Nightmare Alley - Film Noir And The American Dream (50 page)

20
. Pila’s role resembles that of Carol, the female protagonist in
Phantom Lady
, another Harrison-produced noir. In that film Carol assumes an array of active roles to save her employer from being executed for murder.

21
. In the source novel, though Sailor is partly humanized by contact with Pancho and Pila (who has a smaller role than in the film), he ultimately fails to redeem himself and ends up shooting both the Sen and McIntyre. Unlike Gagin, Sailor chooses alienation and loneliness over human contact. McIntyre diagnoses Sailor’s problem: he has always “blamed the world or something missing in [himself ]” (129).

22
. Amnesia stories are common in noir even when they don’t concern veterans. The lengthy list includes films such as
The Long Wait, The Scarf, Man in the Dark
, and
Shadow on the Wall
, as well as
Street of Chance
, discussed in
chapter 2
. For a list of other noir films with amnesia plots see Dickos 182–84; for an extensive analysis of noir amnesia see Santos 67–103.

23
. Further ironies about memory and knowledge crop up elsewhere in the film: many of Cravat’s former acquaintances, including Mel Phillips (Richard Conte),
owner of a nightclub called The Cellar, seem to have amnesia about Cravat; Anzelmo, an ex-Nazi in pursuit of the money, runs a fortune-telling parlor.

24
. Both
High Wall
and
Crooked Way
dramatize the stigma attached to cognitively disabled or traumatized veterans, who were often suspected of faking their injuries to gain sympathy and services (see Waller 168).

25
. It seems likely that this thematic slant is the work of Cole, a Communist and future member of the Hollywood Ten.

26
. This drug was developed during the war, partly as a means to induce truthful confessions from prisoners and partly as a way to weed out malingerers (Luckhurst 58).

27
. Bernhardt and his cinematographer, Paul Vogel, frequently employ high angles on Kenet to show him belittled and crushed by the forces surrounding him. Other examples of verticality multiply as the film proceeds: Whitcombe pushes over the stool of Cronner, his building’s handyman, when Cronner tries to blackmail him; the push sends Cronner down an elevator shaft to his death.

28
. Herbert Marshall, who plays Whitcombe as an able-bodied man, lost a leg during World War I and used a prosthesis to enable him to walk and stand.

29
. As a German-born Jew who escaped from Germany in 1933 after being detained by the Gestapo, Bernhardt possessed firsthand experience of such all-powerful institutions. Like many other noir directors, he knew what it meant to be cut off from one’s past, having landed in America with almost no understanding of English. Bernhardt’s European career and escape are outlined in Brook (167–69).

30
. Robert Richards, who scripted the film, was an ex-Communist who was named by his former wife, screenwriter Silvia Richards (Buhle and Wagner,
Radical
364–65). Richards adapted the script for
Act of Violence
from an original story by WWII veteran Collier Young, who later cofounded Filmakers, Inc., the important independent production company discussed in
chapter 7
. Zinnemann’s later film
High Noon
(1952) is also often read as an allegory of the HUAC era, though he was not a member of the radical Hollywood Left. He also focused on military men in other films of the period: his 1950 film
The Men
deals honestly, if somewhat sentimentally, with the tribulations of physically disabled veterans, and
From Here to Eternity
(1953) superbly depicts the loves and fears of American servicemen on the eve of World War II.

31
. Publicity posters for the film treated Parkson’s disability as a horror movie trope. A typical one reads: “The killer with the limp is coming your way! He may be lurking behind you at this moment! … Listen! Can’t you hear that menacing, scraping, shuffle as he approaches? Neither law, nor fear … not even a woman’s kisses can stop him as he stalks his prey in the most suspenseful screen drama of the season.” None of the ads alludes to Parkson’s motives, nor to the complicated nature of Enley’s guilt (
Act of Violence
posters, Fred Zinnemann Papers, MHLSC).

32
. Research suggests that many POWs suffer from PTSD. One study found that, even forty years after the fact, up to 70 percent of former POWs still displayed symptoms. See Schlenger et al. 77.

