Nightmare Alley - Film Noir And The American Dream (39 page)

Marie’s parole hearing further illuminates her plight. The board members—all men—won’t look at her. Nor do they want to hear her story (one of them even wears a poorly functioning hearing aid), for they have already made up their minds. Deeming her “hardly more than a child,” they refuse to let her live on her own. Yet Marie’s stepfather won’t take her in. Ironically, then, Marie’s youth and innocence work against her, despite her protest that she’s not like the other inmates. Denied parole because she lacks “beneficial influences on the outside,” Marie is trapped in a Catch-22: if she is corrupted, she must stay; but if she remains innocent, she is powerless to create favorable conditions for parole. Under the guise of protecting her, then, the parole board further dehumanizes her, meanwhile sitting smugly beneath a copy of The Declaration of Independence. After Marie hears their decision, the prison bell rings loudly, and a siren sends her screaming down a corridor and into the yard, where she ineffectually tries to climb the barbed-wire-topped wall.

In the aftermath Marie is hardened, exchanging her former breathy tentativeness for a clipped delivery. The entrance of “vice queen” Elvira Powell (Lee Patrick), who gets Kitty Stark exiled to solitary confinement, disrupts the inmates’ hierarchy, and Marie’s foolish attempt to adopt a kitten prompts a riot and earns Harper’s
wrath: Marie’s reward is a shaved head and a stint in solitary. Having already lost her identity, her baby, and her hope, Marie has left only her will; this new punishment crushes that as well, and we watch her weep hopelessly in the darkness. But what finally breaks Marie isn’t punishment but a simple look. When a group of “club women” visit the prison, Marie is arrested not by their rude comments (“it smells like a zoo”) but by the pitying stare of the youngest visitor—a woman like the one Marie might have become. Her stare mirrors our own emotions—prurient interest, followed by horror and pity—but it is cut off before it can change into moral outrage. The glare that Marie returns to the woman is also directed at us, as if to say, “Judge me if you dare.” So Marie joins Elvira’s gang. As she does, the inmates sing “Amazing Grace,” but there is no grace for Marie. There isn’t even the kind of rough justice that Kitty renders on Harper by stabbing her to death with a fork. There is only conforming. Ironically, only when Marie is finally corrupted does she receive parole. Aware that her outside job is a fraud, Benson reminds her that in a couple of months she might have been paroled and preserved her “self-respect and dignity.” Marie snarls, “What did those things ever get me? … From now on what’s in it for me is all that matters,” and sardonically concludes, “for that forty bucks Tom and I heisted I certainly got myself an education.” Marie has come of age; she has acquired a new identity, though hardly the sort promised by the Declaration’s ringing phrase about the pursuit of happiness. Prison has also taught her the same lesson Ethel Whitehead learns: use others before they use you. Marie sells out. But what choice does she have? In
Caged
it matters little whether one lives inside or outside the walls, for a woman is imprisoned either way.

Both
Possessed
and
Caged
, as their titles indicate, share a grim vision of America as a vast carceral institution that, under the guise of helping women, strips them of their souls. Although each film fits into a Hollywood genre—the psychiatry film and the social-problem picture, respectively—they also reveal how their protagonists’ gender exacerbates their ill treatment. Less hemmed in than Louise or Marie but still constrained by the studio system, writers Silvia Richards and Virginia Kellogg managed to fashion provocative feminist examinations of American ideologies and institutions.

The institution perhaps most on women’s minds, however, was marriage. Femme noir probes this institution in two films,
Caught
and
The Bigamist
, which are
ideal test cases, not only for their content but also for their production histories. Both explicitly address postwar conflicts about the two kinds of labor, and both depict marriage in a myriad of guises: as an economic arrangement and a prison but also as a refuge and means of redemption. Each is also the offspring of a mixed creative “marriage.” Loosely adapted from Libbie Block’s novel
Wild Calendar
and told from a woman’s point of view,
Caught
was created by a male writer, Arthur Laurents, and a male director, Max Ophuls (who took over from John Berry).
⁴²
Conversely,
The Bigamist
, scripted by Collier Young and directed by Ida Lupino, is told from the (male) bigamist’s point of view. Both were the brainchildren of independent production companies (
Caught
of Enterprise Studios, a consortium of leftist artists and businesspersons,
The Bigamist
by Filmakers, Inc.), two of several that sprouted in late-1940s Hollywood, providing artists with greater sovereignty and expanding the zone of permissible content.
⁴³
Both films exemplify how progressive filmmakers developed alternatives to the studio system that enabled them to critique hallowed American institutions and beliefs.

