Nightmare Alley - Film Noir And The American Dream (46 page)

Out of work and increasingly bitter and desperate, Tyler gives his son, Tommy, fifty cents to attend a ballgame, even though the money is needed for food. His pregnant wife, Judy (Kathleen Ryan), voices her frustration at “begging for groceries, begging for doctors. Is that what we came to California for?” The embodiment of the American Dream of westward expansion, self-reinvention, and unlimited possibility, California has become a giant net enclosing their prospects. But a way out presents itself at the bowling alley that night, when Howard meets Jerry Slocum (former Communist Lloyd Bridges), a vain, domineering man with a glib line of patter, who forces a snort on the abstinent Howard and whose leering war anecdotes make Howard feel inferior (Howard never saw combat). Later, Slocum prances shirtless in his room, combing his hair, while boasting that all women are partial to “green”; soon he has Howard stroking his shirt and buttoning his
cuff links for him (the homoerotic undercurrent here is unmistakable). But when the “jobs” Jerry had mentioned turn out to be small-time holdups, Howard blanches and Jerry grows surly: “You guys kill me. They kick ya in the teeth and the more they kick ya the better ya like it. Whaddaya lookin’ for, handouts?” He throws ten bucks at Tyler and sneers, “Live!” The low angle on Jerry underlines his dominance over Howard, who meekly yields: after all, he only has to drive the car.

Though Howard stays in the car while Jerry robs a mom-and-pop filling station / grocery store, we don’t. We watch the psychopathic Slocum pistol-whip the attendant and leave the elderly female proprietor in tears. Afterward, Jerry is cocky, Howard ambivalent. But the latter’s mixed feelings evaporate after he picks up Tommy and Judy from a neighbor’s, where they are watching television. Holding a large bag of groceries, he promises to buy a television set and pretends that his wad of bills is an advance on his salary at the cannery. Unable to participate in the consumer society that proffers brand-new TVs and burnished fruit as proofs of success, Howard, like so many noir protagonists, seeks in crime an avenue to the glittering prosperity promised by advertisements. Before long he is urging Judy to buy expensive shoes (even while warning Tommy that he might “put somebody’s eyes out” with his toy gun). Emasculated by poverty, he briefly feels empowered by the money the stickups bring, but he purchases this bogus manhood at the cost of submitting to Jerry’s increasingly wild schemes.

Next we meet the other major characters, attending a barbecue at the well-appointed home of newspaper columnist Gil Stanton. His editor, Hal Clendenning (future blacklistee Art Smith), offers Stanton a bonus to write a feature about the raft of recent holdups. “You mean money!” Stanton enthuses. “You know that might make a petty robbery very significant!” Hal reminds him that he has a big following and that his byline will “really sell some papers.” Later, in front of the grocery store / filling station that Jerry robbed, Hal and Gil decide to attribute the crimes to an Eastern gang: “that always makes good copy,” notes Hal. “By the time I’m through,” Stanton boasts, “this town will think it’s been invaded.” But Stanton’s guest, Italian professor Vito Simone (Renzo Cesana), wonders if such stories aren’t “destructive to public health” and a “distortion of journalistic values.” Clendenning answers, “Selling newspapers is … the way I make my living.” Simone’s lectures, although they serve as the film’s conscience, are intrusively didactic, spelling out themes that the action and visuals make clear enough.
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For example, as the men speak, the large sign advertising
GROCERIES
is visible behind them. Groceries were the reason Howard participated in the robbery,
and they are Hal’s ostensible motive for trumping up violence in his paper. Yet we’ve already seen that Stanton, with his deluxe barbecue, luxurious home, and bourgeois guests, has no trouble providing for his family; instead of groceries, he feeds his audience sensationalistic stories that fuel his ego.

