Nightmare Alley - Film Noir And The American Dream (30 page)

After the tune ends, Frank chats up a “jive crazy” rich “chick” named Jeanie, as a bluesy B-flat minor ballad plays in the background. The tune’s lyrics (“I wanted to kiss you / I tried to resist you”) reveal the real point of their coy conversation. But although Frank knows he’s fishing, he doesn’t realize he’s also bait: distracted by Jeanie (Virginia Lee), he fails to notice a mysterious man in a distinctive scarf and hat meddling with his drink. When a hungover Bigelow awakens the next morning, we hear the ballad again, but now it sounds tinny and hollow, indicating both Frank’s self-disgust and his incipient illness: having been dosed with “luminous toxin” (a radioactive chemical), he will die within days. The song thus serves as the audible residue of the club and of Frank’s desired (though incomplete) infidelity. We hear the tune twice more: when Frank finds a Fisherman Club matchbook in a deserted warehouse and again when he confronts Halliday (William Ching), the mysterious personage who poisoned him because he once notarized a bill of sale for an iridium shipment. Inadvertently, Bigelow is acting out the tune’s lyrics: “And when I met you, I tried to forget you / But you whispered, ‘Darling, I know.’” His knowledge is deadly. Robert Porfirio points to the ballad’s “lethal potential” (“Dark” 180). But it’s not just this song that carries that potential; it’s jazz itself. Thus Bigelow
is punished not merely for notarizing a document, or for sowing some wild oats, but for yielding to the enticements of jazz, depicted as an aural toxin and the very voice of Satan. Though the poison itself is a luminous white, Bigelow, like Jigger Pine, has been blackened by the touch of jive.

D. O. A
. links two of the period’s pervasive cultural anxieties. First, it dramatizes the allure and fear of African American culture, which, in the form of jazz, emancipates the primal impulses of the world’s Frank Bigelows. As an instrument for blacks to repay whites for commodifying and sexualizing their bodies, jazz offers a more insidious brand of rebellion than the riots and protests that eventually yielded progressive social changes. Second, jazz is associated with the anxiety about atomic energy, materialized in the luminous poison.
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In sum, the Fisherman band embodies the mix of desire and dread that marked American attitudes toward two dangerously intoxicating entities: blackness and the Bomb. Far from fusing the “whole USA” into one chorus, here jazz splits the nation into two camps: infected victims and poisonous perpetrators.

“That tune! … Why was it always that rotten tune? Knocking me around, beating in my head, never letting up. Did ya ever want to forget anything? Did ya ever want to cut away a piece of your memory or blot it out? You can’t, ya know. No matter how hard you try.” Thus speaks the hapless Al Roberts, erstwhile saloon pianist in
Detour
. The tune that makes him feel so black and blue is “I Can’t Believe That You’re in Love with Me,” an innocuous pop song from 1927 that is forever associated in his mind with his ill-fated journey to Los Angeles to meet his fiancée, Sue, and the nightmarish events that followed: the death of Charles Haskell and his unfortunate decision to assume Haskell’s identity, his killing of Vera, and his subsequent flight. But whereas Al wants to forget this song, other noir musicians can’t remember important songs. Just as the ballad in
D. O. A
. becomes a vestige of the night of Frank Bigelow’s murder—a memory of an ineradicable but mysterious trauma—so in many noirs melodies provide mnemonic clues to the plot’s initiating events, which are often the protagonist’s own crimes. In these films jazz is linked to violence, fear, and rage.

Gorbman demonstrates how romantic/classical film scores establish “motifs of reminiscence” that enable audiences (unconsciously or consciously) to link disparate moments of the narrative (28). According to Caryl Flinn, musical themes often signal “temporal disphasures, especially those associated with the flashback”
(109), which express a wish to “reach back from an unlovely present to the past, and therefrom to construct a lost beauty.” This “utopian function” of film music, she argues, creates a “conduit to connect listeners … to an ideal past” (50). Noir likewise employs musical motifs to indicate temporal disphasures; however, rather than revealing “lost pleasure and stability” (Flinn 117), these films record their impossibility. In noir jazz films traumatic events—occurring before the narrative itself or at its outset—become repressed memories that can be retrieved only through nightmares, posttraumatic flashbacks, or forced reenactments similar to those plaguing disabled vets. These half-remembered melodies violate the principle of inaudibility by invoking memories both for the audience and for the characters.

