Nightmare Alley - Film Noir And The American Dream (42 page)

Arriving before the others, Nick meets Figlia (played with panache by future “friendly” witness Lee J. Cobb), who sends the prostitute Rica (Valentina Cortesa) to occupy him while his minions slash Nick’s tires and thereby provide a pretext for Figlia to sell Nick’s load.
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Nevertheless, Nick charms Rica and negotiates shrewdly enough with Figlia to earn $3,900 for the apple shipment. Bursting with pride, he phones Polly, his hometown girlfriend, boasts that he “made a killing the first time out,” and asks her to marry him in San Francisco. But when he takes Rica out for a celebratory drink, Figlia’s thugs beat him up and steal his earnings. Meanwhile, Kinney’s prediction about making a “killing” comes true when the U-joint of his truck breaks while descending a hill, causing his death in a fiery crash. As the truck burns, the apples bounce down the hill, mutely mocking the trucker’s aborted dream. Pete and Slob, who witness the wreck, do reach the market, only to be rooked by Figlia. Worse, Pete agrees (to Slob’s disgust) to help Figlia scoop up Kinney’s dumped apples for fifty cents per box. No matter that the fruit represents their dead friend: the apples are now money, which has no smell. The fruit here symbolizes how, as Marx famously wrote, capitalism transforms human relations into “a relation between things” (
Capital
1:321).
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Rica, too, represents the commodification of human beings via the “cash nexus” (Marx and Engels 475–76). But at least she is straightforward about her goals, declaring to Nick that she wants “money, lots of money.” Polly is no better: as soon as she learns that Nick has lost his wad, she curses him and departs. “The only difference between you and Polly,” Nick asserts, is that “she’s strictly an amateur.” Figlia, however, is no amateur: he now has both the apples and Nick’s hard-earned money. The personification of capitalist oppression disguised as free trade, Figlia, like one of Marx’s factory owners, transmutes apples into surplus value by exploiting the labor of those who produce and transport them.

In the film’s hokey conclusion Nick and Slob catch up to Figlia at a diner, where Nick beats him into submission and avenges his father. The police arrive and lecture Nick about letting them take care of people like Figlia. Added by producer Darryl Zanuck after Dassin had left the country to escape the blacklist, this scene violates the film’s tenor and theme (we already understand that Figlia’s fiefdom operates with the tacit approval of the authorities) but does not erase its broader implications.
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Thieves’ Highway
could scarcely be more direct in equating capitalism and criminality: although honest dealers are mentioned, we don’t see any and instead witness the wealthy steal from the proletariat and force them to exploit each other. Like the cars discussed in
chapter 5
, the men’s trucks are potential engines of upward mobility (it’s not an accident that Kinney crashes while cresting a hill) on a permanently blocked road. Hence, even as the film celebrates Nick’s success in achieving his American dream through individual enterprise, it more forcefully underlines the obstacles to such attainment.

Class is also the theme of
The Strange Love of Martha Ivers
(directed by Milestone and scripted by Rossen), a film that, according to the MPAPAI, contained “sizeable doses of communist propaganda” (qtd. in Buhle and Wagner,
Radical
377).
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Propaganda or not, the film dramatizes “how class oppression had hardened since the Depression” (Broe 64) via a melodramatic tale of a love triangle involving Barbara Stanwyck’s Martha, the niece of a wealthy factory owner; Walter O’Neil (Kirk Douglas), the weak son of a middle-class striver; and Sam Master-son (Van Heflin), a lower-class boy Martha once loved.
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As a child in 1928, Martha, after being caught trying to run away with Sam, bludgeons her snobbish aunt (who has just killed Martha’s cat) and causes her to fall down the stairs to her death.
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Although Walter had snitched on Martha and Sam for running away, he stays mum about the murder and, with his father’s help, worms his way into the Ivers family by keeping the secret. Their shared information perfectly fits Georg Simmel’s description of the secret as a form of
“inner property”; it is at least as valuable as the tangible property that Martha inherits (331). But, as Simmel reminds us, secrets are also “surrounded by the possibility and temptation of betrayal” (333): though it connects Martha and Walter, it also, like the secret in
No Man of Her Own
, places a barrier between them. Hence, if the secret gives Walter power over Martha, it also ties him to her in perpetuity and makes him her minion—and gradually converts him into a drunk who can’t enjoy his success. The secret also granted Walter’s father the leverage to “see all his dreams come true”: using the threat of blackmail, he sent his son to college, married him to an heiress, and participated in the framing of a homeless man for the murder.