1
. Kent Minturn argues that these painting noirs display a “Romantic notion of the artist as a tortured genius” (282). In addition to the figures in the films I discuss,
one could also cite sculptor Jack Marlow in
Phantom Lady
and Bogart’s mad artist, Geoffrey Carroll, in
The Two Mrs. Carrolls
, who obsessively paints his wives as the Angel of Death and then poisons them to revive his moribund muse.

2
. For a discussion of how Grable and other “pinup girls” were defined by their body measurements see Renov 184.

3
. Leonard Leff points out the homoerotic tinge in the McPherson/Lydecker relationship. For example, when they dine at Waldo and Laura’s favorite restaurant, the two men seem to be on a date (7). It is also difficult to miss the innuendos in the opening sequence, when McPherson confronts Lydecker as the latter luxuriates in the bathtub. This subtext is also present in Vera Caspary’s source novel, which hints that Lydecker’s wooing of Laura is but a set of “gestures” designed to make him appear heterosexual (Caspary,
Laura
158).

4
. Kathryn Kalinak observes that the picture frame “serves to contain the power of her threatening sexuality” (168). Liahna Babener similarly argues that the portrait is “quarantined inside the pictorial space” and usually “sandwiched between men” (95) to signify Laura’s domination by males.

5
. Royal Brown comments that the theme represents Laura’s absence (90); yet it also betokens her continued presence, at least in McPherson’s thoughts and senses, as each restatement reinforces “the feeling that he is trying to get it [or her] out of his mind” (Ness 62).

6
. Nicholas Spencer asserts that the “prior murder narrative was simply a dream” (137); later in the film McPherson urges Laura to “forget the whole thing like a bad dream.” The lyrics Johnny Mercer added to the musical theme make this possibility explicit: “but she’s only a dream.”

7
. In Caspary’s novel Diane was having an affair with Laura’s fiancé, Shelby Carpenter. The novel’s Diane Redfern was born with the name Jennie Swobodo (Caspary,
Laura
95); thus, this fleshing out of Diane’s background adds heft to the doubling motif.

8
. Babener concludes that the filmmakers “defeminized” the novel by erasing Laura’s voice in order to advance a “misogynist agenda” (86). Caspary herself praised the film but disliked the way it transformed Laura into a “Hollywood version of a cute career girl” (
Secrets
209). In Jay Dratler’s original script, according to Biesen (161) and Kalinak (162–63), Laura was given voice-over narration, which Zanuck urged Preminger to remove. According to Preminger, however, Laura’s voice-over was added later, at Zanuck’s request, then deleted (Bogdanovich 619). For Preminger’s recollections about the production see Bogdanovich (614–21).

9
.
The Dark Corner
was also produced by Zanuck at 20th Century–Fox, and was coscripted by Jay Dratler, who cowrote
Laura
.

10
. Though allegedly by Raphael, the portrait looks nothing like Raphael’s females, instead resembling a touched-up twentieth-century photograph. As Richard Dyer notes, the painting also provides a “grim undertow” to Cathcart’s earlier quip that “the enjoyment of art is the only remaining ecstasy that is neither illegal nor immoral” (Dyer, “Postscript” 124).

11
. The sculpture most closely resembles Donatello’s
Fountain Figure of a Winged Angel
(ca. 1440), though that sculpture is bronze, not marble like the film’s piece, and much smaller as well: see
Metropolitan Museum
, “Fountain Figure,”
www.metmuseum.org/TOHA/hd/dona/ho_1983.356.htm
.

12
. For versions of this argument see Renov 174–91; Belton 240; and Hanson 1–17.

13
. For example, when Christopher wakes in his apartment to find Cornell sitting in a chair near his bed, the camera angles and blocking are nearly identical to those in the 1941 version. Several sequences are absent, however, including a sexually suggestive scene in which Jill saws off Christopher’s handcuffs. Crain and Peters also resemble each other more than do Grable and Landis.

14
. These shots are virtually identical to the camera movements Preminger uses when McPherson dozes in Laura’s apartment.

15
.
The Woman in the Window
’s principal photography was completed in June 1944 and
Harry
’s a year later. It is possible that the makers of
Uncle Harry
were imitating
Woman
, but it is more likely that a major motivation for both endings was to satisfy the requirements of the Production Code administrators, who frowned on suicide.

