In Lonely Places: Film Noir Beyond the City 0786463058, 9780786463053

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In Lonely Places

In Lonely Places Film Noir Beyond the City IMOGEN SARA SMITH

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers Jefferson, North Carolina, and London

FRONTISPIECE : Strangers here on earth: Ida Lupino and Robert Ryan in the wintry isolation of On Dangerous Ground (Nicholas Ray, 1952).

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Smith, Imogen Sara. In lonely places : film noir beyond the city / Imogen Sara Smith. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7864-6305-3 softcover : 50# alkaline paper 1. Film noir — United States–History and criticism. 2. Alienation (Social psychology) in motion pictures. I. Title. PN1995.9.F54S65 2011 791.43' 653 — dc23 2011025546 BRITISH LIBRARY

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© 2011 Imogen Sara Smith. All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Cover photograph: Joan Bennett in The Secret Beyond the Door, 1948 (Universal Pictures/Photofest) Manufactured in the United States of America

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers Box 611, Jefferson, North Carolina 28640 www.mcfarlandpub.com

Table of Contents Acknowledgments

vii

Introduction

1

1. Imaginary Prisons: Noir and the City

19

2. In Exile at Home: Noir Between Two Worlds

34

3. Maximum Security: Domestic Noir

57

4. The Tyranny of Neighbors: Small-Town Noir

83

5. Blind Highways: Noir on the Road

105

6. Mirage of Safety: Noir on the Mexican Border

135

7. Lone and Level Sands: Desert Noir

159

8. Past Sunset: Noir Westerns

178

9. Private Traps: Noir in the Mind

214

Notes

237

Selected Bibliography

241

Index

243

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Acknowledgments This project began as a series of three articles published in Bright Lights Film Journal in 2009 and 2010. I am grateful to editor Gary Morris for giving me space to develop my ideas, and for his advice and encouragement. I could not have completed this book without the great help I received from the Film Noir Foundation, a non-profit organization that supports the restoration of lost films, organizes festivals of screenings, and facilitates the study of film noir. I am deeply indebted to Don Malcolm, editor of the Noir City Sentinel, who generously and tirelessly assisted me with finding prints of rare films and assembling photographs, and whose knowledgeable and stimulating correspondence helped me to shape my arguments. Many, many thanks also to Gary “Kingpin” Deane, Amy Schireson and Ted Whipple, who shared their time, resources and expertise. Everyone involved with the Film Noir Foundation has been friendly, generous and supportive: I don’t know how they acquired these qualities, but they didn’t get them from watching film noir! I appreciate the excellent staff at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, where I did extensive reading, and the very helpful staff at Jerry Ohlinger’s Movie Materials Store. Finally, I must thank my friends and family for their interest and encouragement throughout this project, especially my father, Allan Smith, for his editorial suggestions; Daniel Riccuito for sharing titles from his vast film collection; and all the friends who attended screenings with me and shared lively conversations about non-urban noir, making my work on this project far from lonely.

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Introduction Living in fifties America was in many ways like living in a public space that’s suddenly emptied out, a theater after closing, or a classroom after school. The emptiness could feel liberating, but it could also make you feel blank and vaguely nostalgic. — James Harvey, Movie Love in the Fifties

Far from the mean streets, a lake dazzles through thin mountain air. On the shore a man and woman are lazily fishing; in the bright winter sun the fish aren’t biting. “Every time I look up at the sky, I think of all the places I’ve never been,” the woman says. “And every time you look up they’re all the same,” the man replies wearily. For Jeff Bailey in Out of the Past, places form and dissolve like perfect smoke-rings. He drifts through them like a sleeper through a series of fitful dreams: hotels and campsites, racetracks and bars, dark alleys and sun-blinded Mexican piazzas, plush apartments and simmering jazz clubs, a mansion at Lake Tahoe and a cabin off a dirt road in pine-dark woods. He comes to rest in the town of Bridgeport, California, a bleak cluster of white frame houses dwarfed by high, bare mountains. Its main street could be the backdrop for a western, except that the stranger blowing into town wears a black fedora and drives a convertible. Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past (1947), an essential film noir, opens with images of serene, rugged wilderness, framed in the style of Ansel Adams. Like the corpse-filled Raymond Chandler story sarcastically titled “No Crime in the Mountains,” it proves that the stain of noir can be found anywhere. It’s in the stripped, shivering trees and the little white clapboard church beside the gas station where Jeff Bailey’s name is “written on a cloud”; in the ominous signs the deaf Kid flashes to Jeff, standing in a bleached field as the sky clouds over; in the black fishing nets draped like warnings on the Mexican beach where Jeff falls into Kathie’s web; in the broken shadows of branches falling on the bodies of lovers meeting secretly in a swamp; in the rushing, icy river where the gangster Joe Stefanos falls to his death, his elegant black overcoat snagged by a fishing line. In this world, a perfect view of a snowmelt lake mirroring pine-covered mountains belongs to a racketeer, the spoils of his crooked New York deals. Three years before he played Jeff Bailey, Robert Mitchum had his first major film role in William Castle’s When Strangers Marry; in it he murmured a line that would haunt the rest of his career: “Places are all alike; you can’t run away from yourself.” Below the 1

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Introduction

surface, the force driving noir stories is the urge to escape: from the past, from the law, from the ordinary, from poverty, from constricting relationships, from the limitations of the self. Noir found its fullest expression in America because the American psyche harbors a passion for independence, an impulse to be, in the words of Walt Whitman, “Loosed of limits, and imaginary lines, / Going where I list, my own master, total and absolute.” With this desire for autonomy comes a corresponding fear of loneliness and exile. The more we crave success, the more we dread failure; the more we crave freedom, the more we dread confinement. This is the shadow that spawns all of noir’s shadows: the anxiety imposed by living in a country that elevates opportunity above security; one that instills a compulsion to “make it big,” but offers little sympathy to those who fall short. Film noir is about people who break the rules, pursuing their own interests outside the boundaries of decent society, and about how they are destroyed by society — or by themselves. Noir springs from a fundamental conflict between the values of individual freedom and communal safety: a fundamental doubt that the two can coexist. The chapters that follow will track this ambivalence across a big continent, moving out from urban jungles into increasingly desolate regions. Prisons come in many forms;

“You can’t run away from yourself.” Jeff Bailey (Robert Mitchum) waits for the past to catch up with him at his Bridgeport gas station in Out of the Past (Jacques Tourneur, 1947).

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sometimes the walls press in and sometimes they are invisible; sometimes the broadest horizons encircle only barren emptiness. The city is film noir’s most elaborate visual metaphor for incarceration, but even the home can be converted, by means of well-placed shadows, from nurturing refuge to stifling cage. In small towns, the neighborliness and persistence of tradition that should be virtues are twisted into corruption, repressive conformity and hostility toward outsiders. The road promises unobstructed flight but turns travelers into homeless, transient strangers or desperate fugitives, at the mercy of chiselers who help them for extortionate fees and traitors who turn them in for rewards. They race for the Mexican border, trying to slip the net of American laws but falling into a phantasmagoric fun house where no laws apply; or they flee into mountains and forests, where nature offers no nourishment or renewal, only a place to die. In deserts and on western plains, film noir found a counterpart to the claustrophobia of urban spaces: instead of closing in and crushing, the wide-open lands leave people exposed and diminished by their immensity. People respond with monumental obsessions and outbursts of egomania, as though trying to fill the vacuum, to make themselves bigger in order to match the landscapes. “I take SPACE to be the central fact to men born in America,” Charles Olson wrote in a study of Herman Melville. “I write it large because it comes large here: large and without mercy.” Noir stories are powered by the need to escape, but they are structured around the impossibility of escape: their fierce, thwarted energy turns inward. The ultimate noir landscape, immeasurable as the ocean and confining as a jail cell, is the mind — the darkest city of all.

Specific Alienation: Defining Noir The Dark City is a synonym for noir: high heels on wet pavement, beatings in blackshadowed alleys, feet banging on fire escapes outside tenements and warehouses, the shriek and roar of elevated trains, dim greasy bars and glossy nightclubs where the big wheels have their offices up flights of carpeted stairs. Noir is all too often and too easily defined by these icons: a private eye in a trench coat, a sexy woman holding a gun, smoke curling up in the shadows of Venetian blinds, a neon light flashing outside the window of a cheap hotel room. Countless films open with generic images of night and the city: a jagged black skyline pierced with lights, or streets unrolling like a blurred strip of film: asphalt and lamplight, scuffed walls and store-windows smeared with light, the ebb and flow of sidewalk crowds. For many writers on noir, the city is not merely a starting point but a defining boundary. Nicholas Christopher, in Somewhere in the Night: Film Noir and the American City, states, “However one tries to define or explain noir, the common denominator must always be the city. The two are inseparable.” Eddie Muller, in Dark City: the Lost World of Film Noir, similarly states: “One way or another, noirs are all about people’s struggle to survive in what [Lewis Mumford] calls the ‘megalopolis.’” Muller suggests that the city provides not only theme and setting but also structure: film noir, he writes, often features “a storyline in which the structure resembles the city itself.... The blueprint for noir seems

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to have been drafted by a demented urban planner.” In The Street with No Name, Andrew Dickos includes the city in a list of mandatory elements for noir, arguing that even if films are not set in cities, they must have urban characters or some connection to urban life. These claims are based on more than the undeniable fact that a majority of noir films are set in cities; they argue that the city provides noir with its “psychological and aesthetic framework.” The skyline symbolizes the treacherous lure of money and ambition (an allegory that goes back to the electric sign flashing “The World Is Yours” in Scarface); city streets overshadowed by skyscrapers and filled with anonymous crowds represent the alienating and dehumanizing effects of modern urban life. Writing about The Asphalt Jungle, which contrasts a thoroughly degraded and corrosive city with a lost idyll of rural life, Gary Morris construes film noir as an expression of “the broken promise of America’s transition from farm and field to city, from wilderness to development, from a rural, agricultural economy to industrialization.”1 But is film noir really inseparable from the city? Consider the dusty back roads of Gun Crazy and They Live by Night; the snowbound countryside in On Dangerous Ground; the stagnant southern town in Moonrise; the desert in Detour and The Hitch-Hiker; the isolated outpost of Escudero in Ace in the Hole; the ghost town in The Prowler; the beachside hamburger stand in The Postman Always Rings Twice; the fishing village in Clash by Night; the staid suburbs in Pitfall and Crime of Passion. Each of these settings is, in its own way, as “noir” as a city at night, and the variety reflects a postwar society in which cities were rapidly losing their luster and a new decentralization was changing the structure of America. One reason many writers attempting to define film noir insist on the necessity of an urban setting is that it provides a firm boundary for what has always been a vague and slippery concept. Controversy starts with the long-running debate as to whether film noir should be considered a genre, or treated as a finite series or cycle of movies.2 Genres are defined by their settings or subject matter (a western must be set in the west; a war movie must be about warfare), and noir is too diverse to be so neatly classified. It can encompass other genres — the gangster movie, the heist movie, the melodrama, even the western — because noir itself is a mood, a stance, an attitude. It is defined not by any single element but by a combination of content, style and theme. Rather than simply declaring movies noir or not, I would propose rating them by noir content — as alcoholic beverages are labeled by proof— depending on the degree to which they exhibit the following characteristics: First, there are common plot elements, principally crime and other “left-handed forms of human endeavor,” such as adultery, violence, betrayal and corruption. Not all crime movies of the postwar years are noir, and not all noirs are crime movies, but noir must address the less savory aspects of human behavior and experience — for shorthand, the deadly sins. Second, there is a narrative method that tends to be convoluted, ambiguous and disorienting, deliberately rendering the audience uneasy, confused or disturbed. In this regard film noir rebelled against classic Hollywood’s usual method of leading the audience carefully by the hand. While many B noirs feature authoritative, omniscient narrators, the subjective and sometimes unreliable narrator (Force of Evil, Laura) is a more typical and

Introduction

5

innovative feature. Psychological elements pervade both the method and subject of the narrative, reflecting the enormous influence of Freudianism and psychoanalysis: stories often play as flashbacks in the minds of troubled protagonists. In the first book devoted to the subject, Raymond Borde and Étienne Chaumeton’s 1955 Panorama du Film Noir Américain, the authors defined this cycle of films by their effect on the audience, who “co-experience” the “anguish and insecurity” onscreen. If a comedy is a movie that aims to make the audience laugh, and a horror film aims to frighten the audience, “The aim of film noir was to create a specific alienation.”3 Third, there is a visual style that uses the techniques of expressionism — dark, slicing shadows, chiaroscuro lighting, distorting camera angles and labyrinthine, off-kilter spaces — to create a mood of menace and mystery. A handful of color films have a place in the canon (Leave Her to Heaven, Desert Fury), but the noir look was designed to exploit the power of black-and-white cinematography. It also departed from the style of “invisible” camerawork that dominated films of the thirties, introducing flamboyant touches that clearly set the film world apart from the real world. Fourth and most crucially, there is a tone of enveloping pessimism, coming in all flavors of cynicism, disillusionment, paranoia, fatalism, moral ambivalence and alienation. Or, as David Goodis sums it up, describing his hero’s feelings in Nightfall as “a certain amount of confusion, some despair mixed in, and some loneliness, and some bitterness, and topped with a dash of desperation.” Although it was only labeled and defined by critics in retrospect, Americans were well aware of the phenomenon at the time — they called it crime melodrama, or the hardboiled style — and its conventions were familiar enough to be easily spoofed. As early as 1945 — for instance, in Lloyd Shearer’s article in the New York Times, “Crime Certainly Pays on the Screen”— people debated whether it expressed a new, thick-skinned acceptance of violence bred by the war. The term film noir was first applied to American crime films by Nino Frank in 1946, when he and other French writers picked up a trend in American films imported after the end of the occupation.4 Thus began the critical search for the origins, influences and taxonomy of noir, a subject of endless fascination and one that has been extensively and rewardingly explored elsewhere (one of the best books to address the whole concept and “mythology” of noir is James Naremore’s wide-ranging, bracingly skeptical More Than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts). Noir was born from the mating of American pulp fiction, which came of age during the Depression with sordid tales of desperate lives, and German expressionist cinema, which developed in the turbulent Weimar era and was imported to Hollywood by immigrant directors, many fleeing Hitler. Pulp writers (Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain and Cornell Woolrich were the most influential) supplied seamy settings, twisting plots and unsentimental dissections of American society and character; while European filmmakers like Fritz Lang and Robert Siodmak contributed expressionism’s techniques for turning the world inside-out, refracting reality through a prism of madness. Noir drew on gangster movies of the thirties but also on melodrama, with its extreme emotions and narratives propelled by secrets from the past. Together, these influences distorted and undermined the harmony and objectivity of evenly lighted, smoothly constructed 1930s Hollywood cinema.

6

Introduction

The boundaries of the classic noir period, roughly 1940–1959, are determined by the release of particular films, but also reflect the extent to which noir was in the air during this time, spreading to infect other genres, like the western and the woman’s picture. Thickest in the immediate postwar years, it shone light on the underbelly of victory and prosperity: the suppressed horrors of combat; the anxiety of the nuclear age and the Cold War; tension between the sexes heightened by pressure on women to return to domestic roles; stresses inflicted by materialism and an oppressively homogenous political and cultural climate; and a general mood of exhaustion and disillusionment. Hollywood movies can’t be treated as straightforward documentation of the societies they entertained; they blended realism and fantasy in widely varying proportions. But they were the dreams people chose to dream, and the sheer number of postwar films reiterating noir themes proves they must have struck a chord. While earnest “message movies” directly addressed challenging issues like racism (Home of the Brave), juvenile delinquency (The Blackboard Jungle) or the rehabilitation of disabled veterans (The Men), film noir was far more subversive, smuggling a disenchanted, even despairing, vision of postwar life into mainstream entertainment. Cynicism and nihilism, outrage at social injustice, world-weary melancholy and amused, astringent misanthropy all found their way into unpretentious thrillers that received little serious attention in America at the time. It was partly the low budgets and absence of prestige that allowed filmmakers to get away with such unsavory material at a time when the studios’ only interest was in producing a lucrative product that would appeal — in the days before multiplexes and niche marketing — to a broad audience. Writers and directors also had to get around the Production Code, which had begun to weaken by the mid-forties (largely due to tougher depictions of violence in wartime films and groundbreaking triumphs over the censors, such as in 1944’s Double Indemnity), but which was still far from toothless. Originally drafted in 1929 by Catholics Daniel Lord, Joseph Breen and Martin Quigley, and enforced by Breen since 1934, the Code mandated films that clearly distinguished between good and evil, showed respect for authority, and never created sympathy for criminals or lowered the moral standards of their viewers. Unlike the exuberantly racy, irreverent films made before the censorship crackdown of 1934, noir followed the letter of the law but not the spirit. It demonstrated that crime doesn’t pay, and that the wages of sin are death, but along the way made audiences identify with flawed or unscrupulous characters. The stealth and insinuation that the Code required suited noir, which took advantage of audiences’ eagerness to suppose the worst. In his September 14, 1946, review of several noir films, James Agee defended crime movies by pointing out that “for many years so much has been forbidden or otherwise made impossible in Hollywood that crime has offered one of the few chances to get any sort of vitality on the screen.” Crime always has been and always will be exploited by filmmakers as an easy way to generate excitement and suspense. But film noir offered something more, a vision of the world in which crime is not an aberration or a marginal profession, but a temptation lurking in every heart. Gangsters and professional burglars are less important to noir than ordinary, law-abiding citizens who take a first wrong step in a moment of panic or temporary blindness. Frequently, noir went even further by making the wrongdoers not just law-abiding citizens but law-enforcing cops, whose corruption

Introduction

7

suggests that society and the laws that protect it are tainted or are inherently predatory. The enjoyment of film noir lies in a peculiar blend of empathy and Schadenfreude. There is always a sense that “it could happen to you,” but there is also the safe, vicarious thrill of watching people onscreen take the risks audiences might fantasize about but shrink from acting out. It was not just the Production Code that noir flouted, but the national character — resilient, optimistic, self-reliant — that American art and literature has traditionally celebrated. “America, as a social and political organization, is committed to a cheerful view of life,” Robert Warshow wrote in his seminal 1948 essay, “The Gangster as Tragic Hero.” Democracies depend on the conviction that they are making life better and happier for their citizens; only feudal and monarchical societies can enjoy the luxury of fatalism or a fundamentally pessimistic view of life. Praising the gangster genre as a form of modern tragedy, Warshow also accounted for film noir in his statement, “There always exists a current of opposition, seeking to express by whatever means are available to it that sense of desperation and inevitable failure which optimism itself helps to create.” The gangster’s demise is the purest American tragedy because it is driven by his mania to climb the ladder of success. The end of his saga is inevitable, so in chasing success he is really chasing failure; his self-destructiveness expresses defiance at the inevitability of defeat, but also confirms it. Gangster films of the thirties always had urban settings, and Warshow calls the gangster “the man of the city,” the man for whom “there is only the city; he must inhabit it in order to personify it: not the real city, but that dangerous and sad city of the imagination which is so much more important, which is the modern world.”

The Disappearing City In 1948, the same year that Warshow wrote his essay, Tracy Augur argued that traditional cities were obsolete and no longer met the needs of modern life; improvements in communication and transportation made it unnecessary to have large aggregations of people living together. President of the American Institute of Planners, Augur also advocated decentralization as a defense measure, suburbanization as a way to survive the atomic age. During the decades after the Second World War, cities hemorrhaged their populations, and a shift in perceptions of urban life accompanied the movement of city-dwellers into suburbs. Hollywood movies of the thirties served up glamorous urban fantasies: Fred and Ginger danced in gleaming, mirror-floored nightclubs while Nick and Nora Charles threw parties in their art deco penthouse, and small-town girls (usually played by Carole Lombard) would stop at nothing to escape their humdrum lives and get to New York. In 1946, by contrast, the zeitgeist was captured by Miracle on 34th Street, in which young Natalie Wood lives unhappily in a splendid apartment on Central Park West, dreaming of a suburban ranch house where she can have a tire swing. Suburbs were intended to mimic idealized small-town life: safe, clean and cohesive. They came instead to symbolize the breakdown of social bonds. With no town centers, street life or even sidewalks, there was nowhere for people to congregate or encounter

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each other by chance. There was none of the enforced intimacy of the tenement, and minding one’s own business became a way of life. There were no courtyards or other shared space; backyards obviated the need for parks. Segregated by class and race, suburbs eliminated diversity. With rows of near-identical houses, they promoted conformity. Purely residential, they cut people off from commerce, entertainment and industry. Everything about the design of suburbs was geared towards autonomy and privacy. Suburban streets are often eerily empty, like asphalt deserts. As people who had grown up in bustling neighborhoods and crowded tenements sought the “elbow room” that is embedded in the American dream of the good life, tight-knit communities broke into “nuclear” families, moving around too often to put down local roots. By now, a jaundiced view of suburban life as soulless and culturally impoverished has become commonplace. It is a dramatic cliché that the suburbs’ utopian pretensions and antiseptic perfection mock or even perversely exacerbate the flaws and dissatisfactions of their inhabitants. But film noir expressed prescient skepticism about suburbs at a time when they were still widely viewed as idyllic (think of Miracle on 34th Street). In Tension (1950), a husband drives his wife out from their L.A. apartment over a drugstore to see the house he wants to buy in a new subdivision. The place is raw, treeless, barren, with low, modernistic bungalows lined up in rows, receding into the distance where pylons march away on the horizon. “Isn’t it a beauty?” he says enthusiastically. “It’d be great to live out here — fresh air, room to entertain. And it’s a great spot for kids.” His unimpressed wife snorts, “It’s a miserable spot. It’s thirty minutes from nowhere.” For men, the suburbs were a place to come home to, far removed from their working lives. For women, however, they were a domestic ghetto. Noir mocked the postwar ideal of wholesome family life with stories illustrating how thin a line separates the middle and upper classes from an underworld of crime, danger, and illicit pleasures. Films like Pitfall and Crime of Passion, set in stultifying suburbs, are motivated by a creeping horror of being just like everyone else. How often noir protagonists cry, “I want to be somebody!” But escaping from mediocrity, breaking out of the mundane routine, leads to swift and sure punishment. Noir grimly illustrates Lewis Mumford’s conclusion (in his 1961 study, The City in History) that “the ultimate effect of the suburban escape in our time is, ironically, a low-grade uniform environment from which escape is impossible.” Mumford, one of the earliest and sharpest critics of these new developments, defined suburbia as “a collective effort to lead a private life,” and noted, “That smug Victorian phrase, ‘We keep ourselves to ourselves,’ expresses the spirit of the suburbs.” This way of life was directly linked to a Cold War emphasis on American individualism. William Levitt, who built the first Levittown in 1947 and earned himself the title Father of Suburbia, spelled out the importance of individual home ownership as a bulwark against socialism: “No man who owns his own home and lot can ever be a Communist; he has too much to do.” Urban life involves a dangerous amount of sharing and dependence on government-run infrastructure. An article by William H. Whyte in a 1957 issue of Fortune magazine asked bluntly, “Are Cities Un-American?” His answer was no, but it’s significant that the question would be posed at all.

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It seemed, for a time, that traditional cities would eventually vanish or be restructured out of all recognition. Frank Lloyd Wright had written a book in 1932 confidently titled The Disappearing City. In it he introduced his plan for Broadacre City, which like Le Corbusier’s 1922 plan for the “Contemporary City” (Ville Contemporaine) was a radical reimagining of urban space: horizontal rather than vertical, spread out rather than dense, dependent on cars, and devoid of a center. These visionaries embraced the idea of huge, cube-like towers widely spaced on green parkland, connected by multi-lane highways. Streets scaled for pedestrians, with a mix of shops, housing, entertainment and manufacture, were eliminated; Le Corbusier explained that cross-streets are an “enemy to traffic.” In his 1940 book, Magic Motorways, Norman Bel Geddes (father of Barbara Bel Geddes, who starred in several films discussed in this book) glorified the promise of speed and efficient travel, writing that “there should be no more reason for a motorist who is passing through a city to slow down than there is for an airplane which is passing over it.” While Broadacre City and the Ville Contemporaine were never built, their ideas had direct and devastating impact on the physical fabric of cities, which were reshaped by slum clearance (euphemized as “urban renewal” in the 1949 Housing Act) and the construction of highways and housing projects whose design reflected Le Corbusier’s horror of traditional urban congestion and messiness. In New York, Parks Commissioner Robert Moses sought to demolish historic, low-rise neighborhoods to make room for expressways and identical, slab-like high-rise towers. The wanton destruction of Manhattan’s magnificent Pennsylvania Station in 1964 reflected Wright’s dismissal, in The Disappearing City, of the grand railway station as a gateway to the city. Diminished concentration would render it unnecessary, he thought. (Since the population of New York has, instead, grown, the dismal underground replacement for Penn Station is perpetually choked with crowds.) Le Corbusier’s ideal of the “tower in a park” underlies the design of office parks and public housing projects — the latter now widely recognized as failures that isolate and alienate their inhabitants. This project of modernization, which reached its pinnacle (or nadir) in the 1960s and did not begin to reverse until the end of the 20th century, was driven by a wholesale rejection of the past and inordinate faith in the new. So many urban structures were destroyed beginning in the postwar period that it seems as if Americans were determined to do with bulldozers what had been done to European and Japanese cities with bombs. In Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity, Edward Dimendberg writes that during these years, “Perceptions of time and space, bodily rhythms, and experiences of speed, distance and density, were destroyed and remade no less palpably than the metropolitan fabric.” These changes brought “the attendant experiences of loss and displacement that produce a sense of being in exile at home.” Dimendberg argues persuasively that around 1949 (one year before the production of film noir peaked), “centrifugal” and ex-urban spaces began to replace the claustrophobic, “centripetal” spaces that had defined noir in its early years. Films made before and during the war (The Maltese Falcon, Laura, Double Indemnity, This Gun for Hire, Murder, My Sweet) took place mainly in interiors or studio-built sets, and were exclusively urban in mood and character. Immediately after the war, location shooting became more common and film noir began to explore non-urban settings, which dominate a handful of mid-to-late forties films like They Live by Night,

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“Always on the run, always on the move.” Cody Jarrett (James Cagney) at the wheel, with his loyal Ma (Margaret Wycherly, center) and disgruntled wife, Verna (Virginia Mayo, left) in White Heat (Raoul Walsh, 1949).

Detour and Out of the Past. The early fifties saw a spate of films set in the desert, and, beginning in the late forties, hybrid “noir westerns” darkened America’s most romanticized landscapes: open range, soaring mountains, sculpted mesas and canyons. Modern design — horizontal, spacious, sleekly spare — became part of the noir aesthetic in the mid-to-late fifties, marking a sharp change from the vertical, encroaching urban spaces of the early forties. Many films from the bitter end of the noir period, like Murder by Contract (1958) and The Brothers Rico (1957), have an anonymous, emptied-out, flat-lit look, influenced by television and imitating the corporate numbness of airports. Noir emphasizes the coldness and impersonality of the cheapened International Style, the generic blandness of American prosperity. Raoul Walsh’s White Heat (1949) is a good example of the “centrifugal” noir: it’s a film without a center, forever on the move. A criminal gang, disintegrating under the strains of resentment, betrayal and madness, moves between equally bleak urban and rural hideouts. The opening scene evokes outlaws of the Wild West, but with all glory stripped away; train robbery might seem a quaint crime if it weren’t executed with such savagery. The train is waylaid in a rocky no-man’s-land on the California border, and four railroad workers are killed, while one of the robbers is badly scalded by steam. After this job the

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gang holes up in a frigid, creaky old farmhouse “a hundred miles from nowhere,” as the leader’s wife gripes. Cooped up together in this gloomy Gothic house, surrounded by split-rail fences and naked, rolling hills, the gang members snipe at one another and grumble about their leader, Cody Jarrett ( James Cagney), who suffers debilitating migraine headaches and relies on his gaunt, fiercely loyal Ma, in whose lap he still huddles. His frailty only makes him more brutal. At his orders the gang leaves their wounded member behind, bandaged and in pain, to freeze to death once they make their move to a motor court in L.A. The blankness of the modern west makes room for Cagney’s majestically psychotic performance, fine-tuned and sensitive as a landmine. One year after Warshow published “The Gangster as Tragic Hero,” White Heat took the “man of the city” out of the city, but Cagney’s explosive death atop an industrial gas tank is the supreme illustration of Warshow’s observation that the gangster’s pursuit of success —“Made it, Ma! Top of the world!”— is a pursuit of death. Cody Jarrett crumples inward under the crushing pain and then erupts, and White Heat similarly closes in and breaks apart; people are either cramped in suffocating enclosures (Cody shoots a man while he’s locked in the trunk of a car, cruelly offering to “give him some air”), or stranded in vacant, inhospitable spaces. At the rural hideout, the wind is always blowing bitterly around the house, tossing the trees; Cody walks alone at night, talking to his dead mother, who was shot in the back by his wife while he was in jail. He tells a friend — really a police plant who will betray him — how lonesome he is, because “all I ever had was Ma,” and how hard his mother’s life was being “always on the run, always on the move.” White Heat brings together the ultra-modern — radio-tracking devices; drive-in movie theaters — with the pre-modern, even the primitive. It proves not just that film noir can thrive in the country as well as the city, but that noir was not merely a response to the new — industrialization, the bomb, etc.— but drew on deep veins in the American psyche and the American landscape: the desire to stand alone on top of the hill, even if there’s nowhere to go from there but death; and an accompanying fear of being buried “on the lone prairie,” having no one to talk to but the night wind.

A Lonely Time in America Noir flourishes in marginal places and what Marc Augé calls “non-places” (where “people are always, and never, at home”5): the outskirts of cities, industrial wastelands, airports and bus stations, motels, trains, and borderlands where identities and loyalties shift like sands. There are recurring noir images out here, too, evoking a transient, banal, melancholy world. Long-distance buses with their miserable enforced communities of travelers; the milling, waiting crowds in train stations; couples in cars driving all night. The new interstate highways carry people either pursued by their pasts or too dissatisfied to settle down. Travelers eat in roadside diners, all furnished with the same chunky white coffee cups and square napkin dispensers, the same leather-padded stools, handlettered signs, exhausted men with cigarettes dangling from their lips. They sleep in the dingy cabins of auto courts and anonymous motel rooms. “I like this: Early Nothing,” Gloria Grahame observes of a hotel room in The Big Heat (1953). Suburban homes are

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just as soulless, with their chintz curtains and twin beds, sterile kitchenettes and shadowy garages. During the postwar era, new technologies allowed life to be more private, eliminating the need for servants, milkmen and ice men, public transportation and public forums. More and more activities could be performed in “the comfort of your own home.” Theaters succumbed to television (described by T.S. Eliot as “a medium of entertainment which permits millions of people to listen to the same joke at the same time, and yet remain lonesome”), while trains and streetcars gave way to automobiles, the most noir form of transport (to be explored at length in Chapter 5). At the same time, the increase in surveillance, intrusive commercialism, and mass media made life less private, creating a virtual public space that was ever harder to shut out. Easy mobility and communication technologies made distance and proximity, presence and absence matter less. Homogenization erased any strong sense of place: if all houses look the same, and contain the same products, and take in the same sources of news and entertainment, and all towns have the same chain stores, geographic location becomes insignificant. The sharp distinction between cities and outlying areas breaks down, and isolation can co-exist with conformity. Mumford coined the term “the invisible city” for this dematerialized metropolis, and envisioned the arrival of “an encapsulated life, spent more and more either in a motor car or within the cabin of darkness before a television set ... untouched by human hand at one end, untouched by human spirit at the other.” As he drove around the U.S. in the mid–1950s, taking the pictures that would go into his 1958 book, The Americans, the Swiss photographer Robert Frank discovered “what a lonely time it can be in America, what a tough country it is.”6 He photographed a crowded drug store where men sit at the counter eating in silence, not looking at one another; passengers on a segregated New Orleans trolley, cut off from one another by white window frames; children waiting in parked cars; old people sitting on benches with their backs to one another; men working alone in offices, eating alone in cafeterias, sitting alone on curbs and sleeping alone in parks. A television droning on in an empty, sunlit restaurant intensifies rather than relieves the emptiness. A white man reads a newspaper, his face hidden behind his hand, as his shoes are shined by a black man in an empty men’s room lined with white urinals. Jack Kerouac called this the loneliest picture ever made. Frank’s people don’t look unhappy so much as weary, wary, weathered, idle, dreamy. They’re used to being alone. A black woman sitting in a field at sunset laughs with her hand on her hip: she loves to see that evening sun go down. But The Americans was attacked on its release, and later revered, for making America look like a sad, ugly, uneasy place. Flipping through it, you see lonely roads; then you start to see lonely gas pumps, lonely restrooms, lonely jukeboxes, lonely mailboxes. It seems to be built into our habitat. American culture has always found a special glamour in the lonesomeness of cowboys and frontiersmen, hoboes and drifters, train whistles and long straight roads running west. Frank scratched beneath this romanticism without quite destroying it, and film noir did something similar with its gripping, downbeat stories of isolated people incapable of connection. America is a nation of aliens, a country of strangers built on ideals of independence

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and freedom, faith in the ability to shape one’s own character and life. Film noir turned up the underside of this philosophy: selfishness, distrust, lack of fixed identity. Through the lens of noir, America appears as a country where no one can be trusted, where callous and predatory behavior is the norm. Depression-era movies often evoked a sense of shared struggle and working-class unity. World War II films showed men from all walks of life pulling together to act as a team and fight for their country, while women and children back home displayed loyalty and support for their neighbors. After the sacrifices and the sense of purpose that carried people through the war years, a feeling of letdown and disenchantment was inevitable. There was no longer a hard-times sense of being all in the same boat. (Kirk Douglas nastily smirks at his colleagues in Ace in the Hole: “I’m in the boat. You’re in the water.”) The upbeat propaganda of uniting for a common cause looked naïve as servicemen returned to the difficult readjustments — troubled marriages, unemployment and psychological distress — that always greet veterans. Aged by the horrors of the war, people relished the wised-up, hard-boiled attitude that film noir flaunted. Films like Cry Danger (1951) depicted a battered country that had turned pessimism into a joke. A man just out of prison after serving five years for something he didn’t do trades sour wisecracks with a one-legged, alcoholic ex–Marine. They make their home in a dilapidated trailer; the vet (Richard Erdman) falls for a pickpocket who steals

“We’re all just trying to make a buck.” Truckers Ed (Millard Mitchell, left) and Nick (Richard Conte, right) hope for a big score in Thieves’ Highway (Jules Dassin, 1949) (Photofest).

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his wallet whenever he gets drunk; the ex-con (Dick Powell) idealistically tries to vindicate his best friend, who’s still in jail, only to find out he’s a double-crossing liar. The film achieves an extraordinary blend of the glum and the snappy, recalling the gallows humor of movies from the depth of the Depression. “What’s five years?” Powell says of his stretch. “You could do that just sitting around and waiting.” This was hardly the tone mainstream America projected during the fifties. Compared with the monumental challenges of the Depression and the war, the problems of the postwar era were submerged beneath the surface of triumphant patriotism and growing prosperity. In Bowling Alone: the Collapse and Revival of American Community, Robert D. Putnam cites the nineteen-fifties and sixties as a time when “engagement in community affairs and the sense of shared identity and reciprocity had never been greater in modern America.” The pessimism about communities and human relationships expressed in film noir was an undercurrent or counter-current to the mainstream. (Similarly, the murder rate was lower in the fifties than before or after; the popularity of crime movies did not reflect a real crime wave, but perhaps channeled other anxieties.) It was a prophetic vision that has become only more compelling with time, a development that may explain the passionate revival of interest in film noir in the last decades of the 20th century, when the vision became recognizable reality. As Putnam notes, “Community has warred incessantly with individualism for preeminence in our political hagiography.” During the Cold War years, expressions of communitarian spirit or calls for collective action could rouse suspicions of communist sympathies.7 Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) crystallized the paranoia of the time with its vision of brainwashed uniformity as an aggressive, infectious disease. But are the pod people communists, or are they conformist McCarthyites filled with an irrational hatred for difference? A few noir films (like Pickup on South Street) depict communism as a form of crime — only worse. But many of the writers, directors and actors associated with film noir were liberals, often former Communist Party members who had seen the left-wing idealism of the thirties buried by World War II and then vilified during the Cold War. Disillusioned, they used crime movies to indict a culture of rampant greed and cutthroat competition. For instance, Thieves’ Highway (1949), the last film directed by Jules Dassin before he left the country to escape the blacklist, slices open the produce business to reveal the rotten heart of capitalism. Even something as pure and nourishing as an apple becomes a poisoned agent of strife when it’s equated with money. A Polish farmer, enraged at being paid less than he was promised for his apples, flings boxes of them off a truck, screaming, “Seventy-five cents! Seventy-five cents!” The apples roll wastefully across the ground, an image foreshadowing the film’s most famous shot, when after the same truck has careened off the road and exploded, apples roll silently down the hillside toward the flaming wreck. When the dead trucker’s partner finds out that money-grubbers have gone out to collect the scattered load to sell, he begins kicking over crates of apples, fuming, “Four bits a box! Four bits a box!” Everyone in the movie is “just trying to make a buck,” and cash haunts the film, dirty crumpled bills changing hands in a series of soiled, coercive transactions. It is easy to see why the House Un-American Activities Committee wanted to drive

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these directors out of Hollywood. Films like Joseph Losey’s The Prowler (discussed in chapter 7) and Cy Endfield’s The Sound of Fury (a.k.a. Try and Get Me!, 1950) are scathing attacks on a materialistic society, unmasking the American dream as a shallow and shabby illusion that breeds crime and shreds the social fabric. (Both directors fled to England in the early fifties to avoid persecution by the HUAC.) Endfield’s stark anti-lynching drama opens with a down-on-his-luck family man hitchhiking on a dark highway; he tells the trucker who picks him up that he’s been looking in vain for a job. Howard Tyler (Frank Lovejoy) moved his wife and son out to the postwar California suburb of Santa Sierra, hoping for a better life; “I can’t help it if a million other guys had the same idea,” he complains bitterly. They live in a little bungalow behind a wire fence that makes the place look like a miniature P.O.W. camp. Howard’s pregnant wife hates the idea of using a charity clinic, and frets over money owed for groceries, while his angry, whiny little boy begs for money to go the baseball game (“All the other kids are goin’!”). A bartender at a bowling alley sneers at his cheap customer: “You take a beer drinker, you got a jerk.” If Howard weren’t so dejected and humiliated, he would never fall under the spell of Jerry (Lloyd Bridges), the vain braggart he meets at the bowling alley. Primping and preening, flexing his muscles and showing off his fancy aftershave (“Smells expensive!”), the manic Jerry boasts about his sexual conquests and the big money he makes, and he treats the modest Howard like his valet. He offers to put him onto something good —“nothing risky”— just driving the car for his hold ups. When Howard hesitates, Jerry snorts, “You guys kill me! The more you get kicked in the teeth the better you like it.” Their first job is knocking over the grocery store at a cheap motel (“The Rambler’s Rest”), where Jerry easily intimidates an elderly couple and pistol-whips their son. Intoxicated with the easy money — and a few stiff drinks — Howard bursts in on his family with armfuls of groceries. His wife gasps at the extravagance of baked ham and canned peaches, and he brags that now they can get their own TV, and won’t have to go over and watch their neighbors.’ “And we’ll throw this piece of junk away!” he crows, pointing to the family’s radio. Soon Howard is buying his wife new shoes and dresses with hot money, telling her he has a night job at a cannery. His little boy sports a cowboy outfit and ambushes his jumpy father with toy guns. Unsatisfied with these penny-ante crimes, Jerry comes up with a scheme to kidnap a wealthy young man and hold him for ransom. He’s overcome by envy as he fingers the victim’s suit, tailor-made in New York, and after they’ve taken him out to a gravel pit in a disused army base, Jerry panics and kills him. When Howard gets home, dazed with horror and guilt, his wife wakes and tells him about the lovely dream she was having: she had the baby and this time there was no pain at all; “I got right up out of the hospital and took her shopping. I was buying her a pinafore.” Even in her dreams she’s a consumer, subconsciously linking commercial goods with the fantasy of a painless life. As Howard mentally unravels, the shoddiness and vulgarity of the culture around him takes on a sinister cast. Jerry shows him the ransom note he’s written in a diner while ordering a steak sandwich (“Cow on a slab!” the waitress yells.) For cover, they go out of town to mail the letter, taking along Jerry’s girlfriend, a glossy blonde who works in a beauty parlor, and a lonely manicurist she has dug up for Howard. In a nightclub, he’s subjected to a string of dumb jokes and parlor magic tricks from a burlesque comedian (“Blame my

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psychiatrist,” the comic quips, “I didn’t pay my bill last month and he’s letting me go crazy!”). Even before sensationalizing newspaper articles stir up a frenzy of mob violence, the crowd is clearly a mindless and malevolent force. Film noir filtered many social issues through its visceral stories, and it relentlessly exposed the atomization of American society. Healthy, functioning groups don’t exist; even gangs and criminal “organizations” break apart because their members are out for themselves, ready to betray one another for a payoff or a bigger share of the take. Institutions such as politics and business appear only in stories revealing their corruption; the possibility of communal action is never entertained. The police are the only representatives of government commonly seen, and they are often shown as bullying and crooked, hounding innocent suspects with sadistic relish. Even films that take the side of law enforcement depict it as an army battling a criminal nation, both separate from mainstream society. (“Nobody likes cops, on either side of the law,” Robert Ryan snarls resentfully in On Dangerous Ground.) Apart from the justice system, the public sphere does not exist: the town meetings and popular movements that crowd the screen in thirties films, with indignant and excitable citizens marching, rioting or celebrating, are unimaginable in film noir. People seem to exist in a vacuum. Rather than offering any balm for isolation, noir films warn against trusting strangers, or even loved ones. (Robert Frank discovered the provincial American suspicion of strangers when he was arrested in Arkansas simply for having a foreign accent and a camera. He was asked point-blank, “Are you a commie?”) Good Samaritans who pick up hitchhikers become hostages to vicious predators, like the sadistic Emmett Meyers in The Hitch-Hiker. The affable owner of a gas station and hamburger stand in The Postman Always Rings Twice impulsively hires a charming vagrant, who conspires with the owner’s young wife to kill him. “In this world you turn the other cheek and get hit with a lugwrench,” says a wealthy industrialist in Impact, after waking in a ditch where he was left for dead by his wife’s lover. “I don’t even trust my own mother,” a crooked businessman boasts in Ride the Pink Horse. Like the man trapped in a cave in Ace in the Hole, many noir protagonists are buried alive, beyond reach and beyond help. Some are natural loners, like the small-time gambler Robert Mitchum plays in His Kind of Woman!, described as “a lone wolf without friends or relatives, a man who’s made it his business all his life to keep under cover.” Others fight against solitude, justifying betrayals and crimes as John Hodiak does in Desert Fury: “A guy’s alone. All his life he’s alone. He keeps trying not to be alone.” Some find themselves cut off by a crime, a mistake or a false accusation. Some are set apart by their contempt for average people, others are unable to fit in despite their desire to belong. Some are alienated by their violent tempers, by a monomania, greed or sexual obsession, by power or helplessness, by betrayal, or simply by living in a world controlled by random chance. Few are as honest as Robert Ryan in Clash by Night, who cries out, “Help me, I’m dying of loneliness!” In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville defined individualism as “a calm and considered feeling, which predisposes each citizen to sever himself from the mass of his fellow creatures, and to draw apart from his family and friends.” He warned of the danger this self-absorption could pose to society, making it vulnerable to apathy, anarchy and,

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perhaps, new forms of despotism. I’m not trying to say that Tocqueville foresaw film noir in 1835, but this passage is oddly descriptive of postwar American society as it appears in noir’s dark mirror: The first thing that strikes the observation is an innumerable multitude of men all equal and alike, incessantly endeavoring to procure the petty and paltry pleasures with which they glut their lives. Each of them, living apart, is a stranger to the fate of all the rest — his children and his private friends constitute to him the whole of mankind; as for the rest of his fellow citizens, he is close to them, but he sees them not — he touches them, but he feels them not; he exists but in himself and for himself alone; and if his kindred still remain to him, he may be said at any rate to have lost his country.8

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CHAPTER 1

Imaginary Prisons: Noir and the City Then the vision of an enormous town presented itself, of a monstrous town more populous than some continents and in its man-made might as if indifferent to heaven’s frowns and smiles; a cruel devourer of the world’s light. There was room enough there to place any story, depth enough there for any passion, variety enough there for any setting, darkness enough to bury five million lives. —Joseph Conrad

Splendid Deserts: Alienation and the Modern City Walking the streets of Los Angeles in Double Indemnity, Walter Neff discovers that he can’t hear his own footsteps: “It was the walk of a dead man.” He’s far from alone in this sudden discovery that, no matter how good a fight he puts up, it’s too late: the coffin lid has already closed, and there’s only so much air left to breathe. “You’re dead, son. Get yourself buried,” the mighty J.J. Hunsecker barks at his desperate minion Sidney Falco in Sweet Smell of Success. An enemy likewise gloats over the hero of Night and the City: “You’ve got everything, but you’re a dead man, Harry Fabian, a dead man.” If Walter Neff is the walking dead, Fabian is the sprinting dead, pelting around London in a feverish flurry of schemes and scams. Even his fellow crooks deny him refuge after he angers a powerful underworld figure; in a city of a million alleys, holes and corners, there’s no place to hide. The London of Night and the City is recognizable as the “monstrous town” Conrad described in his preface to The Secret Agent (1907), a story of anarchism, espionage and murder as mazy as London’s streets and murky as its coal fogs.1 As film noir would amply prove, year after year, there was indeed darkness enough. In “The Waste Land,” T.S. Eliot compares London’s crowds to the teeming shades whose numbers surprised Dante in the Inferno. Going about their business, they evoke a fate worse than death: a sterile, interminable lifeless life: Under the brown fog of a winter’s dawn, A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, I had not thought death had undone so many.2

The noir city, like Eliot’s London, is a necropolis; its tremendous energies are destructive rather than creative. “The metropolis is rank with forms of negative vitality,” Lewis Mumford wrote in The City in History. “Nature and human nature, violated in this envi19

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ronment, come back in destructive forms.... In this mangled state, the impulse to life departs from apparently healthy personalities. The impulse to die supplants it.” The persistent association of cities with ruin and death is linked to their ancient association with money-worship, sexual deviance, corruption and hubris. Cities destroyed because of their wickedness (Sodom and Gomorrah) or because they challenged the gods (Babel) recur throughout the world’s mythologies.3 (The fate of Lot’s wife, whose crime was to look back at the Cities of the Plain, is noted in Kiss Me Deadly and The Strange Love of Martha Ivers.) The doomed men and women in film noir don’t think they’re chasing death; they’re after money, success, freedom, sex, or even love. That their desires and ambitions lead them toward failure, loss or extinction reflects noir’s foundational pessimism: those who climb high, fall; those who reach out are cut down; those who seek to grow larger are diminished; those who step off the beaten path are lost. Cities are built on precisely these efforts to improve, expand, amass and achieve; the bigger, higher and more advanced they grow, the more fragile and perilous they become. Cities give visible form to the whole project of human development away from the natural state, so they are natural targets for criticisms of progress and all aspects of modern technology, economies, governments and societies that are perceived as unnatural or degenerate. Americans have always harbored a special distrust of cities, following the argument of Thomas Jefferson, who wanted the nation to remain an agrarian society, believing that urban industry and commerce were corrosive to virtue and self-reliance. Influenced by classical visions of pastoral society, such as Virgil’s Eclogues, Jefferson wrote (in Notes on Virginia, 1785) that “those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God, if He ever had a chosen people.” The problem with cities, according to many antiurban thinkers, is that they are cut off from nature and from the sources of their sustenance. They devour resources they can’t produce. The divorce of money-making from useful products or services leads in its purest form to crime. In film noir, theft, blackmail, organized crime and gambling are capitalism’s shadow, if not its mirror image. “Money has no moral opinions,” Joe Morse ( John Garfield) says in Force of Evil (1948). As a crooked lawyer working on Wall Street for the numbers racket, Morse recalls how, when he decided to accept his slide into crime, he could smell money as though it was perfume pervading the city’s air. It was there to be taken, not earned. (Sidney Falco [Tony Curtis] similarly rhapsodizes about his “favorite perfume — success,” and his urge to be “way up high, where it’s always balmy.”) The growth of cities like New York was shaped by economic forces — the desire of landlords and developers to squeeze as much profit as possible from each parcel of land — not by goals of livability or beauty. The Industrial Revolution expanded cities and dehumanized them: street grids, factory work, trains and crowded tenements all forced people to submit to regimentation, congestion and anonymity. Urban development increasingly favored cars, technology, manufacture and business over people. In Metropolis (1927), Fritz Lang’s dystopian vision of the modern city, workers live in subterranean ghettos, slaves to the machines that power the fabulous elevated realm of the wealthy. Nature exists only in the pleasure gardens of the idle rich. Sex is a destructive, mechanized force embodied by a robot that whips nightclub patrons into a depraved frenzy and the workers into an orgy of suicidal rebellion. The city is so thoroughly artificial that its existence

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The human enslaved by the machine: Gustav Frölich in Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927).

depends on the machines; when the workers abandon them, their underground dwellings flood, almost drowning their children. The hero envisions the machines as Moloch, a greedy god devouring the workers. The argument that film noir is a critique of cities, a response to the strains of modern urban life, draws on this history of anti-urban thought. But the extreme stylization and distortion of the noir city suggests a different view: that noir used cities to represent its vision of modern life — both specific aspects of postwar society and eternal features of human nature and relationships. Alienation, corruption and all the many forms of “negative vitality” are embodied in cities, which act as complex visual allegories. They are not the source of these problems, but rather the expression of them. The sight of Manhattan’s spires rising up out of the harbor at night famously inspired Lang’s design for Metropolis. The futuristic city may be morally crippled, but it is a beautiful, awe-inspiring spectacle, worth saving in the end. By contrast, film noir’s most unforgiving portraits of cities drain them of any visual splendor. The noir city is often a blank, undistinguished “Any City, U.S.A.” These drab towns possess all the drawbacks of city life (crime, cramped quarters, the absence of greenery) without the advantages of culture, architecture, ethnic flavor or local character. The “street with no name” that runs all across America, a metaphor for organized crime (and the title of a 1948 film), can also stand for the formless urban mass explored in film noir.

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In the opening scene of John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle (1950), the camera follows a prowl car through the grey streets of a nameless Midwestern city at dawn, deserted except for a stick-up man scurrying to safety after a robbery. This is no metropolis: there are no landmarks, no distinctive towers, no signs of any kind of vitality: just run-down, low-rise buildings, wide streets and shabby little businesses. There’s an intimate, tactile sense of grim and comfortless surroundings: dirty, scuffed, hard, ugly surfaces; blank walls and bricks; unadorned, grubby, impersonal rooms. Even the home of the wealthy Mr. Emmerich (Louis Calhern) is oddly bland and generic; only the room of his invalid wife has curtains, decorations and pictures. Many scenes are set in a small, windowless hideout, where harsh lighting ravages men’s faces — especially the sweaty, pock-marked face of the nervous bookie Cobby (Marc Lawrence). Dix Handley (Sterling Hayden), the stick-up man from the opening scene, despises the city. He dreams of buying back the family horse farm in Kentucky that was lost through bankruptcy, and says that the first thing he will do when he gets home is to “take a bath in the crick, get this city dirt off me.” (“If you want fresh air, don’t look for it in this town,” someone else remarks.) Dix’s opposite number is the treacherous private detective Brannom (Brad Dexter), a slick urban type who sneeringly calls the Kentuckian “farmer” and threatens that he’ll “never pitch another forkful of manure.” Dix is the last of the participants in the central heist to remain free and alive; he escapes the city,

A shabby, cheerless urban environment: Donato (Alberto Morin, left), Dix (Sterling Hayden, center) and Doc Reidenschneider (Sam Jaffe, right) in a hideout The Asphalt Jungle (John Huston, 1950).

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wounded, and drives to Kentucky with the help of his devoted girlfriend. But he is another of the walking dead: by the time he reaches his destination a doctor says he “doesn’t have enough blood to keep a chicken alive.” He collapses and dies in a field, nuzzled by gentle grazing horses. Dix, the spokesman for the film’s condemnation of cities and its romantic belief in the land, is a dumb and violent “hooligan.” It seems dangerously simplistic to conclude that the city is solely to blame for his corruption, that if only “Pa hadn’t sold that black colt,” he would never have turned to crime. Each participant in the heist has a different reason for needing a big score: to support a mistress, to pay protection money, or simply to provide for a family. “One way or another, we all work for our vice,” says Doc Reidenschneider (Sam Jaffe), the mastermind of the caper and one of noir’s most aphoristic sages. Dix’s vice is betting on horse races; he’s deep in debt to Cobby but keeps on making losing bets, furious when his honor as a debtor is doubted. The difference between raising horses and gambling on ones he may never see perfectly illustrates the dislocation of urban life, and Dix is warped by it; he blames his surroundings for what he’s become, and takes out his hatred on the city by robbing and killing its inhabitants. Doc, on the other hand, is a career criminal unfazed by long jail terms; a rootless professional who lives by the motto, “Home is where the money is.” He’s a pragmatic, likable man who never carries a gun; his cynicism has none of the bitterness that poisons Dix’s wounded idealism. He tells the nostalgic country boy, “You can always go home. And when you do, it’s nothing. Believe me, I’ve done it.” Doc and Dix, so different in their backgrounds and desires, are both honorable thieves, as are the gang’s professional boxman and driver. The respectable citizen who supplies the operating money is the real rat; he’s actually broke and planning to doublecross the thieves. The only person lower is a cop who takes protection money but still arrests his patron, playing both sides of the fence. Lawful societies and criminal enterprises depend equally on adherence to a contract, and in noir the bonds of trust are always frayed, endangering cities, gangs, marriages, families, neighborhoods, even spontaneous partnerships between strangers. In the final scene of The Asphalt Jungle, a police chief explains away the occasional crooked cop by arguing that, though law enforcement may be imperfect, if there were no police force “the jungle wins, the predatory beasts take over.” This image summons a Hobbesian view of human nature as essentially savage and selfish, of society and its laws as necessary to suppress the anti-social impulses of individuals. But an even darker view is possible. Joseph Conrad articulated it when he wrote, “Crime is a necessary condition for all types of organizations.... Man is a vicious animal. His viciousness must be organized. Society is essentially criminal — or it would not exist.”4 Film noir dissected many kinds of crime-bound communities: gangs both temporary and permanent (White Heat, The Killing, Criss Cross); couples whose love affairs become murderous partnerships (The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity); prisoners plotting jail breaks (Brute Force). In the aftermath of the 1950–1951 Kefauver hearings into the mafia, noir developed a fascination with criminal “organizations” that copied the structures and methods of big business and metastasized across the country, forming a shadow economy. In New York Confidential (1955), the Syndicate is a new form of society as radical as communism. Its central rule is that the Organization is always more important

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than the individual; anyone who endangers the security of the group is immediately eliminated. Impersonal and ruthlessly logical, the Organization becomes a monstrous machine — another Moloch — that cannibalizes its own members in an endless cycle of self-destruction. The Brothers Rico (Phil Karlson, 1957) deepens the horror of this inhumanity by meshing corporate-style crime with an Italian family and tracing the decline of the once-paramount virtue of loyalty. It’s a small, low-key movie, but it has a chilling heart. Richard Conte, who played gangsters with silky elegance and dangerously glittering eyes (he’s the quiet, icily polite hit man in New York Confidential), stars as a man who believes the Organization functions like a family, and is tragically disillusioned as he’s duped into betraying his own brother. In a sterile world laundered of all human empathy, he learns the hard way to accept his own mama’s advice: “Don’t trust nobody.” Cities force people into close contact with countless others with whom they can have no personal relationships, blurring the distinction between solitude and companionship. At best, cities grant freedom from scrutiny and interference, or “the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy,” as E.B. White wrote in Here Is New York. There is both more and less privacy in cities: it’s impossible to get away from other people, and city-dwellers grow used to seeing into their neighbors’ windows and cease to care if they are seen. Modern surveillance techniques mean that they must also submit to being electronically spied on and tracked. But urban life is predicated on mutual indifference; people learn to ignore one another. Mark Twain saw this in 1867 when he called New York “a splendid desert — a domed and steepled solitude, where a stranger is lonely in the midst of a million of his race ... never seeing a familiar face, never seeing a strange one the second time.... The natural result is ... the serene indifference of the New Yorker to everybody and everything without the pale of his private and individual circle.” The cliché of the “lonely crowd” unites congestion and alienation, suggesting that when there are too many people, communication and natural sympathy break down. Fugitives in film noir constantly encounter this paradox; they are traced by sophisticated technologies and hemmed in by the ubiquity of witnesses, but when they seek help from strangers or acquaintances, no one wants to get involved — except those who offer help while planning betrayal for a payoff. In noir, it’s not only criminals, outsiders and anti-social loners who are alienated. Society is pervaded by the assumption that everyone is out for himself; selfish and distrustful, people are alone together. They’re not rejecting mainstream values like counter-culture rebels; they’re just trying to survive in a society that seems to reserve its cruelest punishments for the trusting. Noir constantly denies any benign view of the urban crowd. Random encounters and accidents become nightmares: the entirely innocent protagonist of Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man (based on the true story of Queens native Christopher Emmanuel Balestrero), is dragged to jail because he happens to look like a local robber. The serendipity of urban life is distorted into improbable coincidences, constructing that distinctive, malicious net of circumstances that closes in around the guilty and blameless alike. In The Stranger on the Third Floor (1940), a reporter, tormented by the suspicion that his testimony may have convicted an innocent man, runs into the real culprit on the staircase of his building. Unseen forces control events to a degree impossible in the thick of a real city: in Phantom

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Lady (1944), a killer who wants to destroy a fall guy’s alibi manages to bribe every single person who saw him one evening to deny that they did — an achievement that would be utterly impossible in New York. Film noir focuses most often on hidden aspects of urban life: crime and police work, the secret dramas that go on behind closed doors. Only a handful of films treat the city as spectacle. Fourteen Hours (1951) is based on the true story of a man who perched on the ledge of a hotel building threatening suicide — and did eventually jump. The film plunges into the huge crowd attracted by the drama, whose reactions range from callous (cab drivers bet on what time he will jump) to sensitive (a woman about to sign divorce papers is moved to give her husband another chance). Crowds are rarely portrayed this tolerantly. Usually they are mobs, ready to lynch or riot, baying for blood at boxing matches, enjoying a carnival built around a man buried alive in a cave, capable of any cruelty because their members have shed any individual sense of responsibility. Edgar Allan Poe wrote cryptically about the sinister undercurrent that draws crowds together in a mysterious, unforgettable story, “The Man of the Crowd” (1840). The narrator follows an old man through the streets of London for a night and a day, observing how he compulsively seeks out the densest crowds and mingles aimlessly among them, seeming to feed like a vampire on the energy of the throng. “This old man,” the narrator finally concludes, “is the type and genius of deep crime. He refuses to be alone. He is the man of the crowd.” Poe’s narrator is a flâneur, a people-watcher, a connoisseur of street life. The type appeared in the latter half of the 19th century, as city streets became cleaner and safer, and as developments in shopping and urban design turned streets into stage sets for an ongoing pageant. Women, for the first time, could venture into public spaces alone; restaurants, sidewalk cafés, department stores and free public parks all brought diverse crowds of people together. The flâneur was the first, other than prostitutes, criminals and the poorest classes (vendors, beggars, street-sweepers, etc.) to inhabit the streets rather than simply move through them. The flâneur is a detached observer who enjoys the flow of the crowd without becoming part of it. In place of the flâneur, noir has the detective, who attempts to uncover the secrets of a city that, as Poe wrote, does not “permit itself to be read.”5 In the noir city, disinterested pleasure in the urban scene is impossible; you can’t watch without getting involved. Cities turn people into inadvertent or unwilling witnesses, like the little boy in The Window who sees his tenement neighbors commit a murder, or the man in Woman on the Run who stumbles onto a murder while walking his dog. The Window, like Hitchcock’s Rear Window (and like Phantom Lady), was based on a story by Cornell Woolrich, whose cities were less gritty and corrupt than Hammett’s or Chandler’s but more fatalistic, ingrown and claustrophobic. The City That Never Sleeps (1953) unites themes of the urban theater and the unwilling witness in the figure of the Mechanical Man, an actor whose job is to impersonate a robot in the plate-glass window of a burlesque club, attracting crowds to guess whether he is metal or flesh-and-blood. (A reverse of the robot that impersonates a living woman in Metropolis.) From this window he sees a shooting, and must convince the killer, who has spotted him, that he is only a harmless machine. The actor (Wally Cassell) is a lovelorn

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loser, pining for a stripper who’s involved with a crooked, married policeman and fantasizing about living with her in some remote, exotic paradise. Degraded by his monotonous publicity stunt, he sees himself as less than human, or “just a mechanical man.” The one time that his life depends on playing the role to perfection, the stripper chooses that moment to tell him she loves him, that they can go away together. Tears cut channels through the silver makeup on his face. Loneliness, spectacle, crime, mechanization, commercialized sexuality, and the dangerous proximities of urban life all come together in this moment, in a film narrated by Chicago itself.

From the Naked City to the Invisible City Watching as a noisy drunk is thrown out of a Times Square bar, J.J. Hunsecker announces, “I love this dirty town!” Film noir loved the city with a similar dark glee, reveling in its dynamism, labyrinthine mysteries and tawdry allure, even as it vividly depicted all the ills attributed to urban life. The noir city was as much a locus of desire as of fear, and film noir produced some of the most pungent and seductive urban imagery on film. This paradox reflected the state of flux and incipient crisis in postwar American cities. They still possessed great power and influence in the 1950s as centers of culture, fashion, society, and wealth. It wasn’t until the sixties that cities began to visibly decay and became associated with race riots, white flight, poverty and violent crime. Here, as in other ways, film noir was prophetic, finding the roots of the anxiety that led people to reject cities even as it still portrayed them as dominant, glamorous magnets. Alexander Mackendrick’s Sweet Smell of Success (1957) subtly portrays the irony in New York’s role as the nation’s cultural capital. While his physical territory is a small, nocturnal tract of midtown Manhattan, J.J. Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster) reaches a nationwide audience through a syndicated gossip column and radio addresses, and his public persona is that of a sentimental, patriotic conservative. He is, in fact, a cruel, ruthless egotist and a warped man obsessed with his sister. When a jazz musician whom he slanders in his column as a pot-smoking communist calls him “a national disgrace,” he takes refuge behind his readers, the clean, decent Americans who trust him. Hunsecker and the fauxpopulist television superstar Lonesome Rhodes in Kazan’s A Face in the Crowd (also 1957), who broadcasts his folksy program from a Manhattan studio, demonstrate the symbiotic relationship between cities and the rest of the country. As urban advertisers, entertainers and politicians catered to ex-urban populations suspicious of cities, they created a flattering simulacrum of small-town and rural America and sold it to people living in the real thing. Even as Americans turned away from urban life they were engulfed by it, their contact with nature and traditional communities replaced by contact with mass media and branded commercial products. Thus the modern “invisible city” encompassed its opposite. Sweet Smell of Success, however, reeks with local flavor. Shooting on location in and around Times Square, cinematographer James Wong Howe emphasizes the scrappy, jostling visual clutter but also gives everything a glistening, obsidian sheen. Coffee urns in all-night drug stores and the chrome hubcaps of cars gleam; the pavement itself shimmers on this brutal street of dreams. The film that started the trend for location shooting,

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and for turning the city into a central character, was Jules Dassin’s The Naked City (1948), which remains far more interesting for its footage of New York than for its rather perfunctory detective story. Noir rarely attempted to present a well-balanced overview of the city; parks, cultural institutions, landmarks and schools rarely appear, while places ordinary inhabitants seldom see, like police stations and the waterfront, loom large. The Naked City, by contrast, presents New York as a city of ordinary men and women going about their daily business. Despite focusing on a murder, it has little of the raw, lurid feeling that Weegee captured in his photographs, which he published under the title The Naked City in 1945. Like the pseudo-documentaries Boomerang! and Call Northside 777, Dassin’s film takes the point of view of a conscientious detective, and it comes to a happy conclusion.6 It ends with the famous line (later recycled in a television program of the same name), “There are eight million stories in the naked city. This has been one of them.” You’re left with the feeling that crime is only a small and manageable strand in the city’s tapestry. The Naked City does, however, focus on certain aspects of urban space that noir habitually accentuated. In the denouement, a killer is chased onto the Williamsburg Bridge and climbs up to the top of one of the towers, irrationally fleeing to a dead end. He reaches the top and can’t go any further: the city lies spread out below him for a moment before he is shot and plummets to the roadbed below. Precarious and vertiginous settings recur constantly in film noir: high windows, rooftops, fire escapes, bridges, train platforms and rail yards, ledges and stairs. Narrow, unsteady, barred and often twisting, the staircase is a ubiquitous motif found in all types of film noir, a durable visual metaphor for the noir predicament. In the final scene of Force of Evil, John Garfield goes down under the George Washington Bridge to find his brother’s body; it is grey dawn, and the stark, endless stone steps he descends look surreal, like something in a dream. “Naturally I was feeling very bad as I went down there,” he narrates. “I just kept going down and down there. I felt like I was going to the bottom of the world.” Subterranean passages often appear as the refuge of literal “underworld” figures: the Vienna sewers in The Third Man, where the elegant, charismatic Harry Lime ends up scuttling like a trapped rat; the Los Angeles storm drains used as escape routes by a technologically savvy criminal loner in He Walked by Night, the New York subways where pickpocket Skip McCoy makes his living in Pickup on South Street. The architectural elements noir emphasizes are many of the same ones Piranesi fantastically magnified in his print series “Carceri d’Invenzione [Imaginary Prisons]” (1750), in which he conceived lofty, cavernous spaces filled with intricate webs of bridges, arches, stairs, balconies and machinery. Like the noir cityscape, Piranesi’s “imaginary prisons” are both mind-bogglingly vast and torturously confining, full of obstacles and ropes and cages. “Did you ever stop to think how cities crowd you?” a character says in the David Goodis novel Nightfall. “They move in on you, like stone walls moving in. You get the feeling you’ll be crushed. It happens slow, but you imagine it happening fast. You feel like yelling. You want to run. You don’t know where to run. You think if you start running something will stop you.” In noir cities, people squeeze themselves into the shadows of doorways; they run to the ends of piers or find themselves trapped in narrow, dead-end alleys; they climb fire escapes and hide in cellars. The exploitation of these Piranesian structures

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is evidence of the way noir turned cities into material metaphors. Urban life is not dangerous and disorienting because people are surrounded by alleys, stairwells and underground passageways. It’s just that these spaces — which cause ordinary city-dwellers no undue distress — can be converted cinematically into visceral images of danger and disorientation. Nicholas Christopher proposes that the basic motif of film noir is the mythological trope of “the hero entering the labyrinth,” and that “the labyrinth is an American city.” European cities, with their layers of history, their wartime scars and complicated cultural and political compromises, were even more maze-like and haunted by the past than their American counterparts; consider London in Night and the City or Vienna in The Third Man. It was in Vienna and Berlin that Fritz Lang, Billy Wilder, Max Ophüls, Otto Preminger, and Robert Siodmak began their careers; they looked at American cities through European eyes, both observing American society with an outsider’s clarity and overlaying New World towns with the abraded atmosphere of older capitals. The “hero entering the labyrinth” can be either a detective or policeman hunting for a criminal, or a criminal on the run, searching for a safe haven or a way out. The wounded fugitives in Siodmak’s Cry of the City and Carol Reed’s Odd Man Out act as guides illuminating the darkest recesses of their cities; the scavengers and predators, the corrupted transactions, betrayals and small moments of compassion.

A typical studio backlot city street: Alice (Joan Bennett) and Professor Wanley (Edward G. Robinson) meet by chance in The Woman in the Window (Fritz Lang, 1944).

