Nightmare Alley - Film Noir And The American Dream (10 page)

Like the noir dream films, the mistaken-identity movies question the cinematic medium. In one sense the geographically and socially mobile audiences watching these characters shift shapes may have felt they were seeing themselves as in a mirror. But those mirror images may also have raised as many questions as they answered. For if the dream films at once affirm and challenge movies’ status as authentic representations of our inner and outer worlds, the switched-identity films are more radical, suggesting that there may be little or no correspondence between inside and outside, image and inner reality, or, conversely, that the outside is the
only
reality. They leave us with two extremes, each one untenable: that one’s essence remains unchangeable, one’s past sins inescapable, or that the self is but a series of performances, a process in constant flux with no center at all. If the latter is true, then identity is something that neither photos nor movies nor writing can ever capture.

Walking past a sign with these words (the slogan of Empire House Wrecking) one day, a man (Burgess Meredith) is hit by a chunk of falling plaster. He is
shaken but unhurt—except that he doesn’t recall why he is on this street or where he has been. He does know that his name is Frank Thompson. So why do his hat and cigarette case bear the monogram “D. N.”? When he goes home, he learns that his wife has moved away, although he believes he saw her that morning. And when he finds her living under her maiden name elsewhere, she tells him he disappeared over a year ago.

This echo of the Flitcraft episode opens Jack Hively’s early noir,
Street of Chance
—the first of many noir adaptations of Cornell Woolrich novels—and serves as prelude for the missing-person noirs that follow it. “It doesn’t make sense,” Frank tells his wife. “It’s like a bad dream.” But once he returns to his office job with the excuse that he had a nervous breakdown, we may wonder which life is the bad dream. The enormous room behind his office window, presaging the hive-like, identical cubicles in Billy Wilder’s
The Apartment
, similarly implies that Thompson is a worker bee. Perhaps he hated this humdrum life and longed to pursue happiness as someone else.

Not only does this missing year remain an abyss at the center of his memory; he is also being pursued by a mysterious man (Sheldon Leonard) and has no inkling why. Revisiting the streets around the accident site, Frank encounters Ruth Dillon (Claire Trevor). Though he doesn’t remember meeting her, she knows him, insists his name is Danny Nearing, and chides him for disappearing, worrying that “all our plans, all our dreams, gone.” He soon learns that Nearing is wanted for the murder of a wealthy man named Diedrich and that the man stalking him is police detective Joe Marucci. Although Ruth is noncommittal about whether Danny is guilty of the murder (Alma, the dead man’s wife, and Bill, his brother and Alma’s lover, seem more likely suspects), she vows to protect him. At one point during their discussion Frank/Danny stares at himself in the mirror, as if to acknowledge that he possesses two selves, straight businessman and shady character. Yet he avers to Ruth that “the me that’s inside wouldn’t let me kill anyone”—that his Emersonian “aboriginal” self is good. But since he doesn’t know who Nearing is, what he has promised or done, how can he be sure?

To find out the truth, Frank/Danny returns to the Diedrich house, where he meets Grandma Diedrich (Adeline De Walt Reynolds), an invalid who can neither move nor speak. In a compelling scene, they devise a means for her to communicate through eye blinks (once for yes, twice for no). This curious encounter is a meeting of doubles: the woman who can’t speak addresses the man who can’t remember—missing body meets missing mind. As Marlisa Santos remarks, her “mute and paralyzed state” signifies “Thompson’s inability to prove his innocence
or identity” (90). It’s as if Frank is attempting to gain access to his own absent memory through her. And her eyes—which compensate for Frank’s/Danny’s blindness to his own motives and emotions—are also a gateway to truth, since she witnessed the murder. The next day he induces Grandma to spell out words letter by letter, but she resists telling him about the murder because she is “a-f-r-a-i-d.” That night he tries to learn more, and she quickly eliminates Bill and Alma. Who could it be, then? The answer enters the room: Ruth, whom Grandma saw stab Diedrich via a reflection in the bedroom mirror. This image is fitting, for Frank has become Grandma’s mirror, itself an element in the looking-glass world where he is Danny Nearing.

