Nightmare Alley - Film Noir And The American Dream (35 page)

One of those issues is motherhood. Most noir mothers exist primarily to shed light on the male protagonists: Cody Jarrett’s smothering ma exposes his Achilles heel in
White Heat
; Bart Tare’s sister, Ruby, in
Gun Crazy
, serves as Annie Laurie Starr’s foil. Even less evident than mothers are children, who also function as plot devices or symbols: Dave Bannion’s daughter provides a pretext for his revenge campaign in
The Big Heat
; Frank Enley’s toddler son, in
Act of Violence
, mirrors his own entrapment. In the femme noirs, children still appear in mostly symbolic roles—as measures of the mother’s morality, as signs of attachment to the past, as emblems of fresh beginnings, as psychological scars—and rarely as
real people. Most often, children—those products of female labor—represent the conflict between domesticity and nondomestic work. Femme noir’s many dead or damaged children not only motivate the action; they also indicate conflicting views about a woman’s place.

“Writers are the women of the film industry” (qtd. in Francke 2). This quip, overheard by screenwriter Eleanor Perry, both indicates the low prestige of writers in Hollywood and points to a prime reason why women were the writers of the film industry. As “middle-level executives in a large collective enterprise,” writers earned much less than directors or actors (Ceplair and Englund 8); female writers generally earned less than their male counterparts (Ketti Frings, whose work I discuss below, was an exception). Studios could use these women’s expertise without threatening the male power structure. This pattern was well-established by the 1930s and explains why even film scholars may not recognize all of these names: Marguerite Roberts, Lenore J. Coffee, Ketti Frings, Silvia Richards, Catherine Turney, Sally Benson, Lucille Fletcher, Lillie Hayward, Gertrude Walker, Leigh Brackett, Virginia Kellogg, Bess Meredyth, Dorothy Hannah, Eve Greene, Muriel Roy Bolton. Yet each of these women wrote at least one screenplay or original story for a completed film noir, and almost nothing has been written about any of them.

A case in point is Turney, who wrote scripts for MGM in the 1930s (including the one for Dorothy Arzner’s
The Bride Wore Red
) before being hired by Warner Bros., which boasted a roster of female stars who sought roles “in which they weren’t just sitting around being a simpering nobody.” Turney, whose forte was writing stories about women “battling against the odds,” could provide them, as she did for Ida Lupino in
The Man I Love
(Turney, qtd. in Francke 47). At Warner Bros., where she was the only woman writer on-site, Turney was charged by ambitious young producer Jerry Wald with adapting James M. Cain’s novel
Mildred Pierce
. Wald, who went on to produce several femme noirs, was eager to capitalize on the loosening of censorship signaled by
Double Indemnity
, and he hoped to transform Cain’s chronicle of a female restaurateur and her monstrous daughter into a murder mystery with a flashback narrative.
⁶
Resistant to both changes (no murder or flashback exists in the novel), Turney was more intrigued by the story’s female characters and relationships but after three months was removed from the project; after Albert Maltz beefed up the murder plot, she was brought back with strict instructions to follow his outline (Francke 51). Although Turney
eventually left to write the Bette Davis vehicle
A Stolen Life
(leaving the credit to Wald favorite Ranald MacDougall), her stamp remains on the film’s female-centered workplace, supportive female friendships, and its complex portrayal of Mildred’s ambition and resilience (traits that also appear in Turney’s script for
The Man I Love
).
⁷

Biesen attributes the finished film’s blend of women’s melodrama and noir to its having been “rewritten, produced, and directed by males to reinforce a macho crime ethos” (138–39). Yet Cain himself believed that the story was about “one woman’s struggle against a great social injustice—which is the mother’s necessity to support her children even though husband and community give her not the slightest assistance” (qtd. in Biesen 139). Joan Crawford, who won the role after Davis and Barbara Stanwyck had turned it down, perceived Mildred not only as her ticket back into the Hollywood pantheon (MGM had dropped her after several flops) but as an alter ego, for Mildred’s life mirrored that of poor young Lucille LeSueur, who remade herself through grit and relentless energy into a Hollywood icon.
Mildred Pierce
displays both the conditions of its creation and the period’s ambivalence about a woman’s place. Hence, the noir mise-en-scène—sharp diagonal lines, heavy shadows, an aura of doom—dominates the first few minutes, as Mildred’s playboy husband, Monty Beragon (Zachary Scott), is shot in her (actually Curtiz’s) beach house, after which Mildred attempts to frame her associate Wally Fay (Jack Carson) for the crime. But the rest—comprising Mildred’s recollections at the police station—adopts a more orthodox style.