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In Elia Kazan’s Panic in the Streets (1950), Richard Widmark plays a public health official who must track down a killer who is carrying pneumonic plague, while concealing his real motive to avert panic. The plague-carrying criminals (who caught the disease from an illegal immigrant smuggled into the country on a fishing boat) vanish like vermin into their holes, and Widmark’s terrier-like persistence leads him through the nooks and crannies of New Orleans. No city has ever looked less sanitary than this: all sagging tenements, rickety stairs, blind alleys, crumbling houseboats and cheap restaurants that stonewall health inspectors. The disease is a physical manifestation of the malaise pervading the city, an epidemic of fear, suspicion, lies, petty thievery and casual murder, wife-beating, and everywhere grime, unease, sweat, decay and poverty. When he comes home after long days and nights of searching, Widmark must sleep on the porch and keep a distance from his wife and child, in case he has caught the contagion. The Killer That Stalked New York (a.k.a. Frightened City, 1950) dramatized the real mass vaccination of New Yorkers against smallpox in 1947, making the carrier a delicate blonde woman (Evelyn Keyes) who caught the disease smuggling jewels out of Cuba for her sleazy, criminal boyfriend. In City of Fear (1959), a convict (Vince Edwards) breaks out of jail with what he believes is a canister of pure heroin; it really contains radioactive Cobalt 60, which will wipe out most of L.A. if he opens it. Again, officials hunting for him must decide whether or not to evacuate the city and risk mass hysteria. This recurrent premise releases a concentrated, delirious expression of every urban paranoia: nuclear devastation, infiltration by (literal) foreign bodies, and crime as a contagious disease, which graphically destroys criminals (Keyes and Edwards die in hideous slow motion, becoming sweaty, feverish, leprous, pain-wracked staggering cadavers) but also threatens to infect anyone who comes near them. In other films, it’s not a diseased body but a diseased mind that endangers the city: both While the City Sleeps (1956) and The Sniper (1952) pivot around disturbed young men pathologically compelled to kill random women, whom they attack in their apartments or pick off on the streets. No stronger argument could be made against dense population centers. In The Sleeping City, even a hospital — New York’s Bellevue, an enormous, somber city of the sick — is contaminated by crime; doctors and nurses steal drugs, injecting suffering patients with ineffectual substitutes. An acute need for cash afflicts the hard-working, meagerly paid staff like the common cold. Films shot on location capture something of the packed, swirling energy of urban life, but film noir was more often shot on studio sets: generic, eerily empty streets reused in film after film. The artificiality adds its own sinister note: the people moving through these streets are like dolls trapped in dioramas, hemmed in by narrow framing. These cities have no sky, no connection to the natural world, and no exits. They are ideally suited to films like Lang’s The Woman in the Window and Scarlet Street, which are about men boxed in by their own minds, living in their own dreams. Likewise, in Lang’s While the City Sleeps, the spare abstraction of the setting is appropriate to solipsistic characters incapable of thinking past the limits of their insular workplace. Cities in noir are never cohesive social organisms; they are aggregations of unrelated and usually hostile strangers, broken into isolated social fragments. The lonely streets in the opening scene of The Asphalt Jungle are typical; cities in noir are often starkly depopulated, more desert than jungle. This desolation leaves people vulnerable to attack, like the frightened small-town girl

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played by Kim Hunter in The Seventh Victim (1943), wandering a city populated sparsely and — it seems — exclusively by members of a secret Satanic cult. This provokes a different kind of claustrophobia; instead of the push of crowds, the alarm of strange faces and chance encounters, the backlot cities are lifeless and shrunken. People seem to encounter only those they already know, aggravating the sense of entrapment and inescapable fate. The New York of The Seventh Victim, in which the heroine finds herself sharing an empty subway car with a propped-up corpse, is as lively as a graveyard. These backlot streets lay within a real city: Hollywood. New York with its looming canyons and San Francisco with its vertiginous streets both have good claims to be the capital city of noir, but Los Angeles has the best claim of all with its decentralized sprawl having “no more personality than a paper cup,” as Philip Marlowe puts it in Raymond Chandler’s The Little Sister, no “individual bony structure under the muck.” Apart from its one distinctive tower, the City Hall, and the colorfully dilapidated neighborhood of Bunker Hill, Los Angeles rarely looks like a city. Horizontal, ruled by the car and devoted to an ideal of sun, sea and palm trees, L.A. is an inversion of the compact, vertical cities of the East. Lacking a true center, it is made up of many identical sub-cities; Jean-Paul Sartre compared it to “a big earthworm that might be chopped into twenty pieces without being killed.” The narrator of He Walked by Night declares, “Los Angeles has been called a bunch of suburbs in search of a city.” It perfectly illustrates the mid-20th-century concept of the “megalopolis,” one vast urban entity spreading without boundaries. Rather than dwelling on standard images of urban menace and decay, noir films set in Los Angeles exploit its clean, new, prosperous façade as an ironic counterpoint. In Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944), when Walter Neff visits the handsome Spanish-style home of Phyllis Dietrichson, he discovers that “murder can sometimes smell like honeysuckle.” Phyllis, an icy murderess with platinum hair, glossy lipstick and an ankle-bracelet inscribed with her own name, is a personification of Los Angeles in all its glittering, perfumed artificiality. (As Oscar Levant quipped, “Strip away the phony tinsel of Hollywood, and you’ll find the real tinsel underneath.”) The “Dark City” is Hollywood, Eddie Muller concludes at the end of his tour of noir. By mid-century, the “dream factory” had spent four decades churning out visions of glamour, success, youth, health, beauty, prosperity and happiness, in the process reducing many of its servants to alcoholic despair and tossing them aside when they were no longer useful. In 1950, two great noir films revealed the black heart of tinsel town. In Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard, Norma Desmond’s refusal to face the decline of her fame turns her into a recluse; her denial of age makes her a kind of mummy, living in a resplendent mausoleum that she has turned into a creepy shrine to herself. When mortality intrudes in the form of a dead pet chimp, it is swathed in white satin and ceremonially buried in the garden. Joe Gillis, a penniless hack screenwriter whose virile youth Norma craves, is repelled by this delusional setup yet sucked into it by his own greed and reluctant pity. He gets the swimming pool he always wanted, and ends up floating in it. Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place opens with Humphrey Bogart’s darting, wounded, angry eyes in the rear-view mirror as he drives the dark streets of Hollywood. He plays Dixon Steele, a “genius” screenwriter who hasn’t had a hit since before the war. He despises

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“popcorn salesmen” and the vapid trash they give him to adapt, yet remains addicted to success and approval. Torn between contempt and insecurity, he brawls with crass, egotistical actors in chic restaurants and careens around dark canyon roads in his convertible, getting in violent altercations with other drivers. He lapses into uncontrollable fits of rage, then graciously sends anonymous gifts to his victims. One night he brings a checkroom girl home to tell him the story of Althea Bruce, the potboiler he’s supposed to be adapting. She’s his audience, he’s reminded: a hearty young girl glowing with ignorance: sentimental, conventional and cheerfully vacuous. When her body is discovered the next morning, strangled and dumped from a moving car, Dix can’t pretend to care, earning the suspicious dislike of the police detective on the case. He gets an alibi thanks to one of those chance urban encounters; a new neighbor saw him in the window from across the courtyard after the girl left. Laurel Gray (Gloria Grahame), a former actress with a few small B-movie roles behind her, is quietly stunning, not “coy or cute or corny,” Dix says appreciatively. She’s also a “get-out-before-you-gethurt type,” frightened of commitment and quick to run away when things get sticky. The graceful, hacienda-like apartment complex where they live, with its courtyard full of greenery, statues and burbling fountains, is an elegant setting for Dix and Laurel’s love affair.7 They run in and out of each other’s apartments to make breakfasts, complete with fresh grapefruit. They go out on the town, to piano bars and restaurants with valet parking and obsequious maître-d’s; they have picnics on the beach. But in each of these places, something intrudes to crack or unsettle their romantic union. The courtyard that suggests openness and connection ends up marking out the space between them, which they can never close: the film ends with Dix walking away from Laurel on the prissily manicured path, following the stepping stones into a desolate future. Famously, Nicholas Ray had studied with Frank Lloyd Wright before going into film, and he carried over not only a love of the horizontal that made him one of the finest exponents of widescreen cinema, but an exceptional sensitivity to space and people’s intimate relationships with their surroundings. The search for a home, a place to settle and belong, is the current that flows through Ray’s films, never reaching safe harbor. Laurel’s masseuse, who creepily calls her “angel,” lectures her to think about herself, think about security, go back to the real estate millionaire who wanted to marry her. “In the beginning was the land,” she intones like the voice of Los Angeles. “Motion pictures came later.” Dix constantly thinks in terms of screenplays: he writes lines and scenes in his head; he has an eye for detail and a deep instinct for character, but in moments of rage he loses all control of the script. He rapturously narrates his theory about the murder of the check-room girl, describing how the man strangled the woman with his arm as he drove. Later, he puts his arm around Laurel’s neck in just the same position as they sit parked off the road. He recites a swooningly romantic bit from the script he’s writing; but it’s from “the farewell note.” He can’t face losing her, yet has already written a goodbye. You can’t blame Laurel for being afraid of Dix, and you can’t forgive her for the cowardly way she plans to run out on him. The tenuousness of connections — missed phone calls, overheard messages — places the dissolving love affair in the context of a city where relationships, like fame, are short-lived and insubstantial. Dix’s former girlfriend, whom he allegedly beat up, is always observing from the sidelines; his only lasting friends are the

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meek agent who puts up with his abuse, and a drunken old Barrymore-like ham whom he stakes to drinks. In this town murdered women, lovers and Shakespearean actors are tossed away like cigarette butts, and the cars speed on. Nathanael West’s 1939 novella The Day of the Locust paints an apocalyptic portrait of Los Angeles as the last city, the place where Americans come to die, a gaudy hellhole doomed by its hysterical, fame-obsessed inhabitants. Kiss Me Deadly (1955) takes the dehumanization of Los Angeles to its furthest extreme in classic noir. It opens with a desperate, barefoot woman running on the highway, appealing for help from indifferent hurtling cars. (A similar scene appeared one year later, near the end of Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers: when the hero pleads for help from drivers on the expressway, trying to warn them that they are in danger, they brush him off with angry shouts: “Get lost!” “Get out of the road!”) The byzantine tale of an unscrupulous private detective chasing a mysterious “great whatsit” that leaves a trail of bodies in its wake, Kiss Me Deadly was scripted by A.I. Bezzerides, a self-described “car nut” who also wrote the screenplays or stories for the trucking movies They Drive by Night and Thieves’ Highway. In adapting the novel, Bezzerides and director Robert Aldrich subverted novelist Mickey Spillane’s reactionary, jingoistic, pulpy style, exposing his creation, the detective Mike Hammer, for the vapid, narcissistic lout that he is. When Hammer stops (reluctantly) to pick up the barefoot fugitive Christina, his flashy sports car tells her that his only lasting love is himself. Hammer’s sleek, modern bachelor pad has a view of a ceaseless stream of traffic on a multi-lane freeway, which he likes to contemplate as though gazing down at a column of ants. Cars are the preferred murder weapon of the film’s villains: Hammer narrowly escapes being killed when he and Christina are pushed over a cliff in his car, and two others have been killed by the same gang in car “accidents,” one falling out of a cab, the other pushed in front of a truck. Mike’s friend, the mechanic Nick (who loves to imitate the “va-va-voom!” of a hot set of wheels), is crushed to death under the car he’s working on, after narrowly escaping being killed by a car bomb. Cars are not the only prominent technology in the film. Hammer flaunts the newest gadgets; he uses a primitive wall-mounted answering machine to screen his calls, protecting himself from unwanted communication. He’s interested in other people only as he can use them. When he complains to his secretary/lover, “You’re never around when I need you,” she retorts, “You never need me when I’m around.” The atomization of society is complete: people zip around one another like electrons, sometimes colliding, but never connecting. This is “centrifugal” noir with a vengeance, a world that never stops exploding. “There’s something sad and melancholy about trips,” the sinister Dr. Soberin muses. “I always hate to go away. But one has to find some new place, otherwise it would be impossible to be sad and melancholy again.” A moving man, only in the film for a few moments, makes a little speech about how people are moving all the time, and the only place they never move from is the house of the body. But even bodies are not stable or whole; characters are often shot fragmentarily, and Dr. Soberin is seen, for most of his footage, only as a pair of feet. The disjointed quality of the film’s narrative and cinematography reflects the breakdown of traditional relationships, identities and stories. This disintegration is ironically highlighted by the

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A city for cars, not people: Gabrielle (Gaby Rodgers) and Mike Hammer (Ralph Meeker) in the Los Angeles of Kiss Me Deadly (Robert Aldrich, 1955) (Photofest).

film’s incessant, fleeting references to mythology: Ariadne’s thread, Lot’s wife, the head of the Medusa, and of course Pandora’s box, the irresistible container of all the world’s evils. The mysterious object everyone is hunting for turns out to be a suitcase-sized nuclear weapon: the big score they imagined is a box full of death. Kiss Me Deadly definitively illustrates what Mumford described as “the absurd belief that space and rapid locomotion are the chief ingredients of the good life.” It was this belief that attacked and undermined cities, which urban planners came to see as merely “enemies to traffic.” The new interstate highway system, the proliferation of cars and freeways and jet travel all promised an infinite number of escape routes. But cities in noir have no boundaries and no outlets, because they’re not places on the map, they’re prisons of the imagination.

CHAPTER 2

In Exile at Home: Noir Between Two Worlds In a universe suddenly divested of illusion and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. — Albert Camus, “An Absurd Reasoning,” The Myth of Sisyphus

“I couldn’t place my home if I were heartsick for it,” Lucas Doolin (Robert Mitchum) says in Thunder Road (1958). He’s a country boy who still lives with his family in a Tennessee valley where his father and his forefathers have stubbornly brewed moonshine on their hilly farms. When he was drafted and sent overseas in the Korean War his roots were torn out, and he learned the truth of the adage: he couldn’t go home again. He doesn’t belong in the country or in the city, only on the roads he travels, transporting illegal whiskey from the rural still to the urban markets, casually risking his life in nighttime chases with revenue agents. Visiting his girlfriend, a Memphis nightclub singer, he explains why they’ll never be able to settle down and be “regular people,” the way she wants. “You’re at one end of the line and the valley’s at the other,” he tells her, “and I’m moving fast in the middle.” Mobility is a core tenet of American life: a conviction that individuals can roam freely, that the self is fully independent of its surroundings. But identities can’t shift as fast as bodies can move, and travel can leave people psychologically stranded halfway, neither here nor there. Beyond homesickness, the loss of ties can result in a sense of being a stranger everywhere — in Dimendberg’s words, being “in exile at home.” Emigration from abroad, the settling of the west and internal migrations (like the exodus of blacks from the rural south to northern cities) kept people flowing into and across the country throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. World War II created one of the great population shifts in American history, as people redeployed around the country for the war effort. After the war people began leaving cities for suburbs, draining out of the aging industrial northeast and into the Sunbelt. These movements have continually injected contemporary relevance into the old tropes of the small-town girl or country boy arriving in the big city, of the city slicker adrift in the hinterlands. A sleazy private detective, hired by gangsters to find an enemy, barges into a traditional Czech wedding party in rural Minnesota, where women in lace caps are dancing the schottische. A San Francisco industrialist, left for dead in a ditch by his wife’s gigolo 34

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boyfriend, wanders into the idyllic Wyoming town of Larkspur and starts a new life as a garage mechanic. A jaded nightclub singer from Chicago, hired to work at a road house near the Canadian border, is hunted through the woods by her psychopathic boss. These cookie-cutter setups, from minor B-movies, play on city mouse country mouse stereotypes. Anthony Mann’s enjoyable Desperate (1947) draws almost cartoonish contrasts between the wholesome and sordid sides of life, from the opening in which a pretty blonde wife bakes her first cake and plans to tell her husband she’s pregnant, while across town in a hide-out full of smoke and sinister shadows, a gang of thugs plots to use her husband as a fall guy for a robbery. After bullets fly in a dark alley, the innocent couple flees the city, finding refuge with warm, loving relatives on a Minnesota farm, a world of milk and hay and pot roasts. Nature and old-fashioned communities promise safety, healing and transformation for those wounded or endangered by cities. In Impact (1949), the legally dead hero adopts a new name and tries to forget his former life, vindictively allowing his wife to be tried for his murder, until the love and trust of a sweet Larkspur girl and her wise mother convince him to go back and tell the truth. His reward is to be accused by the police of killing the man who tried to kill him, but this nasty irony is the film’s last gasp of cynicism. In Road House (1948), Lily Stevens (Ida Lupino) arrives in the boondocks as a burnedout, seen-it-all dame whose whiskey-ravaged voice smolders through her saloon songs while her cigarette burns holes in the piano. She’s terrific: bleached blonde and aged in wood, faintly amused by everything and surprised by nothing. But then, seemingly out of sheer boredom, she succumbs to rustic refreshment: learning to bowl, going sailing and swimming in the lake, she blossoms into a bright-eyed, sincere and passionate woman. It turns out that the crisp northern woods (a forested sound stage with a busy fog machine) are more dangerous than the streets of Chicago, as Stevens discovers when she’s chased through them by a love-maddened Jefty Robbins (Richard Widmark), armed with a shotgun and an endless supply of maniacal giggles. She plugs him as calmly as she would slap the face of a fresh nightclub patron. “See?” he murmurs with his dying breath, “I told you she was different.” In Cry Vengeance (1954), all the pristine wilderness of Alaska can’t revive Vic Barron (Mark Stevens), a man so deeply damaged by past wrongs that he looks and acts like a zombie. He’s a big-city cop whose family was killed by mobsters; they added insult to injury by framing him for accepting a bribe. He gets out of jail a grey, withered ghost, face drained and crumpled, body awkward and stiff except when he lashes out in sudden flurries of blows, chopping and jabbing at his enemies. His only interest in life is killing the man he believes murdered his wife and child, and he tracks him to the small fishing town of Ketchikan, Alaska, where he’s hiding out. The grim, taciturn city cop sticks out like a frozen thumb amid the friendly locals, but a kind, fresh-faced girl is inexplicably drawn to him. She lectures him about the need to forget the past and move on, but he’s so warped by his ordeal that he contemplates kidnapping the gangster’s beloved young daughter. He finds he can’t go through with it, and then learns he’s been after the wrong man all along. Though he recovers a sense of decency, Barron leaves the cold waters and dark mountains, still a hollow man. One of the precepts of noir is that the past never goes away, but the past is also unrecoverable: the dead wife and child will never come back.

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Barron, like all revenge-seeking heroes, is stuck in a cold place; burdened with a loss he can’t lose, an absence that will always be with him. In noir, no one travels light.

Blood on the Snow: Noir in Winter The darkest city and the whitest country are juxtaposed in Nicholas Ray’s On Dangerous Ground (1951); the film’s first and second halves are like negative and positive images hanging side by side. The city is filtered through the eyes of prowl-car cops working at night, driving around slowly as an endless litany of crime and distress — man beating his wife, drunk disturbing the peace, holdup at a liquor store — comes over the car radio. The camera peers through the windshield, giving a cropped and flattened view of the streets. This city, like that in The Asphalt Jungle, is devoid of attractions; it’s nothing but a sooty strip of tenements and alleys, bars and drugstores, inhabited by hoods, crooks, whores and stool pigeons. “You get so you think everybody is like that,” an aging detective says, explaining his younger partner’s embittered alienation. “Until you find out different, it’s kind of a lonely life.” The lonely young cop is Jim Wilson (Robert Ryan). His two partners are family men whose wives strap on their guns as they go out to work, while their kids watch shootem-up westerns on TV. By contrast, Wilson eats a hurried dinner alone in a small, cheerless apartment, his only company the mug shots he shuffles through while he memorizes the faces of killers, pimps and robbers. The “garbage” he sees on the job has gotten under his skin and flows through his veins, turning him rancid. He has become part of the brutality, beating confessions out of suspects and reacting with splenetic outbursts to any casual insult. His loathing for criminals blurs into self-loathing. The symbiotic, nearly sadomasochistic relationship between abuser and abused is exposed in his sexually charged encounter with a gangster’s girlfriend named Myrna. (“I like to stink myself up,” she explains as the cop looks at all the perfume bottles on her dresser.) The tarty blonde taunts him: “You’ll make me talk, won’t you? You’ll squeeze it out of me with those strong hands,” and he responds with a blend of icy disgust and queasy arousal: “That’s right, sister.” This dynamic explodes when he tracks down her boyfriend, Bernie Tucker, who knows the whereabouts of two cop killers. The man is sweaty, terrified, yet grinning and giggling expectantly, inviting Wilson to hit him just as Myna did. “Why do you make me do it? Why do you always make me do it?” the cop cries, his voice rasping with agony, before he beats the man to a pulp. Wilson is no fonder of the civilians he protects than the criminals he pursues. “A cop has no friends. Nobody likes a cop,” he whines. Wilson’s boss and partners keep telling him to calm down, take it easy, let things go. Just do the job, don’t take it home with you. These men sound sensible, but also shallow and unimaginative. When Wilson asks his older partner, Pop Daly, “How do you live with yourself?” he snaps back, “I don’t, I live with other people.” He can comfortably divide his life between chasing criminals and tending roses; but is it really good to be so insulated, so untroubled by the sight of cruelty, degradation and suffering? An essential noir actor, Robert Ryan had none of Bogart’s dry insolence or Mitchum’s

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Zen detachment, none of the preening pugnacity of small men like Cagney or Robinson. He seemed to lack any defensive mechanism, any safety valve; he was always seething, wound too tight, ready to crack — as though inside him two great stones were grinding together. Tall and craggy, Ryan usually played heavies, specializing in vicious unstable racists. A liberal in real life, onscreen he vented hatred for Jews in Crossfire, the Japanese in Bad Day at Black Rock, blacks in Odds Against Tomorrow. The strain of playing such hateful characters, and frustration over repetitive typecasting, drove him to drink. His small, black, squinched-up eyes looked disconsolately out of a handsome but harrowed face. He could be terrifying because of that frayed wire or over-wound spring inside him that might give way at any moment, and he brilliantly exposed the self-hatred and insecurity that fuels irrational prejudice and violent bullying. After beating Bernie Tucker, Wilson washes his hands at the little sink in his apartment, scrubbing and wringing them in a convulsion of disgust. Violence is a release for this clenched, repressed man, but each bout further isolates him. After attacking yet another suspect, Wilson is sent out of town to work on a case in a rural area upstate.1 He drives there alone along a road that spins out like a black thread through the snow, an image that makes it clear that the distance traveled is psychological as much as physical. Wilson is like someone going into exile, or like a mythical hero sent away to prove himself by achieving a difficult task. The road connects the two halves of the film; the car is Wilson’s natural shell. (The film’s working title was “Dark Highway,” and the script is by Hollywood’s poet laureate of driving, A.I. “Buzz” Bezzerides.) When he finally gets out of the car and flounders through fresh snow, the trackless white expanse presents a new challenge: he has to make his own path. The snow cruelly illustrates the cold void of solitude that surrounds him. His destination, the town of Westham, is a little cluster of low, shabby, box-like houses crouched among smooth, bare mountains streaked with ice and dirt. Deep snow blanks out fields, turns pines and people into sharp black silhouettes. The only thing moving is a posse of men with dogs and shotguns, hunting a young man who has killed a girl. Wilson joins in, following tracks in the snow as if chasing an animal. Incongruous in his suit, overcoat and fedora (the other men wear hunting clothes), he’s unusually reticent. Without the scum of the city to lash out at, he isn’t sure of his place or role. The country proves to be no less violent than the city. But unlike the urban crime Wilson is used to, motivated by greed or revenge or simple survival, the killing in Westham is senseless — like the slaughter of the Clutter family that Truman Capote turned into the classic of chilling rural violence, In Cold Blood. When Wilson tries to question the family of the slain girl, her parents don’t want to talk about it. The father, Walter Brent (Ward Bond), cuts him off, saying, “When I find him, there won’t be any of your city stuff— no fancy trials, no sob sisters. I’m just going to empty this shotgun in his belly, and anyone who tries to stop me will get the same.” Brent is Wilson’s rural alter ego, even more obsessive and brutal, but, ironically, he disdains the city cop whom he assumes to be soft and over-civilized. François Truffaut wrote of Ray, “All his films tell the same story, the story of a violent man who wants to stop being violent, and his relationship with a woman who has more moral strength than himself.... There is always moral solitude, there are always hunters,

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The clash between city and country: Jim Wilson (Robert Ryan, left) and Walter Brent (Ward Bond, right) hunting for a killer in On Dangerous Ground (Nicholas Ray, 1952).

sometimes lynchers.” On Dangerous Ground follows this pattern to the letter. The woman is Mary Malden (Ida Lupino), who is blind and lives in a remote farmhouse where she is hiding the killer, her mentally ill younger brother Danny. Wilson responds immediately to her dignity and vulnerability, and shields her from Brent’s roughness. When he blocks Brent from striking her, the camera, accompanied by a swell of music, turns the gesture into a sudden swooping motion, a release of fluidity like a dam breaking, as Wilson’s rigid anger gives way. The latter part of On Dangerous Ground is less successful than the opening, drifting toward sentimentality and excessively schematic drama. The entire urban segment of the film was an original creation of Ray and Bezzerides, with no source in the novel (the egregiously titled Mad with Much Heart, by Gerald Butler) on which the film was based. Bezzerides felt that the two parts of the film didn’t mesh, and was unhappy with the second half. Everything in Westham seems designed specifically to test or instruct Wilson and offer him a chance at redemption. “Why should you care?” people keep asking him (she wasn’t your daughter; he isn’t your brother), and his repressed decency rises to the bait. Mary instinctively trusts him and asks him to protect her brother. She’s his equal opposite, just as the country is like a reversed image of the city. When he says that as a cop “you get so you don’t trust anybody,” she responds, “You’re lucky. You don’t have to trust anybody. I do. I have to trust everybody.”

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Nicholas Ray’s romanticism turns the knife-wielding killer Danny Malden into another in his pantheon of misunderstood youths. He’s dangerous, but also confused and pitiful; trying to explain the murder he recalls that his victim was pretty, that he wanted her to smile but she wouldn’t. (Bezzerides wrote this speech, inspired by a childhood memory of trying to approach two wealthy girls who ran away from him.) When Brent finally sees Danny, after he has fallen to his death from a cliff to which they chased him, he is improbably shaken, exclaiming, “He’s just a kid!” Brent carries him, Pieta-style, back to the house, where Mary prays over him, asking God to forgive and accept him. Ray, who said he didn’t believe in miracles, wanted to give the film a relatively downbeat ending in which Wilson returns to the city alone after Mary tells him not to come back. The original version of the script ended with this line of direction: “Then he goes slowly down the steps and heads away across the frozen yard.” (Virtually identical to the ending of In a Lonely Place, with a frozen yard instead of a leafy courtyard.) In the final version, the film ends with Jim and Mary kissing, and the implication that they will live happily ever after — though, at least, the film narrowly avoids promising that Mary’s sight will be restored.2 The clinch feels tacked on, but the casting of Ida Lupino helps to keep the script’s sentimentality in check. Like Ryan, Lupino was a crucial player in film noir, and her intense performances were layered with toughness, brittleness and tenderness. She combined a waif-like body and the huge eyes of a starved child with a very grown-up, smoky voice: tired, melancholy but dry, tense under its hard-won calm. She often played women who hurt and are hurt, but as Mary Malden she becomes, for a change, a redeemer. Sometimes trite in her wisdom, Mary is most moving in her radical isolation, imposed by her dedication to taking care of Danny. She lost her sight rather than leave him to go away for an operation; her whole world is blank as snow. She’s confined to the house where she can move around among familiar things, like the hanging plant and polished piece of wood positioned to guide her through the rooms. When Wilson asks if she doesn’t get lonely living by herself in the country, she replies, “The city can be lonely, too. Sometimes people who are never alone are the loneliest, don’t you think so?” It’s an unoriginal remark, another version of that everlasting cliché of the lonely crowd, but it’s borne out by the script. Surrounded by strangers, city dwellers learn to limit their empathy, to ignore their proximity to poverty, crime, and human suffering. Seen en masse, people become types: Wilson sees criminals only as mug shots. Mary, in her tightly circumscribed world, is acutely sensitive to the individuality of her visitors, exploring Jim’s face and hands with her fingers. “Sooner or later most lonely people try to figure it out, about loneliness,” she tells him, offering a quiet rebuke to Pop Daly’s unreflective answer (“I don’t, I live with other people.”). Companionship can be a way to avoid self-examination, and loneliness can breed compassion rather than callousness. There are two kinds of “moral solitude”: Wilson’s self-imposed exile from humanity, and Mary’s saintly self-sacrifice. Ray said that he had one working title for all his films: “I’m a Stranger Here Myself.” He took the phrase from a folk song he collected in the late 1930s when he was traveling through the South with Alan Lomax, and which remained a touchstone throughout his life. Sterling Hayden speaks the title line in Johnny Guitar, and an early script for They

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Live by Night had the young fugitive Bowie singing the song, about being a stranger everywhere, even at home. With its mixture of complaint and proud aloofness, the lyrics express the way Ray’s heroes long for a home, a place to belong, and at the same time cling to their identity as outsiders. Often, they enjoy a fleeting glimpse of hearth and family, like the three teenagers playing house in a deserted mansion in Rebel Without a Cause, but lose it through some violent misunderstanding. Ray intended Jim Wilson’s encounter with Mary Malden to be just such a painfully brief connection, not a path to matrimony. He never did use the title “I’m a Stranger Here Myself,” but most of his films could be called In a Lonely Place, or, like his last, unfinished film, made with his students in Binghamton, New York, We Can’t Go Home Again. “I’ve been leaving all my life,” Earl Slater (Robert Ryan) laments in Odds Against Tomorrow (1959). “Since when I can first remember, since the wind first blew us off our land in Oklahoma. We left. Since then I’ve never stayed any place.” Robert Wise’s stylish black-and-white heist thriller-cum-plea-for-racial-tolerance has some claim to be the last classic-era film noir. With a cool-jazz score by John Lewis and the Modern Jazz Quartet that blows through it like an icy draft, it exemplifies the cold, emptied-out feeling of late noir, from the opening shot of a wide, hushed upper–Manhattan street. Wind whistles eerily, blowing papers and rippling puddles. The whole film has a bleached, wintry chill. An embittered ex-cop who was thrown off the force recruits Slater and Johnny Ingram (Harry Belafonte) to help him rob a small-town bank, foolishly ignoring the racial hatred that will foul up the plan. Earl Slater is the most nuanced and fully developed of Ryan’s repellent bigots: the actor wrings out every last drop of bile and pathos in this aging, violent man — a two-time loser whose faithful, frumpy girlfriend pays the bills; a man desperate to “make it” for once, before it’s too late. He lets us feel how threatened and humiliated Earl is by the presence of Johnny Ingram, an exceptionally handsome, beautifully dressed, intelligent, proud young black man. Ryan’s credible Southern accent and dialect, lapsing into redneck, deep-fried KKK philosophy, contrasts with Belafonte’s elegant hipster lingo: “I’m just a bone picker in a four-man graveyard,” he says, referring to his gig with a jazz band. When he first hears the proposition for the bank robbery he turns it down flat: “Man, you’re drifting. That’s for junkies and joy boys. We’re people.” He’s forced into it by gambling debts, but remains unenthusiastic, well aware that he’s committing suicide. The film’s ending goes notoriously overboard, heavy-handedly flogging the destructiveness of racial prejudice, culminating with an unsubtle close-up of a sign reading, “Stop: Dead End.” But before the heist, which predictably goes awry because Earl refuses to trust Johnny, the three men spend an afternoon waiting around in the river town of Melton (really Hudson, New York). It’s not a picturesque hamlet, Hollywood’s idea of a small town, but a very ordinary, faintly gritty and melancholy working-class burg. The men drive up through pale, glistening countryside of bare orchards and telephone poles running along fields of corn stubble. They stash their car in a muddy, abandoned factory beside a ruined pier, then separate to wile away the hours. Johnny sits by the river, which shines silver between dark banks under an overcast sky, and sees a baby doll floating in the debris-filled water. The cop sits under a crumbling religious monument and throws

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pebbles at a can. Earl finds that for some reason he can’t bring himself to shoot a rabbit. Early winter dusk creeps in and the street lights come on, recalling Johnny’s smooth, icily angry performance of a blues about the lonely night “when that cold, cold sun goes down.” The bleakness of the settings, the tiny figures of the three men — each alone and far from home in the last hours of his life — and the desolate onset of nightfall, create a far more powerful sense of self-inflicted alienation than the explosive climax. These men aren’t chained together, like the black and white convicts in The Defiant Ones. They’re just — as Johnny says —“drifting,” like chunks of ice on the river. At dusk, in an L.A. newsstand, a man searches through the out-of-town papers that offer balm to the homesick; but his home town isn’t there. “No call for it,” he proprietor shrugs. The man lives in a furnished room, drinks alone in bars, stores things in busstation lockers. Ten years after Out of the Past, the story of an urban private detective hiding out in a small rural town, Jacques Tourneur inverted the setup in Nightfall (1957). This time the hero tries to lose himself in Los Angeles, lurking amid the blinking neon, cocktail lounges and cheap rooming houses. Carefully parceled-out flashbacks reveal why Jim Vanning (Aldo Ray) has become a hunted and haunted drifter, moving from city to city and name to name, trying to outrun the consequences of something terrible that happened in the mountains of Wyoming, where — as in On Dangerous Ground— the purity of snow was lethally soiled. He was there on a hunting trip with an old army buddy, both trying to escape their jobs and domestic relationships in the hushed, peaceful wilderness, cooking trout over campfires and stalking deer. Their only mistake was to be Good Samaritans, helping two men lightly injured in a car crash, who turned out to be bank robbers fleeing with their loot and unwilling to leave witnesses behind. The scene in which one of the bandits, a sniggering psychopath, sets the innocent campers up for a staged murder-suicide has a numbing absurdity. Faced with inexplicable violence amid the silent pines, white peaks and drift-deep meadows, Jim’s buddy says, “I should be terrified, but I just can’t believe this is happening.” Left for dead, Jim grabs the bag of money that the robbers have accidentally left behind and flees, leaving his slain friend sprawled out under the trees. He plunges into a blizzard, somehow losing the bag and, with it, his only chance to prove his innocence. (While his failure to go to the police seems wrong-headed, it’s true that his story, like several other aspects of the script, is hard to believe.) He can’t break out of the dazed state of shock; it’s as though he were still lost in the storm, the white snowfall — reversing the title image of nightfall — erasing direction and perspective. Vanning is an unusual noir protagonist in that he’s completely guiltless — even too good a guy to fool around with his friend’s more-than-willing wife — yet he acts as though he were guilty. Living with his back to the wall has changed him, he says. He takes to the role of the victim, of doomed and almost passive prey, with peculiar ease, so instinctive a fugitive that he flinches when lamps are lit as he browses in the newsstand. When the robbers take him out to an oil rig to beat and torture him into revealing where the money is (the pounding machinery providing an apt backdrop for their relentless greed), he keeps urging them to kill him; he just wants to get it over with. Aldo Ray has the looks of a college football star thickened with age and hardened into wariness. Physically a big husky

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brute, he’s oddly diffident and contained in his manner, and he sounds like a man whose throat has been stripped by cheap Scotch. The film’s opening simmers with vague dread, subdued melancholy and the ominous threat of betrayal. But rather than plunging into deeper convolutions, it sheds mystery to become more straightforward, by the end almost turning into a light-hearted buddy adventure story. Jim gains friends rather than losing them. Fraser, an insurance investigator tailing him in an attempt to recover the money, comes to identify with his mark, feeling as though he’s living the man’s life, and he ultimately accepts Jim’s innocence and helps him. In a bar, Jim meets Marie Gardner (Anne Bancroft). Their initial encounter, perhaps the best scene in the film, is seductively ambiguous. She asks to borrow five dollars, claiming she has lost her wallet, and he rather sheepishly angles for a pickup. She could be any number of things: a hooker or a dignified loner, a woman guarding her virtue or a tramp selling out a man for money. When the thieves corner Vanning as soon as they step out of the bar and say to Marie, “O.K. sister, you can go now,” he and we both assume she’s been paid to set him up. The assumption says much about the film’s mood and the generic expectations it arouses; but the misunderstanding is cleared up, and Marie turns into a staunch gal Friday. When the bandits turn up at a fashion show, having tracked down Marie (who is modeling frivolous haute couture), the incongruity is both comic and sinister. They are an odd couple, undermined by their clashing personalities. John (Brian Keith), is the brainy, soft-spoken, squeamish leader, who lets the crude, sadistic Red (Rudy Bond) do his dirty work. It seems like an obvious good cop–bad cop strategy, but John’s distaste for Red’s gleeful brutality, coarse bullying and pathological need to cause pain is not feigned. Once they’ve finally gotten hold of what they pursued for so long and are no longer bound by mutual interest, they quarrel over whether or not to kill their prisoners and, thoroughly sick of each other, face each other with drawn guns and hate-filled eyes. Despite the violence of the denouement (anyone who has seen Anthony Mann’s Border Incident will know what to expect as soon as they see the snowplow sitting beside the shack), the mood isn’t dark. The money will go back to the insurance company, Jim has found a woman to marry, and the snowy scenery of Moose, Wyoming, is once more cleanly picturesque, despite the unseen gore all over the blades of the snowplow. The film was adapted from a seminal novel by David Goodis, before his work plunged into the despair and futility that marks books like Down There (filmed by Truffaut as Shoot the Piano Player, and also set during a blizzard) and Street of No Return. But Goodis’s brooding lyricism hangs over the film, crystallized in Vanning’s description of watching the night fall from the window of his rented room, a speech that sums up the mood of weariness, foreboding and resignation that hangs over the movie, despite its hopeful ending. The first time Fraser speaks to Vanning, asking for a light as a pretext and making small talk while he waits for a bus, the subject turns to the tropics. Lying on the beach on some island paradise —“That’s for me,” Fraser says. His vision bumps up against Vanning’s actual experience of the Pacific islands: he was on Okinawa during the war, hardly a tranquil haven. Much later, the thieves talk about what they will do with the loot and John says he’s going to buy a yacht and sail around until he finds the right island, where he will live out the rest of his days. This is noir’s standard-issue fantasy, both blandly

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conventional and deeply sincere. As much as they yearn for money or success, people yearn for a place to settle in peace, to be left alone, the way Jeff Bailey in Out of the Past dreams of building a cabin by a lake and living there for the rest of his life. He’s been “one too many” places; all he wants now is rest. He doesn’t know, as he describes this daydream, that he’s already been tracked down by Joe Stefanos, a henchman of the “big op” he crossed. But he sounds, nonetheless, like he knows the lakeside cabin is a shimmering mirage that will vanish as soon as a cloud drifts over the sun.

Better to Forget and Smile: Returning Veterans and the Suburbs In his black overcoat and hat, Stefanos appears like an ink-blot on the clean white town of Bridgeport. Sleek, bemused and scornfully urban, he listens to the chatter of Marnie, who runs the diner where he waits for Jeff Bailey. An archetypal small-town gossip, Marnie boasts of being able to smell “burning hamburger or a romance” within a hundred yards. She thinks Bailey is in trouble for stealing the sheriff ’s childhood sweetheart, little knowing he’s in much deeper trouble for having once stolen a powerful gambler’s mistress. Lying low in this backwater under an assumed name, Jeff has been waiting resignedly for his former life to catch up with him. Joe Stefanos is an emissary from the past and from the city: in a sense, the two are one and the same. “Out of the Past” is a title, like “In a Lonely Place,” that could fit a wide swath of noir films. One of them is Fred Zinnemann’s Act of Violence (1948), another story of a fugitive who has made a new life for himself in a small town, and a man from his past who comes to find him. The setting is California, but the film opens with a night view of New York, anchored by the black silhouette of the Chrysler Building perforated with lights. A man in a trench coat and fedora limps across a deserted street, goes up to his drab hotel room, and pulls a gun from a clothes drawer. Joe Parkson (Robert Ryan) wears the uniform shared by gangsters, police and private detectives —“What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun,” as Philip Marlowe says in Farewell, My Lovely— and he shares their common, cipher-like anonymity. Noir is full of men who live in hotel rooms and seem to have no friends, no belongings, no personal tastes, no interests except for some mission, usually of revenge, or some obsessive memory. Parkson boards a Greyhound bus for Los Angeles, and it crosses an empty country, rain-swept plains and sun-parched deserts, with everyone on board sleeping except the man in the trench coat, who never closes his eyes. When he steps off the bus, cheerful martial music is playing and a Memorial Day parade passes in the “warm and bright sunshine” of California, fulsomely described by a radio announcer. Parkson barges through the marching veterans, rejecting the rosy commemoration of war with every veteran cast as a hero. Meanwhile, in the little town of Santa Lisa, another Memorial Day ceremony is taking place: veteran Frank Enley (Van Heflin) stands beaming with his small son on his shoulders as he is praised for his work in building a housing development, and for his splendid war record. Behind him, rows of small, flimsy, identical bungalows stand half-finished: the pre-fab houses thrown together quickly to provide dream homes for conquering heroes.

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Frank, a successful contractor, lives in a comfortable, impeccably modern house and is married to the girlish, gorgeous Edith ( Janet Leigh). The contrast between the two men couldn’t be more starkly drawn, and Parkson’s dogged, single-minded pursuit of Enley is almost comical at first. We see the fresh-faced ex–G.I. packing for a fishing trip with a neighbor, and as soon as he’s gone the scowling cripple comes to his house and rings the doorbell, holding a gun under a bunched-up raincoat, ready to shoot his prey down in the doorway. Learning about the fishing trip, he promptly rents a car, drives to the pineringed lake, hires a boat and rows out alone, planning to shoot Frank as he fishes with his buddy. Deranged and implacable, Ryan is presented like a monster from a horror movie: the sound of his dragging leg, of the oars as he rows, of the doorbell when he rings it, are all magnified for sinister effect. On the pure, sparkling face of the lake, the hunched, malevolent gunman is like a cockroach crawling on a clean kitchen table. But Frank’s reaction when he learns that Parkson has tracked him down is not that of an innocent man. He tells Edith that Parkson was in his outfit during the war, that he’s now mentally unstable and holds an irrational grudge. But he refuses to go to the police, insisting there is nothing anyone can do, even as he admits that Parkson is the reason they had to move from Syracuse out to California. They cower in their kitchen as

The suburban dream home becomes a shadowy jail: Frank Enley (Van Heflin) at his house in Act of Violence (Fred Zinnemann, 1948).

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Parkson limps around the house, trying all the doors. Frank turns out the lights and pulls all the blinds, and Edith is drenched in black shadows as she does the dishes. The suburban home becomes a gloomy jail, barred with banisters and wall slats and ceiling beams; the Enleys’ baby screams alone in a cage-like playpen. Trying to lose himself in a crowd, Frank flees for a builders and contractors convention in Los Angeles, where more cheerful band music blares (“Happy Days Are Here Again”) while drunken conventioneers march around with lampshades on their heads. Out on a fire escape crisscrossed by a net of shadows, Frank finally tells Edith the truth: that while he was in a prison camp during the war, he told the Nazis about an escape plan among his men, and they were slaughtered by the guards. Frank had convinced himself that he was trying to save the men’s lives, and trusted the SS Commandant’s promise to go easy on them. He could claim that he was himself betrayed, but as he confesses disgustedly, “I talked myself into believing he’d keep his word, but I knew in my guts he wouldn’t, and maybe I didn’t even care. All I knew was they were dead and I was eating.”3 The only survivor among the escapees, Parkson has been driven mad by the memory of this horror: the men were ambushed as they came through their tunnel, bayoneted and left to die in slow agony. Parkson survived only because he was believed dead. Neither man has ever really gotten out of the prison camp. Frank is repeatedly seen against chainlink fences or in enclosed spaces like a long, white-tiled tunnel. Parkson’s life has shrunk down to the size of a bullet. When his abandoned fiancée comes to find him and begs him to give up his plan for her sake, he says bluntly, “I don’t love you enough.” Even after the explanation of his motive has transformed him from a monster to a wronged avenger (his dragging leg becomes a rebuke), Parkson remains repellent: a specter, a ghoul, as though he’d died after all and returned as a vengeful zombie. These are drastic versions of the typical veteran’s predicament: traumatized by things he has seen and done, and surrounded by people who can’t share his experiences. As Frank condescendingly tells Edith, “A lot of things happened in the war that you wouldn’t understand.” When Parkson tracks Frank down at the convention, he flees blindly into the city. A montage of urban desolation follows as he runs through darkened streets. Not a single person appears; not one building looks inhabited or welcoming. He ends up at Angels Flight, the funicular railway that runs up to the neighborhood of Bunker Hill, at such a steep slant that it tilts the cityscape into expressionist distortion or drunken imbalance. By this point, the sturdy, upright citizen of the opening scenes has become a man who can barely stand up straight, doubled over and staggering as though his guilt and terror were violent cramps. Finally he stumbles into a bar, deserted at closing time apart from the bartender and a weathered barfly sitting forlornly, not wanting to go home alone. Pat (Mary Astor) looks like nothing could shock her, or make her any dirtier. She’s been around the block too many times to count; she’s seen all the troubles in the world, and she comforts the tormented man: “So you’re unhappy. Relax. No law says you gotta be happy.” All nervous tics and impulsive generosity pinched by fear and bad memories, Pat is a survivor in the lowest regions of the noir city, a world of desperation that has ground itself into the pores of her face. Bunker Hill, with its slanting streets, crumbling stairways and dilapidated Victorian houses, was film noir’s favorite neighborhood. (It appears in Cry Danger, Somewhere in

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the Night, M and The Night Has a Thousand Eyes, among others.) Described by Raymond Chandler in The High Window as “old town, lost town, shabby town, crook town,” it was the only part of L.A. that looked like it had a past. (A slum clearance project began in 1955, and the area was eventually bulldozed and replaced by parking lots and new buildings, now including Disney Concert Hall.) Edward Dimendberg writes that in film noir, “It is as if the neighborhood assumes the role of the repressed historical unconscious of Los Angeles in juxtaposition to its recently constructed suburban present.” In Kiss Me Deadly, Bunker Hill was home to Christina, the murdered woman who leaves Mike Hammer with the final message, “Remember Me,” a reference to the poem by Christina Rossetti — which, ironically, concludes, “Better by far you should forget and smile / Than that you should remember and be sad.” Older parts of cities are repositories of memory: the names of streets, landmarks, the decay or renovations of buildings preserve layers of the past, as Bunker Hill’s squalor retains the traces of a time when it was a wealthy, genteel neighborhood. While wandering the streets, Frank Enley flashes back to the prison camp, hearing the voices of his dead soldiers echoing in the tunnel under Angels Flight. Pat tries to help Frank, but his predicament lies outside even her wide experience. In her world there are only two kinds of problems, love trouble and money trouble (“Either you’re broke or you’re lonely. Or both.”), and she believes that with enough money anything can be fixed. When she calls up Parkson and offers him a bribe to go away, she is astonished when he just laughs. She has never heard anyone laugh at money before. Frank’s money is of great interest, however, to a crooked lawyer and a hit man whom Pat takes him to meet at an illegal gambling joint. They twine around Frank, serpent-like, tempting him with how easy it would be to “scare” Parkson off: “Get rid of this guy and be sorry later. It’s him or you.” They seduce him with their amoral indifference, urging him to act the way he did in Germany — after all, he’s the same man he was then. This devastating judgment is confirmed when Frank tries to kill himself by standing in front of a locomotive; his instinct of self-preservation is too strong, and he weeps with shame at his failure. In a dazed stupor, he makes a deal with the plump, smiling hit man Johnny (Barry Kroeger) to lay a trap for Parkson at the Santa Lisa train station. (The professional is happy when he hears where Frank lives: small towns —“quiet, them hick cops”— are the best places for killings. The deserted train station is an appropriate setting for the final confrontation: Parkson’s murderous drive is unstoppable as a locomotive, and gives Frank a second chance to atone.) The next morning, Frank is horrified by what he’s done, and Pat is hardened and querulous, packing her things to get out of town, running away from what she’s seen and caused. For Pat, there will always be another town, another cheap room, another man, another drink. She’s not happy, but she gets her kicks. She has a resilience the two men lack, because she has learned to get along with her nightmares. A survivor plagued by memories he can’t share, a victorious hero who wonders what he fought for, the returning veteran personifies the noir view that postwar prosperity rests on unsteady or corrupt foundations. G.I.’s return to find their wives unfaithful (The Blue Dahlia), they suffer from amnesia (Somewhere in the Night), they struggle to support their families and turn to crime (The Sound of Fury). But the Hollywood studios were wary of playing on the stereotype of the “haywire vet.” In Raymond Chandler’s screenplay for The Blue Dahlia, Buzz (William Bendix), the hero’s buddy who suffers disorienting

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headaches caused by a steel plate in his skull, was originally supposed to be the murderer. Influenced by military advisors, the studio insisted on a different ending in which the culprit turns out to be a shady house detective; they didn’t want to suggest that war experience alone could turn a man into a killer. Act of Violence not only shows the psychological scars of the war leading one man into a violent, unbalanced obsession with revenge, it even broaches the possibility that some war heroes might really be war criminals. The most celebrated postwar film about returning soldiers, William Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), focuses on the relationships between the men and their wives as they try to overcome not merely the years of separation, but the vast gap in their experiences during those years. For the vets, home now feels foreign. As the plane carrying the three protagonists descends over their home town, one (Dana Andrews) says, “Do you remember the way you felt when you went overseas? I feel that way now.” And another (Fredric March) describes his feelings as he is about to enter his home and surprise his family: “I feel like I’m going in to hit a beach.” The tidy banality of the small city — drugstore soda fountains, cheap Italian restaurants, bankers’ banquets, family gatherings in the parlor — feels uncomfortable, even hostile, to men fresh from the battlefields. Only in Butch’s (Hoagy Carmichael) bar do they all feel at home; he offers the comforting assurance that if there’s another war, everyone will be killed the first day. Typically, the men rarely speak about anything they witnessed in the war, though one has nightmares about seeing his friend’s plane hit. He falls in love with a woman who is understanding about these episodes, and breaks up with the wife who is not. Act of Violence’s Frank Enley wants to keep his guilty secret from his wife, both to spare her (“Why should you have to bear this, too?”) and to remain a hero in her eyes. She looks up to her husband, and her innocence untouched by experience is a reproach and a barrier to him. Even after she knows the truth, Frank still treats Edith like a child rather than an equal, lying to her even as he says, “I wouldn’t lie to you.” With her flawless, doll-like beauty, her checkered dresses and aprons, Edith looks as though she were designed as part of Santa Lisa, the sunny, tidy new suburb (the setting was really Santa Monica) built on a desire to “forget and smile” rather than “remember and be sad.” Needless to say, film noir cast grave doubt on the suburban promise of a fresh start; Enley’s new life is as flimsy as the bungalows he builds.

The Trapped Woman Film noir, argues Sylvia Harvey, is “structured around the destruction or absence of romantic love and the family.” She points out that “many films noirs depict boredom and sterility in the married state,” and suggests that in rejecting domesticity, film noir expressed subversive views of women’s confinement to the home.4 Far from absent, the family is central to Max Ophüls’s The Reckless Moment (1949), and no film noir offers a more subtle, rich or moving treatment of American middle-class family life and that controversial icon, the American mother. The film is even more unusual in its portrayal of the relationship between suburban domesticity and the urban criminal underworld, which plays out not as a clash of alien realms but as a delicate and tragic love story.

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When Parkson forces his way into the Enleys’ home in Act of Violence, he is a hostile intruder bullying a defenseless housewife. In The Reckless Moment, when James Mason appears in Joan Bennett’s comfortable suburban home, he is another obvious ambassador from the dark city, but a more polite, conflicted one. She arrives to find him standing in the unlit parlor, surrounded by ominous shadows he seems to have brought with him, enveloped in a black overcoat and looking up with hurt dark eyes in a hangdog face. Though initially threatening — like Parkson, he knows the family’s secret — he turns out to be more vulnerable than his victim. Lucia Harper (Bennett) is a Balboa housewife with two children and a husband absent overseas; she’s so trim and attractive that Mason first pays her the sincere if clichéd compliment of mistaking her for her daughter. That daughter, the spoiled 17-year-old Bea, has killed her older boyfriend, Ted Darby, and Lucia has disposed of his body. The death was accidental and the man was a slimeball, so Mrs. Harper feels little compunction about dumping his corpse in the bay at dawn to spare a public revelation of her daughter’s affair. But now Mason’s Martin Donnelly appears, a mournful Irish blackmailer demanding money for Bea’s indiscreet letters to the dead man. (Revealing the depths of his sleaziness, Darby gave the letters as collateral for a loan, and his demise has increased their value.) In the film’s opening scene, before the murder, Lucia leaves the sparkling waters and well-tended homes of Balboa and drives to Los Angeles, a city that, in this film, consists exclusively of shabby hotels, pawnbrokers, bus stations, and loitering sailors. In an empty hotel bar she confronts Darby, a shifty, insinuating, drowsy-eyed chiseler who hopes to be paid off for not seeing Bea again. The upright matron and the unscrupulous seducer belong to different species, but the film sets out to prove the truth of Donnelly’s words when he tells Lucia, “We’re all involved with each other, one way or another.” The Reckless Moment was the last of Ophüls’s four American films, and only the second with an American setting. The German director’s years in Hollywood (1941–1950) were a frustrating and largely unproductive hiatus between his early career in Vienna and his greatest artistic achievements in France in the 1950s. Yorkshire-born James Mason, with his seductively gentle voice —“so attractively sinister,” as the women gush in Hitchcock’s Rope— was in his first year in Hollywood (his American debut was Ophüls’s Caught, also 1949.) Donnelly’s elegant, weary, guilt-stricken ambivalence has a European flavor, but with The Reckless Moment Ophüls keenly wanted to make an authentically American movie. He got the feel of American life, the sound of American voices, the trappings of an American home: the spacious rooms, the white-bannistered staircase, the blue plastic Christmas tree, the portrait of Frida Kahlo above art student Bea’s bed. Minor characters who turn up — the woman arguing with a post-office clerk about the wrapping of her package; the nervously affable pharmacist; the genteel, disapproving woman in the loan office — are sharp sketches but not caricatures. The tone of this film is matter-of-fact, like Lucia’s reaction to finding a body on her beach and a blackmailer in her parlor. There are no crescendos of suspense, just a steadily mounting tension. With meticulous locations and extremely sparing use of music, the film gives an unusually strong sense of real life — not the semi-documentary look so popular at the time, but a fresh, quiet, tactile feeling of the ordinary. You can smell the ocean air in the silent sequence when Lucia takes Darby’s corpse out in the boat; you get to know the

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Harper’s house — the turns of the stairs, the doors along the hall, the kitchen and the garage — the way you become familiar with a house where you’re staying. The Reckless Moment supports Walter Benjamin’s argument (in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”) that cinema and architecture are both fundamentally tactile rather than visual: that films are experienced like places one moves through, not just like pictures one looks at. There are a few flourishes of noir style in the shadows of tree branches that play on the creepy boathouse — site of two murders — and the bare lamp swinging creakily over the path that leads to it. (Ophüls specifically wanted the house and the boathouse to be contiguous, not shot on separate locations, as would have been more common at lowbudget Columbia Studio.) But there is no style for the sake of style. Ophüls uses his directorial signature, the fluid moving camera and sophisticated sense of space, to choreograph the constant swirl of motion in the Harper household: someone is always entering or leaving, going up or down stairs, opening or closing a door, moving from one room to the next. The writers hired to adapt Elizabeth Sanxay Holding’s original story — Robert Soderberg and Henry Garson — had never written a screenplay before, but had worked on the CBS radio program Junior Miss, a satirical family comedy. Ophüls was reportedly delighted with the quality they brought to the script: he “loved what he thought were keen observations of standard American living,” Soderberg recalled. “It was all a discovery to him, the wit, the humor, the American woman — the trapped woman.... She’s not trapped by anybody, except her own responsibilities and lack of privacy.” While Lucia devotes herself to her family — a noisy, hyperactive son; a sulky, selfdramatizing daughter who condescends to her mother and then runs to her, sobbing for protection; a genial, oblivious father-in-law; a husband reduced to a voice in long-distance phone calls — only Donnelly thinks of her, and imagines for her an existence separate from her family. “You’re quite a prisoner, aren’t you?” he says when she insists that she can’t take a trip to Los Angeles because her family will question her about it. “I don’t feel that way,” Lucia answers flatly. She refuses to be lured into voicing any disloyalty, but even she admits that the family “surrounds” her at times. They constantly pop up to demand explanations of her every move, to insist that their own needs be met. Before long the soft-spoken crook who knows her secret becomes the only person she can confide in and depend on. Lucia could easily seem like a deluded, narrow-minded slave to propriety: she tells Bea that she wishes she’d listened to her husband, who disapproved of sending their daughter to art school because of the “kind of people” she’d meet there. (If Darby is a good sample, he was right.) But even when she goes into a loan firm in her fur coat and veiled pillbox hat, expecting to borrow $5,000 with nothing but her signature and a case of jewelry, she doesn’t look naïve so much as brave. Even while being blackmailed over a murder, she still thinks about the family dinner, the Christmas tree and remembering to buy her fatherin-law’s razor blades, because these things are reality. People do need to eat dinner. In her selflessness and competence, Lucia is the maternal ideal, but she never appears saintly, or complacent; she is brisk, nervous, even snappish, and unsentimental. She dismisses Martin’s wistful compliment, “Everyone should have a mother like you,” with a

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Family life endangered: Bea (Geraldine Brooks, left) and Lucia Harper (Joan Bennett, right) read about a murder, and are watched by their maid, Sibyl (Frances E. Williams, center) in The Reckless Moment (Max Ophüls, 1949).

brusque, “Everyone does have a mother like me.” Joan Bennett had been a wisecracking dame in the thirties and a sexy, tawdry femme fatale in the mid-forties, and here she suggests that a proper matron could still possess the pluck and common sense of a working girl, and even a trace of the femme fatale’s brazen confidence. The movie looks at her with more detachment than Donnelly does (even the lilting way he says her name, Lu-see-a instead of Loo-sha, grants her a touch of glamour and romance), but shares his admiration for this harassed and hemmed-in but extraordinarily capable and strong-minded woman. She spends a lot of time telling her son to roll down his jeans or not eat so much butter, but she’s no less authoritative in confronting underworld characters or dragging a full-grown man, impaled on an anchor, into the family motor boat. When she first meets Donnelly she is almost comically un-intimidated. She orders him to drive her to the drugstore and give her change for a phone call; soon he’s helping her son with his homemade automobile and giving her father-in-law tips on the horses. He doesn’t invade her world so much as she invades his — or rather, she brings him into her world, letting him imagine, as he carries her parcels and worries that she smokes too much, what it would be like to be her husband.

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This reverses the standard noir formula in which a virtuous family man falls for a wicked woman who pulls him into the netherworld of crime and danger. Here a man entirely at home in that netherworld loses his heart to a respectable housewife — but the result is the same; the man is doomed. Martin, who comes from a large Irish Catholic family, recalls that his mother wanted him to be a priest, and could never believe that he was her “bad” son. One might think that Lucia reminds him of his mother, but he doesn’t want to be cared for — what he wants more than anything (he never tries to kiss her) is to care for Lucia, to help her, to bring her coffee, buy her a cigarette holder that promises “less nicotine, less tobacco stain!,” and most of all to protect her, the way she wants to protect her family. Towards the end of the film, Lucia returns to L.A. to try to raise the blackmail money. Exhausted and frantic after a long and fruitless hunt, she meets Donnelly in the bus station, and he eagerly tells her she is out of danger because a man has been arrested for killing Darby. Lucia, who knows he is innocent, is aghast: the man must be saved, even if she has to confess to the murder herself; she can’t consider letting him stay in prison for something he didn’t do. Donnelly argues from a compromised morality: the man is a criminal, guilty of many things — it doesn’t matter if he winds up paying for the one thing he didn’t do. Saving Lucia will be the only good deed he’s ever done. Donnelly’s partner, Nagle, senses that his agent has gone soft and takes over the case himself. Nastily addressing Lucia as “Duchess,” Nagle is a thug with only one thing on his mind, and faced with him Lucia becomes panicked, self-righteous, lying that she is safe because “they got the man that did it.” Nagle is wholly vicious; he wants his money and doesn’t care at all about his victim. But Donnelly considers himself even worse than his partner, who has no illusions about himself, while Donnelly believed that his selfloathing and conflicted feelings made him better than his fellow criminals. He can only redeem himself by killing Nagle — in a brutal scene he strangles his partner, kneeling on him and grimly holding on even as Nagle stabs him repeatedly in the arm with a broken bottle — and then by dying in a car crash, managing to stay alive long enough to confess to killing Darby. He gets to play the hero and die for his lady — and she is shattered, collapsing in sobs for the first time in the movie. For Lucia, Donnelly represents a kind of grown-up honesty lacking from her life. She is, in the truest sense, an adult, and almost everyone around her is less mature and dependent on her. Her family must be kept in the dark about things, and they never fully recognize how much she does for them. (Ophüls’s acerbic view of American youth recalls the even harsher disapproval of another European director, Douglas Sirk.) The only exception aside from the blackmailer is Sibyl (Frances E. Williams), the Harpers’ black maid, who alone senses that Lucia is in real trouble, and who is with her when she pursues Donnelly and finds him dying. The maid has been a near-silent witness throughout the film, but she has formed her own opinions: “I always liked that Mr. Donnelly,” she says. Like the blackmailer, Sibyl has a sad, worried, compassionate face, and appreciates the enormity of her employer’s responsibilities. Lucia knows she can trust her, that the maid is her equal and friend. She has no one else: she can’t bring herself to worry her absent husband with her problems, and tells him instead how much she needs and misses him, though she is obviously able to cope without him. When her father-in-law, dimly realizing that Lucia is worried, reminds

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her that he’s there if she needs him, it’s a pathetic moment: the well-meaning old duffer in his yachting cap would be far out of his depth. Surrounded by her family, she is, nonetheless, on her own, in “the special loneliness of family life,” as James Harvey writes. Sitting in her room at night going through the household budget and writing to her far-away husband, Lucia is deeply alone, and so used to it that she hardly seems to notice. Lucia is insulted when Donnelly says, “You have your family, and I have my Nagle,” but there is rueful truth in the words: these are the bonds they can’t escape, and that define them. The family, for all its surface irritations, is the locus of the kind of love — not romantic but responsible, anxious, caring — that the film depicts so tenderly and movingly. This love is not soft, not a matter of smiles and hugs and kind words. Lucia rarely looks directly at anyone, touches anyone or shows any deep emotion; her love is expressed in action and willingness to take trouble. When Donnelly dies, she is left even more alone, with not merely a secret but a secret self she can share with no one else. The film ends with her telling her husband, Tom, on the phone that everything is fine. Lying to people in order to protect them from painful truths is a common expression of love, but it infantilizes the sheltered person and creates an estranging gap like the one that separated veterans and their wives. Few people would argue with the practice of shielding children from life’s harsh realities, but Americans are notorious for attempting to preserve innocence through adulthood. Hollywood’s Production Code was devoted to protecting adults not only from sordid sights but from unpleasant realities, like the fact that evil is not always punished. However skillful filmmakers were at sneaking around the Code, American noir of the classic era could never approach the uncompromising bleakness of The Bad Sleep Well, Kurosawa’s great drama of corporate corruption — in which, sure enough, evil triumphs with ease. After the First World War, shattered societies took refuge in frivolity and exuberant hedonism: jazz, gin and ukuleles. After the Second World War, Americans retreated instead into wholesome, sanitized domesticity — kids, kitchens and lawnmowers. Film noir offered escape from this ethos, and sometimes sharp criticism of it. “This was not merely a child-centered environment: it was based on a childish view of the world,” Mumford wrote of the suburbs: “The temptation to retreat from unpleasant realities, to shirk public duties, and to find the whole meaning of life in the most elemental social group, the family, or even in the still more isolated and self-centered individual.” Donnelly’s reminder that “we’re all involved with each other” comes from his urban milieu; it’s harder for the city dweller to ignore the way his life is intertwined with others,’ while the suburbs support the illusion that people can “keep themselves to themselves.” Lucia Harper’s main concern is to keep the scandal of her daughter’s affair from being revealed; it’s Bea’s reputation that’s at stake, not her life. The Harpers are shielded by Donnelly’s false confession: a criminal takes the blame so that the middle-class family can preserve their appearance of respectability. The Reckless Moment neither condemns nor celebrates the way of life that demands these lies, nor the American woman’s willingness to be a prisoner of the home. Mary Malden, Edith Enley and Lucia Harper are all identified with their houses; they remain in place while men travel. Not that travel is always broadening. Human

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Desire (1954) opens with a man returning home after fighting in the Korean war, like Mitchum in Thunder Road. Though on his arrival he says “the town looks great ... one hundred percent better than Korea,” he shows the common veteran’s disaffection and boredom at the tedium of civilian life. He drives trains for a living, passing back and forth through landscapes that are monotonously dreary: scrubby winter trees, skeletal bridges, telephone poles, water towers, freight cars, gas stations, drab little towns and outskirts of cities. This back-projected scenery, pieced together from second-unit footage, jumps inexplicably from western mountains to eastern industrial cities, and, while it includes one piece of conspicuously recognizable geography — the “Trenton Makes: the World Takes” bridge in Trenton, N.J.— there is never any distinct sense of place: we are in Any Town, U.S.A. The interiors of the trains are blank as jails or hospitals: flat grey corridors and unadorned compartments. This is the ultimate “non-place,” a space of perpetual in-betweenness. Rail travel can create a movable community, whether of hobos or of high society on the Twentieth Century Limited, but here its cramped quarters force people into close proximity while placing them in a featureless limbo where no one is at home. Fritz Lang was reluctant to undertake this Hollywood remake of Jean Renoir’s La Bête Humaine, (1938), adapted from the novel by Emile Zola; he thought the material was hackneyed and he hated the studio-imposed title. He seems to mock the warmblooded subject of “human desire” with an opening montage of mechanized steel. Rails unspool endlessly like a strip of celluloid running through a projector, the ties clicking past like frames of film; wheels rush over the camera; tunnels swallow the screen in blackness then release it through keyholes of light. Lang’s opening sequence copies Renoir’s introduction to life on the railroad, but Renoir’s subtle tolerance and vivid sensitivity to nuances of behavior were far from Zola’s clinical, deterministic approach to his characters, as they were from Lang’s cold dissection of tawdry, grubby lower-middle-class American life. Trains serve a double, contradictory allegorical purpose throughout the film. The images of wheels on rails suggest lives confined to set paths, going back and forth without ever getting anywhere, unable to move from familiar ruts. At the same time, the hulking metal behemoths suggest ungovernable passions, monstrous automatons carrying people helplessly into destruction. The film’s two murders both occur on trains. People are constantly surrounded by signs that admonish: “No Smoking,” “No Profane Language,” “Safety First: Think!,” but as a self-satisfied party girl remarks, “The men I know can see much better than they can think.” This is certainly true of the returning vet, Jeff Warren (Glenn Ford). Before any words are spoken (it’s too noisy to talk in the cab of the locomotive) we see a gesture of male camaraderie, as Jeff lights a cigarette from his older friend’s pipe. The film will end, rather disturbingly, with an identical scene. Stable, comfortable male friendship survives the train wrecks of sexual relationships, but it seems obtuse and insulated, as the cab is cut off from the rest of the train. Back in his home town, Jeff rents a room in his friend’s house. The little white bungalow, first seen with a small child in a newspaper hat riding past on a tricycle, offers him an illustration of ordinary, placid domesticity: wife hanging curtains, old married couple affectionately bickering over breakfast. Jeff tells the daughter

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of the house, who has aged during his absence from a little girl with pigtails into a buxom bombshell, that all he wants now is a nice, quiet, orderly life of fishing and nights at the movies. But his status as a lodger, sleeping in a single bed like another child of the house, hints at Jeff ’s failure or refusal to settle down into an adult life. He never shows any real interest in fishing or going to the movies. He ignores the daughter’s undisguised crush on him, and jumps instead first at what looks like the chance of a casual pickup, and then at a destructive affair with a married woman, Vicki Buckley (Gloria Grahame). The house where Carl Buckley and his wife live also sits behind a white picket fence, but right across the street is the noisy, grimy rail yards. Trains roar past, clanking and steaming. Inside, a large birdcage hangs in the living room above a small TV; twin beds are set far apart in the bedroom, under nubbly, unpleasantly textured bedspreads. There are flying-duck plaques on the wall, kitschy emblems of cultural impoverishment. Carl (Broderick Crawford) spends his evenings getting drunk at a dreary bar called Duggan’s; Vicki spends both days and nights lounging aimlessly around the house, reading magazines, eating popcorn, admiring her new stockings. The marriage is a vision of utter waste: at the dinner table, Vicki leafs through a magazine, not looking up; they say nothing to each other until Carl complains that the soup is cold, at which Vicki clears away the dishes. She won’t let him touch her, though he pleads, “I’m all alone, and I love you.”

