ferocity and meekness, splendidly highlights the theme of the divided self that runs throughout noir.
The Dark Side of the Screen: Film Noir Page 17
