Nightmare Alley - Film Noir And The American Dream (54 page)

20
. Their evaluation is hardly to be trusted, since among the other films singled out as “communist” was the hugely popular and adamantly liberal
Best Years of Our Lives
.

21
. The first version of the story is a “treatment”—a 132-page prose narrative—called
Love-Lies-Bleeding
, by Jack Patrick. Patrick’s story is much less concerned with class than is Rossen’s finished script.

22
. Broe asserts that the stairway represents the passage from one class to another (67), but it more likely stands for the class hierarchy itself, and Milestone uses verticality throughout the film to represent class relations.

23
. Neve argues that the film presents political life largely as a “front, thinly disguising the determining material forces” (“Red” 191), a reading that suggests a vulgar
Marxist perspective. But this interpretation fails to acknowledge the characters’ mixed emotions about wealth, class, and each other.

24
. Davis’s name is spelled two different ways in the film. On the brush he gives to Peg it is spelled “Charlie,” but in many of the boxing posters it is spelled “Charley.” I’ve chosen the former since, presumably, Davis would know how to spell his own name. Roberts was given his name—the same name as the coproducer—to avoid the possibility that his name was that of a real crook (Eyles 16). Actor Lloyd Gough’s name was then spelled “Goff,” but I have used the spelling by which he was best known. Gough, too, was blacklisted and unable to work in Hollywood from 1952 until 1964.

25
. Garfield, whom Andersen calls the “first axiom” of “film gris” (258), was among the first “Method” actors to become a Hollywood star. Born Jacob Julius Garfinkle in New York’s Lower East Side in 1913, Garfield was a committed leftist who emerged from New York’s Group Theatre and often played roles that evoked his own early years as a slum kid who fought his way to the top (Andersen 258).

26
. Polonsky allegedly came up with the story during a short walk from Paramount to Enterprise and “made a present” of it to Enterprise co-owner Charles Einfeld (Polonsky, qtd. in McGilligan and Buhle 485). The original concept for
Body and Soul
was based on the life of boxer Barney Ross; when Ross was arrested on a drug charge, Einfeld wanted to cancel the picture, but Rossen insisted on carrying it through (Eyles 16); see Eyles for an informative history of Enterprise’s brief moment in the sun.

27
. Robert Wise’s
The Set-Up
also portrays a boxer directed to take a dive, but its protagonist, aging pug Stoker Thompson (Robert Ryan), isn’t in on the fix. Though admirable in his uncompromising devotion to his dream, Stoker is more pathetic than heroic: he believes he is just a fight away from a title shot, but it’s clear that he is really one fight away from brain damage or death. This strikingly directed fable is set in a place called Paradise City, near a club called Dreamland, and depicts its boxers as innocents pursuing delusions of success, unaware that they are pawns in a game of profit-taking. Even more than
Body and Soul, The Set-Up
shows how the boxers enact their fans’ appetites for violence, fame, and success. In the end Stoker wins his fight but is beaten so severely afterward that, luckily for him, he will never fight again.
Champion
seemed so similar to
The Set-Up
that RKO sued its producers (Stanfield, “Monarch” 79); see Stanfield’s “Monarch” for a fine survey of the postwar boxing movie.

28
. Originally the film was to be titled
Tiger, Tiger, Burning Bright
(Eyles 16).

29
. Watching this scene, it is difficult not to recall that Garfield and Lee both died after being stigmatized and hounded by red-baiters. Here, alas, art adumbrates life.

30
. Rossen and Polonsky disagreed about the ending. Rossen wanted to conclude with Charlie being shot by Roberts’s thugs and falling into a barrel of trash but finally accepted Polonsky’s more positive ending, which jibes more smoothly with the film’s fable-like tone. For further details see Neve, “Red” 194–95, and “Abraham Polonsky” 486.

31
. For other versions of this argument see Polonsky, quoted in May 226 (“gangsterism is capitalism or the other way around”); Mason 74; Andersen 259.

32
. Munby notes that Leo’s “perception of himself … as hopelessly anachronistic in the face of new forms of ‘organization’ is shared by a whole host of protagonists in
the postwar gangster-syndicate film” (130), such as those in
The Gangster, I Walk Alone
, and
New York Confidential
. The syndicate film constitutes a significant sub-genre of 1950s crime films; unlike red noir, however, most of these films are exposés or pro–law enforcement vehicles.