They also boost that of Slocum, who reads with relish the headline about his robbery (“Hoodlums Expert Gunmen”). One more big score, he assures Howard, and they’ll be on “easy street.” But this caper—the kidnaping of Donald Miller (Carl Kent), the scion of the town’s wealthiest family—is a large step up from the penny-ante stickups Jerry has been executing; Howard has misgivings but quashes them for the promise of a big payoff. The two abduct Miller as he walks to his fancy convertible and force him to drive to a secluded spot. On the drive Jerry enviously comments, “You guys sure treat yourselves all right, don’t you?” They tie Miller’s hands and gag him, planning to hold him in a barn and demand ransom from his parents. But after they encounter a trysting couple at the allegedly never-visited barn, Jerry panics, binds Miller’s feet, and rolls him down a rock-covered hill. Then Jerry brains the poor man with a boulder as Howard screams, “You never said you were gonna kill him!” The scene’s blocking—Howard in the shot’s foreground as Jerry clubs Miller—makes it appear that Jerry is beating
Howard
, whose grimacing face indicates that he is experiencing the pain of death and whose tightly closed eyes invoke the street preacher’s words about moral blindness. Dazed and disheveled, Howard returns home to his sleeping wife, who tells him of her “most wonderful dream.” She was in the hospital having her baby, who said, “Daddy.” Then she went shopping and bought a dress. Her dream (and Howard’s) of domesticity and consumer prosperity has driven him to this sorry plight; but that dream is over, and their nightmare has begun.

If the night-for-night murder sequence is painful to watch, what comes next is even more excruciating. Jerry sets up a double date with his girlfriend, Velma (Adele Jergens), pairing Howard with Velma’s friend, a lonely hairdresser named Hazel (Katherine Locke). Velma reflects Jerry’s values: she too thinks he is “nature’s gift to women” and cares not a whit where his money comes from, so long as he spends it on her. Hazel, a pitiful sad sack, would like nothing better than to settle down with a quiet man like Howard. The men plan to drive to a neighboring town to mail the ransom note, believing that the women will deflect any suspicion about the two strangers. As Howard mails the note, he recalls the murder: its images dissolve over his face, and Jerry’s blows pound like his own heart, as musical spikes emphasize his horror. The rest of the evening only deepens Howard’s agony: in a nightclub he is made the butt of a comedian’s jokes, and this
sequence—Howard’s nightmare alley—is presented in dizzying canted angles that reflect Howard’s disorientation and despair (as well as the drunkenness that has become chronic since his involvement with Jerry). Howard Tyler, it seems, has become a geek. The next morning he returns to Hazel’s drab apartment, where he listens to her read the newspaper story about Miller’s murder. She believes that “people who do things like this should be …” Howard protests that “people do things they don’t … mean.” When she finds Miller’s gold tie-clip in Howard’s pants (engraved with DM), he blurts out a confession: “I didn’t want to take that, Jerry made me. Why did he have to kill him?!” He begins to strangle Hazel, who swears she won’t tell. “I’ve never been in trouble before, I don’t know what to do! … Oh, Judy,” he cries, his hands over his eyes. With Howard temporarily blind, Hazel runs to the police, who await him (along with a horde of gapers) when he finally goes home. Just before he arrives, we cut to Judy and Tommy with a neighbor woman, who complains, “People who can’t afford children shouldn’t have them.” These are the kind of small-minded, self-righteous folks responsible for what is about to happen.

But there are two people delighted with the turn of events: Stanton and Clendenning. The crime has sold a lot of papers. Prof. Simone isn’t impressed, however, and warns Stanton that his “direct appeal to the emotionalism of [his] readers … is wrong; as a journalist you have great responsibility.” Even the sheriff, worried about the possibility of a lynching, asks him to tone it down. Everyone else, however, is proud of him: the mayor congratulates Stanton for his “public service,” and Hal announces that they have a big “job ahead of us here, cleaning up this town.” No longer just reporting the news, they are creating it; no mere accusers, they have become judges.

