The Dark Side of the Screen: Film Noir

by Foster Hirsch

The “happy” endings in Gilda, Sweet Smell of Success, and The Woman on the Beach are no more persuasive than any other upbeat conclusions in noir. Climactic confrontations supposedly loosen the powerful psychotic bonds that have linked the quarreling romantic partners, but in effect contradict what we have been told about them. The relationships in these films are fatally infested, the characters are so deeply disturbed, so mired in self-destructive behavior, that any last-minute psychic exorcism is frankly incredible.

  Many noir psychotics hold onto romantic obsessions in ways that destroy themselves rather than inflict harm on others. Perhaps not surprisingly, the most memorable of these nervous wrecks are women: Joan Crawford in Possessed, Marilyn Monroe in Don’t Bother to Knock, Deanna Durbin in Christmas Holiday. Iconographically, all three actresses make fascinating victims: Durbin, because she is here radically different from her usual homespun image; Crawford, because she is an obviously hard, mean woman playing a pathetically vulnerable one; and Monroe, because her own fragility is here presented, for the first and really the only time in her career, as psychotic.

  In Christmas Holiday, Deanna Durbin atones for her failure to save the man she loves by becoming a whore and a torch singer, whose theme song, fittingly enough, is “Always.” She maintains her obsession even after the discovery that her husband is a murderer; she cannot change her feelings even after it becomes increasingly clear that she has married a lily-livered mama’s boy who is also insane. Waging a deadly battle with the dragon lady mother for possession of her husband, she is trapped in a brutal game of psychological warfare. After her husband breaks out of prison and comes to the club where she sings to attack her, she is “cured” of her enflamed and masochistic loyalty. At the end of the film, she stands alone, seemingly transfigured, staring up at the sky, her compulsions safely behind her. But, as so often in films of the forties, as Barbara Deming notes in her brilliant study, Running Away from Myself, the attempted happy resolution goes against the grain of the entire film. Durbin’s character has been shown as so pathologically obsessed that it is impossible to believe that her husband’s hysterical cruelty toward her after his jailbreak would result in a change of heart. Sustained by her self-imposed role as a guilt-stricken martyr, she is really quite as mad as her husband and his mother.

  Christmas Holiday treats its loaded material—there are hints of incest and sadomasochism, along with the heroine’s use of prostitution as a form of self-punishment-in a glancing way typical of many kinky films noirs. What gives the film some added impact is that its tough, masochistic heroine and its pathological mama’s boy are played by the normally sweet-natured Deanna Durbin and Gene Kelly. The clash between the stars’ personae and the twisted characters adds to the gnarled psychology that permeates the drama: it is as if, in addition to all their other problems, the characters are also schizophrenic. Durbin is remarkably persuasive as a lowlife noir psychotic, departing from her syrupy mode yet retaining echoes of it. Gene Kelly is less successful in a part equally rich. He does not suggest a true and intimidating darkness beneath an agreeable facade. His performance looks like nice Gene Kelly trying to be mean. He is really too lightweight—too much a prisoner of his own image—to fill the role of a self-destructive, emotionally stunted con artist.

  In Don’t Bother to Knock, Marilyn Monroe is a babysitter whose lover was killed in a plane crash. She has never recovered from the trauma of his sudden death. “Everybody tries to come between Philip and me,” she whispers, eerily. She tries to kill the child she is babysitting for, accusing the girl of coming between her and Philip and of preventing her from getting married. “Philip is dead. Do you know it?” asks Richard Widmark, as a man she meets in the hotel where she is working. Traumatized, self-abnegating to a pathological degree, unreachable, the woman lives in a closed fantasy world: “I’ll be any way you want me to be. From the beginning, I knew you were the very best. Don’t leave. I was in a hotel room once, the night before he flew away, for the last time.”

  As this lost child-woman, hopelessly alienated, dumb, sensitive, inarticulate, Marilyn Monroe is brilliantly cast, revealing dark aspects of her own tortured personality more nakedly than at any other time in her career. As she is taken away to an asylum at the end, her last words are a fragment: “People who love each other ...”