Drab lives in drab surroundings: Jeff Warren (Glenn Ford, left), Carl Buckley (Broderick Crawford, center) and Vicki Buckley (Gloria Grahame, right) outside the Buckleys’ home by the railroad tracks in Human Desire (Fritz Lang, 1954).

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Lang’s depiction of marital abuse is startlingly harsh for 1954, and also disturbingly complex. Carl, a clumsy, raging bull of a man, is obsessively jealous of his nubile young wife. But he keeps pushing her to use her sex appeal for his advantage: after he’s fired for losing his temper, he pleads with her to go see a wealthy acquaintance, Owens, who has the power to get his job back. He probably doesn’t admit even to himself what he’s asking her to do, but he already knows that she has a past relationship with the man, and knows why she’ll be able to ask a favor. When she returns after some hours, Carl blows up with fury as he “realizes” that her errand was a tryst. Knocking her down and hitting her until she admits the truth, he then forces her to write a letter to Owens arranging to meet him in his train compartment. On the train, Carl stabs and kills Owens with his pen knife (his satisfied smile afterward is blood-curdling) and takes the letter Vicki wrote, threatening to show it to the police and implicate her if she tells anyone what happened. When the Buckleys try to leave Owens’s compartment, Jeff is standing in the corridor smoking a cigarette. Incredibly, Carl sends Vicki to lure him away so that he can escape. She has no trouble picking up Jeff, who grins fatuously at the prospect of getting lucky with this odd, nervous woman he’s never met before. She leaves him puzzled after one kiss, and when the train pulls into their home town, Jeff finds out that she’s Carl’s wife. Soon she begins telling him about how Carl abuses her and describing her fright and shame. Cowering in a darkened railyard shack, Vicki and Jeff share a supremely noir love scene: Vicki seduces him not with her sex appeal so much as with her misery. They talk about loneliness, failure, violence and death before falling into a hot clinch. The lovers begin meeting in a borrowed apartment in the city, and Jeff urges Vicki to leave Carl so they can get married. (The nameless city, where the characters go in futile attempts to escape from the strangling confinement of their lives, consists of nothing but a train station, an apartment and an office.) Yet when she finally confesses the truth about the murder, he initially distrusts and despises her — why does she keep saying Carl “forced” her to participate? Why didn’t she try harder to alert the police? He eventually accepts her story, and even considers killing Carl, following him through the dark train yards as he stumbles drunkenly home from the bar. It would be easy to make his death look like an accident, but Jeff can’t bring himself to kill the pitiful, helpless man. Vicki thinks that Jeff should be able to kill her husband because he’s a veteran who has killed in war. He tells her that killing a man is “the easiest thing in the world,” then grins, puts his arm around her like a teenage boy on a date, and says, “This is some conversation we’re havin’!” When he explains why he couldn’t kill Carl, he says that in the war “you fire into darkness, at a sound, a light, a uniform.” It’s not like murdering a man who’s right in front of you and whom you know. He believes there is a real, moral distinction, and his revulsion destroys his love for Vicki. He ends their relationship, telling her, “I feel dirty.” Men hate Vicki for the way she makes them feel, the passions of jealousy and violence she arouses. As she contemptuously points out, Jeff ’s conscience didn’t stop him from making love to her. Vicki is the most complicated and ambiguous character in the film. She is both a victim and a manipulator; in her scenes with Carl, the balance of power constantly shifts from one to the other. His physical strength gives him an advantage, but he is also vulnerable, since he needs and wants her, while she gains power by withholding herself from

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him. She tells Jeff that Owens forced himself on her when she was the 16-year-old daughter of his housekeeper; she later tells Carl that she wanted Owens’s wealth and his big house, and that she respected him for seeing through her schemes. The truth is probably a combination of both. She’s a woman who knows no other way to get along except to trade on her sex appeal; but unlike her fur-clad blonde friend Jean (who lends her apartment for adulterous trysts), she isn’t hard-shelled, cynical and successful at it. (Gloria Grahame, with her bruised pout, lisping voice and keen-but-off-kilter intelligence, was film noir’s leading female masochist, turning wounds both physical and mental into weirdly sexy accessories. Petite and adorable, with a left eyebrow that wouldn’t stay put, she often conveyed the sense that her sexiness was akin to a dangerous addiction, leading her helplessly into destruction.) In the end, Vicki commits a kind of suicide: she goads Carl into killing her by telling him about her relationship with Owens and cruelly taunting him with his abject failure: “You haven’t got the letter, or me, or a job, or anything.” Drunken, tremulous, disheveled, broke, Carl is truly pathetic in this final scene, yet his attack on Vicki is staged with shocking brutality, as he strangles her in a train compartment. The film cuts from this to Jeff in the cab of the same train, tranquilly sharing a smoke with his friend, who earlier lectured him that it was wrong to fool around with a married woman, and warned him that “this is a small town, people notice things.” The ending could be read as a happy one for the “hero,” who escapes from temptation; but it feels more like a condemnation of a shallow, selfish man who has abandoned the woman he claimed to love and will feel nothing when he finds out she’s dead. Human Desire is an early example of the flat, ashen look that began to take over film noir in the fifties. The visual dullness evokes the emotional poverty of the characters; though they are driven by violent passions, there’s something thin and cheap about their relationships. In the railyard shack, Vicki explains how she came to marry the monstrous Carl, who seemed “big, solid, decent” when he courted her. She speaks for many noir women who find themselves trapped in wretched marriages: I wanted a home. I wanted to belong someplace. It isn’t easy for a girl, drifting around from one job to another. After I married, I felt a little unhappy, but I figured that wasn’t important. Most women are unhappy; they just pretend they aren’t. At first I didn’t mind when he touched me. But now I can’t stand it. Everything turns cold inside of me. Is it wrong to feel the way I do? I don’t know what I’m doing in the same room with him. I feel lost, alone. I guess I’m not much of a woman, or a wife, am I?

CHAPTER 3

Maximum Security: Domestic Noir That gloomy, horrible house ... the slit of sunlight slicing through those heavy drapes— you could smell that death was in the air, you understood why she wanted to get out of there, away, no matter how. —Barbara Stanwyck, on Double Indemnity

The House on the Hill: the Dream Home as Bluebeard’s Castle To a visiting salesman, the Dietrichson home appears almost as desirable as the platinum-blonde housewife who greets him wrapped in a towel. It’s not a mansion, but a comfortable, well-groomed white-stucco-and-red-tile house on a quiet street up in the L.A. hills, surrounded by palm trees and honeysuckle. Inside, however, it’s somber and oppressive as Stanwyck later recalled it: ornately furnished with Turkish carpets, heavy chairs and wrought-iron banisters. The rooms are always closed off, and the bars of light coming through Venetian blinds show dust in the air. Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) finds the living room “still stuffy from last night’s cigars,” and a pall of inert boredom lingers in the air, left over from quiet evenings of Chinese checkers. Goldfish swim around and around in a small bowl on the piano. The irony is that Phyllis Dietrichson (Stanwyck) fought to get into the cage she schemes to escape in Double Indemnity. A former nurse, she let her husband’s first wife die so that she could have the house and the security it represents. “I wanted a home,” she tells Walter (just like Vicki Buckley); but now her husband “keeps me on a leash so tight I can’t breathe.” She’s shut up, never allowed to go anywhere. She’s suffocated by family life; some evenings she and her husband sit not saying a word to each other. She envies Walter’s bachelor apartment, with a cleaning lady who comes twice a week and breakfasts at the drugstore. “Just strangers beside you,” she muses longingly. “You don’t know them, you don’t hate them.” Through the eyes of Walter Neff we see Phyllis as a monster; he narrates the film as a dying confession, and, naturally, he heaps blame on the woman he just killed. Film noir did not always take the man’s point of view, though the assumption that it did — along with a common prejudice against melodrama and women’s movies — often leads films 57

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with female protagonists to be treated as less than fully noir. Movies with women at the center complicate the standard noir duality of good girl vs. bad girl, avaricious temptress vs. apron-wearing wife happily keeping her husband’s supper warm. Films about men with dangerous jobs typically show them returning home to loving, supportive and contented wives, but films that focus on domestic settings show women as vulnerable, locked in lifeless or life-endangering relationships and warped by the narrowness of their experiences. These captive women elicit sympathy with their frustrated desires for freedom, even when they are demonized like Phyllis Dietrichson or Rosa Moline, Bette Davis’s character in the ludicrous melodrama Beyond the Forest (1949). “This is the story of Evil,” the prologue trumpets, but all we see at first is a dissatisfied small-town housewife who would like to go to Chicago. It’s impossible not to enjoy Rosa’s incessant stream of histrionic invective, which Davis delivers with venomous relish: “Living in Loyalton is like sitting in a funeral parlor waiting for the funeral to begin,” she sneers. When her dull, countrydoctor husband suggests she should try to get people to like her, she retorts, “I don’t want people to like me. I’m never happier than when they don’t. I don’t belong.” He asks why she torments herself, and she responds frankly, “Because it makes me feel alive.” Every day she goes to watch the Chicago train pull in (exasperatingly, the film’s score plays “Chicago” every time Rosa thinks of the place), and she spends her sleepless nights watching the hellish flames of the town’s sawmill flicker on her bedroom walls. “When I think of the things I want,” she cries, “it’s like your stomach feels when there’s no food in it.” What she wants, however, is merely a mink coat and “everything deluxe.” She’s lazy and rude and vain, and she murders a man who threatens to stop her from running away with her lover. A jury rules the death accidental, but she’s still trapped in Loyalton, this time by pregnancy. Even when he finds out that she’s a murderer, Rosa’s disgusted husband won’t let her go until she has the baby: she’s no longer his wife, just an incubator for his child. Thwarted and desperate, she takes a flying jump off a hillside to induce a miscarriage. In a grotesque and deeply punitive scene, she gets out of bed, sick and sweaty and feverish, smears on fright make-up, and drags herself to the station to die in the shadow of the train she dreamed of taking. The “evil” of Rosa Moline is as phony as the witchy black wig that Bette Davis wears. It’s not that she’s sympathetic, exactly, it’s just that the film works far too hard to blacken her, leaving the audience to wonder why the effort is necessary. A throwaway line pinpoints part of the problem. When Rosa’s lover reasonably asks her why, if she hates the town so much, she didn’t get out on her own, she replies, “As what — a waitress? A telephone girl?” She yearns for the good life, but if the price is work, it’s too high; she’d rather wait for a rich man to rescue her. The message of Beyond the Forest is clearly that Rosa should be happy as a wife and mother, though to the latterday viewer it seems clear that what she needs is a career, perhaps as a talk-show personality or a cutthroat CEO. Conventional postwar wisdom held that working women took jobs away from men who needed them, neglected their families and threatened their husbands’ pride. In The City That Never Sleeps (1953), a wife blames herself for the fact that her husband, a policeman, participated in a robbery in order to make money to run away with his mistress. It was really her fault, she says, because she earned more money than he did, and

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she promises to give up her job — thus more than halving the family’s income — to keep him happy. In fact, many women did continue to work out of necessity or inclination (in 1960, 40 percent of married American women with children had jobs), but the stayat-home wife was held up as an ideal and a status symbol of middle-class success. Women in postwar America were caught in a double bind. While they were discouraged from pursuing careers, they were also typed as gold diggers and husband hunters out to trap men into supporting them. (In The Sound of Fury, a truckdriver declares that guys shouldn’t be allowed to get married young: “They hook you before you got sense,” he complains, adding, “You take my old lady. You want her, you can have her.” Later, a stickup man, bragging about his conquests, flourishes a wad of bills and announces, “Women all like the same color: green.”) Men, it seems, both feared losing power if women became economically independent, and resented being treated as meal tickets. In movies, it’s taken for granted that every woman yearns for fur coats and diamond jewelry, badges that prove her value to a man. This was no less true in the thirties, but screwball comedy presented the battle of the sexes as a playful, bantering competition of equals. Film noir, by and large, reduced it to an ugly equation: women want money, men want sex, and they will use and hurt each other — and themselves — to get what they want. Only rarely (for instance in the 1957 Stanwyck movie Crime of Passion) did noir explicitly address the issue Betty Friedan would define in 1963 with the publication of The Feminine Mystique: the lack of fulfillment and vague sense of anxiety and unease among women who followed the postwar trend of devoting their lives exclusively to home and family. More often, this theme was submerged in thrillers about women who become endangered prisoners in their own homes. It’s a classic vehicle for suspense, going back to silent thrillers like D.W. Griffith’s 1912 An Unseen Enemy and Lois Weber’s 1913 Suspense, which play on female vulnerability and the violation of the home. Beware, My Lovely (1952) is the purest noir version of this trope. Based on a play by Mel Dinelli that had earlier been performed as a radio drama,1 the film is a simple, claustrophobic miniature about a lonely widow’s struggle with a psychotic handyman who locks her inside her house. The setting is World War I–era California at Christmas time, a sunny day in a picturesque small town. The widow’s house is fussy Victorian Gothic, full of bric-a-brac and gingerbread trim, busy wallpaper, pictures and knick-knacks and Christmas decorations. Director Harry Horner was also a set designer, and lavished great attention on his characters’ surroundings and their interactions with spaces and objects. Helen Gordon (Ida Lupino), whose husband has died in the war, is alone for the holidays and hires Howard Wilton (Robert Ryan) to do some work around the house. (Ryan and Lupino, competing to see who can be more highly strung, again play a man who has no home and a woman who never leaves hers.) He is a friendless drifter who has fled on a freight train from his last job, where he discovered his employer lying dead in a closet. It is implied, though never proven, that he killed her during one of his violent blackouts. He is pathetically eager to please, consumed by the idea that people don’t like or appreciate him. Mrs. Gordon treats him kindly and tries to befriend him, first sincerely, and then to humor him once it becomes clear that he is dangerous. He alternates between clumsy, overbearing attempts at friendship and fits of suspicious rage; he locks her in the

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The home invaded: Howard Wilton (Robert Ryan) menaces Mrs. Helen Gordon (Ida Lupino) in Beware, My Lovely (Harry Horner, 1952).

cellar when some children come to the door, but when he lets her out hours later he proudly shows her how he has trimmed the Christmas tree, and suggests a dinner for two. Tormented by his rejection from the army and taunted with doing women’s work like polishing floors, Howard asserts his power by bullying Mrs. Gordon, but also fantasizes about being her husband. Why are houses so effective in evoking terror? The creak of a stair, a shadow moving along a hallway lined with closed doors, the tinkle of glass chimes on a lampshade, the gleam on a kitchen knife, even a reflection on a Christmas ornament — everyday things are easily turned into creepy threats by common cinematic tricks of pacing, lighting and scoring. The method is predictable, yet it generally works like a charm. The home is a refuge, so when it is violated it becomes the most frightening place of all: if you’re not safe there, where can you be safe? During the whole of her ordeal, Mrs. Gordon is separated by the thinnest boundary from the normal and comforting: children playing, dogs barking, visiting grocery boys and telephone repairmen. Yet she remains alone and helpless, since Howard, who has locked the doors from the inside and ripped out the phone cord, threatens to harm the children if she tries to alert them to her imprisonment or seek help. This improbable and overwrought story can be taken as a vivid allegory of an abusive marriage;

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a secret psychodrama going on undetected under the noses of friendly neighbors. The home can be dangerous because it is private, cut off from the larger community. In the street, at least, someone might hear you scream. Dramas about women menaced by their husbands ironically invert the notion of marrying for “security.” The word is perhaps a euphemism anyway: “What is security?” a young woman asks in Caught: “Money! Period.” The third of Max Ophüls’s American films, Caught (1948) is a superficially straightforward warning about the pitfalls of marrying for money. The credits are superimposed on a sequence of magazine illustrations: seductive images of fashions, furs, cars, vacations, the trappings of wealth and ease. Leonora Ames (Barbara Bel Geddes), an ambitious carhop, is leafing through the magazine with her roommate, who convinces Leonora to scrounge up the money (cutting her lunch budget from 65¢ to 25¢) to pay for a course at a charm school: learning social graces and how to exploit her looks is the only way she’ll ever get to meet the right men and escape dingy apartments and menial jobs. Leonora is a blonde with a pleasantly average face, an ordinary young woman whose hunger for luxury seems more conventional than personal, but who is dangerously unformed. She gets a job as a department store mannequin: two middle-aged women paw the mink coat she’s modeling and discuss whether their husbands’ salaries can pay for it; one decides she’d “rather make him buy me a new bracelet anyway.” One customer sees Leonora, rather than her coat, as a product for sale, and invites her to a yacht party. Though the setup makes her feel cheap, she reluctantly agrees to go, and meets Smith Ohlrig (Robert Ryan), an immensely wealthy and powerful tycoon. Ohlrig is chilly, rude and neurotic; he wants nothing more than a fling, but when his psychoanalyst diagnoses his fear of being married for his money and tells him the marriage would be a mistake, he decides to marry Leonora out of spite. Newspapers treat the Cinderella story as frontpage news: “This is America,” one headline gushes, showing the bride’s humble birthplace and the Long Island mansion where she will live. The mansion itself is strikingly European, a mixture of Gothic and Renaissance styles with the grandeur of a palazzo, full of marble columns and objet-d’art.2 It is a strange setting for a workaholic industrialist who spends all his time running multiple companies and sweating over deals and innovations. But Smith is not a self-made man; he inherited millions from his father, and is so used to getting his way that he goes into rages and suffers nervous heart attacks if his will is crossed. Convinced that Leonora married him for his money, he treats her as an “employee,” making her stay up all night in case he should summon her, ordering her around and humiliating her in front of guests.3 Her duty is to act as hostess, he tells her; the house is her place. The situation feels feudal, more Old World than American, a sense heightened by the presence of Franzi, an Austrian former headwaiter who is Ohlrig’s toady; a cynical, malicious little man with no illusions about himself, his employer or Leonora. She hates the Strauss waltzes he plays on the piano, which serve as a reminder of Ophüls’s origins. The film is full of his trademark fluid, encircling camera movements, which draw attention to the way people move through enclosed spaces. Very few scenes are set outdoors. Leonora keeps insisting that she loves Smith and didn’t marry him for money, but

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no one believes her. (It’s left up to the audience whether or not to believe her. She seems sincere, but Ohlrig is so loathsome that it’s easier to assume Leonora has hypnotized herself into believing she loves him.) Whenever she complains of being lonely and neglected, people harp on how lucky she is, how she should enjoy her luxury. Finally fed up with Ohlrig’s petty, domineering habits, she leaves him and gets a job as a receptionist at a doctor’s office on the Lower East Side. Falling in love with Dr. Larry Quenada ( James Mason), she learns to abandon her charm school manners and become a competent, responsible worker. She returns to Ohlrig again when she discovers she is pregnant; despite all she has learned, she wants to secure her baby’s “future.” She spends months cowering in her bedroom while Smith, sadistically determined to destroy her, summons her to go for drives every night, never allowing her to sleep. When he has one of his attacks while playing pinball — a one-man game that suits his immature solipsism — she refuses to help him or call a doctor. Though he survives, she is so distraught that her baby is born prematurely and dies. Under the circumstances, this is a happy ending, leaving her free, and the dead baby is a fitting issue of this sterile marriage. While its themes are boilerplate (marry for love not money; work is more fulfilling than luxury), Ophüls gave the story a noir tone not only by focusing on Ohlrig’s warped mind and Leonora’s confused ambivalence, but by grounding the story within a materialistic society where it’s taken for granted that marriage is an economic arrangement. The depiction of a relationship in which the husband treats his wife as a servant, demanding obedience and humility in exchange for idleness and finery, is a nightmarish caricature of traditional marriage: a trap in which both men and women are caught. Noir gave a particular — and literal — slant to the “house on the hill,” turning the tired symbol of affluence and aspiration into a vertigo-inducing horror. (“Let’s just say it’s the altitude,” Robert Mitchum says in Angel Face, as he quits his job as chauffeur at a cliff-side mansion: “Living up here makes my heart pound.”) San Francisco’s dizzy, tilting streets made it an ideal noir setting, as in Robert Wise’s polished if unoriginal House on Telegraph Hill (1951). This time the heroine is not an ambitious working girl, but a Polish refugee who has survived Bergen Belsen. When her best friend dies in the camp a few days before liberation, Victoria Kowelska (Valentina Cortese) steals her papers and assumes her identity, knowing that Karin Dernakova had wealthy relations in America who adopted her son. When she tracks them down, they are suspicious of her claim, and she exerts herself to seduce the boy’s guardian, Alan Spender (Richard Basehart). There is a brief scene in which he takes her shopping for a haute couture wardrobe, which evokes countless other movie sequences of men showering gifts on attractive women. As she parades in a sexy black evening gown she gloats, “This is what I had dreamed about ... the feel of silk on my skin again.” But she’s not motivated by greed; she’s just frightened and tired, pursued by ghosts and convinced that marriage to a wealthy American will give her safe harbor. As soon as she enters Alan’s house in San Francisco, that sense of safety drains away. It is an old-fashioned mansion full of carved wood, weighty antiques, family portraits and sinister undercurrents. The house is perched at the top of a precipitous slope, and

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two murder attempts make use of its location: Victoria almost dies when the brakes in her car suspiciously fail as she drives down the hill, and Karin’s son Chris narrowly escapes an explosion in his playhouse, which leaves a gaping hole over a sheer drop. Alan is a poor relation ensconced in the house only as Chris’s guardian; he is determined to cling to what he believes is his rightful inheritance, and begins to shadow his wife’s every move. The house and its furnishings, which Alan desires — fetishizing an antique chair he loved as a child — becomes increasingly uncomfortable and nerve-wracking for Victoria. In this self-consciously Hitchcockian thriller, a branch tapping at the window, a phone lying off the hook, even a pitcher of orange juice heighten her fear and sense of helplessness. Looming in close-up, the orange juice recalls the phosphorescent glass of milk Johnnie Aysgarth (Cary Grant) serves to Lina McLaidlaw ( Joan Fontaine) in Suspicion, another film about a woman who suspects her husband is trying to kill her; Victoria’s near-fatal drive also echoes the Hitchcock film’s bungled climax on a winding mountain road. Her sense of imprisonment, awareness of being watched and fear of being poisoned recall Alicia Huberman’s (Ingrid Bergman) marriage to Alex Sebastian (Claude Rains) in Notorious, while her feeling that secrets from the past still overshadow the present puts her in company with the heroine in the Gothic, new-bride-in-an-old-house melodrama Rebecca. All of these stories turn on the vulnerability of brides who know little about their husbands, whether they are entering their husbands’ homes or taking their gold-digging husbands into their own. As the house is supposed to be a secure space, husbands are supposed to protect and take care of their wives. Trusted, and with access to the women’s intimate spaces, they can become the most dangerous predators. In Woman in Hiding (1950), Deborah Chandler Clark (Ida Lupino) survives her husband’s attempt to murder her on their wedding night and goes on the run, certain that no one will believe her story. She finally confesses her plight to a friendly man who has taken a liking to her — and his response is to call her husband, who assures him she’s delusional. He immediately trusts the man he’s never met and assumes the woman he loves is crazy and should be returned to her husband’s care. Once they’re shut up together in a train compartment, Deborah’s husband tells her that he’s going to commit her to an insane asylum. There’s no reason to think he won’t get away with it. Lupino excelled at portraying women clinging to the crumbling edge of sanity. In Jennifer (1953) she’s a friendless, mentally fragile woman who gets a job as housekeeper at a huge, uninhabited estate. It’s the worst job she could have: creeping around the echoing, shadowy rooms alone, hearing odd noises and discovering strange evidence of her predecessor, she quickly starts to unravel. She becomes obsessed with the disappearance of Jennifer, the former housekeeper, and soon becomes convinced that she was murdered and buried somewhere close by. The film is all atmosphere and no substance, gorgeously shot by James Wong Howe. (In a stunning image, Lupino comes upon a gardener burning leaves on the estate, the smoke filling the air with ghosts of light.) But the film is a big buildup without a climax. It turns out that Jennifer didn’t disappear at all; she went crazy and was put away, and the family is ashamed to admit it. Agnes comes close to following her. She goes down into a dark, cluttered cellar and confuses her own face, reflected in a pool of water, with the face of the corpse she’s looking for. In Gothic melodramas, women are not only physically menaced and held captive, but psychologically isolated and

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harassed. Just as they rarely leave their houses, they are forced further and further into their own troubled minds, incapable of communicating freely or getting accurate information. Sorry, Wrong Number (1948), like Beware, My Lovely, was adapted from a radio play (listed in the credits as the “famous” work of Lucille Fletcher.) A narrative constructed solely of a series of phone calls is a clever idea for radio, but problematic for film, and despite director Anatole Litvak’s best efforts to open up the drama with flashbacks and sometimes irrelevant visual interest (during one phone call, the camera watches a pair of exhibition ballroom dancers performing nearby), it remains a talky and oddly disembodied film. But the focus on the telephone demonstrates the vulnerability of a technology designed to connect: crossed wires, missed connections, conversations cut off for lack of change to feed a pay phone, and calls that aren’t answered illustrate the tenuousness of this web of communication. The phone accentuates the characters’ separation; except in flashbacks that dramatize their memories or monologues, they are never together in the same room. Since there is often no action whatsoever, the camera prowls around the rooms in which people are talking, especially the bedroom of Leona Stevenson (Barbara Stanwyck), an invalid whose only link to the outside world is the telephone. The windows of her room, in a townhouse on Sutton Place, look out on the Queensboro Bridge and the power stations of Manhattan’s East Side. But the city feels very distant and unreal, and Leona is imprisoned like a man in a cell, immobilized by her illness. The house, with its central marble staircase, is shadowy and silent as a mausoleum. Left alone when her servants have the evening off, Leona frantically calls in search of her husband, who has failed to come home on time. Someone reassures her, “You’re right in the heart of New York City and there’s a telephone beside your bed.” But after inadvertently overhearing the conversation of two men planning the murder of a woman, she becomes more and more panicked, shrieking, “I’m all alone in this horrible, empty house!” Leona is a spoiled heiress (the “cough-drop queen”) whose father has indulged her every whim since she was a child. She marries Henry (Burt Lancaster), a working-class young man who enjoys the luxurious life she gives him but feels stifled and humiliated (much like the protagonist in Caught). He’s given the title of “vice president” in his fatherin-law’s pharmaceutical company, but no responsibilities. He moves into the family mansion in Chicago, and is told, “While you’re in this house you’ll do what my daughter tells you.” He tries to get her to move into an apartment, but she prefers to stay under her daddy’s roof with his stuffed hunting trophies. Frustrated and resentful, Henry begins stealing drugs from the company and selling them on the black market. He tries to double-cross his fence, but the racketeer catches up with him, demanding the money he feels cheated of, and suggests that Henry save himself by killing his wife for her fortune. The role of Leona was originally played on radio by Agnes Moorhead; the casting of Stanwyck, who usually played dynamic, assertive women, makes the character’s bedridden feebleness even more frustrating. Stanwyck does nothing to make Leona more appealing; indeed, she may be the most unattractive character Stanwyck ever portrayed. (Pushing herself into extended flights of hysteria, she also gives one of her worst performances.)

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Woman isolated, immobile and helpless: The bedridden Leona Stevenson (Barbara Stanwyck) realizes she’s marked for death in Sorry, Wrong Number (Anatole Litvak, 1948).

Pushy, selfish and shrill, Leona is also weak and needy. Her heart condition turns out to be purely neurotic: like Smith Ohlrig, she has an attack whenever she doesn’t get her way, and uses her condition to demand attention. But her conviction that she is “a very sick woman” saps all her strength. By the time Leona finally speaks to Henry and tells him that the racketeer is in jail, the hit man he’s sent to kill her is already in the house. No longer needing the money, Henry tries to save her, urging her to run to the window and scream. But Leona, too frightened to move and paralyzed by her self-inflicted helplessness, screams, “I can’t! I can’t!” as the hit man approaches and calmly murders her. In Sudden Fear (1952), Myra Hudson ( Joan Crawford) is also an heiress, but unlike Leona she is a successful working woman. She’s a playwright who, when asked why she works when she doesn’t need to, replies, “I suppose it’s a desire to achieve, to earn my keep, stand on my own two feet.” Observing a rehearsal of her latest play, she radiates confidence and importance, attended by an admiring, girlish secretary. She casually fires Lester Blaine ( Jack Palance), the play’s leading man, because she feels he’s not sufficiently romantic-looking for the part. But when he angrily protests, she falters; she’s easily hurt

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and too eager to be liked. When they meet again, apparently by chance, on a train taking Myra back to her home in San Francisco, she succumbs readily to his attentions. The romance between Crawford and Palance brings together two of the harshest faces in cinema, but while Palance’s taut features remain unreadably reptilian, Crawford’s hard, mannish mask opens into a soft, glowing appeal, a pitiful plea to be loved. Soon she is telling Lester, “Without you I have nothing,” overcoming his pretense of discomfort at courting a wealthy woman. “It’s a cozy home,” he says sarcastically the first time he sees Myra’s Nob Hill mansion, where most of the film is set. The house is opulent, comfortably appointed, and deeply insulated from the city. Myra also has a summer house on the bay, where the couple spends their honeymoon. The steep, irregular, crumbling flight of steps leading down to the water is the first obvious foreshadowing of danger in the marriage: Lester’s exaggerated concern that they are unsafe, which Myra blithely dismisses, hints at his interest in getting rid of her. When Myra finds out that Lester and his girlfriend Irene (Gloria Grahame) are planning to kill her, all of her familiar surroundings shift and blur. The look of the film changes from plain, well-lit realism to murky, distorted expressionism. A double interiority lies at the heart of Sudden Fear: many long scenes follow Myra alone, the camera exploring the rooms she is in as they blend into the interior of her mind. She discovers the truth about her husband when she plays back the Dictaphone in her study, which was accidentally left on to record Lester and Irene making love (“I’m so crazy about you, I could break your bones”) and discussing how they might kill her (“I know a way” plays over and over as the record sticks). The Dictaphone, like the telephone in Sorry, Wrong Number, simultaneously connects and alienates. It allows Myra to be present during a secret meeting; it brings the conversation to ghostly life as she listens in horror, but it breaks the illusion of intimacy with her husband and makes her realize she is truly alone.4 After her shock, Myra retreats into her darkened bedroom, which is dominated by a loudly ticking pendulum clock. In the vague dimness she fantasizes about being murdered by her husband, then about murdering him: her waking nightmares are projected like little movies in the dark. When she sees Lester again, his feigned concern and affection appear subtly threatening; when he kisses her he puts his hands around her neck, and he is too insistent when he urges her to take a sleeping pill. Lying awake all night, she devises an elaborate, diabolical plan to kill Lester and frame Irene. The clever and almost quaint work of a playwright, the scheme involves faked handwriting and pillows arranged under the covers to look like a sleeping body. This is Myra’s attempt to regain the control she had in the first scene, to assert the godlike power to determine events on a stage. But even as she carries out her plan she appears ever more narrowly hemmed in, both within cramped spaces — Irene’s apartment, barred with shadows of Venetian blinds, and finally the darkness of Irene’s closet, where she hides after realizing she can’t bring herself to shoot Lester — and within her own tortured mind. In the closet, one sliver of light from the door illuminates her ravaged face, beaded with glistening tears and sweat, as she cowers among the furs and dresses. In the ultimate transformation of the quotidian into the terrifying, a wind-up toy dog toddles across the floor toward the closet, almost revealing her presence to Lester.

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Myra is first seen in a theater, then on a train, then in a succession of rooms and finally in a closet. Only in its last scene does the film move outside, with a chase through a classic noir cityscape of dark, empty, twisting alleys. As she walks away from the car crash that kills both Lester and Irene, Myra’s face composes itself; she is free, strong and confident once more. She is an independent woman with wealth, fame and rewarding work, for whom romantic love has been a nightmare of humiliation, fear and disappointment. All of these stories about wives awaking to the realization that their husbands want to kill them echo the tale of Bluebeard, originally written down by the father of the fairy tale, Charles Perrault, in 1697. The much-married Bluebeard gives his new bride keys to all of the rooms in his castle, but orders her never to open one particular door. As soon as he goes away, of course, she opens the forbidden door, and behind it she finds the carcasses of her predecessors dangling gorily from the walls. This gruesome story has inspired countless versions, all of which use the same pattern to explore the mysteries of marriage — the interplay of trust and lies, curiosity and secrets, intimacy and estrangement — and the psychology of men who kill the women they love. In several versions, including Edgar G. Ulmer’s Bluebeard, which casts the title character as a painter, and Michael Powell’s film version of Bela Bartok’s opera Bluebeard’s Castle, the killer is driven by the desire to turn beautiful women into permanent and perfect images: murder as a work of art. Fritz Lang, who stated his belief that “every human mind harbors the compulsion to murder,”5 and who was dogged by the rumor that he had killed his first wife (Lisa Rosenthal, whose death was ruled a suicide), made his own version in 1948, The Secret Beyond the Door. In Lang’s film the husband is not an artist but an architect, a man consumed by a pet theory that “the way a place is built determines what happens in it.” He collects what he calls “felicitous rooms,” recreating spaces that he believes influenced events that occurred in them; in each case, the significant event was the murder of a woman by a man. (In one room, a man tied his mother to a chair and allowed her to drown in a flood.) His new bride, Celia ( Joan Bennett) doesn’t find out about this macabre aspect until she’s ensconced in his big, poorly lit country house; she thinks “felicitous” means happy and that her husband’s hobby is just an eccentric diversion. A fickle, slightly feckless heiress, Celia meets Mark Lamphere (Michael Redgrave) in Mexico, spotting him first in a crowd watching a knife fight, which perversely excites her. Bennett narrates the film in a hushed, breathy voice; both narration and dialogue are purple-hued, as when Mark, moments after meeting Celia, tells her that in her face he sees “cyclone weather ... the shimmering stillness ... a turbidness.” With camerawork by Stanley Cortez (who shot The Night of the Hunter, another Bluebeard story) that ceaselessly caresses the baroque sets, roaming over arches, up stairways and down long, deep-shadowed hallways, the film is Lang’s most visually lush and swooningly romantic American work. The Secret Beyond the Door is set among New York socialites who are constantly talking about psychoanalysis (one young woman who holds forth about Freud is identified in the credits as “Intellectual Sub-deb.”) The Freudian conclusion may be the most ridiculous of the era: it posits that Mark’s tortured compulsion to kill Celia, whom he loves, is the

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Bluebeard’s bride: Celia (Joan Bennett) marries Mark Lamphere (Michael Redgrave) in a Mexican church, attended by Paquita (Rosa Rey, far left) and Edith Potter (Natalie Schafer, far right). The Secret Beyond the Door (Fritz Lang, 1947).

result of his having been locked in his room once as a child by his older sister, and mistakenly believing it was by his mother, an incident that turned his Oedipus complex into murderous misogyny. Despite its intellectual sub-debness and melodramatic excesses (the presence of a disfigured, insanely jealous, arsonist secretary is a bit of overkill), the film is not only mesmerizing but subtle in its examination of the bride’s mercurial feelings. She falls madly in love with Mark, then realizes as she enters the church for her wedding that she’s marrying a stranger. In the midst of a blissful honeymoon (during which they drink from a fountain that is supposed to make lovers speak only the truth and be of one heart), her new husband suddenly turns cold, lies about a business engagement and runs away — then sends her a passionate love note. She arrives at his house only to discover that he has a son he never told her about: a prim, icy boy who believes his father killed his mother. Despite its weirder aspects, Celia’s predicament is universally recognizable: everyone knows what it’s like to suddenly feel that a loved one is a stranger. Mark’s mind is locked to Celia the way the seventh room in his collection is locked. Determined to decipher his bewildering identity, she steals the key and creeps down one night, along spooky black corridors and through barred gates, to unlock the seventh door and draw aside the curtains — and find a perfect replica of her own bedroom. The unveiling

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has the eerie logic and inexplicable terror of a nightmare. Mark built the room because, though he did not literally murder his first wife, he blames himself for her death: she died because he didn’t love her and she lost her will to live, dwindling away as an invalid in the room that is now Celia’s. But as Celia realizes with horror, it’s also waiting to become the room in which she is murdered. Though she is the one in danger, it’s really her husband who is trapped in the house. He’s still locked in that room, pounding on the door with bleeding nails. Celia is the one who lets him out.

A Life Sentence: Film Noir and the Suburban Family The curse of America—sheer, helpless, well-ordered boredom. And that is going some day to be the curse of the world. — Rudyard Kipling (letter to William James, 1896)

Big, old, shadowy, unfamiliar houses are the stuff of every child’s delicious fears, and films set in mansions reuse the blueprints of Gothic suspense. More subversively, film noir also turned modern, modest suburban houses into sinister, uneasy spaces. The desire to be separate from the crowd, which draws people irresistibly to the “house on the hill,” also leads them to chafe in the small, constricting routines of middle-class domesticity. The mundane setting of Cause for Alarm! (1951), yet another story of a wife who suddenly discovers that her husband is a maniac, is intended to provide a counterpoint to the suspenseful narrative. Instead this odd little film, with its awkward shifts in tone, makes the manicured, dollhouse setting seem like the source of the terror. Loretta Young plays Ellen Jones, a housewife caring for her bedridden husband who suffers from heart problems and also a progressive psychological derangement that leads him to believe his wife is having an affair and wants to kill him. He writes a letter laying out his accusations and tricks his wife into mailing it, just before dropping dead of a heart attack. As his corpse lies sprawled on the bedroom floor, she panics and frantically tries to get to the letter back. The entire second half of the film plunges her into a Kafkaesque obstacle course of postal regulations, during which it never occurs to the innocent housewife that the authorities might not automatically believe her husband’s lunatic accusations. Nor does she ever take a moment to mourn her husband’s death or muse on how their marriage could have gone so wrong. The film opens with Ellen in an apron, vacuuming the den. “The housework seemed like drudgery, and so meaningless,” she narrates, as though this feeling were a symptom of some rare malady. Her nervous irritability, tinged with guilt and paranoia, steadily escalates. She’s convinced that everyone — the postman, the pharmacist, her neighbors — will take her husband’s side and turn against her. “I could feel the woman next door watching me. Maybe she’d be a witness against me, too.” The neighbor is indeed watching, and tells a visitor who comes while Young is out where the key to the front door is hidden. The visitor is her husband’s aunt, who chatters away about how she’s going to resign from the “Helper’s Guild” because she didn’t get the presidency, and tries to force her way upstairs to see her nephew. Even the little boy riding his tricycle in a Hopalong Cassidy costume outside the house is a pest, always popping up at inopportune moments. Rather

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Men too are trapped by suburban domesticity: Sue (Jane Wyatt) and John Forbes (Dick Powell) in their bedroom, Pitfall (Andre de Toth, 1948).

than offering a humorous counterbalance to terror, like Hitchcock’s nattering matrons and unsettling children, these characters aggravate the housewife’s angst. She feels herself always surrounded, watched and judged, interrupted and put upon; forced to wear a cheerful face while her husband’s body decomposes in the master bedroom. It’s not only women who feel enslaved by the postwar ideal of domesticity. Andre de Toth’s Pitfall (1948) opens like a curdled sitcom, with a wife standing over the stove shrilly calling her husband to hurry up and come down. “Your breakfast is on the table,” she tells him; “Where else would it be?” he responds flatly. As family man John Forbes, Dick Powell pushes his usual deadpan into robotic paralysis; his face and voice are numb with boredom. He’s tied to a dull job as an insurance agent by the endless requirements of supporting a wife and child; he wildly suggests they should all get in the car and just keep going: “They’ve got a road goes all the way to South America now.” His wife, Sue ( Jane Wyatt), is smug and repressive, a perfect embodiment of the suburbs and the triumphalist postwar mood: “Nothing’s too tough for us — we won the war together,” she chirps, as though they really deserve full credit. She is wholly invested in being ordinary, while he complains peevishly, “I don’t want to be like fifty million other guys.... I don’t want to be the average American, backbone of the country.” Powell’s line of work is

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significant: insurance represents security and caution, an attempt to take the risk out of life. At the same time, it offers a dangerous temptation to fraud, turning a superfluous spouse into a potential cash bonus. (In Double Indemnity, when Walter Neff tells Phyllis that he’s with the Pacific All-Risk Company she responds sharply, “Pacific All-What?”) Just as he’s groping for a way to escape the routine, Forbes meets a gorgeous young woman, Mona Stevens (Lizabeth Scott), whom he visits about an insurance claim. He barely seems to notice her obvious attractions, but he’s goaded by her insult when she dismisses him as “a little man with a briefcase. You go to work and do what you’re told.” Determined to prove her wrong, he goes for a ride in her speedboat and buys her a drink; they spend one night together. But as soon as the fling lands him in trouble, Forbes runs back to the security of his marriage. Helping his son build a model airplane one afternoon, he launches into a lecture about how people don’t appreciate what they have. “People all over the world would like to live here,” he tells his boy. “You have one of the nicest houses on the block — security.” When his wife asks what’s come over him, he snaps, “Contentment!” He still sounds rather cranky about it. He would be quite happy to forget all about his brief lapse, which a colleague he confides in calls “temporary insanity,” but he keeps getting tangled up with Mona’s two dangerously possessive admirers, one a private detective hired to spy on her, the other her former lover who went to jail for embezzling money with which he bought her gifts. Both attack Forbes out of jealousy, but he gets off easily. He shoots and kills the ex-convict, a “justifiable homicide” since the man broke into his home. Mona shoots the detective when he tries to coerce her into going away with him; she winds up in jail. Three lives are ruined because Forbes wanted to hide his peccadillo from his wife; and when he finally does break down and tells her the truth, all she can think about is avoiding a scandal. “If you drag this family through the dirt I’ll never forgive you,” she says, her voice hard and tight. When his son has a nightmare, Forbes explains to him that the mind is like “a wonderful camera,” always taking pictures and storing them away; when one of the pictures comes loose while you sleep, it causes a dream. “So the trick is to take only good pictures, and dream only good dreams,” he concludes in a dead voice. In the end, his wife grudgingly takes him back, and they agree that they will try to save their marriage. There is no tearful reconciliation; it’s obvious that the distrust and resentment will not go away. Sue is less like a spouse than a jailer, locking her husband back in his safe but sterile prison. In Nicholas Ray’s Bigger Than Life (1956), James Mason plays Ed Avery, a schoolteacher so enslaved by middle-class propriety that he’s afraid to tell his wife he moonlights as a taxi dispatcher to make ends meet. There’s nothing to indicate his quiet frustration, except perhaps the travel posters that decorate his suburban house, but when he’s given an experimental treatment of cortisone for a terminal heart problem, he becomes addicted to the gaudy, arrogant grandeur it injects into his life. Warped by the pills, he becomes a preening, narcissistic bully, belittling his wife, squandering the family’s money and lecturing his students’ parents that “childhood is a congenital disease, and the purpose of education is to cure it.” Oddly, rather than breaking out of the bourgeois routine through bohemianism, this liberal man morphs into a scary Old Testament patriarch, ranting about how modern society is raising a “race of moral midgets” and determined to turn

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his hapless son into an intellectual superman. Does his madness reveal the real Ed Avery, or a grotesque magnification of the ethos of Father Knows Best— or is it just a chemical disaster? It’s hard to tell where the heart of this weird movie lies: between the conflicting visions of Mason and Ray, it’s somewhere between a shocker about drugs and mental illness and a confused but passionate critique of suburban dullness. A man who feels small, boring and hemmed in finds release in drug-induced euphoria; the purple pills make him feel like God, but, unfortunately, they also bring him to the brink of slaughtering his own child. There’s Always Tomorrow (1956) reunites Stanwyck and MacMurray in a muted but powerfully affecting portrait of a man diminished by suburban family life, neglected and belittled by his wife and kids. It’s not a film noir, but an understated melodrama that shares noir’s jaundiced vision of family life. MacMurray, so brash and sleazy as Walter Neff, is unexpectedly moving as Cliff Groves, a middle-aged man who realizes his wife and children are shallow and self-absorbed, barely aware of his presence even as he works to support them. Director Douglas Sirk offers a repellent vision of American adolescents as spoiled, narcissistic and narrow-minded (they are far more puritanical than the adults). Joan Bennett plays a wife so sure of herself and wrapped up in her “busy-ness” that she doesn’t notice how dissatisfied her husband is, even as she assures him that she knows him better than he knows himself. Left alone one night when no one in the family will join him at the theater, Cliff eats a depressing dinner in the dimly lit kitchen, wearing a flowered apron that loudly advertises his emasculation. Still in the apron, he answers the door to find an old friend (Stanwyck) whom he hasn’t seen in years, now a glamorous, unmarried career woman. She recalls him as a promising, inspired young man, and still carries a torch for him. He imagines abandoning his dull routine and making a last grab at happiness, but Stanwyck, with that devastating, face-up-to-it honesty that was her trademark, tells him it’s too late. He sinks back into the bosom of his family, and she continues on her loveless way. Sirk wanted to end the film with an image of the toy robot that is Cliff ’s stand-in (he’s a toy designer, and “Rex the Walkie-Talkie Robot Man” is his latest creation) rolling off a table and lying on the floor uselessly revolving its wheels. The studio nixed this lugubrious fadeout, and it may be just as well. That Cliff is an impotent automaton stuck in a lifeless rut comes across just as clearly as he stands in his living room with his arm around his wife, listening to a jet pass overhead, carrying away his lost love. Men at least could leave the suburbs for the day when they went to work. They had chances to meet new people, to get into trouble. Women were stranded, with nowhere to go but the grocery store or another house just like their own. “We lived on Corvallis Street, where all the houses looked alike,” Mildred Pierce recalls in the 1945 film by Michael Curtiz (from the novel by James M. Cain) that bears her name. “I was always in the kitchen. I seemed to have been born in the kitchen and lived there all my life, except for the few hours it took to get married.” Mildred ( Joan Crawford) is an ordinary housewife, except that, to her daughter’s shame, she adds to the family’s income by baking cakes to sell. Though she eventually becomes a wealthy, successful businesswoman, she has no hankering for a career. She’s driven instead by devotion to her daughters, especially the snobbish Veda, who becomes the center of her life after the younger daughter dies of

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a sudden illness. Mildred will do anything to give Veda the life she demands. After breaking up with her husband, who is disgusted by her fixation on the children, Mildred goes to work as a waitress to support the family. The class-conscious Veda is horrified when she finds her mother’s “degrading” uniform. Mildred and Veda represent two poles of noir femininity: the nurturing martyr and the greedy glamour-puss. The mother spoils her daughter, and the snobbish daughter lives off the mother she looks down on. Men are marginal, at least for Mildred. She seems hardly to notice her first husband’s absence, and marries her second only because he’s a playboy who can give Veda the kind of classy excitement she yearns for. He’s from an upper-class family but broke, and Mildred frankly and contemptuously buys him. Turning her one talent, cooking, into a thriving chain of restaurants, Mildred is hard-working and successful, but feels her life is empty without her daughter; she’s like a man in thrall to a femme fatale. Veda is played with revolting smugness and petulance by Ann Blyth. Completely amoral, Veda tries to extort money from a wealthy family by pretending to be pregnant by their son. Glossily pretty, shallow and brittle, she is incapable of caring about anyone but herself. Mildred reflects Joan Crawford’s own fanatical perfectionism, a peculiar blend of steely competence, deliberate softness and strained refinement, and rampant, unappeasable emotion. Mildred is admirable in some ways, yet frustratingly wrong-headed and ultimately pathetic. The film finds a gaping hollowness in both the avaricious, seductive minx and the capable, no-nonsense professional. Mildred gets everything a woman can have: love, marriage, motherhood, a high-powered career, a fur coat, yet none of it gives her real happiness. This was the paradox of the “woman’s picture.” It offered women in the audience wish-fulfillment fantasies — gorgeous clothes, glamorous surroundings, passionate love affairs, rewarding careers — and at the same time made suffering the defining female experience. These films reassured women that it didn’t matter whether they chose love or a career, because either way they would wind up dissatisfied. “Most women are unhappy, they just pretend they aren’t,” as Gloria Grahame says in Human Desire. In Crime of Passion (1957), Kathy Ferguson (Stanwyck) reverses Mildred’s transformation, going from career woman to a housewife. The opening scene establishes Kathy, a San Francisco advice columnist, as a busy, competent professional. Already, however, the role differs from the reporters played by Stanwyck in Meet John Doe or Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday. Kathy’s editor derides her work as “schmaltz” and condescendingly urges her to get the “woman’s angle” on a murder case; women are plainly supposed to care only about relationships. When Kathy confronts two Los Angeles policemen, demanding information because she and the other newsmen have a job to do, one of the cops tells her, “Your work should be raising a family, getting dinner ready for your husband.” Kathy succeeds in tracing the woman the cops are after, who is wanted for murdering her husband. She writes an open letter, “from one woman’s heart to another,” offering sympathy and asking the fugitive to call her. We see a series of women — taxi drivers, housewives, grandmothers — reading the letter, a collage conveying solidarity among women in “a world made by and for men.” Her coup in capturing the killer (despite her expressions of compassion, she has no qualms about turning the woman over to the police)

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earns Kathy an offer from a New York paper, and she exultantly prepares to pursue her career. But she has already fallen for Bill Doyle (Sterling Hayden), one of the L.A. cops (not the one who told her she should be home making dinner), and when he calls and asks to see her, she eagerly changes her plans. On their first date she tells Bill she has no plans to marry: “For marriage I read ‘life sentence.’ For home life: TV nights, beer in the fridge, second mortgage. No, not for me. For me life has to be something more than that.” But in the very next scene they’re being married (by a female justice of the peace!) and she tells him her only remaining ambition is to make him happy, be a good wife, darn his socks. He lives in the suburbs, a soporific neighborhood of low bungalows, with kids playing in the street; his home is a boxy, flimsy little house with tacky, flowered wallpaper in the living room. The horizontal, flat-lit spaces of Los Angeles dominate the film, the atmosphere is nonetheless crushingly claustrophobic. Kathy almost immediately begins to rebel against the tedious, enclosed social world of policemen and their wives. Night after night the men play poker and discuss their pensions while their wives prepare canapés and talk about clothes and whose husband is popular with the boss. Bored to tears by the vacuous chatter, the former career woman begins to crack up. “Is this all you have to look forward to, this mediocrity?” she demands of her husband. He tells her that he only works in order to support them, so they can be together — he values love and domesticity over his career (he is even willing to quit and move to another police department to please her), while she insists, “I want you to be somebody!” She projects her own thwarted ambition onto her easygoing, complacent husband, who refuses to “stick his elbow in the other guy’s eye.” So Kathy begins scheming to get Bill promoted, putting her brains and her wiles to work behind his back. She conspires to meet and seduce the chief inspector, Tony Pope (Raymond Burr), so that he will favor Bill. Pope sees through her immediately, but is happy to get what he can from her. He keeps a file of “strange offenses committed by seemingly normal people”; Kathy notices they the perpetrators are mostly women, and he explains that this is because “they reason with life only so far.” Kathy sleeps with Pope in order to secure a promotion for her husband, and when the inspector passes over Bill, bluntly telling Kathy that he’s just not good enough, she snaps and shoots him. In the end her husband arrests her and turns her in. For marriage, read “life sentence.” From her rise in the early thirties through her late television work, Stanwyck kept the same svelte, greyhound figure and the same volatile blend of hard shell and wounded heart. With her husky voice that always sounds oddly close to your ear, her ineradicable Brooklyn accent, her famously lithe and bold stride, she was the archetypal American “dame.” At the same time she was an exception, facing down the fickleness and discomfort audiences showed toward overpowering female stars with the same unflinching yet unshowy fortitude with which she faced down opponents in her movies. She was the toughest broad on the silver screen, and unlike other dominant actresses, she wasn’t required to apologize for herself, reinvent herself, or indulge audiences with self-parodying camp performances. She played killers, but never became a harpy. She didn’t rub audiences the wrong way as the haughty Katharine Hepburn did, and never confronted the punishing

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“box-office poison” label that was slapped on so many women stars. She made a great many mediocre program pictures, and beginning in the 1950s she struggled to get decent roles, but she found refuge in westerns and television dramas and avoided becoming a figure of grotesque fright like Crawford or Bette Davis. Though never a great beauty she was, if anything, more popular with men, despite duping, exploiting and mastering them onscreen. (“I need him like the axe needs the turkey,” she says darkly of Henry Fonda in The Lady Eve.) With Stanwyck around, Anthony Lane has observed, “The battle of the sexes is over before it has begun.” Offscreen it was another story; her life was a saga of failed relationships and emotional isolation, from her orphaned, hard-knocks childhood in Brooklyn (where she was born Ruby Stevens in 1907), through her marriage, as a rising young actress, to the arrogant Broadway and vaudeville star Frank Fay, who became increasingly abusive as his career foundered and his wife’s prospered (according to legend, the Stanwyck-Fay marriage provided the inspiration for A Star Is Born); to the photogenic but hollow second marriage to matinee idol Robert Taylor. Her close friendship with her publicist, Helen Ferguson, brought rumors of lesbianism, but whatever her preferences she was fundamentally unsuited for intimacy. It’s no wonder she lived for her job. Stanwyck was known in Hollywood as the ultimate pro, a determined workhorse always word perfect in her lines, beloved by film crews and directors, and at one time (in 1944) the highest-paid woman in America. She could zing her way buoyantly through comedies and bare raw pain in weepers; she always had the keen, flexed focus of an athlete, an archer zeroing in on the bulls-eye. Her style was a stripped, streamlined minimalism, wasting no effort, cutting straight to the heart. Blossoming in the gritty and steamy atmosphere of pre–Code movies, Stanwyck strode through the thirties like a lioness on the hunt. Even when she played thieves, con women or prostitutes (as in Baby Face, Ladies They Talk About, Remember the Night and her masterpiece, The Lady Eve), in these pre-war films she generally survived and thrived, making no apologies for cutting moral corners. Baby Face (1933) was so sullied that it was rejected by state censorship boards and heavily altered before its release. (The original, unaltered camera negative was discovered at the Library of Congress in 2004.) Stanwyck plays Lily Powers, who toils in a steel-town speakeasy for her father, who has been pimping her to his customers since she was 14. The one man she admires, a German cobbler, gives her Nietzsche’s books to read and tells her that she should exploit men instead of being exploited, use her sexual power to get the things she wants, stamp out all emotion and be strong, defiant. So she goes to New York — paying her way on a freight train by offering the brakeman a roll in the hay — and proceeds to sleep her way up the corporate ladder until she is the mistress of the bank president, installed in a Manhattan penthouse and swathed in furs. Lily is heartless (when one of her cast-off lovers shoots her sugar daddy and then kills himself, not a muscle moves in her face), but wounded fury festers behind her defiant poise. “My life has been hard, bitter,” she tells her husband. “I’m not like other women. All the gentleness and kindness in me has been killed.” No one could play the part better than Stanwyck, with her level, unwavering gaze; her sudden lashing rages; the enticing warmth that she could, chillingly, turn on or off at

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will. Douglas Sirk, who directed Stanwyck in All I Desire as well as There’s Always Tomorrow, spoke of her “amazing tragic stillness,” and how she seemed to have been “deeply touched by life.” The riveting simplicity of her style comes from a steely inner resolve, a hard-won self-mastery that allows her to look at life without fear, though not without anger or sorrow. Inexperience was one of the few things she had difficulty enacting convincingly; in Baby Face she assumes a pose of girlish innocence when caught in the ladies’ room with her boss, pleading with brazen untruth: “Nothing like this has ever happened to me before.” She expresses the same sense of disillusionment, the deep sense of knowing the score, that turned men like Mitchum and Bogart into noir icons. Stanwyck was initially reluctant to take the role of Phyllis Dietrichson in Double Idemnity, fearing that playing such a “bitch” would ruin her career. But film noir would become her cinematic lifeline in the late forties and throughout the fifties, allowing her to continue playing complex, attractive, powerful women at an age when many actresses were forced into mother roles (she was almost 50 when she made Crime of Passion). These parts reflected how the world had closed in on ambitious, forceful women, how much more unforgiving postwar films were of those who step out of line. In film after film Stanwyck is frustrated by her circumscribed life and schemes to escape, resorting to both seduction and violence, usually ending up imprisoned or dead. In The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946), she’s a wealthy businesswomen who runs a steel mill, but laments that she’s always been “so choked with wanting something else, with wanting air and room to breathe.” The abiding lesson of Stanwyck’s career in noir is that in order to get air, a woman must break the windows.

Hothouse Flowers and Parachutes: The Femme Fatale and the Dependent Woman Not all women in noir want to escape from their homes; there are those who don’t crave freedom but only the smothering embrace of an exclusive, possessive love. They are hothouse flowers, psychologically frail and shrinking from the buffets of the outside world. They invert the usual depiction of the femme fatale as a cold and selfish woman who loves only herself and fakes it with men in order to get money or serve her own aims. These women already have money and luxuries, and are driven instead by an insatiable need for love. Diane Tremayne ( Jean Simmons) in Otto Preminger’s Angel Face (1952) lives unhappily in the mansion of her wealthy stepmother, Catherine Tremayne (Barbara O’Neil), perched perilously on the edge of a Los Angeles hillside. Unlike other “houses on the hill,” this is a genuinely inviting residence: an ivy-covered English manor with a forecourt; spacious, white and well-lit inside, full of flowers and art and books. Diane is chic and eerie: black Cleopatra hair frames her pale, elfin face and huge dark eyes. She wears sleek cocktail dresses and drives around in a snazzy roadster, but she’s also sad, needy and quietly crazy, clinging to her father, a doting but weak English novelist suffering from writer’s block. Both Diane and, less openly, her father, Charles, blame his creative block on Catherine, a slightly self-absorbed and insensitive but basically good-hearted rich

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Emotional dependency verging on incest: Diane Tremayne (Jean Simmons) and her father, Charles (Herbert Marshall), play chess in Angel Face (Otto Preminger, 1952) (Photofest).

woman. Embarrassed by his financial dependence, Charles treats Catherine with condescension disguised as humility, and plainly favors his spoiled daughter. Diane hates her stepmother so much that, as the film opens, she has tried to kill her by opening the gas valves in her bedroom. When Frank Jessup (Robert Mitchum) arrives at the house as part of the ambulance crew, he finds Diane playing the piano, spookily unconcerned. It’s only when she hears that her stepmother will live that she becomes hysterical. Diane was ten when her mother was killed in the London Blitz. Like Victoria Kowelska, haunted by the concentration camps, she’s a feminine version of the traumatized veteran. Childlike, alternately creepy and charming, Diane fastens on Frank, throwing herself at him and separating him from his girlfriend, a level-headed nurse. Diane has no friends, no one in her life except her father. She lures Frank to the house with the offer of a job as chauffer and the indefinite promise of sex and money for the auto garage he wants to open. When he tells her they’re from different worlds, that she has money and beautiful clothes and he has nothing, she answers like Sudden Fear’s Myra Hudson, “All I want is you. I can’t let you go.” She pursues Frank even more desperately after her father dies in the “accident” she devises to kill her stepmother, rigging her car to drive backwards over a cliff. Unhinged by this horror, she retreats into her mind. She and Frank are put on trial for the murder,

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but are acquitted after a lawyer shrewdly convinces them to get married in order to gain sympathy. In what must be noir’s saddest wedding, they are married in the prison psych ward where she’s confined; the other crazy ladies present them with a cake and serenade them with “Oh, Promise Me.” Their union is a fatal combination of a woman who cares too much and a man who cares too little. Frank Jessup could come across as just a chump, a none-too-bright guy who falls for the allure of easy money and a beautiful woman. But Mitchum turns him into something else, a man pathologically uncommitted; a disenchanted, passive slacker; a former racecar driver unmoved by anything but the thrill of speed. He easily sees through Diane’s lies and doesn’t want to get involved in anything, yet is incurably opportunistic. At the end of Angel Face, Frank bluntly tells Diane he’s “clearing out,” but accepts her offer to drive him to the station so he can catch a bus to Mexico. The only way to watch this without groaning — of course she puts the car into reverse and drives them both off the cliff— is to assume that Frank’s indifference encompasses his own fate: baby, he doesn’t care. Mitchum embodied a particular brand of masculinity: the unattached, vagrant loner who resists ties and responsibilities. Diane Tremayne represents the contrasting extreme of femininity: clinging, dependent, addicted to attention. Like Myra Hudson she is trapped in interiors, in the house and in the distortions of her mind, her fantasies and lies. In a long, wordless sequence near the end of the film, Diane, who has tried to confess to the killing and been shocked to learn she can never be punished for it, wanders through the empty rooms of the house. She’s pitifully lonely and lost, touching objects that remind her of her father and the vanished family’s life, caressing Frank’s belongings and wrapping herself in his coat, wanting to be enfolded in his arms. She’s like a ghost, doomed to wander the vacant house. Leave Her to Heaven ( John M. Stahl, 1945) moves through a series of rustic retreats that look like magazine spreads: a desert lodge, a Maine cabin, a New England beach cottage. Shot (by Leon Shamroy) in luscious Technicolor, the whole film has a glowing, unnatural perfection, impeccably desirable as a store-window display. Such material fantasies are part of what women’s movies offered, but Leave Her to Heaven, even more brutally than Mildred Pierce, lays bare the void beneath this gorgeous façade. Ellen (Gene Tierney) is a woman who has everything but remains hungry, who loses her husband by trying too hard to hold onto him. She “loves too much,” her mother says, and her love is devouring and destructive. She even — like Rosa Moline in Beyond the Forest— destroys her unborn child, throwing herself downstairs to induce a miscarriage, because she fears losing her figure and doesn’t want to share her husband’s attention with a baby. She dons a soft, frilly, powder-blue bathrobe to perform this act, tumbling down the carpeted stairs outside the newly painted nursery. In the next scene she runs out of the surf in a bathing suit as red as fresh nail-polish, so happy and healthy and sexy it’s frightening — she’s like a nuclear-powered pinup girl. Ellen is both hyper-feminine and unfeminine. Despite her beauty she is eaten up by jealousy of her homier, more bookish sister, fearing (rightly, as it turns out) that she has more to offer Ellen’s writer husband. Ellen has no nurturing warmth or sociability, though she presides over immaculate households and works obsessively to please her

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husband. There’s an Amazon-like hardness beneath her sweet appearance. In an early scene at the desert lodge where she and her husband meet, she rides along the ridge of a canyon in a cold blue dawn, scattering her beloved father’s ashes in defiant handfuls, her face set as in stone. In the film’s most famous scene, Ellen sits in a rowboat on a sparkling Maine lake, watching impassively through a pair of cat’s-eye sunglasses as her husband’s crippled younger brother drowns. She’s repeatedly seen swimming: in the pool at the desert lodge, in the lake and the ocean; she’s like a mermaid, cold-blooded and alien, preying on a hapless human male. In both Angel Face and Leave Her to Heaven, the women’s husbands are stand-ins for their fathers, whom they have either lost through death or been forced to share with a stepmother (Ellen is first attracted to her future husband because of his striking resemblance to her dad). The women’s demand for total attention is like a child’s, or even an infant’s selfish need. They have never matured into the independence that makes adult relationships possible. This Peter Pan–like refusal to grow up, supremely represented by Ellen’s refusal to bear a child, seems linked to the actresses’ youthful physical perfection and the spotless newness of their surroundings. In The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry (1945), Lettie Quincy (Geraldine Fitzgerald) does not even bother to transfer her affections from a family member to an eligible man. She is exclusively devoted to her brother Harry (George Sanders), a mild-mannered, repressed bachelor who lives in his old family home and works every day at a textile mill that looks like a prison, painting endless rosebuds in fabric designs. He’s as immobilized as the statue of his ancestor, a Civil War general, that stands atop a war memorial in the center of the small New England town. The local children call him Uncle Harry, a nickname that suggests benign asexuality; his sisters fuss over him as if he were a child, bickering with each other and competing to pamper him. The usually suave and caddish Sanders succeeds in making Harry ineffectual and thwarted without making him a henpecked milquetoast. He hints at a sophisticated, bitter intelligence submerged by lack of will; he’s wearily resigned to the smallness of his life but still harbors unspoken longings. Based on a play by Thomas Job, Robert Siodmak’s film accentuates the feeling of being stuck in stage sets, rather than opening out the script to make it more cinematic. Even the camera remains largely static and passive, like the characters it observes. One day Harry meets Deborah Brown (Ella Raines), a glamorous, bold young woman from his company’s New York office. She swaggers around in menswear-inspired tailored suits and sexy high-waisted pants, making it clear that she is an experienced woman whose door is open to a potential lover. She teases, entices and hectors Harry to get out of his rut. Lettie immediately recognizes Deborah as a threat. Her romantic attachment to her brother is as unhealthy as the atmosphere of the hothouse where she habitually lounges in a soft, revealing negligee. Harry shows no sign of returning her incestuous affection, though it may be significant that Deborah looks rather like dark-haired and slender Lettie. Lettie holds up Harry’s marriage first by refusing to move out of the house, declaring all the available houses impossible; then by begging Deborah to put off the wedding or agree to share the house with her. She tells Deborah that she never married because Harry needed her; but, in fact, she knows that he is “sorry for everything” and exploits his soft-

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heartedness, posing as a chronic invalid and faking “attacks” to hold onto him (putting her in company with Leona Stevenson and Smith Ohlrig.) Finally, when Harry is about to elope to New York, she has another “attack” and takes to her bed. Despite Deborah’s ultimatum, Harry refuses to leave while Lettie is ill. Harry’s older sister Hester, a widow, is a typical gossipy matron, but Harry and Lettie seem isolated and aloof, living in their own private world. Lettie tells Deborah, “His world is inside him, and it’s rare and beautiful and lonely — and you’ll spoil it!” Harry at least has his men’s club, where he sings barbershop quartets with middle-aged storekeepers, but Lettie never goes anywhere; she has no friends, hobbies or activities. What she wants above all is to be alone with Harry, in the special intimacy they had as children. “People don’t understand how pleasant and comfortable living in a small town can be,” Lettie gloats as she and her brother share cocoa before bed after Deborah has returned to New York and married another man. Harry has put poison in her cocoa — poison that Lettie herself bought to put the family dog (named Weary!) out of his misery. She inadvertently gives the poisoned cup to Hester, who dies; known for constantly quarrelling with her sister, Lettie is tried and condemned to hang for the murder. Harry remains as helpless as ever, his life still controlled by his sisters. Finally unable to bear the guilt, he tries to confess, but can’t get anyone to believe him. Lettie cruelly plays along, saying that it’s just the “gesture” she would have expected from him. She knows he will suffer more from not being punished. Harsh and vindictive, she predicts the years to come when guilt will rob him of food and sleep. She no longer wants to live, knowing Harry hated her enough to kill her, but she realizes triumphantly that she can hold onto him for the rest of his life through his guilt. “I just wanted to be free,” he protests hopelessly. In the same year, Fritz Lang’s Scarlet Street got away with a similar conclusion: Edward G. Robinson allows an innocent man to be executed for the murder he committed, but is so guilt-ridden that he becomes a homeless lunatic. But RKO, worried about censorship and audience response, demanded a new ending for Uncle Harry (the film’s original title). Perhaps taking a page from Lang’s The Woman in the Window, of the previous year, they went for the ultimate cop-out: Harry wakes to find that the bungled murder was all a dream. Moments later, Deborah bursts in to say that she didn’t get married after all, and they make plans to elope. Producer Joan Harrison resigned in disgust, but the ending is so blatantly tacked on that it can be easily ignored; there is no attempt to make it dramatically plausible. Harry has done nothing to deserve Deborah’s change of heart or to shake her conviction that he will always remain under Lettie’s thumb. In The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry, the independent, sexually available city woman is the savior, while the traditional chaste, family-bound, homemaking women corrode a man’s identity. When single working girls turn up in noir, they are usually honest, intelligent and helpful to men: the secretaries played by Ella Raines and Lucille Ball who gallantly save their bosses in Phantom Lady and The Dark Corner, respectively; Ida Lupino’s worldly-wise, big-hearted nightclub singer in The Man I Love; Lili Palmer’s artist who acts as her estranged fiancé’s conscience in Body and Soul; even Valentina Cortese’s waterfront prostitute in Thieves’ Highway, who turns out to be less mercenary than the hero’s nice-girl fiancée. By contrast, mistresses and molls — women who live off men —

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tend to be either gold diggers who seduce their lovers into crime to support them, or victimized possessions like Jean Wallace in The Big Combo. And has a woman’s romantic obsession and need for love ever seemed more like a disease than in the 1947 Joan Crawford vehicle Possessed, which opens with her wandering the streets of L.A., dazed and delusional, searching for the man she shot when he rejected her? It is often said that the femme fatale was an embodiment of male anxiety about the empowerment of working women during the war. Because men felt threatened by newly emancipated women, the theory goes, they depicted ambitious, undomesticated females as evil and destructive. Foster Hirsch has written: Passed through the noir filter, the “new woman,” forced by social circumstances and economic necessity to assert herself in ways that her culture had not previously encouraged, emerges onscreen as a wicked, scheming creature, sexually potent and deadly to the male.

