Nightmare Alley - Film Noir And The American Dream (7 page)

After he enjoys a quick rest in his apartment, we see him through a porthole playing the piano for a rapturous Lorna; then he closes the porthole: lovers need privacy. But they remain the subjects of spying: in Havana they are abandoned by their driver, and, as they listen to romantic music in a club (“Havana, like the stars in a dream song / … you’re a promise of love”), their photo is taken. Suddenly Lorna falls dead, and the hapless Chuck pulls a knife from her body.

During the police interrogation Chuck’s memory is hazy, but he does recall purchasing a knife the previous night—but not the one the detective holds, its
jade handle displaying a monkey covering his eyes. Chuck insists that he bought a different knife—“hear no evil,” not “see no evil.” But the saleslady fingers him as having bought the murder weapon. In any case both monkeys represent Chuck, so blinded by love and deafened by heartstrings that he neither saw nor heard the plot enveloping him. He pretends to confess, then escapes. What follows is decidedly weird: Chuck is hidden by a weeping, cigar-smoking woman, then finds the club photographer dead (because he had photographed the real murderer). Creeping around in the dark, he overhears Gino with the knife lady and learns that he and Roman are framing him for Lorna’s murder. When the saleslady refuses to cooperate further, Gino shoots her and then, spotting a light behind the curtains where Chuck is hiding, bursts through. Out of the frame we hear gunshots and then see Gino dragging Chuck’s body through the door. Is our hero dead?

No. A phone rings, and the camera dollies back from the receiver to show the living Chuck lying on his bed: he has dreamed the entire Cuban sequence. No wonder it seemed so illogical, its darkness so oppressive, its symbols so bizarre. Yet something is still amiss, for Chuck staggers around, swallows a handful of pills, gazes at himself confusedly in the mirror, then calls Commander Davidson, a psychiatrist, at the Naval Hospital: “It’s happened again,” he says. Davidson (Jack Holt) informs Chuck that he’s a “shock” case with an “anxiety neurosis,” or, as we would call it today, posttraumatic stress disorder. Like the traumatized vets we meet in
chapter 3
, Chuck experiences recurring nightmares coupled with amnesia and remembers neither how he got his new uniform nor the Cuban escape. Ripley crosscuts between Chuck and Davidson at the nightclub and Lorna at home, where she realizes that she has been “bought and paid for” by Roman. Both she and Chuck are trapped—she by her husband, he by his mental condition. But after Roman and Gino enter the club (a nicely executed crane shot reveals their proximity to Chuck), Chuck feels the ship tickets in his pocket, remembers the plan, and runs off to rescue Lorna. Discovering that Chuck and Lorna are headed for Cuba, Roman and Gino drive after them—or rather, Gino steers while Roman floors the gas pedal. But this time they don’t beat the train to the crossing, and both men die in the smash-up. In Havana for real, the lovers are chauffeured by the same cabbie and repeat the same words of love they uttered in Chuck’s dream. “Tell me again,” she implores him. “I love you,” he answers. “I want you to keep telling me that as long as we’re together.” “That’ll be forever.”

Chuck’s dream, unlike those of most noir vets, is not a memory of war but the forecast of a future that he ultimately avoids. Yet he does little to alter his destiny
and instead is saved by a deus ex machina in the form of a train. Though his dream lacks the condensed metonymies of Al Walker’s nightmare, its monkey symbolism blatantly evinces Chuck’s fear that he is fated to remain a flunky, as if his PTSD keeps him chained to his traumatized old self. A conventional reading of the conclusion would suggest that Lorna’s love enables him to pass through his oedipal stage by engineering the death of the dominant father figure, and then to enter an adult heterosexual relationship. But the dream’s details tell a different story and lay bare a different side of Chuck—his “Scottie” side, perhaps. This story acts out Chuck’s hatred not of Edward but of Lorna; indeed, given her death in the dream, one might argue that the person Chuck really desires is not Roman’s wife but Roman himself. The affair with Lorna may be a displacement of Chuck’s desire to possess her husband. After all, in his dream he confesses to killing her, maybe because doing so will end the love triangle and permit him to resume the homosocial relationships familiar to him from the navy. And though he is technically innocent, the dream exposes his guilt feelings, as if he believes he should die at Gino’s hands because he and Gino are rivals for Roman’s affections. And at the end of the dream, having acted out Roman and Gino’s murderous misogyny, Chuck must be sacrificed (by Roman’s apparent lover) for doing so. The dream thus dramatizes Chuck’s dreadful, desirable homoerotic urges, his masochism and self-hatred, while still blocking him from hearing and seeing these parts of himself. Hence, his dream is someone else’s nightmare. Though the film seeks to drown out these undertones with its heterosexual love story, the dream sequence that takes up a third of the film makes them impossible to ignore. Curiously, Chuck’s American dream can be fulfilled only elsewhere—in the dreamscape of Cuba—just as his self-hatred and sexual ambivalence must remain hidden behind a porthole cover. Because Chuck can’t remember his dream, he may be doomed to reenact it and forever chase himself.