With or without the murder the film is a piquant study of social mobility and a scathing critique of capitalism. When Mildred’s first husband, Bert (Bruce Bennett), loses his real-estate job and admits his affair with a Mrs. Biederhof, Mildred kicks him out, leaving her without money or skills, aside from her well-developed homemaking prowess (“I felt as though I’d been born in a kitchen and lived there all my life,” she proclaims).
⁸
Doggedly seeking work despite numerous rejections, Mildred finally lands a waitressing job, but wearing a uniform and taking orders from others offends her bourgeois sensibilities. Yet that job launches her rise to successful owner of a restaurant chain. Even before her success, however, Mildred pushes daughters Veda (Ann Blyth) and Kay (Jo Ann Marlow) to take ballet and piano lessons and dress above her means. Although Mildred disavows Veda’s pretensions, early in the film Curtiz cuts from a montage of Mildred at work directly to the girls at their lessons to suggest that Mildred is fashioning a new identity for herself through them. The girls are a vehicle for
her
self-expression; like the restaurant she buys, they are her properties.

Poor little Kay, who dies of pneumonia contracted while Mildred spends a romantic weekend with Beragon, is sacrificed for her mother’s aspirations; Veda becomes an insufferable snob who sneers at the smell of grease. She is sacrificed in a different way, as her humanity is scorched out of her by Mildred’s burning drive: not only does Veda hurl insults at Mildred, but she extorts $10,000 from a wealthy boyfriend by claiming to be pregnant and eventually has an affair with Beragon. In the film, as Veda is sent to jail for murdering Monty, she insists to her mother that “It’s your fault I’m the way I am.” Perhaps Mildred has been too busy to notice that her daughter has become a gorgon or is simply too weak to say no to her. A more likely explanation is that she cannot separate Veda from herself, for she is Mildred’s class aspirations come to monstrous life. Mildred says she loves Veda more than herself, but, as Haskell observes, her love masks a “hatred so intense it must be disguised as love” (32): a hatred, I would add, not just of Veda but of herself.

Why does Mildred hate herself? Because she is torn between the myth of domesticity, in which a woman’s worth is certified by her credentials as wife, homemaker, and mother, and the emerging postwar ethos that encouraged women to boost their self-esteem (and independence) through nondomestic labor. Just as Mildred’s homemaker self despises the ambitious entrepreneur, so Veda’s snotty remarks about grease express Mildred’s own self-disgust. The film is similarly riven. Thus Mildred’s restaurants are depicted as lively, collegial, female-dominated environments—welcome respites from men and her stifling home. The restaurant also lets Mildred find her voice: when she tries to purchase the restaurant property from Beragon, Wally, who has engineered the deal, won’t let her speak; only when she makes her own plea does Beragon agree to sell. Soon after that scene, however, Curtiz dissolves from Mildred’s face to Mildred’s place: she
becomes
the restaurant.
⁹
By commodifying herself, the film suggests, she loses both her femininity and her humanity. Veda’s fake-pregnancy scheme thus reflects lessons learned from her mother: to get ahead, you must sell yourself.

Indeed, everyone is a commodity in
Mildred Pierce
. Not only does Mildred turn herself into a restaurant; she also buys Monty, gradually increasing her “loans” to him until he becomes little more than a gigolo, then purchasing him as a present for the estranged Veda (“Sold. One Beragon,” Mildred remarks). Veda uses her body to get money; Wally betrays Mildred for money. By working outside the home, the film implies, Mildred merely exchanges one form of objectification for another; in prostituting Beragon, she also prostitutes herself. In short, her American dream is self-sabotaging: as Cain commented, the story
proposes that “a dream come true may be the worst possible thing that can happen” (qtd. in Als 111).