When Sam, who left Iverstown the night of the murder, returns eighteen years later, he finds Martha married to Walter, who is running for reelection as district attorney.
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Hearing about his campaign, Sam addresses the poster of O’Neil: “You still look like a scared little kid to me.” Beneath the poster is his own reflection in a mirror. Is he referring to Walter or to himself? Sam is also scared, and he is, moreover, divided about his class allegiances, his feelings for Martha, his attitude toward money—about everything. His ambivalence is embodied in Toni Marachek (Lizabeth Scott), an ex-convict who shares his working-class background and with whom he becomes romantically involved. Yet Sam also remains fascinated by Martha, even after she and Walter get Toni arrested and try to scare Sam away with a beating. Martha, too, is divided: she wants Sam because he represents her father’s working-class origins and her innocent childhood, but she also hopes to prevent him from spilling the beans about her childhood crime.

Walter and Martha believe that Sam plans to blackmail them; in fact, they seem to
want
him to blackmail them, for doing so would assuage their guilt and reinforce their belief that everyone is as dishonest as they are. To test him, Martha brings Sam to her office overlooking the factory. Sam sardonically remarks that when he was a kid, he couldn’t even get past the gate. Surveying her domain, she recalls that her father was a mill hand there before marrying her wealthy mother and boasts that she has expanded the business tenfold “all by myself.” But now Sam wants half of it. Later, during a hilltop tryst above the city (Martha is invariably shown looming over others or perched above the town), she tells Sam of the sensation of power she feels from owning all this, and, ignoring his warning (“you know what happened to Lot’s wife when she looked back, don’t you?”), she professes to wish that she had married him instead of Walter. Sam then reveals
his
secret: he wasn’t even present during the murder and only that day investigated the killing and trial. Enraged at her self-incrimination, Martha tries to
brain Sam with a fiery stick, then pleads with him to stay with her, admitting that she feels trapped. This is Martha’s “strange love”: she loves money and power but hates herself for having them; she loves Sam but hates him for making her feel guilty.

In the film’s final confrontation at her mansion an intoxicated Walter tells of Martha’s affairs, her soulless immorality, and his own cowardice. Stumbling drunkenly, he falls down the stairs, as if to reenact—or undo—the original crime and the class elevation he received as a result of it. Martha urges Sam to finish Walter off, to “set both of us free.” A wide shot shows her gazing down the stairs at the men, like a puppeteer with her marionettes. But Sam carries Walter to a chair. “Now I’m sorry for you,” he says to her. “Your whole life has been a dream.” Taking up a pistol, Martha sneers, “What were their lives compared to mine? … A mean, vicious, hateful old woman who never did anything for anybody” is worthless compared to Martha, who has donated to charity, built schools and hospitals, and put thousands of people to work. Martha here reveals her true nature: she is a fascist. “And what was he?” she continues, referring to the man she framed. Sam’s answer to both questions: “a human being.” After Sam departs in disgust (Martha having been unable to shoot him), Walter excuses them. It’s nobody’s fault, he tells her. “It’s just the way things are. It’s what people want and how hard they want it. And how hard it is for them to get it.” Broe calls this speech a “direct concentration on the structure of class inequality” (66), but it isn’t that, for it blames their crimes on universal appetites rather than on economic circumstances. In the end Martha induces Walter to shoot her. Dying, she utters her birth name, “Martha Smith,” and then Walter kills himself. Thus do the capitalists—their wealth a product of murder—dig their own graves, as Marx and Engels promised. When Sam and Toni leave Iverstown (passing the sign for “America’s Fastest Growing Industrial City”), he quips, “Don’t ever look back. You know what happened to Lot’s wife, don’t you?”

As is so often the case in noir, individuals are fated to repeat the actions that entrapped them. Milestone alludes to the specters haunting Iverstown through setting and mise-en-scène. For example, both the opening sequences and the scene of Sam’s return take place during rainstorms, as if to suggest that he personifies the past. The concluding scenes on the stairway also replay the murder scene, as if to imply that Martha’s and Walter’s lives have been irrevocably molded by that single childhood act. In these images and in the concluding lines we may also sense postwar Americans’ ambivalence about their Depression past and, perhaps, the filmmakers’ fears that their own pasts, their own secrets, might return to
make them pay. Overpowering these themes, however, is the film’s argument that wealth is criminal and capitalism a brand of soul murder. These sentiments lie at the heart of red noir, as
Body and Soul
further reveals.