Hirsch considers this an example of how film noir distorts reality, turning women who were “strengthened by wartime experience” into destructive vamps. He fails to note that even before the war ended, women were being pushed out of the workplace to provide jobs for returning servicemen, or that the dominant postwar image of woman was the housewife. The femme fatale is never a working woman; she always uses men to further her ends. Her first assumption is that they have the money and power, and it’s only through them that she can get what she wants. The femme fatale was not a version of the “new woman” but a return to the trope of the female as a temptress that reflects societies in which women have only their sexual wiles to rely on. There is something odd about Janey Place’s claim that the classic noir era “stands as the only period in American film in which women are deadly but sexy, exciting, and strong ... active, not static symbols ... intelligent and powerful, if destructively.”6 Tough, competent, yet still alluring female professionals and working girls flourished in films of the 1930s and early forties. These “fast-talking dames” were certainly active, intelligent and powerful — even a bit destructive, though never fatal. Pre-Code films of the early thirties often depicted women who exploit men, trade on their sex appeal, and care chiefly (if not exclusively) about money — hardened women ready to do whatever they feel they have to in order to survive the Depression. They rarely paid for their sins, but usually triumphed in the end and won the love of an honest man. World War I shattered of the Victorian age’s manly and womanly ideals; World War II brought back the idolization of the he-man and the homemaker. The free-spirited “new woman” belonged to interwar years, and the thirties were a golden age for women in Hollywood movies, the only time when they were regularly allowed to be smart, capable, funny and sexy all at once. The femme fatale, by contrast, has sexual power, strength of will and sometimes shrewdness, but remains dependent on men. She’s constantly looking for security, leverage, a protector, a fall guy, a chump. She relies on male violence, but also suffers from it; her power can dissolve with a man’s disillusionment. She deceives and betrays, but sometimes she deceives herself, too, unable to believe her sucker will turn on her. She uses men’s protectiveness against them, claiming to be weak and in need of a champion; but her fear is real. Mary Astor captured this essential vulnerability in her performance as Brigid O’Shaughnessy in The Maltese Falcon (1941). Astor deliberately hyperventilated before her scenes to convey the pathological liar’s panicky desperation to be

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believed. Even more than her beauty, she uses her weakness to appeal to male vanity, telling Sam Spade, “I’m so alone and afraid.... You’re brave and strong. You can spare me some of that courage and strength.” Women like Vicki Buckley manipulate lovers by confessing that they are abused by their husbands, pulling down their dresses to reveal titillating bruises. Jane Greer in Out of the Past tells Robert Mitchum that she had to return to the gangster she hates; she had no choice; she was afraid and helpless. (“You’re like a leaf the wind blows from one gutter to another,” he replies disgustedly.) Noir’s iciest black widows often betray some softer feelings: even Phyllis Dietrichson finds herself unable to shoot Walter Neff in the end, though he has no such qualms, plugging her in the belly with a brusque, “Goodbye, baby.” The femme fatale may reflect male fear of strong women, but she surely also expresses men’s fear of their own vulnerability, their capacity to be led astray by their libidos or even by their chivalrous impulses. This seems to be the point of a notorious exchange in Dead Reckoning (1947), when Rip Murdock (Humphrey Bogart) tells Dusty Chandler (Lizabeth Scott) that women should come capsule-sized, so they won’t get in a man’s way. When he wants her “full sized and beautiful” he waves his hand, but if she starts to interrupt or ask too many questions he can just say, “Get back in my pocket.” Rather than bridling at this chauvinism, Dusty smilingly responds, “What you’re saying is that women are made to be loved.... Yes, it’s a confession. A woman may drive you out of your mind, but you wouldn’t trust her, and because you couldn’t put her in your pocket, you get all mixed up.” Rip spends most of Dead Reckoning insisting that he never trusts women, and thinking the worst of Dusty, only to finally succumb, falling in love and believing her professed innocence. It turns out she’s a liar and a killer after all. But as she lies dying, she appeals to Rip: “I’m scared ... I wish you could put me in your pocket now.” Rather than the security of a man’s pocket, he offers the image of a parachutist jumping from a plane, leaping alone into darkness and emptiness. “Geronimo” is not a word of comfort, but an admission of equality.

CHAPTER 4

The Tyranny of Neighbors: Small-Town Noir You may talk of the tyranny of Nero and Tiberius; but the real tyranny is the tyranny of your next-door neighbor. What law is so cruel as the law of doing what he does? What yoke is so galling as the necessity of being like him? —Walter Bagehot1

Bedford Falls and Pottersville are the Jekyll and Hyde of American towns: one a friendly, harmonious community, the other a crooked Sin City ruled by money and fear. Yet it is Bedford Falls that George Bailey spends most of his life trying to escape. The heartwarming “no one is poor who has friends” ending is what people remember best about It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), but it doesn’t quite cleanse away the bitter aftertaste of George’s raging resentment as he lashes out at the obligation and monotony that have blighted his life. Film noir is full of Pottersvilles — towns or small cities in the grip of omnipotent bosses; where the police are a private army rather than upholders of the law, where prostitution and gambling go on openly, and anyone who rocks the boat is asking for a beating or a bullet. But towns like Bedford Falls turn up in film noir, too, sometimes merely as clean-cut backdrops for menacing intruders, but also as false fronts concealing grubby secrets, bigotry and mob violence. A small town is a place where everyone knows everyone else, where no one can break free of the expectations and consequences of the past. Even Robert Putnam, in Bowling Alone, acknowledges the “dark side of social capital”: the degree to which “community restricts freedom and encourages intolerance.” Small towns are sentimentally cherished in American culture, but they also stand for complacency; their inhabitants are typed as narrow-minded, conservative, ignorant, self-righteous, and distrustful of outsiders. The nosy, judgmental, trouble-making gossip who spies on her neighbors and broadcasts their perceived failings is a ubiquitous type in classic Hollywood films; her male counterpart is the Babbitt, the “middle-class joiner,” a gregarious and ill-informed conformist. As James Harvey notes in Romantic Comedy, many influential films of the thirties portrayed small towns as places to get out of at all costs, like Lynnfield in Theodora Goes Wild, with its prudish, joyless women’s committees; or Warsaw, Vermont, in Nothing Sacred, where a New York reporter is bitten in the leg by a small boy and has to tip the locals to talk to him, and from which a local girl is so desperate to escape that she pretends to be dying of radium poisoning. The provinces were always good for a laugh and an insult; in Virtue (1932), a New York prostitute 83

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remarks of Danbury, Connecticut, “Great town. They don’t bury their dead, just let ’em walk around.” As World War II approached, small towns took on new meaning; they were the vulnerable bastions of America’s way of life, exactly “what we’re fighting for.” The late thirties saw the birth of the hugely popular Andy Hardy series, set in the fictional Midwest town of Carvel, a forerunner of postwar sitcoms with their gee-whiz juveniles and fathers who know best; and saccharine, swinging-on-the-garden-gate pictures like Four Daughters (1938). But in wartime, small-town innocence came to seem not only fragile but dangerous: how could people protect themselves if they had their eyes shut? Movies that introduced hazards to sedate towns posed the question of how ordinary, decent, sheltered people should confront evil. Opening with scenes of safe, tidy streets where children play and neighbors go about their quiet lives, these films loudly warn that the world is never as safe as it looks, that — as Macdonald Carey concludes in Shadow of a Doubt— it “needs a lot of watching.”

Strangers in Our Town: Invasions on the Home Front Alfred Hitchcock’s daughter, Patricia, said that Shadow of a Doubt (1943) was her father’s favorite of his films because “he loved the idea of bringing menace into this small town.” It was his first movie with an American setting (his two previous Hollywood productions, Rebecca and Suspicion, were set in England), and like Ophüls with The Reckless Moment, he wanted to capture the authentic texture of American life, hiring Thornton Wilder to work on the screenplay, which he pitched as the dark side of Our Town. Though he usually preferred working in the studio, where every detail could be controlled, Hitchcock shot almost the entire movie on location. It opens in Newark, New Jersey, with a pan across the industrial docks, then a view of a small, shabby street where children play ball outside the rooming house where Charles Oakley ( Joseph Cotten) is holed up. Thunderous, foreboding music insists on something sinister and desperate in his plight. Looking for a way to escape the two detectives who have tracked him down, he sends a telegram to his sister in Santa Rosa, California, to say that he is coming to stay. Cheerful, sprightly music sets the scene for Santa Rosa. In bright sun, a traffic cop stands as a sentinel of order; the biggest building is the courthouse. It’s a handsome, prosperous-looking town, bustling but not overcrowded, and the Newton family lives in an old-fashioned white house, open and welcoming. Nothing suggests California; it’s a typical American town that could be anywhere. Once the stark contrast between town and visitor is established, Hitchcock enjoys playing with it, as though pouring a little black into a can of white paint and stirring it around to see what happens. “Charlie” Newton (Teresa Wright), a girl just out of high school, voices a teenager’s typical frustration with the quiet routine of family life in a small town. “We just sort of go along and nothing happens,” she complains, worried that the daily repetition of “dinner, dishes, then bed” is bad for their souls. She is ecstatic when she learns that her Uncle Charlie is coming to visit; he’s just the one to “shake up” the family. Uncle Charlie is her mother’s youngest brother, spoiled and adored, a charmer with plenty of money to throw

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An intruder in “Our Town”: Uncle Charlie (Joseph Cotten) with his unsuspecting sister Emma Newton (Patricia Collinge) in Shadow of a Doubt (Alfred Hitchcock, 1943).

around, though no one knows exactly what he does to earn it. His namesake, Young Charlie, believes they are more than just an ordinary uncle and niece. They are like twins, she tells him, sharing a special, near-telepathic mental and emotional bond. This bond becomes a source of anguish for her as she begins to suspect that her beloved uncle is none other than the Merry Widow Murderer, so-called because he preys on wealthy widows. Despite her reluctance to believe the truth, she obsessively follows up each clue (his theft of a page from the newspaper, his gift of an emerald ring engraved with the initials of his last victim). Her love makes her hypersensitive and uneasy, exactly the opposite of her mother’s blind devotion. When she sees her uncle as he really is, her hatred is as fierce as her former love. Their uncanny closeness —“The same blood flows through our veins,” he reminds her — makes her somehow soiled and guilty, too. Hitchcock’s films stand apart from film noir not only because of their cunning humor and meringue-like insubstantiality (“Some films are slices of life. Mine are slices of cake,” he said, like those strangers with poisoned sweets that children are warned about) but because of his fixation on blameless heroes who are wrongly accused or victimized by random ill-chance. His films comes closest to noir when they explore the internalized guilt of bystanders like Young Charlie or Manny Balestrero’s wife in The Wrong Man, or the

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momentary lapses in which normal people commit crimes, like Sylvia Verloc in Sabotage or Marion Crane in Psycho. It is surely significant that all of these characters are women. (T.R. Devlin in Notorious and Scottie Ferguson in Vertigo stand out as psychologically complex and morally shadowed heroes among the beleaguered innocents and charismatic psychos.) Once his mask has been removed, Charles Oakley drags his niece into a smoky bar, the ’Til Two Club, where soldiers loudly carouse with their dates. She has never been in such a place before. Uncle Charlie berates her naïveté and lack of experience, describing her as “just an ordinary little girl in an ordinary little town.” (Earlier, the detectives who tracked him from the East gained entry to the house by convincing Mrs. Newton that they were conducting a survey and needed an “average American family,” a label to which Young Charlie objected.) Expounding his own noxious world view, he tells her, “You live in a dream, you’re a sleepwalker, blind. What do you know about the world? Do you know the world’s a foul sty, that if you ripped the fronts off houses you’d find swine? The world’s a hell; what does it matter what happens in it?” Uncle Charlie keeps trying to play on his niece’s former affection: his embraces and attentions now feel inappropriate, half-coercive, faintly incestuous. He also tries to bump her off by staging household “accidents”: rigging a rickety stair to break, sending her into a fume-filled garage with a door that’s known to stick shut. Young Charlie survives these attempts and finally forces him to leave by flaunting proof of his identity. In a farewell toast he says unctuously, “I’ll always remember this lovely town as a place of hospitality, and kindness, and homes.” It may be a foul sty, but he would like to stay there after the death of another suspect falsely clears him; he’s comfortable, pampered, universally admired. People like him precisely for his urbane sophistication and raffish humor, which make him excitingly different; they never realize they are the objects of his contempt. There’s something chilly in the eye that the film itself turns on the Newton family and their neighbors, with their pettiness and obtuseness. Though Santa Rosa appears to be an amiable, close-knit town, it is also a community of sleepwalkers who can’t be woken without harm. Young Charlie is the only one who suspects her uncle, and she also seems to be the only one capable of bearing the knowledge. She feels compelled to conceal the truth because it would destroy her mother, a weak and fluttering woman. Her father is an ineffectual, wooly-minded man; he and his friend Herb consume detective stories and crime magazines; their habitual conversations about how they would kill each other provide not only black comic relief but a glimpse of how insulated from reality they are. Murder is funny only to people who have never gotten close to it. Young Charlie’s knowledge makes her more mature than her parents, but she is tormented by her moral compromise; in order to protect her family she lets her uncle off scot-free to go on with his murdering; he already has a next victim lined up. Even after Uncle Charlie dies, she has to keep her secret. Telling the truth now would only upset her family for no purpose. He is given a huge funeral for which the entire town comes out, lining the streets and listening to the eulogy that intones, “Santa Rosa has gained and lost a son, a son of whom we can be proud.” Only the younger of the two detectives, who has fallen in love with Charlie, shares her secret. (The casting of an actor as affably bland as Macdonald

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Carey seems a deliberate move to prevent the detective from becoming a compelling character. He has none of Uncle Charlie’s — that is, Joseph Cotten’s — perversely appealing vividness, and though he knows the truth he doesn’t really mitigate Young Charlie’s lonely position.) Speaking from his own experience, the detective concludes that the world, while no foul sty, just “seems to go crazy from time to time.” This final line evokes the war that has never been mentioned in the film, but that would surely have been on audiences’ minds.2 Orson Welles’s The Stranger (1946) makes explicit the warning that no place is beyond the reach of the war or its aftereffects, as Harper, Connecticut, becomes the unlikely hiding spot for a Nazi war criminal. Introduced (as was Santa Rosa) with jaunty music and clean winter sunshine, it is a classic New England hamlet with a church (which houses a German baroque clock), a village green, a general store, and a boys’ prep school. Mary Longstreet (Loretta Young), who marries Franz Kindler (Welles), the fugitive posing as a schoolteacher, personifies her home town: lovely, serene and self-satisfied. She doesn’t want her husband to fix the church clock, insisting, “I like Harper just the way it is, even with a clock that doesn’t run.” Her sense of security puts her in danger: “In Harper there’s nothing to be afraid of,” she says, unaware that her husband has ducked out of their wedding reception to bury a body in the woods, and poisoned her dog to prevent him from finding it. When a Nazi-hunting government agent named Wilson (Edward G. Robinson) shows her slides of concentration camp atrocities (The Stranger was the first American feature film to include such footage) and tells her who her husband is, she refuses to believe it. She resents having her nose rubbed in horrors, and stubbornly, then hysterically, insists he is innocent, lying to protect her husband even though she knows he has committed murder. She is what Uncle Charlie accused his niece of being: blinkered by optimism, living in a dream. Using the trendy terms of psychoanalysis, Wilson correctly predicts that the battle between her conscious belief and subconscious doubt will cause her to break down. Finally, when she believes her brother has died in a trap her husband set for her, she goes to kill him. He has taken refuge in the clock tower, while an angry mob gathers around the church. “The citizens of Harper, they’ve come after you,” Wilson taunts him, “The plain little ordinary people, the ones you’ve been laughing at.” Welles in the tower, looking down at the “little people” he despises, crudely foreshadows his famous scene on the Ferris wheel in The Third Man, when as the black-marketeer Harry Lime, he speaks of the children playing far below as “dots,” telling Joseph Cotten, “Look down there. Tell me. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever?” But Franz Kindler has none of Harry Lime’s insidious charm or seductive amorality. He’s like the villain in a 19th-century melodrama: glowering, saturnine, an ostentatiously foreign menace whose gruesome death (he falls from the tower and is impaled on the clock) is cause for celebration. The outraged townspeople play no role in the ultimate death of the Nazi in their midst, but they call to mind the bands of villagers with torches and pitchforks who hunt and kill the monsters in horror films, cornering and destroying the threats to their enclosed worlds. No sooner did Nazi spies and fifth-columnists disappear from films than communists

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began to infiltrate celluloid towns and cities. Even in movies where ordinary criminals stand in for reds, Cold War paranoia is evident in the jingoistic tone with which they hector audiences about the need to get tough with bad guys who threaten the American way of life. This message is delivered with ham-handed force in Suddenly (1954), a film so brightly lit and morally blunt that it falls outside the bounds of noir, but which perfectly illustrates the right-wing strain in crime movies of the fifties. The film pits Sterling Hayden, as Tom Shaw, a small-town sheriff, against Frank Sinatra as John Baron, a hit man plotting to assassinate the president. Baron and his cohorts take over the home of a war widow, Ellen Benson (Nancy Gates), who lives with her young son and father-in-law, holding them hostage as they wait for the president’s arrival. The town is a sleepy western whistle-stop, once a gold rush town, where “it’s been a quiet day for the last 50 years” and “things happen so slowly now the town council is figuring to change the name to Gradually.” The mere fact that the president must be so heavily guarded, even passing through such a peaceful burg on his way to a fishing trip (all stores on the town’s main street are closed, pedestrians banished, snipers placed on rooftops) is an unexamined comment on the chronic violence of American history. In one of the film’s most embarrassing scenes, a TV repairman, hearing of the assassination plot, blurts in horror, “They’re commies! They’re enemy agents!” But there’s nothing un–American about wanting to kill the president, and the killers are not ideologically driven; they’re just mercenaries doing a job. Ellen is still bitter about her husband’s death and forbids her son to play with toy guns or watch war movies. Shaw, who wants to marry her, lectures her that the boy, who is teased as a “sissy” by his peers, must be exposed to evil and violence as to germs, or he will not know how to cope with them. He recites the predictable line that guns are only bad in the wrong hands. This conflict between women who wish violence could be avoided and men who know that it is the only way to combat evil is a central theme in westerns. Almost invariably, the women’s pacifist pleas are given a respectful hearing before men settle things with bullets. Once the widow’s home has been invaded by vicious thugs who threaten her son, it is hardly necessary to watch the rest of the film to know that she will learn the error of her thinking. In The Desperate Hours (1955), a family is held hostage by ruthless outlaws in the same backlot house that would be used in Leave It to Beaver. The movie opens just like a sitcom — not a sly parody of one as in Pitfall— with a family sitting around the breakfast table: successful but put-upon executive father; immaculate housewife; voluptuous yet virginal daughter; and cocky, smart-aleck little boy obsessed with heroism. After the family has gone off to school and work, the wife calmly makes beds while listening to a radio report of the prison break; moments later, three brutish escapees burst into the house. They remain for several days, threatening and bullying the family as they wait for the arrival of the leader’s moll. A career criminal, Griffin (Humphrey Bogart), resents “shiny-shoed, respectable” men who carry pocket handkerchiefs. He enjoys controlling and terrifying the family, forcing them to wait on him and do his bidding as revenge for their air of superiority: “Pass us on the street, you’d look straight through both of us.” His younger brother yearns for the family’s secure life and the pretty, untouchable daughter, complaining that his older brother “never taught me how to live in a house like this.” But, unlike John Garfield’s last film, He

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Ran All the Way (1951), which uses a very similar premise, The Desperate Hours arouses no sympathy for the criminals. Griffin’s class resentment seems merely self-serving, and he is almost pitiful, though not likeable, in his insecure need to be in charge. Fredric March, as Dan Hilliard, the head of the family, is by contrast intelligent, cool-headed, infallible in his judgment: the definitive fifties sitcom patriarch. He bears the responsibility for protecting his family, who endanger themselves through their own emotional outbursts and ill-advised attempts to escape. Hilliard tells Griffin that he now has it in him to kill, because his hatred is as strong as the criminal’s, but in the end he is unable to shoot Griffin in cold blood, and instead forces him out of the house, where he is mowed down by police machine guns. “You can’t play ball with savages,” the chief police detective explains. These films side wholeheartedly with authority, with fathers and sheriffs. Women and children must be protected; they always break down when faced with too great a challenge. “Get out of my home!” Hilliard bellows at Griffin, after he has tricked him into drawing an unloaded gun. Both Griffin and John Baron have thick New York accents (as Griffin, Bogart uses a touch of “dese and dose”), which in these western communities mark them out as no less foreign than Franz Kindler. These films demonstrate that the sense of danger lurking even in the most outwardly benign places—a pervasive noir theme—could inspire a rightwing response (the need for vigilance and an uncompromising response to “savages”) as well as a left-wing response (the indictment of an unjust society that drives people to crime.) Left-wing films inverted the motif of towns as flocks of sheep endangered by lone wolves. Vigilance becomes vigilantism, and good townsfolk become lynch mobs hunting down outsiders. In The Sound of Fury (later known as Try and Get Me!), the two criminals who pull a string of holdups, then kidnap and kill a prominent citizen, are not outsiders at all; they are home-grown, small-time crooks. But a local paper sensationalizes the “crime wave,” suggesting it must be the work of a sophisticated Eastern mob, and stirring up outrage by hinting that the kidnappers might get off on a technicality. A liberal reporter who reluctantly wrote the articles at his boss’s urging watches in horror as a huge crowd gathers outside the jail, roaring with bloodlust. The script’s only flaw is the unnecessary addition of a wise Italian mathematician who lectures on the “breakdown of social decency.” (“Ain’t it wonderful what the H-bomb has done?” a fellow guest at a cocktail party says: “It’s made a scientist almost as important as a good fullback.”) The message comes across strongly enough without any preaching, and the film’s ending pulls no punches. There’s no last-minute miracle to calm the crowd, no backdoor escape as in Fritz Lang’s anti-lynching drama, Fury. A rabid crowd, led by college boys, pours into the jail and drags off the two men, beating and tearing at them in a frenzy. From the film’s opening moments, when people rushing toward the jail knock down a blind street preacher (as he is ranting, “I tell you, my friends, the world is going to hell in a dive bomber!”) the crowd is terrifying, a human hurricane.

Poisonville: Corrupt Communities Towns and outsiders are natural enemies, like wolves and sheep — but which is which? Conflicts between the individual and the group, between the established settlement and

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the drifter, are ubiquitous in westerns: a stranger rides into town and his disruptive presence uncovers its crooked foundations and moral cowardice. Newcomers are dangerous in corrupt towns because they don’t know the rules; they don’t know what questions shouldn’t be asked; they don’t know how things are done. In film noir, this type of tainted community turns up most often in the American South, where the strength of tradition, rather than geographic isolation, protects against change. In Storm Warning (1951), Marsha Mitchell (Ginger Rogers) is a model from New York who gets off a Greyhound bus in a southern jerkwater to visit her sister, and almost immediately witnesses a murder by the Ku Klux Klan. The film, produced by Warner Bros. and beautifully directed by Stuart Heisler, is fatally flawed by its refusal to acknowledge the real nature of the Klan. Incredibly, there is no mention of race or religion; the Klan is alleged to be a “private money-making racket” run by a couple of prominent citizens who bilk money from their hick followers and cheat on their income taxes. They complain about “interference” from New York and Washington, and the man they kill is a reporter from a nearby town who was “getting close to the truth.” (The crusading D.A. points out that the victim was a pretty good sports reporter, as though to vindicate him.) Storm Warning is further hurt by its shameless plagiarism of A Streetcar Named Desire: Marsha’s sister, Lucy Rice (Doris Day), is crazy about her husband, Hank, a dim-witted but sexy hunk of white trash (Steve Cochran), who wears a tight t-shirt, gets raucously drunk, and eventually tries to rape his sister-in-law. These embarrassing lapses are unfortunate, since the film comes close to being very good. It opens with a ravishing variation on a noir staple: the lonely walk through dark streets. The town where Marsha alights (described by her colleague on the bus as “a dead end” and “a wilderness”) is unnervingly dark and quiet, the streets faintly glimmering with rain, the air heavy with moisture. All the shops are shutting down early; when the visitor approaches a hamburger stand she’s greeted with suspicious hostility. “It’s a real friendly town,” she deadpans as a rude cabdriver refuses to give her a ride. She walks alone through the empty streets, her heels echoing on the pavement, fear prickling the back of her neck even before she nears the jail and sees a bound-and-gagged man hauled into the street and shot by a crowd of men in white robes and hoods (which they conveniently doff to give her a look at their faces). When she arrives at the little white bungalow where her bouncy sister lives, she discovers that her brother-in-law is one of the murderers. Though disgusted by this stupid, violent lout, Marsha can’t bring herself to ruin her sister’s life by telling the truth. The D.A. (Ronald Reagan) is more than happy that she’s willing to say merely that it was the Klan, since no one else is willing to speak up against the group and everyone assumes that nothing will be done about the killing. A delegation of business leaders, not members of the Klan, come to beg the D.A. to let the matter drop, since he is making their town look bad and the negative publicity will hurt their business during the Christmas rush. They’re right about the bad publicity. A TV reporter for a national network stands in the midst of a crowd outside the courthouse during the hearing (a few black faces are seen behind him, the only hint of racial diversity in the movie), telling his viewers about the “angry people, sullen and hostile” who don’t want to talk to him. On the witness stand, looking drained and defeated, Marsha lies, claiming she couldn’t see who the attackers

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were; the Klan leader has told her that if she testifies against them, he will turn in her brother-in-law for the murder. (The naïve Hank is dumbfounded by this betrayal, reminding his leader, “You said what happened to one of us happened to all of us!”) Marsha chooses a personal tie over what she knows is right, and has to watch the Klan goons whooping it up in a bowling alley afterward. The film tries to make up for its failure as an exposé by ratcheting up the shock level of the denouement to a degree that feels exploitive. Marsha is spied on in her underwear and then attacked by Hank, who remarks hopefully that “some women like to be hurt.” Though saved by the arrival of her sister, she is dragged off to be whipped at a massive Klan meeting complete with burning crosses. The whole town, it seems — including women and children — gathers to watch, and the leader cries “Outsider!” at Marsha as she is lashed. But there is nothing in these scenes as sickening as the sight of a bullied woman guiltily lying under oath. Remarkably, in the same year that Storm Warning chickened out about confronting racism, The Well, an independently produced film without name stars (written and codirected [with Leo Popkin] by Russell Rouse and released by Cardinal Pictures), depicted a nice town descending into a race riot. A five-year-old black girl falls into an abandoned well, and, after witnesses report that she was last seen with a white stranger, rumors and resentments begin to boil in both black and white communities. Though the thriving town (which is geographically neutral, evidently not in the South) has a history of racial harmony, it takes only a few hours for hysteria to break out, with mobs of whites and blacks roaming the leafy streets with baseball bats, beating one another up, wrecking cars and smashing storefronts. Two white teenage girls who want attention from boys claim they were “insulted”; minutes later, the rumor is across town that a white girl killed herself after being raped. The hapless suspect is the nephew of the town’s richest man, who promises to give him a false alibi, concerned only about protecting his name from the stigma and disgrace of the accusation. Soon the wealthy industrialist is leading a charge to drive every last “nigger” out town (surprisingly, people in the film really use this word, which was forbidden by the Production Code). At a panicked gathering of town leaders, those who are reluctant to call in state troops for fear of hurting their reputation are convinced by a black man who has survived a race riot and vividly describes the flash-flood of unreasoning terror that sweeps people away. Then, suddenly, the movie jolts to a stop, as at the edge of a cliff, and turns off in another direction. It ends up being about, well, the well. When the missing girl is finally discovered, all the mob anger vanishes without a trace and everyone in town gathers to hold a vigil and help with the rescue. The firebrand who wanted to wipe out the town’s black population (and who said, “Kid? What kid?” when reminded of the origin of the trouble) brings in his own machinery to drill a parallel shaft. The suspect who, on his release, declared his hatred for the town and everyone in it, shows up and volunteers to be lowered in to rescue the girl who caused his ordeal. The movie’s message (and it is a message movie, not by any stretch a film noir as it is sometimes labeled), that prejudice disappears when people come together for a common cause, is so clumsily delivered that it seems dangerously close to suggesting that the way to stop a race riot is to drop a small child down a deep hole. The submerged resentments that allowed the community to be torn apart so quickly are never probed, though the film clearly implies that

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even where the fault lines of race are hidden, the earth can be wrenched apart without warning. A cluster of movies about mob violence came out around 1950, and, oddly enough, they are all set in outwardly placid middle-class communities. The Lawless (1950) combines aspects of The Well and The Sound of Fury a California town divided between wealthy Anglos and Mexican field workers explodes after a Mexican youth accidentally slugs a cop during a fight at a dance. Though handsomely directed by Joseph Losey, the film is predictable and over-determined in its liberal pieties. Through sheer ill-luck the hapless kid winds up being accused of murder and assault. Dishonest, muckraking news stories feed the frenzy; whites darkly intimate that their daughters aren’t safe from these “fruit tramps”; and a callous reporter remarks that “they all look alike to me.” Care is taken to point out that young men from the Mexican community fought and died in the war, and one veteran admonishes a crowd that comes to smash up a newspaper office, “They paid me to kill the same kind of guys you are.” The mob is outraged by Larry Wilder (Macdonald Carey), a newspaper editor, a new arrival in town who has taken the fugitive’s side. Wilder is a former globe-trotting, big-city newspaperman who’s tired of fighting. He longs to recover the tranquility of the village where he grew up; he clings to memories of “leaves burning in the fall, the sound of people talking over fences,” and announces that he now believes in nothing except Mother’s Day. Feeling betrayed and disillusioned after Santa Marta (“The Friendly City”) turns on him, he packs up to leave, heading back to New York. He’s through with small towns, he says; they’re not like he remembered. Of course he changes his mind at the last minute, but all these movies suggest that it is precisely the cohesion and homogeneity of small towns that gives rise to lynch mobs. When people feel safe and united (an assumption city-dwellers never make), they close ranks to defend their sanctuary against any perceived contamination. The more compact a community is, the more thoroughly it can be corrupted. Political machines or organized crime may infest big cities, but they can’t control all of their inhabitants; they aren’t embedded in the daily lives of ordinary people. Many noir films are set in towns or small cities, often nameless or fictional, all based on the blueprint of Personville/Poisonville in Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest. This “ugly city of forty thousand people,” a mining town as morally filthy as it is physically polluted, is owned “heart, soul, skin and guts” by one man.3 In these kind of towns, racketeering doesn’t only affect the hidden realm of government; it’s a shared, unspoken secret among all citizens. Money and violence take over the roles of law and justice in structuring society; truth itself is warped as people agree to accept the validity of lies. It is in this sense that racial prejudice can be treated as a form of corruption, as it is in The Lawless; a racially biased society enforces a skewed, “fixed” version of reality. If Hammett’s Poisonville was the literary model for the thoroughly rotten town, the real-world archetype was Phenix City, Alabama, known as the “Sin City of the South” and “the wickedest town in America.” It made headlines in the mid-fifties when citizens begged the state government to declare martial law, after the murder of reform-minded attorney general-nominate, Albert Patterson. A town of 25,000, Phenix City’s main industry was vice: gambling, prostitution and liquor drew soldiers from nearby Fort Benning, and manufacturers churned out loaded dice, marked cards, rigged slot machines and

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Democracy under attack. On election day in Phenix City, mob enforcer Clem Wilson (John Larch, fifth from left) beats voters (unidentified extras) outside a polling place. The Phenix City Story (Phil Karlson, 1955).

bootleg whiskey. A crime syndicate controlled the town, rigging elections in order to ensure the safety of their business. Phil Karlson’s fictionalized 1955 movie, The Phenix City Story, opens with a 15minute documentary prologue in which several of the people portrayed in the film are interviewed. The drama that follows, shot in pseudo-documentary style, uses the town’s plight to draw an allegory of the conflict between democracy and dictatorship, and to construct a rousing argument for the importance of communal action and political engagement. Karlson’s Phenix City is both Bedford Falls and Pottersville. It has cozy residential streets and more churches than any other town in the state, but also more cabarets and casinos. On one side of town is 14th Street—a hotbed of debauchery, the sidewalks crowded with drunken soldiers and their floozies, flashing neon signs for loan sharks, sultry jazz seeping out of bars. The other side of town is a leafy hamlet with big front yards and well-tended homes. Most of the people who live in the good part of town prefer to ignore the dark side rather than risk challenging it. A small group of indignant, virtuous citizens keeps forming committees to stamp out vice, advocating vigilante action to burn out the evildoers. The mob’s soldiers beat them up as they attempt to attend a meeting, and the bought-and-paid-for police

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ignore the blood spilled on their streets. Rhett Tanner, the head of the syndicate, is a genial good-old-boy who argues that the town has been this way for almost a hundred years, and what was good enough for their forefathers should be good enough for them. The film focuses on Albert Patterson’s reluctant change of heart from resigned apathy to fearless determination, and the involvement of his son John, newly returned from a military posting in Germany — both home-town boy and disruptive stranger. The turning point of the film is one of the most shocking and upsetting images to come out of Hollywood in the fifties. The syndicate goons kidnap and kill the young daughter of Zeke Ward ( James Edwards), a black janitor who dared to assist John Patterson in a fight with one of the mob. They hurl the little girl’s bloody, wide-eyed corpse onto Patterson’s lawn with a note pinned to her dress, “This will happen to your kids too.” John’s hysterical wife begs him to leave “this horrible town,” but he insists on staying to fight, though he sends his children to safety. Many other horrors follow: a young man and woman are separately murdered, a jury is too cowardly to convict the killers, a home is bombed, voters are beaten on election day. But nothing ever exceeds or mitigates the brutality of the little girl’s murder, which is compounded by the way she’s dropped from the movie without comment. She’s merely used as a message, as a missile. It is Zeke, her father, who articulates the film’s stand against moral compromise and vigilantism; he talks John out of killing Tanner, arguing that they must not stoop to the level of their opponents, that they must hold to the principle that killing is wrong. But it takes the arrival of the state militia to establish order and enable fair elections, and the movie ends without the villains being brought to justice, with only the promise that they will be.4 Exposés of behind-the-scenes corruption, so ubiquitous in films of this time (Robert Wise’s 1952 The Captive City was another example, and its publicity stressed the idea that any town —your town!— might be “the captive city”), feed the American appetite for conspiracy theories. People love to feel that there’s some secret explanation for the problems of their lives; just as they lean on theories about fate to account for their failures (“it wasn’t meant to be”), they like the notion of racketeers pulling the strings, causing the wrong people to succeed. These kinds of government shenanigans can be revealed and cleaned up. The troubling sense that communities inherently encourage conformity, dishonesty and risk-averse herd behavior is more intractable. Flamingo Road (1949) delivers a more noirish portrait of a Deep South town too lazy to break the spell of graft and dishonesty. Boldon City is introduced in the generalizing, it-could-be-your-town terms of “a small city of people with big dreams.” Beneath this cliché-ridden voiceover (the eponymous road is “the street of social success,” the carnival is “on the wrong side of the tracks”), the film has a thick, humid atmosphere, courtesy of the always-stylish Michael Curtiz. The southern night is still and heavy after a storm, mist lingering in the air. Insects chirp in the trees and jive music plays loudly in cheap cafés that serve inedible blue-plate specials. Boldon is run by an obese sheriff named Titus Semple (Sydney Greenstreet) from the rocking-chair on his front porch; and by the “boys” of the political machine, who decide on appointments while playing poker in the upstairs room at Lute Mae’s roadhouse. The sheriff sells chain-gang convicts to the county for roadwork at a kick-back of 50 percent, while on Flamingo Road, debutantes sit on patio chairs drinking iced tea.

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Lane Bellamy ( Joan Crawford) is a cooch dancer who decides to stay behind when the carny skips town after a dispute over unpaid rent. She’s tired of the grind of traveling, and she soon finds two more reasons to stay. She falls in love with the deputy sheriff, Field Carlisle (Zachary Scott), and incurs the hatred of Titus Semple, who gets her fired from the job that Field found for her as a waitress. Knowing Semple wants to get rid of her, she decides to stay just to prove she won’t be kicked around. “For the first time in my life I really feel I belong somewhere,” she says: “I live in Boldon.” Carlisle comes from an old, respectable family in the best part of town, but has become Semple’s puppet; in exchange for promises to make him a senator and eventually governor, he puts up with being ordered around like a servant. He even marries a proper wife to further his political career. To make sure Lane won’t get in the way, Semple has her arrested for soliciting and sentenced to 30 days on a work farm. More obstinate than ever, she returns and gets a job at Lute Mae’s, where she meets Dan Reynolds (David Brian), the top boss, who is honest about the nature of crooked politics (“When the people don’t care, they get about what they deserve”) and sees it as part of his job to protect the state from even greedier men like Semple. Dan marries Lane and they move to a white-columned showplace on Flamingo Road. Eaten away by his own weakness and self-loathing, Field becomes an abject alcoholic and shoots himself in Lane’s parlor. Semple — whose mounting megalomania is matched only by his lip-smacking viciousness — now decides to get himself elected governor, blackmailing the machine bosses with evidence of their own underhand schemes. Only when she has nothing to lose — her husband having left her, convinced she only married him for security — does Lane clean up the town by plugging Semple. Flamingo Road, like King Vidor’s swampy melodrama Ruby Gentry (1952), spices the outcast-versus-community premise by making the despised outsider a sexy, low-class woman who marries a wealthy and powerful man. Social disdain is thus compounded by envy and puritanical disapproval. After Field’s suicide, the women of the “Mother’s Committee” condemn Lane and a mob gathers outside her house, breaking the windows and threatening to ride her out of town on a rail. Similarly, after Ruby’s wealthy husband dies in a boating accident, she is harassed by phone calls accusing her of murder and by muttering crowds who surround her house and throw rocks. She gets revenge by calling in all the loans her husband made and single-handedly wrecking the town that he kept afloat. She’s driven solely by anger at social snobbery and thwarted passion for a man she can’t have, while Lane, in confronting the man who ruined her life, exposes the town’s debased nature. Everyone knows elections are fixed, and no one cares — not even Field’s society wife. They don’t want to face the fact that they are all at the sheriff ’s mercy. Dan’s loyal foreman helps to frame him in order to save his own son from a trumped-up charge of drunken driving. Semple controls reality: because he’s “the law,” the truth is the story he chooses to tell. The fat, folksy sheriff of a desert town in The Tattered Dress (1957) similarly plays god in his backwater domain. He hates a slick New York lawyer so much that he frames him and then commits murder to protect the lie, just because the lawyer made him look foolish in court. A high-profile mouthpiece notorious for winning acquittals for guilty

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defendants, James Blaine ( Jeff Chandler) travels across the country to defend a wealthy couple after the husband shoots his wife’s lover. The Restons are spoiled degenerates, the wife a shameless tramp and the husband an arrogant thug who explains to Blaine that when he spills a drink on the carpet he expects the butler to clean it up, and when he spills blood he expects a lawyer to do the same. They live cocooned in a luxurious resort called Desert Valley, full of swimming pools and cocktail bars, springing like an oasis out of a vast, bleached desert. Naturally, they are hated by people in the nearby town (coincidentally called Bolton), and their New York lawyer even more so. But the humble townspeople are no more appealing; they’re always loitering in watchful, threatening mobs, and two men jump Blaine and beat him in an alley. After he gets the Restons off, the humiliated Sheriff Hoak ( Jack Carson) plots against him; he’s lured to a poker game in a desert shack, and the $5,000 he loses turns up in the possession of a woman on the jury who claims he gave it to her as a bribe. She’s really Hoak’s girlfriend, a fragile and intimidated woman whom he has coerced into perjuring herself. The hypocritically jovial sheriff, whose office is full of old college sports trophies, exploits small-town resentment of big-city experts. At his trial the hard-driving lawyer comes off looking like a bully while the lying locals have the appeal of underdogs. Long established as a second lead in comedies, Carson skillfully uses his persona as a crass but genial blowhard to create an acute portrait of an aging man with a chip on his shoulder who clings to his one-time status as a football hero and can’t stand competition from a more powerful man. He poses as a good-humored average guy, but in private slaps around his girlfriend and unleashes murderous rage. He’s the strongest element in what becomes a rather pompous and plodding courtroom drama; while Blaine is the morally complex character, Hoak is a fascinating, irredeemable rattlesnake. The provincial resentment of eastern elites in The Tattered Dress looks very familiar today. The settling of the desert created strangely exposed communities; busy Main Streets that run into bare wasteland, air-conditioned houses with patios that look out on strip mines. Violent Saturday (1955) opens with a wide-screen panorama of an Arizona copper mine; an explosion reduces a rock face to a cloud of dust while dumptrucks unload dirt and rubble. The quarry looks like an open wound in the raw, sun-baked land. This is the modern West; a train slices across a flat expanse of dry grass, beneath a smokestack trailing a long white plume across the sky. The train brings three bank robbers to Bradenville (Stephen McNally, Lee Marvin and J. Carroll Naish); they’re not rugged outlaws but impersonal, calculating professionals who pose as traveling salesmen. Their arrival, like a blast of dynamite, uncovers the town’s hidden perversions. The mine owner is a despairing alcoholic and his bombshell wife is chronically unfaithful. The bank manager is a Peeping Tom who walks his dog at night in order to spy on a shapely nurse. (“Can’t blame him,” Dill, one of the bank robbers, observes as the banker gawks at the dancing nurse, “She moves like a Swiss watch.”) In the alley one night the drooling banker runs into the town librarian (Sylvia Sidney), in the act of discarding a purse she stole from a library patron. Shot in hot-hued Technicolor and directed with Swiss-watch precision by Richard Fleischer, Violent Saturday is engagingly eccentric for most of its length. Dill (Lee Marvin) rambles on about his ex-wife, whose susceptibility to colds started his addiction to nasal

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inhalers, and Ernest Borgnine, as Stadt, a kindly Amish farmer (an all-time triumph of against-type casting), keeps saying, “I thank thee, neighbor.” In the too-tidy denouement, however, the film shifts from minor key to major and becomes another attack on pacifism, another glorification of patriarchal violence in defense of family. This outcome is foreshadowed by the least interesting plot-strand, in which Shelley Martin (Victor Mature, baked to the color of a roast turkey), who was forced to stay home at his mining job during the war, suffers the cruel disappointment of his son, whose friends’ fathers were combat heroes. Small boys’ obsession with their fathers’ war records and general manliness is a recurring theme in fifties films (see The Desperate Hours and Pitfall), a tic that exposes the era’s chest-thumping anxiety. When he’s kidnapped by the robbers, who use the Amish farm as their rendezvous to change cars, Martin gets a chance to be a hero, and Stadt learns to abandon his religious principles: after a bullet wounds his son he impales Dill on a pitchfork. That the only person who dies during the holdup is the adulterous wife seems suspiciously like a convenience for the censors, though the pointlessness of her death hits home in a bleak shot of her husband, with whom she had reconciled and planned to leave town, standing over his mine and crying into the gutted earth. The librarian who resorts to thieving to pay her debts is Elsie Braden of Bradenville. Her background is never openly discussed, but her frayed hauteur obviously alludes to a proud old family in decline. To bear the name of one’s town seems to be a special kind of poisoned distinction. In Woman in Hiding, Stephen McNally is Selden Clark of Clarksville, a Southern mill town. His fine old family has a local reputation for producing domineering lunatics; his grandfather was a Civil War general crazed with battle fever. Selden is obsessed with reviving his family name by taking over the mill that is “all that’s left of Clarksville,” and to this end he kills the owner and marries the man’s daughter, proposing on the day of the funeral. In Samuel Fuller’s The Naked Kiss (1964), J.L. Grant of Grantville, grandson of the town’s founder, is a beloved philanthropist and cultured international playboy who showers the townsfolk with gifts when he returns from European travels. He is also a child molester who falls in love with a reformed prostitute because he believes she will “understand his sickness.” As she recoils in horror at this revelation, moments before fatally braining him with a telephone receiver, he assures her, “Our marriage will be a paradise because we’re both abnormal.” Even more than most of Fuller’s films, The Naked Kiss makes you feel like you’re losing your mind; all moorings slip away in the flood of hallucinatory images, deep-purple dialogue, bizarre plot twists and jarring tonal shifts. The film that opens with a hooker beating the stuffing out of her drunken pimp, in the process losing her wig and revealing herself to be bald as a billiard ball, later includes a mawkish, sincere, unsettlingly haunting musical number sung off-key by a parade of handicapped children, led by the former prostitute, now an angelic nurse. The lurid and the cloying come together in the calm, white, sunny town of Grantville, where Kelly (Constance Towers) gets off a bus, posing as a “traveling saleslady” peddling “angel foam” (champagne — for the price of a bottle she will throw in herself ). She’s immediately picked up by a cop, who takes her home for a boozy tryst before telling her that the town is “clean” and she’d better get going. He offers to get her a job as one of

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the “bon-bons” at Candy’s place across the river; the madam is a personal friend of his, but that doesn’t stop him from passing judgment on Kelly when she tells him she wants to go straight and start over. He repeatedly tries to run her out of town, even after she has proven herself at the hospital. Though Kelly has the proverbial heart of gold, Fuller is not guilty of sentimentalizing prostitution; her speech to a fellow nurse who is tempted to start down the primrose path is admirably frank and eloquent in its description of a life that destroys heart, body and soul. “You know what’s different about the first night? Nothing. Except that it lasts forever. You’ll be sleeping on the skin of a nightmare for the rest of your life.” Grant (Michael Dante) appears to Kelly as Prince Charming, the man she has allowed herself to dream about, but he’s immediately disturbing; he looks like a very bad artist’s attempt to draw a conventionally handsome face. On their first date they quote poetry to each other, listen to Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” and watch silent home movies of Venice. Grant tells Kelly that if she pretends hard enough, she will be able to hear the gondolier’s song, and a spectacularly schmaltzy fantasy sequence follows — but when it culminates in a kiss, Kelly knows something is wrong. (She can tell from experience the kiss of a “pervert,” the so-called “naked kiss.”) She ignores the warning bell and succumbs to the romantic dream. Earlier, she told the handicapped children at the hospital that if they pretended hard enough they would be able to play like normal children. But all this pretending only lands Kelly in jail for killing Grant: everyone assumes she was after his money and tried to blackmail her into marrying him. Her disgruntled former pimp and Candy — whom Kelly pummeled for trying to recruit one of the nurses at the hospital — show up and tell lies about her to the cop who is eager to think the worst of her. She is finally able to clear her name (apparently, killing a pervert is not a crime, which is as believable as that it’s possible to kill a grown man by tapping him on the head with a phone receiver), and when she’s released from jail a crowd of colleagues and neighbors waits to welcome her. It would be interesting to know what the townsfolk think when they discover that their beloved namesake was a child molester, but the film does not portray their reactions. Despite this heartwarming embrace, Kelly heads straight to the bus station, and is viewed from above as a tiny figure crossing wide, empty streets. Is she leaving because her past has been exposed and she knows she can never belong in Grantville, or because she has discovered that the “clean” world she longed to be accepted by is really diseased? Her motives are unclear, but it’s hard to believe that Kelly will ever rediscover the paradise she found with the “abnormal” children at the hospital, whom she dressed as pirates, turning society’s rejects into a crew of rebels.

Don’t Look Back: Towns with Long Memories One of the great romantics of Hollywood cinema, Frank Borzage, was preoccupied by the bonds formed between outsiders. His late silent-early sound love stories (7th Heaven, Street Angel, Lucky Star) are about street cleaners and streetwalkers, the handicapped and the abused. In the pre–Code Man’s Castle, a homeless girl sets up housekeeping

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with a bum who lives in a shantytown. Mortal Storm is about the struggle of Germans who resist the Nazis; Strange Cargo follows convicts escaped from Devil’s Island. These outcasts create their own private worlds and find in intense romantic love the acceptance they have been denied. Moonrise (1948) was Borzage’s only film noir, and it marries generic themes of violence, guilt and the oppressive burden of the past with his distinctive compassion, lyricism and faith in the redemptive power of love. The film’s brief, expressionistic prologue compresses a lifelong nightmare into a few wordless images. The shadow of a man is led to the shadow of a gallows. A doll dangles by the neck above a crib; a baby cries behind the bars. A boy is beaten in a schoolyard, his face smeared with mud, as other children chant over and over, “Danny Hawkins’s Dad was hanged!” Daniel Hawkins (Dane Clark) lives in this recurring nightmare because he has never left the little Southern town where his father was executed. It’s a muggy, stagnant, backward-looking place where to be different is to be inferior. In a dance pavilion beside a swampy pond, a crowd of young men and women tease and laugh at a retarded deafmute, Billy Scripture (Henry [Harry] Morgan), who is attracted to small, bright objects. Danny breaks in and stops them; hyper-sensitive to persecution, he is Billy’s only friend and protector. His own best friend is a black man named Mose (Rex Ingram), a wise but embittered loner who has “resigned from the human race,” moving to a cabin in the swamps so he won’t be pushed around. He calls his hunting dogs “Mister” because “there isn’t enough dignity in the world.” Danny has trouble finding work, and though inwardly “gentle and lonely and lost,” he is habitually truculent, prey to self-doubt and uncontrollable rages. In the woods behind the pavilion during a dance, he is attacked by his arch-enemy, Jerry Sykes (Lloyd Bridges), the arrogant son of the town’s prominent banker, who is addicted to the pleasure of taunting and abusing Danny. They get into a fight, and when Jerry picks up a rock to hit him, Danny grabs it and crushes Jerry’s skull. He hides the body in the bog and returns to the dance, where he aggressively pursues Gilly Johnson (Gail Russell), the beautiful schoolteacher who was Jerry’s fiancée. An educated woman looked up to in the town, she is “out of his class,” and initially repelled by Danny’s rough manners and reckless anger. But she is irresistibly drawn to him, perhaps to his inconsolable need for her. He insists on keeping their romance secret, afraid that their relationship will arouse suspicion after Jerry’s disappearance. They meet in an abandoned plantation mansion still furnished with lace curtains, sofas, harps and antebellum portraits, all swathed in dust and cobwebs and shadows. Putting on a fluting, Southern-belle voice, Gilly pretends they are attending a genteel Civil War–era soiree, inviting “Captain Hawkins” to waltz. Danny is a hillbilly from the mountains, yet another mark against him; but rather than mocking him, Gilly gently spoofs traditional Southern society and conjures an imaginary world in which he is respected. She herself is not an outsider, but her sensitivity and vulnerability connect her to Danny. Gail Russell’s otherworldly beauty was always lit by an intense, melancholy stillness; here, with her long dark hair and white trench coat, she looks like an angelic messenger of mercy. Dane Clark was known as the B-list John Garfield; both were short, stocky Jewish actors from New York (Clark’s real name was Bernard Zanville) who always played hard-

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Love among outcasts: Gilly Johnson (Gail Russell) and Danny Hawkins (Dane Clark) meet secretly in Moonrise (Frank Borzage, 1948).

luck characters — Garfield was once described by a reviewer as “official gall-and-wormwood taster for Warner Brothers.” Clark graduated from playing regular–Joe G.I.’s inevitably nicknamed “Brooklyn” to chip-on-the-shoulder types in gritty crime films. He often lacked subtlety and strained for effect, but his performance in Moonrise has the beautiful clarity and simplicity that Borzage was able to draw from mannered or even inadequate actors. With his fist-clenched fighter’s stance and dark, hunted-animal eyes, he is poignant as a man molded and warped by hatred. His guilt is so painfully obvious that it’s hard to believe everyone in town doesn’t guess that he killed Jerry. “A small town’s like a stomach, always digesting,” says the philosophical sheriff, claiming that he can catch criminals just by listening to the talk on Main Street. This town has many gathering places: a lunch counter run by a jive-talking soda jerk, the dance pavilion, a county fair, and the benches in front of the railway depot, where an ancient Civil War veteran sits watching the comings and goings, asking of anyone he doesn’t recognize, “Whose boy?” The way the past lingers in this place, where Yankees are still despised, helps to explain why Danny has never been allowed to escape the stigma of his father’s death. Nothing can be kept hidden for long in such a town, and nothing is forgotten. Danny himself worries that he has “bad blood” that “makes him do bad things.” As he grows more and more anxious about being caught, he turns on the only creatures more

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powerless than himself. Though he plainly identifies with the prey in a coon hunt — the film cuts directly from his frightened face to the frightened animal’s — he shakes it out of a tree, sobbing as it is torn apart by the dogs. Later, he almost strangles poor Billy Scripture, who found the knife he lost during the struggle with Jerry. Only the deaf man’s helplessness and inability to fight back stops him in time. Danny feels cursed, incapable of avoiding his fate or defying expectations. Before he can come to terms with his resentment and give himself up to the police, he has to return to the cabin in the hills where his parents once lived, and where his grandmother talks him out of his deep-seated anger at his father. Moonrise has a feeling for the natural world and the traditions of rural and smalltown life found nowhere else in noir — a mood that recalls Charles Laughton’s unclassifiable The Night of the Hunter (1955). In his sound films Borzage remained faithful to the silent tradition of expressive, symbolic images, a mode of visual storytelling. Again and again, Danny’s environment mirrors his feelings of being confined and pursued: a goldfish swims in a small bowl, a hand stalks a fly across a table-top, a knife whittles a stick to breaking point. When the sheriff gets on a Ferris wheel at the county fair, following his suspect around and around the circle, Danny panics and jumps off. In a final materialization of his fears, he is hunted through the swamps by dogs, but the dogs — Mose’s pack of coon hounds — know Danny, and rather than attacking him they greet him affectionately, repaying his kindness to them. Borzage never hesitated to summon miracles: his heroes return from the dead, rise from their wheelchairs to walk again, experience lightning-flashes of forgiveness and redemption. Danny not only forgives his father but returns willingly to the town, where the understanding sheriff promises him a fair deal. The sheriff joins the small family of those who love and understand Danny — Gilly, Mose, Grandma Hawkins — and in arresting him, he is also bringing the outcast into the community. He voices a theory of crime highly unorthodox for a lawman, but in line with noir’s moral ambiguity: a sense that guilt is pervasive and fluid, that no one is independently responsible for his actions. “Sometime murder is like love, it takes two to commit it ... the killer and the killed.” There’s no redemption for people who are bound by their pasts in The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (Lewis Milestone, 1946); the only way out is to leave town and never look back. Sam Masterson (Van Heflin), a drifter who knows his Gideon Bible from countless hotel rooms, reminds an old friend of what happened to Lot’s wife when she looked back, adding that Lot “got away” because he didn’t turn around. This lesson interests Martha Ivers of Iverstown (Barbara Stanwyck), whose frozen demeanor suggests a woman turning into a pillar of salt. She’s the most powerful person in the Midwestern mill town that bears her name, and also the most powerless, arrested forever by the consequences of a single childhood act. The film opens with two children planning to run away with a circus train. Sam is a streetwise kid with a drunk for a father and a mother who ran out when he was a baby; Martha is an orphan living with her wealthy aunt, who owns the local steel mill. The girl and her guardian are bound by an icy mutual contempt; the aunt ( Judith Anderson, in full Mrs. Danvers mode) needs an heir, but despises Martha’s dead father, a lowly mill hand. (She has had Martha’s surname legally changed from the undistinguished Smith.)

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The rebellious girl would happily give up her fortune for freedom, but she can never run far enough to get beyond her aunt’s reach. In a single “reckless moment,” Martha loses any hope of getting away. She snatches her aunt’s cane — she is using it to beat Martha’s kitten!— and clubs her; she tumbles down the stairs and dies. Sam vanishes from the house some time during the struggle and makes it to the circus train, leaving Martha with no friends, no one to turn to. Her tutor, an obsequious social climber, sees his chance. With the unspoken threat of exposure, he takes control of Martha’s life, using her money and influence to advance his son Walter, a timid goody-two-shoes who is both terrified of the tough Martha and devoted to her. Some 18 years later, Sam is driving west and finds himself by chance in his home town. While waiting for his car to be repaired, he discovers that Walter O’Neil is running for re-election as district attorney, and that he’s married to Martha. She has grown into a poised, glamorous businesswoman who has improved and expanded the mill “all by myself,” as she tells him with grim satisfaction. She shows Sam how she has redecorated her aunt’s house — all except for her childhood bedroom, which is unchanged. She is still living in the night of her aunt’s death, as “a little girl in a cage waiting for someone to

A love triangle overshadowed by the past: Sam Masterson (Van Heflin, left), Martha Ivers (Barbara Stanwyck, center) and Walter O’Neil (Kirk Douglas, right) in The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (Lewis Milestone, 1946).

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come along and let her out.” Unaware that Sam left the house before the blow was struck, Martha and Walter assume that he has returned to blackmail them, and Walter rightly fears that Martha carries a torch for her old friend. A gambler and casual opportunist (played by Heflin with a blend of shiftiness and rakish charm), Sam weighs his options. He’s not above gouging money out of his old friend once he learns the truth, but he’s also drawn to Martha, even as he takes up with Toni Maracek (Lizabeth Scott), a down-onher-luck young woman just out of jail. He meets her as she is sitting on the steps of the house where he grew up, now a rooming house for transients. Like the unsentimental Sam, she feels no ties to her family, doesn’t want to go back to her home town and dreams of heading west. She stands for the future, Martha for the past, and Sam — despite his Gideon Bible wisdom — is torn between the two. Milestone’s film is visually bland for a noir, but the run-of-the-mill sets and uninflected lighting form an appropriate backdrop, conveying a lack of imagination that keeps the characters locked into their preordained roles. There’s something drained and robotic about the domineering Martha; she has been absorbed into the drab and featureless town that she and her husband use as a battleground. They manipulate it like a model train set, but its limitations have stunted them. Standing on a hill overlooking the lights of town, Martha tells Sam that owning the place gives her a feeling of power. She even owns the hotel where he and Toni are staying. Walter says that being the D.A. in a small city is like being God; he knows everything, even the phone call Martha made to the garage asking them not to fix Sam’s car. He abuses his power, coercing Toni into putting Sam on the spot, and having his romantic rival beaten and dumped outside of town. But neither Martha nor Walter can have what they want, so for all their political and economic means they are impotent, and they know it. Sam is a veteran of the war and of countless hard knocks and shady deals, has had “many arrests, no convictions,” but even he has never seen anything like the O’Neils’ toxic marriage. Walter (Kirk Douglas) is a pathetic, ineffectual alcoholic who went along with his father’s scheme because of his hopeless love for Martha. He can hold onto her through their shared guilt — together they prosecuted an innocent man, who was executed for the murder of Mrs. Ivers — but knows that she is unfaithful and has never loved him. Douglas, in his debut film, brings out Walter’s insecurity and stinging jealousy, his lame attempts to project confidence, his dependence on liquor to salve his humiliation. Douglas was never cast as such a weakling again, but the mismatch works perfectly. A less imposing actor would come off as just a wimp, but Douglas’s virile presence lends an interesting touch of perversity to his plight, and his frustrated love approaches masochism. “Even pain at your hands...,” he sighs as Martha puts iodine on his cut fingers. As Martha, Stanwyck gives the film a core of impenetrable ambiguity. Is she villain or victim? When she breaks down in tears and confides that she has been helpless and frightened all along, exploited by Walter and his father, Sam is moved but not sure whether to believe her. At times she seems as hard and cruel as her aunt, controlling her husband like a ruthless hypnotist. Yet she tells Sam that she still thinks of herself as plain Martha Smith; and she still dreams of running away with him. Falling under the spell of old loyalty, pity and attraction, he almost succumbs to Martha — until she urges him to kill Walter after he has tumbled drunkenly down the same stairs that killed her aunt.

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There is a strong affinity between Martha and Sam, both tough and knowing and hard to read, while Toni and Walter are more vulnerable and transparent, driven by the simple motivation of love. But by the end it’s clear that Martha and Walter have become twins, equally misshapen by their ugly history, alone in their suicidal duet. They blame each other for the death of the man they framed, but cling together to the last. Walter consoles Martha with noirish philosophy: “It’s not your fault, or mine, or my father’s. It’s not anyone’s fault. It’s what people want, and how hard they want it, and how hard it is for them to get it.” Their pact with desire, fear, greed and guilt is the spectacle of ruin, the Sodom and Gomorrah, from which Sam runs away. As he and Toni motor out of town, heading west on a road that promises anything can be left behind, he tells her, “Don’t look back, baby, don’t ever look back.”

