Nightmare Alley - Film Noir And The American Dream (49 page)

6
. Like Julia, Nina Foch was an émigré who reinvented herself. Born in the Netherlands as Nina Consuelo Maud Fock (to Dutch composer Dirk Fock and silent film actress Consuelo Flowerton), she changed her name and lost her Continental accent after moving to the United States, where she studied at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and signed with Columbia at age nineteen (Brumbaugh).

7
. Earlier, Bertha, the maid at Julia’s London apartment house, voiced a sharper envy at Julia’s class position: “secretary,” she scoffs, “sittin’ and writin’ all day. Call that work!”

8
. Coincidentally, Muriel Bolton later cowrote (with Ian McLellan Hunter) the noirish horror picture
The Amazing Mr. X
.

9
. One might object that this subversive theme was permitted only because this was a minor film that few people saw and that the studio cared little about. However, Robert Osborne remarks in the Turner Classic Movie channel’s afterword that although the film was shot in just ten days on a budget of $175,000, and originally slated to be a B picture, it was so well received in previews that Columbia ended up releasing it as an A film and premiered it at the prestigious RKO theater in Los Angeles. In other words this subtly subversive film was released by a major studio in a major venue.

10
. One might also read this 1945 film as an allegory about American involvement in the war. Though forced to take part in the internecine conflicts of old, tired Europe, Americans still resist living out Europe’s murderous fantasies and mistakes or imitating its nihilism: we can be free of that past, at least.

11
. Benson’s first screen credit was for cowriting Alfred Hitchcock’s
Shadow of a Doubt
, another story of a clever young woman confronting criminal complicity. Benson also contributed to the scripts for
Little Women, Anna and the King of Siam
, and numerous television shows (“Sally Benson”). Turney cowrote
The Man I Love
, the Ida Lupino vehicle treated in
chapter 7
, and worked on such films as Dorothy Arzner’s
The Bride Wore Red, Mildred Pierce, A Stolen Life
, and
Cry Wolf
. Turney and Barbara Stanwyck worked on three films together (and Turney later wrote for Stanwyck’s first television series). Both Benson and Turney, in short, carved out solid
Hollywood careers by lending verisimilitude and strong female characters to so-called women’s pictures.

12
. Benson’s draft (titled
With This Ring
[
I Married a Dead Man
] and dated Jan. 24, 1949) also contains several additional characters and a long scene in Grand Central Terminal. Turney’s first pass at the script is dated April 14, 1949; all subsequent versions (dated April 16, 1949; May 5, 1949; and Dec. 16, 1949) contain this prologue and flashback.

13
. In the Woolrich novel Helen is a “dreary, hopeless nineteen” (805), but in 1949, when the film was shot, Barbara Stanwyck was well over forty years old. Born Ruby Stevens in 1907, the legendary actress was an expert at remaking herself. Even so, she isn’t quite believable as an anxious ingénue: Stanwyck’s Helen is herself a bit of a counterfeit.

14
. See Osteen, “Face Plates” 130–31.

15
. Benson’s draftincludes a witty effect underlining this doubling. During the train crash “the mirror cracks and seems to fall back, her [Helen’s] own reflection going away from here. We
HEAR
Patrice scream, and then see the mirror fall apart” (Benson 18).

16
. Benson’s first draft includes a character (not in the novel) named Peggy Marshall, who maliciously plays Hugh’s favorite song, Manon’s “Un rêve,” during a party (see Benson 54). Turney deletes this character and changes the tune. In Benson’s first draft the real Patrice had attended art school, so the Harknesses turn the attic into her studio. But Helen can’t paint, and revealing her shoddy efforts would destroy her imposture. When the time comes to show her work, however, it has been replaced (Bill’s doing) by a work that is “very good, indeed” (Benson draft). The art motif illustrates, perhaps too blatantly, the artificiality of Helen’s new self-portrait.

17
. His language in the novel is a bit more to the point: “The you I made for myself. … You’ll
only
be Patrice. I give you that name. Keep it for me, forever” (946–47). In other words he has made her and, by knowing her secret, owns her.

18
. In Benson’s second draft Mother Harkness makes her confession to the police in person, using the letter as backup (Benson second draft, Feb. 25, 1949).

19
. The letter from Breen to Luigi Luraschi, Paramount’s director of censorship, requesting the alterations, is dated May 26, 1949: thus the censors must not have read the script dated May 5, 1949 but an earlier one lacking the lines in question. Presumably they were added in anticipation of Breen’s objections, which makes their deletion from the film a fascinating example of how studios sidestepped prohibitions when necessary.

