Nightmare Alley - Film Noir And The American Dream (51 page)

3
. Twin Oaks is one of the innumerable roadside diners in noir films, establishments that, like full service “filling” stations, are now obsolete features of highway culture.

4
. Wieder and Hall’s
The Great American Convertible
and Vose’s
The Convertible
illustrate how the convertible was branded to appeal to a sense of youthful rebellion and was depicted in contemporary advertisements as an emblem of upward mobility.

5
. Recall, for example,
Out of the Past
, in which Jeff Markham (now known as Bailey) relates the story of his compromised past to his girlfriend, Ann, during a long drive from Bridgeport to Whit Sterling’s home at Lake Tahoe.

6
. The used-car dealer in lam films epitomizes the law-abiding thieves who judge others. Selling overvalued or worthless autos, they also indicate the sellers’ market that dominated the immediate postwar period (when, because of wartime production curbs, anything on wheels could fetch a price) and prey on the belief in automobility as a path to social mobility. For a discussion of the postwar automobile market see Rae,
American Automobile
161–77; and Rae,
American Automobile Industry
99–109.

7
. Swede in
The Killers
and Jeff Markham/Bailey in
Out of the Past
also express this desire. Jeff is, however, the only one who achieves it, albeit not for long, as we have seen: when Joe Stefanos drives into Jeff’s gas station in his shiny convertible, he pulls Jeff back into his restless past.

8
. For details about how this scene was conceived and shot see Lewis’s interview in Bogdanovich 675–77.

9
. Trumbo worked on the script but received no credit since he was already persona non grata as one of the Hollywood Ten. Shadoian similarly reads the carcasses as “an emblem of the employees at the Armour plant and all sodden adherents to a bourgeois homogeneity” (135).

10
. Kitses aptly likens the film’s “headlong narrative design” to the loops and rolls of a carnival ride (36).

11
. Lackey notes how often the picaro figure appears in American road narratives (8). However, these American vagabonds, at least those who populate film noir, lack the wit and resourcefulness of their continental counterparts.

12
. Al’s fate bears out David Laderman’s point (24) that American naturalist fictions, in which characters are at the mercy of huge implacable forces such as the environment, heredity, or poverty, are also important precursors to noirs such as
Detour
and
They Live by Night
.

13
. Andrew Britton’s reading of Al as an “obtuse and pusillanimous egotist” (179) whom we should root against misreads Tom Neal’s portrayal of Al as a passive (albeit dim) victim of circumstance.

14
. Laderman claims that the rain is the narrative catalyst for Al’s discovery of Haskell’s death (32), but it’s more in keeping with the film’s automotive theme to see the car as the engine of fate.

15
. Osteen, “Big Secret” 84.

1
. In the 1940s jazz was used only in incidental scenes, and the jazz was never bebop, though bop had become the dominant style by 1950. According to Butler the association between crime films and jazz began in earnest with the rise of jazz themes for TV series such as
Peter Gunn
and
M Squad
in the late 1950s; these “crime jazz” scores created the impression that earlier noirs employed jazz soundtracks as well (147–53).

2
. “
Inaudibility
” is the second quality Gorbman lists in her comprehensive list of film music’s properties (73; italics in original).

3
. Versions of these arguments appear throughout noir criticism. See, for example, Porfirio, “Dark Jazz” 178; Gorbman 86; Kalinak 120; and McCann 121.

4
. Jigger’s aims are in line with the Popular Front’s goals. The notion that jazz epitomizes democratic cooperation is also offered in several jazz-oriented novels of the period, including Dale Curran’s
Piano in the Band
, in which a character declares, “The blues are America, they are all of us, black and white, our reaction to a world made too complex for us, a world in which we are subjects of great forces we can’t face and fight directly” (16). Later in that novel, an interracial jam session is held in the Communist Party’s meeting hall under a portrait of Lenin (120). Near the end, pianist/protagonist George Baker proposes that “we organize [musicians] into a cooperative
and we play our own music. … We find a small public for that real music, we plug at it, make that public grow” (208). Ideas about jazz as a democratic force also appear in the writings of the Albert Murray/Stanley Crouch school of contemporary jazz criticism.