33
. There may be an allusion here to
The Communist Manifesto
’s comparison of modern bourgeois society to a “sorcerer” (Marx and Engels 478).

34
. Polonsky observes, “I don’t ask myself ‘Now what are the social issues I have to realize here?’ There’s a Marxian world view behind my films, not because I plan it that way. That’s what I am” (qtd. in Kemp 268). Marx’s analysis of the four forms of alienation appears in the
Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844
. See Tucker 72–77.

35
. The agents overheard and transcribed a conversation between Polonsky and Wolfert in which the two acknowledged that the phone was probably tapped. Polonsky sardonically reminded Wolfert, “You know, we’re not living in a police state. … We’re living in a free democracy.” See Buhle and Wagner,
Dangerous Citizen
(235–38) for a transcript of this conversation.

36
. Polonsky hated David Raksin’s music for this scene. The piece, “Regeneration,” rises to a triumphant major-chord conclusion, seeming incompatible with the degradation and remorse pictured (“Abraham Polonsky” 489).

37
. Stuart Kaminsky notes that the heist film derives from stories of “communal quests requiring cooperation of men with special powers” (qtd. in Telotte, “Fatal Capers” 164). For helpful analyses of the heist picture see Telotte, “Fatal Capers”; and Mason 97–105.

38
. Huston’s film shares the distinction as the first true heist film with the B picture
Armored Car Robbery
, directed by Richard Fleischer: both films were released on the same day, June 8, 1950. The two films constitute the dexter and sinister arms of the subgenre. Whereas
Asphalt
explores the lives and motives of its humble criminals, Fleischer’s film presents a police detective (played by Charles McGraw) as its protagonist and paints its criminals, especially leader Dave Purvis (William Talman), as psychopaths and selfish weasels.

39
. Tropes of gaming and gambling appear in almost every heist picture, regardless of its politics. For example, Stanley Kubrick’s
The Killing
depicts a race-track robbery;
Kansas City Confidential
(Phil Karlson) uses four playing cards as identifying marks and depicts many card games;
5 against the House
(also directed by Karlson) concerns a casino heist; Johnny Ingram, in
Odds against Tomorrow
, is a compulsive gambler. These tropes not only reflect the idea that the gangs are playing a game but also indicate the risks involved in their left-handed endeavors.

40
. The name of the hotel thus predicts and sardonically comments on Dix’s final pilgrimage back to Kentucky. As Mason suggests, the gang—consisting of two Italian Americans and a WASP southerner, and headed by two men with German names—constitutes a miniature American melting pot (138).

41
. May asserts that the gang members display a “communal spirit” that contrasts favorably with the corruption of officials such as Ditrich (243). But he goes too far in claiming that they embody “family values”: although they do come together, their solidarity is fragile and ephemeral.

42
. Joshua Hirsch outlines three strategies by which red noirs deconstruct divisions between crime and legitimate society. If
Force of Evil
uses what he calls
“simile”—juxtaposing criminals and noncriminals to show their similarities—
Asphalt Jungle
relies more on “antiphrasis”—reversing values to depict criminals as honorable and the “legal” world as dishonorable (85).

43
. Hayden, who plays the rock-solid Dix, ironically became one of the first “friendly” witnesses in the second round of HUAC hearings, not long after
Asphalt Jungle
was released. Tormented by guilt for naming names, he spent his later years apologizing and condemning the blacklist. See Ceplair and Englund 364, 391; and Navasky 129–30, where Hayden speaks of his self-contempt after testifying. In the latter, Hayden tersely summarizes the predicament of all the witnesses: “Cooperate and I’m a stool pigeon. Shut my mouth and I’m a pariah” (130).

44
. In another of the blacklist era’s grotesque ironies Marc Lawrence, who plays Cobby, became a “friendly” witness during the second round of HUAC hearings. Lawrence told Lee Server that testifying was “like a stab in the back. You’re still breathing, but you … can’t get the thing out of your back” (Server, “Marc Lawrence” 53).