20
. The studio’s initial reader focused on the problematic conclusion: “The entire ending, which tries to be bitter like James M. Cain, is all wrong for the screen. The murder of the villainous Georgesson should be solved, or else it should not remain as a barrier between Patrice and Bill anyway” (Leavitt).

21
. Polan comments on the implausibility that Parry’s wife’s best friend would also know Irene (but that Irene has never met Parry) and observes that these coincidences suggest “the dominance of a logic based not on a coherent narrativity but a dream” (196).

22
. But where is the suspense? Even casual movie fans—in 2012 as in 1947—know perfectly well what Humphrey Bogart looks like. As a result we never truly believe in
Parry’s “true” face, and the Hollywood star system undermines the film’s premise to some degree.

23
. This plot twist makes little sense: wouldn’t she know the location of the windows in her own apartment? Nor does it seem logical for Parry to visit her there: why would he believe she would now confess to two murders after going to such lengths to cover them up? The falls of Baker and Madge, however, do consummate the many vertical images throughout the film: Parry’s original fall from the truck, his climbs up and down Irene’s stairs, and the frequent shots of San Francisco’s hilly terrain.

24
. Henreid certainly read Fuchs’s notes: they are annotated in red pencil and tucked into a bound copy of his script of
Hollow Triumph
.

25
. Bartok’s accent creates a curious set of echoes since Paul Henreid, a Triestine who had immigrated to the United States, doesn’t successfully hide his own accent when playing the American Muller. Of course, Henreid was no criminal, but the movie’s tale of self-reinvention parallels his own biography.

26
. In their generally smart and useful essay V. Penelope Pelizzon and Nancy West write, “If the viewer paid careful attention to the scene of the incision, remembering that Muller’s actions are presented in a mirror, she would have realized that Muller, in fact, did mark the left side of his face” (par. 21). They go on to suggest that this is a trick on the audience, who are assumed to be as unobservant as the film’s characters and are thus “implicated in the very culture of indifference that the film conveys.” But Pelizzon and West are confused by the mirror. Since the camera is facing Muller and the photo as he looks in the mirror, when he marks what looks to be the left side of his face, he is, in fact, marking the right side. The very next shot, in which he’s wearing a bandage on the
right
side, clearly shows as much. But this is an easy mistake to make: a viewer automatically reverses a mirror image so that it matches the face looking at it. In earlier drafts of this chapter I too was confused by the mirror image and went so far as to claim that the filmmakers had made a mistake and had
failed to flop the photo
. In other words, I forgot that in a mirror image, what looks to be left (if one stood, as it were, behind the face) reflects one’s right side.

About this scene Fuchs writes, “With the picture of Bartok in [the] same position as Muller’s face in the mirror, the scar appears in both cases on the right side, and we have no problem. We mustn’t get the audience to thinking about this point at all. It must come as news to them when Aubrey [the photo store clerk] tells his boss the scar is on the wrong side.” The cigarette “scar” was also Fuchs’s idea (29).

27
. Just before the murder scene, Muller services the car of Stancyk’s thugs in a scene virtually identical to the recognition scene at the Brentwood garage in
The Killers
. But these thugs are less observant than Jim Colfax and fail to recognize Muller as the man they’re looking for.

28
. Fuchs’s notes state that the debts are Bartok’s. He continues: “
THE IRONY
: (a) he has succeeded as Bartok, therefore he must die as Bartok; (b) in trying to do a decent thing, in leaving to start all over, he has undone himself” (39).

29
. Fuchs’s script notes urge Sekely and Henreid to “
WORK LIKE HELL HERE FOR PURE SCHMALZ
. Poor Muller, weep for Adonais, for he is dead” (58). But the feeling the scene elicits is closer to sardonic recognition than to mourning because, as I noted earlier, Muller/Bartok’s coldness largely defeats our impulse to empathize with him.

1
. Homer is played by Harold Russell, who actually did lose his hands in the war. Martin Norden argues that the film’s portrayal of Homer is “one of the most forthright, sensitive and honest” depictions of physical disability in cinema history (167).

2
. This function of disability is common in literary depictions and constitutes one of Ato Quayson’s primary types (see 41–42). As I demonstrate below, this tendency holds true in
Act of Violence
as well, where Joe Parkson’s limp embodies Frank Enley’s moral failing. See Davidson (72–73) for a fuller list of disabled characters in film noir.