In
Detour
“I Can’t Believe That You’re in Love with Me” prompts the flashback that frames the narrative. A sign of both a utopian past and a lost future (Flinn 124), the song embodies Al’s mistake in believing that he could escape his club gig and start a life with Sue in Hollywood. Its lyrics don’t promise love or success but rather profess incredulity that someone so wonderful could love the song’s speaker; even so, Al balks at serving as Sue’s accompanist and playing for little money (a ten-buck tip is a “jackpot”) and less respect at the Break o’ Dawn Club. He should complain, for he is clearly possessed of great talent, displayed when he ingeniously transmutes Brahms’s “Waltz in A Major” into an improvised boogie-woogie. Flinn writes that this scene indicates that jazz signifies failure for Al (125).
¹⁴
But it also shows Al using improvisation the same way that the black inventors of jazz did: to turn confinement into liberation. Al’s hitchhiking (geographic improvisation) further indicates that he enjoys playing things by ear. Perhaps sensing that life with Sue would be as insipid as the song, he doesn’t really want to join her. His ambivalence is suggested in a shot that occurs just before his nightmare begins, as he gazes into the rearview mirror of Haskell’s convertible and pictures Sue in Hollywood, singing “I Can’t Believe” before a shadowy band. The shot’s placement within the mirror implies that Al will never achieve his dream, the song and all it stands for immuring him, as Flinn suggests, “in much the same way that the film’s claustral visual style and narrative structure confine him” (127). Later, while waiting in a stifling hotel room with the predatory Vera, Al tries to phone Sue; as he waits to speak, “I Can’t Believe” swells, only to dissolve into dissonant fragments as he hangs up, unable to complete the call. Al really
can’t
believe that Sue’s in love with him; moreover, he probably prefers his improvised life to the suffocating future promised by “I Can’t Believe.” Although the tune haunts him as a symbol of his
fatal detour, this restless musician would never have been satisfied playing Sue’s sideman for life.

Most noir jazz musicians share Al’s self-contradictions and instability. Of course, the association between musical talent and mental disturbance is hardly new to noir; musicians have long been deemed unreliable and threatening by conventional folk. Traveling from town to town, whether alone or with other suspicious types, musicians seldom establish ties to a single locale. After sleeping much of the day, they work at night inviting audiences to lose inhibitions. Musicians thus become scapegoats for audiences’ guilt, as well as focal points for their longing to escape. Further, as Susan McClary observes, “the whole enterprise of musical activity is … fraught with gender-related anxieties.” For example, the “charge that musicians are ‘effeminate’ goes back as far as recorded documentation about music, and music’s association with the body and with subjectivity has led to its being relegated … to what was understood as a ‘feminine’ realm” (17). Musicians often dress stylishly and create art that evokes emotions, yet they are also widely perceived to be sexually predatory, using their sensitivity and exoticism to entice semiwilling partners.
¹⁵
Male musicians are thus viewed simultaneously as androgynous and hypermasculine. Jazz musicians carry even more baggage, since they are coded as at once black
and
white, gifted
and
disabled, stars
and
geeks. Hence, as jazz historian Ted Gioia writes, male jazzers are a sonata of dissonances: “world-wise yet innocent; hard-edged yet wearing their hearts on their sleeves,” they are “flip and cynical, yet firmly committed to their calling” (77). In short, the postwar jazz musician bundled together anxieties about race, masculinity, and productivity, embodying conflicting traits that appear throughout noir jazz films, where musicians’ scandalous characters and sensitive natures create what Gioia calls a “fascinating series of ‘anti-hero’ contradictions” (77).

Midcentury Hollywood’s stereotyping of musicians and the affiliation between music and memory are both exemplified in the neglected whodunit
Nocturne
(directed by Edwin L. Marin and produced, like
Phantom Lady
, by Joan Harrison), in which music and lyrics (by Leigh Harline, Mort Greene, and Eleanor Rudolph) play pivotal roles. The film begins with a high overhead shot of composer Keith Vincent’s house, then cranes down and seems to pass through the large picture window into the room where he is playing the piano for a partially hidden woman. Vincent (Edward Ashley) cavalierly lists the various songs he has written for his paramours: a Latin number for a compliant señorita; a jolly swing tune for a Sun Valley girl, and so forth. For the listening woman he has written a piece called “Nocturne,” which he plays while talking through the lyrics—

Nocturne, you are my nocturne
You are the words I sing
The notes I play

—and ending with these lines:

When it’s over and done
You’re no longer the one
For that was yesterday.