“Ya gotta be businesslike, Charlie. … Everybody dies.” The speaker is Mr. Roberts (Lloyd Gough), a gangster who owns boxer Charlie Davis (John Garfield) and wants him to throw his next fight so Roberts can make a killing by betting against him.
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Business is not only Roberts’s creed; it’s his only reality, as he declares in one of many memorable lines in Polonsky’s script for
Body and Soul:
“Everything is addition or subtraction. The rest is conversation.” Like Garfield a working-class Jewish kid from the inner city, Charlie believes in the American Dream of upward mobility, which he hopes to achieve through boxing, but in the course of the film he is transformed from an aspiring young man into a thing.
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This sharply written fable of a young man who sells his soul was the only hit for Enterprise Studios, which teamed with Roberts Productions (co-owned by Garfield and Bob Roberts) to produce the picture. Strongly invoking 1930s social realism (Naremore,
More Than Night
103; Buhle and Wagner 390), the film is among red noir’s finest achievements, as well as a tribute to the collaborative, artist-first ethos of the short-lived Enterprise.
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It also initiated a new round of boxing pictures, including
Champion
and
The Set-Up
, as the ring proved a useful setting for tales of moral combat, as well as a handy way to depict the symbiosis of crime and “legit” businesses.
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In Charlie’s dressing room, just before his title fight, Roberts speaks the lines quoted at the beginning of this section and then reminds Charlie that he must lose in fifteen rounds. Not only has Roberts bet against him; Charlie has wagered on his own defeat. Tortured by second thoughts as he lies on his pallet awaiting the opening bell, he flashes back to the beginning of his career when he met his girlfriend, Peg (Lilli Palmer), an art student, and shared his dreams with her. “You mean you want other people to think you’re a success?” she asked. “Sure,” he replied. “Every man for himself.” Charlie’s response reveals a confusion that becomes deeper as the film proceeds. To illustrate it, early in the film Rossen and cinematographer James Wong Howe place Charlie in small, cluttered spaces surrounded by others to show how he is defined by his friends and relatives: Shorty (Joseph Pevney), who first promotes him; Peg; his mother and father; his neighborhood. Yet Charlie clings to the fantasy that he is an individual striver—a
“tiger,” as Peg calls him, quoting Blake’s poem and drawing him with fur on his legs.
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Yet this trait also stems from his environment, as his mother (Anne Revere) laments: because they live in a jungle, he can only be a “wild animal.” Above all, Charlie dreads becoming his father (Art Smith), who runs a dinky candy store before being killed in gang-battle crossfire. His mother exhorts Charlie to “fight for something, not money,” and encourages him to go to night school, but the only thing Charlie values is money. In a scene just after his father is killed, Charlie stands before the empty store, a “for rent” sign behind his head: he is available for lease or purchase, a piece of merchandise like the Coca-Cola advertised beneath the rental ad. Charlie’s conflict between financial goals and emotional ties is also invoked after Alice (Hazel Brooks), one of Roberts’s hangers-on, claims to be “nobody.” Peg quips, “Nobody is anybody who belongs to somebody. So if you belong to nobody, you’re somebody.” What does it mean to belong? To be the property of someone, or to be emotionally attached to someone? Charlie’s dilemma revolves around these conflicting connotations: does he belong to Peg and his family and friends, to Roberts, or to himself?

Offended when a social worker interviews them to determine if they qualify for welfare, Charlie, with a push from Shorty, sells himself to Quinn (William Conrad), Roberts’s underling, and starts to box in earnest. Bursting with magnanimity after winning several fights, he brings his entourage to a lavish hotel room. There Shorty implores Peg to marry Charlie right away to save him from becoming “a money machine, like gold mines, oil wells.” Roberts, he warns, is “cutting him up a million ways.” Sure enough, shortly afterward Charlie agrees to give 50 percent of his earnings to Roberts, who has promised a bigger pie, with “more slices, more to eat for everybody.” But not for Shorty, who is cut out—he’s now one of Charlie’s “expenses”—and will get only Charlie’s crusts. Despite his fantasy of independence, Charlie has become an alienated laborer whose talent and effort are surplus value for Roberts. He’s not the only one: African American boxer Ben Chaplin (Canada Lee) has already passed through this stage. Left with a head injury from his previous fight, he has been warned not to box again but agrees to fight Charlie with the understanding that he (Ben) will lose. Unfortunately, Roberts and his partners don’t let Charlie in on the plan, and he pummels Ben mercilessly. Celebrating his tainted victory, Charlie learns that his opponent threw the fight and has been severely injured. No matter, says Roberts: “Everybody dies.” Shorty is enraged: “We didn’t win. He [Roberts] won.” Charlie is not “just a kid who can fight; he’s money. And people want money so bad, they make it stink; they make you stink.” When Shorty is killed by a speeding car, Charlie’s
conscience seems to die as well; Peg also urges him to quit, but he won’t give up the dream. “I can’t stop now,” he tells her. “It’s what we wanted. … I’m the champ!” “You mean Roberts is,” she answers. “I can’t marry you; that’d just mean marrying him.” The Johnny Green title song plays in the background: Charlie belongs to Roberts, body and soul.