3
. For the symptoms of PTSD, as described in the fourth edition of the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual
(the diagnostic handbook used by most clinical psychologists), see Saigh and Bremner 9.

4
. Luckhurst describes the flashback as “the central device of cinema’s representation of trauma” (179). For an analysis of noir’s flashback structure see Telotte,
Voices
14–17.

5
. The films also conform to Mitchell and Snyder’s outline of the conventional disability story, which first isolates deviance, explains it, moves it to the center of the narrative, and then normalizes or eliminates it (53–54).

6
. As of 1980, thirty-five years after the war, more than a million people had received war-related disabilities benefits from the US government. About fifty-one thousand were categorized as “totally disabled.” See Allcountries.org.

7
. Director William Wyler, born in Alsace, was, like many noir directors, himself an immigrant.

8
. As Waller points out, “The Soldier Comes Home Angry”—sometimes with good reason (95).

9
. See Naremore,
More Than Night
108–10 for an account of this script change and a discussion of Raymond Chandler’s original screenplay, in which all three vets are more clearly disabled, and in which Johnny is more blatantly depicted as Buzz’s double.

10
. As Davidson notes, disability in film noir often points to “anxiety over the stability and definition of gender roles” (59).

11
. Chopra-Gant offers a tidy Freudian reading of this conclusion: “‘Dad’s’ killing of Helen frees Johnny from the encumbrance of his ‘delinquent’ wife and enables him to pursue a relationship with the altogether more wholesome Joyce” (162). The rushed and gimmicky contrivances used to bring it about, however, make this denouement unconvincing.

12
. Brooks’s novel, though static and clumsily plotted, thoughtfully examines veterans’ alienation. Scott pitched
Crossfire
to the studios as a film attacking anti-Semitism (which he treated as a brand of fascism) rather than as a film about veterans (see “Appendix 5” in Ceplair and Englund 451–54). Friends and associates warned Scott against making this controversial film, which contributed to the crackdown that cost him his career (see Langdon-Teclaw 166–68).

13
. To illustrate this inhumanity, Dmytryk employed increasingly shorter lenses, beginning with a 50mm and eventually a 25mm lens, to make Ryan’s face appear gradually more demonic, dark, and distorted.

14
. In the documentary feature enclosed with the DVD, Dmytryk claims that he shot the scene in this way only to avoid using more than one camera setup, thereby saving money on a tightly budgeted picture.

15
. Though the Popular Front agenda of “anti-fascism, anti-racism, and progressive unionism” (Langdon-Teclaw 152) is clear enough in both films,
Cornered
was not chosen by Scott but assigned to him by RKO chief William Dozier.

16
. As Krutnik notes, Gerard’s “assertive masculine quest becomes an obsessive post-war continuation of the extreme wartime conditions” that had tested him (
Lonely
134).

17
. Original screenwriter John Wexley feared that Dmytryk would whitewash his story, which indicted the Peron government, and thereby soften the film—and he did. According to Ceplair and Englund, the results prove that “screenwriter, director, and producer Communists were far more vulnerable to the dictates of the studio system than to the demands of their ideology” or their party (315). Dmytryk’s alleged disgust with Wexley’s communism eventually formed part of his “friendly” testimony to HUAC in 1951. See also Navasky 232–37.

18
. The film fits the pattern I outline in
chapter 4
, in which framed narrations describe the narrator’s framing for a crime.

19
. The premise in Dorothy B. Hughes’s source novel is quite different. Its nonveteran protagonist, Sailor, pursues a quest to obtain full payment from his father figure, “The Sen” (Senator Willis Douglass), who had welshed on paying Sailor for his role in a plot to kill the senator’s wife and a female informer (see 135–39). A kid from the Chicago streets with an abusive alcoholic father whom he once tried to kill (80), Sailor has made his way up the chain in the senator’s criminal organization by serving as a steady, loyal hand. He needs a father yet rebels against male authorities such as Douglass and McIntyre, the Chicago cop who has followed Douglass to this border town. Hughes organizes the novel around three rituals: the killing of Zozobra; a mass including the Procession of Martyrs (142–57); and the town dance. In each ceremony Sailor is offered a rite of passage that could enable him to trust others. The adaptation, by celebrated screenwriters Ben Hecht and Charles Lederer, lightens the mood and renders it more timely by making Gagin a veteran. The film was produced by Joan Harrison, one of only two female producers in Hollywood at the time.