Claiming she committed the murder “for us,” Ruth begs him to flee with her. He refuses: “I don’t love you. I’ve only known you two days. I’m not the man you think I am. … My name is Frank Thompson, and I’m married.” As she prepares to shoot Frank, Marucci enters and guns her down; dying, she admits that “Danny” is innocent. But is he? Why did he drop out of his life as Frank Thompson to become a feckless character consorting with a murderous maid? Was he, as I speculated above, sick to death of his life as the staid Mr. Thompson? Or did he, like Flitcraft, somehow glimpse the randomness of existence and suddenly decide to live “in step” with its absurdity? We never find out. Although Frank asserts that the “me inside” isn’t a killer, he already “killed” Frank Thompson once, just as he now puts Danny Nearing to rest: if not a murderer, he is at least a kind of suicide. Ironically, he reinhabits his old self only through the ministrations of Nearing, who is then sacrificed for his troubles. One set of past attachments is severed so that he can take up another set. Was his life as Nearing a “journey into his own unconscious, a dream-world” (98), as Santos suggests? Or is Nearing his aboriginal self, the identity he so yearned to occupy that he was willing to give up everything for it? Will he do so again? Even at the conclusion Frank Thompson remains a partial person, as disabled in his own way as Grandma Diedrich—and far less honest.

As haltingly spoken by “The Swede,” also known as Pete Lund (Burt Lancaster), these words reverberate throughout Robert Siodmak’s brilliant
The Killers
. They are the Swede’s only explanation for why he waits passively in his room for two thugs to execute him. He is not merely resigned to his fate; he believes he deserves it. Why? That question motivates Jim Reardon (Edmond O’Brien), an insurance investigator whose interviews with Lund’s acquaintances compose most
of the film. This narrative structure (borrowed, perhaps, from
Citizen Kane
) pushes the signature noir flashback device nearly to its limit, splintering the narration into eleven dramatized narrations by eight characters, each one supplying a different memory of the Swede, whose real name was Ole Anderson. A different character for each narrator—reliable gas station attendant, suicidal hotel guest, boxer and childhood buddy, mooning lover, intimate cellmate, double-crossing rat—Ole is at once mysterious and simple. Many flashbacks begin or end with lap dissolves from the narrator’s present face to his or her face at the time of the action, indicating that each tale is less about Ole than about the teller’s own fears and aspirations (and excuses for not helping him): Ole is a mirror. At other moments narrators’ faces dissolve to Reardon’s, implying that in listening he “becomes” each one—on his way to “becoming” the Swede.

Ole’s haunting words testify that he can’t outrun his original self or forgive his original sin. They also suggest, as Shadoian remarks, that he was already “dead while he was alive” (81). Indeed, as he lies waiting for the killers, Ole’s face is engulfed in shadow: he is literally effaced, just as he has effaced himself by changing his name to hide from the gang of Jim Colfax (Albert Dekker), whom he betrayed after they robbed a hat factory of its payroll. His initial erasure is revealed in an early flashback by his childhood friend, police lieutenant Sam Lubinsky (Sam Levene), who recalls how, after the Swede broke his right hand in a boxing match, he became a worthless commodity to his trainer and manager. As Ole showers behind the pair, they discuss his replacement. Cinematographer Woody Bredell’s use of deep focus is telling: the washed up Ole literally recedes into the background. Similar compositions characterize many shots in the flashbacks, as Swede is consistently crammed into the corner or overshadowed by others. Likewise, as the backlit Ole strides down an archway after refusing Sam’s offer to become a cop, Siodmak implies that he is already enclosed by fate.

Indeed, Ole is rarely the primary agent in his own story, and when he is, he makes foolish decisions, such as pursuing Kitty Collins (Ava Gardner)—even going to jail for her—instead of staying with the stable Lily (Virginia Christine), and then becoming involved in the hat factory heist instead of emulating his mentor, Charleston (Vince Barnett), who finds the job too risky. The first time Ole sees Kitty, in fact, Siodmak renders his infatuation almost comically, by placing a brightly lit phallic bulb between him and the singing siren. Ole can’t take his eyes off her, but another organ motivates him even more powerfully. The Swede isn’t very bright; but more than that, as the structure implies, he is a secondary character in his own life.