“Look at me, look at what you’ve bought!” shouts Leonora Ames (Barbara Bel Geddes) to her husband, the wealthy (and much older) Smith Ohlrig (Robert Ryan) in
Caught
. But Leonora wanted to be bought: she molded herself into a commodity modeled after the pages of a fashion magazine. Early in the film, as she and her roommate fantasize about landing a rich husband and wearing mink coats, Maud (her original name) decides to enroll in the Dorothy Dale School of Charm, whose credo is “look your best” to win a husband. There she changes her name to Leonora (it’s more “charming”) and learns to walk, talk, and wear clothes, which leads to a modeling job. Clearly the mink coats she wears are not the only items for sale (Doane,
Desire
157). Soon she meets Ohlrig, who, as he drives her to his mansion, quizzes her coldly about her life and assumes she’ll sleep with him. Leonora declines, which only whets Ohlrig’s appetite. The next scene, a session with his psychiatrist, reveals him as a pathologically insecure man driven by an insatiable need for omnipotence. His recurrent “heart attacks” are, according to the doctor, really panic attacks, pleas for pity issuing from the loneliness and fear he hides behind his imperious manner. When the doctor challenges him about his inability to form relationships, Ohlrig vows to prove him wrong by marrying Leonora.
⁴⁴

A year after the nuptials, we find the miserable Mrs. Ohlrig at home, with nothing to do but look stunning in her expensive clothing: she has indeed been flattened into a magazine photo. Ophuls and cinematographer Lee Garmes brilliantly use deep focus to stress the rooms’ immense emptiness, as well as Leonora’s
isolation and diminished self-esteem. Not only does she never see her husband; she is tormented by his factotum, the oily Franzi (Curt Bois), who plays awful piano and responds to her laments with a brusque “tough.” When Smith at last comes home, he treats her as a servant, then humiliates her in front of his associates when she has the temerity to laugh while he projects a self-aggrandizing movie about his accomplishments. As they argue, Leonora faces
away
from Smith, denying him the adoring gaze he desires and reversing her original position as spectator and consumer of idealized images.
⁴⁵
After she shouts, “Look at what you’ve bought,” Ohlrig notes that she’s better paid than any of his other employees.

The next day she quits this “job” to seek one as a receptionist in the office of Doctors Hoffman (an obstetrician) and Quinada (James Mason as a pediatrician; the doctors’ specialties point to her possible future), whose small, noisy waiting room contrasts starkly with Ohlrig’s sterile Brobdingnagian manse. Leonora charms Quinada into giving her the job, only to quit two weeks later after he scolds her for parroting Dorothy Dale dogma to a little girl. A chastened Ohlrig visits Leonora’s tiny apartment, imploring her to come back to him and pledging that things will be different (but as they speak, she is repeatedly framed in doorways that make her resemble a doll in a box). However, when she learns that the honeymoon Smith had promised is actually a business trip, she leaves her mink coat at the mansion, returns to Quinada, acquires secretarial skills, and accompanies him on a house call. Shocked at her lack of an overcoat, Quinada offers to buy her one; but this time she won’t be lured by new clothes. As they talk, they stand before a store selling “New and Used Merchandise”: used merchandise herself, Leonora has learned a few things. Soon the doctor proposes, but Leonora, pregnant with Ohlrig’s child, must first get a divorce. Quinada follows her to Ohlrig’s mansion, where he looks puny within its vast spaces, and where Ohlrig informs him that Leonora is still his “employee.” As the men argue, the camera pans back and forth to track Leonora’s pacing, illustrating her role as a shuttlecock in their battle for control. (The metaphor is apt, for Ohlrig is addicted to games.) Her husband seems to win by refusing to divorce her unless she gives him sole custody of the baby. He claims to despise her for her weakness, but what he really hates is his own weakness: his inability to
make
her love, honor, and obey him. Leonora shuts herself in her room and refuses to come out, despite Ohlrig’s insistent phone calls and Franzi’s blandishments. At last even Franzi grows fed up with Ohlrig’s brutality and quits.

