Nightmare Alley - Film Noir And The American Dream (26 page)

Director Douglas Sirk’s little-known
Shockproof
, scripted by Helen Deutsch and Samuel Fuller, is a distaff version of the same story. This time the man, Griff Marat (Cornel Wilde), is a parole officer in love with an ex-convict named Jenny Marsh (Patricia Knight), who cannot sever her tie to oily gambler Harry Wesson (John Baragrey). After Griff receives a mysterious phone call from Harry that ends in a gunshot, Griff picks up Jenny in his car. During the drive she tells him that she accidentally shot Harry: here, as in several other noirs, the car serves as the engine of narrative itself.
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When she finishes her story, Griff turns both the car and himself around and takes Jenny on the lam. During their journey cars become symbols of sexual license (though they allegedly marry in secret offscreen, this is an unconvincing nod to the Breen Office) and shifting identities. Those two meanings ingeniously converge when Griff and Jenny steal a newlywed couple’s car, its hanging cans and “Just Married” sign covering the license plate. Though not literally a convertible, the car nevertheless represents their mobile identities: Jenny dyes her hair (back to its original brunette shade), and Griff assumes a nom de guerre. But as we saw in the missing-person noirs, the freedom to become anybody eventually turns them into nobodies, as represented by their increasingly humble modes of transportation: car, bus, then freight train. Their downward flight briefly comes to rest in an oil driller’s shack that, for Griff, proves that they’re “living like pigs.” Unable to bear the thought of a life of perpetual downward mobility, the lovers turn themselves in. Griff had unwittingly forecast this prospect while earlier explaining a western movie to his younger brother: criminals, he explained, usually give up when “corrosion” sets in. When he decides to give up, Griff cites this line, suggesting that the lovers’ flight has transmuted them into worn-out car parts. As in
You Only Live Once
, cars’ amoral space devolves into amorphousness, and unending automobility becomes a traveling prison cell.

Nicholas Ray’s
They Live by Night
opens with an overhead shot of a car holding three escaped convicts: young Bowie Bowers (Farley Granger) and his mentors
Chicamaw (Jay C. Flippen) and T-Dub (Howard Da Silva). The car gets a flat, and while fixing the tire, Bowie talks of his dream of owning a gas station with Keechie (Cathy O’Donnell), the grubby daughter of an accomplice. At once Bowie’s conscience (“fine company you’re runnin’ with,” she admonishes, standing above him in the frame) and his motive for mobility, Keechie hopes to fix Bowie as he does the tire. Alas, as an escaped convict with no money or prospects, Bowie has little choice but to drive the getaway car for his partners, who understand that their criminal identities are embodied in their getaway cars and thus always burn them after heists.

Soon, however, Chicamaw’s reckless driving causes a crash that injures Bowie, implicates him in two murders, and forces him temporarily to exit the motorway. Nursed back to health by Keechie, Bowie falls in love and marries her. Whereas Keechie’s blossoming is blatantly displayed in Cathy O’Donnell’s flattering new makeup and clothes, Bowie’s rebirth is illustrated by his postnuptial car—a dashing convertible, which embodies his wish to convert from impoverished ex-convict to up-and-coming man about town. As in
You Only Live Once
, the convertible becomes a mobile home, complete with dining room and, of course, bedroom (Keechie soon becomes pregnant). After a final job results in the death of his cronies, Bowie and Keechie flee to New Orleans, where they try to impersonate ordinary newlyweds. But a sequence depicting their outing to a park and a nightclub (they are mystified by golf and disdain dancing) dramatizes their status as permanent outcasts. At evening’s end a chanteuse sums up their condition: they’re just two kids in a “red wagon,” she sings, and even if it’s “all [their] own,” it’s going nowhere. Bowie, the song continues, cannot forever use Keechie as his “spare tire,” for eventually “you get burned when you play with fire.” As in
Shock-proof
and
You Only Live Once
, the end of automobility (here, in a motel) signals the end of the male’s life (in the novel both die). Their convertible provided only the illusion of transformation; its mobility was merely geographic, never social, and even that movement was circular. Little more than children, Bowie and Keechie were merely play-acting in their wagon, briefly enacting a fantasy of rising from poverty.

Even more innocent than Ray’s characters are truck driver Steve Randall (Steve Brodie) and his pregnant wife, Anne (Audrey Long), in Anthony Mann’s
Desperate
. Mann and his director of photography George Diskant underline this ingenuousness by juxtaposing their bright apartment with gangster Walt Radak’s gloomy hideout, where a single bulb provides the only illumination. (In an eerily effective scene early in the film, Radak’s men beat up Steve as the bulb swings, lending a nightmarish quality to his predicament.) But the barriers between their worlds break down once Steve is enlisted to deliver “perishables” for Radak (Raymond Burr) and then wrongly implicated in the murder of a policeman. This turn of events reminds Steve and viewers that, as Dennis Broe points out, “working-class mobility is tenuous and can just as easily lead downward” (57).

And so, when he and Anne go on the lam, the car they drive is not a convertible but a beat-up jalopy. After offering to fix and then buy it for ninety dollars, Steve is duped by a crooked dealer who, realizing that Steve is in a hurry and probably in trouble, ups the price as soon as it is roadworthy.
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When Steve returns to persuade him to sell it, he finds the dealer gone and steals the car, which, initially representing the Randalls’ marginal economic position and victimization, now embodies Steve’s conversion into a shady character. But Steve doesn’t want to be converted; he wants to affirm his authenticity as an honest man. And unlike the other lamming lovers, the Randalls thrive only when they stay put: while living with Anne’s aunt and uncle, for example, Steve gets a new job,
and the couple are remarried by a minister. Would they be better off eschewing upward mobility for rustic stability? Radak’s appearance at the farmhouse (where the thugs’ dark trench coats, fedoras, and gangster argot contrast jarringly with the farm’s rural domesticity) renders the question moot and forces another departure.