45
. Henry Blankfort,
Underworld
’s coscreenwriter, was the cousin of fellow radical writer Michael Blankfort, who named him before HUAC. Afterward, Henry Blank-fort left the movie business (Buhle and Wagner,
Radical
365–66).

46
. Bowing to pressure from distributors, the filmmakers cast a white actress, Mary Anderson, as Molly (Neve,
Film
178). Close scrutiny of key scenes reveals that all words referring to Molly’s race were overdubbed in postproduction (the actors’ lips form other words). The MPA censor board reports that the word
nigger
was removed from the film for screenings in Massachusetts, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. The Breen office had earlier recommended that the filmmakers remove the word: see letter from Breen to Forrest Judd of Allied Artists.

47
. As Buhle and Wagner observe, the liberals leading the defense committee “look a lot like the real-life Civil Rights Congress—as many in the noir audience would have recognized—at that moment frantically pursued by the FBI, baited by [HUAC] and finally destroyed after several dramatic campaigns for southern African-American defendants” (
Radical
344).

48
. Similar media lynchings were occurring at that moment in Hollywood, led by right-wing columnists such as Westbrook Pegler and George Sokolsky of the
Hollywood Reporter
(Humphries 235).

49
. This critical stance probably explains certain newspaper reviewers’ antipathy for the film. See, for example, Bosley Crowther’s review in the
New York Times
of Sept. 27, 1950.

50
. The film’s ultimate title was a last-minute decision: the picture was first submitted to the censors for approval under the title
The Whip
, and later versions were entitled
The Whipped
; even its first reviews (e.g., by the
Hollywood Reporter
and
Variety
of March 1950), call it by that name. It was finally submitted for certification in May 1950 under its current title (PCA File,
The Underworld Story
).

1
. Endfield didn’t want to cooperate with HUAC (doing so seemed to him “seedy”) or to plead the Fifth, so he immigrated to England and rebuilt his career there (Neve,
Film
180). His recollection, in 1989, is clear-eyed about how the Hollywood Left was
deluded by Stalinism and communism. But the witch hunt, Endfield claims, was mostly just publicity-mongering. He concludes that in the end “it’s hard to say who was more wrong,” the witch hunters or the Communist apologists (qtd. in Neve,
Film
181).

2
. Naremore writes that the film is such a “thoroughgoing indictment of capitalism and liberal complacency that it transcends the ameliorative limits of the social-problem picture” (
More Than Night
127): that is, the problems do not merely stem from corruption but inhere in the institutions themselves.

3
. Against Endfield’s wishes Stillman insisted on including these preachy scenes (Neve,
Film
179).

4
. Although these words sound like bland liberal pieties, to include them, the filmmakers had to ignore the Breen Office’s warnings that the movie should include no “philosophizing” that “might seem to relieve your murderers of the blame for their crimes and put it on society generally” (Breen to Robert Stillman).

5
. To produce the fine performances in this film, Losey rehearsed his actors for almost two weeks, then shot the film in a spare nineteen days (Ciment 99).

6
. Even Garwood’s car testifies to this history: the Cadillac automobile was named for the French explorer Antoine Laumet de La Mothe, sieur de Cadillac, who founded the city of Detroit. Cadillac embodied both the Dream and the fraud: not a nobleman, as he claimed, he actually emigrated to America to escape debtors, then reinvented himself as a dandy and aristocrat (ehow.com).

Asterisks indicate blacklistees
.

The Accused
. Dir. William Dieterle. Scr. Ketti Frings. Paramount, 1949.

Act of Violence
. Dir. Fred Zinnemann. Perf. Van Heflin and Robert Ryan. Scr. Robert L. Richards. MGM, 1949.

Anatomy of a Murder
. Dir. Otto Preminger. Music by Duke Ellington. Columbia, 1959.

Appointment with Danger
. Dir. Lewis Allen. Paramount, 1951.

Armored Car Robbery
. Dir. Richard Fleischer. RKO, 1950.

The Asphalt Jungle
. Dir. John Huston. MGM, 1950.

The Best Years of Our Lives
. Dir. William Wyler. Perf. Dana Andrews, Fredric March, and Harold Russell. MGM, 1946.

The Bigamist
. Dir. Ida Lupino. Scr. Collier Young. Filmakers, 1953.