The filmmakers present the dream as “reality,” only to pull the rug out from under us. The Cuban scenes fool us because their heavy romantic music and brooding atmosphere only slightly exaggerate the tone of the rest of the film, as if the dream and waking worlds permeate each other. Indeed, although the ending—with its gushy dialogue and sweeping score—aims to wash away the film’s unsettling residues, it seems as unreal as the dream sequence. It is no accident that the lovers speak virtually the same lines, visit the same places, and meet the same characters in the dream and in “reality,” for their dream of eternal love is just as false—or true—as Chuck’s nightmare. Moreover, the dream sequence alludes to expressionist cinema: not only does it feature the strange characters and impenetrable darkness
displayed in those films (some of them the work of Planer); it even gives us Peter Lorre (famous for his role as a child-murderer in Lang’s
M
) as a serial killer! The filmmakers suggest, in other words, that Chuck’s paranoid dream has been influenced by motion pictures. If a movie can contain a dream, why can’t a dream contain a movie? The ending permits the filmmakers to have things both ways: to assert the reality of what we see in Florida, while acknowledging the artificiality of its Hollywood ending. A movie,
The Chase
suggests, is always a dream, a pursuit of chimeras by viewers whose perceptions are being controlled by a Roman (or a German) in the backseat.

The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry
, produced by Joan Harrison and directed by Robert Siodmak, uses a similar ploy: a dream that becomes known as such only after the fact. Again a protagonist must decide whether to remain harnessed to the past or start over with a new self (and partner). Harry Quincy (George Sanders) lives in a large house in the small New England village of Corinth with his two sisters, Hester (Moyna MacGill) and Lettie (Geraldine Fitzgerald), the latter a valetudinarian who manipulates her siblings and tortures her sister with catty remarks. Harry seems resigned to this prison until he meets attractive young New Yorker Deborah Brown (Ella Raines) at the textile mill where he works as a designer. He takes her out, but not to the George Washington House (representing the town’s stodgy past) recommended by the sisters; instead, they attend a women’s softball game. The sporting event typifies Deborah, with her athletic build, mannish suits, and forward manner. Although she spends much of the game with a man named John, afterward she accompanies Harry to his carriage house to gaze through his telescope at Saturn and Venus. The carriage house, open at the top, is Harry’s sole domestic retreat in the stifling manse. Shown his paintings, Deborah urges him to “slash it on,” to do something stronger than drawing prim rosebuds at the mill. She also offers Harry a revitalized sexual life—an opportunity to investigate the terrain of Venus—though her assertiveness unnerves him.

And not only him: while Hester welcomes this new blood, Lettie feels threatened and tries to drive Deborah away by informing her that Harry “has never grown up” and is easily imposed upon. As if in response, Deborah manipulates Harry into proposing to her by implying that she might accompany John to Europe. But Lettie, who would be displaced from her home by this coupling, is not to be defeated and prolongs the house-hunting process to the point that Deborah is ready to call off the engagement: “Lettie has no intention of giving you up. Not as long as she lives.” At last Lettie asks Deborah to postpone the marriage. She refuses, advising Lettie to realize that “Harry is like other men.” Lettie answers,
“You may not like the new Harry he becomes. … You’ll spoil it.” Harry, in short, is already married—to Lettie. As the two women argue—Lettie wearing a black-and-white outfit and hat that makes her resemble a stylish nun, Deborah in sleek pants and satin blouse—they are surrounded by drawings of female fashions, suggesting the array of female types from which Harry might choose. Each woman is also vying to create the Harry who might fit her self-image: a mobile, assertive man or a static, celibate mannequin.