CHAPTER 5

Blind Highways: Noir on the Road Flight is many things. Something clean and swift, like a bird skimming across the sky. Or something filthy and crawling; a series of crablike movements through figurative and literal slime, a process of creeping ahead, jumping sideways, running backward.... It is back roads, spur railroad lines, the tailgate of a wildcat truck, a stolen car and a dead couple in lovers’ lane. It is food pilfered from freight cars, garments taken from clotheslines; robbery and murder, sweat and blood. The complex made simple by the alchemy of necessity. You cannot do what you must unaided. So throughout your struggling, your creeping and running, your thieving and killing, you are on the hunt for help. — Jim Thompson, The Getaway

Life’s Crooked Road: Detour and the Perils of the Highway Fleeing from a jailbreak, the young hero of Edward Anderson’s 1937 novel Thieves Like Us looks back from a speeding car and observes, “The empty highway behind looked like a stretching rubber band.” The opening credits of Detour offer an identical image. The highway — Route 66 — running through flat, scrubby desert dotted with prickly pears, is shot from the back of a moving car: it’s not the point of view of someone driving, but of someone passively riding, and watching to see if he’s being followed. A stretching rubber band will snap back. The road runs into the distance, but somewhere it will bring the traveler to a sudden stop. Edgar G. Ulmer’s Detour (1945)1 owes its outsized reputation not so much to the skill with which it makes the most of its extremely meager resources, but to its concentrated expression of the noir ethos. Produced by PRC, the poorest of Poverty Row studios, it looks and sounds dirt cheap; compared with the flashily inventive low-budget work of Anthony Mann and John Alton, the trick of flooding scenes with fog to disguise non-existent sets is a shabby gimmick. But it’s hard to imagine wanting Detour to look better. Everything about it is iconic: the muddy lighting and grungy sets; the crumpled, hangdog face of Tom Neal; the raw, fearless performance of Anne Savage as Vera, a woman with the manners and morals of a rabid alley cat; the scenery of crummy diners, used-car lots, drive-ins, cheap hotel rooms, and above all, the endless highway running through the desert night. Detour was released three months after V-J Day, and nothing could be a more complete repudiation of triumphalism than this pessimistic, down-at-heels, depressed little movie. 105

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It opens with Al Roberts (Neal) walking along the road, trying to thumb a ride. His face is creased with defeat; he’s wearing a dead man’s suit. He was once a nightclub pianist in New York with a beautiful blonde fiancée, but she refused to marry him and resign herself to a life of penny-pinching mediocrity. When she left to try her luck in Hollywood — chasing the same old dream of fame and success — he set out after her, hitching across the country with barely enough money to eat. Hitchhiking is a barometer of trust: the act of offering or accepting a ride with a stranger implies confidence that people are decent. The Depression fostered a sense that everyone was in the same boat, and Americans were obligated to help one another out. Knowing how to thumb a ride was a mark of the regular guy, as Clark Gable lectures Claudette Colbert in It Happened One Night (1934), before her famous demonstration that “the limb is mightier than the thumb.” The man who gives a lift to Gable and Colbert ends up stealing their suitcase, but that doesn’t really mar the lighthearted sparkle of the scene. Hitchhiking flourished again in the 1960s, when young people embraced a spirit of communal openness and generosity. In the post–World War II years, however, film noir produced a series of warnings against picking up hitchhikers — or hitching rides. (The most terrifying of these caveats, Ida Lupino’s The Hitch-Hiker, will be discussed in Chapter 7.) In Detour, a trucker in a diner spontaneously offers Al a lift because he doesn’t like driving alone at night, but he ungratefully sneers: “My mother taught me never to talk to strangers.” Too bad he didn’t remember that sooner. Detour is entirely built on chance encounters, and all are disastrous. The chronically dyspeptic Roberts hates hitching even before things go wrong. Though he never says as much, he’s humiliated by the inferior position it places him in, the way it advertises his failure to achieve even the most basic symbol of American success: a car. He mocks the notion that it’s an education, an opportunity to meet all kinds of people. He doesn’t know how to talk to the drivers who pick him up; he never knows the right way to act. Few people will stop to pick up a guy these days, he complains; they’re afraid it will be a stickup. He doesn’t really blame them. But it’s dangerous for the hitcher, too, he adds. You don’t know what you’re getting into when a car screeches to a halt and someone says, “Hop in, buddy.” In the middle of the Arizona desert, Roberts gets a lift with Charles Haskell, a wellheeled bookie and con artist who picks him up, it becomes clear, to give himself an audience. He shows off his scars, telling a strange story about running away from home after putting out another kid’s eye in a mock duel. (We later learn that he’s now planning to con money out of his long-estranged father by posing as a Bible salesman.) He displays just as proudly the scratches on his hands, which he got from a female hitchhiker who objected to his advances. As he indignantly explains, “Give a lift to a tomato, you expect her to be ... nice. After all, what kind of dames thumb rides, Sunday school teachers?” Al pays his way by listening to this blowhard’s monologue; he’s a morose yes-man, both obsequious and resentful. “There is nothing in his face but sweat, stubble, shame and anger,” Greil Marcus has written. “All the shared gestures of the Great Depression are present in the way Tom Neal sits in the car.”2 When Haskell unexpectedly dies of natural causes, Roberts is convinced that no one will believe the truth; everyone will assume he killed the man for his money. This panicky

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Muddy road ahead: Vera (Anne Savage) collars Al (Tom Neal) in Detour (Edgar G. Ulmer, 1945).

pessimism springs from Al’s conviction that fate is against him — or is that just a convenient excuse? Once he rolls Haskell’s body into a ditch, steals his clothes, money, documents and car, his insistence that he’s just an unlucky guy who has done nothing wrong comes to seem ever more of a self-serving delusion. The whole movie is narrated by Al, and while there’s no proof that he’s unreliable, his version is soaked in his own blinkered selfjustification. The way he keeps accusing us, the audience, of not believing him (defensively imagining the laughter on our smug faces as we give him that “who are you kidding?” look) does not inspire confidence. His famous concluding remarks about fate are a final refusal of responsibility; he won’t admit he has destroyed himself through reckless, impulsive, opportunistic actions. His second big mistake is picking up Vera, whom he finds thumbing outside a gas station in the desert: “Man, she looked like she’d been thrown off the crummiest freight train in the world.” Here the PRC touch adds a crucial authenticity that no major studio would have allowed. Anne Savage’s clothes really do look cheap and unlaundered; her hair is a mess; her face is greasy. Yet she has “a natural beauty; a beauty that’s almost homely, because it’s so real,” he remarks as he watches her sleep. (Roberts tells us he felt sorry for the young woman obviously down on her luck, but his manner is more like that of a man who assumes he’s giving a lift to a tomato who’ll be nice.) The brief hint of

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beauty and vulnerability is obliterated when Vera wakes, fixes her benefactor with a gorgon-like glare and demands, in a voice that sounds like someone scraping paint off metal, “All right, what did you do with his body?” She was the girl who scratched Haskell, and she knows Roberts has taken over his car and identity. She instantly takes advantage of the situation, agreeing not to turn Roberts in as long as he gives her all the money he got from Haskell and all the money they get from selling his car. She gleefully bullies and insults her prey, keeping up a constant stream of vituperation and acrid invective. “You got all the earmarks of a cheap crook.... Shut up! For two cents I’d change my mind and turn you in. I don’t like you.... Just remember who’s boss around here.... Not only don’t you have any scruples, you don’t have any brains....” Vera is, in fact, a far more nuanced character than the monotonously whiny Roberts. Cooped up together in an apartment that she rents (“Home sweet home”), posing as a married couple, they spend hours sniping at each other, and their snappy banter at times echoes the battling lovers in a screwball comedy. They have more rapport than Al had with his bland fiancée, and seem more like a couple, albeit a sadomasochistic one. “We’re both alike,” she tells him, “Both born in the same gutter.” Al never tries to escape from Vera; she, not “some mysterious force,” is his fate. When he says sarcastically, “My favorite sport is being kept prisoner,” he’s telling the truth; his weakness and boundless sense of self-pity are both fulfilled by Vera’s gloating control; her aggression perfectly moulds to his passivity. She’s helplessly selfish and domineering, even when she’s trying to flirt. In one of the film’s funniest moments, she suddenly drops her voice to a husky drawl as she announces, “I’m first in the bathtub.” Vera has a softer side; she would just as soon team up with Al, and repeatedly tries to initiate romantic contact, spitting like a cornered cat when he rebuffs her. She berates her companion for his gloomy attitude (“Your philosophy stinks, pal”), declaring that in this life you have to swing at anything that comes your way. She has a certain cockeyed optimism, even as she’s aware that she is dying of tuberculosis, a knowledge that makes her reckless. She’s funny and drunken and pathetic and gritty, one of the most unbridled and nakedly real characters to come out of classic Hollywood. When she dies, accidentally strangled by Roberts after she somehow gets a phone cord wrapped around her neck, the movie can’t go on without her. The Production Code required that Roberts pay for his crimes, accidental though they may have been. The last scene shows him being picked up by the Highway Patrol. The film should have ended with him wandering the empty, blackened country, unable ever to return home or reach the woman he loves: fading into the great American night like Paul Muni in I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang. The road that runs through Detour is a road that leads nowhere. The people on it are all fleeing pasts they don’t want to talk about and heading for futures that are pure mirage: Haskell’s boast of having $3,000 to bet on a horse, Al’s dream of settling down in Hollywood bliss with his girlfriend, Vera’s fantasy of conning her way into a huge inheritance. People share cars and rooms and meals and beds, but they are cordoned off by the lies they tell, not only to each other, but to themselves. The “lam story” was a boon to the makers of low-budget movies. All they needed was three or four actors, a stretch of empty road in the California desert, a car and a little

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back-projected scenery to fill in the windows. Flight provided the necessary impetus, and kept stories moving even when the road was full of plotholes. The Devil Thumbs a Ride (1947) challenges Detour with the minimalism of its miseen-scene. The entire film takes place at night, apart from a brief final scene at dawn. There’s nothing to see out the windows of this car but road and darkness. A filling station, a precinct house where cops play poker in a small ring of light, and a small beach house are the only sets. Floating in blackness, the film follows the logic of a nightmare. A tipsy salesman (Ted North) driving home up the California coast from a convention, happy because it’s both his birthday and his wedding anniversary, picks up a hitchhiker (Lawrence Tierney). “Glad to have company,” he says. “Hate driving alone.” His companion, unfortunately, is a cold-blooded sociopath who has just pulled off a bank robbery. A pushover, North agrees to take on two more hitchers, a pair of women who just met at a bus station. One is a demure, conscientious young woman, the other a coarse, jaded blonde, goodnatured but always looking out for herself. The four strangers share an increasingly perilous and phantasmagoric night amid pursuing cops, spilled liquor, drunken night-watchmen, punctured tires and blaring jive music. The wily Tierney manages to steal North’s identity, makes a heavy-handed play for the younger of the two women and then kills her when she finds out who he is, insults, manipulates and commandeers everyone around. The older woman, despite his initial rudeness to her, ultimately sides with Tierney. “I been on the lam myself, but you’re terrific,” she tells him admiringly. He returns the compliment, telling her she’s “a pretty hep character,” and bribing her to help him escape. They’re gunned down in a stolen police car, and the film ends with North and his wife driving home in the grey dawn through a wasteland of freeways and telephone wires. In Highway Dragnet (1954), Richard Conte, a vet just returned from Korea, is picked up by the police while trying to thumb a ride outside Las Vegas. A woman he was seen arguing with in a bar the night before has been found strangled. He manages to escape the cops and flees into the desert, where he comes upon two women whose car has broken down. One of them (a slumming Joan Bennett) just happens to be the real murderer. (Nothing in this cheaply made and poorly written movie makes much sense, but the settings offer a barren beauty that belongs in a better film.) To escape the police dragnet, Conte and his hostages drive off the roads, getting stuck in sand and huddling by a campfire in the cold desert night. Conte is trying to get to a house that now stands in the waters of the Salton Sea; the flooded rooms and the expanse of water stretching around the building are dreamily surreal, though the dismal climax involves Bennett shrieking as she sinks in quicksand. The film’s only sharp scene is Conte’s initial, tawdry encounter with a former model-turned-barfly, whom he meets in a casino. “You live around here?” she asks. “Yeah. My suitcase,” he replies. A casual insult, a slapping fit and a hot kiss quickly follow, before these two strangers go their separate ways. The sense of people adrift in the empty spaces of the West, like flotsam on a dead sea, is one advantage of these shoestring B-movies, full of hot sun and dust and bickering in cars that won’t start. The lam story is as ritualistic and full of repeated motifs as the heist movie or the prison drama. Fugitives drive all night, sleep in back seats, hop freight trains, abandon their cars as the license plates are reported over the radio, steal new cars; stay in motels and tourist cabins with suspicious landladies; get married in quickie roadside ceremonies;

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work menial laboring jobs, hold up gas stations, wake up doctors in the middle of the night to treat wounded companions; charge roadblocks, flee cops armed with machine guns, see themselves on Wanted posters with prices on their heads; haggle with used-car dealers, pawnbrokers, immigrant smugglers and other carrion crows of the road. Al and Vera plan to sell Haskell’s car in order to erase his ownership and trade the accusatory evidence in for some hard cash, but Al almost gives himself away by not knowing what insurance he has on “his” car. In Desperate, Steve Brodie doesn’t have enough money to buy a decent used car; he applies his mechanical skills to fix up a wreck going for $90, only to have the owner of the lot — knowing his customer is in no position to go to the law — take his money and tell him that now that the car is working, it’s worth $300. The used-car salesman’s predatory geniality, the lie of the altered speedometer, the desperation that forces fugitives to let themselves be suckered, all crystallize the dark side of the American love affair with automobiles. Fugitives, for whom cars are a matter of life or death, confront the degree to which they are prisoners of their vehicles. “The American really loves nothing but his automobile,” William Faulkner wrote in Intruder in the Dust (1948). This might provide an epigraph for Drive a Crooked Road (1954), the story of a man in whose life cars have taken the place of human relationships. Eddie Shannon (Mickey Rooney) is first seen driving in a race in the desert, on a dusty track ringed by low, bare mountains. An observer comments that he has “no family, few friends, lives alone and hates it.” He’s a car mechanic teased by his co-workers, who call him Shorty and mock his lack of experience with women. He’s homely and awkward and shy, with a searing scar across his forehead from an accident, unable to talk about anything except cars and racing. He lives alone in a rooming house, with all his driving trophies arrayed beside his single bed. He’s an easy mark for a sexy woman (Dianne Foster) who pretends to be interested in him: she has been assigned to seduce him by her boyfriend, who wants Eddie to drive the getaway car for a bank robbery in Palm Springs. She’s an unusually remorseful femme fatale, gradually overcome by guilt when she realizes that her prey is “not like other people — he’s like a lonesome little animal. He’s never had any love in his whole life.” She comforts herself by thinking of the money he will get, which will allow him to achieve his dream of competing in the big European races. She spouts a standard noir line: don’t wait around hoping someday you might earn enough money; this is your big chance to break out of the mundane, to be somebody. Eddie reluctantly agrees to participate; he’s inspired more by love than greed, but also by the challenge of the drive over a narrow, winding dirt road through desert canyons, which must be traversed in a near-impossible 22 minutes in order to outrun pursuers, giving him a chance to excel and prove himself. He throws himself into fixing up a car and watching films of the run, over and over. Though he dislikes his partners and the whole idea of the robbery, his intense, trance-like concentration during the silent drive — a mirror of the race at the opening, also over an empty, rocky, dusty track — is a moment of personal transcendence. His prize for accomplishing this feat will be to learn he’s been used and abandoned by the woman he loves. The more intensely Americans idolize cars as symbols of youth, freedom, success and achievement, the more potent they become as symbols of failure, confinement, traumatic

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experience and lack of autonomy. This is the argument of Cynthia Golomb Dettelbach’s In the Driver’s Seat, a study of the automobile in American literature and popular culture.3 For every dream that cars embody, there is a nightmare counterpart. This duality is demonstrated not just by automobiles themselves, but by all aspects of the infrastructure and culture built around them. Car culture began to spread in the 1930s, with the first drive-in restaurants, banks and movies, as well as a vast increase in roadside eateries, shopping centers, motor courts and tourist camps, billboards and filling stations. The Second World War briefly interrupted the steady increase in manufacturing and ownership of cars, but the postwar years made up for lost time with an automotive boom, including road building, the rapid sprawl of suburbs and the evolution of businesses catering to drivers (McDonald’s and Holiday Inn were both founded in 1952). The new roadside architecture and design often attempted to mimic the institutions it displaced: motels devised a formulaic style of faux hominess, tourist camps echoed pioneer cabins, fast-food chains impersonated Momand-Pop cafés. Architect Victor Gruen based his innovation, the shopping center, on a traditional village green and intended it to foster a sense of community. Gruen argued that this new form of commercial aggregation would “counteract the phenomenon of alienation, isolation and loneliness.” Instead, the spread of homogenized chain businesses for people on the road, offering the promise of familiarity —“No surprises” was Holiday Inn’s motto — created what James Kunstler defined, in his 1994 book of the same title, as “the geography of nowhere.” As distinctions between origin and destination dissolve, travel becomes a mere act of traversing space, aimless and featureless; movement without change. Such a road trip is superbly evoked by Nabokov in his description of the ramblings of Humbert Humbert and Lolita through a never-ending succession of motels, diners, gas station restrooms and tourist sights. “We had been everywhere. We had seen nothing,” Humbert concludes. He is not, of course, just a tourist: he’s a fugitive, moving constantly to avoid the detection of his forbidden relationship with Lolita. It’s not the police who catch up with him but the red Aztec convertible of Clare Quilty, which follows them around the country, pushing Humbert ever further into insanity. Published two years after Lolita (1955), Kerouac’s On the Road (1957) offered an opposing view of the great American road trip. Kerouac exalts the freedom of the road, repeatedly equating cars with ships, physical travel with spiritual discovery, and canonizing a hero who loves automobiles so much that he not only steals them for fun but finds joy working in a parking lot. Nabokov, by contrast, depicts the repetitive sameness and psychological paralysis of directionless travel, and the moral decay that can find refuge in the bland privacy of a world designed for transients. In 1939, the president of Studebaker declared, “In highways, then, lies a new national frontier for the pessimist who thinks frontiers have disappeared.” Interstate highways offered broad, flat horizons and the promise of unbroken, arrow-like travel. Movable rooms — even homes — on wheels, cars became one of the primary factors in the privatization and atomization of postwar society. Walled off in their glass and metal boxes, drivers can’t communicate with other drivers. Like movies and television, cars foster an addiction to speed, motion and the solitary consumption of spectacle. Both cars and motion pictures are vehicles of escape, offering a fantasy of individual power and liberty.

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But as more and more Americans took to the roads in cars, they destroyed the very freedom they were seeking: as a result of congestion and the sprawl of development, driving no longer means taking flight. Instead of separating himself from the crowd, the driver now joins the crowd; but driving remains a profoundly anti-social activity. As traffic has grown increasingly jammed, and as the majority of car trips have become repetitive urban commutes, TV commercials for cars still favor images of lone vehicles conquering the wilderness, cruising around the curves of a mountain or boldly fording streams and mounting rocky plateaus. Road rage reflects this shattered yet persistent illusion; every driver believes he or she has the right to swift, unfettered travel, and that others — who want exactly the same thing — are unnecessary obstacles. In 1957, Plunder Road demonstrated how completely the roads had ceased to offer escape or freedom. Like White Heat, this terse, stripped-down thriller opens with a train robbery; for 12 almost wordless minutes we watch five men, their faces ghostly and distorted under white stockings, carry out a sophisticated, high-powered heist, involving poison gas, explosions, and a crane truck with a long ladder. (In this and his other late noir, The Third Voice, director Hubert Cornfield spends a great deal of time just watching things happen.) Executed in driving rain at 4 A.M. in a desolate stretch of Utah, the robbery nets a fantastic ten million dollars’ worth of gold bullion. The thieves must now transport the gold nine hundred miles to a foundry in Los Angeles. They conceal it on three trucks — one a moving van, one a gas tanker, and one filled with a load of coffee — and set out on main highways. “Our best chance is to move along with the rest of the traffic,” advises the gang’s tight-lipped, college-educated mastermind Eddie (Gene Raymond.) Plunder Road sticks to this drive as closely as truck wheels hug the asphalt. Few films have come out of Hollywood with less decoration, less prettiness, less subplot or character development. In the few daylight scenes, the landscapes are blankly dreary, devoid of any visual interest. This is truly the geography of nowhere. On the surface, the texture of the film is as boring as a drive along an interstate highway: a grey stretch of tedium, waiting, gum-chewing, idle chit-chat. One of the men (Elisha Cook, Jr.,), who has spent most of his life in and out of jail, tells his driving partner all about Rio de Janeiro, where he dreams of taking his son once they are rich; he describes the white sands, the polychrome mosaic sidewalks, the many secluded hillsides where you can build a home and no one will bother you. “You been there?” Cook’s companion asks. “No,” he replies. The biggest train heist of all time prompts a massive police dragnet covering 23 states. One of the robbers is apprehended at a roadblock because he’s caught listening to police calls on the radio. Two more are caught at a weighing station when their load is found to be too heavy. Ordinary people they encounter are sympathetic with the famous fugitives. A waitress in a truck stop says she would like to see them get away with it, and imagines what she’d do with the money if she had it. A gas station attendant laments, “Fellows like that hardly have a chance these days, with radio and all that science. In the old days, a man had a chance.” Moments later, after he has accidentally spotted the driver’s gun, the attendant is dead.

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Eddie and his partner make it to the foundry where — in a touch as clever as the Eiffel Tower paperweights in The Lavender Hill Mob— they melt the gold into hub-caps and fenders which, plated with chrome, they hide in plain sight on their car. Everything is going perfectly, until they run into rush-hour traffic on the L.A. freeways. As they pull onto the freeway, they merge into a hazy river of cars, an almost surreal vision of numbing conformity. An accident gums up the traffic, and a woman gawking at the overturned car rear-ends the fugitives; as the cops try to unlock their bumpers, they notice the gold under the scraped-off chrome. Eddie jumps from the car and flees across the highway, finally leaping from an overpass and getting run over by a truck. The solid gold vehicle that was to carry them away on a boat to South America winds up immobilized, and the sluggish, ceaseless river of cars flows on around it. In The Americans, Robert Frank paired two photographs that grimly illustrate the cost of our national passion for automobiles. Outside a squat bungalow in Long Beach, California, flanked by two regal palm trees, a parked car is swathed in shiny fabric, its precious paint job protected from the elements. Along a highway in Arizona, the victims of a car accident lie under a blanket, on a rutted patch of dirt under a flurry of snow. The car’s status as a glamorous trophy and the broken bodies of its casualties are both covered, yet plainly revealed.

Love Is Fugitive: Couples on the Run Didn’t it ever occur to you that once we started, we could never ask anybody for help, no matter if we were dying, for the rest of our lives? That we’re all alone, and always will be? — John Dall, Gun Crazy

An account of the grueling, increasingly bizarre and hellish cross-country flight of a bank robber and his wife in the wake of a heist and murder, Jim Thompson’s The Getaway is a fantastic embroidery of the classic lam story. This is the darker twin of the travel narrative, the loosely spun yarn of adventure and discovery. People travel to America, and within it, convinced that, by moving, they will find better opportunities. American folk music and the blues celebrate men with the restless urge to ramble, men for whom travel is not a vacation but a vocation, for whom the road is not just a route to travel but a domain to rule. To be on the road is to be moving forward, unattached, released from all bonds. To be on the lam is to be hunted, running away from something that is always closing in, shutting off options and diminishing the possibility of survival. The insouciant boast of being at home wherever you hang your hat has its B-side, the haunted flight from a “hellhound” snapping at your heels. Several native traditions flow into the American flight narrative, beginning with the slave escape, which entered mainstream culture in the 19th century through factual firsthand accounts like that of Frederick Douglass and through the dramatizations of white writers like Mark Twain and Harriet Beecher Stowe. The pursuit by bloodhounds, the advice to “wade in the water,” the underground network of transport, the lingering danger of betrayal even after reaching safety, have formed a template for fugitive stories of all

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kinds. Crucial to the slave-escape narrative is the significance of geography: freedom is a place; a line on the earth divides the hostile country through which the fleeing slave must pass from the “promised land.” Slaves are branded not by personal guilt but by a society that denies their most basic rights; they are marked not by what they’ve done, but by what they are. While for slaves the northern United States were the promised land, for other Americans, especially in the years following the Civil War, it was the West that represented a new birth of freedom: a vast and underdeveloped land where people from the East could make a new start, shedding their pasts, and where criminals could easily slip through the loose net of the law. To aid in the capture of elusive outlaws, western towns hung up “Wanted” posters and advertised rewards for bringing in the originals, dead or alive. This system created opportunities for professional bounty hunters and for betrayal by friends, associates, and anyone with the luck to encounter a man with a price on his head. The conflict surrounding the act of collecting money in exchange for turning someone in looms large both in westerns and in film noir: it’s an act both entirely lawful and universally abhorred. Though greed may trump sympathy, Americans are predisposed to root for fugitives, as the ordinary folk do in Plunder Road. Perhaps it is a universal human tendency to side with the hunted rather than the hunter, but some groups have more reason than others to identify with those in flight from captivity. The African American folk song “Long Gone” celebrates the exploits of a black bank robber who escaped from the jail at Bowling Green, Kentucky. W.C. Handy’s joyful version of the traditional lyrics turns the character of “Lost John” into an escape artist of tall-tale proportions, who slips away from San Quentin because “the guards forgot to close the Golden Gate.” The common double meaning of “wanted man” (exploited in Nightfall, when Marie tells Jim, “You’re the most wanted man I know”) is fitting; there is an air of doomed romance and dangerous glamour about being “wanted.” The 1930s introduced two new archetypes of flight: the bank robber and the Dustbowl refugee. The reality of travel during the Depression was grim, as countless hoboes found themselves in county jails or on chain gangs, convicted of vagrancy. Woody Guthrie crystallized the Depression experience of hard traveling in songs like “I Ain’t Got No Home,” the defiant “Goin’ Down the Road Feelin’ Bad,” and “Do-Re-Mi,” which sardonically warned the migrants of the cold welcome they would receive if they lacked money to pay their way in California’s Garden of Eden. Hollywood produced films like Wild Boys of the Road and Heroes for Sale (both 1933), valorizing the struggle of freighthopping kids and veterans tramping the country in search of work. “Okies” and “Arkies” driving their overburdened jalopies from the blighted Midwest to the promise of work and fertile land in California turned the Manifest Destiny tradition of westward migration into an image of dislocation and disillusionment. John Steinbeck, in The Grapes of Wrath, wrote about families leaving their farms, land many had lived on since birth: “The highway became their home, and movement their form of expression.” They found that the automobile was now their house and the engine of all their hopes: “This was the new hearth, the living center of the family.” The car had to be fed before its riders; it had to be tended while humans might go sick and ill-clothed.

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The modern outlaws who roamed the Great Plains during the Depression became media obsessions and entered into American legend as folk heroes, partly because they preyed on the banks many Americans blamed for their economic distress, but also because their mobility had an exultant air of freedom and speed at a time when many people moved around because they had lost their homes, because they couldn’t find work and were driven out of communities that posted signs: “Jobless men keep going: we can’t take care of our own.” The down and out traveled by freight train or on foot, sticking newspapers in their shoes, sleeping on park benches. “Public enemies” like John Dillinger, “Baby Face” Nelson, Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker zipped around in the latest-model cars, shooting it out with the cops and racing to safety across state lines. (At least, this was how they were perceived; in fact Bonnie and Clyde’s crime spree got off to a flying stop as their stolen car bogged down in the mud during a rainstorm and they were forced to flee across the fields on mules. Their mobility was even more compromised later when Bonnie was crippled in a car accident.) The saga of their efforts to evade capture provided escapist entertainment for people who were themselves pursued relentlessly by the specters of hunger and homelessness. It wasn’t hard to blame society for their lawbreaking: Bonnie and Clyde both grew up in dire poverty in the slums of West Dallas, gazing across the river at the shining towers of Dallas proper; Clyde Barrow and Dillinger were both smalltime crooks who emerged from prison hardened and determined to revenge themselves on authority.4 Bonnie and Clyde’s fame was largely due to Bonnie Parker’s gift for self-dramatization: her sexy, irreverent image, captured in photographs found undeveloped in a Joplin, Missouri, hideout where they were ambushed, made her an instant celebrity. She posed in front of a stolen 1932 Ford V-8, wearing a flaring black skirt and a tight deco-pattern sweater, ankle-strap heels and a chic beret, hands insolently on hips or one foot hiked on the car’s bumper. In one picture she scowls comically with a cigar and a gun cocked, leading her to be labeled (erroneously) a “cigar smoking gun moll.” The public ate up the image of this tough woman determined to “go down together” with her man. There is doubt about whether Parker ever fired a gun, and the Barrow gang was an inept-thoughviolent bunch who stole eating money from small stores and gas stations, and were reduced at times to breaking open vending machines for change. Bonnie’s oddly persuasive doggerel, some written during a stint in jail, turned a minor robbery spree into one of the century’s indelible romances. The public turned against Bonnie and Clyde before they died. After they (or, more likely, gang member Henry Methvin) killed a young motorcycle cop, sentiment shifted and they were portrayed as bloodthirsty animals. A creative “witness” invented the image of Bonnie pumping bullets into the young cop’s body as he lay dead. After the fatal ambush in which they died, crowds swarmed around their bloody corpses, cutting bits off their clothes and hair, even trying to cut off Clyde’s ear and trigger finger for souvenirs. Their bullet-riddled “death car” became an attraction at county fairs throughout the thirties. Crime movies reflect — and cater to — the ambivalence of the law-abiding, who envy and admire outlaws while at the same time fearing and disapproving of them; in the safety of the movie theater they can vicariously enjoy criminals’ exploits while being reassured by their bloody deaths that they have chosen the wrong path.

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In adapting the stories of Depression-era fugitives, film noir typically downplayed family ties, gangs and support networks (Dillinger and the Barrow gang frequently visited their families, even though it put them at risk of capture, and remained close to siblings and parents), while playing up the betrayals of fugitives by those whom they trust. In this they were not inaccurate: Dillinger was betrayed to the police by the woman with whom he and his girlfriend were hiding out, an immigrant threatened with deportation for running a brothel. (Baby Face Nelson [1957] made the “woman in the red dress” Dillinger’s girlfriend, a crueler betrayal.) Bonnie and Clyde were ambushed by a posse of lawmen aided by Henry Methvin, whom Clyde had sprung from prison, and who gained a pardon in exchange for his treachery. Film noir has no monopoly on man-on-the-run stories, which also encompass lighthearted, “wrong man” variants like those of Alfred Hitchcock (The 39 Steps, North by Northwest), or on the motif of fugitive lovers, which was reinvigorated in the 1960s by Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde, and has remained a popular trope. Film noir emphasizes the isolation of fugitives, their vulnerability to betrayal and exploitation by opportunists, the ruthless closing-in of the law-enforcement dragnet, the physical and mental fraying of outcasts unable to settle anywhere in safety, and the way outlaws are driven further and further out of society, until they eventually become something less than human — something to be hunted down and slaughtered with overwhelming force, like rabid animals. In On the Lam, a study of American flight narratives, William Beverly writes, “In the modern fugitive story, to go on the lam is to accept the possibility of never going home again. Seeking the holes, empty spaces, or borders of civil society, these fugitives also lose the other social designations that have marked and supported them. Through aliases, they discard their names; through flight, they abandon their families.” Films about fugitive lovers, however, center on bonds of loyalty that are rare in film noir, suggesting that a shared experience of exile brings couples closer than anything else. The template for all couple-on-the-lam films was set by Fritz Lang’s proto-noir You Only Live Once (1936). It’s not until the last third of the film that Eddie and Jo (Henry Fonda and Sylvia Sidney) flee, after Eddie escapes from prison and kills a priest. The film passionately takes the part of the fugitives, who are victims of a corrupt and callous society. (“They made me a murderer,” Eddie laments, repeating the blame-society mantra that supplied several film titles.) A three-time loser, Eddie is a reformed robber who goes straight after marrying Jo. He meets nothing but hostility and unfairness: the couple is rousted out of their hotel room on their wedding night by the outraged proprietors (a grotesque pair of rubes, Grant Wood caricatures), who have found the groom’s picture in a crime magazine. He is fired from his job as a trucker on a slight pretext by a nasty boss, and framed by his former gang-members. His instinct is to flee, but Jo convinces him to turn himself in, since he is innocent. When he’s found guilty and sentenced to death, she is so devastated by guilt that she plans to kill herself when he is executed. After his escape, they meet in a box car in a fog-shrouded rail yard. Eddie, wounded in his escape, despairs of his chances, but Jo insists that she will share his fate, and that they have the right to live (a line that supplied the film’s more appropriate French title, J’ai le Droit de Vivre). They take off in a car, and Jo marks her departure from lawful

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“Maybe anywhere is our home.” The original lovers on the run, Jo (Sylvia Sidney) and Eddie (Henry Fonda) in You Only Live Once (Fritz Lang, 1936).

society with a crash, breaking the window of a drugstore to get medicine for Eddie. Stealing only as little as they need in order to survive, they are blamed for every crime in the country; Jo is labeled a “moll,” and a Wanted poster with a reward of $5,000, soon raised to $10,000, is superimposed over the image of a dirt road flying under the tires. After they hold up a filling station for gas, the two attendants lie to the police that they robbed their cash register, so that they can help themselves. Far from enjoying the profits of a spree, as newspaper readers imagine, they sleep in the increasingly dusty and dilapidated car, parking it in the underbrush off roads. After the window is marked by bullet holes, they smash it out and cover it with burlap that flaps in the cold wind. They eat from cans piled in the back seat and huddle in blankets, driving through slashing rain. They seem like Depression-weary vagabonds rather than outlaws. Jo gives birth in a tumbledown shack in the woods, and gives up her baby to her sister so that she can stay with Eddie. “I never knew two people could be so close,” she tells him. Eddie apologizes for depriving her of a home, remarking bitterly, “We were inside a house once, for a few minutes.” Jo replies, “Maybe anywhere is our home. In the car, or on that cold star. Anywhere is our home.” She’s got it backwards: nowhere is their home. However transcendent their love, they are exiles from society, gradually losing

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touch with civilization. When Jo’s sister asks the child’s name, she looks baffled and responds: “We just call him ‘baby.’” Even auto courts, like the one where she drops off the baby, are too risky: a man spots Jo buying cigarettes from an outdoor machine and reports her for the reward. Finally fleeing their car after they are ambushed, they run into pine woods on the Canadian border, and are shot down by police who look like Nazis, in riding breeches and belted uniforms, armed with high-powered hunting rifles. Their death is a release from the prison of an impossible life: the gates are open, they are free. The soft-focus romanticism and tender-heartedness about criminals tie You Only Live Once to Depression-era cinema, and the two loyal friends — Jo’s sister and former boss — who help the fugitive couple are types rarely found in noir. Lang’s film is critical of the Bonnie and Clyde legend, however; it replaces the real bandits’ insolent attitude (“Their nature is raw / They hate the law —/ The stool pigeons, spotters and rats,” Bonnie wrote) with a melancholy pair who just want to lead normal lives. It paints the lam story not as a joy ride but as an endless camping trip from hell. At the other end of the noir cycle lies Don Siegel’s Baby Face Nelson, a hard-edged though semi-fictionalized account of the bank robber (born Lester M. Gillis) who died in a shootout with police in 1934. Mickey Rooney plays Nelson as an initially likable fellow who is gradually taken over by his raging temper and itchy trigger finger. He starts out refusing to kill a union organizer at the behest of a racketeer who sprang him from jail, and he has the odd humane impulse, as when he declines to kill a kidnapped bank manager because the man (George E. Stone, a veteran of Little Caesar) is as short as he is. But once he starts toting a “chopper” (submachine gun), he begins spraying bullets indiscriminately, and the more endangered he feels the readier he is to kill. In the film, Nelson’s faithful wife, Helen, becomes a girlfriend, Sue (Carolyn Jones), who joins him on the run but is gradually sickened by his violence. Holed up in a country shack, Sue chafes at the confinement, week after week of claustrophobic monotony. “We’re really living!” she taunts him as they play cards and live on canned beans. A turning point comes when Nelson almost shoots two young farm boys who wander close to the spot where they’re switching cars after a robbery. “Lie to me, baby,” Sue pleads hopelessly. “Tell me you wouldn’t have killed them.” A final car chase along winding country roads ends with Nelson fatally wounded; Sue helps him stagger, bleeding heavily, through the gate of a white picket fence and into a rural graveyard, where he collapses on a tombstone. He begs Sue to finish him off, and to overcome her reluctance, he barks savagely that he was going to kill those kids. As she plugs him, she finishes off the romantic tradition of fugitives-in-love that Lang introduced and that reached its pinnacle in Nicholas Ray’s They Live by Night (1949). “This boy and this girl were never properly introduced to the world we live in.” The pre-credit prologue to Ray’s debut film, printed over a heart-melting image of Bowie (Farley Granger) and Keechie (Cathy O’Donnell) kissing in the flickering light before a fireplace, establishes from the outset that the film’s view of criminal outcasts will be filtered through Ray’s doting embrace of alienated youth. Bowie and Keechie are so fresh-faced and softly pretty that their banishment from society suggests an inversion: since they are innocent, it must be society that is guilty. The title of the source novel, Thieves Like Us,

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sums up Edward Anderson’s theme: that banks, politicians and other institutions of authority are no better than the robbers who attack them. Ray wasn’t much interested in this political gloss, only in the personal relationships between the characters, and the way the lovers are united by their exile. Like Romeo and Juliet, Bowie and Keechie are doomed not by their own actions but by the selfishness and violence of the adult world — a world where, in the words of Oliver Stone, “Love, if it exists at all, would be fugitive.”5 Like the outsiders in other Ray films, the young lovers on the run in They Live by Night find a temporary home, this time in a tourist cabin in the mountains. They ask for a cabin far away from the others, and the proprietor assumes they want privacy because they are newlyweds: “Married people like to be alone,” he tells his son. (In Desperate, the hero fleeing both cops and gangsters with his imperiled wife is afraid he has been spotted on a train, but the man who was staring at him merely chuckles to his own wife, “Honeymooners — I can always spot them.”) The mistake is at once ironic and apt: in these films the couples’ romantic bond is indistinguishable from their outlaw status. By contrast, couples who commit a crime together but do not flee often wind up hating and destroying each other, like Walter and Phyllis in Double Indemnity, who are only metaphorically riding together to the end of the line. When Bowie and Keechie decide to take a chance and spend a day in public (“just like other people”), they and we are reminded how completely they are cut off from normal life. Bowie has been advised by an older criminal, “One thing you gotta learn: you gotta look like other people.” But they look and feel out of place, stiffly dressed up and clutching a briefcase full of stolen money. They observe everyday activities like anthropologists among baffling natives. Disparaging habits that are unfamiliar and out of reach, Bowie declares that horseback riding is a waste of time, that he could never get interested in “patting a little ball around” like people on a golf course, and that dancers in a nightclub look silly. “People sure do act funny,” he concludes. They keep asking each other for reassurance: “Are you having a good time?” Arthur “Bowie” Bowers was sent to prison as a young teenager for a killing in which he was barely complicit. In his pocket he carries around a crumpled newspaper clipping about a man who, like him, was jailed at 16 and whose conviction was overturned with the help of a lawyer. When he breaks out along with two hardened, experienced convicts, he imagines that once he has some money he will be able to find that Tulsa lawyer and get his case “squared away.” Childish and unformed, though determined to seem tough and ready for anything, he dreams of holding hands with a girl in a movie theater. His two fellow escapees want him as their driver for a series of bank hold ups. TDub ( Jay C. Flippen) is an old-school professional crook, steady and decent; he enlists his sister-in-law Mattie to bankroll their operation with the promise that they will supply money for her to mount an appeal for her own jailed husband. The desire to “break out,” to get free of the net woven by crime and the law, hangs over almost everyone in the film. Only Chicamaw (Howard da Silva) wants not safety and a normal life but action and fame as an outlaw. He is annoyed that the newspaper prints only a small item about the jailbreak, and is infuriated when the press mistakenly dubs “Bowie the Kid” the leader of the gang. The one-eyed Chicamaw is a purely destructive force, driven by envy, avarice and a reckless hunger for excitement. Breaking in on the lovers’ domestic bliss to demand

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that Bowie rejoin the gang, he gobbles handfuls of candy and carelessly taps a Christmas tree ornament until it shatters.6 Chicamaw’s niece Keechie has a harder shell than Bowie. She has lived all her life in a grimy, rundown service station owned by her drunken, irresponsible father. Her mother ran away when she was a baby and she has no friends, has never had a “fella.” She and Bowie approach each other warily, at first quarrelling and feigning indifference, but quickly giving way to their eagerness for love. When she comes to tend his wounds, her touch on his bare back evokes an intense yet delicate moment of adolescent awakening. Neither of them has ever been loved; they don’t even know how to kiss. Their relationship changes Keechie more than the terminally naïve Bowie, a malleable type who is easily led astray and just as easily redeemed. Keechie’s plain, grubby face — set throughout the early scenes in a look of defensiveness, disdain, and hurt pride — becomes prettier and more feminine as she blossoms into a wife. She delivers a sentimental speech about how a good dog loves only its master, and a good woman is the same, but apart from this she manages to embody the film’s conscience without sanctimony.7 When the film came out, New York Times critic Bosley Crowther accused it of “waxing sentimental over crime,” but he was wrong: the film may be sentimental about youth and love, but it never romanticizes crime. Unlike other movie couples on the lam, Bowie and Keechie steal nothing and hurt no one while together; she remains untainted by crime, and though Bowie does take part in bank robberies, he is always a reluctant and non-violent helper. The rich glow of the central love story is offset by the gritty portrayal of a hardscrabble world in which few people can be trusted. Ray recreated the rural areas he had explored during the Depression, when he traveled through the South with Alan Lomax, collecting folk music. Dingy motels and autocourts and sleepy little towns like Zelton (where the men rob a bank on Main Street) look unchanged since earlier decades. Cars throw up trails of dust as they careen along dirt roads running through dry, empty fields. The overhead shots taken from a helicopter establish a raw, documentary look that contrasts sharply with the Rembrandt lighting of the close-ups in the scenes between Bowie and Keechie; their private world is very different from the world through which they move. Many postwar noir films were based on novels of the 1930s, and they demonstrated that the disillusionment, pessimism and angry, anti-authority mood of hard times hadn’t vanished from American life, it had only gone underground. There was a brief period of high unemployment and economic distress immediately after the war, which may have influenced the popularity of these works; and as They Live by Night demonstrates, rural areas saw little of the sleek prosperity that reshaped cities and new suburbs. Some adaptations, like MGM’s 1946 version of James M. Cain’s 1934 novel The Postman Always Rings Twice, scoured away the Depression ambience. As Cora, the ambitious and frustrated hashslinger, Lana Turner wears spotless white dresses like a nurse; in a turban and playsuit she looks like a mannequin in the window of Saks Fifth Avenue, not a housewife in a roadside hamburger stand. Cecil Kellaway as Nick, her amiably doltish husband, has an inexplicably proper British accent — a far cry from the sweaty Greek Cain described — and he all but shoves her into the arms of Garfield’s lusty drifter, Frank. Compared with

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the lovers in the scandalous novel, they look like high school students sneaking a kiss on the front porch. The MGM gloss turns the book’s hot-blooded desperation into a cold dissection of two people grabbing at a shallow dream of postwar success, and the whitewash makes the few genuinely nasty moments stand out. The film’s two deaths both take place in cars at night: Frank clobbers Nick over the head with a bottle, as Cora shrinks away to keep the blood off her creamy white beret; later he crashes the car, killing her, just after they have rapturously reaffirmed their love. It comes off as a particularly mean joke, which the film tries to cover up through Frank’s dim groping toward an uplifting explanation — that fate is giving him a second chance to pay for the first murder, perhaps allowing him to be reunited with his beloved in heaven — making explicit the meaning of the title, which Cain left submerged in the novel. Ray’s film remains much truer to its source, but the times did require some changes. In Anderson’s novel, the lovers never marry, and they have an out-of-wedlock pregnancy, but in the film marriage was mandated by the Code. Ray’s staging of it, however, makes it anything but reassuring. Bowie and Keechie impulsively jump off a Greyhound bus when they see a neon sign for a wedding chapel; as they approach it, the ominous darkness of the empty street and their nervous, hesitant manner make them seem more like a couple

A world designed for transients: Bowie (Farley Granger) and Keechie (Cathy O’Donnell) contemplate a roadside marriage in They Live by Night (Nicholas Ray, 1949) (Photofest).

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in a horror movie approaching an old dark house. The beady-eyed justice of the peace, stuffing a fresh carnation into his button hole as he greets them with forced cheer, immediately spots them as fugitives but marries them anyway. They take his cheapest wedding, without organ music or photographs, but buy a ring for five dollars. It’s all over in a minute, the pronouncement of “man and wife” immediately followed by the hint to tip the two glum, perfunctory witnesses a dollar each. Saying that he likes to help people get what they want, the justice arranges the purchase of a stolen car, demanding $500 for himself on top of the price. The car becomes their only permanent home as they travel aimlessly, their route traced on a black map. “Some day I’d like to see some of this country we’ve been traveling through,” Bowie says as they drive over the Mississippi. Keechie responds, “By daylight, you mean?” At first, just after their marriage, they look like any young newlywed couple, driving along in the sunshine with the wind in their hair, laughing as they struggle to drink Cokes and eat sandwiches, Keechie resting her head on Bowie’s shoulder. The music on the score — their love theme throughout the movie, introduced in the pre-credit sequence — is a slightly saccharine arrangement of the Scottish folk song “I Know Where I’m Going” (known to cinephiles from the Powell & Pressburger film of the same name). The next time they’re in the car — after fighting bitterly over Bowie’s participation in another robbery, and being forced to flee their holiday cabin after he’s recognized by a plumber — the vacation mood is gone. Rain streaks the windows; they sleep in the car or drive all night, wary of roadblocks, as the pregnant Keechie grows weaker. Their day of pretending to be ordinary people is their last happy interlude. They go to a nightclub where a black entertainer sings “Your Red Wagon” (which was Ray’s working title for the film). It’s a song about minding your own business, a song that says: don’t come to me with your troubles, you’re on your own. The lyrics are double-edged. For a wanted man, nothing is more desirable than being left alone; but the cheerful indifference expressed in the song — irresistibly performed by a beaming Marie Bryant — is reflected by the way no one in the film is willing to help the young couple. Bowie speaks of wanting to get to a city, since Chicamaw used to say that in cities “they don’t big-eye you so much.” He dreams of fleeing to Mexico, where they can live like “real people,” where no one can touch them. But the fantasy is constantly punctured. In the men’s room of the nightclub, Bowie is recognized by a local crook who gives him an hour to get out of town, because “business is good” there and he doesn’t want “a lot of trigger-happy hillbillies” heating things up. There is no sense of loyalty in the underworld, nor honor among thieves. Keechie’s father rats out Bowie to the police, partly out of spite for the loss of his daughter, and partly in hopes of a reward. (“You just have to depend on yourself in this world and nobody else,” Keechie states in the book, after she and Bowie have fled to the remote hills near the Mexican border.) In Anderson’s novel, Bowie starts off believing that he owes loyalty to his fellow criminals, and that he can trust them in turn, but he winds up concluding that “the only way to beat this game is just to go off and pull the Hole in after you. Not have a single friend.” He insists that he “wouldn’t trust Jesus Christ if he came right in this door this minute.”

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In desperation, he does seek friends — in both book and film — returning to the wedding chapel to beg the man who married them to help them get to Mexico. He refuses, explaining, “I marry people because there’s some hope of their being happy. In a way I’m a thief just the same as you are. But I won’t sell you hope when there ain’t any.” “Then there’s no hope?” he asks, “No place for her and me?” As he leaves, the organ is striking up the wedding march for another couple. In the end, Bowie is betrayed by T-Dub’s sister after they take refuge at her Prairie Plaza Motel. She sets him up for capture in exchange for the release of her own imprisoned husband, who is sickened by the bargain and refuses to look at her. Sad, hungry-eyed Mattie is no stock villain; when a cop tries to reassure her that she has saved everyone a lot of trouble, she replies disconsolately, “I don’t think that will help me sleep nights.” The irony of one woman’s love destroying another’s spells out the lesson that while trust and intimacy can exist between individuals, it doesn’t create larger family or community bonds. Keechie, sleeping inside the motel room while Bowie is gunned down outside, survives. This ending runs counter to the usual Bonnie-and-Clyde motif in which the couple is united in death, and it is more tragic, since Keechie is left alone. Nicholas Ray’s first film fully expressed the concerns that would dominate his career: lonesome wandering, wounded romanticism, the alienation of youth, the destruction of emotional bonds by misunderstanding and an uncaring world. Though he made only a few contributions to the noir canon, Ray added a new note to the heavily German-influenced style. It is often said that outsiders can see a society most clearly, and foreign directors like Billy Wilder and Fritz Lang ruthlessly laid bare American illusions and dreams. Ray’s tone is not acid but saddened, not cold but tender. He has been described by Geoff Andrew as “the first home-grown poet of American disillusionment.” Like Bowie, Bill Clark (Steve Cochran) has lost most of his life to prison. Felix Feist’s Tomorrow Is Another Day (1951) opens with Bill, who was sentenced at 13 for killing his abusive father, being released at 31 to face the world with no friends or family. A child in a man’s body, he is sweetly naïve but also surly and suspicious, readily resorting to violence. Wandering around his home town, carrying his few belongings in a cardboard box, he’s like Rip Van Winkle, impressed by the unfamiliar new cars (the first thing a boy would notice) and forgetting that Prohibition ended the year he went to jail. He hesitantly tries to follow a girl, and sheepishly throws his hat in a trash can when he realizes it’s out of fashion. In a diner he orders three slices of pie and a beer to go with them, a meal that sums up his semi-arrested development. With no idea how to relate to people socially, he is insecure and truculent. It turns out that he’s right to be wary: his first day out, he is befriended by a helpful and sympathetic man who turns out to be a reporter merely using him to get a story on the release of the “State’s Youngest Murderer.” Handsome and swarthy, Steve Cochran was usually cast as a slick, overconfident gangster (White Heat, The Damned Don’t Cry), a chillingly sadistic gangster (Highway 301, The Chase) or some other variety of heel (a crooked cop, albeit a sympathetic one, in Private Hell 36; the lounge-lizard boyfriend of Dana Andrews’s wife in The Best Years of Our Lives). But he’s very effective as the vulnerable, uncertain Bill, a rough-edged, unfinished man who could turn out to be a savage or a nice guy. (He would draw even

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more deeply on this well of confusion and melancholy in Antonioni’s Il Grido [1957], as a man who sets off on an aimless journey through the cold, grey marshes of the Po Valley after his wife leaves him.) After attacking the reporter who double-crossed him, Bill flees to New York and wanders around in a daze of loneliness. Having “just heard about dames, that’s all,” he visits the dime-a-dance Dreamland, where ten cents buys 60 seconds of feminine company, and promptly falls for a hard-boiled bottle blonde named Kay (Ruth Roman). She’s annoyed by his awkwardness, but sizes him up as a good mark: she unsubtly hints that if he wants to spend time with her he should buy her a present, and he obediently returns with a wrist-watch. The watch becomes symbolic of their unsteady relationship as it passes back and forth between them — after he clumsily lunges and tries to kiss her she throws it back at him, snapping, “Give it to someone who doesn’t know the time!” (Bowie’s first present to Keechie is also a wrist-watch, and “What time is it?” becomes a repeated reminder of their love.) Showing him the sights of New York, Kay gives her soured perspective on city life: “You live in one trap and work in another.” In an abrupt and oddly hallucinatory scene, they run into Kay’s sugar daddy, who picks a fight with Bill and knocks him unconscious. Kay panics and shoots the man, a police official, who staggers out wounded and later dies. She tells Bill he did the killing while blacked out. Feeling guilty about her deception, she agrees to join him in his flight, and the film turns into another saga of a couple on the run. They sneak into a car being towed on a tractor trailer; it’s a clever ploy, but also symbolic of their lack of control, as they are passively carried west. With little money, they eat hamburgers in truck stops and stay at the Shady Nook Auto Court. This tacky little cabin is the setting for a pivotal, deeply dated scene in which Bill offers to marry Kay. “It’s what you want, isn’t it?” he says rather sulkily, though up to this point he has pursued her and met only resistance. When she asks if it’s what she wants, he responds churlishly, “You don’t do what you want, you do what you have to.” Even though Bill is desperately hungry for a woman, and though he has been mesmerized from his first sight of the gorgeous Kay; and even though he has nothing but flight and danger to offer her — despite all this, the ethos of the time insists that he’s doing her a favor and fulfilling her fondest dream. They, too, are married by a justice of the peace — we don’t see the ceremony — with a five-dollar ring: “Pawnbroker gave me a good price,” Bill admits. As they travel the couple changes, and so does the movie’s mood. Kay begins to call herself Kathy; she cuts her hair and becomes a brunette; she sheds her jaded, mercenary shell. She was once a small-town girl who came to the city with dreams of being a ballerina; all her hard-boiled mannerisms and attitudes are reversed as easily as the peroxide is washed out of her hair. “Do people change, I mean inside?” Bill asks. Kay suggests that they do, though Bill remains unsure. They take on new names, too: Bill Clark becomes Mike Lewis, since the one thing he can remember learning about in school is the voyage of Lewis and Clark, appropriate for their own journey into the unknown. Lacking a car, they don leather jackets and jeans to hop freight trains, as the movie seems to slip backwards in time to the Depression. (While the Golden Age of riding the rails was long gone, movie characters still turned to

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them in duress: as late as 1957, Richard Conte evades a manhunt by riding freight trains in The Brothers Rico.) It’s as though Bill were traveling back to the world he left when he entered jail in 1933. The film’s theme music is the popular song “Deep Night”: when it’s first heard on a café jukebox, someone points out that it’s an old tune from Bill’s childhood, now revived and a number-one hit. The past keeps coming around again. Lounging on a bank above the train tracks, for the first time Bill describes the murder of his father, and how he refused to express remorse in order to shorten his prison term. He recalls that he earned ten cents a day in prison, leading to the film’s most poignant line. Kathy muses in amazement: “You worked a whole day, just to dance a minute at Dreamland.” Hitchhiking (shots of feet trudging along the road are another echo of thirties filmmaking conventions), Bill and Kathy are picked up by a Joad-like family, the Dawsons, headed for a lettuce-picking camp in the Salinas valley. They glowingly describe their goal: “Plenty of space, no helter-skelter, nobody bothers you.” So the fugitives become farm laborers, living in a cabin and befriending their wholesome neighbors, playing horse-

Hard traveling: Bill and Kathy (Steve Cochran and Ruth Roman, second and third from left), meet the Dawsons (Bobby Hyatt, left, Lurene Tuttle and Ray Teal, right) on the road in Tomorrow Is Another Day (Felix Feist, 1951).

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shoes, going fishing, eating lemon-meringue pie. The camp seems unrealistically tidy, happy and middle-class (none of the workers are Mexican; there are no complaints about the management), though the film does touch on poverty and grueling labor. After his first day, Bill has a strained back and a bad sunburn, and wants to quit. Life outside turns out to be tougher than life in prison, where he never had to make choices or take responsibility. Then, in a barbershop, Mr. Dawson picks up a True Crime tabloid and sees Bill’s photo under the heading, “These are the faces of murderers. They could be worth cash ... to you!” Mr. Dawson is immediately excited by the prospect of collecting the reward; his eyes light up like those of a kid at Christmas, thinking what he could do with the money. The fact that Bill/Mike has been his friend doesn’t trouble him at all, but it troubles his more scrupulous wife, who insists that they couldn’t be happy with that kind of money. “There’s only one kind of money,” Dawson declares, pleading, “Look at us — no home, nothing that belongs to us.” A thousand dollars would “buy a lot of security,” he says (that word again!), but his wife chides, “That’s not security, that’s greed.” Dawson reluctantly agrees to give up the idea, but after he’s badly injured in a car crash and needs expert medical care, his wife calls the police, selling out her neighbors to save her husband, choosing a personal tie over her sense of what’s right and wrong. As Bill and Kathy are led off in handcuffs, Mrs. Dawson and her little boy snap at each other and then cry, ashamed and tainted by their act of betrayal — like the reporter from the opening scenes, who refused to let Bill be arrested for assault, explaining to the cop that he deserved it. Even Bill and Kathy’s relationship is repeatedly marred by distrust, as Bill grows increasingly paranoid about being caught (“No one will ever put me in a stinking cage again,” he tells the warden at the outset). When Kathy reveals the truth about the killing, he slaps her, and she shoots him in the shoulder to stop him from killing the sheriff who had come to arrest them. In the end, the movie betrays its own vision of a world full of lies and betrayals: not only do Bill and Kathy both nobly try to take the blame to protect each other, but it turns out the victim exonerated them before dying, saying Kathy shot in self-defense. They leave the courthouse and walk toward the camera, grinning but still wary, flinching as two policemen cross their path. Director Felix Feist toiled in B-movies until moving into television. Working in all genres (The Devil Thumbs a Ride was another of his noir entries), he’s the epitome of the efficient studio craftsman lacking an individual style. Tomorrow Is Another Day is far from a typical B-noir, however. It is animated more by character development than by plot twists, and its meat is not action but the interactions between characters. Cameraman Robert Burks, who would go on to shoot all of Hitchcock’s films from Strangers on a Train through Marnie, does not indulge in conspicuously stylized lighting or angles, but consistently makes rich use of backdrops — the crowded, neon-lit streets of New York; the blaring, jostling dance hall; the numbing traffic on a highway at night; the emptiness of the prairie; the flimsy, cramped lettuce-pickers’ shacks — and captures characters in continuous motion — not moving fast or purposefully much of the time, just shifting uneasily around each other. Moving through so many different settings, the film shows people shaped and altered by their surroundings, yet also shows them reverting to type, as Bill,

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whenever the tension gets too great, becomes the angry and confused kid who shot his father but can’t remember doing it. Despite the forced optimism of the ending, the question, “Do people change, I mean inside?” remains unanswered. The latter part of Tomorrow Is Another Day recycles elements of Douglas Sirk’s inexplicably titled Shockproof (1949), which was co-scripted by Samuel Fuller. Sirk’s film opens with a woman (Patricia Knight) getting out of jail and visiting her parole officer, who reminds her of all the things she can’t do while on parole: she’s not allowed to drive a car, drink alcohol, get married, leave her job or move without obtaining permission, or associate with known criminals. Stripped of adult autonomy, she’s in a kind of invisible, moral jail, but her parole officer (Cornel Wilde) is gentle, warm, sincere and handsome. This soft imprisonment for her own good is evoked by an extraordinarily intricate mise-enscène (consisting to an unusual degree of real Los Angeles locations), where she is constantly surrounded by lacy iron grillwork, banisters that look like beaded curtains, gingerbread arabesques and scrolling floral wallpaper. To keep his charge away from the no-good gambler who got her in trouble the first time, and whom she furtively continues to see, Wilde installs her in his own house, taking care of his blind mother. Though initially resistant to this attempt to smother her in familial goodness, she gradually succumbs, and they fall in love. She doesn’t cross over to the right side of the law, however, so much as he crosses over to the wrong. They marry secretly, in defiance of the rules, and when she shoots her former lover, who blackmails her with old love letters, they take off for the border. “Others have gotten away with it,” Wilde assures her. He obviously hasn’t been watching any movies lately. Their flight is compressed, as though the experiences of fugitives are so well known that they only need to be ticked off the list. They steal a car from outside a church, complete with a “Just Married” sign and strings of cans attached to the back (again, outlaws disguised as honeymooners), but can’t make it across to Mexico before the license number is reported. They abandon the car and take buses; she dyes her hair back to its original brunette; he tries to hock his watch but is suspected by the pawnbroker, who pulls a gun on him. They ride freight trains, listening to a fellow traveler explain why it’s safer to carry a knife than a gun; they sit on a park bench eating stolen sandwiches, and get yelled at by a cop for littering. Wilde finally gets a job as an oil-field worker and they live in a grimy shack, quarreling because of the strain and worrying about the “corrosion” of their relationship. A neighbor tells them that his brother managed to buy a house in California by turning in a criminal for the reward; when a newspaper prints an item about them — a schmaltzy human-interest piece headlined “The Lovers”—they panic and head back to turn themselves in. Shockproof’s happy ending is even more of a cop-out than that of Tomorrow Is Another Day; the whole film is a compromise between Columbia Pictures’ insistence on conventional moralizing, Fuller’s rough-edged storytelling brio, and Sirk’s gift for capturing subtle, fluid, unconventional relationships. Wilde is peculiarly ready to abandon his boy-scout values, while Knight spends much of the film confusedly torn between two men, and shows herself to be a woman who will always shoot first and regret it later. Tracing the way fugitive couples are transformed into media icons, You Only Live Once and They Live by Night both gesture toward Bonnie and Clyde, but it is Joseph H.

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Lewis’s Gun Crazy (1950) that most influenced post-noir versions of the Bonnie-andClyde formula by shifting the romantic bond toward amour fou, and making the woman not an innocent helpmeet but the destructive engine of the antisocial couple. Like Bowie and Bill, Bart Tare ( John Dall) is weak-willed, not aggressive but easily led. All three men are outcasts, marked by their prison records or, in Bart’s case, by four years in reform school, where he was sent as a boy for stealing an ivory-handled six-shooter from a hardware store. Like the others, Bart has missed crucial formative years of his life and emerges, after a stint in the army (as a firearms instructor) dangerously immature and aimless, set apart by his single-minded obsession with guns. While his friends have professions — sheriff, newspaper reporter — wives and families, Bart is an overgrown kid; his only, vague idea of what to do with himself is to get a job with Remington, and his most cherished possession is a set of English dueling pistols. The long prologue to Gun Crazy establishes Bart’s love of guns as fundamentally innocent. He loves shooting but not killing; holding a gun makes him feel like “somebody,” but he has no impulse to hurt or threaten anyone. To prove this, one of Bart’s school friends recounts to a judge how they went on a camping trip in the mountains and Bart refused to shoot a mountain lion. His sister recalls how she gave him a BB gun when he was a small boy; in flashback we see him in the scruffy dirt-packed yard of a wooden shack, mounting on a toy steed made out of a sawhorse and happily firing his rifle. A hen and her brood are pecking in the dust; the little boy’s face takes on a disturbing smile as he stalks one of the chicks and shoots it. But once he sees the dead chick, he cries — proof, his sister insists, that he will never kill again. Russ Tamblyn (credited here as Rusty Tamblyn), who plays the young Bart, and John Dall each have an all–American, Tom Sawyer look about them: Tamblyn is freckled and curly-haired; Dall is lanky and boyish with a cowboy’s lean, bony features. Mackinlay Kantor, in his original story, emphasized the importance of the western mythology that underlies Bart’s romance with guns, adding the detail that his absent father was a slain outlaw. Needless to say, guns are associated with boyish dreams of heroism as well as with male sexuality. In westerns, women often plead with men to lay down their guns and renounce violence, but Bart finds a woman who loves guns as much as he does: the carnival sharpshooter Annie Laurie Starr (Peggy Cummins), whom he encounters at a local fairground. His dream woman enters his life with pistols blazing, dressed up in a fancy cowgirl outfit with tight pants, a holster and boots. (Her mousy female assistant wears a skirt.) Laurie’s snow-white, painted face is doll-like beneath waving blonde hair. She’s introduced by the carnival owner as “So appealing! So dangerous!” and her first trick is to fire a blank into the audience — directly at Bart. She slays him. He beams, infatuated, while she gives him a cool, appraising look. He takes up her challenge to try his skill against hers, happily twirling his guns to show off. As the two light matches on a crown worn by each in turn (an outrageous variant on the ubiquitous innuendo of cigarette lighting), Bart’s pleasure in his marksmanship is flagrantly sexual, a flaunting of potency that succeeds in impressing the baby-faced but hard-eyed Laurie. She’s like Atalanta, a woman who can only love the man who bests her previously undefeated supremacy. Beating men at their own game, Laurie also manipulates them by disparaging or admiring their virility. She tells the carnival owner, who tries to hold onto her by black-

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mailing her over a man she killed in St. Louis, that she prefers Bart because “he’s a man.... You’ll never make money, you’re a two-bit guy ... I want action.” Trying to convince Bart to embark on robbery, she holds before him her dream of a man with spirit and guts, a man unafraid of anything, a man who will “kick over the traces and win the world for me.” Though she coerces the reluctant Bart by threatening to leave him, Laurie is not the usual deceitful femme fatale stringing along a fall guy. Her love for him is genuine; their fierce attraction (they look at each other “like a couple of wild animals”) and exclusive loyalty are both reciprocal. The censors of the Breen office, who demanded numerous changes to the script, insisted that Laurie be depicted as evil and Bart as an innocent victim.8 The filmmakers officially went along with this dictate — the name of the film was changed to the trashy Deadly Is the Female on its initial release — but through the presentation of the couple’s romantic bond, and through the complex performance of Peggy Cummins, they undermined the simple morality the censors wanted. 9 Bart admits that he is equally guilty in the deaths of Laurie’s victims; by robbing at the point of a gun he has declared himself willing to kill. The lovers are mutually dependent, going together “like guns and ammunition.” With the change back to the original title for a second release, the focus returned to the shared love of guns, tools which (according to the principle of “production for use,” as Hildy Johnson theorizes in His Girl Friday) are designed to kill. Naturally unfit for a settled, nine-to-five life, Bart joins Laurie’s act as a buckskincostumed sharpshooter, fitting in easily in what is described as “the crookedest little carnival layout west of the Mississippi.” The jealousy of the owner, Packy, forces Bart and Laurie to set out on their own. They are married by the “Desert Justice” in a flimsy roadside shack painted with signs — the most ironic, “Be Married Safe and Sure”— which is also a café, cocktail bar and motel. Their honeymoon in Yellowstone is conveyed through a sequence of postcard-like scenes, cloying in their clean-cut, outdoorsy prettiness, and very obviously fake. After they lose all their money in Las Vegas, they hock Laurie’s wedding ring to buy hamburgers in an owl wagon. Bart offers to get a job, but like Al Roberts’s girlfriend in Detour, Laurie refuses a dull life on a modest salary. While Bart derives satisfaction from firing at targets, Laurie needs the riskier thrill of danger and the power of scaring people with guns. In a montage of their spree, opening with a gumball machine exploding, we see frightened storekeepers and hotel clerks and gas station attendants putting up their hands as guns are leveled at them. Never again do Bart or Laurie exercise their skill at sharpshooting; they use guns only bluntly, to menace and kill. Constantly changing costumes and cars as they roam the country, they create a traveling carnival of crime. For one of their heists in a small Wyoming town, Bart and Laurie wear their cowboy gear and pretend to be part of a rodeo troupe. (The artifice of these disguises is even greater given that Annie Laurie Starr — obviously a stage name — is English.) A cop, moments before being cold-cocked, tries to impress Laurie by telling her that he killed a man last year. To throw off pursuers, they change into sober suits and horn-rimmed glasses. Another time, Bart wears a navy uniform stolen off a drunken sailor; for yet another job they sport matching sunglasses and overcoats. Censors demanded that that actual bank heists not be portrayed (lest audience members try to imitate them), so we get only the preparations and aftermaths with the event itself left up to our imagination — the same

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way love scenes were filmed during the Code era. There is a suggestion of erotic role-playing in their methods; their heists bring them closer together and exhibit a theatrical playfulness and witty planning, as they act out the legend of rebellious outlaws. They change cars as often as clothes. For one bank robbery, they steal a car: Laurie poses as a hitchhiker, exploiting a middle-aged man’s fantasy of picking up “something nice” on his solitary pleasure trip, then pulls a gun on him. The film’s evenly lit, documentary look brings out the dispersed, featureless sprawl of rural American overrun by automobile culture. Many scenes are shot from the back seat behind Bart and Laurie, peering through the windshield for a car’s-eye view of the world, the streets of low-slung western towns lined with parked cars. By putting us — the audience — in the back seat of the getaway car, the camera forces us to identify with the criminals: we see what they see, and feel their confinement. They brazen their way through roadblocks and the inspection station at the California state line. As they gain notoriety, their life becomes a series of car chases along western highways at night. Bart, confused by the ease with which he takes to the life, complains that “everything is moving so fast, it’s all in such high gear. Sometimes I don’t feel it’s really me.... It’s as if nothing really happened, as if nothing were real any more.” The one recurring source of tension between them is Laurie’s urge to kill and Bart’s reluctance to hurt anyone. He stops her from shooting a bank guard, but is unable to prevent her from killing two people during their last and biggest heist, when they rob the payroll of a meatpacking plant in Albuquerque. Endless rows of hanging carcasses form a macabre, supremely apt backdrop for their crime: the packing plant lives by killing, just as they do. In the film’s one unintentionally funny line, Bart laments, “Two people dead, just so we can live without working!” After taking jobs at the plant (Laurie in the front office, Bart packaging and delivering meat: their last and most elaborate disguises), they steal the money intended for their fellow workers. They have no qualms about robbing the poor. But the couple becomes more, rather than less, sympathetic as the film progresses. While their initial attraction is presented as animalistic, once things begin to go wrong for them, scene after scene emphasizes their passionate devotion and loyalty to each other, bringing the film closer to the doomed romance of Ray’s and Lang’s films. Just like Bowie and Keechie, they dream of a new life in Mexico; they will get a ranch, settle down, raise some kids. “We’ll grow old together,” Laurie says, promising that she is tired of the excitement she so craved. After they cross into California, she asks to find a place near the ocean; she grew up in Brighton, on the English seaside, where her father had a shooting gallery, and she misses the sea. This moment reveals in Laurie, for the first time, a kind of innocence, summoning her childhood in the way the mountains summon Bart’s. For most of the film she has appeared hard and avid for violence, but she tells Bart that she shoots people only because she is afraid: “I get so scared I can’t even think — I can just kill.” Again like Bowie and Keechie, Bart and Laurie’s fatal mistake is to go out together, attempting to behave like a normal couple. They go to a carnival and enjoy the rides, then dance together in a blissful romantic trance; the song, appropriately, is “Mad About You.” After they’re traced by the police and have to flee without money or a car, they take to freight hopping, resorting to the transport of the broke and desperate. With no place

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left to go, they turn up at Bart’s childhood home, where his older sister still lives, vainly hoping she will shelter them. Outside in the dark, they peer through the window at the domestic scene of mother and children, a scene from which they are forever shut out. Laurie has no sentimentality about it; there’s something flat in her voice as she says perfunctorily, “Gee, what cute kids,” and a horrified Bart has to stop her from kidnapping one of the children to protect them on their flight. As they drive off in their last car, pursued by Bart’s two childhood friends, the camera looks up at them through the steering wheel. This shift in perspective means that we are no longer looking forward with them (“I Know Where I’m Going”), but looking at them, trapped in a small, dark space. In the flashback scenes of Bart camping with his friends at the beginning of the film, the mountains are seen in broad vistas. Over the course of the film, he is increasingly seen in confined spaces — the car, a snowbound shack, a hotel room — and when he returns to the same mountains at the end, he is surrounded by dense underbrush and then by opaque fog. Like guns in the movie, cars seem able to participate in their passion. When they try to separate for safety after their last job, they drive off in opposite directions, but their cars swing around, almost colliding, and they leap out to embrace in the road. Guns and cars go together, because in the American imagination they both symbolize individual freedom and power. Gun Crazy illustrates the limits of this illusion in both cases. The standard defense of guns is that they are merely a tool, as good or bad as the people who carry them; the evolution of Bart into a stickup man and Laurie into a killer suggests instead that an addiction to the power of holding a gun inevitably warps the person behind it. (America’s troubled love affair with guns will be explored more fully in Chapter 8.) During one getaway, Laurie frantically tries to speed up the car but can’t get it to go faster: they are betrayed by the machine they rely on for escape. Gun Crazy illustrates what William Beverly, in On the Lam, terms “the closure of fugitive space in the American West,” the way developments in technologies of surveillance and tracking gradually shut down all possibility of finding refuge in wilderness. (“Fellows like that hardly have a chance any more,” the station attendant says in Plunder Road.) Cars can only drive on known roads, so the police can set up dragnets for fugitives. A staple of crime movies, the setting up of roadblocks is a ritualistic representation of how options for escape close off one by one. License plates become identifying brands; the police spread descriptions wanted cars through the radio ether, making it impossible to pass unnoticed. In White Heat, much is made of a new device for radio tracking; a beacon is hidden on a car, which then beams its location, silently betraying fugitives. The battle between police and criminals becomes a battle over cars: who can drive faster and better exploit the mobility of the automobile. In White Heat, a car chase ends when the criminals slip into a drive-in movie theater to evade the pursuing cops, and discuss illegal schemes in the privacy of their car while a war film plays silently outside. Bart and Laurie drive their car until it gives out like a fatally exhausted horse, then keep running on foot through the forests and swamps of the San Lorenzo mountains. That they should flee into the mountains is apt for a couple described as “wild animals,” who will be hunted down like rabid dogs or tigers escaped from the zoo. But this is not true wilderness: it’s a national park. Even as they crash through the underbrush, Bart and Laurie are on gov-

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No refuge in wilderness: Laurie (Peggy Cummins) and Bart (John Dall) are hunted through a national park in Gun Crazy (Joseph H. Lewis, 1950) (Photofest).

ernment land, which refuses them sanctuary. They collapse under a pine tree, panting for breath in the thin mountain air. The quiet is broken only by the chirping of crickets and frogs, then by the sound of baying hounds. After spending a night sleeping in the rushes, they wake in a silent, fog-white marsh at dawn and listen to the faint rustle of their pursuers. The serene images of cattails faintly etched on mist, like Chinese ink-paintings, are an eerie counterpoint to the hunted couple’s anxiety as the forces of the law close in on them. The ending is ambiguous, like so many of noir’s inconclusive conclusions. Bart kills Laurie as she is about to shoot his friends; this could be read as an expression of his resurgent decency or loyalty to his life before Laurie entered it. But Jim Kitses, in his study

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of Gun Crazy, argues that Bart is not thinking of his friends but wants to protect Laurie from killing again. She has snapped into a wild-eyed frenzy of panic, and his bullet might be merciful. He himself is shot by the police, perhaps by his own friends, but as their bodies fall together the image is of a lovers’ double suicide. Their bodies are pierced by the bullets that whizzed safely past them at the carnival, making them feel invincible. There is no refuge in wilderness. Beautiful and unspoiled, the woods and mountains where fugitives make their last stands are as unforgiving as the societies they have fled. In High Sierra (1941), Roy Earle (Humphrey Bogart) retreats to a crevice in the rock high up in the bare Sierra Nevada mountains; lured out by his loyalty to a woman, he is picked off by a sharpshooter with a high-powered rifle, as though he were a coyote or a mountain lion. Clearly based on Dillinger (an inspiration telegraphed by Bogart’s haircut), Roy Earle is an old-fashioned, individualistic, noble outlaw who has outlived his time. By fleeing into in the barren mountains he signals his suicidal rejection of society. In Anthony Mann’s Raw Deal (1948), Joe Sullivan, a prison escapee (Dennis O’Keefe) on the lam with two women — his loyal girlfriend and an initially unsympathetic “good girl” he has taken hostage — makes it through roadblocks in a stolen car. They stop to rest beside a campfire in the lofty pine forests of Oregon, where the girlfriend, Pat (Claire Trevor, who narrates the film as in a brooding, haunted reverie), muses that the wilderness makes her feel “big and small at the same time.” Even here, however, they are under the eye of the law: a park ranger comes by and orders them to put out the fire. When Ann, the hostage (Marsha Hunt), realizes that Joe would have killed the ranger if he felt threatened, she tells him he is “something from under a rock.” They reach a remote safe house owned by a fellow criminal who has arranged to get them a car. In the night, a posse of police with motorcycles, torches and dogs surrounds the place, but it turns out they’re not after the convict at all; they’re hunting a man who went “psycho” and killed his wife. Breathless, sweaty and panicked, the killer pounds on the door begging to be let in. Joe doesn’t want to risk discovery by the police, but Ann takes pity on the helpless man. Once he’s safe inside, he realizes he doesn’t want to live without his wife and runs out to be riddled by machine gun bullets. Entirely unconnected to the plot of Raw Deal, this incident is strangely affecting: the pathetic murderer (played by the ubiquitous character actor Whit Bissell) can’t understand his own act of horrific violence; in a single stroke he has lost his human identity, not only in the eyes of the law but in his own. He’s become something from under a rock. The woods are a sanctuary for Libby Saul (Ida Lupino) in Deep Valley (1947). She lives in an isolated farmhouse that is going to pieces from neglect; her parents haven’t spoken to each other in seven years. Her bedridden mother, who imagines herself an invalid, is needy, vain and self-pitying; her father is brutish and mean. Both lean on Libby while constantly belittling her, and in this loveless environment she has grown up stammering and crippled by shyness. She is only happy when she’s roaming the hills with her dog; the old-growth woods (filmed in San Bernardino National Forest) are beautifully captured by director Jean Negulesco, whose flair for visual style outshone the dramatic substance of his films. Leaves glisten against the light, branches trace intricate webs, and flickering shadows dapple the silvery trunks of trees.