  Monroe playing a victim of thwarted love is very different from Joan Crawford in the same kind of part. Monroe’s collapse to madness seems absolute, terrifying in its finality, whereas Joan Crawford as a victim of romantic delusion retains her usual obduracy and strength. She plays an obsessed woman with a fierceness that Monroe would never have been able to summon. In Possessed, Crawford as a woman scorned is more tyrant than victim. The toughness that the actress projects, regardless of her role, prevents audience sympathy. Her character is a fiend whose only reality is possession of a man who doesn’t want her. Van Heflin’s David treats her shabbily, claiming that the war has made him restless, unable to settle down. To be near him, she marries his employer (Raymond Massey), then is thwarted when David falls in love with the man’s daughter. She says she will resort to anything in order to keep David, but she is guilty of crimes only in her own imagination. Through it all, as she becomes progressively unhinged, her rich husband remains unnaturally patient, even claiming at the end that he will wait for her probable recovery. Monroe’s babysitter, colored by the actress’s own weakness, clearly could not help herself. But Crawford’s perverse obsession with a man who continually spurns her suggests willful behavior; her madness is a conscious way of inflicting punishment on others because she cannot have what she wants. There is a kind of doubleness about the character’s mania, as if insanity were something that can be called up and placed on display.

  The noir psychopath, inevitably, is bedevilled, pursued by ghosts from his past; and he is often fatally self-divided. Sometimes the schizoid motif is presented in a literal way, as in A Stolen Life or The Dark Mirror or Dead Ringer, stories about good and bad twin sisters. Sometimes it is dramatized as conflicting aspects of the same personality, as in So Dark the Night, The Lost Weekend, and Psycho. And sometimes it is offered as an exchange between two different but in some ways parallel personalities, as in Shadow of a Doubt and Strangers on a Train.

  The movies about good and bad twins are the least suggestive of these variations on schizophrenia. In The Dark Mirror, Terry, the evil sister, kills her fiance because she senses he loves her good sister Ruth (both are played by Olivia de Havilland) even though he doesn’t know Ruth exists; he simply feels a warmth when he is with Ruth and a strange kind of absence when he is with Terry, and he goes to a psychiatrist to ask about the possibility of a split personality in the woman he loves. As the net closes around her, Terry becomes more possessive of Ruth: “You and I are never going to be separated, as long as we live. You and I are going to be together. Always.” In collusion with a police officer, Ruth, who all along has been reluctant to believe in Terry’s badness, stages her own “suicide” in order to trap her sister. When Terry is caught, she breaks a mirror. “The mirror is everything in reverse,” a doctor explains to Ruth.

  The film suggests but does not develop the possibility that Terry is Ruth’s other self, the “dark mirror” that reflects the negative potential lurking beneath Ruth’s sunny mask. But the insistent separation of the characters into icons of good and evil makes the film a superficial melodrama rather than a probing psychological study. Good and evil do not engage in an internal clash but are presented as the essence of two separate characters, as in a medieval morality drama. “One sister could and one couldn’t commit murder, and that’s all there is to it,” the film’s resident psychiatrist explains.

  The division between virtue and vice in such films as The Lost Weekend and So Dark the Night is equally simplistic, though here the doubleness exists within a single protagonist. “There are two Don Burnhams,” explains the hero of The Lost Weekend: “Don the drunk and Don the writer—I’ve tried to break away from that guy a lot
of times, but it’s no good—that other Don always wants us to have a drink.” Alcoholism is presented as the moral equivalent of the wicked sister in The Dark Mirror, eating away at the good Don, keeping him off the track. During his lost weekend, Don succumbs to his demon—alcohol is the devil that must be exorcised before its victim can return to society as a whole person. “Don Burnham died this weekend—of shame, the DTs, moral anemia. He wanted to kill himself.” “Get rid of it by writing it down,” suggests his girlfriend Helen, who has been fighting his addiction as if it were a rival. Overcoming the writing block which contributed to his collapse, Don vows to record the events of his weekend. In the novel by Charles Jackson on which the film is based, the problem tearing away at the hero is fear of his homosexuality. (In 1940s Hollywood, alcoholism seemed a fair exchange, as a moral and social stigma, for homosexuality.) In both versions of the story, the character’s struggle with powerful inner forces takes on the dimensions of a religious conflict. The film’s rosy and quite incredible resolution suggests that Don becomes whole after having descended to rock bottom. Utter damnation leads to improbable salvation, according to the drama’s artificial scheme. The character’s breakdown, presented in a vivid noir style, with the city weighing down on him during his long, isolated weekend, is far more convincing than his last-minute rehabilitation.