5
. Richard Whorf was Jewish, and, as Vincent Brook suggests, “jazz and noir [also] intersect with Jewishness in the person, and name, of Jigger Pine” (202). Nicky, played by Elia Kazan, also fills the stereotypical role of the young Jewish intellectual. The two, then, are located in a racial gray area. Krin Gabbard remarks on the conflicting representations of African Americans here: although black players’ abilities are portrayed as primitive, Leo’s solos were actually played by African American trumpeter Snooky Young (112).

6
. As Brook comments, “What better moniker than ‘Jigger’ to specify a Jewish black wannabe?” (202).

7
. One exception occurs in
Appointment with Danger
, a run-of-the-mill pseudodocumentary from 1951, which features a score by Victor Young. Bebop comes up during a conversation between undercover postal inspector Al Goddard (Alan Ladd) and gangster Earl Bettiger’s girlfriend, Dodie (Jan Sterling), who asks Goddard, “You like bop?” He answers, “Bop? Is that where everybody plays a different tune at the same time?” She replies, “You just haven’t heard enough of it. Have you heard Joe Louie’s ‘Oh Me, Oh My?’ … What he can do with a horn! He belts it and melts it and rides it all over the ceiling!” In the next scene she listens, transfixed, to a record that sounds less like bop than like raucous big band swing. “Get this,” she says. “Flatted fifth.” Goddard protests, “Look, I wouldn’t know a flatted fifth if they gave one away with every purchase.” The dialogue (by Richard Breen and Warren Duff) displays some knowledge of modern jazz (e.g., that the use of the flatted fifth was a bebop harmonic innovation). But it also depicts bop as a symptom of Dodie’s promiscuity and disregard for convention.

8
. For an excellent account and analysis of the bebop revolution see DeVeaux.

9
. Butler calls the solo “masturbatory” (62), but since “Jeannie” is pretending to enjoy it and urging Cliff to his exertions, it’s at least mutual masturbation, if not simulated intercourse.

10
. In the source novel Woolrich refers to the musicians’ “possessed, demonic” faces and describes the room as a “Dante-esque Inferno,” where the sounds and abundant reefers bring “terror into her soul” (144).

11
. As McCann astutely notes, the musicians’ blousy sleeves adumbrate Steve’s arm cast (124), thereby implying jazz’s role in fostering his sexual obsession.

12
. These two Siodmak films employ the same song, “I’ll Remember April,” to signify nostalgia and lost love. In
Phantom Lady
it becomes the main musical theme after the phantom lady plays it on the jukebox during the night of the murder. In
Criss Cross
Anna picks out the song’s melody on the piano, giving voice to Steve’s yearning and to her own apparent regret for losing him and taking up with Slim Dundee.

13
. I discuss how this fear is manifest particularly in
D. O. A
. in “The Big Secret” (84).

14
. Cantor points out that director Ulmer, an aficionado of classical music, probably would have disapproved of Al’s playing jazz (150).

15
. A perfect example of this stereotype appears in Ida Lupino’s first directorial effort, 1949’s
Not Wanted
, in which jazz pianist Steve Ryan (Leo Penn) impregnates
the naive Sally Kelton (Sally Forrest), then abandons her. He has to “travel light,” he insists, and even if such selfish restlessness may be “a sickness,” he can’t help it. I discuss this film and Lupino’s other directorial and authorial work in
chapter 7
.

16
. Joe’s mother provides some of the film’s best moments. In one scene Joe asks her, “How would you feel if I married a murderess?” She replies, “I wouldn’t mind, as long as she was a nice girl.” The screenplay, by hard-boiled novelist Jonathan Latimer (with help from Harrison), contains plenty of snappy dialogue: when Frances, in costume on a movie set, wearies of Joe’s accusations, she dismisses him with “Hop on your scooter, sonny boy, and blow! I’ve got to emote.”

17
. The musical sequences in the film are quite believable: Duryea appears to play the piano in several scenes, and June Vincent was in fact a big band singer. The songs—solid midcentury pop—were written for the film by Edgar Fairchild and Jack Brooks.

18
. The protagonist is not a musician in either the earlier film or in the source text.

19
. The story makes little sense, but it testifies, like the films discussed in the first chapter, to the pervasive influence, and mistrust, of Freudian psychology in midcentury Hollywood. While perusing Belknap’s books, Bressard thumbs a copy of Freud’s
Studies in Hysteria
.