After Anne gives birth, the lovers formulate a plan entertained by a surprising number of male noir protagonists: to own a “filling” station.
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Popping the baby’s bottle into her mouth, Anne fantasizes about “Steve Randall’s gas station.” But after sending Anne and baby away to claim the station, Steve becomes the police’s bait for Radak, who captures and arranges to kill Steve at the very moment Radak’s brother is being executed for the cop’s murder. Their tense wait for midnight to strike (punctuated by imposing Eisensteinian close-ups) is interrupted when a neighbor knocks on the door to borrow cream. The contrast between domesticity and mobility, innocence and evil, is thus rendered in terms of fuel—milk versus gas. But despite abundant indications of his milky innocence, Steve dirties himself by killing Radak. And the Randalls’ dream of domesticity remains harnessed to the auto economy: they can provide milk for the baby only by selling fuel for others’ cars. By the end of the film, these innocents have been soiled by road grime, infected by the auto’s amoral space, altered by automobility.

Unlike Ray’s or Mann’s ingénues, lovers Bart Tare (John Dall) and Annie Laurie Starr (Peggy Cummins) in Joseph H. Lewis’s sensational
Gun Crazy
never try to settle down. And unlike Keechie, who tries to dissuade Bowie from his criminal career, trigger-happy Laurie entices weak-willed Bart into ever more reckless capers: robbing diners, then hitchhiking so as to rip off lecherous male drivers. For them, cars are like guns—erotic machines that enable them to evade the fate embodied by Bart’s sister, who represents (to Laurie) the living death that is small-town domesticity (see Wager,
Dangerous
101). They prefer the nearly infinite play of convertibility enacted during their crime spree, when they adopt a series of outrageous false identities and vehicles: in one scene they wear conservative suits and glasses; in another Bart dons his old army uniform. In the film’s most celebrated sequence—which unfolds for three and a half minutes without a cut—the lovers sport ludicrous carnival cowboy outfits while robbing a bank. Lewis places us in the backseat of their car as Bart and Laurie, like teens on their first date, make nervous conversation, and the camera remains in the car as Bart executes the robbery.
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Lewis thus makes us their passengers and accomplices, brilliantly evoking suspense and sympathy by inviting us to inhabit their amoral space. Indeed, as Laurie and the cop she encounters suggestively fondle their guns, we
become voyeuristic partners in the lovers’ erotic escapades. Their car is now both camera and gun: it not only moves—it shoots! Not surprisingly, their string of sedans and coupes ends with a convertible.

Though Bart professes his unwillingness to continue—“everything’s going so fast, it’s all in such high gear. It doesn’t feel like me”—Laurie persuades him to pull one last heist. And so the lovers take straight jobs with Armour in order to rob the packing plant’s safe, but the caper goes wrong when Laurie shoots two employees. The sequence ends in a striking scene depicting the two racing through a refrigerated chamber filled with dangling carcasses. Jim Kitses reads this scene as a “caricature of the ideal of social mobility enshrined in the capitalist trajectory” (48), but it may also be Lewis’s (and the film’s blacklisted cowriter Dalton Trumbo’s) sardonic commentary on the lovers’ consuming amorality, whereby other humans are merely carcasses serving a cold, hedonistic lifestyle in which, as Bart almost comically puts it later, “two people [are] dead just so we can live without working.”
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The fugitives had originally planned to split up afterward and drive separate convertibles in different directions, but in the end they can’t do it: their car, after all, represents their bond and the incessant mobility that is the essence of being gun—and car—crazy. Despite their violent natures, there is something childish about their attitude, an idea borne out during their final fling, when they ride a roller coaster and merry-go-round like youngsters out for a lark.
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But these vehicles move only in circles, just as their lam ends where it began—in Bart’s hometown of Cashville. Significantly, they have to hop a freight car to get there, and even after they steal Bart’s sister’s car (
not
a convertible), they can’t escape their fate, the inevitable outcome of being car and gun crazy.

By portraying lovers who test their society’s tolerance for extreme mobility, these lam films imply that the American dream of convertible identity can be lived only briefly, often at the cost of death. Whereas the vet noirs imply that permanent self-reinvention is possible (if only by experiencing trauma and painful recovery), and the missing-person films suggest that one cannot truly change one’s nature because it is molded by others, these lovers’ pursuit of upward mobility through automobility is presented as a speed trap contrived by a society that craves yet finally cannot abide the antisocial impulses of young lovers. And despite the fugitives’ challenges to the economic and social system that confines them, they cannot evade their own commodification as glamorous criminals in hurtling cars. Even so, the thrill of riding with Eddie and Joan, Griff and Jenny, Bart and Laurie, Bowie and Keechie seems infinitely preferable to the pedestrian lives of Cora’s husband and Bart’s boyhood friends—and even, perhaps, to the compromised stability of the Randall family. If the lamming lovers’ restlessness ends up imprisoning them, at least they felt briefly the rush of air on their faces, the passing delight in driving—indeed,
being
—convertibles. And if they finally have no particular place to go, at least they’ve gone there fast.