Both forms of female labor, then, seem poisonous in
Mildred Pierce
. At the conclusion Mildred is back with Bert, and as they walk from the police station, they pass two cleaning women on their knees—images of a woman’s proper place, perhaps. Several critics therefore argue that the film condemns Mildred and demonstrates Hollywood’s efforts to “rechannel working women back into the home” (Biesen 143).
¹⁰
The film is, however, as Walsh points out, far from univocal (133). After all, Mildred is as much victim as perpetrator. Because males exploit her, her business fails. Because society is suspicious of female entrepreneurs, Mildred must work twice as hard to succeed. Because the community stigmatizes divorcees, she gets no help in raising her daughters. Yet despite these obstacles, she bounces back again and again. Indeed, the restaurant scenes, with their female workers bursting with industry and purpose, resonate beyond the chastening conclusion.
Mildred Pierce
epitomizes Jeanine Basinger’s argument that even retrograde or ambiguous films can foster progressive ideas. To convince women that marriage and motherhood were desirable, she writes, Hollywood had to show women doing something else. “By making the Other live on the screen, movies made it real. By making it real, they made it desirable. By making it desirable, they made it possible” (6). By asking what women should do, Hollywood implied that there was more than one answer.
Mildred Pierce
thus demonstrates how female artists and protagonists, even when supervised by males, exerted pressure on Hollywood’s industrial system and generic conventions.

Other women managed to exercise more creative control. Two women—Joan Harrison and Virginia Van Upp—even became producers. The Oxford-educated Harrison began as Alfred Hitchcock’s production assistant, learning the business from Hitch and his wife, writer Alma Reville. Harrison earned cowriting credits on five Hitchcock films before striking out on her own as a screenwriter. She eventually became a producer at Universal and RKO, where she supervised several noirs, four of which I have already discussed. Because I treat her films at length elsewhere in this book, here I will merely glance at her work.
¹¹
I have already pointed out how films such as
Nocturne, Uncle Harry
, and
Ride the Pink Horse
challenge gender norms and macho posturing by harnessing these themes
to crime stories. Indeed, Harrison insisted that she was “proud of being a [crime] specialist” (qtd. in Francke 57), but despite her hard-boiled oeuvre, news stories and studio publicity releases invariably emphasized her “ah-inspiring legs,” “wavy blonde hair, dimples and … 24-inch waistline” (qtd. in Francke 59). More insidious was the institutional sexism she faced: as Harrison confessed to the
Boston Sunday Post
in August 1944, studio heads “simply do not want to give a woman authority. … They recognize women writers but prefer to keep us in prescribed groves [
sic
]” (qtd. in Francke 60).

One of those “groves” was the Gothic, and in this grove resided Harrison’s first post-Hitchcock script (cowritten with Marian Cockrell),
Dark Waters
, a moody piece about a woman named Leslie Calvin (Merle Oberon), who recovers from posttraumatic stress after a shipwreck kills her family, and later must fight off criminals impersonating her relatives with the help of Franchot Tone’s Dr. Grover. The success of
Dark Waters
gave Harrison the clout, when Universal asked her to adapt
Phantom Lady
, to insist that she be allowed to produce the film as well. More typical of Harrison’s productions,
Phantom Lady
offers a somewhat more enlightened, though still conflicted, view of gender, as represented by Ella Raines’s protagonist, Carol “Kansas” Richman, who, in becoming a sleuth, plays an array of roles that test and enhance her strength and flexibility. Grossman proposes that Carol embodies the “resourcefulness, flexibility and aggressiveness of the
femme moderne
” and enacts the “subversive potential of the hard-boiled female protagonist” (35).
¹²
But not too subversive: at the end she happily receives employer Scott Henderson’s marriage proposal via Dictaphone. The film thus challenges gender norms only to reinstate them at the end. If Carol’s roles mirror those played by the writer-producer who helped create her, the film’s conclusion points to the compromises she had to make to achieve success.

A child of Hollywood (her mother had been an editor for Ince), Virginia Van Upp rose from assistant casting director to secretary for writer Horace Jackson at Pathé and Paramount, where her gifts (she reportedly finished some of Jackson’s scripts when he was too drunk to work) were soon recognized (Francke 62). Working mostly with director E. H. Griffith, she specialized in crafting sharp parts for actresses such as Madeleine Carroll. By 1941 she was one of only five screenwriters in Hollywood earning more than $75,000 per year (Ceplair and Englund 3–4).
¹³
Seeking someone to propel newcomer Rita Hayworth to stardom, Harry Cohn wooed Van Upp to Columbia, where she wrote
Cover Girl
for Hay-worth and oversaw her performance. Their relationship culminated in
Gilda
, the career-defining role for Hayworth, which she accepted with the condition that
Van Upp produce the film (Francke 63). The screenplay, credited to (male writer) Marion Parsonnet but supervised (and much of it written) by Van Upp, displays a skeptical perspective on gender and relationships and mocks the sexism that permeates noir.
Gilda
is indeed a key film in the noir canon, for it reveals how men create femmes fatale out of femmes vital and use marriage to regulate female sexuality.