From her bed Leonora hears a crash and dashes downstairs to find Ohlrig lying helplessly beside his beloved pinball machine. She looms over him, then
walks away as he begs for water. In the aftermath, tortured by guilt—“I wanted him to die,” she cries (though he doesn’t die)—she goes into labor. Beside her in the ambulance, Quinada exultantly tells her that she is “free to start living again.” Yet, as Doane observes, the blocking and camera movements contradict his words: as Quinada cheers her up, he moves closer and closer, finally nearly lying upon her, and the camera closes in on Leonora, as if to imply that she is “caught in the pincers” of marriage (
Desire
172). The last shot of Leonora, lying in a hospital bed, writes Doane, depicts her as another Louise Howell, “a helpless, bedridden object of the medical gaze” (174). The film’s tone, however, contradicts this reading; indeed, what is most disturbing here may be the cavalier, even jocular manner with which everyone treats the death of her premature baby, as if to acknowledge that the child was a mere plot (in)convenience in the first place. Along with the baby, “Mrs. Ohlrig” dies too. Perhaps she can now give birth to a new self.
⁴⁶

One would like to believe that Leonora has traded her alienated labor as Ohlrig’s captive for Quinada’s love and has cast off her shallow aspiration to be a magazine
picture. But one need not entirely agree with Doane to find the film’s conclusion unsatisfactory. Even putting aside the ending’s rushed pace (perhaps owing to the demise of Enterprise midway through the shoot), Leonora still marries a man who is also her boss.
⁴⁷
Her relationship with Quinada is based on the same conflation of roles that characterized her marriage to Ohlrig. As Doane remarks, she “becomes the object of exchange, from Smith Ohlrig to Dr. Quinada” (173). Hence, the film indicates that Leonora cannot be independent because marriage, even when motivated by love, remains an economic arrangement in which men control the purse strings.

A lost child plays a key role in another film made the same year:
Not Wanted
, a social-problem picture about an unwed mother, coscripted and produced by Ida Lupino for the independent company Emerald Productions, which she founded with producer Anson Bond and her then-husband, Collier Young.
⁴⁸
This sensitive story concerns young Sally Kelton (Sally Forrest), who is impregnated by a jazz pianist but, while at a home for unwed mothers, gains the sympathy and solidarity denied to Marie Allen and Leonora Ames.
⁴⁹
After giving up her baby for adoption, Sally finds love with Drew (Keefe Brasselle), a disabled veteran whose injury (like that of Bruce Ferguson in
Outrage
) renders him safely asexual. The film refrains from judging Sally, nor does it kill off the child as a plot convenience. In fact, Lupino sympathized with unwed mothers (“I think we owe them a new start”) and aimed to “bring to the public a keener understanding of what it means to be not wanted” (“Eleanor” 8). In other words it’s not just the babies who are not wanted. Thus, though we may protest the decision to have Sally rescued by a man (and may raise an eyebrow at the compromises Lupino and company made to the Breen Office),
Not Wanted
still manifests how the presence of a female auteur influenced both subject matter (this was the first Hollywood film about unwed mothers) and treatment.

More important than this single film, however, is Ida Lupino’s body of work. Given that she was the only female director working in Hollywood at the time, it is shocking how little has been written about her. This multitalented woman, the scion of a renowned British theatrical family, became famous in the United States for tough, intelligent roles in such films as
Road House
and
The Man I Love
. The low-budget, socially conscious films that she directed, produced, and/or wrote are even more distinctive: they analyze gender roles (and not just femininity; as we have seen, she turns a cold eye on masculine posturing in
The Hitch-Hiker
), motherhood
(Hard, Fast and Beautiful)
, female sexuality
(Not Wanted, Outrage)
, and marriage, all from an enlightened liberal point of view.
Lupino’s work portrays ordinary people as “victims of an uncomprehending society who struggle to find an identity” (Cook 59): they are noir characters, in other words, casualties of the American pursuit of wealth. Yet, as Amelie Hastie writes, Lupino has been “relegated to the ‘women’s’ room for feminists to reclaim, however reluctantly” (75). Very reluctantly: before Annette Kuhn’s 1995 collection rehabilitated Lupino’s reputation, the feminist view of her work was exemplified by Barbara Koenig Quart’s condemnation of her “extreme obeisance to male wisdom and authority,” and of her films’ alleged repudiation of “the very values Lupino lived by” (27, 28). Lupino’s films do tend to conclude by appealing to legal or medical authorities. Yet in
Outrage
and
Not Wanted
she addressed previously unmentionable subjects with sympathy and without sensationalism. A more generous view would echo Francine Parker, who lauds Lupino for “daring to be inventive in concept and technique; daring to do ‘A’ movies on ‘Z’ budgets long before it was fashionable, risking unknown faces, gambling on untried subjects; daring to shoot big while shooting fast; daring to direct at a time terrifyingly tough for women” (19).