When Lettie collapses the day that Harry and Deborah have planned to move to New York, he must choose between the women. Unwilling to leave his ailing sister, he lets Deborah depart (soon afterward, he hears that she has married John). The sisters quarrel bitterly, as Harry, alone in his upstairs room, finds a vial of poison, which Lettie allegedly used as pesticide, and then repairs to his all-male club, where the boys sing and clap each other on the back like superannuated high-school kids. Although Harry gains some relief here, the scene proves Lettie’s point that he has never grown up; indeed, its dull bonhomie seems as imprisoning as his home. At the club the local pharmacist tells Harry that Lettie actually bought the pesticide to kill Weary, their aged dog. Later, back in his observatory, Harry thoughtfully holds the vial, then calls Lettie up to the room. As she approaches in her filmy white gown, she resembles nothing so much as a bride, and what follows amplifies these creepy erotic undertones, as brother and sister reenact the scene between Harry and Deborah. Harry muses, “We are mere drops of nothing compared to a sun which is a hundred million miles from our backyard. So why do we torture ourselves, trying to discover what’s good and what’s evil, what’s right and what’s wrong? It’s so unimportant.” The lines provide a nice rationale for his plan: drop poison into Lettie’s hot chocolate.

A tense scene ensues in which Harry and the audience wait for Lettie to drink the poison. She carries two cups—one of them contaminated—upstairs to Hester, then returns. “You need a change,” she tells Harry. “We’ve all been cooped up here too much. … Three women in one house. It would strain any man’s nerves.” It’s as if she has suddenly become Deborah. But the sisters are the ones who have changed places, which we grasp when we hear Hester fall to the floor dead, having drunk the poisoned cocoa. Nona, the housekeeper, angrily accuses Lettie of the crime. “You said you wanted to get rid of her and you did.” Turning to Harry, Lettie says, “Nona seems to have gone out of her mind.” Harry coldly replies, “I wonder if the jury will think so. … I’m sorry, Lettie, but that’s the way things are.”

After Lettie’s conviction (thanks to Nona’s damning testimony about the sisters’ fights), a guilt-ridden Harry confesses to the unbelieving judge. But when Harry
asks Lettie to corroborate his story, she serenely refuses. “I wanted to be free, that’s all, free,” he protests. “Then it’s turned out beautifully,” she responds, and predicts Harry’s horrible future: racked by guilt, he’ll be unable to think, sleep, eat, or drink. With a cruel smile on her face, she quotes his own words: “I’m sorry, Harry. But you see, that’s the way things are.” Surrounded by barred shadows, she walks down the hall to her death. But then a dissolve occurs (Harry, asleep in his chair, is momentarily superimposed over Lettie’s deathward walk) and a revelation: the incidents with Lettie in the carriage house, the murder, and the aftermath were all just Harry’s dream. Relieved, he disposes of the poison and welcomes back Deborah, who didn’t go through with her marriage to John. Hester is also alive, and Harry asks her to deliver this message to Lettie. “Tell her I’m sorry, but that’s the way things are.”

A caveat appears after the ending: “In order that your friends may enjoy this picture, please do not disclose the ending.” The warning makes it seem that the conclusion was planned all along, but in fact, as Alain Silver explains, the picture was previewed in Los Angeles with five different endings “aimed at appeasing the Hays Office.” When the dream ending was selected, producer Joan Harrison “quit Universal” (“
Uncle
” 297) in protest. As with Fritz Lang’s
Woman in the Window
(discussed in
chapter 4
), it is hard not to feel cheated by the gimmick, since there is little previous indication that the murder is a dream.
¹⁹
Indeed, the ploy seems like a nasty joke on the audience: “see, we can make you believe anything!” But the dream also opens the royal road to Harry’s unconscious: it begs us to psychoanalyze him, and what we find is not pretty. As Silver argues, the “most disturbed psyche” is not Lettie’s but Harry’s, as his dreamed “recourse to an elaborate murder scheme rather than a direct, adult confrontation reinforce[s] the likelihood that his reverie is a manifestation not just of his deep-rooted psychological dependency on his sister but also of profound guilt over his sexual attraction to her” (297–98). Indeed, Harry’s dream, like Chuck Scott’s, bears out Freud’s contention that all dreams are wish-fulfillments by acknowledging his incestuous feelings and implying that he’d rather stay with Lettie than become Deborah’s husband. In his dream he gets rid of Deborah and has Lettie kill his other sister so he can have Lettie to himself. Yet his guilt over these wishes compels him to have Lettie executed and then punish himself, less perhaps for the murder than for his failure to live up to socially acceptable standards of masculinity. After all, Harry is much more like Lettie—a hot house flower, a man who spends his days drawing rosebuds—than like the young, assertive Deborah, whom he fears. Hence, Harry’s dream is also someone else’s: though it permits
him to enact his incestuous and murderous impulses, it prevents him from acknowledging them.