  The noir sexual psychopath: Marilyn Monroe (opposite) in the performance of her career, as a babysitter suffering from a romantic fixation, in Don’t Bother to Knock.

  Simplistic schizophrenia: Bette Davis times two, in Dead Ringer.

  Hitchcock offers the most subtle and unsettling treatments of the divided personality. In his work, the split self is not presented in the obvious and simplistic twins motif, nor as a drama of inner struggle between good and evil, but as an exchange between disparate yet startlingly complementary personalities. In Shadow of a Doubt, a teenage girl and her adored uncle, both named Charlie, share a strange kind of psychological bond. “I have a feeling there is something deep inside you that nobody knows about,” she tells him. “We’re sort of like twins. I have to know.” The uncle is a murderer, a killer of rich widows; his niece is an innocent small town girl. What could they possibly have in common? Yet the film implies both visual and psychological connections between them. The first time we see Charlie (Teresa Wright), she is lying on a bed in a listless way that imitates her uncle’s position in the preceding shot. Both are suffering from anomie; she is bored and thinks that a visit from her uncle will revive her and her family. She decides to send him a telegram. But in one of the many reciprocal gestures that occur in the film and that suggest an almost mystical rapport between the two Charlies, he has already sent her one, announcing his arrival. It is as if the niece, in summoning her uncle, is also, unconsciously, calling up qualities in herself. When he arrives, she gets the tune of the Merry Widow waltz in her head (her uncle is the Merry Widow murderer). “I think tunes jump from head to head,” she says. On the surface, Uncle Charlie is a charming man; it is easy to see why Charlie adores him, and why merry widows dance when he calls. The casting of Joseph Cotten, so earnest and likable, is shrewd, as it underlines the film’s theme that evil comes masked in bewitching guises.

  The struggle between the characters is compelling because it lacks neat correspondences. The two Charlies are unevenly matched, an unlikely pair, rather than conflicting halves of the same personality. Her uncle educates her to the presence of evil in the world and to possibilities in herself that she had not suspected. When she finally confronts him with being the Merry Widow murderer, he makes a frightening speech to her: “You’re just an ordinary little girl living in an ordinary little town. You’re a sleepwalker, you’re blind. How do you know what the world is really like? Do you know the world is a foul sty? Do you know if you ripped the fronts off houses you’d find swine? The world’s a hell: Wake up, Charlie, use your wits, learn something...” He concludes menacingly, “The same blood flows through our veins.”

  Charlie keeps her uncle’s secret, allowing him to have a hero’s burial, in order to protect her mother, a genuine innocent who would be demolished by the truth about the charming brother she has worshipped. Charlie doesn’t “become” her uncle, yet she internalizes the dark knowledge that he has passed on to her, his apocalyptic view of the world as a sty, his profoundly cynical belief of the universal darkness within. She is no longer a naive small town girl. In Shadow of a Doubt, as in many of Hitchcock’s other films, good and evil are intertwined. Because, in this film, the divided self is not magically restored and the knowledge communicated from uncle to niece remains an ongoing threat and possibility, the drama attains a psychological realism rare in American popular cinema. The final statement of the film, as so often in Hitchcock, is that even the most virtuous characters harbor a darkness within.

  A hard-boiled, psychopathic Faust: Tyrone Power as a power-mad spiritualist, in Nightmare Alley.

  Many noir psychopaths wage a fierce inner battle between their rational selves and their demonic other selves. Often, the dark self stems from sexual obsessions, but in a range of films noirs the characters’ psychoses are beyond sexual perversity; and these twisted characters, whose madness is only partially explained, are among the most terrifying of noir protagonists. Though the films may hint at reasons for the characters’ erratic behavior, their evident capacity for violence exceeds whatever motivations are implied. In Crossfire, a soldier’s anti-Semitism “causes” him to commit murder. In Sunset Boulevard, Norma Desmond’s lost fame and fading beauty turn her into a psychopathic recluse. In Nightmare Alley, the hero’s lust for power contributes to his becoming an amoral spiritualist. Power also fatally corrupts the gang boss in The Big Combo and the sheriff in Touch of Evil. No one is safe from such characters.