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On one of her walks, Libby comes to a ridge and stands silhouetted against the sky, like Cathy in Wuthering Heights. The camera angle reverses to show what she’s looking at: the woods end abruptly and a vast, raw slope of dirt drops down to the ocean far below. The hillside is crawling with men, swinging picks that throw up a thick haze of dust, amid growling machinery and ugly rubble. The men — sweaty, grimy and shirtless — are convicts from San Quentin, building a road under the supervision of lazy guards with shotguns. The lonely girl watches them, both enthralled by their virile physiques and instinctively sympathetic to their confinement. One of the convicts escapes when an avalanche crushes the toolshed where he’s been locked up after slugging a guard. Barry (Dane Clark) is hotheaded and incorrigibly violent; whenever he feels he’s being pushed around he reacts with belligerent fury, losing all control, only to lament afterward that he didn’t mean to do it. When they meet in a tiny, backwoods cabin, Barry pulls a gun on her, but Libby offers to help him, explaining that she “knows what it’s like to be shut up and kept away from everything.” Predictably, the two love-starved outcasts fall into a blissful romance, and the road to redemption seems to lie before them. Libby blossoms into womanhood, stops stammering and starts to wear fetching, off-the-shoulder dresses. Barry says that caring for someone has changed his outlook, but again and again, when he feels endangered he strikes with blind, unthinking aggression. He throws his gun in the stove to demonstrate his reformation, then fishes it out again; when he’s hiding in Libby’s barn loft, he almost kills her with a scythe, thinking she’s someone else. He just can’t change, as he realizes with growing despair. While Libby describes her love for the woods in companionable terms — the big trees that close around her are “whispering, laughing”— Barry says he prefers the ocean. “I like nothing around me but open space, open water in all directions, as far as you can see, as far as you can think, even.” He’ll never be able to live with other people. In the end, the only freedom he can find is death. Wounded in a shootout with the guards, he makes his way back to the cabin, where Libby finds him dying by the stream where they fished with a hand-made trap. He’s content to die, knowing he can’t be caught now; he feels as though he were “way out in the ocean.” His last words, as he watches a fish avoid the mouth of the trap: “He got away.” In the final scene, Libby stands again watching the road crew at work in the noise and dust, her face bleak. The convicts are building a highway that will open up an area “locked in between the sea and the mountains, no way to get in, no way to get out.” But for them it’s not a path to escape, just a hellish pit to which they’re chained. Crooked roads, blind alleys, lost highways: these metaphors run on forever. Bonnie Parker summoned noir visuals when she wrote “The Trail’s End” (usually known as “The Story of Bonnie and Clyde”), in which she envisions herself and Clyde traveling on a highway without lights or signposts, a “blind” road that’s getting too dark to see. The urge to “light out for the territory” lies dormant in every American heart. A favorite image conveying the promise of travel is a road that runs straight as an arrow over flat land, vanishing into a point in the distance. Robert Frank made his own version, of U.S. highway 285 in New Mexico, a shining strip of asphalt cleaving through dark, formless earth. In film noir, such an image can only be an illusion. All roads are blind, in both senses of the word: full of twists and corners concealing the dangers beyond, and leading ultimately to a dead end.

CHAPTER 6

Mirage of Safety: Noir on the Mexican Border What gets into Americans down here? — Gary Cooper, Vera Cruz

America’s Shadow: Robert Mitchum in Mexico One more couple on the run: an adulterous pair takes to the road in a mad dash for the Mexican border after the woman’s husband is killed in a scuffle with her lover. Where Danger Lives (1950) is a potboiler cobbled together out of genre clichés, but the clichés are peculiarly warped and tarnished, and the film plays out like a fevered dream. The concussed Dr. Jeff Cameron (Robert Mitchum) and psychotic Margo Lannington (Faith Domergue) are noir’s sickest couple. The film was made largely to showcase Domergue, one of producer Howard Hughes’s protégées, but in identifying her femme fatale qualities — habitual deceit, avarice, selfishness, violence — with clinical madness, it makes her less mysterious and alluring than pathetic and dysfunctional. On the other hand, casting her as a deranged character who alternates between heavy-eyed stupor and shrieking hysteria helps to hide Domergue’s clumsy acting and something unpleasantly wooden about her face. Mitchum’s character starts off as a garden-variety chump, a nice doctor led astray by a combination of lust (not only for a woman, but for a break from his tedious lawabiding routine, which seems to bore him) and misplaced chivalry toward the lonely rich girl he treats after a suicide attempt. Like Margo’s mental illness, Jeff ’s concussion — a result of that scuffle with her husband, who brains him with poker — pathologizes his confusion and passivity.1 In this film, noir is less a mood than a diagnosis. Jeff ’s gradual slide into groggy paralysis is mirrored by the couple’s journey from a clean hospital and a ritzy San Francisco mansion into a realm of squalor and absurdity. Their flight is driven by ignorance, panic and misunderstandings. They lose their chance to get to New York on a plane because they think they’ve been spotted by the police at the airport, when, in fact, the body of Margo’s husband hasn’t even been discovered yet. They detour to avoid a roadblock that’s really nothing but an agricultural checkpoint. They have no reliable information; Margo doesn’t want Jeff to listen to the radio, afraid 135

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A world maddened by sunstroke: Margo (Faith Domergue) and Jeff (Robert Mitchum) race for the border in Where Danger Lives (John Farrow, 1950).

he’ll hear about her history of insanity. She’s the one who wants to flee the country, and for her the border becomes a shining goal beyond which everything will be all right. She doesn’t reveal until later that she stashed away a lot of her husband’s money in her own name in a bank in Mexico City. Jeff, sensibly, wants to go back and explain, but lets himself be talked into running. Bleary and woozy, with a head throbbing and bursting, he’s in no condition to argue. Speaking for many of noir’s bewildered heroes, Jeff explains, that, due to his concussion, “I may talk rationally, but my decisions may not make much sense.” They drive through the baking monotony of the desert, where the radio brings only static and the glare of the endless straight road lulls Jeff into a sweaty sleep, only to be awakened by bloodcurdling screams as Margo is jolted from a nightmare about being suffocated. From this point on, the film observes the lovers’ relationship going bad like fruit in the sun, blackening and fermenting and disintegrating into pulp. Heat is a dominant metaphor: the couple is “hot” in the sense that they’re wanted by the police; and as they drive south, they enter a world that seems maddened by sunstroke. Everyone they encounter on the way is shady, meddlesome or has a screw loose. “Honest Hal” is an archetypal used-car salesman, a jovial jackal with a cheesy line of patter, his chortles and guffaws turning sinister once he realizes his customer is desperate and can be cheated. In a quiet little town Jeff and Margo run into another car and are dragged off to answer questions by an overzealous sheriff; there hasn’t been an accident in the town since 1908, so he wants to make the most of it. The driver of the other car

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is a perpetually drunken Mexican named Pablo, who is happy to forget the matter for a bribe of $42. The closer they get to the border, the more surreal, bumbling and sordid the communities they find. In a bizarre, nightmarish farce, they stumble into the Arizona town of Postville, which is celebrating “Wild West Whiskers Week.” The stubbly, crazyas-bedbugs inhabitants, decked out in cowboy clothes, try to fine Jeff 25 bucks for not having a beard, and when a picture of the fugitive Margo Lannington comes over the wire, some joker scribbles a beard on the photo before she can be recognized. When Margo lies that they can’t pay the fine because they need their remaining $13 to get married, the couple is bundled off to be forcibly hitched, made to spend their wedding night in a cheap tourist cabin decorated with figurines of a bride and groom trapped under a glass bell. The townsfolk sing and carouse outside the cabin (“How many songs do these maniacs know?” Jeff groans), while inside the miserable newlyweds pace and fret. “I need you to say you still love me,” Margo pleads, promising again that “everything will be all right once we cross the border.” Last stop is the seedy border town of Nogales, lined with neon signs and wooden arcades, where a pawnbroker, recognizing their position, gives them a thousand dollars for a $9,000 necklace and then offers to get them across the border — for a thousand dollars. (A statue of Justice with balanced scales stands ironically behind the chiseler.) They kill time in the back of a tawdry burlesque theater (“International Follies of Guadalupe”), watching an obese peroxided blonde in a too-small tartan suit belt off-key, “Living in a Great Big Way.” As they wait in a dreary motel room lit by blinking neon, Jeff sits with his head hanging morosely and observes that his whole left side is now paralyzed. He refuses to go with Margo, who protests, “You know I can’t be alone!” In a hateful confrontation, Jeff diagnoses her dementia and tells her he never really loved her; when he falls to the floor she tries to smother him with a pillow — the way she killed her husband while Jeff was out cold. As she makes her getaway he comes lurching and staggering after her like Frankenstein’s monster, and she winds up shot by police, dying against the chainlink border fence with the last words, “Nobody pities me!” A whitewashed epilogue is tacked on, in which Jeff is exonerated, recovers and reunites in a hospital with his forgiving girlfriend, Julie. It’s hard to forget how eager he was to ditch her and the sterile decorum of the hospital for a voluptuous, obviously disturbed black angel, or how easily he was convinced to abandon his successful life and lam out for Mexico. The Mexican border is an essential noir locale: a no-man’s land populated by fugitives, illegal immigrants, and those who prey on them. Robert Mitchum may hold the Hollywood record for fleeing to Mexico: he heads there not only in Where Danger Lives but in Out of the Past, The Big Steal and His Kind of Woman. He played Americans settled in Mexico in two westerns, Bandido and The Wonderful Country. These films and others, like Kansas City Confidential, The Hitch-Hiker, Jeopardy and Orson Welles’s border-town masterpiece Touch of Evil portray Mexico as a vacation paradise but also as a lawless land for Americans, easygoing but treacherous, rife with smugglers, drug dealers, exiled gangsters, lone murderous bandits, and egregious tourists. Borders towns, as Charlton Heston tells his wife in Touch of Evil, bring out the worst in their countries. In The Naked Alibi (1954), a family man who runs a bakery in a sedate California town, just “trying to lead a simple, decent life,” so he says, goes off on “business trips” to visit his sexy saloon-singer

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mistress in Border City, where he is a part-time racketeer and full-time psycho. The cop who follows him there is promptly ambushed and mugged in an alley, and later almost killed in a staged saloon brawl. In The Breaking Point (1950), a second and more faithful adaptation of Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not, Mexico is where Harry Morgan ( John Garfield), the struggling captain of a charter boat, is tempted to stray from his hard-working, domesticated existence. He takes a tycoon and his good-time-gal companion there on a trip, and in a smoky, crowded, cacophonous bar, with cock-fighting in the back room, his woman passenger offers him a fling and a crooked lawyer offers him a chance to make fast money smuggling Chinese immigrants into the United States. (Or rather, loading them onto his boat: the Chinese agent makes it clear that he doesn’t care what happens to them afterward.) Harry turns them both down flat, but soon finds himself weakening after his rich passenger takes a powder without paying him, leaving him too broke to get home. The shyster urges Harry not to be so uptight: “Relax — let it happen.” In film noir, Mexico offers an alternative to an overdeveloped, rule-bound, socially rigid and safe America. What gets into Americans down here (to answer Cooper’s question in Vera Cruz) is a frontier mentality, akin to the anarchic free-for-all of the Wild West or the gold rush days. The American prospectors in Treasure of the Sierra Madre are no less greedy than the banditos who prey on them. In Plunder of the Sun, an opportunistic American gets involved in a frantic hunt for Zapotec treasure amid a scrum of crooked archaeologists and double-crossing dames, all grubbing for money in the shadow of ancient temples. The treasure most noir protagonists seek in Mexico, however, is freedom from America’s laws: the border means the same thing to criminals that the Mason-Dixon Line meant to escaping slaves. In Thompson’s The Getaway, the bank robber and his wife make it to their destination, the kingdom of El Rey, a sanctuary for fugitives in a part of Mexico that does not officially exist. This haven seems like a peaceful paradise at first, but once they arrive they can never leave, and there is no way to get more money than they brought with them. Gradually they realize they are doomed to starve to death. A society made up entirely of criminals turns out to be cannibalistic: “One need only live literally as one has always done figuratively.... They lived by taking what they wanted. By getting rid of anyone who got in their way or ceased to be useful to them. It was a fixed pattern with them; it was them.” The border is a shimmering mirage promising freedom and safety, a booby trap disguised as an escape hatch. Beyond it lies a looking-glass land, both liberating and disorienting ; a country, Damien Love suggests in his book on Robert Mitchum, that is “imagined as the United States’s shadow.” “I want to go back to Mexico,” Kathie Moffatt ( Jane Greer) tells Jeff Bailey (Robert Mitchum) near the end of Out of the Past. She imagines that if they return to the place where they met, they can recover the blissful romance they shared before Jeff learned that she was a liar and a killer. Things are looking bad for Kathie: both Jeff and Whit Sterling (Kirk Douglas), her mobster boyfriend, have turned against her, sick of her schemes and double-crosses. They intend to throw her to the cops to save themselves. It’s a simple

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matter to solve this: she shoots Whit and orders Jeff to run away with her, smirking, “You can’t make deals with a dead man.” She is no longer the alluring beauty in white, enchanting Jeff in a Mexican cantina; in a severe grey suit and with a hat like a wimple covering her hair, she looks like an evil nun. She’s immensely pleased with herself for killing Whit, savoring the sense of being at last in charge. But by this point Jeff is so disgusted that he’s ready to throw his life away, as he tosses a glass angrily into the fireplace, rather than let her win. He secretly phones the police, who set up a roadblock, ensuring that, like so many fleeing couples, they will die together in a car at night. The journey that ends at a roadblock started when Bailey was a New York private eye named Jeff Markham, and was hired by Whit to find Kathie after she put a bullet in his shoulder and absconded with 40 grand. Tracing her to Mexico was easy. Her maid lied that she had gone to Florida, but gave away enough information to help him follow her trail across the border. Jeff recounts all this to his girlfriend, Ann, in Bridgeport, California, after the past has caught up with him. The long flashback that fills in this back story is like a movie within a movie, narrated by Mitchum, strung together by a theme song (“The First Time I Saw You”) that plays everywhere he goes, filled with orchestrated entrances and exits, and saturated with style. Mitchum’s voice is like the lead instrument of a jazz ensemble, setting the pace of the film, giving it a distinctive, coherent sound —his sound, cool and weary and knowing, developed through different moods and tempos and melodies. An accomplished singer, Mitchum referred to his dialogue as “the lyrics” and treated it that way, delivering his lines behind the beat, the way Sinatra sings. Though he has no musical interludes in Out of the Past, no film better captures his musicality, his sense of rhythm, pace and inflection. The script is one long improvisation on the theme of disenchantment, full of blue notes and hot riffs. Jane Greer (also a singer) contributes her gorgeous, dry contralto and Kirk Douglas, jumping avidly on every line, offers a perfect counterpoint to Mitchum. (“You just sit there and stay inside yourself; you wait for me to talk,” Whit observes on first meeting Jeff.) Out of the Past is, like much great American popular music, sublime hokum. It creates a world in which every small throwaway gesture — ordering a cup of coffee, checking a briefcase — has drop-dead style; every line spoken is a wisecrack or a morsel of pulp poetry. Even minor characters and incidental scenes are milked for all they’re worth. Take, for instance, Jeff ’s interview with Eunice, Kathie’s maid. This could have been accomplished by a phone call or merely noted in the narration, but instead director Jacques Tourneur gives us a shock cut to a close-up of a wailing trumpet in a steamy, crowded Harlem nightclub. Eunice is played by the slim and elegant Theresa Harris, sporting a fabulous bouquet of a hat that cascades white flowers down over one ear. Sitting in the protective arm of her boyfriend as she banters with Jeff (who is neatly identified as a hepcat by his ease in this setting), answering his questions with cute, flirty insincerity. Everyone onscreen is engaged in a continual game of verbal one-upmanship. The hierarchy is clear: the seductive, superficial Meta Carson is a second-rate version of Kathie, just as Jeff ’s partner, Fisher, is an inferior parody of him. When Whit wonders how Kathie could have missed him with so many of her shots, we’re meant to know the difference between a showy one-liner like Fisher’s explanation, “A dame with a rod is like a

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guy with a knitting needle,” and Jeff ’s deadpan suggestion: “Maybe you were moving.” Effortless cool is a tautology: if you’re trying, you’re — by definition — failing. Even with its stylized dialogue and distractingly gorgeous cinematography (by RKO’s master of noir, Nicholas Musuraca), drifting into glistening abstract patterns of black and white, the film never feels overworked, never tries too hard. The wit and elegance and glamour feel unforced and alive, just happening by casual serendipity. It’s a film about disenchantment, but it casts a spell that never breaks. The consistency of the dialogue is all the more impressive given that the screenplay, chiefly adapted by Daniel Mainwaring from his novel Build My Gallows High, included uncredited revisions by a number of writers. The collaborative effort may, however, explain some of the entanglements of the plot, which becomes so impenetrable in the latter half that Mitchum cracked to Greer during shooting, “Don’t tell anyone, but I think they lost three pages in mimeo.” Out of the Past looks and sounds far too good for the viewer to care about plot confusion. It floats on Mitchum’s narration, on a sustained, laid-back high like a wee-hours jam session. Jeff drops his philosophy of life in a casino when Kathie asks if there’s a way to win, and he answers, “There’s a way to lose more slowly.” When she says she’s sorry Whit didn’t die from her bullet, he murmurs dreamily, “Give him time.” This motif keeps coming back like a song, ringing changes on the theme of the inevitability of loss, betrayal and death. Jeff ’s enveloping pessimism is strangely elated; he knows the score and savors it like some private hipster knowledge. Yet for all his wisedup cynicism, he plunges with eyes open into romantic blindness. Having traced Kathie to Acapulco, he waits for her, less like a private eye pursuing a case than like a man waiting to meet his fate, as though he had already decided to fall in love with her. During the somnolent afternoon heat, he sits in a quiet, shadowy cafe, La Mar Azul, where he’s “half asleep, with the beer and the darkness.” Acapulco is a postcard city, with elegant white buildings, peasant girls at courtyard wells, men sitting in groups on the sidewalks. When Kathie walks in “out of the sun,” it’s as though she’s a creature of light, a pure celluloid goddess. He sees her later, appearing “out of the moonlight” or “walking in front of me in the headlights.” She’s all in white, with a broadbrimmed hat that shades her face, bringing out the duskiness of her dark hair and huge, velvety-black eyes. Jeff ’s expression when he sees her is not a silent wolf whistle but the look of a man calmly receiving a death sentence. He approaches her as a fellow American, a lonely supplicant for companionship: “I haven’t talked to anyone who hasn’t tried to sell me something for ten days.” He takes advantage of the arrival of a pudgy Mexican man in a sombrero who offers his services as a tour guide, then peddles lottery tickets and jade earrings, which Jeff buys to get rid of him. Kathie’s first words are, “I don’t want a guide,” and long afterward, when Jeff finally faces that death sentence, he wryly observes, “We owe it all to Jose Rodriguez. I wonder if he’ll ever find out what a bad guide he really was.” At their first meeting Kathie is guarded, warily seductive, and she tells him about another bar where “a man plays American music for a dollar,” and you can sip bourbon and close your eyes and “it’s like a little joint on 56th Street.” So Jeff takes up his post there, waiting for her to reappear, while the violinist plays — of course —“The First Time I Saw You,” which was introduced by the band in the Harlem nightclub. Even before he has succumbed to Kathie, Jeff knows

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“We owe it all to José Rodriguez.” Jeff Bailey (Robert Mitchum, seated) meets Kathie Moffatt (Jane Greer) in Acapulco. José Rodriguez (Tony Roux) stands in the doorway. Out of the Past (Jacques Tourneur, 1947).

what a chump, what a sucker he is. Yet he makes no attempt to resist, telling her frankly, “You’re going to find it very easy to take me anywhere,” and responding to her earnest protestations that she didn’t take any money from Whit with a dismissal that sums everything up: “Baby, I don’t care.” But Jeff and Kathie’s romance is genuinely rhapsodic, not just a one-sided mating of temptress and sap. They’re both so sexy and smart and wised-up, always laughing, getting the joke, appreciating each other. They meet only at night (“The day went away, like a pack of cigarettes you smoked”), often on the beach among the fishing boats and nets, hanging like black webs or shrouds in the glistening, studio-lit night. Seen through Jeff ’s enchanted eyes, Kathie is delicate, pretty, girlish, running up “like school was out,” with her shoes in her hand, a soft ruffled blouse, an irresistibly warm smile. They run in from the rain to a cozy little cabin with bamboo screens, laughing as they towel off each other’s hair. The magic of their Mexican honeymoon is heightened by being on the run, hiding out in a foreign country, playing hooky from reality. “I don’t know what we were waiting for. Maybe we thought the world would end,” he recalls ruefully. “Maybe we thought it was all a dream.” The fantasy shatters when Whit Sterling knocks on Jeff ’s door, having followed him down, suspicious of the lack of news. Fleeing discovery, Kathie and Jeff return to the

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States, where they hide out but are tracked down by Jeff ’s disgruntled partner, Fisher. When Kathie shoots Fisher, Mitchum, in a reaction shot lasting all of two seconds, shows us Jeff realizing (and instantaneously coming to terms with) the fact that the best thing that ever happened to him is also the worst thing that ever happened to him. He looks simultaneously shocked to the core, and as though he knew it all along. After that, Jeff spends the rest of the film fighting boldly and cleverly to survive, to evade a murder frame-up, to dodge bullets and resist Kathie’s efforts to win him back to her side. An unusually itinerant film noir, Out of the Past floats from place to place, from rugged landscapes to studio sets, but wherever Jeff goes, he’s tracked down. He’s spotted at a racetrack, traced to his gas station, cornered in a backwoods cabin and a Mexican hotel, followed to a hidden campsite by a mountain stream. No matter how swiftly or stealthily he moves — driving aimlessly on back roads or prowling cat-like around Meta Carson’s apartment while boogie-woogie piano drifts in from the next room — he knows he’s a goner; he’s just looking for a way to lose more slowly. Or, as he rephrases it when Kathie protests that she doesn’t want to die, “Neither do I, baby, but if I have to I’m gonna die last.” He doesn’t quite make it, since Kathie shoots him before the police kill her. Jeff tells his girlfriend, Ann, that nothing remains of his feeling for Kathie, yet the rapturous depiction of their love comes in his own retelling of the affair to Ann, as though he were reliving it in her presence, seeming deliberately cruel in the way he describes Kathie’s “magic.” (That the saintly Ann is unfazed by his revelations makes her character flat and unreal.) The flashback is the best part of Out of the Past, and everything that follows has a slight feeling of let-down. Jeff ’s love for the dull but faithful Ann is never compelling; she’s merely an antidote to Kathie. In the end, the deaf-mute Kid who was Jeff ’s only friend tells Ann that he really was running away with Kathie, so that she will be able to forget him and settle down with her square, small-town suitor. This can be taken as a conventional Hollywood ending with the virtuous living happily ever after, but it can also be read as a subtly subversive postscript. Ann is disillusioned about Jeff and can, thus, appreciate the colorless sheriff, just as Jeff appreciated Ann after he was disillusioned about Kathie. But we know the Kid is lying, so Ann is really deluded, not disabused of a false faith. The Kid assumes that she will be happier believing a lie, as Jeff was happier when he believed in Kathie. Unlike him, she will never know the score. Jeff ’s hatred of Kathie is as magnified as his passion was, and he flaunts it, always trying to make up for his former gullibility. When Ann says no one is all bad, he responds, “She comes closest.” Kathie says in the end, “I never told you I was anything but what I am. You just wanted to imagine that I was.” This is patently false: she lied repeatedly and fervently about stealing Whit’s money. But she’s right that Jeff chose to play the sap. Perhaps he needed one great, beautiful illusion — those weeks in Acapulco — so that he could plumb the depths of disillusionment. Perhaps he was drawn to her because she could rouse him from his torpor of indifference, because he could only really care about his life when he was in danger of losing it. His blend of cynical pride and romantic masochism remains puzzling, but Mitchum knew how to hold the audience’s interest without explaining himself. (Even Ann observes of Jeff, “You sure are a secret man.”) The essence of Mitchum lies in hidden depths, those hints of melancholy, amusement and cold violence that seep through his impassive surface, suggestions of menace and compassion and old wounds.

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In a movie review in The New Yorker, David Denby stated, “An actor won’t last as a leading man unless he plays characters who want something passionately.” That sounds plausible, but then what about Robert Mitchum? What does Mitchum want? Perhaps his enduring power lies in the way he leaves that question open. The motivations of his characters may be clear, but his performances blur them. The script may say he wants a woman, or a home, or money, or revenge, but he doesn’t really convey lust or greed or any kind of burning desire, any need. And yet, you can’t just say he wants nothing — baby, he doesn’t care — because that would make him invulnerable, and you always believe that he can be hurt, that he has been hurt. This core of mystery is Mitchum’s gift to his movies. He’s always holding something back. Trying to figure him out is like dropping a stone into a well and listening for the splash. It falls and falls, and you never do find out how deep the well is. While Jeff and Kathie never make it back to Acapulco, Mitchum and Jane Greer were reunited in Mexico for Don Siegel’s The Big Steal (1949). Without their presence this light-hearted, sunlit, shaggy-dog road movie would hardly qualify as noir. The casting came about only because of Mitchum’s arrest for possession of marijuana, which occurred shortly before shooting was scheduled to start. Lizabeth Scott withdrew, afraid that costarring with Mitchum would tarnish her reputation, and no other actress could be found who was willing to consort with him. Jane Greer was desperate for a movie role, since Howard Hughes, who had her under exclusive contract, was spitefully refusing to let her work because she’d refused to continue dating him. She also loved Mitchum “like a brother,” as she later said, and she eagerly sought the part, concealing the fact that she had recently become pregnant. Filming was interrupted by Mitchum’s brief jail sentence, but this is hardly apparent in the loose, easygoing, episodic rhythm of the film. Everyone is after money: Lt. Duke Halliday (Mitchum) is a soldier falsely accused in a payroll heist, fleeing the military police and chasing the boodle; Capt. Vincent Blake (William Bendix) appears to be a cop chasing Halliday, but is really a thief doggedly pursuing his take; Joan Graham (Greer) is a woman trying to get back the money she loaned to a no-good fiancé; the no-good fiancé has the stolen payroll and needs to get it to a fence living deep in the Mexican countryside. They all wind up chasing each other around hotels, tourist resorts, drowsy little villages, and dusty roads that unfurl endlessly through a rolling, pastoral landscape. They run into herds of goats and amiable construction workers, baffled peasants and crafty, patient Mexican police. They pick up parrots and nosebleeds; Halliday and Blake make fools of themselves whenever they try to speak Spanish. (When Graham tells Halliday not to call her Chiquita because “you don’t say that to girls you hardly know,” he responds tellingly, “Where I learned Spanish you do.”) Graham is smarter and more self-possessed than any of the men, though she doesn’t know what to do with a gun. (The dry, affectionate, deprecating banter between Greer and Mitchum more than justifies the movie.) There are savage beatings and holdups, too; men are constantly pulling guns as they go through doors, or suddenly slugging each other — even Joan Graham gets slugged. The chase becomes a matter of life or death. But that doesn’t stop Halliday and Graham from carrying on their love-hate courtship or getting into idiotic scrapes. There are lies and

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stolen identities; nothing is what it seems; but Siegel points out that all this gun-waving and car chasing and hunting for suitcases full of cash could be farcical rather than dark, and that the convoluted, mystifying plot could mimic the confusion of being in a foreign country. This Mexico is no studio backlot as in Out of the Past, but the real thing, shot as picturesquely as any tourist board could wish. The cities are elegant, the natives gracious and bemused by the flustered gringos. (“Loco?” a barber inquires of Halliday as he pays for a shave he hasn’t received. “Americano,” his friend explains, shrugging.) No one comes off worse than Blake, who is not only corrupt and murderous, he’s the worst kind of tourist — noisy and pushy and blundering, impatient and oblivious. Poised and sardonic, Graham repeatedly demonstrates that courtesy and intelligence are more effectual than brute force. The Big Steal is a lesson in manners, a crime holiday, and a rare entry into the category Elizabeth Ward terms “fiesta noir.” Perhaps surprisingly, it’s not the only film that deserves this label. Robert Montgomery’s Ride the Pink Horse (1947) is set during an actual fiesta in the New Mexico border town of San Pablo, which is overrun by merry-makers and parade floats, flags and posters decking the low, cracked adobe buildings and arcades. When a man in a suit and hat steps off a Greyhound bus, his urban anonymity renders him conspicuously out of place as he stalks past sad-faced Indians selling blankets and baskets. He’s another noir cipher, a disillusioned veteran (“all cussed up because [he] fought a war for three years and got nothing to show for it but a dangle of ribbons”) single-mindedly intent on avenging the death of his friend Shorty, who was killed when he tried to blackmail the powerful, crooked businessman Frank Hugo. Lucky Gagin (Montgomery)— the cheerful nickname is never used — is the blankest of protagonists. Locals call him “the man with no place” and he explains tersely, “I’m nobody’s friend.” Robert Montgomery had been a sleek, effervescent leading man of thirties comedies, and when he reinvented himself as a forties tough guy, he did not make as successful a transformation as Dick Powell. Too alert to achieve a laid-back, laconic style, he comes across as snappish and bratty. Trying to act tough, he only seems ostentatiously rude, like teenage boy proud of his poor manners. He is a man with no interests apart from his scheme (and it, too, feels strangely impersonal, driven not by any deep feeling for his friend but by some private code); a man uninterested in his surroundings, dumb and stubborn, impossible to move or please. It is hard to tell whether Montgomery intended to make Gagin so hard to know or like, but his refusal to ingratiate himself adds an alkaline note to an uneven film that is both brutal and sentimental. Gagin undeservedly attracts two saintly helpers: Pancho (Thomas Gomez), the bighearted, philosophical owner of an antique carousel, the Tio Vivo, and Pilar (Wanda Hendrix), an innocent young Indian girl who has come to the fiesta from her remote village, and who mysteriously foresees Gagin’s imminent death and follows him with doglike devotion, even as he crudely insults her appearance and calls her “Sitting Bull.” Both Pancho and Pilar nurse Gagin when he is injured, protect him, and endure beatings and torture rather than give him away. They take over the film, pushing the conventional figures of femme fatale and crooked operator into the margins. They come from somewhere outside the noir world, some place where loyalty and selflessness are still commonplace.

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Pancho explains that while most men want money (“Me? I am only happy when I have nothing”), he values friendship above any other virtue or pleasure, and he provides sanctuary for Gagin at his carousel, which represents the heart of the non-noir world (and supplies the film’s title). The movie contrasts Gagin’s myopic obsession with achieving a goal — avenging his friend — with the cyclical, accepting nature of the traditional world that he at first ignores and slights, but eventually learns from. This is a rare film noir in which the alienated hero finds a community that embraces and protects him, though he leaves it in the end, still alone. The characters of Pancho and the otherworldly Pilar come dangerously close to a “noble savage” view that those closest to the earth and furthest from civilization have the purest wisdom. Ride the Pink Horse is an eccentric film, yet its characters are, at least on the surface, generic types. The script (by Ben Hecht and Charles Lederer) is full of noir boilerplate, as when Gagin says of dames: “They’re not human. They’re dead fish with a lot of perfume on them. You touch them and you always get stung, you always lose.” Frank Hugo (Fred Clark), the shady businessman, preaches the gospel of amoral cynicism: “If you work hard and play by the rules, all you get is pushed around. People are interested in only one thing: the payoff.” He mocks Gagin for being conned by “honor, responsibility, patriotism.” Freely admitting that he is a crook, he declares that there are only two kinds of guys in the world, those who worry about what’s right and wrong, and “guys like us.” In the end, he seems angered less by the fact that Gagin tried to blackmail him than that he asked for so much less than he might have; he and Shorty were “mice” who asked for “peanuts.” Affable and smooth-talking, Hugo is a pleasure to watch compared with the dense, boorish Gagin; but his deafness (he wears a hearing aid, which is ripped out in the final confrontation) all too obviously symbolizes moral obtuseness. During this climactic showdown, the tough-guy hero is totally passive, limp and helpless. Almost unconscious after being beaten and stabbed, he is saved by the loyal Pilar and the folksy, crafty F.B.I. agent Retz (Art Smith), who has been pursuing Hugo. Ride the Pink Horse is really an anti-noir, setting up the hard-boiled elements that, by 1947, were already clichés, only to knock them down like hollow ninepins. Gagin is protected by the Indian talisman Pilar gives him, not by the service revolver that he calls “the best charm in the world.” He turns out to belong not with the noir types (he refuses a more ambitious and elaborate blackmail scheme offered by Hugo’s mistress) but with the little people, those who are “born to be broke,” as Pancho says. When Gagin takes his hat off and kisses Pilar on the cheek before leaving town, it feels like a triumph of grace, a sign that he has matured into a human being. As in The Big Steal, the culture of Mexico — not yet spoiled by impatient, grasping modernity — improves the character of a crass, jaundiced American. This pattern is taken to mawkish extremes in One-Way Street (1950), a thin B-movie in which James Mason plays a mob doctor with “no faith in anything,” who is redeemed when a plane crash (he was trying to make it to Mexico City with a bag of loot he stole from his boss) lands him in a remote village inhabited by wise priests and warmhearted peasants. The trouble with these films is that they turn noir’s cynicism into a straw man, so obviously excessive that it never feels convincing, and they ignore the possibility that the “primitive” life could have its own flaws and trials, invisible to the tourist’s eye.

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Noir rarely considered how the border looks from the other side, but Anthony Mann’s Border Incident (1949) focuses on a reverse migration, not American fugitives fleeing to Mexico but braceros, farm workers seeking jobs in the United States, who are sometimes too impatient to wait for legal permission to cross the border. Like Mann’s T-Men, the film is a tribute to law enforcement and lacks the moral ambiguity and psychological dimension of a true noir, but its tight, suspenseful action is elevated by Mann’s use of western landscapes. (A year after making Border Incident, Mann would direct his first westerns, embarking on a string of masterpieces.) John Alton’s astonishing cinematography captures the desert at night: magnificent, hard-edged cloudscapes tower over a silveryblack wasteland. Every rock and shrub and dust storm and barbed-wire fence is visible in the darkness, yet the detail doesn’t distract from the feeling of emptiness and desolation. The landscape of the border is the ultimate no-man’s-land, a place where the protections of nationality are stripped away. A Mexican immigration agent (Ricardo Montalban) goes undercover as a bracero, joining the throngs of peasants from all over Mexico who gather to wait for entry permits, and then the smaller number who seek out smugglers to get them across the border. They pay a steep fee to be bundled into trucks with false bottoms, and when they reach the States they are cheated with lower wages than they were promised, and many are robbed and murdered in the desert on their way home. In going the illegal route, they sacrifice their rights and their identities; they are treated like prisoners, like slaves. They can’t complain or appeal for help; officially, they no longer exist. They are exploited by a greedy, multi-national crew: the German coordinator in Mexico who poses as a trader in souvenirs (his American clients call to order shipments of “curios”); his grimy, ignorant Mexican goons who steal whatever isn’t nailed down; and the American thugs who kill a U.S. immigration agent with a mechanical reaper. The final solution for the smugglers when they’re afraid of getting caught is to march the braceros into the narrow rock walls of the Canyon of Death, shoot them from the rim with rifles, and dump their bodies in quicksand. The earth literally swallows them, a fitting death for men who work the land, bringing food out of the soil, only to be destroyed by the machinery —figurative and literal — of agriculture. The film ends with the assurance that immigration problems on the border are now a thing of the past, earning laughter from present-day audiences. While impoverished workers flow into the U.S., tourists flow the other way, staying in resorts designed to insulate them from the discomfort of real foreignness, islands of faux exoticism where cooped-up strangers warily stalk one another around cabins and pools. In Phil Karlson’s Kansas City Confidential (1952), an ex-con falsely suspected of participating in a daring bank heist traces the real culprits down to the Mexico fishing resort of Borados, where they are meeting up months later to divide the take. The quiet little “bananaville” is full of shifty, loitering characters, waiting around without knowing for whom they’re waiting. The heist was masterfully designed by a disgruntled ex-cop, who recruited three desperate lowlifes — a twitchy, wall-eyed gambler; a squinty-eyed ladies’ man; and a brutish, gum-chewing cop-killer. The key to his scheme is that the men never see one another, or him, without masks; they don’t know who their partners

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are or who “Mr. Big” is; this way they can’t betray anyone. It also means they don’t know that one of the men in their midst is not a fellow-conspirator but the fall-guy, Joe Rolfe ( John Payne), who was blamed for the job. Rolfe is masked in his own way, since for much of the film we’re not sure if he really wants to clear his name by exposing the criminals, or if he would be happy just to have a share of the spoils. The mask motif neatly distills the refusal of trust that always fouls up collaborative crimes. Despite its priceless collection of plug-uglies ( Jack Elam, Lee Van Cleef and Neville Brand, whose faces resemble Halloween masks),2 no one in the movie comes off worse than the cops — from the brutish police eager to beat a confession out of Rolfe to the wily mastermind, Tim Foster (Preston Foster), who appears to have turned to crime but who, in fact, plans to play both sides off each other, selling out his three patsies and collecting the credit for solving the case as well as taking his share of the loot, not in hot money, but in the safer form of an insurance reward. Foster’s daughter (Coleen Gray), who takes a shine to Rolfe, never learns the truth about her dad. Rolfe earns the dying man’s gratitude and the quarter-million reward by promising not to tell her the truth (like Ann in Out of the Past, she’s lied to for her own good), allowing the doting father to die with his virtuous mask on. His Kind of Woman (1951) luxuriates at a far more upscale, exclusive resort on the Mexican coast called Morros Lodge, accessible only by airplane: a rustic-modern retreat with a palm-fringed private beach, sparkling pool, split-level lounge and crowds of wealthy, frivolous guests swirling around its bar, dance floor and terraces in cocktail dresses and fashionable swimwear. Dan Milner (Mitchum again) wanders around, drifting from one odd conversational encounter to the next, trying to figure out what the hell he’s doing there. Nothing in Milner’s life makes any sense. As the film opens, he’s in a slump, just out of jail in Palm Springs, where he was locked up “for nothing.” He gets back to his apartment to find three hoods playing poker at his table; they tell him a bookie is demanding payment for a bet he never made. They beat him up and then casually leave. As he is “taking off my tie, wondering if I should hang myself with it,” he’s summoned by phone to a columned mansion guarded by pit bulls and offered $50,000 to go to Mexico and await further instructions. A professional gambler (“Who isn’t?” another character replies), he agrees. Milner has been chosen as a doppelganger and fall guy by a famous gangster, Nick Ferraro (Raymond Burr), who’s been deported to Italy and wants to return to America. The plan is for Milner to disappear and Ferraro to take over his identity, with a face altered by plastic surgery. Milner is picked because he’s the right height and weight, but also because he has led such a shadowy life that no one will notice he’s gone. Noir hangs over him like a portable cloud. Whenever anyone complains about tribulations, he comes back dismissively with, “Things are tough all over,” or “Everyone’s in trouble.” Mitchum is even sleepier than usual here, barely able to keep his eyes open and mumble his lines. During this stage of his career, as he waited out his contract while his studio, RKO, disintegrated under the chaotic and quirkily obsessive management of Howard Hughes, Mitchum often seemed minimally engaged in his movies. But his unimpressed, disappointed air was entirely appropriate for the men he played onscreen. You don’t know whether you’re watching Robert Mitchum thinking, Here I am making another crummy

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movie, or watching his character thinking, Here I am living this crummy life. I don’t even know what’s going on, and I don’t care. The first thing shows any real interest in is Jane Russell, whom he discovers in an airport bar in Nogales, wearing an absurd coolie hat, drinking champagne and singing a brainlessly catchy song called “Five Little Miles from San Berdoo.” She says she’s a wellbred millionaire named Lenore Brent, but she’s really a singer named Liz who went to Europe on a U.S.O. tour and came back with a new identity, adopted in an attempt to hook a Hollywood matinee idol named Mark Cardigan (Vincent Price). This romantic comedy subplot mirrors Ferraro’s scheme to reenter the United States under a false identity, and the weird echo points up the nature of film, which is both a hard-boiled gangster drama (Burr is genuinely creepy, with his oily bulk and solemnly crazy eyes) and a goof ball comedy. Everyone but Milner seems to be acting a part. A federal immigration agent arrives at Morros Lodge pretending to be a slobbering drunk playboy. A German plastic surgeon poses as a chess-playing writer. Cardigan (a scene-stealing, over-the-top comic performance by Price, whose part Hughes expanded because he got such a kick out of it, and who plays an entire scene while holding a dead, plucked duck in his hand) gets childishly excited watching himself in his latest swashbuckling movie, and jumps at the chance to play the role of an action hero in real life, taking charge of an expedition to rescue Milner after he’s been taken out to Ferraro’s yacht. Milner moves through a labyrinth of slatted screens and busy drapes and patterned floors, through a world of phonies and poseurs and people in disguise, searching for someone who will give him a straight answer. Blunt and bemused, he squelches all attempts to impress or intimidate him. When he meets an obnoxious tourist ( Jim Backus, sporting Hawaiian shirts and Bermuda shorts, lecherously ogling every passing female and scheming to take advantage of a young bride on her honeymoon) who reels off the name of his firm of investment bankers, Milner brushes him off with, “I bury my money in the ground.” The instability of tone intensifies throughout the film, until what started as a fairly standard noir story becomes a bizarre jumble of brutality and flat-out farce. In the hellish, steamy hold of Ferraro’s yacht Milner is stripped and beaten with a strap, then tied down to be injected with a brain-destroying serum. Meanwhile Cardigan, hamming it up like a grade-Z Barrymore, leads a detachment of bumbling Mexican Keystone Kops to his rescue. This bizarre inconsistency was largely due to the meddling of Hughes, who cared more about the packaging of Jane Russell’s bosom than about plot coherence; Mitchum later said that much of the film was made up as they went along, and the shoot (like Where Danger Lives, it was directed by John Farrow) was long, drawn-out and messy. But the disjointed, surreal, half-drunk quality of the script (in one scene Mitchum deadpans, “Whenever I have nothing to do and I can’t think, I always iron my money”) contributes to the sense that south of the border the noir world takes on a different cast: still violent and corrupt, drenched in sex and money; but also delirious, nonsensical, deranged, like a menacing carnival. Homelessness and exile haunt Mitchum’s films, and he was repeatedly cast as a man without a country. In Josef von Sternberg’s Macao (1952), which reunited Mitchum with Jane Russell, he’s a Nick Cochran, man roaming Asia, who can’t return to America because

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there’s a warrant out for him. His alienation goes deeper than his status as a wanted man; he tells Julie Benson (Russell), “I’ve been lonely in Times Square on New Year’s Eve.” The Wonderful Country (1959), which Mitchum produced through his independent DRM Productions, again cast him as stateless, and it provides the fullest expression of his complex relationship with Mexico. He’s a man who made it to safety there after killing his father’s murderer, stayed on and went native. Some 20 years later he crosses the Rio Grande again on an errand for his employers, the Castro family, a powerful military-political-criminal syndicate. Under a battered sombrero his face is dusty, weathered, creased with sadness. A disdainful American who sees him wonders what “a Mexican” is doing with such a magnificent horse — a black Arabian steed named Lagrimas (“Tears”), a gift from the Castros that suggests he has done more than run errands for them. A tumbleweed rolling through the billows of dust is a clear stand-in for Mitchum’s character Martin Brady, a man drifting with the winds through an empty border land. But the tumbleweed forces him to face his dual identity when it causes his horse to shy and he’s thrown off, breaking his leg. He’s more worried about Lagrimas than himself. The horse is “the only thing I’ve got in the world.” Once he’s back in America, he gradually loses his Mexican accent and trades his sombrero for a respectable Stetson. He learns that he’s no longer wanted for the killing that prompted his exile; it was ruled justifiable homicide shortly after he fled. He now faces a choice between America and Mexico, and finds himself in the middle of a tug-ofwar over his loyalties. He’s useful to both sides because of his bilingual, culturally ambidextrous nature, but no one quite trusts or respects him. He keeps being told, “Go back where you belong,” or “You belong to the Castros,” or “You belong nowhere.” His past repeats itself when he’s forced into a gunfight and kills someone; he flees back to Mexico, but realizes that if he stays there he will become merely a killer for hire. The “wonderful country” is haunted by homesick, dislocated and dejected people. There’s the lonely German immigrant who befriends Martin, and the black cavalry sergeant, a “buffalo soldier” (played by baseball legend Leroy “Satchel” Paige) whose troops have all been wiped out by Apache. “I don’t know what to do,” he confesses. “I don’t know where I am.” There’s the upright military commander from Martin’s home state of Missouri, whose wife’s notorious infidelities have forced them to travel west where they’re not known. The wife ( Julie London) compares her addiction to illicit romances to Martin’s dependence on his gun, concluding, “But then we all fail ourselves, don’t we?” In the end Martin leaves behind a Mexican family that has generously sheltered him, shoots his beloved, fatally wounded horse, throws down his guns and his sombrero, and wades into the Rio Grande. The film leaves him in the middle of the river, a man without possessions or connections, standing between worlds.

“A Bright, Guilty World”: Orson Welles in Mexico Like Out of the Past, Orson Welles’s The Lady from Shanghai (1948) is a peripatetic film noir, moving from New York to San Francisco via a pleasure cruise through the Caribbean on a yacht called the Circe. It also has a plot so incomprehensible it makes Out

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“I was not in my right mind for some time.” Elsa Bannister (Rita Hayworth) seems at home in the “crazy house” in The Lady from Shanghai (Orson Welles, 1948).

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of the Past seem simple as a bedtime story; Elsa Bannister’s plot to dispose of her husband and frame her lover, with the aid of a third sucker, is convoluted to point of incoherence. Some of the impenetrability may come from the way the studio cut down and edited Welles’s original vision; and as with other Welles projects, the shoot was beset with problems, including heat, illness, death (a cameraman keeled over from a heart attack), and the drunken shenanigans of Errol Flynn, whose yacht was used for the Circe. Welles and Rita Hayworth were on the point of divorce, so their collaboration was inevitably uncomfortable. As Kevin Jack Hagopian put it in Images Journal (Issue 2), “Shooting was plagued with so many disasters and rancorous personal squabbles that The Lady from Shanghai seems more like a documentary of its own making than a fiction film.” Chaos and futility are the whole point. The legendary “crazy house” sequence that concludes the film gives material form to the noir predicament. The hero literally — not metaphorically — moves through a maze of shadows, plunges through a trapdoor and down a chute, and winds up in a hall of mirrors where it is impossible to tell reality from reflection, to distinguish the true person from the illusion. Confronted with fun-house phantasmagoria and the bottomless deception of the femme fatale, Michael O’Hara (Welles) declares rather obviously, “Either me or the rest of the whole world was absolutely insane.” It’s in Acapulco, where Jeff met Kathie, that O’Hara first gets a glimpse of the deadly labyrinth into which he’s being led. The sun shines on white adobe walls and palm trees and the ocean dazzling far below, but the creepy, crowing lunacy of Grisby (Glenn Anders) gives the whole scene a sinister mood and the luscious landscape turns unstable and vertiginous. Leading the bewildered O’Hara along a path at the top of a cliff, Grisby gradually reveals that he wants to hire him to kill — Grisby. He’s obsessed with the bombs that he’s convinced will wipe out all cities soon, a chilling thought in a vacation paradise. “There’s a fair face to the world, but it can’t hide the hunger and guilt,” O’Hara muses. “It’s a bright, guilty world.” Anders’s sweaty, squinty face — always shot in disturbingly tight close-ups — and his nasal, abrasive falsetto; his deranged cheer and malicious cunning are so repellent that no sensible person would make a deal with him; yet he’s so bizarrely off-kilter that it’s almost possible to believe he really does want to be killed. Later he says he only wants to fake his death in order to disappear to the smallest island in the South Seas, where he can live in peace. Grisby shares this fantasy with John in Nightfall and Lenore in His Kind of Woman (and even with Frank, a feisty, toothless little bum in Lionel Rogosin’s 1957 documentary On the Bowery, who spends his days collecting cardboard on a pushcart, and claims that as soon as he can get some money together he will ship out for the South Seas and live under a coconut tree). The simple island life is imagined as an antidote to the noir world. When Lenore stands on the beach at Morros Lodge and dreams of sailing off to some Pacific island where she could start afresh, Milner sets her straight with another version of the Mitchum refrain: “You’re not going to find a thing there but yourself.” Elsa (Rita Hayworth) has learned the same thing; she tells Michael, himself a roving Irish sailor, “Running away doesn’t work. I tried it. Everything is bad. Everything. You can’t fight it. You have to accept it, make terms.” Noir often exploited exotic locations (as Sternberg did in The Shanghai Gesture and

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Macao— O’Hara labels the latter the wickedest city in the world), but Welles creates not an alluring mystique but an overwhelming and uncanny sense of otherness. In Acapulco, Elsa and Michael talk about suicide as they wend their way through darkened arcades plastered with torn posters (foreshadowing the look of Los Robles in Touch of Evil). Threatening drums pulse in the background and suspicious characters flit about the alleys. Toward the end of the film, when O’Hara escapes from the courtroom where he’s being tried for killing Grisby, he runs through San Francisco’s Chinatown and winds up in a theater watching the arcane, stylized ritual of Peking opera. The blonde, white–Russian Elsa, who once worked in Shanghai, speaks Chinese as she searches for him, becoming even more foreign (to Michael and the non–Chinese speaking viewer), more remote and inscrutable. Her face is as mask-like as the painted faces of the actors. We never find out what Elsa did in Shanghai, or what her husband used to blackmail her into marrying him, but Hayworth’s glacial, hollowed-out impassivity suggests a woman who, somewhere in the course of her extensive travels, mislaid her soul. She is, of course, a version of Circe, the Homeric sorceress who transformed men into beasts. Michael goes beyond finding the Bannisters and Grisby foreign; he sees them as inhuman, cold-blooded monsters. He compares them to the most horrible sight he’s ever seen, sharks in a feeding frenzy, gnawing on their own flesh and staining the sea with blood. Later he meets Elsa in an aquarium and they kiss in the rippling light in front of tanks full of sea turtles, manatees and shimmering fish. This flamboyant symbolism captures the way the alien simultaneously attracts and repels, fascinates and disgusts. It’s never safe to explore the unknown, to be seduced by the strange, to cross the border into a different country. The only way to stay out of trouble, Michael sadly concludes, is to stay home and grow old. Throughout Welles’s Touch of Evil (1958), people go back and forth between the U.S. and Mexico in the border town of Los Robles. The international crossing-point is well-marked and guarded, but there are other kinds of borders besides those between countries. Boundaries between races and sexes, between right and wrong, between reality and insanity shift and blur, are porous and violated. The people living in this swirl of confusion cling to strict, simple ideas: ethnic superiority, the sanctity of the law, the certainty of guilt, personal loyalty, the safety of home. They stand sentinel on these borders, as solid lines fracture and dissolve around them. Space in the films of Orson Welles is complex, fragmented and subjective, just like narrative. The geography in Touch of Evil isn’t laid out as on a map; it’s a dreamscape warped and molded by the characters moving through it. This is partly a result of Welles’s chameleon-like camera, which forces our perception of an event to mimic the quality of the event. For example, the famously sinuous, unbroken tracking shot that opens the film, following a car with a ticking time bomb in its trunk, shatters when the car explodes, replaced by shaky handheld footage and rapid editing. The eruption that scatters and confuses the smoothly flowing crowd shakes up the film itself, and introduces us to a violently unstable world prone to epileptic fits, sudden seizures and frenzies. The result, and perhaps the purpose of Welles’s style is disorientation: spaces feel off-kilter, discontinuous, producing a constant sense of menace and unease. Characters keep saying things like, “What am I doing here?” and “What does this have to do with me?” It’s as though the

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whole film were taking place, like the end of The Lady from Shanghai, in a carnival fun house full of distorting mirrors, sudden horrors, optical illusions, tawdry spectacle and grotesque humor. We enter the labyrinth with the opening shot, which establishes a deep and fantastically intricate space. The streets of Los Robles (really Venice, California) are lined with arcades, rows of white columns supporting round arches, evoking both classical ruins and flimsy amusement-park architecture. The fluid crane shot captures a seething blend of cultures: Mexicans driving goats and trundling decorated pushcarts, rich Americans in finned convertibles. Even the music is an overlapping collage of Latin jazz and rock and roll. The Mexican side of Los Robles, marked by a billboard announcing, “Welcome, stranger!” is a crowded visual and aural cacophony of smoky strip clubs and neon “Jesus Saves” signs. The walls are covered with layers of shredded, flaking handbills, forming a leprous, ravaged surface. (In a very nasty joke, a poster advertising the burlesque dancer Zita, who has just been incinerated in the car bomb, is burned by a bottle of acid.) The streets are littered with junk and detritus, newspapers floating past like tumbleweeds. At the edges the town just dissolves into blackness, giving way to towering oil derricks on the banks of a sludgy, polluted river. It is always night on this side of the border. “This isn’t the real Mexico,” the clean-cut police detective Miguel Vargas (Charlton Heston) assures his uncomfortable American bride, Susie ( Janet Leigh). The bomb that explodes just as they are about to kiss separates the newlywed couple, who have just crossed over to the American side so that Susie can get a chocolate soda. Vargas gets involved with the investigation of the bombing while his abandoned wife is drawn into an escalating nightmare. Heston and Leigh are the film’s ostensible stars, but they mainly serve to set off everything around them with their healthy, well-groomed, movie-star good looks, their innocence and uprightness. As Terry Comito wittily puts it (in his excellent essay from the Rutgers Films in Print series), their story is “about a nice couple from Hollywood movies who stumble into a film by Orson Welles.” The fact that Heston is quite obviously not Mexican (he has his hair dyed black, eyebrows thickened and skin darkened; Welles convinced him not to use any accent) feels appropriate to his colorless character, and also fits the strange international community of expatriates that Welles assembled: German-accented Marlene Dietrich as a gypsy brothel owner, Zsa Zsa Gabor as the blonde mistress of a cabaret, Mercedes McCambridge as a leather-jacketed Mexican lesbian, and Akim Tamiroff as the ethnically indeterminate Uncle Joe Grandi. Janet Leigh’s part foreshadows her signature role in Psycho (her line about going to an American motel because “I’ll be safe there” is doubly ironic in retrospect), but has none of the dimensions of the Hitchcock character. Susan Vargas is the pinup girl as girlnext-door, an embodiment of American naïvité whose illusions of privilege are demolished by the reality of her vulnerability. At first we don’t like her much: when she’s approached by a handsome and sinister Mexican hood (Valentin de Vargas), her reaction is condescending (“Lead on, Pancho”), and her confidence makes her seem spoiled and oblivious. When she tells Uncle Joe Grandi — who has summoned her to relay the message that her husband should lay off his brother, whom Vargas has nailed on a narcotics charge — that he has been watching too many gangster movies, she inadvertently hits on a truth, both about the buffoonish Grandi, who is really something of a paper tiger, and about the way

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the film constantly verges on parody. Its genre elements are smothered by a theatrical, baroquely excessive, self-parodying tone. Separated from her husband, Susie suffers a gradual invasion of her privacy, space and sanity. Nothing is what it seems; she’s harassed and framed by enemies of her husband, a pawn in a game she never understands. She assumes that “Pancho” is following her because he wants to pick her up; when someone shines a flashlight in the window of her hotel room while she’s changing, she thinks it’s just a Peeping Tom. When another Grandi minion appears outside the plate-glass window of the hotel lobby she waves him away, saying, “I don’t want any more postcards.” He gives her a photograph furtively taken of her and Pancho, accompanied by the mocking note, “With a million kisses.” The picture is part of a plot to frame Susie as a drug addict, but its real purpose is a teasing reminder to Susie that she is not in control of her image. The camera ogles Janet Leigh and the film plays with her appearance, overdoing her objectification-by-the-male-gaze to the point of satire. When she talks on the phone to Vargas from her motel room, she lounges on the bed in a lacy white bustier, a husband’s fantasy. When she’s surrounded and attacked by a gang of leather-jacketed Mexican greasers, she’s wearing a high-necked nightie, virginal and girlish.

The dangers of an open border: Susie (Janet Leigh), drugged on the bed, is observed by Capt. Hank Quinlan (Orson Welles, center) and Uncle Joe Grandi (Akim Tamiroff, right) in Touch of Evil (Orson Welles, 1958).

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Susie is always near windows: the hotel window that has no shade, the plate-glass window through which she gestures uncomprehendingly at a messenger; the doors and windows through which the Night Man at the Mirador Motel keeps popping in and out while she tries to talk to him. Her motel room is progressively invaded: first by music blasting through a sound system she can’t turn off, then by the noisy party in the next cabin, then by a voice whispering at her through the wall, then by threatening gang members looming up outside the window, the rattling of the doorknob, and finally the gang entering her room and slowly surrounding her bed. Later, when she wakes in the Grandi hotel to find the corpse of Uncle Joe hanging over her head, she rushes out onto the fire escape, half-naked, where passing crowds laugh and point at her as she screams for help, a climax of the brutal gaze she’s been subject to throughout the film. She’s seen behind the bars of the bedstead in the room where she lies drugged, then on the cage-like fire escape, and finally behind the bars of a cell: imprisoned, yet cruelly visible to all. Susie’s plight is always related to being on display. Her husband makes a romantic speech about the U.S.-Mexico border, one of the longest open borders in the world, free of guard towers and guns. It is just this lack of protected boundaries that puts his wife at risk. The Mirador Motel on the American side of the border is the visual antithesis of Los Robles, yet it is an equally stylized setting. A cluster of bare little cabins stands in the middle of a vast, empty sweep of land. A few leafless, windswept saplings stand in front of the cabins; one road runs through the dry, scrubby, rolling country. Yet while it appears isolated to an almost absurd degree — an exact illustration of the middle of nowhere — the motel is owned by the Grandi family, so in running away from their harassment, Susie runs right into their hands. She can’t escape the circle of surveillance. The American side of the border has a clean, flat, drab, rectilinear look, in stark contrast to the decrepit rococo of the Mexican side. It is always glaring daytime here, a grid of streets lined with squat concrete cubes. Vargas, who comes from the seamy, nocturnal side of the border, is young and healthy and scrubbed and incorruptible, while his American counterpart, Police Captain Hank Quinlan (Welles), is a monument to extravagant decay. He unites two meanings of corruption: physical breakdown and the corrosion of truth, of reality itself, by power. A mountain of putrefying flesh; a crude, growling racist (he says things like “I don’t speak Mexican” and “Let’s get back to civilization,” and refers to Vargas as “this foreigner”), Quinlan is so unprepossessing that in another film he would surely reveal a heart of gold. But Welles was unafraid of overt allegory (a blind woman foregrounds a scene in which Vargas is unaware of his wife’s peril; Quinlan washes his bloody hands in filthy water, etc.) This is a film in which appearances, far from deceiving, advertise their owners’ natures the way the neon signs of Los Robles advertise strip joints and churches. Welles insisted that there was no ambiguity about Quinlan’s moral character: he is a pure embodiment of the abuse of government power, the oppression and hypocrisy of the police state. Vargas’s idealistic speeches about the supremacy of law in a free country are indisputably right, Quinlan’s convenient mumbo jumbo about intuition and his selfrighteous certainty in pronouncing guilt are unquestionably wrong. He has made a legendary reputation for himself as a detective who always gets his man, by planting evidence and framing suspects he “knew” were guilty. He disdains “idealists” like Vargas who insist

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on doing everything by the book. The bloated Quinlan is a scabrous caricature of the tough western sheriff who follows his own code. He justifies himself with constant, selfpitying reminders that his wife was murdered and he, then a rookie cop, was unable to bring her killer (a “half-breed”) to justice. The film pointedly does not tell us whether Quinlan was right about his wife’s killer or any of the other men he framed, including Sanchez, the shoe clerk he fingers for planting the car bomb. Yet Quinlan inspires, if not sympathy, then at least pity because of his age and frailty and vulnerability. He is a living ruin, his huge bulk surrounding an inconsolable loss and absence. His nostalgia and mourning for the past are lyrically embodied by the pianola in Tanya’s brothel. The shot of the machine, keys depressing without a player, cranking out an old-fashioned, sentimental melody, is a perfect poetic image of memory and the persistence of ghosts. Tanya (Marlene Dietrich) explains that her customers like the pianola because it’s “so old it’s new.” The brothel is cluttered with faded pictures, loudly patterned wallpaper, stained-glass lampshades, knick-knacks: but there is also a television on which patrons can watch movies. A stone-faced sibyl, got up in Hollywood gypsy finery (Dietrich wore the wig that had been made for her 1947 film Golden Earrings), Tanya is refreshingly unsentimental, summing up Quinlan’s dilapidated corpulence with the terse comment, “You’re a mess, honey,” and advising him to “lay off those candy bars.”3 He holes up in the brothel when he can’t face the present, marinating in memories of vanished youth. Recognizing that the past is now all he has, Tanya voices one of the canonic noir lines when Quinlan asks her to read his fortune and she demurs: “You haven’t got any. You’re future is all used up.” The film’s ambivalence lies not with Quinlan and Vargas; it lies with Pete Menzies ( Joseph Calleia), the hero-worshipping deputy whose relationship with Quinlan echoes that of Holly Martins with Welles’s Harry Lime in The Third Man. Both of these naïve men end up betraying their best friends, driven partly by moral disapproval, but perhaps more by personal feelings of disillusionment, resentment and envy. Menzies comes across as a dumb, gullible kid brother, beaming when Quinlan allows him to find the dynamite he has planted in Sanchez’s apartment, eagerly telling people how his boss once stopped a bullet meant for him, and how bravely he has conquered his alcoholism. When he hunts for Quinlan in the bars of Los Robles (he only drinks on the Mexican side of the border, that looking-glass nightworld where rules don’t apply), he’s more like a worried parent of a troubled child. Menzies known his boss better than the other toadying American officials who idolize him; when Quinlan threatens to turn in his badge, wounded because they have agreed to listen to Vargas’s accusations, they fall all over themselves to apologize. Even Schwartz, the faceless, bespectacled D.A.’s assistant who helps Vargas, announces at the end that Sanchez has confessed, and marvels that Quinlan was right after all; he was a great detective. Whether or not the viewer believes this (Sanchez may well have just broken under interrogation), Schwartz’s admiration makes him seem like another dupe. The investigation of the bombing is really a “MacGuffin,” a plot device that serves to set the conflict between Quinlan and Vargas in motion. Quinlan has spent so many years bending the facts to reflect his own beliefs that he now views reality through the distorting lens of his prejudices. He knows himself to be

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“Your future is all used up.” Tanya (Marlene Dietrich) tells Hank Quinlan’s fortune in Touch of Evil (Orson Welles, 1958).

incorruptible — after all, he has never taken a bribe — so when he agrees to collaborate with Grandi to frame Vargas and his wife, he cuts himself off from the truth irrevocably. He really seems to believe his assertion that Vargas is a delusional drug addict, and confides that he saw a hypodermic needle with his own eyes. Does he kill Uncle Joe to eliminate the one man who knows the truth? This murder can seem like a gratuitous flourish for both the director and the killer. Shot in the intermittent light of a neon sign, as a lurid series of violent flashes, it plays like the bad-trip hallucination of Susie, who tosses on the bed, coming out of her drugged sleep. The murder plays some murky part in Quinlan’s scheme, but it also seems he is acting out a long-standing dream. To take a life, to get away with murder, is the ultimate expression of power. In strangling his victim, he puts himself in the place of the man who killed his wife, a move that suggests his fascination with that crime is more perverse than simple grief or anger. His pursuit of criminals has brought him closer and closer to them, until he has crossed over into the place of those he has vowed to capture. It is the evidence of Quinlan’s complicity in this murder and the plot against Susie that convinces Menzies to turn against his beloved captain. As he watches Vargas comfort his terrified wife in her cell, forced at last to face Quinlan’s victims, he is stricken just as

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Holly Martins is when Major Calloway takes him to the hospital to see the children sickened by Lime’s penicillin racket. That Quinlan’s cane is found in the room where the murder was committed is fitting; Menzies, who has spent much of the film trying to get the cane back to his forgetful boss, is its human equivalent. He has been propping up the ruined hulk, trying to stave off the degradation of his reputation, his body and his mind. His motives in agreeing to help Vargas obtain evidence by secretly recording a conversation are not wholly pure, though Quinlan refers disgustedly to “that thing you’re wearing — that halo.” Menzies complains of being played for a sucker. His own identity is entirely tied up with Quinlan’s. He declares, “I am what I am because of him,” and it’s true: Quinlan has made him a prize chump. The climactic scene in which Vargas, clutching a recording device, trails Quinlan and Menzies as they talk, takes the fragmentation of space to its furthest limit. Vargas clambers over the skeletal towers of oil rigs, scuttles over and under and around obstacles, his movements filmed from extreme angles and choppily edited so that he seems to be moving through shards of space, able to see only what’s immediately in front of him. The recording machine, seen in close-up as he twiddles the dials, echoes the bomb in the film’s opening shot. It’s another instance of long-distance technology, like the telephone and the loudspeaker at the motel, all of which obscure and confuse communication rather than opening clear lines. The recording keeps vanishing into static. Vargas complains, “I hate this machine — spying, creeping.” His integrity as an upholder of law has already been dented when he barged into a cabaret and beat up the Grandi gang, crying, “I’m not a cop now, I’m a husband.” His eruption of violence is shot through a glittering fringe of beaded curtains that half conceal his actions. The final confrontation between Menzies and Quinlan comes on a bridge, another visual border, another image of tenuous connection. The film’s last and most blatantly symbolic setting is the garbage heap where Quinlan meets his end, collapsing amid old mattresses and rusting auto parts at the edge of a fetid, oily river in which he winds up floating like another piece of trash. He’s still convinced of his ability to shape the truth, certain he can frame Vargas for killing Menzies and get away with killing Vargas for resisting arrest. We’re left with the feeling that we’ve been played for suckers, too: despite all the horrors that were suggested, we learn that “nothing really happened” to Susie: she wasn’t raped or injected with drugs (only sodium pentathol), and the Grandi hoods were just putting on a show to scare her. She seems unscathed as they drive off, and Vargas tells his wife, “I’m taking you home.” The ending can seem like a cop-out, but it’s in keeping with the film’s emphasis on spectacle and illusion. The atmosphere of trickery and sleightof-hand reflects Welles’s fascination with magic, hoaxes and forgers, which he would explore most fully in the free-wheeling documentary F for Fake (1974). Tanya’s famous concluding eulogy (“He was some kind of a man. What does it matter what you say about people?”) is hardly profound, but it expresses a shrugging acceptance of ambiguity, an admission that, as Welles himself states in F for Fake, every story is some kind of lie.