16
. In Nunnally Johnson’s original script (adapted from a novel by J. H. Wallis), Wanley kills himself. But Lang and producer William Goetz insisted on the dream twist. For more on how the scene was created see McGilligan,
Fritz Lang
(310).

17
. As E. Ann Kaplan comments, Legrand is placed within internal frames throughout the film to expose how he is “bounded by, trapped in, bourgeois culture” (“Ideology” 43).

18
. Near the beginning of
Woman
, Lang dissolves a clock over Wanley’s body to express the same idea.

19
. Chris’s works were actually painted by John Decker (see McGilligan,
Fritz Lang
322).

20
. This moral, and the fact that Cross ends in a living hell, permitted
Scarlet Street
to pass muster with the Breen Office. It didn’t, however, prevent the film from being banned in several cities. For an account of this controversy see Bernstein.

21
. Minturn (306) notes that the film alludes to the notorious case of Han van Meegeren, who forged a number of works in the manner of Dutch masters (especially Vermeer) that were sold to the Nazis for large sums. For a fuller account of the Meegeren forgeries see Arnau 242–65.

22
. Steele’s quasi-expressionist aesthetic ignores the likelihood that the socialist Millet was probably trying to portray the poverty and spiritual desperation of the peasants among whom he was raised.

23
. Diane Waldman notes that many postwar American films affirmed an “illusionist” aesthetic and viewed modern art with “hostility and suspicion.” Among modernism’s alleged offenses were elitism, ugliness, incomprehensibility, and political subversiveness (54, 53).

24
. Not only did Dalí write a long analysis of the painting, but he created several variations on it, incorporating its two figures into his 1932 painting
Angelus
, into his
El Ángelus arquitectónico de Millet
(1933)—where the praying peasants become two white stones—and into his
Reminiscencia arqueológica de El Ángelus de Millet
(1935). These multiple versions bear out Schwartz’s description of the history of art as “the history of copy rites, of transformations that take place during acts of copying” (248). For images see “Art of Europe”:
www.artofeurope.com/dali/dal26.htm
; and “Meeting Dalí!”:
http://meetingdali.blogspot.com/2011/06/dalis-obsessions-revealed-in.html
.

25
. In his analysis of the train wreck scenes Miklitsch similarly describes the aural effects as an “exquisite sonic trope for the psychic dislocations of the postwar world” (78).

26
. Rolling up the real Dürer work would be impossible, since it was painted on wood.

27
. Although the “Scola copy” is an invention of the filmmakers, Dürer forgeries have long been commonplace. Indeed, in the sixteenth century, according to Arnau, there were far more Dürer forgeries in circulation than genuine Dürer works (119–20). For an analysis and reproduction of
Adoration of the Magi
see
Web Gallery of Art
, “Dürer, Albrecht,”
www.wga.hu/frames-e.html?/html/d/durer/1/04/2adorat.html
.

28
. This copy was bequeathed to the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the original is in London’s Victoria and Albert Museum. Sometime after 1831 the original of this painting was cut vertically, but the parts were reunited before John Forster bequeathed it to the museum. See
Metropolitan Museum
, “The Painter’s Daughter Mary” for further details.

1
.
Double Indemnity
was among the first group of American films screened in France after the war (a collection that also included
The Maltese Falcon
and
Murder, My Sweet
), which prompted critic Nino Frank to coin the term
film noir
.

2
. Fotsch observes that insurance company profits expanded immensely as car accidents became common (105), and
Double Indemnity
exploits this trend, deriving its premise from an insurance policy clause. Drivers need insurance, and insurance encourages the desire to “crook the system,” as Neff declares: murder and insurance are part of the same game. Further, in the James M. Cain novel on which the film is based, there is an elaborate auto-switching scheme in which Neff (named Huff in the book) attempts to murder Phyllis and pin it on her step-daughter Lola’s boyfriend (and Phyllis’s lover) Nino Sachetti, by using Sachetti’s car as a sign of his identity. See Cain,
Double Indemnity
87–95.