  Orson Welles as an officer of the law suffering from a God complex plants evidence against people he wants to prove guilty; it doesn’t matter to him whether they are guilty. Tyrone Power’s career as a mindreader in Nightmare Alley is a pop version of the Faust legend: he is a down-and-out opportunist who fakes mental powers in order to fleece millionaires. Trying to control others, he is himself controlled by a nagging sense of guilt that gradually overwhelms him. Descending lower and lower in self-esteem, he ends up a geek in a circus, his mad quest for control having removed him from any connections to the normal world. Richard Conte’s motto as the ganglord in The Big Combo is “first is first, and second is nowhere.” Because his code allows him no loyalty to anyone, he bombs the two weird henchmen who have remained dumbly faithful to him.

  One of noir’s most memorable tyrants: Orson Welles, Touch of Evil.

  Robert Young in Crossfire, as the detective who investigates an apparently motiveless killing in a barroom brawl, explains, “[The murderer’s] hate is like a gun. The motive had to be someone who could hate Samuels without knowing him; it had to be inside the killer.” It is—he is a crazed anti-Semite. The film, through raisonneur Robert Young, tries to present the character’s blind prejudice within the frame of pious social drama: “My grandfather was killed just because he was an Irish Catholic,” Young says. “Hating is always the same, always senseless. It can end up killing people who wear striped neckties.” Yet Robert Ryan’s powerful performance resists the kind of neat, limiting social classification that the film wants to attach to his sickness. He plays with an intensity that transcends the film’s own boundaries as a liberal social document. Anti-Semitism alone does not fully account for the character’s insane behavior—like the sheriff in Touch of Evil, the corrupt mentalist in Nightmare Alley, the has-been actress in Sunset Boulevard, the gangster in The Big Combo, the Ryan character’s derangement is complex and finally mysterious; it eludes analysis. These characters are more dangerous, more anti-social, than the reasons the films tentatively offer to “explain” their pathological state; the spectacular and unclassifiable nature of their mania gives the films their strong impact—we feel we are in the presence of characters whose evil is profou
nd and beyond understanding.

  The protagonists of On Dangerous Ground and In a Lonely Place have sudden rages only partially accounted for in the scripts. In On Dangerous Ground, the city, teeming with crime, seems to be closing in on a policeman (Robert Ryan) who has spent too many years trafficking with underworld types. The “dangerous ground” applies not only to the urban milieu in which he works but to his own emotional condition. He is living on the edge. After he violently attacks a criminal suspect, his boss orders him to go for a rest in the country. The lonely place in In a Lonely Place is the isolation enforced on a Hollywood screenwriter (Humphrey Bogart) by his anti-social behavior. His irrational explosions make him the likely suspect in a murder case and also alienate a neighbor (Gloria Grahame) who has grown romantically attached to him. As Ryan and Bogart play these festering characters, they seem completely removed from society, ostracized by the force of their anger. That their eruptions have no simple cause makes them truly alienated, unreclaimable. The ending of In a Lonely Place, with the writer neither becalmed nor realigned with the world, is therefore more plausible than that for On Dangerous Ground, which suggests that the cop has been redeemed by a kind-hearted blind woman—a sentimental conceit at odds with the feverish noir world in which the protagonist is imbedded.

  Their perversity largely unexplained, their murderous instincts ultimately eluding definition, some noir psychopaths seem to be evil for evil’s sake, and are placed on exhibit, as it were, as weird case histories. The killer in The Spiral Staircase outlines his philosophy: “There is no room for imperfection in this world ... What a pity my father didn’t live to see me strong—to dispose of the weak of the world whom he detested. He would have admired me for what I am going to do.” The film offers too neat a Freudian explanation in presenting its psychopath as a weakling who has been poisoned by his brutish father’s cult of masculinity; the only way he can prove himself to his dead father is to kill the maimed and the infirm, to project outward, onto others, his overwhelming sense of his own incompleteness and vulnerability. His sickness is deeper than the film’s facile definition of it.