She may be his muse, but only for about three minutes; women are fine for brief nocturnal activities, but there shall be no strings attached. Ironically, “Nocturne” is also Vincent’s swan song: as the final chords resound, a shot rings out and he falls dead.

His death is officially called a suicide, but Lt. Joe Warne (George Raft) believes it’s a murder and becomes obsessed with solving the crime, even after being suspended from the force for doing so. The crime is linked in his mind to the melody of “Nocturne,” which, early in the investigation, he plinks out on the piano: A, A, up to C, down to F, then G, then A; A, A, D, F, G, A. On the sheet music is written, “For Dolores,” but this clue is no help, for Vincent called all his women “Dolores.” That night Joe dreams of these Doloreses, oneirically scanning the photos on Vincent’s wall as the title tune plays: it’s his nocturnal edition of Vincent’s song. Following a montage of interviews with the Doloreses, we watch a photo emerge from the developing bath, then dissolve to the face of its subject, Frances Ransome (Lynn Bari), a bit actress with a firm alibi and a soft kid sister, Carol Page (Virginia Huston), a nightclub singer who works with pianist Ned “Fingers” Ford (Joseph Pevney). Soon after they meet, Joe and Frances visit a club where Fingers essays “I Couldn’t Sleep a Wink Last Night” (too many nocturnes, perhaps). But when Joe asks him to play “Nocturne,” Carol becomes upset, arousing Joe’s suspicions. Though the sisters are hot, Warne is lukewarm: after kissing Frances, he immediately turns her off with persistent accusations.

The next morning he visits Fingers and Carol as they rehearse “Why Pretend?” and Fingers admits that after he cowrote three songs with Vincent, the latter dumped him. However, the key clue comes from another set of fingers—those of Joe’s mother and her friend Queenie, as they discuss how powder burns showed up on Vincent’s head and hands.
¹⁶
While demonstrating, Mrs. Warne accidentally fires Joe’s gun, leaving powder burns on the head of her son, who has intervened at the last moment. Fortunately, the pistol was loaded with blanks,
which explains Vincent’s powder burns: someone fired blanks at him after his death. Two other incidents provide further clues: Joe finds Charles Shawn, the man who photographed every Dolores, hanged in his own studio; then at Frances’s place he discovers the gas on and Frances lying unconscious. In the latter sequence “Nocturne” plays, as it should, for the scene reenacts the first murder. Indeed, all three deaths are staged suicides, melodramatic tableaus designed to be misinterpreted. “Nocturne” plays again when Joe finally confronts Carol and Frances: a long pan left reveals Fingers, who confesses that he is married to Carol and was cuckolded by Vincent. He murdered the composer, then set up the fake suicide. The pianist’s fingers pull out a gun, but Joe has already removed the slugs.

The title tune is associated with murder as well as with the promiscuous lifestyle of Keith Vincent, who used women and then tossed them away, as his lyrics describe. “Nocturne” is also the aural emblem of Fingers’s dirty hands. More interesting than these associations, perhaps, is the triangular relationship among Vincent, Fingers, and Warne, each of whom plays the theme song on the piano: Vincent sardonically, Fingers passionately, Warne haltingly. Each man’s ability to play mirrors his ability to “play”: Vincent, though portrayed as an epicene dandy by Edward Ashley, is an inveterate womanizer; Fingers is ineffectual, perhaps impotent (his gun was, remember, loaded with blanks). But what of Warne? What did he do to be so black and blue? Why does he risk his career on this case? Perhaps he gets a thrill from vicariously living Vincent’s decadent life. After all, he only halfheartedly romances Frances, and we can’t help but wonder about the sexuality of a man in his forties who lives with his mother and can’t stir up ardor for any woman. In this regard George Raft’s wooden performance is appropriate, for Warne’s stiffness may signify either a man married to his job or a closeted homosexual. Or perhaps Joe would like to be Vincent but actually resembles Fingers: his gun may also be filled with blanks. In any case, though Joe tries to stay clean, he is dirtied by the black powder burns that indicate his noir impulses. The title song, then, not only symbolizes the fake suicides, but, as its occurrence during Joe’s “Dolores” fantasy sequence implies, also represents the inauthentic life of Joe Warne, who seems doomed to remain his own nocturnal companion.