Charleston, his former cellmate, remembers him fondly. In fact, Charleston was in love with Ole and spent long evenings in prison teaching him about astronomy and advising him that women, whom he’s “studied up on” when not in stir, aren’t reliable. But Ole doesn’t listen and continues to stroke the green, harp-covered handkerchief that Kitty gave him—the fetishized “symbol of [his] dreams” (Shadoian 84). This handkerchief becomes Reardon’s fetish as well, as he carries it with him throughout the investigation. This totem raises the question of why Reardon becomes obsessed with the murder of a man he calls a “nobody.” There’s very little in it for the insurance company: the $2,500 death benefit Swede left to the hotel maid is not worth Reardon’s time; the money from the heist will merely become part of next year’s rate adjustment (while his boss relays this fact, Reardon plays with Kitty’s handkerchief).

One answer is that Reardon is an investigator by nature. Like Sam Spade, he delights in the thrill of the hunt; he’s a hound for truth and believes there is such
a thing. But another, more complex, answer speaks to the theme of self-reinvention. We know nothing about Reardon before the pursuit begins: in contrast to Anderson, who exists only as a collection of others’ memories, Reardon has “no past” (Shadoian 83). The more absorbed he becomes in Ole’s life, the more like Ole and his underworld associates he grows: his first interviews are with law-abiding folk, but his later interviews are with Charleston, Blinky Franklin, Dum Dum (Jack Lambert), Colfax, and Kitty—criminals, every one. Indeed, partway through his investigation Reardon occupies the same room in Brentwood where Ole was killed—ostensibly to catch Dum Dum but also to reenact the death scene. The mise-en-scène here even repeats the shadowy atmosphere of that sequence, as Reardon, a novice at the detective game, waits for Dum Dum. But this time Rear-don holds the gun: he has become “the killer.” He even lets Dum Dum believe that he wants the money for himself. In short, just as the opening scene’s killers parrot the tough-guy lingo of 1930s gangster movies (as in the Hemingway short story on which the film is loosely based), so Reardon now plays at being a movie thug. But not very successfully: Dum Dum easily takes the gun away and subdues him.

Reardon is clearly fascinated by these crooked characters and gets a thrill from associating with them; he “fills his emptiness with a vicarious dream” (Shadoian 84). This adventure gives him a chance to inhabit a much more exciting world than the bland offices where he spends his days as a functionary. In some respects he even resembles Anderson: if Ole is an unwitting victim of others’ machinations, Reardon is subject to the cold realities of the actuarial tables. Like Ole, Reardon is a secondary character in his own life. Late in the film, at the conclusion of Reardon’s chat with Colfax, the now-legit gangster’s face dissolves to Reardon’s: the point is that he wants to
be
Colfax, which becomes even clearer in the justly famous Green Cat sequence.
²
As Reardon and Kitty converse there, a candle rests between them, recalling the phallic bulb shining between Kitty and Swede at
their
first meeting; Reardon too is falling for her. “I’d like to have known the old Kitty Collins,” he declares, even after she has just told him how she betrayed Swede! When she suggests returning to his hotel with him, his eyes light up at this apparent sexual come-on. But she does to him what she did to Ole—“takes a powder,” as Reardon earlier put it. It’s almost as though Reardon wants to be killed, or perhaps, like Ole, he feels dead, with only the prospect of violence capable of reviving him.

Though the convoluted story of how Ole was betrayed and disappeared—a skein of double crosses engineered by Colfax, using Kitty as bait—is finally explained, Ole’s true nature is not. Just as he exists for us only as a set of fragments, so he was even for himself a puzzle with pieces missing, a collection of
half-understood dreams and impulses organized around a handkerchief. At the end he remains, like Frank Thompson, broken into parts, as the coroner’s early description of his demise implies: the slugs “near tore him in half.” Perhaps Rear-don believes he can be the glue holding Ole together. But what holds Reardon together? Clearly he and the Swede are doubles, or halves of a single self. Whereas Ole could never escape his past, Reardon acquires one by sifting through Anderson’s. Their mirrored trajectories imply that self-integration, let alone self-renewal, can be for him only fleeting or imaginary. Hence, at the film’s end Rear-don is informed that the investigation that nearly cost him his life will merely generate a minuscule difference in next year’s rates. He hasn’t become a gangster, boxer, cop, or lover; come Monday, he’ll be back to work as a cipher. Similarly, the film’s structure draws the viewer’s attention to its own artful construction, reminding us that “Ole” (like the other characters, but more so) exists only as a piecemeal concoction of “cuts”:
we
put him together, living, like Reardon, vicariously but fleetingly through his exploits.