Though Stanton is deaf to voices of moderation, he does hear one voice—that of Judy, who comes to his house to plead for his help, standing in a doorway that encloses her in a box even tinier than her husband’s cell. At first unmoved, Stanton thaws as she reads Howard’s pathetic letter to her. “I’m guilty and I deserve to die,” he writes. “And I would die peacefully if I knew you would forget me and forgive me for what I’ve done to you. You were a good girl, and you deserve something better.” He admits his part in the robberies, then writes, “I’ve been having bad headaches and bad dreams. … I’m sorry for everything, sorry for you and Tommy. I’m sorry for Donald Miller and his mother and father.” When Judy can’t continue, Stanton finishes: “I didn’t know Jerry was going to kill him. … I’m glad it is all over and I want to die.” Unfortunately, producer Robert Stillman wasn’t content to let these powerful words stand alone, so Simone enters
to inveigh against hatred and declare that “if a man becomes a criminal, sometimes his environment is defective.” Violence is not an individual condition but a disease caused by “moral and social breakdown. This is the real problem. … And this must be solved by reason, not by emotion, with understanding, not hate.”
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Stanton now realizes his responsibility, but it’s too late; headlines such as “Brutal Kidnap Murder May Go Unpunished” have already done their work. As a crowd forms near the jail, we are shown a montage of hands honking car horns and a throng of furious, shouting faces. The sheriff remarks to Stanton, “Well, you got your party, all right. How do you like it?” Stanton and his “yellow rag” have incited a riot, and when the sheriff tries to address the swelling crowd—“In a democracy there is no place for mob violence!”—a group of men tear down the loudspeaker. “Are you passin’ laws against justice?” one man shouts. These rioters can hear nothing but their own rage, and they vent it by singling out others who have done the same. Rather than rectify the inequities that have victimized Howard, or take meaningful political action, they howl for a lynching—which, the film suggests, is merely the uglier face of the neighborly competition that impels them to best the Joneses by buying a better TV set. Eventually Stanton, jail bars slashing across his face, apologizes to Tyler, the bars indicating not only that he is powerless to stem the tide but that he shares Howard’s guilt. The mob bowls over the guards, bursts through the doors and rushes upstairs to the cells, grabbing Slocum—who meets their fury with his own—and Howard, who yields to them as passively as he did to Jerry. Then we cut to Tommy, waking from a nightmare; “Everything’s going to be all right,” Judy assures him. Not for Howard: he has been lynched.

The lynching scenes were a major concern of the Breen Office, which insisted that there be a “voice of morality” present; the sheriff and Simone serve this purpose (Breen to Stillman). Even so,
Try and Get Me!
is as powerful an indictment of the mob mentality as Fritz Lang’s more-famous
Fury
, which appeared in the mid-1930s, a period much more receptive to progressive message pictures. Indeed, Endfield’s film has a broader sweep: like
The Underworld Story
, it attacks capitalism as well—not just for discarding people like the Tylers but also for commodifying the news and tainting the freedom of the press. Like other films of the period, such as Billy Wilder’s searing
Ace in the Hole, Try and Get Me!
excoriates the media for inflaming emotions and appealing to people’s worst instincts. Clendenning and Stanton use words criminally, never caring who is victimized by what they write: crime is just a commodity to them. Although Howard Tyler deserves blame for his loss of moral bearings and terrible choices, the film
bravely dissects the social forces responsible as well: the neighbors who deem him a weakling for his inability to feed his family, the justice system that fails him, the economic conditions that render him incapable of resisting Slocum’s enticements. Howard is guilty, but his community is also culpable. One of the film’s strongest ironies is that the same neighbors who offer no helping hand to the Tylers are able to band together for a collective activity: the murder of one of their kind. Howard may be blind, but they are blind and deaf.

Behind these broad statements lurks another, more specific challenge.
Try and Get Me!
is a protest against the Hollywood blacklist and Communist witch hunt. No, former reds such as Endfield, Bridges, and Smith weren’t literally lynched; they were only ostracized, humiliated, and denied their livelihoods. But the parallels are clear enough.
Try and Get Me!
blames not merely the Hollywood reactionaries who encouraged the witch hunt with their smears but also the clamoring masses who believed their sensationalistic stories and, most of all, the studio heads who, like Hal Clendenning, cared more for profits than for people.

According to disgruntled cop Webb Garwood (Van Heflin) everybody has an “angle.” Talent doesn’t matter; what counts are “breaks.” He wants money but doesn’t want to work for it. “I’d rather be one of those guys who shows up around ten in the morning, after having a big argument with himself over whether he’ll drive the station wagon today or the convertible,” he tells Susan Gilvray (Evelyn Keyes). Garwood feels he has been denied what is rightfully his: doesn’t the American Dream say that everyone has an equal right to a piece of the pie? What Garwood forgets is the cost of living: that actions have consequences and that a right comes with obligations. Hence, according to director Joseph Losey,
The Prowler
(originally titled
The Cost of Living
) is about “false values”: the idea that “100,000 bucks, a Cadillac, and a blonde” are the “
sine qua non
of American life … and it didn’t matter how you got them” (qtd. in Ciment 100). To dramatize these values, he, along with blacklisted screenwriters Hugo Butler and (uncredited) Dalton Trumbo, created Garwood, who, as Reynold Humphries observes, is “the most subtle and far-reaching representation of the relations between masculine self-assurance and class resentment Hollywood has given us” (238). Garwood is a monster; but the film suggests that his appetites are nourished by “a mercenary and materialistic society” (Krutnik, “Living” 62): he differs from others only in degree.