20
. Although their music is definitely of the moldy fig variety, this first interracial jazz group to appear in noir represents a progressive vision. The fact that nobody even comments on the musicians’ race may say less about the state of race relations than about Louis Armstrong’s singular ability to cross racial boundaries.

21
. The implausibility of Armstrong and company agreeing to work with such a novice (not to mention the unlikelihood of the novice’s turning them down) is hard to swallow, but we are to understand that Stan is a kid who doesn’t yet know what really matters.

22
. These scenes feature other musical interludes, including a lively performance of “La Bota” and Vic Damone’s lugubrious rendition of “Don’t Blame Me,” which, despite his exaggerated emoting and flaring nostrils, effectively expresses Stan’s feelings for Jane.

23
. Stan is doubled with little Artie Dell, the bratty son of one of Jane’s friends: on a ride with Jane and Stan, Artie causes a wreck by stomping on the gas pedal; Stan later pulls the same trick to escape from Sonny’s muscle men.

24
.
Odds
is often cited as the last noir of the classic period. The film was produced by Belafonte’s own company, HarBel Productions, and its screenplay credited to African American novelist John O. Killens, though it was actually written by the blacklisted radical Abraham Polonsky. In William McGivern’s source novel Ingram is not a musician but a professional gambler.

25
. Belafonte insisted on presenting Ingram as a flawed character and hoped the film would “change the way America was doing business” (Buhle and Wagner,
Dangerous
184–85).

26
. Wise’s previous film,
I Want to Live!
, also featured a dynamic jazz score by Johnny Mandel, as well as remarkable performances by an interracial bebop combo including Art Farmer and Gerry Mulligan.

27
. About
I Want to Live!
protagonist Barbara Graham—a convicted killer who cultivates a taste for avant-garde jazz—Wise wrote, “Human beings … don’t come in
clearly definable shades of black and white. They come in grays, and often the shades of gray are all but indiscernible” (qtd. in Butler 119). Polonsky wanted to use a simpler ending, but Belafonte sided with Wise in advocating for the explosion; see Server, Polonsky interview (91); and Buhle and Wagner,
Dangerous
184.

28
. Though the source novel’s premise is the same as the film’s, half of its action occurs after the failed robbery, as Ingram and Slater hole up in a farmhouse. They eventually achieve a rapprochement after Ingram refuses to abandon the wounded Slater, which enables Slater to perceive Ingram (whom he calls “Sambo”) as a human being—indeed, as a “buddy”—and incorporate him into the schema of male homo-social relations he discovered during the war.

29
. Butler points out that the major influence on this new jazz scoring was Stan Kenton; Mancini and Rogers, for example, used many Kenton musicians on their soundtracks (106).

30
. Stanfield argues that American films of this period frequently “represented urban decay through the trope of the burlesque dancer and stripper” (5).

31
. For all its virtues James Naremore’s terrific short book on the film barely mentions the music.

32
. Katz and Hamilton’s score was rejected in favor of Bernstein’s (Butler 136). Martin Milner’s guitar work was dubbed by John Pisano.

33
. McCann writes that
Sweet Smell
presents jazz as a “model of hip interracial affinity at odds with a demagogic, and masculinist, popular culture” of Hunsecker and Falco (129). Gabbard likewise observes that the film “associates the music with idealism and a refusal to compromise with the mediocrities represented by Sidney, J. J., and most of the film’s other characters. It places Steve very much on the right side of the art vs. commerce binarism,” and thus stands as “one of the most flattering portraits” of a jazz musician ever seen in American film (128–29).

34
. Lupino was in ill health through much of the troubled shoot, which may have given her performance the world-weary edge it needed (see Donati 124). Her singing was dubbed by Peg La Centra.

35
. Adrienne McLean offers a list that includes Lizabeth Scott in
Dark City, I Walk Alone, The Racket
, and
Dead Reckoning
; Lauren Bacall in
To Have and Have Not
and
The Big Sleep
; and Ava Gardner in
The Killers
(13). I would add Nancy Guild in
Somewhere in the Night
, Lupino in
Private Hell 36
, and Ellen Drew (though she doesn’t sing on camera) in
The Crooked Way
. Rita Hayworth also memorably asks us to “Put the Blame on Mame” in
Gilda
and delivers sultry melodies in
The Lady from Shanghai
and
Affair in Trinidad
. For further analyses of the role of torch singers and blues women in noir see Miklitsch (192–241).