CHAPTER 7

Lone and Level Sands: Desert Noir Few men realize that their life, the very essence of their character, their capabilities and their audacities, are only the expression of their belief in the safety of their surroundings. The courage, the composure, the confidence; the emotions and principles; every great and every insignificant thought belongs not to the individual but to the crowd; to the crowd that believes blindly in the irresistible force of its institutions and its morals, in the power of its police and of its opinion. But the contact with pure unmitigated savagery, with primitive nature and primitive man, brings sudden and profound trouble into the heart. To the sentiment of being alone of one’s kind, to the clear perception of the loneliness of one’s thoughts, of one’s sensations—to the negation of the habitual, which is safe, there is added the affirmation of the unusual, which is dangerous; a suggestion of things vague, uncontrollable, and repulsive, whose discomposing intrusion excites the imagination and tries the civilized nerves of the foolish and the wise alike. — Joseph Conrad, “An Outpost of Progress,” 1897

Vacations in the Waste Land The desert is a place defined by absence: the absence of water and vegetation, of people and man-made infrastructure. Its emptiness provokes a primal ambivalence: it can symbolize purity and patient resilience; or it can represent desolation, barrenness and death. Movie westerns found beauty in the stark, arid landscape of the American Southwest, a hard country fiercely loved by settlers for its sweep of open, undeveloped space. Film noir, which exploited the proximity and cheapness of desert settings, found something closer to the final scene of Erich von Stroheim’s silent masterwork Greed (1924). In a fight to the death over a sack of gold, one man ends up handcuffed to the corpse of another in Death Valley. Parched and glaring under a fatal sun, the landscape of rock without water or any sign of life pushes the spectacle of human reversion to savagery to delirious heights. T.S. Eliot brought similar scenery into “The Waste Land” (“a heap of broken images, where the sun beats, / And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief, / And the dry stone no sound of water”), using a sterile landscape to evoke the depletion and infertility of modern life. The “noble savage,” living in a pre-lapsarian Golden Age untainted by the ills of civilization, comes and goes like a mirage in the Western imagination. Celebrations of the natural (for instance, the hippie movement’s effort to escape the artificiality, inhibitions 159

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and unhealthiness of industrialized modernity) alternate with the Hobbesian view that life in a state of nature is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.” Film noir, which turned to the desert in the early fifties, managed to combine the pessimism of both sides. Civilization may be hopelessly corrupt, but away from laws and authorities, in places where money, education, class, and social contracts are meaningless, all power resides in violence and the willingness to use it. While the farmers, ranchers and lone gunmen of westerns are part of their landscape, working the land, conquering or molding to it, the urban exiles in desert noir are always out of place, pushed to a desperate extremity, unprepared to survive in a hostile environment. Filmed in black and white, the desert landscapes of California, Nevada and Mexico look like the surface of an alien planet. Out here, the illusory protections of society are stripped away and people are left to face their physical and moral vulnerability. They are stranded in space that is “large and without mercy,” as Charles Olson wrote. The wheels of their cars spin futilely in sand, engines break down in the heat, ordinary injuries become life threatening, and vicious human predators roam freely. In two films released in 1953, Jeopardy and The Hitch-Hiker, vacationing Americans on fishing trips in Mexico encounter “primitive man” in the person of criminal sociopaths who take advantage of their isolation. Jeopardy opens with a reassuringly trite voiceover by a housewife, Helen Stilwin (Barbara Stanwyck), setting out on a vacation with her husband and young son. Sounding like a spokeswoman for General Motors, she tells us, “Vacation time in the United States means traveling, and traveling in the U.S. is wonderful. Fill your gas tank and hit the road. The big rolling freeways, the fantastic traffic patterns, monuments to a civilization that moves on wheels.” Under her words, the camera pans over spaghetti-knotted freeways and hundreds of cars parked in huge lots. “Something happens to you when you cross the border into another country,” she tells us, without specifying what, and she goes on to offer a conventional postcard of Tijuana: “fun, like a carnival ... a boom town with tourists as oil wells.” The happy American family strolls past street vendors and souvenir shops and neon signs for racetracks and cabarets. But this is not the holiday they want; they drive farther south down a long, straight road through naked hills, rocks and cactus: a “road of dust and desolation,” in Stanwyck’s words. Their goal is a remote beach where they plan to camp in a cove adorned with a few derelict houses and a crumbling, half-ruined pier. Helen’s husband, Doug (Barry Sullivan), marvels at “all this wonderful privacy,” but the haven becomes deadly when part of the pier collapses, pinning him on the beach. He’s unharmed, but they can’t lift the massive column, and the incoming tide will drown him in a few hours. So, with Junior staying behind to keep his dad company, Helen takes the car and races off down the dirt road in search of help. She meets some peasants but can’t speak Spanish and quickly gives up trying to make them understand. The nearest gas station is abandoned, like an outpost in a war zone — until, as Helen rummages for a rope, a man looms up outside the window. The good news is he’s American; the bad news is he’s an escaped convict who has just left the gas station owner lying dead, and who is interested only in making it to safety. Lawson (Ralph Meeker) takes Helen hostage and they drive off in her car, as she pleads with him to return to the beach and help rescue her husband. She says she’s in

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trouble; he shrugs, “Aren’t we all?” When Meeker materializes, he revs up what has been a fairly vacuous little movie. Though he’s a remorseless killer, Lawson has an undeniable charm, and brings a much-needed dose of cynical humor. When Helen reveals her trump card — that her child, too, is stranded on the beach with his soon-to-die father — Lawson says dismissively, “Frankly, I’m not a family man.” Getting a whiff of the expensive perfume she bought in Tijuana, he confesses, “I like cheap perfume. It don’t last as long but it hits harder.” He hasn’t seen a woman in a long time, and he soon takes a fancy to the middleaged housewife, telling her she’s “built for speed” and that he likes smart women, because “they got cat in them.” This chiseled bad boy seems to spark something in Stanwyck, who starts acting like a sultry, hard-boiled dame instead of a cheerful mom. Ostensibly, she has decided to seduce the thug into helping her, draping herself against the car as she purrs, “I’d do anything to save my husband. Anything.” Though the film cuts discreetly away from the steamy clinch that follows, the implication is clear: she gives herself to her captor and promises to remain with him if he will first rescue her husband. The film takes a strange turn at this point, attempting to recover the upbeat tone of the opening section. The resourceful convict does manage to free the trapped husband, and when he realizes that Helen is willing to follow through with her promise without whining or pleading, he turns decent and lets her go, leaving Junior to remark, “He was a swell guy,” as he drives off, presumably to be captured by the police. Stanwyck concludes in voiceover: “I’d always wondered what I would do if it ever came to something like this. I wonder if every wife wonders.” Suddenly, instead of a woman’s nightmare the incident turns into a housewife’s fantasy: sex with a dangerous young hunk justified as sacrifice to save her husband. MGM, which gave the film its glossy sheen and reluctance to follow its grim premise to a natural conclusion, surely did not have this interpretation in mind, though it clearly intends us to admire Stanwyck for her noble act. The foreign country, the isolating wilderness, and the life-or-death challenge merely provide a backdrop for a sheltered woman to enjoy an adventurous fling without consequences. The Hitch-Hiker, directed by Ida Lupino and produced by The Filmmakers, the independent company she formed with Collier Young and Howard Duff,1 takes a similar premise and tracks it with raw, unblinking candor. The story was inspired by a real case from 1950 of a serial killer, William Cook, who roamed the Southwest, preying on those who offered him rides. A misanthropic loner, he explained his crime spree tersely: “I hate everybody’s guts and everybody hates mine.”2 Lupino’s film opens with the road at night and a pair of feet walking, prowling like some nocturnal hunter. The friendly souls who stop to pick this man up are soon lying dead as he rifles their wallets. Like Detour and The Devil Thumbs a Ride (alluded to when a radio announcer declares, “The devil thumbed another ride today.”), The Hitch-Hiker warns of the danger of benevolent impulses; no one who sees it will ever again pull over to give a lift to a guy who looks down on his luck. Roy and Gil (Edmond O’Brien and Frank Lovejoy) are middle-aged buddies who leave their wives behind for a fishing trip on the Mexican coast. There is no chipper vacation mood as in Jeopardy; the men seem tired and grumpy as they drive through the night,

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and the difference in their characters is immediately apparent. Roy grins lasciviously at the thought of stopping for a drink in Mexicali and looking up “Florabel,” while Gil, a family man who just wants to fish, gloomily remarks, “She’s probably dead — that was a long time ago,” and later pretends to be asleep so they won’t have to stop in a cabaret. Driving on, they stop to pick up Emmett Myers (William Talman), the wily, inhuman killer. He takes the two men hostage, forcing them to travel through godforsaken back country, far from any possible help. Though Myers is from Kansas and has traveled widely, he seems like a native of the desert, a personification of the harsh, otherworldly landscape. His reptilian face, distorted by a drooping eyelid and set in a habitual expression of brutish disgust (he smiles only when he is making his captives suffer), resembles the rough, irregular crags of rock that loom up around the lonely road. Nicholas Musuraca films many of the driving scenes in extreme long-shot as the dust-streaked car moves through a vast, unromantic landscape of stony outcrops and low shrubs. The nights are blindingly dark. Vultures circle above, and after the car breaks down and the men trudge through the desert, they drag their long shadows over white earth webbed with cracks. The country looks prehistoric, a fit setting for a battle between cavemen. Perhaps only a woman like Lupino could so pitilessly dissect the dynamics of masculine competition. Roy and Gil are full-grown American males robbed of their independence and self-respect, two of the least heroic heroes in classic cinema. Myers gives orders, telling the men when to move and where to put their hands, and taunts them with their helplessness. Sadistic and obsessed with asserting his superiority, he plays with them like a cat with mice. Infuriated because Roy dared to mock him for missing a rabbit he fired at, he insists on testing his skill against theirs, forcing Gil to shoot a can out of Roy’s hands just to see them sweat. He takes advantage of the fact that his damaged eye never closes, so that they can never be sure if he’s asleep, and he presents himself as a superman. “You guys are soft ... you’re suckers. You’re afraid to go out on your own,” he torments his captives, boasting, “No one ever gave me anything, so I don’t owe nobody.” To receive gifts shows weakness and puts you in debt to people; he is proud of the fact that the best watch he ever owned was stolen. He recites one of the mantras of film noir: “When you’ve got the know-how and a few bucks in your pocket, you can buy anything, or anybody.” Myers never softens or displays any glimmer of humanity; he dismisses his family — he didn’t need them — and shows no interest in women. Even money matters less to him than power. Crime, he believes, is the ultimate form of self-reliance. Yet he keeps the men alive longer than seems necessary, and since he has to constantly hold them at gunpoint, he orders them to perform every simple task, dependent on them as though he were crippled. Perhaps, for all his boasts of independence, he needs an audience, needs the presence of weaker men to make him feel strong. He tells them that if they weren’t foolishly loyal to each other, one would have gotten away. Gil insists they should stick together and not take foolish chances, but Roy, the more hot-tempered and macho of the two, is goaded to the breaking point by Myers and falls for his line of reasoning. To prove his own masculinity he needs to escape or overcome his captor. “From now on we’re each on our own,” he tells his buddy, and makes a futile run for it, only succeeding in spraining his ankle. Gil saves him by knocking him out

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“Primitive man” and his civilized captives: Gil (Frank Lovejoy, right) supports his wounded friend Roy (Edmond O’Brien, center) as both are held at gunpoint by Emmett Meyers (William Talman, left) in The Hitch-Hiker (Ida Lupino, 1953) (courtesy Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences).

before he can attack Myers. Gil is not only more prudent, he’s capable of thinking about others: he protects a little girl from Myers, and surreptitiously leaves his inscribed wedding ring on a pump at a last-chance gas station, so that his wife will know what happened to him. The Hitch-Hiker has elements of a police procedural, with scenes interspersed to follow the pursuit of the Mexican police, who search for the car with helicopters and cleverly broadcast false news reports on the radio to mislead Myers into thinking he’s safe. This lets us know the men are not really alone in their plight, but the film does not spend unnecessary time following the law-enforcement side, and there are no scenes of the men’s wives worrying over their fate. Apart from the little Mexican girl, not a single woman appears in the film; Lupino may have been determined to prove herself as a director not limited by her gender, but more importantly she keeps the focus narrowly on the intense psychological struggle between captor and captives. The film is stripped-down without feeling cheap, and all three actors rise to the scrutiny they receive. Talman, a versatile actor who could play anything from a fresh-faced rookie cop to a suavely crooked lawyer, makes Myers the stuff of night terrors, monstrous and yet completely believable. Lovejoy, whose average looks and low-key style could sometimes be bland, is quietly heroic in his patience and maturity, his sadness at the thought of his family setting off his friend’s more self-centered anger. O’Brien, always a sweaty, worked-up actor, makes Roy’s psychological breakdown pathetic and painfully truthful.

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The degree to which Roy is gradually turning into Myers is manifest when the hitchhiker forces his hostage to change clothes with him. In the end it’s the calm and compassionate Gil who overpowers Myers — through force, by knocking the gun out of his hand while he’s distracted — but Roy seizes the chance to beat him savagely once he’s been captured and is writhing in his handcuffs like a wild animal. The police have to pull Roy off, and Myers spits at him. In the film’s last line Gil says consolingly, “It’s all right now, Roy, it’s all right,” but the words only accentuate a feeling that, for Roy at least, it may never be all right again: his identity has been permanently damaged. The story of “a man and a gun, and a car” ends on a bleak note: all that really matters is who holds the gun. The desert is a test of character, a theme explored thoroughly in Roy Baker’s Inferno (also 1953), which suggests that Caught’s Smith Ohlrig could have been cured by undertaking an Outward Bound experience. Robert Ryan plays another neurotic, abrasive millionaire spoiled by his riches; when he’s thrown from his horse on a camping trip and breaks his leg, his wife and her lover seize the opportunity to abandon him, certain he will die in the desert. Determined to survive and get revenge, the pampered scion reveals untapped reserves of grit, resourcefulness, humor, and sheer cussedness, setting his own leg, improvising ropes and crawling down jagged canyons, eating cactus and dried deer meat. His agonizing ordeal is intercut with accusatory scenes of the guilty lovers enjoying cool drinks, steak dinners and sparkling swimming pools. Ragged but proud, the millionaire is finally rescued by a scruffy old prospector who lives in a tiny shack in the middle of nowhere, and who tells him that you can’t fight the desert, but if you work with it, “She’s got everything a man needs.” A vivid, gripping action picture, Inferno was filmed in color and 3D, opening out the enormous emptiness of the desert. The horizon recedes while the rough, reddish rocks jut out into the audience; the viewer is drawn into the space, forced to experience with Ryan the heat, sand, rocks, prickles and daunting distances of the desert. “Boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away.” In the last lines of Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” the desert mocks human pride in the works of civilization. In the tiresomely pretentious poverty-row drama The Scarf (1951), these stark words are recited as an enticing slogan by a desert hermit so anti-social that he keeps no mirrors in the house because “even my own reflection is too much company,” but who turns out to be a cuddly guardian angel. An odd turkey, the film is confused enough to be interesting until its pat conclusion, though it suffers from the writers’ compulsive need to show off their intellectual credentials, resulting in a nervous, insistent talkiness. The Scarf concerns an escapee from an asylum for the criminally insane, which looms like a castle in the middle of a howling waste, where the wind scrapes the earth and broken stumps protrude from the naked sand. John Barrington ( John Ireland) somehow breaks loose from this fortress and is first seen running and crawling through the savage night, collapsing under a spiky cactus amid the disorienting gabble of what turn out to be several hundred turkeys. He comes to under the watchful gun of the farmer, Ezra Thompson ( James Barton), who claims he came out to the desert to be by himself, but whose loquacious monologue shows he desperately misses having someone to talk to. The cello-playing “sage of the sagebrush” is prone to philosophical musings and one-liners like, “Before a

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bullet all men are equal.” Explaining that he “knows what it is to be fenced in,” he chooses not to give away the convict, develops a fatherly fondness for him and puts him to work as a hired hand. Barrington claims he can’t remember the murder he’s supposed to have committed, which is why he wound up in the asylum rather than the electric chair. He has broken out, he swears, only to find out whether he really did it, and whether or not he’s insane. The farm, with its windmill and shacks standing in a blasted lunar waste, becomes a refuge. No one seems to be looking very hard for the escaped killer; the prison officials are a kindly, enlightened bunch, though Barrington’s wealthy adopted father puts up a $5,000 reward for his capture. Scant effort goes into making the far-fetched mystery convincing, and a snooty psychiatrist with an upper-crust British accent (Emlyn Williams) seems to have wandered in from some other movie. Far more screentime goes to Connie Carter (Mercedes McCambridge), a singing waitress whom John picks up as she’s hitchhiking in the desert in a sexy gang-moll outfit. Like Ezra she’s compulsively garrulous and chatters away to her silent host. She takes it for granted that any man who picks her up will make a pass, and insists that “my morals have no zipper,” but a strange scene follows in which she and John lie stretched out on the dirt for several hours, talking and napping. Connie recounts how she worked for a few weeks at a dude ranch but couldn’t stand the rural lifestyle, the smell of “milk and fertilizer,” and that she is on her way back to Los Angeles. John responds clumsily that, to him, the desert is “an image spelling freedom.” In town, John is beaten up by two drunken, giggling cowboys who just want a good brawl, and the sheriff who shows up to stop the fight runs Connie out of town for no reason; before she leaves, she thinks long and hard about turning John in for the five thousand. Community, it is plain, has little to offer, and once his case has been cleared up, John and Ezra happily head back home to the desert, where the young man apparently looks forward to spending the rest of his life feeding the turkeys and listening to his mentor quote Emerson amid the lone and level sands.

Vacancies Available: Ghost Towns Deserts preserve ruins and other evidence of the past; even footprints linger in lands without rain. Humbler than the massive, shattered monument of Ozymandias, western ghost towns mark failed communities built on shallow foundations, held together only by the hope of quick riches and abandoned once the mines ran dry. During the Second World War, the desert attracted a new kind of boom town, likewise built around a single industry: the atomic bomb. (“Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.”) The military took advantage of uninhabited areas to do its dirty work in secrecy; the conveniently unoccupied desert became a playground for weapons tests. Split Second (1953), the accomplished directorial debut of actor Dick Powell, brings together the desert’s past and future, as two fugitives from a jailbreak hole up in a Nevada ghost town. They’re safe from discovery because the area has already been cleared for a bomb test; they plan to make their getaway before the explosion at dawn, but their hostages know they’re likely to be left

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behind in the blast zone. This premise is a gimmick to ratchet up suspense and add novelty to an over-used setup (essentially identical to that of the stagy, studio-bound 1936 desert-hostage drama The Petrified Forest); but the clash of the old West and the new, the combination of small-scale criminal brutality and scientific, government-sponsored annihilation makes for a striking alchemy. Under the credits, ant-like black figures run across a flat, glaring expanse of earth cracked like eggshell, their long black shadows straining ahead of them. (Again, Musuraca was behind the camera.) Helicopters sweep over the blank sands, looking for any sign of life, while roadblocks stop travelers from entering the area. The helicopter patrols take in Lost Hope City, a cluster of grey, weathered wood buildings around a weed-sprouting Main Street. The abandoned, decaying town foreshadows the cities that might be destroyed by nuclear warfare. All of the scientists and military men seen planning the test at the control center are benign, even comforting, figures, taking every precaution against killing innocent bystanders. But the purpose of their work is destruction and death on a scale beyond the wildest dreams of the misanthropic ringleader of the escapees or his mute, trigger-happy henchman Dummy, who wiles away the hours with a shotgun across his lap, reading comic books about Martian invaders. Sam Hurley (Stephen McNally), the ringleader of the criminals, is a war veteran who “hates heroes” and, for that matter, everyone else. Like Myers, he holds onto his hostages for no very good reason, explaining sarcastically, “I’m afraid to be alone.” His only loyalty is to Bart (Paul Kelly), the prisoner with whom he made his getaway; they seem to have a genuine bond of friendship. But even Bart finally turns against Sam, pulling a gun on him as they argue over whether to kill or release the hostages. The captives include a level-headed reporter and a wisecracking nightclub dancer who was hitching a ride with him, and a rich, faithless wife who was heading to Reno for a divorce with her stuffy boyfriend. She throws herself at Hurley even after he kills her lover, begging him to take her with him when he goes. She’s terrified of dying, but she’s also fascinated and perversely excited by the killer. Sam shows good taste, telling the spoiled rich woman, Kay, that she’s “a real bad dame — no one could depend on you for ten minutes,” and setting his sights instead on the hard-boiled but good-hearted dancer, a product of the slums of Pittsburgh. Rounding out the hostages are an old prospector who has been living in the ghost town since World War I, and Kay’s doctor husband, whom Hurley summons to treat the wounded Bart. As in other hostage dramas like Key Largo, the forced confinement and hours of waiting give the characters plenty of time to converse, argue, fall in love and ponder their fates. Asa Tremaine (Arthur Hunnicutt), the old prospector, is mostly a comic character, spouting tall tales about the Wild West era, when the saloon where they’re staying (the “Bonanza Bar”) was full of gunfights and dance-hall girls, when real men were unfazed by bullets —“used to dig them out and use them for watch fobs.” He’s like a time-traveler from the past, so when he speculates on what they could have done with a few nuclear weapons in the First World War, or laments how the bombs “tear this desert to pieces,” the anachronism accentuates the feeling all the characters have: that a weird and terrifying future has suddenly become the present, as though they’d walked into one of Dummy’s comic books. The official approach to the nuclear threat is determinedly cheerful. A radio

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The ghost town in the blast zone: (left to right) Kay (Alexis Smith), Arthur (Robert Paige), Bart (Paul Kelly), Dottie (Jan Sterling), Larry (Keith Andes) and Dummy (Frank de Kova) arrive in Lost Hope City several hours before a nuclear bomb test. Split Second (Dick Powell, 1953) (Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences).

announcer covering the event promises to give listeners up-to-date information on the time of the explosion, so that they can get up on their roofs and watch the blast, as if it were Fourth of July fireworks. In the end, the atomic bomb destroys the guilty while sparing the virtuous. Sam, Bart and Kay drive off in the only car, head the wrong way, and get stuck in the sand just yards from the bomb. The car is blown away like a burning leaf. Asa leads the others to shelter in an old mine, but when they emerge, their relief is subdued by the chilling spectacle. “Let’s take a look at the world of tomorrow,” the doctor says grimly, as they crawl out to survey the charred wasteland, silent under the blooming pillar of the mushroom cloud. Nothing is left of the town but smoking black stains on the earth. Another ghost town frames the final scenes of Joseph Losey’s The Prowler (1953, clearly the year of the desert), when an adulterous couple takes refuge in an abandoned Mojave desert village so that the woman can secretly give birth to their child. As in all of Losey’s films, places are more than just settings, they are projections of the people who live in them; set decoration is a form of character development. The key note all of the

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spaces in The Prowler is vacancy: a neon sign blinks the word outside a motel where the lovers spend their wedding night lying in twin beds listening to the rumble of cars on the highway. Made while Losey was already under investigation by HUAC, his last film before permanently decamping for Europe, The Prowler is a low-key but merciless indictment of middle-class American life as a pit of dissatisfaction, envy and destructive selfishness. Webb Garwoood (Van Heflin) is a brash, disgruntled cop, a one-time college sports hero who feels cheated of a life of ease and complains that he gets nothing but bad breaks. While Heflin’s performances in The Strange Love of Martha Ivers and Act of Violence play his average looks and nice-guy demeanor against hints of opportunism and moral weakness, Webb is a pure opportunist, sleazy and callous. He goes on a routine call to respond to a housewife’s complaint of a prowler lurking in the vacant lot (that motif again) beside her house. From the film’s opening moments it’s clear that Webb is the real prowler: he acts not like a concerned, professional policeman but like a guy on the make, lustfully surveying not only Susan Gilvray (Evelyn Keyes), the fragile blonde who made the call, but her luxurious Spanish-style house in the L.A. suburbs. In case we didn’t get the point, he looms up suddenly outside the bathroom window as Susan is describing the PeepingTom incident. The original prowler never appears in the film. Susan’s husband is an all-night D.J., and she spends her sleepless nights alone, listening to his disembodied voice on the radio. He has a corny shtick of describing the meals she cooks, creating a portrait of cozy domesticity that is never matched by what we see onscreen, and he ends each program with the faintly sinister sign-off, “I’ll be seeing you, Susan.” A would-be actress who realized she was “just a little short on talent,” she settled instead for the security of a home and family. But her husband is unable to have children, and her obvious lack of fulfillment makes her easy prey for Webb’s aggressive seduction. He keeps stopping by, ostensibly following up on the original complaint, but soon inviting himself in for meals and beers. When they discover they’re from the same town in Indiana he makes much of the coincidence, speaking of his homesickness and loneliness and longing for the good old days, though also noting with his habitual chip on the shoulder that she was from the nice part of town and he was from the wrong side of the tracks. She responds with a predictable bromide, “They say there are no native Californians.” Wistful and nervous, always stammering and trembling, Susan is unable to resist the forceful cop and they begin an affair. Men always treat her as a possession: she says her husband keeps her locked up and would kill her if he knew she were cheating, while Webb views her as almost indistinguishable from her comfortable stucco-and-red-tile home with its trophies of affluence, like a specially designed record player. The culture of chauvinism is accentuated by Webb’s genial, oblivious partner Bud (his dullness represented by his hobby of collecting rocks), who introduces his smarter wife as “my war department” and slaps her bottom. The emptiness of Susan’s life, as she wanders the house like a lost soul, echoes Webb’s sadly small, cheap dream of owning a motel near Las Vegas. Adultery and murder, deception and greed are commonplace in film noir, but The Prowler goes further in exposing how thin and shoddy the American ideal of success can be. Webb likes the idea of owning

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a motel because it would work for him even as he sleeps; he wants money and success without having to labor for them. He complains that all his father wanted from life was a $1.20 an hour union job; he could have made a fortune wildcatting, Webb claims, if he hadn’t been “afraid to lose his buck-twenty an hour.” But though he blames his father for his lack of ambition, Webb’s personality is perfectly captured by his small room in a cheap hotel, with the standard metal-barred bedstead and flowered wallpaper, a targetpractice poster on the wall with a gunshot through the heart. He lounges on the bed reading muscle magazines and shaving with an electric razor, too lazy and disgruntled to try for anything better despite his dreams of escaping the everyday. Webb and Susan are united by their sense of disappointment, but only Webb has the violent urge to break out and grab the things he wants. He takes advantage of his uniform and the non-existent prowler, concocting a disturbance and then arriving to investigate, “accidentally” shooting Susan’s husband when he comes out to look. Uncertain whether or not he’s guilty, Susan lies for him at the inquest, and when he’s acquitted, his fellow cops surround him, grinning and slapping him on the back. Even the dead man’s brother accepts the unlikely notion that the cop and the widow of the man he killed have fallen in love in the aftermath of the tragedy. They marry and use the insurance money to buy Webb’s dream, a tacky motor court. Everything seems to be going their way, until Susan announces that she’s pregnant; since it’s known that her husband was infertile, a birth too soon will give away their affair and arouse suspicion about Webb’s motives. His solution is bizarre, yet oddly fitting. They will move into one of the Mojave desert ghost towns Webb’s partner has told him about, and wait out the pregnancy in complete seclusion. The whole movie is strangely under-populated (the entire first half takes place at night), and the flight from civilization is a natural expression of the profound alienation the lovers have both exhibited from the start. At first their sojourn has a weirdly idyllic, holiday atmosphere. They settle in Calico, a long-abandoned mining town in the middle of nowhere; the sequence begins with a surreal shot of their dust-covered Cadillac nosing through the desert. As they stroll through the stony, bone-dry landscape, Susan admires the beauty of the desert and notes that it’s important for an expectant mother to be in a beautiful environment. Happy in their total isolation, they muse that their child’s birth will “increase the population of his home town by 33 1/3 percent.” They set up camp in a half-ruined building and dance to the phonograph, only to be spooked by the voice of Susan’s dead husband on the record, booming out over their private hide-away. (The radio voice of Gilvray was really that of Dalton Trumbo, one of the blacklisted Hollywood Ten, who also contributed uncredited to the screenplay.) As duststorms rage outside and tear at the sheets tacked up in the door, Susan struggles through a painful and difficult labor. Webb’s decision to summon a doctor seems to show a gleam of goodness in his character — he loves his wife and is willing to risk his safety to save her — but it turns out to be a stupid act of panic. Her labor pains are normal, but he’s convinced, with his usual sense of persecution, that “having a baby isn’t supposed to be like this.” When Susan, after giving birth, realizes that Webb intends to kill the doctor who helped her, she finally sees the truth about him: that he murdered her husband and lied to her about it. He justifies himself with the argument that everyone cheats:

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lawyers take bribes, clerks pilfer the cash register, businessmen fudge their taxes. “I was a cop — I used a gun.” This, presumably, is “The Cost of Living,” the film’s working title and an ironic refrain that runs throughout the script, as Susan’s husband recites in his nightly sign-off, “The cost of living is going down!” Until the last minute, the audience is left guessing whether Webb and Susan will end up affirming their love and dying in each other’s arms, or whether their relationship will turn out to be as shallow and false as the vapid, sentimental pop songs that form its theme music. Losey never made a film with a conventional love story, and repeatedly depicted what he called “the particular destruction and anguish and waste of most sexual relations.” Webb ends up fleeing after Susan stops him from killing the doctor, only to run into his partner, who has come looking for him. Marking his transformation into a hunted animal, a coyote howls as police sharpshooters close in on him. In a resonant image, he tries to scramble up a slope of scree, scrabbling and sliding back like an insect. A policeman calls “Halt!” three times before shooting him, just as Webb did when he shot Susan’s husband. Calico, the ruin of a community built on unsustainable dreams of easy money, now sitting vacant in the desert, is a bitterly appropriate place for the couple to end up. Though they conceived a child, their relationship was even more barren than Susan’s first, childless marriage.

The Locusts’ Carnival: Ace in the Hole The desert may lure vacationers with the promise of a tranquil retreat, but for Chuck Tatum (Kirk Douglas), a big-city newsman exiled to the hinterlands, it’s a “sun-baked Siberia.” Throughout Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole (1951), Tatum and Lorraine Minosa ( Jan Sterling), a bottle-blonde floozy stranded in the sticks by marriage, compete to see who can express greater contempt for New Mexico and all it represents. New York shines like a beacon to both of them, and when Lorraine’s husband is trapped in a collapsed cave, Chuck tells her, “There are three of us buried here.” The reporter and the housewife, no less than the hapless Leo Minosa, are suffocating, walled in by self-absorption and crushed by the pressure of their thwarted ambitions. As with Joe Gillis in Wilder’s previous film, Sunset Boulevard, we know at the start that Tatum has hit bottom because he no longer has a working car.3 Having broken down in the desert, Chuck is towed into Albuquerque, relaxing in his disabled vehicle and reading a paper as though he were in a chauffeured limousine. As he gets out of the car, he passes a group of Navajo Indians in traditional garb. He walks into a newspaper office and greets the first man he sees, a compositor with Native American features, with a mocking “How!” (“Good afternoon, sir,” the man replies dryly.) He makes fun of the embroidered sampler hanging on the wall (“TELL THE TRUTH”), then marches into the publisher’s office, flourishes a copy of the paper and scoffs, “Even for Albuquerque, this is pretty Albuquerque.” The film is not as one-sided as the chauvinistic New Yorker: the publisher, Mr. Boot (Porter Hall), despite his old-fashioned integrity and belt-and-suspenders caution, is unflustered by Tatum’s silver-tongued diatribe and well able to match wits with him. He hires the desperate reporter despite his past record — he’s been fired

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from 11 major papers for reasons ranging from adultery to drunkenness to provoking libel suits. Perhaps Boot assumes that there will be no opportunities for Tatum to get into trouble in such a one-horse town. For a year he’s proved right; the worst Tatum can do is pace the offices of the Albuquerque Sun Bulletin, decorated with a map of “New Mexico, the Land of Enchantment,” ranting about what’s wrong with the state (“Too much outdoors!”), extolling the glories of New York (“Give me those eight spindly trees in front of Rockefeller Center any day”), and lamenting the deprivations of a backwater where he can’t get chopped chicken livers or garlic pickles. He brims with contempt for the small ambitions and simple virtues of the people around him and dreams of one big story that will free him from this imprisonment and put him back on top. He fantasizes about a nice trunk murder (“I could do wonders with your dismembered body,” he leers at the fluttery spinster who seems to harbor a crush on him), a good nuclear disaster, or 50 rattlesnakes loose in Albuquerque, menacing schoolchildren. “Bad news sells best,” he tells his admiring protégé Herbie, “’Cause good news is no news.” Tatum’s flamboyance and scalding wit are irresistible, but he’s no lovable scoundrel. When he finally finds the story he’s been looking for, he’s willing to do anything to blow it up big enough and drag it out long enough to revive his career. Leo Minosa, buried alive in a cold, dusty cave, is his ace in the hole. Tatum himself compares the setup to the case of Floyd Collins, who was trapped in Crystal Cave in Kentucky in 1925, and whose story became a media sensation. A reporter who crawled in to interview him won a Pulitzer Prize; thousands of people gathered at the site and vendors arrived to sell them food and souvenirs. Collins died several days before rescuers reached him, and his brother later displayed his body in the cave in a glass-topped coffin; the body was stolen in 1929 and recovered minus a left leg. Wilder was also inspired by the 1949 case of a three-yearold girl who fell into an abandoned well in San Marino, California. Thousands of people gathered, drilling equipment was set up to sink a parallel shaft, and midgets, jockeys and circus-performing dwarfs showed up offering to be lowered into the well to rescue her. She, too, was dead by the time she was found. Wilder always insisted that the film was not hyperbolic or unfairly cynical, but an accurate depiction of postwar American culture. Ace in the Hole was his first project after splitting with his writing partner Charles Brackett, and it drew on his early career as a newspaperman in Berlin as well as his observations of his adopted country. After the film flopped, he stuck to adapting successful plays for a while before teaming with I.A.L. Diamond to produce his most popular comedies. While Double Indemnity and Sunset Boulevard are dark films, they don’t directly indict their audiences; with Ace in the Hole, his most caustic and unrelenting satire, he made the mistake of attacking the two groups necessary to a movie’s commercial success: the press and the general public. But Wilder was also, perhaps, indicting himself. The arrogant smart-ass Chuck Tatum, a man who knows how to feed the public the kind of stories they want, is an obvious alter ego. Hard to find for years until the Criterion Collection released it in 2007, Ace in the Hole developed a cult reputation for its scathing humor and its prophetic depiction of media frenzy, which has grown only more uncontrollable with the advent of cable news channels and the internet “blogosphere.” On its first release, however, insulted newspaper reviewers panned it and the public shunned such an unpleasant story.

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The film could have been set anywhere, but the New Mexico background exploits the bleakness of the desert, and in giving the story a western flavor Wilder hit Americans right in their most cherished myths. The film’s sour view of the West emerges through visual details and the masterfully designed setting of Escudero. After shooting the opening scenes on location in Albuquerque, the company moved to a desolate stretch of land near Gallup and constructed the ruined Indian cliff dwelling (a ringer for Arizona’s Mesa Verde) that clings to the underside of a sandstone mountain. The bare, concave rock face looms behind the Minosa trading post, a little one-story adobe shack painted with signs advertising gas, food and Indian curios. Old-fashioned gas pumps stand in front, and a sign offers free access to the ancient cliff dwelling. (Once publicity builds, the price goes up to 25 cents, then 50 cents, then a dollar.) A long straight road and a railroad track run parallel past the trading post; beyond that, a stretch of parched land spreads out to blocky mesas darkening the horizon. As Tatum turns Leo into front-page news, this empty land gradually fills up with cars, campers, tents, TV satellite trucks, mining equipment, and the coup de grace — a carnival with a Ferris wheel and circus tents. In one of the film’s most striking moments, Leo’s pitiful, gimpy father, eagerly bringing food to the drillers working to rescue his son, turns and surveys this panorama: the rows of parked cars, milling crowds, revolving wheel, and a train chugging up with black smoke streaming from the locomotive. The camera jumps in to reveal that the train bears a banner, “Leo Minosa Special.” In time to bouncy, hypnotically mindless music, crowds pour out and stream towards the macabre carnival like vacationing ghouls. They run blindly past Indians in full tribal regalia and war bonnets, vainly holding up crafts for sale; it’s hard to think of a sadder image in the cinema of the American West. All this is still just a gleam in Tatum’s eye when he first arrives at Escudero on his way to cover a rattlesnake hunt and scopes out the situation. A dumb, bullying cop is refusing to let Leo’s father crawl back to reach him. Instead, he suggests some Indians standing nearby should go, since “they ought to know their way pretty well” (the settlement has been abandoned for hundreds of years), and more importantly, they are expendable. “What are you holding out for, a coupla bucks?” he jeers at them. Tatum takes charge and makes his way back through the tunnel into the mountain, explaining to Herbie that this could be a perfect “human interest” story. The narrow, irregular passage twisting between precarious rocks, with dirt sifting down in the dim light and faces spookily distorted by the flashlight, gives the underground scenes a natural noir look, a kind of spelunking German expressionism. In this subterranean realm Tatum commits his first crime, winning Leo’s trust and presenting himself as a concerned pal, when already he is calculating how long the poor sap can be kept underground. Leo is sweet, dumb and gullible, besotted with the wife we already know cares nothing about him. When Tatum snaps a photo for the story, Leo grins idiotically, forgetting his predicament in the excitement of getting his picture in the paper. He proudly poses with an Indian pot he has found. The accident occurred as he crawled back into the mountain’s tombs, where Indians were buried with pots of maize and wampum, which Leo has been scavenging to sell: even the film’s nice-guy victim is an exploiter, robbing graves to provide souvenirs for tourists. He speculates that angry

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spirits may be punishing him for the thefts. Tatum seizes on this, dressing up the story with a King Tut rehash, “The Curse of the Mountain of the Seven Vultures.” The real vultures, of course, are Tatum and his allies. The first person he needs on his side is Lorraine Minosa, with whom he soon shares an intense, sexually charged and fully requited loathing. Chuck hates Lorraine because she reflects all his worst qualities back at him, and because she sees right through him. She makes no attempt to hide her contempt for Escudero or the kindly Minosas; she feels she was cheated by Leo, whom she met as a G.I. (handsome in his uniform, like millions of other guys) and who told her he had a lot of land and a big business in New Mexico. As soon as Leo is safely trapped, she changes out of her jeans and flannel shirt, puts on her city suit and ankle-strap heels, cleans out the cash register, packs her bag and heads for the bus. Tatum, who wants her to stay because a “grief-stricken” wife will improve his story, convinces her that there will be big money to be made once crowds start to arrive. She isn’t fooled by his pretense of concern for Leo, stating, “Honey, you like those rocks as much as I do.” A well-educated and classically trained actress, Jan Sterling specialized in playing cheap trash like Lorraine, perfecting an ugly sneer, an ill-bred whine and a look of dumbblonde vacancy. (She is, on the other hand, funny and extremely likable as the nightclub dancer Dottie in Split Second.) But she finds nuances in the part, emphasizing the fierceness of Lorraine’s desire for freedom and big-city glamour, fearlessly insisting on her utter lack of compassion, and teasing out her conflicted feelings for Tatum. She knows he’s no better than she is, but also resents him for being smarter; she wants to attract him, doesn’t quite understand him, and is impatient with his hypocritical charades. Tatum, for his part, is aroused by her even as he despises her, and hates her all the more because of his attraction; instead of kissing her he slaps her, grabs her by the hair, and finally chokes her. (One scene fades out on his fist clutching her hair, leaving open the possibility that they do sleep together, compounding Tatum’s crimes against Leo.) Lorraine’s pure heartlessness sets off Tatum’s growing nausea as she observes the monster he has created. There’s a deck-stacking element in the way the film surrounds Tatum with people who are more stupid and, in some cases, even more venal than he is. In addition to Lorraine there’s Sheriff Kretzer (Ray Teal), the big, dopey, narcissistic lawman who dotes on a pet rattlesnake he carries around in a shoebox. Tatum makes a deal with him, agreeing to boost him in print (the heroic sheriff who rushed to take charge of the dramatic rescue) in exchange for exclusive access to Leo. Kretzer backs him up when Tatum commits his biggest sin, convincing the foreman in charge of the rescue (a political appointee who owes his job to the sheriff ) to embark on a weeklong project to drill down through the top of the mountain, rather than shore up the walls and rescue Leo in a matter of hours, which would kill the story before Tatum has time to milk it into a national obsession. He doesn’t think he’s gambling with Leo’s life (after all, death would ruin his story: “When you get people all steamed up like this, never make suckers out of them,” he advises), but at the very least he condemns Leo to a week of suffering in the cave. Meanwhile, the slogan “Reelect Sheriff Kretzer” is painted on the mountain, and the sheriff insists on being the first to shake Leo’s hand when he emerges. Next to Krezter, Tatum almost looks decent.

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Then there are the Federbers, Mr. and Mrs. America. They are the first people to turn up wanting to look at the site of the big story; they pull up in a camper on their way to a fishing trip at Bottomless Lake. Mr. Federber (Frank Cady) is a cartoon rube, with buggy eyes and mouth agape like a fish. He feels the situation could be “very instructive” for his two boys, who are soon sporting Indian headdresses and riding on merrygo-rounds. Mr. Federber is an insurance salesman (in a Wilder in-joke, he works for Pacific All-Risk, Walter Neff ’s company in Double Indemnity), a mercilessly skewered specimen of the American Boob. His family is joined by thousands of other gawkers, all convinced that they are involved in an uplifting event, and that their presence is somehow helping. A TV reporter intones with awe that “a new community” is springing up at the foot of the mountain, and the crowds cheer the “courageous” Tatum like a celebrity. They swarm the Minosas’ trading post like locusts. When the “Great S & M Amusement Corporation, Organizer of County Fairs” trundles in to set up a carnival (adorned with a prominent sign, “Proceeds go to the Leo Minosa Rescue Fund,” though we know profits are really going to Lorraine), it banishes any remnants of subtlety from the movie. But Wilder gets just right the motives and mood of the crowd, especially in the topical song introduced by a country-western band, “We’re Coming, Leo.” This brilliantly inane, ruthlessly catchy ditty (written by Jay Livingston and Ray Evans) sums up the crowd’s conviction that they are doing a good deed in keeping vigil. The jingling lyrics offer comfort to Leo, urging him not to stop hoping, because they’re “groping” to reach him. First sung to a chugging beat by a smooth cowboy crooner, as an assistant in cowgirl duds sells sheet music to the crowd, it plays relentlessly through the remainder of the film. Leo can’t hear it: all he can hear is the equally relentless thudding of the drill, which drives him to the breaking point. Still, he is touched when he hears the size of the crowd outside, musing like someone in a Capra movie, “I guess everyone has a lot of friends they don’t even know about.” Disasters are known for bringing people together and creating a sense of unity and common purpose. They also, inevitably, attract some who try to profit from them, whether through fraud and price-gouging, exploiting media frenzy or selling tacky souvenirs. After 9/11 it was easy to be offended by the vendors who hawked Twin Tower snow globes and cheap commemorative T-shirts at Ground Zero, and even by the tourists who put the place on their sightseeing itineraries. But aesthetic distaste is no reason to doubt the sincerity of those who wished to “pay their respects,” to have some direct experience of the place that dominated national discussion for so long. Newspapers, radio and television create a virtual community of people reading, watching and hearing the same stories while having no contact with the subject matter or with each other. The result, it seems, is an almost mystical belief in the significance of being present to “witness history,” and being able to prove you were there. In Ace in the Hole, there are only greedy parasites, including the other big-city reporters who gnash their teeth at Tatum’s advantage, and witless rubberneckers hungry for sensation and attention. The film endorses Tatum’s cynical disdain for his readers, implying that human interest is merely a disguise for morbid or prurient curiosity. There is a melancholy shot of the Federbers packing up their camp after the news of Leo’s death, the wife dabbing her eyes. For a moment, the film almost allows them to have real emotions. Or is it holding

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them up for further ridicule because they never imagined the inspirational experience they hoped to offer their sons could turn into a grotesque tragedy? As Leo, wheezing and dust-caked, succumbs to pneumonia, still convinced that the reporter is his best friend, Tatum, too, begins to break down. He achieves his goal, ditching the Albuquerque Sun Bulletin and squeezing a thousand dollars a day out of a New York paper, but he begins drinking heavily (“Not a lot, just frequently”). The chattering teletype machine in his room hammers at him the way the drill hammers at Leo. He defends himself to Mr. Boot, explaining, “It’s the 20th century, the second half,” but his guilt begins to rot his guts — at least so Douglas suggests in his performance, though Tatum only expresses concern that Leo’s death with spoil his “big finish.” When he announces that Leo is dead, the rescue workers and men in the crowd silently take off their hats; then the cars begin slowly to disperse and the circus tents fall. Tatum throws himself into one last great story: his own “murder” of Leo, with help from the corrupt sheriff. But he takes this turn to honesty only as he knows he’s dying, stabbed by Lorraine as he choked her with a fur piece that Leo asked him to give her for their anniversary, and which she rejects because it looks cheap. The last we see of Lorraine she is walking off down the road, trying to hitch a ride from the departing tourists, wearing her city suit again. There is no suggestion that she will ever pay for killing Tatum, who makes it back to the newspaper offices for his own big finish. “How would you like to make a thousand dollars a day?” he asks Mr. Boot, just before dramatically collapsing with his face almost hitting the camera. “I’m a thousand-dollar-a-day newspaperman. You can have me for nothing.” Tatum is not a man without a conscience — he’s capable of guilt and moral revulsion — but he may be a man without a heart. Ace in the Hole burns like acid when it’s attacking the vulgar and impoverished culture of postwar America, the grubby anythingfor-a-buck economy, the crookedness of government and the uncaring machinery of the media. But it has trouble expressing any real compassion for the victims. Leo’s gullibility makes it difficult to regard him with anything other than condescending pity. His mother is an even more disturbing figure: she never speaks, only weeps and prays. When she’s first seen, kneeling before a shrine and fervently supplicating the Virgin Mary, a shaft of light falls through the window, like a parody of cloying Hollywood spirituality. When she gravely enters the room to change the candles in front of the shrine just as Chuck and Herbie are celebrating the New York deal, the reminder of the price of their success is as subtle as a brickbat. The Wilder fan laughs with delight when Lorraine declares, “I don’t go to church. Kneeling bags my nylons” (a line he attributed to his wife Audrey), and squirms uncomfortably at the sentimental portrayal of the pious, grieving Mexican mother. There simply isn’t room for sincere faith in this world, where Herbie hires a medicine man to put on a ceremony exorcising the angry spirits in order to shoot a feature for the paper. It’s true that Tatum looks wretched as he crouches in the cave listening to Leo receiving last rites from a priest, but the most haunting image is a shot of Leo’s father, a minuscule figure walking alone in the dusty field in front of the mountain after the circus and the press tents and campers and cars have all gone. It strikingly resembles a shot from Nicholas Ray’s The Lusty Men, in which Robert Mitchum as a former rodeo champ who has just “busted the last good ribs [he] had,” limps across a deserted fairway. Both shots

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capture the desolation left behind in the wake of the moving carnivals of modern entertainment, which chew up and spit out their celebrities. Ace in the Hole gives a darker postwar slant to a genre that had flourished in the 1930s: the newspaper movie. Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s seminal drama The Front Page set the tone : newspapermen (and women) were insolent, wisecracking, unscrupulous hacks; they knew all the angles, were alert to the chiseling ways of their world, and looked down on the suckers who devoured their stories. Many films forced cynical reporters to face the victims of their shameless “human interest”-mongering, yet reporters remained heroes; during the Depression they represented the scrappy spirit of the People. Postwar newspaper movies judged them more harshly: in films like Sweet Smell of Success, The Big Clock and Scandal Sheet, media tycoons don’t just report crime, they commit it, and society is poisoned by false or sensational reporting. Film noir’s take on newspapers reflects its dim view of the crowd, but also its insistence that crime is inextricably bound up with the American religion of success. In “The Gangster as Tragic Hero” Robert Warshow writes: “At bottom, the gangster is doomed because he is under the obligation to succeed, not because the means he employs are unlawful. In the deeper layers of the modern consciousness, all means are unlawful,

Buried alive: Chuck Tatum (Kirk Douglas) in the old Indian cave in Ace in the Hole (Billy Wilder, 1951).

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every attempt to succeed is an act of aggression, leaving one alone and guilty and defenseless among enemies: one is punished for success. This is our intolerable dilemma: that failure is a kind of death and success is evil and dangerous.” With his zealous, competitive intensity, Kirk Douglas is the perfect actor to embody this dilemma. If Robert Mitchum epitomizes the passive noir hero, the man who cares too little, Douglas is the essential driven hero, the man who wants too much (“It’s what people want, and how hard they want it, and how hard it is for them to get it,” as he said in his debut role). What Chuck Tatum wants most is not money; the thousand dollars a day is mainly a marker of success, of being on top. Warshow writes about how the gangster is compelled by the need to separate himself from the crowd, to be an individual, and then dies because he stands out too far. Ace in the Hole distills this noir theme with its nasty central joke: Leo Minosa, who just wanted to bring back a pot to sell for 50 bucks, achieves the height of fame, and the depth of isolation, and pays with his life. Tatum’s own story mirrors Leo’s predicament; he alienates his colleagues (his fellow reporters cruelly mock him once his dream collapses, payback for his earlier jabs) and plunges off the lonely height he has achieved. The opening credits for Ace in the Hole are superimposed on a patch of desert ground, and the film ends with Tatum’s head hitting the floor. Bad news may sell best, but as Ace in the Hole makes clear — both with its story, and with its box-office failure — there’s some bad news people don’t want to hear. The truth is not as pretty as an embroidered sampler. Ace in the Hole uses western imagery to demonstrate how American culture is weakened by the addiction to myth and spectacle, recalling the line from John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance: “This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes the fact, print the legend.” The courageous reporter, the griefstricken wife, the dutiful sheriff and the inspirational rescue are all as fake as the Indianchief headdresses on the junior Federbers. A man dying alone in a frigid cave becomes the focal point for a new community, fed by a wellspring of human interest, but scattered as quickly as dust in the desert wind.

CHAPTER 8

Past Sunset: Noir Westerns Maybe he likes to be lonely, ever thought of that? He never asks for any favors because he can take care of himself. He doesn’t trust anybody, so he doesn’t get hurt. That’s not a bad way of living. — James Stewart, The Far Country

“He” is a wolf howling in the distance, lonesome as a train whistle. The cynical cowboy who admires him will, by the end of the story, see the error of his misanthropic ways and learn the value of loyalty and friendship. Hollywood loved lone wolves but loved taming them even more, so the Bogart who declares, “I stick my neck out for nobody” becomes the Bogart who sacrifices love for a cause larger than “the problems of three little people.” But no matter how often movies taught the lesson that selfishness must give way to altruism, they kept reviving the unreconstructed original, the man who lives by the creed Stewart snarls: “I don’t need other people. I don’t need help. I can take care of me.” He’s a cowboy or a private eye, a gunslinger or a ship’s captain, an outlaw or a drifter. He trusted someone “once,” now he knows better; he minds his own business and resists forming ties. He is always a he; women who are tough and selfish, who reject domesticity, are not romanticized but vilified as femmes fatales — destructive, amoral and crazed with self-love. Men, on the other hand, are supposed to be independent, even if they have wives and families. John Updike wrote that it is natural for men to “oscillate in their moods between an enjoyment of the comforts of domesticity and the familial life, and a sense that their essential being is a solitary one — to be found in flight and loneliness and even adversity. This seems to be my feeling of what being a male human being involves.” The isolated hero is one of the points at which film noir and the western overlap. Traditional westerns idealize loners: unattached, self-reliant men come to the aid of families and communities, even though their violent ways doom them to a solitary existence. The private detective plays a similar role as a morally ambiguous though usually honorable free agent who solves other people’s problems while remaining aloof. But film noir infected westerns with its darker view of American alienation, staining pioneer myths with themes of psychological disturbance, betrayal, corruption, and the illusiveness of freedom in a society predicated on it. A frontier where land and resources are free to be grabbed by all takers is a recipe for instability and conflict. While women and sexuality are often marginalized or repressed in westerns, it is the genre that most fully explores the endemic violence of American life and the chronic conflict between the values of individualism and community. 178

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At first glance, the western and the film noir seem too dissimilar to produce a hybrid: wide-open spaces versus claustrophobic cities, color versus black-and-white, epic grandeur versus knotty, inward-looking plots, easy moral clarity versus anxious ambivalence, a robust and hopeful portrait of America versus a sour and skeptical one. But westerns have always encompassed more complexity than the simplistic “oaters” made for kiddie matinees. In the 1910s, Tom Mix and William S. Hart laid out the two paths westerns would follow. Mix wore fancy duds and made lively, upbeat, uncomplicated entertainment, setting a pattern for countless B-western serials starring dandified cowboys like Roy Rogers, Hopalong Cassidy and Gene Autry. Hart’s films were harsh, gritty and austere; his signature role was the “good-bad man,” often an outlaw redeemed by love or a man bent on revenge. A third tradition, the grand historical epic, was established in the twenties and early thirties by The Iron Horse, The Big Trail, The Covered Wagon and Cimarron, all painting the great project of western settlement as a triumph of endurance and pioneer spirit over wilderness and savagery. John Ford carried on this tradition with increasing sophistication, while maintaining his devotion to the rituals of western society: cavalry dances, church-raisings, shootouts and the setting down of legends. Classical westerns reached their mature peak in the 1950s with films like The Searchers, Red River, Shane, and Rio Bravo, which combine serious themes and ambiguous characters with the traditional pleasures of action, humor, genre clichés and masculine camaraderie. Beginning after the war and blossoming in the sixties, revisionist westerns rejected tradition rather than revising it, exposing the frontier’s squalor, the persecution of American Indians, and the nasty, gory truth of a lawless society. It is difficult to mark off the exact boundaries of the “noir western” within this gradual darkening and deepening of the genre. A small group of postwar westerns exhibited distinctive aspects of film noir: chiaroscuro lighting, haunted heroes, dangerous women, confusing plots driven by secrets from the past, and a pervasive sense of anomie. The later westerns of Anthony Mann and Budd Boetticher don’t look or sound so much like noir, but they obsessively follow the paths of, in Jim Kitses’s words, the “dark, extreme men trapped in an impossible dilemma, making a neurotic attempt to escape themselves and rise above a past of pain and violence.” Tracing the roots of certain persistent neuroses in the American character to our most durable myths and archetypes, the noir western leads audiences not into the sunset but into the darkness beyond.

Homeless on the Range: Robert Mitchum and the Birth of the Noir Western Robert Mitchum, hailed by Roger Ebert as the “soul of film noir” for his worldweary pessimism and cool, doomed aura, started his career as a heavy in the amiable, low-budget Hopalong Cassidy series, earning “$100 a week and all the horse manure I could carry home,” he later recalled. According to Mitchum, William Boyd, the actor who played Cassidy in over 60 films, thought he looked mean around the eyes and cast him as one of the eternal crowd of dirty, stubbly badmen he cleaned up in picture after picture. After seven films with Cassidy — parts he described as “a lot of beard, very little

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dialogue”— Mitchum signed a contract with RKO, and the studio tried him out as a clean-cut cowboy hero in two Zane Gray westerns, Nevada (1944) and West of the Pecos (1945). He looked the part: young and tall, broad-shouldered, barrel-chested and trimwaisted. He wears a white hat and a jaunty neckerchief and flimsy shirts that get ripped off in fist fights. He smiles a lot and takes everything good-naturedly, happy to do his job, take his pay and go home — with or without horse manure. Mitchum was wasted on these cardboard heroes and boy’s-adventure stories, which had no use for his undercurrents of melancholy, disaffection and skeptical intelligence. His role in an exquisitely understated war movie about Ernie Pyle, The Story of G.I. Joe (for which he earned his only Oscar nomination, in 1945), revealed how much power there was in Mitchum’s reserve, inchoate sadness, wry humor and “patient cynicism.”1 Director William Wellman wept over the scene in which Mitchum’s exhausted, halfdrunk infantry captain confesses that he can’t bear to look at the young soldiers he must send to their deaths. After this he got stronger parts in better movies, and his first lead in an A-picture came in Raoul Walsh’s Pursued (1947), perhaps the earliest and purest example of the noir western. Here the western’s elegiac mood — the genre was born to celebrate a world already vanishing — shades into noir’s fixation on the past and its refusal to pass away. The magnificent expanse of the Southwestern landscape becomes, through the inky lens of James Wong Howe, a brooding, petrified dreamscape in which the vulnerable characters are dwarfed by empty plains and sheer rock walls taller than skyscrapers. The independent hero becomes a man who lives with a family he can never fully join and which he may be fated to destroy, a man whose foster mother gives him these words of cold comfort: “We’re alone, each of us, and each in our different way.” Throughout his life, Mitchum liked to quote lines from Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward Angel: “Which of us has known his brother? Which of us has looked into his father’s heart? Which of us is not forever a stranger and alone?” By fifteen he had left home — not driven away by an unhappy family life but simply spurred by an urge to wander the country on freight trains; he deliberately cut himself off from hearth and home and savored the sweet pangs of loneliness. In his memoir Them Ornery Mitchum Boys, John Mitchum wrote that he initially saw his older brother Bob’s penchant for “running off ” as a weakness of character, but came to admire the way he “simply released himself from emotional bondage.” As befit a man who arrived in California aboard a freight train, and who never stopped identifying himself as a hobo, Mitchum played all kinds of itinerants: an exile escaping a criminal past, a globe-trotting marine, a roaming preacher, a nomadic sheepherder, a traveler on the rodeo circuit. He once said, “I’ve been in a constant motion of escape my entire life,” and while steadily working decade after decade, he preserved the impression of a man who might just float away into the night. Westerns fall into two camps: films rooted in one spot — a town or ranch — and films that follow a journey through the wilderness. Mitchum doesn’t fit easily into either category, because he’s fundamentally a drifter: a man who can’t settle down, but also a man who travels aimlessly, not pursuing any definite goal. The role of Jeb Rand in Pursued was the first full expression of Mitchum’s persona as the eternal outsider, a man who can never fit into a family or community. “All my life I’ve known I didn’t really belong,” Jeb

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“We’re alone, each of us...” Ma Callum (Judith Anderson) refuses to tell her foster son Jeb Rand (Robert Mitchum) about his past in Pursued (Raoul Walsh, 1947).

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tells his foster mother, Ma Callum ( Judith Anderson). “I couldn’t love. I couldn’t return your kindness. Is there something wrong with me?” Uninterested in stable work, adrift from conventional morality — though he has his own code, and a tender heart hidden away — the Mitchum hero is distrusted, disapproved of and envied by other men. A rovin’ gambler, he gravitates toward card tables, roulette wheels and dice games, willing to risk whatever he has (in Pursued he loses his stake in the family ranch on a coin toss) not out of greed to win so much as an ability to let things go. “A man shouldn’t shoot craps if he can’t stand to lose,” he says in The Lusty Men. From the start, Mitchum appeared curiously comfortable in his doom-haunted alienation, relaxing into his peculiar blend of lucklessness and invincible self-assurance. Pursued is an intensely operatic horse opera. Written by Niven Busch, who also penned David O. Selznick’s notoriously overheated Duel in the Sun, it’s a stylized, sometimes turgid blend of Freud and Greek tragedy, rescued from camp by straightforward direction, crisp acting, and an ominous yet contained mood that suggests an approaching thunderstorm. Like other psychological melodramas of the forties (Spellbound, The Locket), Pursued simplifies Freud into the notion that a twisted psyche can be explained by a single traumatic childhood event. Jeb Rand is scarred by an elusive memory of violence, but can’t recall what happened the night a family quarrel between the Rands and the Callums climaxed in murder. He has recurrent dreams and flashbacks of spurred boots tromping in front of his face, flashing lights and falling bodies; a memory of being alone, scared and abandoned. He was rescued that night and adopted by Mrs. Callum, whose affair with his father was the source of the feud; she atones by raising him but keeps her secret. Confused and unassimilated, Jeb fights constantly with his foster brother Adam, who sees him as an interloper, while he and Thorley (Teresa Wright) develop a very un-siblinglike attachment. Knowing he’s “supposed to be my brother,” she describes the torment of “watching you all the time. Letting you touch me. Then at night, lying there thinking about you.” These three young people become puppets in an obscure ceremony, controlled by forces they don’t understand, shadowed by the secret known only by Ma and her sinister brother-in-law Grant Callum (Dean Jagger), a man whose life is reduced to a single idea: revenge. There is no freedom for anyone in this world. Every action feels fore-ordained. The heightened emotions — hatred, envy, desire — feel almost impersonal, assigned to the characters like arias. In some spots, this is merely the result of an unconvincing script. When Thorley and even Ma Callum turn implacably against Jeb after he kills Adam in selfdefense, there seems to be no explanation except that blood is thicker than water. They have both known and loved this man all his life, so how can they not believe he wasn’t at fault? Jeb seems to accept this injustice, unsurprised, as he seems unsurprised when Adam ambushes him as he rides along the rim of a canyon, singing the mournful “Streets of Laredo.” (“Beat the drum slowly and play the fife lowly / Play the death march as you carry me along”) The film mounts even further into melodramatic excess when Thorley decides to marry Jeb and kill him on their wedding night. But the scenes in which they act out conventional courting rituals have a sick, chilling tone, a joyless mockery of their former romance. He comes to call properly, arriving like a stranger at the house that was his

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childhood home; she awaits him grimly with tea; he takes her riding in his buggy, and she goes through the motions, her face set with loathing. Back at the same house on their wedding night, he carries her over the threshold, knowing that the consummation she plans is murder. Jeb’s love for Thorley seems to be a yearning to latch onto her rooted normality, to be fully accepted in a way he can never be; but the disturbing, incestuous overtones of the relationship make it an unlikely vehicle of salvation. Other actors might have worked harder to depict the mental torment and waking nightmares that haunt Jeb Rand. Mitchum instead plays him with a numb, somnambulistic remoteness, as an emotionally paralyzed man who has never been able to connect with anything. In this cauldron of passions, he is set apart not only by his sense of being pursued (“I’ve always got a feeling something’s after me, a bad feeling”) but by his lack of ordinary reactions, his refusal to take sides or responsibility. He kills two men — Thorley’s suitor and Adam — without wanting to, but feels no apparent guilt. He marries Thorley knowing that she plans to shoot him; he even offers her a gun. In Jeb Rand, the stoic reticence of the classical western hero becomes unhealthy passivity, and the code of the “fair fight” turns a quick draw into an unwilling murderer. At the heart of the film lies the charred, decaying cabin where Jeb takes refuge from a lynch mob; it turns out to be the childhood home where he witnessed his father’s killing. In this gruesome place, where bones jut out of the dirt and bare twisted tree branches offer a hold for hanging-ropes, Jeb narrates the film as a long flashback. It leads up to a saved-in-the-nick-of-time happy ending, but the overwhelming flavor of ruin remains. The darkness in Robert Wise’s Blood on the Moon (1949) is not just metaphoric. More than half the scenes take place at night, not filtered day-for-night but an enveloping gloom that obscures actions and identities. Nicholas Musuraca, who pioneered noir cinematography in Stranger on the Third Floor (1940), and diversified it in Out of the Past, brought his mastery of shadows to the prairie. The film opens on a dismal scene of rain pounding down on a black, formlessly sodden landscape, blotting out the horizon. Mitchum comes riding alone, head down, rain dripping off his hat, stopping to gaze dejectedly over a dark, smudgy valley. Down on his luck after watching his cattle die of fever, Jim Garry (Mitchum) has been summoned by an old trail-herding partner to be cut in on a big deal. He doesn’t know that he’s being hired as a gunman, or that the old friend who sent for him is scheming to steal another man’s herd through a backhanded deal with a crooked government agent for the local Indian reservation. Walking into this charged situation as a stranger — a “loose rider”— he’s immediately interrogated and told to get lost; he counters with cagey evasion, refusing to take sides or reveal his true nature. He’s a man with nothing: in the opening scene his few possessions are destroyed by stampeding cows as he sits miserably drying his wet, mud-caked socks by a small fire. This is the truth of the cowboy’s life. (When co-star Walter Brennan saw Mitchum in his elegantly rugged costume, he declared, “That is the goddamndest realest cowboy I’ve ever seen!”) When Garry asks for compensation from the rancher whose herd trampled his campsite and is told it was his fault for being so far off the beaten track, he replies, Mitchum-like, “There’s no law says a man has to stick to the wagon road, is there?” When

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he arrives in town, it’s pitch dark, and he gets an equally hostile reception from the other side in the range war. The only person happy to see him is his ex-partner Tate Riling (Robert Preston), a shameless con man who lies to local farmers to get them on his side and seduces his enemy’s daughter into betraying her own father. Garry gets the picture right away but goes along without enthusiasm; he doesn’t like being a mercenary, and is acutely aware of the contempt he now inspires in decent people, but he seems resigned to the disgrace. Mitchum’s detachment and neutrality are so attractive that it’s easy to ignore how they can turn into a wholesale abdication of moral responsibility. Keeping to himself a lifetime of bad breaks and worse choices, the laconic Jim Garry never smiles. Once again, he shows a willingness to lose that goes past passivity into selfabnegation. Too proud to admit his mistakes, his first instinct is to simply run away rather than be forced to take a stand. Watching quietly from the sidelines, he’s riveting in his very inactivity, recalling the tribute Lee Marvin paid his one-time co-star: “The beauty of that man. He’s so still. He’s moving. And yet he’s not moving.” Where Marvin is so loose-jointed and slack-muscled that you wonder how he can remain upright, Mitchum’s style of motion combines relaxed, cat-like fluidity and tensed restraint. In Blood on the Moon he confronts a gunfighter and walks toward him across the wide Main Street. All he has to do is walk, with his inimitable panther tread, and the other man knows he’s outclassed and slinks away. In the end, Garry reluctantly decides to switch sides and help the rancher save his herd, inspired partly by growing fondness for the man’s daughter (Barbara Bel Geddes — she and Mitchum meet cute by emptying their rifles at each other), but mostly out of disgust at Riling, whom he seems to recognize as the man he could have become. “I’ve seen dogs wouldn’t claim you for a son,” he declares, setting off a brutally realistic brawl, as Mitchum and Preston wrestle, stagger, thrash and scuffle around an empty barroom by the twitching gleams of firelight. Blood on the Moon ends conventionally, with Jim Garry redeemed and embraced by a family and community. But the whole film remains striking for the extent to which it sheds western clichés, reducing the range to a grey, muddy battlefield. With its dirty deals, government corruption, romantic betrayal, mean thugs, gloomy bars, and its broke, lonely hero pondering whether or not to throw away his honor, the story could easily be transported to some grimy, gang-ridden city. The sad, uncertain, jaded tone — Mitchum’s own signature key — is night to the day of conventional westerns, with their eternally childlike mood of adventure and resolution, their confident separation of the good guys from the bad. Robert Mitchum often seemed to be making a single, career-long movie called Out of the Past. Even as a young man he carried a burden of things he’d seen, or things he’d done. In Richard Wilson’s small, austere The Man with the Gun (1955), Mitchum is a grey-clad mystery man, a “town tamer” who may be more dangerous than the outlaws he battles. As Clint Tollinger, he gets romantic close-ups and wistful, lonely-hero theme music, but creates a frightening, double-edged character. In theory he’s a good guy: he’s on the side of law and order, he’s courteous and gallant and a protector of the underdog. But he’s also cold, ruthless and sick with hate; he doesn’t clean up towns because he wants

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to aid the spread of civilization but because it gives him the license to shoot bad guys like clay pigeons. He deliberately goads men into drawing on him, knowing he can outdraw and kill them. His cool, imperturbable toughness has a mean edge, an almost pathological refusal of emotion. His estranged wife ( Jan Sterling) warns him, “Don’t try to change now. You’ll find that even feeling a little can hurt a lot.” He takes the job of taming Sheridan City only as an afterthought; he has come to track down his wife and find out what happened to their infant daughter. Once so decorous that she disapproved of dancing, she has become the local madam, a tight-lipped and joyless woman living off sin. This is a West from which the “yee-haw” has been surgically removed. The whole film is sober and unadorned, befitting a hero who walks into the bar at exactly the same time every evening to drink one whiskey by himself. When his wife finally tells him the truth — that their daughter is dead — Mitchum freezes as though doused in liquid nitrogen. He storms out of the house, and his wife runs after him calling, “You’ll never be human! You have no pity!” Needing to take revenge on the sinful world, he burns down a dance hall and kills Frenchy, the suave Cajun manager. You can see his sadistic enjoyment as he shoots down a fancy chandelier to start the fire, then slowly walks away, just waiting for Frenchy to throw his bowie knife so he can turn and shoot him. As the blaze runs out of control and the townspeople rush to fight it, Mitchum stands rigid against a wall, watching the fire as though looking into his own hellish mind. Though this story, too, has formulaic aspects, The Man with the Gun is radical in the way it distributes blame. A gun is a gun, and murder is murder, no matter the character or motive behind it. Sheridan City is “rotten ripe,” as one inhabitant describes it; in the opening scene a thug on horseback shoots a dog in the street just for fun. He can do so with impunity because the area is ruled by an elusive, omnipotent cattle baron who sends his minions to attack anyone who tries to build on his land. The craven townspeople are willing to turn to Clint Tollinger, giving him carte blanche to clean up the place his way. Only a few object, one recalling that in another town Tollinger “operated” on, the “patient lost a lot of blood.” At first they are all in awe of their would-be savior: matrons flirt gruesomely at a strawberry festival dance and a young man almost gets himself killed trying to prove he’s as much of a man as the blasé gunslinger. Once bodies start clogging the streets, everyone turns against Clint, gossiping and nervously complaining. Surely there must be some option between inertia and brutality, some way of confronting evil without mirroring it — but the movie doesn’t suggest any. Westerns kept facing this problem, wanting to condemn violence but unable to imagine a world without it. Clint Tollinger’s trigger-happiness is explained by the fact that, as a boy, he watched his father, a peaceful man who refused to carry a gun, murdered in cold blood. The Man with the Gun loses its nerve at the end, allowing Clint to solve the town’s problems with a single bullet, reconcile with his wife and renounce his career, paying for his killings with a symbolic, non-fatal wound. But westerns never resolved their ambivalence. Men like Shane and Ethan Edwards (in The Searchers) make life possible for peaceful families and communities, but pay for their guilt by riding off alone at the end, eternally solitary wanderers. It’s unclear whether these films are condemning the gunmen, or the communities for relying on fast-draw justice that they are unwilling to mete out themselves.

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“Where There’s Women and Gold”: Towns and the Corruption of the West “The Western was in the final analysis a chaste and homely form,” Richard Schickel writes in a foreword to the BFI Companion to the Western, “in which quite ordinary and unpretentious people were seen to be doing what we in the audience were tying to do — building homes and businesses and communities, preserving traditional individualistic values in hard circumstances. This was, of course, John Ford’s great theme.” Scenes like the church-raising dance in Ford’s My Darling Clementine and the funeral in George Stevens’s Shane at which the farmers sing “Shall We Gather at the River?” are iconic representations of small transplanted groups struggling to grow into safe and civilized communities. But in many westerns, even formulaic serials, communities are associated with the same types of corruption, mob violence and moral cowardice explored in Chapter 4. Just as film noir exposed cities controlled by machine politics or racketeers, westerns portrayed nasty little towns ruled by all-powerful land-owners who employ gunfighters to impose their will while their puppet sheriffs look the other way. Bad Day at Black Rock (1955) brought the familiar motif of the stranger arriving in an isolated, hostile town into the postwar present, and it amounts to an anti-western, illustrating the superiority of liberal, coastal America over the redneck interior (dramatized by one of the most satisfying fights on film, when the soft-spoken, one-armed Spencer Tracy neutralizes the brutish Ernest Borgnine with a sophisticated display of judo). The rotten-ripe town became such a well-established motif that it was easily parodied, as in Boetticher’s Buchanan Rides Alone (1958), set in a border town run by three brothers, each greedier and more venal than the last. When the son of one brother is killed by a Mexican whose sister he raped, the bereaved father ransoms his son’s killer for $50,000, frustrating the townsfolk who are panting with eagerness for a hanging. The popularity of “necktie parties” as entertainment is taken for granted. One of the earliest westerns to make the genre a vehicle for social commentary was William Wellman’s somber The OxBow Incident (1943), a critical success shunned by audiences. When news reaches a sleepy little town that a local rancher has been murdered and his cattle stolen, a posse immediately forms to hunt down the culprits. When they come across three cowboys driving the herd, the strangers are promptly lynched, despite protesting their innocence. (The victims are led by a very young Dana Andrews, dignified and intense in his first major role.) They are no sooner dangling from a tree than word comes that the rancher didn’t die after all and has exonerated the cowboys, and the shame-faced mob and its blood-thirsty, selfaggrandizing leaders disperse. In The Halliday Brand (1957), a young man falsely accused of cattle rustling cowers in his stone cell as a mob howls outside. His real crime is to be part-Indian; the sheriff, outraged that his daughter loves this half-breed, leaves town to give the lynch mob free rein. He justifies his methods to his appalled children, explaining that while maybe a few innocent men were hanged on his watch, he kept the peace, and it was all for the good of the country and his family. These lynching scenes make it quite clear that the town is a wolf pack, the outlaw or outsider a stray sheep. The scarcity of law enforcement, which encouraged lynching and the acceptance of “self-defense” shootings, left the West under the control of the men with the most money

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and the most guns. A spate of postwar films focused on ranchers as despots of the range; Man in the Shadow (1957), a contemporary western and a heavy-handed parable about fascism, explicitly compares a powerful cattleman (played by Orson Welles) to Mussolini. His ranch, the Golden Empire, is bigger than some European countries, and untouched by the rule of law. When two of his power-drunk foremen beat to death a Mexican ranchhand who dared to hang around the boss’s daughter, the town sheriff ( Jeff Chandler) stubbornly insists on investigating what no one else even considers a crime. Economically dependent on the ranch, the townsfolk beg the sheriff not to stir up trouble: the town will die without the ranch’s business, and anyway, who cares what happens to a few “drifters” and “wetbacks” who “don’t even live here”? After some men from the ranch drag the sheriff through the streets behind their pickup truck and shoot up the town in a rowdy display of their immunity, the lawman flings down his badge, telling his neighbors, “This isn’t a town, it’s a trained dog act!” Blacklisted writers Carl Foreman and Dalton Trumbo both used similar stories as allegories for their colleagues’ failure to speak out against the anti-communist witchhunt. In Foreman’s High Noon (1952) the sheriff finds that his craven townspeople won’t help him capture an outlaw, and the local judge packs up his American flag and skips town. While the film’s simple plea for moral courage and its portrait of an isolated man who does his duty in the face of danger and rejection has made the film a favorite of U.S. presidents, John Wayne famously derided High Noon as “un–American” and teamed up with Howard Hawks to make Rio Bravo as a rebuttal, showing that no sheriff worth his salt would ask for help from civilians, or display disrespect for his badge, as Kane does by dropping his on the ground, disgusted at having risked his life for such a worthless town.2 In Trumbo’s Terror in a Texas Town (1958), a fat-cat landowner forces farmers off their land, asserting a prior legal claim, because he knows there is oil in the area. He hires a black-clad, one-handed gunman to kill one of the farmers as an example for the others; when the dead man’s son returns from 19 years at sea, he seeks revenge. A mixture of the oddball and the over-familiar, the film is capsized by its ponderous artiness and Sterling Hayden’s embarrassing Swedish accent. The fickle townsfolk who refused to stick by the murdered man gather in a mob to watch the sailor march down Main Street to hurl a harpoon at the unhappy, aging gunfighter. The broad, dusty western Main Street is a stage; in these little towns with their shallow buildings fronting on the only thoroughfare, nothing occurs in secret. The lack of privacy enforces conformity: neighbors can’t hide their actions or opinions from one other. Newcomers are instantly spotted, and often told to keep moving — or more simply, “Drift”— lest they disturb the imbalance of power. Undesirable elements are expelled, rather than punished and re-assimilated, as in larger communities. Bret Harte’s 1869 short story “Outcasts of Poker Flat” focuses on four people run out of a California gold-mining camp: a gambler, a thieving drunk, a madam and a saloon girl; they get caught in a snowstorm on their way over a pass and starve to death in a cabin. The story was filmed three times (in 1919, 1937 and 1952), each version adding different plot elements to Hart’s basic situation. The 1952 version, directed by Joseph H. Newman, introduces a bank robbery and changes the saloon girl into the robber’s wife. The film’s opening is pure noir, courtesy of cinematographer Joseph LaShelle, who gave many of Twentieth Century–Fox’s noirs

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(Where the Sidewalk Ends, Fallen Angel, Hangover Square) their velvety darkness and rich, smoky greys. In a long, wordless sequence the camera prowls around a rainy street at night; instead of wet asphalt there’s glistening mud pitted with puddles. Three men skulk in the shadows as raucous music and noisy revelry spills from the lighted windows of saloons; a man staggers out of one and passes out, and is immediately rolled for his whiskey bottle by a lurking pickpocket. A nice, tight heist scene follows, and the robbery and mayhem inspires the town’s “decent” citizens to kick out its riff-raff. Outcasts takes the claustrophobic western (Stagecoach, Rio Bravo) to its furthest and darkest extreme. Besieged by a snowstorm, the four exiles and an innocent young couple they encounter on their way to get married (in this version alone the bride-to-be is pregnant) are not only deprived of food but menaced by Ryker (Cameron Mitchell), the bank robber who comes to find his wife, to whom he gave the money. Cal (Anne Baxter) was hoping to escape her disastrous marriage, a nightmare of fear, abuse and shame. “Sometimes you get in so deep you can’t get out,” she explains to Oakhurst (Dale Robertson), an elegant gambler who insists that he only looks out for himself— and, of course, winds up saving the others. The four outcasts, who were perceived as enemies of society in Poker Flat, become a society vulnerable to a more ruthless predator. Ryker eats all their food and orders them around, but grows increasingly panicked as he realizes the threat of violence has little effect on people who know they’re doomed to starve anyway. The film suffers from lapses of style and taste (the aging prostitute, who sacrifices herself to save the pregnant girl, gets no recognition for it; Cal’s husband whales the tar out of her, yet she reappears without a bruise or even mussed hair); but it achieves a sustained, harrowing mood of cabin fever. When Dick Powell gets off a stagecoach in an Arizona gold-mining town in Station West (1948), he’s greeted by a hotel keeper (Burl Ives) crooning an ominous ditty advising unwelcome strangers to go back where they came from. Powell doesn’t mind the cold shoulder; he’s not interested in making friends, and responds to the inevitable, “You a stranger here?” with a curt, “I’m a stranger everywhere.” With a mere change of costume and setting, Station West would be an enjoyably generic film noir. Powell is a detective, using an insolent manner and pretense of avarice to gain information; he meets a tough, alluring, mysterious woman ( Jane Greer, no less) and gropes his way through an intricate series of double-crosses and dark revelations. Even the hard-boiled dialogue is right out of a contemporary urban crime drama. Despite the handsome Arizona landscapes, with chimneys of rock looming over the little town, the western setting is irrelevant, apart from the confirmation that, as someone says in Anthony Mann’s The Far Country, “Where there’s gold there’s stealing, and where there’s stealing there’s killing.” The poisonous effects of a gold strike on a community are vividly demonstrated in Mann’s Bend of the River (1952). When a band of settlers led by Glyn McLyntock ( James Stewart) arrives in Portland, Oregon, they find a friendly, wholesome town that encourages their dream of building a new settlement in the wilderness. When McLyntock returns months later to find out why the shipment of supplies they bought was never sent to them, he finds it has become a rowdy western Pottersville, reeking with vice, crime and casual killing — all because someone found gold in the area. McLyntock insists on taking the supplies to his settlers, who will otherwise never make it through the winter, despite

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being first bribed and then ordered at gunpoint to take them to a gold camp instead. In The Far Country (1955) Stewart’s character does the reverse, setting out to bring a herd of cattle from Wyoming up to the Yukon where they can be sold for hugely inflated prices to the gold-rush population. Stewart’s performances in five of Mann’s westerns solidified his tough postwar persona and introduced the tortured neurosis he would bring to Hitchcock’s Vertigo. Jeff Webster in The Far Country is the most hard-bitten and abrasive character Stewart played for Mann, though not the most damaged. When he arrives in Seattle with his herd, it comes out that he killed two of the men in his employ when they tried to steal his cattle. Selfish and amoral, he insists on trusting no one (except his longtime partner, played by lovable old coot Walter Brennan) and professes not to understand why he should help other people, hewing firmly to the philosophy of looking out for himself and expecting others to do the same. But Jeff has never encountered anything like the monstrosity of Judge Gannon ( John McIntire), who is “the law” in Alaska, and who uses his unchecked power to take whatever he pleases. Wearing a top hat and a seedy smirk, as though pleasantly inebriated with his own evildoing, Gannon confiscates Jeff ’s cows on a flimsy excuse; makes a law requiring miners to have a hundred pounds of food before they can cross into the Yukon — then sells them the food, grabs the claims of miners who haven’t been able to record them legally, and employs a sadistic assassin to wipe out his enemies. The remote, muddy goldmining camp of Dawson is divided into two sides: the good folk who dream of founding a “real town” with a church, a school and a marshal, and the bad folk who carouse at the saloon and condone Gannon’s schemes. The dichotomy is echoed by two women who both love Jeff: a virtuous, freckle-faced ingénue and a powerful saloon-keeper who subscribes to the same cynical, self-centered neutrality that he does. In the end, the good folk drive out the bad, and films about corrupt towns usually conclude with them being cleaned up and liberated from their oppressive masters. But the durability of the pattern suggests a fundamental distrust of communities, which goes hand in hand with the western’s admiration for roaming loners who value their independence and personal honor above all else. For all the talk about making towns fit for decent women and children, there’s an undercurrent of disdain for people willing to trade their autonomy or integrity for communal security or financial comfort. Money is marginal in John Ford’s westerns; in films about covered-wagon pioneers, cattle drives, or cavalry fighting Indians, the West appears as a place where filthy lucre holds little sway. Only bandits and dance-hall floozies care about cash. By contrast, movies about gold rushes, bounty hunters and land wars present a West tainted by the familiar noir theme that everyone has a price. The importance of money is linked to the increasing postwar prominence of women in westerns, since when money supplants prowess with a gun or the ability to survive in the wilderness, women have the chance to gain power. Jane Greer in Station West and Ruth Roman in The Far Country own saloons (like Joan Crawford in the most female-centric of all westerns, Ray’s Johnny Guitar); women own ranches in Mann’s The Furies and The Man from Laramie, in Ramrod, Rancho Notorious and Forty Guns. With money they can hire men to work and fight for them — like the eponymous forty gunmen in the last film who ride behind Barbara Stanwyck, who is celebrated in a ballad that thrills to the perversity of a woman in command.

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For a woman without land or money to get ahead using only feminine wiles is much rarer in westerns. In Lust for Gold (1948) Ida Lupino, as a woman who runs a bakery and is fed up with her shiftless husband, seduces a lonely prospector who has discovered a fabulous stash of gold in the mountains. The scruffy, coarse-mannered German immigrant (Glenn Ford) makes himself over into a courtly suitor, falling hopelessly in love, but when he learns that his beloved is still married, and overhears her assuring her husband that she’s only interested in his gold, he plots a cruel revenge, trapping the two at his mine and letting them languish without water before they finally die in an avalanche. Lust for Gold combines a tedious modern framing story with a long central flashback to the Old West. The contemporary tale is yet another reminder of the truth indelibly demonstrated in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre: that gold drives men mad. The far more compelling flashback is about a different kind of lust, and shows the collision of love and greed setting off an earthquake that topples mountains. Though female power is rare in westerns, all of the characters cited above are nuanced and at least partially sympathetic — more so than the black widows of film noir. In Fritz Lang’s Rancho Notorious (1952), Marlene Dietrich’s Altar Keane is richly shaded, raffish and inscrutable, in contrast to the rigidly single-minded hero Vern (Arthur Kennedy), who seeks revenge on the man who raped and murdered his sweetheart. Altar Keane is a former saloon singer — we first see her perched on the back of a male patron, taking part in a raucous “horse race”— who has roamed all over the West. Fired from a job when she objects to being pawed, she puts all her savings on a Chuck-a-luck wheel and wins a fortune, with the help of a gunfighter who knows the wheel is fixed. She becomes the mistress of a horse ranch near the Mexican border, called Chuck-a-luck, which is really a hideout for outlaws who pay her ten percent of their takings in exchange for hospitality and protection. When Vern finds his way to the ranch he sets to work seducing Altar in order to find out which of her guests is the man he’s after. The aging, imperious woman helplessly softens towards the brash young cowboy, and when he reveals his true motives and pours out his contempt for her livelihood —“Is that a bedroom or a morgue? A courtyard or a graveyard?”— she is shattered, forced to face the real source of her jewels and money. Like Ruth Roman in The Far Country and Jane Greer in Station West, she takes a bullet for her man, paying for her ethical impurity. But though these rule-breaking women must either die or be tamed by men, they command more respect than similarly devious male characters, since their world gives them so few outlets for ambition.

Men Who Would Be Kings: Ranchland Empires In Andre de Toth’s lean, tough-minded Ramrod (1947), Connie Dickason (Veronica Lake) declares her independence, telling her father that she intends to make her own life, and “being a woman, I won’t have to use guns.” Connie is the only person bold enough to challenge the tyrannical ruler of a rock-rimmed valley. Frank Ivey (Preston Foster) is a quiet maniac, a man consumed by a single belief: his own absolute power. As the film opens, he faces down a rival rancher who has tried to buck his will in a fight over common grazing land. The humiliated man flees, but leaves his ranch to Connie, his former fiancée,

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who is determined to carry out what her man was too weak to accomplish: knocking Frank Ivey off his throne. Lake’s tiny, exquisite figure, crowned by a cascade of blonde curls, sets off her steely coldness; the rigid set of her head and the frozen mask of her face convey her inflexible willfulness. As Ivey, who wants to marry her, points out: “I can’t play second fiddle any more than you can — we’re alike in that way.” Around this brute clash of wills, de Toth constructs an exceptionally subtle movie, full of compromised characters and moral dilemmas. The visual style matches the script with quietly insinuating tracking shots. The landscapes are magnificent, with cliffs looming like skyscrapers, but they remain in the background, giving a natural and unforced sense of life in the valley without producing illustrations of the Old West. Ramrod is an unusual western in that its world is completely enclosed; there is no stranger, no new arrival to shake things up. Rather, like Pursued (with which it vies for the distinction of being the first noir western), it is set in a world built on old hatreds, mired to the axles in the past. Connie hires Dave Nash ( Joel McCrea) as her ranch foreman or “ramrod.” There’s irony in this appellation: a ramrod is straight and rigid, a tool of unyielding force, but over the course of the film Dave learns the folly of thinking any human character can have the same qualities. He’s a principled man struggling to recover his dignity after a bout of alcoholism set off by the deaths of his wife and son. Having become a joke as the town drunk, he takes Connie’s offer as a chance to prove himself, and to stand up to Ivey, who has ordered him out of town. He recalls the words of Connie’s defeated fiancée, musing: “Walt said Ivey isn’t God. Ivey says he is. I want to find out who’s right.” Ivey and his men terrorize the upstart ranch, burning the house and beating one of Connie’s hands to death. Dave is determined to fight clean and keep the law on his side, but he’s undermined and betrayed by his own friends and allies. Connie is impatient with his methods and schemes to have her own men stampede her herd over a cliff, knowing Ivey will be blamed. The town’s aged and respected sheriff, a firm upholder of law and order, is killed when he goes to arrest Ivey; Dave blames himself for using the law as a weapon when “the law was just a tired old man.” He promptly kills the man he believes shot the sheriff, only to learn it was Ivey who pulled the trigger. Dave’s best friend, Bill Schell (Don DeFore), a charming rascal with a looser code of honor, kills Ivey’s foreman and falsely claims self-defense. All these lies and killings and backhanded schemes and personal vendettas swirl around Dave, a man saddened by his growing realization that things can’t be simple, and that the West’s accepted rules can easily be twisted into cover for selfish acts of aggression. The film’s promotional campaign exploited the femme-fatale angle, with cheesecake shots of Lake (who would later marry de Toth) and leering taglines: “They called it God’s country — until the devil put a woman there!” But Connie isn’t evil, though she’s deeply flawed: unscrupulous and underhanded, falling back on seductive wiles to get her way. She believes that ends justify means, but her ends are admirable. She loves a good man, whom she hurts without meaning to. Towards the end of the film, Connie visits the cave where the wounded Dave is hiding out, inadvertently leading his enemies to him. She reclines with her masses of hair spread out, cradling him as he lies sleeping, a strange look of sinister contentment on her face. In the end, Dave rejects Connie in favor of the good woman, and she complains that she doesn’t want to enjoy the fruits of her triumph alone.

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That Connie is not otherwise punished represents an unusual act of tolerance in a film of the time. Connie and Ivey fight their battle over land, the West’s most important commodity. Perceived as vacant by settlers who ignored anyone there before them, the West seemed to offer unlimited room for individual power, expansion and gain: men like Frank Ivey could make themselves gods. Anthony Mann’s first westerns, Devil’s Doorway and The Furies (both 1950), concern bitter, destructive battles over pieces of land. In the former it’s Sweet Meadows, a gorgeous, fertile valley hidden among sharp mountain peaks, which provokes a race war between the Shoshone who ranch it without a legal claim and a racist lawyer who encourages a band of sheep-farmers to take the land for themselves. In this startlingly fierce revisionist western, an American Indian who fought in the Civil War and won the Congressional Medal of Honor discovers that he is prohibited from staking a claim to his own land. The lawyer (Louis Calhern) makes a misty-eyed speech about how the valley is “what all men dream of when they think about home.” But for the American settlers to make their homes there, they must drive away the natives who feel a spiritual connection to the land. Someone must always be dispossessed. The Furies, like Ramrod, is driven by a contest of wills between a man who would be king and a woman no less strong-willed; here they are a father and daughter with an unnaturally intimate, combative relationship. Niven Busch supplied the original story, which like those of Pursued and Duel in the Sun draws heavily on Greek tragedy in its tempestuous account of a family consumed by jealousy, competition and tit-for-tat vengeance. Through its casting and performances, the film sometimes works against its script, adding to the antagonism onscreen a tension of resistance from the audience. Walter Huston, in his last film role, plays T.C. Jeffords, the patriarch of a vast ranch called the Furies, with so much swaggering self-confidence that he becomes insufferable. He’s a man who has never experienced a split-second of self-doubt, even as his ranch has fallen on hard times and he is forced to plead for a bank loan and pay off his employees and creditors with “T.C.’s,” his own personal currency —flashy but worthless pieces of paper. Obtuse and stubborn, he’s both Lear-like in his vain insensitivity and distinctively American in his refusal of introspection and his robust infatuation with his own legend. His daughter Vance (Barbara Stanwyck) is no more prone to self-examination, and she has inherited her father’s willfulness and overweening pride. Nonetheless, she is far more sympathetic, both in her frustrations and in her redeeming loyalty to the Herreras, a family of Mexican squatters who have lived on the Furies by age-old consent. Stanwyck boldly exposes Vance’s near-incestuous attachment to her widowed father, which makes her ferociously jealous of any rival for his affections, and her spoiled inability to cope with not getting her way. But she also makes us feel keenly for the capable, imperious woman when she sees herself being shunted off the ranch that she has run by herself and that has been promised to her. She is played for a sucker by Rip Darrow, a gambler who wants to recover a piece of land that was swallowed by the Furies. He kisses, slaps and insults her, then takes the payoff her father offers to give up their engagement, leaving her humiliated. Adding to her sense of impotence, her father decides to marry an urbane widow, Flo Burnett ( Judith Anderson), who plans to send her away to Europe. In a rage, Vance flings a pair of scissors at her stepmother, permanently disfiguring her. T.C. gets a horrific revenge

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on his daughter by hanging her best friend, Juan Herrera; Vance patiently plots to destroy her father, gaining financial control of the Furies by cleverly exploiting his “T.C.’s.” The film builds up such a head of resentment and depicts such unforgivable cruelties that no ending could lay all the nastiness to rest. While Mann often closed his films on an ambivalent note, admitting that no catharsis can heal his wounded protagonists, here he makes a sudden, nearly grotesque stab at a neat, upbeat conclusion. T.C. Jeffords is shot dead by Juan’s mother, but both before and after death he is mythologized as a great man. He accepts Vance’s triumph with good grace, proves that he can still wrestle a bull singlehanded, and inspires a cloying ballad by one of his cowboys that celebrates his exploits. Vance, meanwhile, happily winds up in the arms of the man who has brought her to heel. Wendell Corey is woefully miscast as the arrogant Rip Darrow; he’s no match for Stanwyck, and the more his character is touted as handsome and masterful, the more pallid and inadequate he appears. The miscasting only highlights the crude chauvinism of the relationship. (This dispiriting trajectory is repeated in Samuel Fuller’s delirious Forty Guns, in which Stanwyck’s whip-wielding ranch queen is put in her place by a drab Barry Sullivan.) The problem is compounded by the very attractive and appealing presence of Gilbert Roland as Juan Herrera, who quietly loves Vance and alone is capable of appealing to her better nature. Their scenes together, scored with melancholy acoustic guitar, are the only interludes of gentle, affectionate warmth in the film. They perform a traditional Mexican ritual each time they part, sharing a small piece of bread and reciting, “Until our eyes next meet.” Juan is the only person in the film who can see beyond himself, whose personality is not confined by selfishness. Rip Darrow is obsessed with recovering his family’s land; the mutilated Flo refuses to lend money to her husband, afraid that once solvent he will leave her; Vance is not devoted to her father but consumed by the need to be important to him and through him. The Furies, like Mann’s other two 1950 westerns, Devil’s Doorway and Winchester ’73, is filmed in black and white. (His next western, Bend of the River, and all that followed would be in color.) Far more black than white: as in Border Incident (though Alton was not behind the camera this time), many scenes are set outdoors at night, the range flooded with darkness, mesas looming up in black waves, riders silhouetted as they gallop along ridges. Even the daytime scenes seem to be shot under a lowering stormcloud, and the Jeffords’ big house is full of shadows. Much of the film plays as flamboyant, full-blooded melodrama, often tinged with campy humor, but several scenes cut bone-deep. The hanging, carried out with merciless efficiency, is horrifying above all because T.C. kills Juan (ostensibly for stealing a horse) only to punish Vance, and he takes pleasure both in her anguish and in his own power to dispatch summary injustice. Mann kept returning to King Lear, which he evokes in The Furies, The Man from Laramie and Man of the West; he contemplated but never produced a final version of the theme, to be called The King. None of these films closely follow Shakespeare’s plot, but all examine the volatility and melancholy of ruling men weakened by age, and the greed, infighting, grudges and jealousy that that swirl around them. Like usurping kings in Shakespeare, cattle barons amass what looks like absolute power, but find their empires crumbling as they near death.

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Greek tragedy on the range: Vance Jeffords (Barbara Stanwyck) cozies up to her father T.C. (Walter Huston) in The Furies (Anthony Mann, 1950).

Mann’s fullest evocation of Lear is The Man from Laramie (1955), in which Donald Crisp plays Alec Waggoman, whose New Mexico ranch stretches a day’s ride in every direction, and who owns the town of Coronado body and soul. His failing eyesight indicates his declining powers, and also the emotional blindness that leads him to misjudge both of his heirs. He ends up sightless, helpless and heirless, comforted by the woman he long ago cast aside. The cracks and flaws in Alec’s empire, the Barb ranch, are exposed

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by the arrival of a stranger, Will Lockhart ( James Stewart). In this, his last collaboration with Mann, as in his first, Stewart plays a man possessed by the need for revenge. In the film’s opening scene, he surveys charred wreckage at the site where a cavalry patrol was massacred by Apache; shattered wagon wheels and bits of uniforms lie scattered on the stained black earth, in a hollow sunk in the rock. Here we see physical evidence of the trauma that Lockhart has internalized; his younger brother was one of the soldiers killed, and he is determined to find and kill the man who supplied the repeating rifles the Apaches used. His grizzled sidekick, Charlie (Wallace Ford), makes a trenchant comment, applicable to many of the roles Stewart played for Mann: “Hate’s unbecoming in a man like you. On some men it shows.” But while Stewart’s eyes blaze and his voice cracks in moments of anger, his character is aptly named Lockhart: he plays his cards close, refusing to divulge anything about himself except that he comes from Laramie. Of course he’s threatened and stonewalled in Coronado, but each effort to convince or force him to leave strengthens his resolve to stay. His first encounter with the Barb comes in the form of a senseless atrocity perpetrated by Dave Waggoman (Alex Nicol), Alec’s unstable, sadistic son. Lockhart and the crew of his wagon train are collecting a load of salt they have been assured is free for the taking (common land or resources often spark conflicts in westerns), their small figures exposed at the edge of what looks like an immense, frozen lake. Dave and his posse suddenly ride down on them, accusing them of trespassing and stealing. Dave orders his men, who obey him blindly, to lasso Lockhart and drag him through the campfire ashes, burn his wagons and shoot his mules. The slaughter takes place offscreen, but the animals’ rending screams accompany the three bonfires burning red against the snowy plain of salt, giving the scene a phantasmagoric horror. Spoiled by his now-deceased mother, Dave is vain, weak and hysterical. With his curly hair and plump, red face, he looks like a monstrous overgrown baby. He’s determined to prove he’s as tough as his father, equating manliness with gratuitous violence. Alec knows his son is incapable of running the ranch or staying out of trouble, so he has given his foster son Vic Hansbro (Arthur Kennedy) the responsibilities of managing the Barb and acting as his brother’s keeper. He has promised Vic an equal share on the ranch, and the land-hungry orphan is determined to hold him to it, but Alec never fully accepts him, reminding him, “Dave is my blood ... and loving ain’t the same as liking.” The aging man is manipulative, but also deluded. He clings to the belief that the worthless Dave is only “wild” and capable of maturing (even as he bluntly informs him, “You’re not the man I was”), and he underestimates the lengths to which the crafty Vic will go for what he sees as his rights. Alec is domineering and often wrongheaded, but — it seems — not dishonorable. Both Dave and Vic represent a degeneration, epitomized by their complicity in running guns to the Apache. We never find out how or why they started, and assume it was Vic’s idea only because he’s smarter. In westerns, selling guns to Indians is on a par with shooting a man in the back; when Alec suspects that Dave might be responsible, he declares that if it’s true, then Dave was not his son; he is “only a stranger.” But the patriarch is indirectly responsible for the corruption of his heirs; Vic is warped by his desire for Alec’s property, while Dave believes he is emulating his father’s exploits when

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he attacks “trespassers,” seizes cattle that have wandered from another ranch, and tries to kill Lockhart, who gave him a mild beating. Lockhart shoots back and nicks Dave’s hand, which sends him into a psychotic tantrum of self-pity. He orders his men to disarm Lockhart and hold his arm while he shoots him point blank in the hand. Afterward the men hang their heads or look away in mute shame. The camera pans quickly from Stewart’s hand to his face as he nearly swoons with shock and agony: eyes rolling, lips drawn back, body crumpling, whimpering shrilly like the shot mules. Close-ups of men’s faces grimacing in anguish and struggle are Mann’s signature throughout his oeuvre; no action movies are more honest about the reality of physical pain. When men fight they claw at each others eyes, sweat and bleed and totter with exhaustion. As David Thomson has astutely pointed out — discussing Men in War (1957), in which the land for which men spill blood is a bit of rocky waste in Korea — Mann’s heroes realize that “violence must be total if it is to succeed.” It is this realization that guts Mann’s heroes, leaving them emotionally depleted if not dead. Men who enjoy killing or causing pain, like Dave (or like Arthur Kennedy’s character in Bend of the River, who bares his teeth with wolfish delight whenever he shoots someone) are emotionally defective beasts. When Lockhart finally discovers that Vic is the one supplying rifles to the Indians, he prepares to enact his revenge. But though he says with relish, “I’ve come a thousand miles to kill you,” he finds himself unable to shoot a man in cold blood, and finally gives up, ordering him with deflated disgust: “Get away from me.” (Conveniently, the Apache do the job for him when they realize they won’t get their weapons.) Vic has already killed Dave to stop him from summoning the Apache and setting off a massacre of everyone in the territory. (Cracking up, Dave rants, “You’re all against me — I can’t trust nobody. I’m going to fix things my way. I’ll show you who’s weak and who’s strong!”) Everyone blames Lockhart for the killing, and Vic’s position seems safe, but in desperation to keep Alec from finding the hidden load of guns he pushes him off his horse, nearly killing him. Some shreds of sympathy adhere to Vic despite all his crimes, because of the justice of his complaint, “I was the only son you ever had, but you couldn’t see me.” Ambivalence was Arthur Kennedy’s specialty; his performances blended weakness and decency, friendliness and spite. Blond and fine-featured, his face was marred by a scowling brow, narrow eyes and a mouth that twisted sourly. He excelled at playing men deformed by resentment of their secondary status, making a brilliant foil for more self-assured men. In The Man from Laramie, the aggressive, destructively competitive male world contrasts with an unusually rich evocation of the peaceful and civilized female domain. When Barbara Waggoman (Cathy O’Donnell) invites Lockhart into her well-appointed parlor and offers him tea, he reacts with a startled, “Wha...?” On the stony revenge trail, he’d forgotten all about willow-pattern tea sets, and he gets pleasure just from watching Barbara unpack bolts of material in her store. She’s Alec’s niece, but she longs to escape his ruthless, feudal realm, and though engaged to Vic, she is immediately drawn to Lockhart. He’s also befriended by Kate Canaday (Aline McMahon), the only other ranch owner in the vicinity, who hires him as her foreman. Like Barbara, Kate understands Alec’s nature and the dynamics of his family, but remains loyal to him even though he jilted her to marry Dave’s mother. She is the only person in the film who really comes out ahead in the end, having lost nothing and regained the man she loves.

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Lockhart rides back to Laramie alone, leaving Barbara behind. An army man all his life, he grew up traveling from barracks to barracks, and tells Barbara that he “can’t rightly say any place is my home.” When she responds that “everyone should have a place to remember, and feel they belong to,” he replies, “Well, I always feel I belong where I am.” Lockhart, who tells Alec, “I never owned an acre of land in my life, never wanted to,” is a classic loner hero, resisting the western drive to settle, make homes and build towns. He is not defined by property, family or place in a community, but solely by his strength, skill and character. The Man from Laramie, like many noir westerns, reveals the true cause of the loner’s separation: not just a restless urge to wander, but a psychological wound. Covered by a scab of embittered stoicism, the wound festers and forces him to pursue a revenge he believes will make him whole again. Jim Kitses, in Horizons West, pinpoints the strangely masochistic quality of Mann’s heroes, describing how they “behave as if driven by a vengeance they must inflict upon themselves for having once been human, trusting and, therefore, vulnerable.”

Riding Lonesome: Revenge Dramas Samuel Fuller’s Run of the Arrow (1957) opens with a post-massacre panorama that echoes the first scene of The Man from Laramie: earth strewn with bodies, broken wheels and blackened wreckage. It’s the last day of the Civil War. A Southern infantry soldier shoots down a Union cavalryman, then crouches over his victim, rifling his belongings and eating his food. When the devoted rebel, O’Meara (Rod Steiger), sees General Lee surrendering to Grant, he can’t accept defeat. Nursing sullen anger, grieving for his father and brothers, and unwilling to pledge allegiance to the United States, he heads west and is next seen riding alone through a rocky, alien landscape. But O’Meara believes “a man can’t live alone; he must have allegiance to a people, to a nation.” Insisting that he’s not an American, he seeks to join the Sioux, adopting their language and customs and marrying an Oglalla woman. Though he promises to kill his countrymen in battle, when it comes to a showdown between Indians and cavalry, he faces his divided loyalties. It’s dangerous to be between worlds; Walking Coyote ( Jay C. Flippen), the rascally old Sioux scout who first befriends O’Meara, is killed by his own people, who consider him a renegade for having served the U.S. Army. The Civil War cast a long shadow over the West. The land where men came to start fresh and leave behind pasts of defeat and loss, of atrocities suffered or committed, becomes a place where old grievances and animosities are kept alive, driving new conflicts. Ethan Edwards ( John Wayne) in The Searchers is another Confederate soldier unready to lay down his arms; when he comes riding up to his brother’s house, still wearing his grey coat years after the end of the war, the keynote of his character is introduced — he knows how to hold a grudge. While Ethan’s tireless quest to find his kidnapped niece could have been driven by a pure motive — like that of his equally determined companion Martin Pauley — Ford instead exposes his rabid, senseless hatred of the Comanche: he shoots out the eyes of a dead Indian, kills buffalo just so they won’t become meals for the enemy, and finally reveals that his goal is not to rescue his niece but to kill her, to expunge the

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taint of her marriage to a Comanche “buck.” The transcendent moment when he changes his mind (“Let’s go home, Debbie”) is followed by his silent departure from the house where he returns her. His exit mirrors his introduction as an outsider — not only still clinging to a lost cause, but in love with his brother’s wife — who can never be assimilated into a family, because he can never heal and forget. The archetypal western journey is that of pioneers passing through dangers to arrive at a new life. Quests for vengeance invert this goal: their end is not survival or renewal, but death. Revenge is supposed to right wrongs, bring justice and heal wounds. Many stories conclude that vengeance is not worth it; it’s better to move on and forget past injuries. Anthony Mann went beyond facile acceptance or rejection to examine how the lust for revenge corrodes souls, how the long-sought score-settling leaves the victor both disappointed and soiled. The desire to kill compromises avengers and darkens their paths, no matter how just their causes. Struggling with nature, space and time, encountering strangers whom they must help or fight, men on missions of revenge are really exploring the terrain of their own lives, coming face to face with themselves in climactic showdowns. Mann introduced this theme in his first western starring James Stewart, the successful and hugely entertaining picaresque Winchester ’73 (1950). Accompanied by the first of his weathered companions (Millard Mitchell as “High Spade” Frankie Wilson), Lin McAdam (Stewart) spends years doggedly tracking down his own brother, who murdered their father. On his way he encounters a slippery Indian trader who fleeces outlaws and winds up scalped; a cowardly husband who abandons his bride during an Indian attack to save himself; an affable but trigger-happy bank robber; a cavalry troupe besieged by a tribe eager to repeat Sitting Bull’s recent victory over Custer, and Wyatt Earp in Dodge City on the Fourth of July — all strung together by the title object, a perfect gun that passes from hand to hand. This is the only western in which Mann introduces these kinds of historical or legendary elements; while Ford’s westerns are always about the west, it is often easy to imagine transporting the stories and characters in Mann’s westerns to another setting, since he was always most interested in psychological conflicts. His tapestry of the Wild West in Winchester ’73 is not particularly revisionist, nor is Stewart’s Lin MacAdam as much of a departure from his pre-war persona as later roles for Mann would be. He’s tough but clearly just, and while he has shed his endearing awkwardness and boyish stammer, he still has a warm twinkle in his eye. Still, the mere sight of Stewart savagely throttling Dan Duryea (as the charming snake of an outlaw, Waco Johnny Dean) and murderously stalking his own brother, was startling for audiences. In every one of the Mann-Stewart westerns, something in Stewart’s past hangs over him, unresolved and potentially explosive. His usually gentle, gallant demeanor makes the neurotic irascibility and sudden eruptions of crazed fury all the more shocking. That his brother, Dutch Henry Brown (Stephen McNally), is a kind of evil twin is established in the first scene, when they compete in a shooting contest, demonstrating identical skill. In the end Dutch Henry loses only because he agrees to let Lin settle the contest with a single, seemingly impossible shot. His character, not his skill, is inferior. Lin’s prize is the Winchester, a rifle so flawless that it is labeled “one in a thousand,”

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which Dutch Henry promptly steals. The rifle is an almost magical object of desire; every man who sees it is instantly smitten — caressing the barrel and gazing down the immaculate sightlines — and determined to have the gun at all costs. It’s also a death warrant; aside from Lin, who finally recovers it, every man who gets his hands on the Winchester dies soon after. For men of the West, guns are both indispensable equipment, almost part of their organic make-up, and expressions of their identity. In Dodge City, where Wyatt Earp forces everyone who comes into town to check his firearms, Lin and his brother spot each other and simultaneously clutch at their empty holsters. When Lin finally catches up with Dutch Henry, their confrontation is not a clean, ritualistic shootout in an emptied Main Street. They fight to the death on a vertiginous crag of rock, using boulders as cover, firing a barrage of shots at each other as they maneuver for a position from which to take fatal aim. Mann often exploited this kind of violent landscape, most powerfully in The Naked Spur (1953), in which a killer repeatedly takes refuge atop cliffs, forcing his pursuers to climb up precipitous slopes while dodging bullets or man-made avalanches, and to duke it out on narrow ledges. (In The Furies a similar vertical terrain appears when T.C.’s men lay siege to the Herrera’s fortress on top of a mesa.) The rough, craggy landscapes Mann favored mirror the psyches of his heroes, which never lie smooth, and which are shaped by constantly coming up against literal and figurative hard places. Extremity, both internal and external, was Mann’s natural territory, and that of his heroes. The “spur” of the title is both an actual boot spur that comes into horrifying contact with a face, and the brittle, vindictive, wounded rage that spurs on Stewart’s character, Howard Kemp. He’s been betrayed by a woman to whom he was engaged, who not only took up with another man while he was fighting in the Civil War, but sold his beloved ranch out from under him. To get it back he hunts down a killer, Ben Vandergroat (Robert Ryan), with a bounty on his head; Kemp wants the money, but also seems determined to get even with his enemies by stooping to their level. He’s nearly demented by the attempt to drive himself into an act his decency prohibits, and Stewart frighteningly bares his flayed emotions, lashing out furiously whenever he feels threatened or accused. His memories erupt in delirium, a psychological fever. Kemp unwillingly takes on two partners: Jesse Tate (Millard Mitchell), an old prospector whose obsession with finding gold softens his wits and subverts his natural kindliness; and Roy Anderson (Ralph Meeker), a rapist discharged from the cavalry for moral unfitness. The crafty outlaw pits his captors against each other, making each think that the others will double-cross him, tempting Jesse with an imaginary gold mine and Roy with his young female companion, Lina ( Janet Leigh). The orphaned daughter of another outlaw, Lina is loyal to the cocky, self-justifying Ben, whom she looks on as a surrogate father, not realizing he intends to claim her as a lover. She only gradually comes to recognize his viciousness and Kemp’s tortured goodness. The splendor of the Rocky Mountain scenery shows up the sordid pettiness of the men traveling through it. In one of the most upsetting scenes, the party slaughters a band of Shoshone, who are hunting the cavalryman for his rape of a chief ’s daughter. Roy forces them into a fight by mounting a sneak attack on the Indians after Kemp has greeted them peacefully. As they ride away afterward, Roy grinning and pleased with himself,

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A craggy, violent landscape for craggy, violent men: Ben (Robert Ryan, left) fights off Howard (James Stewart, right) in The Naked Spur (Anthony Mann, 1953).

Kemp surveys the scattered bodies of the Shoshone with a queasy sense of waste. Aside from the Indians, the five travelers encounter no one else, and not a single man-made structure; they are all exiles from society, remote both physically and psychologically from the safety and moral limits of community. When they take refuge in a cave on a rainy night, Kemp and Lina listen to the rain making music on their tin dinnerware, and Kemp lapses into a poetic reverie about his lost home, before seizing Lina and kissing her almost frantically. He yearns to recover the rooted, domestic life he was robbed of, not wanting to accept that, in becoming a bounty hunter, he has lost the man he used to be. Despite the varieties of moral turpitude on display, the act of selling a man for money — even if he is dead, even if he was killed by someone else, and even if he was himself a remorseless killer — is treated with unique revulsion. Ben falls to his death in a turbulent river, and Roy conveniently dies trying to recover his body: everything is made as easy as possible for Kemp. He throws Ben’s body over a horse, hysterically insisting, “I’m taking him back! I’m going to sell him for money!” before he breaks down and buries the valuable corpse. This ending could have been staged as a redemption in which Kemp frees himself from the spell of bitterness and looks to the future, California and Janet Leigh. Instead, he seems like a broken man; he recognizes his inability to go through with his plan not with a sense of cleansing but of defeat. In giving up his dream, Kemp must give up the idea that the past can ever be erased or regained.

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In this, The Naked Spur reverses the hopeful moral of Mann’s previous and much less noirish film, Bend of the River, in which Glyn McLyntock (Stewart), a one-time border raider who narrowly escaped hanging, successfully remakes himself as a guide for a band of Oregon settlers, proving that a man can change and put the past behind him.3 As in Winchester ’73, he has an evil doppelganger: Emerson Cole (Arthur Kennedy) is another former outlaw who repeatedly saves McLyntock’s life, but who finally betrays his friend for money — and, apparently, because he resents his moral superiority. The doppelgangervillain exists to show what the hero could have been. The good man is divided between noble and vicious impulses; the villain doesn’t suffer from the guilt or scruples that trouble the repressed hero, and hence is a happier, more relaxed and confident man. (Kennedy in Bend of the River, Ryan in The Naked Spur, McIntire in The Far Country and Duryea in Winchester ’73 are all smiling men who enjoy their villainy.) Hero and villain are both outsiders: the villain because he has broken the law, the hero because his obsession with past wrongs has severed him from normal life. Budd Boetticher turned the premise and structure of The Naked Spur into a sturdy formula in a series of westerns starring Randolph Scott, but his concise, stripped-down austerity is as different from Mann’s baroque grandeur as Scott’s stiff-backed, taciturn inexpressiveness is from Stewart’s raw, combustible temperament. The seven films Boetticher made with Scott, most written by Burt Kennedy, focus on small groups of travelers — tensely balanced between outlaws, settlers, bounty hunters and lawmen — moving through some of the starkest and most inhospitable terrain of the west. Boetticher’s home base was Lone Pine, California, a popular location for western films since the silent days. He emphasized the primitive, otherworldly aspect of the landscape, with its jagged extrusions of rock, bleached sand dunes and arid plains closed in by distant, bare mountains. Towns play no role in Boetticher’s best westerns (those that are set in towns —Decision at Sundown and Buchanan Rides Alone—are less satisfying; similarly, Mann’s least successful and most conventional western, The Tin Star, is his most domesticated). The only signs of civilization are isolated stage posts and corrals, often abandoned and in ruins. Human presences are marked by smoke signals or dust clouds in the distance. The wide-screen landscape consists mostly of negative space, pale and bone dry. A void surrounds his characters, making them look shrunken and pitilessly exposed. “A man needs a reason to ride this country,” Scott says to a man he encounters in the desert in Ride Lonesome (1959). “You got a reason?” It turns out the two men have the same reason. Ben Brigade (Scott) is a bounty hunter who has tracked down a killer with a price on his head. His quarry, the young outlaw Billy John, acts like a 1950s juvenile delinquent: a slouching, giggling punk whose immaturity makes him dangerous. Brigade is taking Billy John to Santa Cruz to hang when he runs into a pair of outlaws, Boone (Pernell Roberts) and Whit ( James Coburn), who want to turn in the killer themselves in exchange for a promised amnesty. They tag along, intending to dispose of the bounty hunter by force, when necessary, and steal his prize. The party is completed by Mrs. Lane (Karen Steele), a freshly minted widow whose blonde-bombshell looks and position as the only woman around make her a source of

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constant strife. A band of Mesculero Indians pursues and attacks the travelers because one of their tribe wants to take the white woman as his squaw; Boone can’t keep his eyes or thoughts off her; and the men keep telling each other that they don’t want to see a woman killed, each hoping to use her sex as a shield against the others. In westerns women, like Indians, are powerful catalysts but often remain opaque and ill-defined. (Boetticher himself said, “What counts is what the heroine provokes.... In herself, the woman has not the slightest importance.”) They represent the scarce comforts and graces of civilization, companionship and the bonds of family (“It makes a man lonesome just to look at her,” is an oft-repeated line); but they also arouse base instincts in men starved for sex and used to grabbing what they want. It’s dangerous to have women around, but women themselves are the most endangered and defenseless in a country reliant on fists and guns. Mrs. Lane, for example, shoots an attacking Indian and reacts with horror. The violence in Boetticher’s films was, for their time, intense and graphic. While Mann dwelled on the drawn-out pain inflicted during fights or torture, Boetticher focused instead on sudden, splattering bursts that are all the more shocking because they follow long stretches of inactivity, of talk and waiting and building tension that is released in unpredictable bloody spasms. Andrew Sarris, in The American Cinema, compared the Kennedy-Boetticher formula to a poker game, with a small group of characters bluffing and guessing and trying to improve their hands. The films are variations on a theme, with lines that recur (“A man needs a reason to ride this country,” “A man should be able to look after his woman,” etc.) and stock characters who return. There are inexperienced settlers who stumble into risky situations; dumb, undisciplined young punks who act like low-grade Brando impersonators; and intelligent, loquacious, charismatic outlaws who treat Scott with friendly respect even while plotting to kill him. These attractive villains are necessary to offset the blandness of Scott’s ramrodstraight heroes; they have all the wit, charm, looseness and ambiguity he lacks. They don’t represent Scott’s dark side, like Mann’s doppelganger villains, but rather occupy a middle ground between pure good and evil, expressing a flexible, self-serving morality. Their fascination with Scott’s characters — a mix of admiration, competitiveness and regret that they feel bound to kill him — makes the heroes seem more interesting. In films where women are peripheral, relationships between men take on the intensity and complicated tensions usually reserved for heterosexual relationships. Lee Marvin steals Seven Men from Now (1956) as Bill Masters, loafing around in a rakish emerald scarf, assuming a lazy contrapposto stance, practicing his fast-draw with cartoon sound effects, and tenderly rhapsodizing over Annie Greer’s (Gail Russell) beauty. He’s not one of the seven men Ben Stride (Scott) is hunting, who robbed a Wells Fargo office and in the process killed Stride’s wife; Masters is merely an opportunist who hopes to get hold of the money by sticking close to Stride. It’s Masters who understands the guilt that drives Stride, and who sees the unspoken attraction between Stride and Greer, who is married to another man. Masters saves Stride’s life several times, only to face off with him in the end over the money and die in the dust. The charismatic villains have one tragic flaw: they need to measure themselves against the hero, and suffer from the fatal delusion that they can outdraw him. Of all the western myths, the most stubborn is the faith that the better man can always get his gun out of his belt faster.

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In The Tall T (1957), badman Frank Usher (Richard Boone) harbors an unrequited fondness for Pat Brennan (Randolph Scott), whom he is holding hostage along with a newlywed couple, waiting for the bride’s father to come through with the ransom money. Frank is sick of his two puerile henchmen, who love killing and never talk about anything except women and drinking; they’re so brainless it’s like they’re not there, he complains. Frank yearns for an equal to talk to; “It ain’t right for a man to be alone,” he asserts, and he dreams of having his own ranch, because “a man should have something of his own, something to belong to.” Despite these humane sentiments, Frank allows his gunmen to kill women and children; he boasts that he never pulls the trigger himself. The Boetticher films are never quite sure what to do with these appealing but morally faulty characters; Frank cleverly saves himself in the end by refusing to turn around, knowing Brennan isn’t capable of shooting him in the back — only to ride back for a showdown, seemingly just because the movie can’t allow him to get away scot-free. Frank isn’t the only lonely character in The Tall T. The film opens with Brennan’s visit to a remote relay station whose owner tells him it’s an unnatural life, that no man should live so solitary an existence. The kidnapped bride admits she married her worthless husband, knowing he was only interested in her money, because she was so alone and desperate to escape a father who didn’t love her. Almost never accompanied by a sidekick, and usually winding up as solitary as they began, Scott’s laconic characters are human lone pines. No director has ever used a severely limited actor to greater effect than Boetticher used Randolph Scott. With a wooden body and a flat, awkward voice, Scott nonetheless possessed a leathery, handsome, crudely noble countenance that looks like part of the landscape, and his opacity becomes the nature of his characters, who are all single-minded, secretive men, usually goaded by fixations that are not revealed until well into the story. In Ride Lonesome (1959) he’s not really after the bounty for Billy John, he’s just using him as bait to lure his older brother Frank, who hanged Brigade’s wife years before. This trauma has turned him into a friendless wanderer, numb except for his desire for revenge. His plans work perfectly: he reels in Frank by threatening to hang Billy John from the same tree where his wife died, then shoots him. It’s hard to tell whether he feels any sense of relief or redemption; he rejects the possibility of marrying Mrs. Lane and stays behind alone when the others ride on. He burns the dead hanging-tree with its jutting branch, wiping out the symbol of both his loss and his vengeance in a towering red blaze that fills the final shot of the film. It’s a spectacular image, but it leaves a lingering question. Once his revenge is accomplished, what will Brigade live for? Decision at Sundown (1957) unmasks the self-delusion that drives Scott’s relentless pursuit of vengeance. As Bart Allison, he shows up in the town of Sundown determined to kill Tate Kimbrough ( John Carroll), whom he has tracked for three years. Allison’s wife killed herself because of her involvement with Tate while he was away fighting for the Confederates; what everyone except Allison knows is that his wife was “no good” and Tate was not her first lover. She wasn’t worth killing or dying for, Allison’s faithful companion (a rarity) tells him. The film becomes a lesson about disillusionment and facing the truth, as Allison’s arrival forces the townspeople to confront the spineless way they have stood by and allowed Kimbrough to take over their town and pay the sheriff and

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his deputies to carry out his orders. The theme is distilled in a moment when drunken revelers in the saloon humiliate the smarmy justice of the peace by exposing him as a furtive tippler. “Why should Zaron be the only man forced to see himself as he really is?” the town’s intelligent, pacifist doctor demands, accusing himself and the other good citizens of complicity in the corruption of Sundown. The equally intelligent but more realistic bartender weighs in, telling the doctor: “If you’d been tending bar as long as I have, you wouldn’t expect so much out of the human race.” The townsfolk redeem themselves by turning on Tate, but Allison has no capacity to change or accept that he’s been wrong. Integrity, incorruptibility, unshakeable stickto-your-guns determination are standard attributes of the classic western hero, but here Scott’s inflexibility becomes pathetic. He stubbornly clings to his original plan, until he’s finally thwarted by Tate’s mistress Ruby, who tells him bluntly, “You were married, but you never had a wife. How can you get revenge for something you never had?” The collapse of his ideal breaks him, and he retreats to the saloon, drooping morosely over the bar and drunkenly flinging whiskey bottles, before riding out of town alone, leading the horse of his dead partner. When a woman insists they can’t just let him ride away like that, the doctor replies sadly, “There’s nothing we can do for him.” By Comanche Station (1960), the last of the Boetticher-Scott films, Jefferson Cody (Scott) seems fed up with riding lonesome. “A man gets tired being all the time alone,” Cody tells a young gunslinger, offering to let the boy accompany him if he will leave the outlaw he’s been following. In this final film, with its long wordless sequences of people riding through tough country, the inevitable pair of dimwitted punks is treated tenderly. “Nothing as lonely as the night,” one sighs they bed down beneath a tree. They’ve grown up wild, never knowing any life but robbery and killing, and they’re rather touching in their lost-boy naïveté. “Why, I didn’t know you could read!” one exclaims as the other haltingly spells out a poster. The gentle Dobie (Richard Rust) gropes toward a better way of living, tempted by Cody’s offer: a hesitation that will get him shot in the back by his boss. In the end, Cody delivers the woman he rescued from the Comanche back to her husband, and returns to the vain search for his own wife, who was taken captive eight years before. As in nearly all of the Boetticher films, he remains on the outside, unable or unwilling to rejoin society. For Scott’s aging characters, so often widowers and exsheriffs, everything seems to be in the past, nothing in the future.

An Outlived Time: The Decline of the Old West Men’s faces — square-jawed, weathered, squinting under their hat brims — are as much a part of western landscapes as mesas, canyons and sun-baked earth. No genre was more dedicated to male beauty (with the possible exception of swashbucklers, though all those tights and earrings, blouses and short-shorts render men a little too ornamental). Tight jeans, placket-front shirts and hip-hugging holsters flatter the masculine form, just as western stories define and celebrate masculine values. As Hollywood’s great western stars began crossing from the prime of life into the dusk of old age, a handful of elegiac films connected the aging of men with the dying of the Old West. John Wayne, whose

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fresh, smoothly virile face made the camera swoon in Stagecoach (1939), became the tetchy sheriff in Howard Hawks’s El Dorado (1966), pained by an old wound in his spine, hobbling on a crutch beside a limping, booze-ravaged Mitchum. Films like El Dorado and Sam Peckinpah’s Ride the High Country (1962) demonstrate that the grand old men, despite grey hairs, rheumatism and dimming eyesight, still outclass callow, cocky youngsters, implicitly suggesting that the postwar “baby boom” generation would never surpass the men of what would later be labeled the “Greatest Generation.” The sun was always setting in westerns, which grew ever more popular as the last remnants of the old west disappeared. The heightened focus on loss in films of the late fifties and early sixties reflected a sense that the world was changing again. Ride the High Country opens with Joel McCrea riding into a town in the midst of a garish carnival; he’s ordered to “get out of the way, old-timer,” as a new automobile rattles past. Despite the introduction of McCrea, a once-legendary town-taming sheriff now down on his luck, as a relic of a world that is past; and despite the theme of betrayal (by McCrea’s old friend, Randolph Scott, for once playing the cheerful bad-man) this autumnal film affirms the values and conventions of the traditional western, culminating in the solemn, squareshouldered march to shoot it out with the bad guys. The film’s reverence for the noble lawman is as unspoiled as its mountain landscapes; he may die, but the values of his life are passed on to the newly appreciative young. Anthony Mann’s severe masterpiece Man of the West (1958) takes a far darker view of age, the burden of the past, personal honor and the cycle of violence. Gary Cooper, whose beauty was lambent — though already strangely expressive of some ingrown hurt — in the 1926 silent western The Winning of Barbara Worth, brings a gaunt, pain-wracked dignity to his role as a reformed outlaw forced to face his past and the surrogate father whom he rejected. Cooper was already ill with cancer and would die three years after the film was made; though he was decades older than the character he played, his drawn, haggard face expresses just the right silent suffering. The part might have gone to James Stewart if he hadn’t had a falling out with Mann, but Cooper’s much more contained presence, with none of Stewart’s effusiveness, suits the grave asceticism of the film.4 At first, Link Jones seems like another of Cooper’s bashful, tight-lipped, upright westerners. Traveling from the newborn town of Good Hope to hire a schoolteacher, he boards a train for the first time in his life and reacts with comic awkwardness to the jolting of the rails and the problem of where to fold his long legs. When the train is held up by bandits, he loses the money that was entrusted to him for the schoolmarm and finds himself stranded in the high plains, far from any town, with a saloon singer named Billie ( Julie London) and an amiable, nervous, crooked gambler named Beasley (Arthur O’Connell). He leads them to the only shelter he can find: a little grey farmhouse set in a valley of lush green grass. It’s the hideout of the gang who robbed the train, and he knows this because he used to be one of them. The house in the valley is lonely and sinister, yet at the same time beautiful — a vision of long-lost Home. Inside, it’s dark and grimy like a cave, a womb-like enclosure that Link has escaped and must now re-enter. In order to protect his companions, he pretends that he has come back to rejoin the gang, and that Billie is “his woman.” As a peaceloving family man, he faces a dilemma: if he kills the outlaws, he will sink to their level

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and return to the former self he wants to shed, but there’s no other way to protect his companions, since the vicious young gang members are constrained only by the authority of their leader. Despite Mann’s penchant for scenes of torture and bizarre methods of murder, nothing he filmed is more upsetting than the scene in which a bestial young punk named Coaley ( Jack Lord) forces Billie to strip for the men, holding a knife to Link’s throat that draws a smear of blood on his Adam’s apple as he witnesses the violation he’s helpless to prevent. Billie — another gorgeous, bosomy blonde — undresses in a numb, out-of-body trance; Coaley and the mute, half-witted Trout (Royal Dano) watch lustfully; and the gang’s leader, Dock Tobin (Lee J. Cobb), sits, feigning aloofness but really controlling the whole scene, demonstrating his power both by allowing Link to be humiliated, and by stopping the exhibition before it goes too far. Dock Tobin is crafty, and perhaps crazy; blustery but infirm; a decaying but still dangerous force of pure criminal mania. He raised Link, taught him to rob and kill, and still regards him as his favorite son. (Cobb was, in fact, ten years younger than Cooper.) The film evokes for Link a past of unspecified and unspeakable depravity. Dock Tobin and his boys revel in animalistic cruelty, yet they share a deep familial intimacy too, the fierce loyalty of outcasts who have no one else. Dock has never gotten over Link’s abandonment, and desperately wants to believe that his son has returned, even as he instinctively distrusts him. Link’s cousin Claude knows the prodigal-son act is a sham, and hates him for cheating the old man to whom he himself has remained blindly devoted. Claude is the man Link might have been: unlike the crude, inept young gang members, he’s strong, disciplined and quietly deadly; he’s sincere in his love for Dock, but he has the mindless amorality of a good soldier. Link grew up and learned to think for himself, while the others have rotted on the vine, and he fears being pulled back into his former life by his anger and hatred. He gets into a lethal brawl with Coaley and avenges Billie’s honor by tearing her tormentor’s clothes off, leaving him so humiliated that he sobs with childlike rage. In a story about a man who must relive his past in order to destroy it, the denouement comes appropriately in a ghost town, a dusty little strip of derelict houses in the desert. The gang has come there to rob a bank, not realizing it long ago closed when the mining town went bust. (The irony illustrates Link’s final condemnation of Dock: “You’ve outlived your time.”) A Mexican woman is living in the old bank, and the nervous, weak-minded Trout panics and shoots her — another example of the pointless, wasteful violence that is a way of life for these men. Link kills Trout and lays a trap for Claude, then returns to the rendezvous only to find that Dock has raped Billie, a final act of betrayal. Link tries to capture Dock alive but the old man, now raving, forces him to shoot, leaving everyone in the movie dead except Link and Billie. As in The Naked Spur, there is no sense of purgation or new beginnings. Link has wiped out his past, but reaffirmed his identity as a killer, and lost any peace he achieved in the town of Good Hope. Billie says that she is grateful to have known and loved him, even though he will return to his family, but her loneliness and yearning are unappeased. Mann’s best films all end this way; his heroes seem hollowed-out by their experiences, having been pushed to an extremity from which they can never make their way back. Man of the West is a grand, classical western, yet it also feels like the last western: by

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the end the elements of the genre have been so thoroughly stripped, spoiled and exhausted that it’s hard to imagine how they could be revived. Even the straightforward title becomes a troubling question: who is the “man of the west”? Is he the man who must destroy his past and wipe out his origins in order to move into the future? Or is he the man who has outlived his time, a decrepit remnant of a vanished world in which violence was glory and humanity was unknown? The Wild West became a re-enactment of itself even before it was really over. As soon as order, safety and civilized comforts were established, people yearned to vicariously experience the rough-and-tumble bad old days. In Ride the High Country, McCrea finds his old partner Scott running a fairground booth, sporting a Buffalo Bill wig and whiskers, offering rubes the chance to outshoot the legendary (and imaginary) “Oregon Kid.” In Samuel Fuller’s first film, I Shot Jesse James (1949), Robert Ford ( John Ireland) tries to cash in on his notoriety by reenacting his murder of James on stage, but finds it harder to pull the trigger for show than it was in real life. Ford is bewildered to find himself reviled and ostracized rather than rewarded; he makes a fortune silver-mining but loses the woman he loves, and dies lamenting his betrayal of James. In rodeos, the West’s open spaces are reduced to enclosed rings of dirt; the stubbornly independent cowboy becomes a performer going through prescribed motions for a surrounding crowd; the glorification of man’s mastery over beast leads to men thrown, gored and trampled by bulls. It’s a world of “broken bones, broken bottles, broken everything,” as Robert Mitchum concludes in Nicholas Ray’s The Lusty Men (1953). The film’s grossly inappropriate title reflects the studio’s discomfort with Ray’s low-key, gracefully bleak film. (The title was Howard Hughes’s idea, and admittedly the working title, “Cowpoke,” is not much of an improvement.) RKO wanted to trick people into expecting a rootin’tootin,’ action-packed good time, and the credits roll over marching-band music and the showy parade that opens a rodeo. Almost immediately, after a rider is thrown and badly hurt by a bull, the spectacle dissolves. In a shot of aching beauty, Mitchum limps across a dusty, deserted fairway with papers floating and sighing around him. A small bag slung over his shoulder holds all that he owns in the world. His stiff-legged, broken swagger lets you know that every bone in his body hurts, but also hints at the pride and power and grace he once had. He is Jeff McCloud, former bronc-busting champion of the world, now broke and forced into retirement by his injuries. He hitches a ride, gets out at a crossroads and approaches a little shack. It’s the house he was born in, and he crawls under the foundation to find the tobacco can that still holds two nickels he saved as a boy. He’s invited in by the old man who now lives there alone, a “thinkin’ man” who tells him, “I like a place that’s lonely, private. Marriage — that’s lonely, but it ain’t private!” Nicholas Ray said, “This film is really a film about people who want a home of their own. This was the great American search at the time.” Instead of wagon trains rolling over the prairies, there are people kept forever on the move by the promise of fame, riches and personal glory. Jeff ’s own longing for a home is never spoken. It’s only glimpsed in this opening sequence and, in the final scene, when he rolls over and buries his head in a woman’s embrace, huddling against her like a child in his mother’s arms.

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When he attaches himself to a young couple, Wes and Louise Merritt (Arthur Kennedy and Susan Hayward), Jeff finds both a way back into the rodeo world and a glimpse of what he will never have: a wife to make a home for him. The child of migrant fruit-pickers, Louise is consumed by the desire for a permanent home and a “decent, steady life.” But Wes, a rodeo amateur, is irresistibly drawn to the lure of fast money and

The reformed outlaw must relive his past in order to destroy it: Link Jones (Gary Cooper) in Man of the West (Anthony Mann, 1958).

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thrills, and in Jeff ’s coaching he sees his chance at the big time. The men’s relationship rapidly curdles as they make the rounds of the rodeo circuit and Wes finds easy success. His hero worship is poisoned by his resentment of his coach’s “freeloading,” since he takes half of the winnings, and by his tormenting suspicion that Jeff is a better man than he will ever be. Jeff suffers as he watches the younger man win the laurels for which he can no longer compete, and begins to doubt his own motives. He falls in love with Louise’s grounded and outspoken certainty of what she wants, so different from his own masculine reticence and irresolution. She blames Jeff for leading her husband astray but gradually comes to trust him; his patience, dignity and competence stand out more and more as Wes becomes a cocky, philandering drunk. The itinerant rodeo world is both flashy and melancholy: dusty trailer parks where wives have to wash at outdoor pumps, men with horrible injuries forcing themselves to compete to show they’re not afraid, noisy parties and crap games and shameless rodeo groupies. Whenever a rider is thrown, as he lies in the ring maimed or even dying, the announcer quickly calls the audience’s attention to the next contestant coming out. The rodeo men are enslaved by their pursuit of prize money and the compulsion to prove their manliness; the money goes in crap games and there will always be younger men to beat the champs. In The Misfits (1961), a broken-down rodeo cowboy played by Montgomery Clift wonders what to depend on, and Marilyn Monroe, a wistful divorcee, replies, “Maybe all there is is the next thing that happens.” Ray’s overlooked film depicts far more subtly and powerfully than Arthur’s Miller’s overwritten drama the desolation of such an unsettled, rootless world. The rodeo is a submerged symbol in Lewis Allen’s Desert Fury (1947), representing the lure of power and control, the high of being alone in the ring and on top, asserting your will over a wild animal. The film’s blazing Technicolor and flamboyant melodrama — throwing together gangsters, western backdrops and brazen sexual confusion — tend to mask its real theme, the weakness and dependency that lurk behind glamorously hardboiled exteriors. Everything unfolds in high style against glowing landscapes, like a brochure for a desert resort: burnished yellow, molten orange and sandstone red set off by cool dusky blue night scenes. Only the black smokestacks and pylons marring the vista hint that the first characters onscreen won’t be two cowboys on horseback, but two racketeers gliding into town in a grey Chrysler. Set in a West thoroughly tainted by crime, money, corruption and social snobbery, the film is a study of people trying to lasso and bridle the objects of their desire. Everyone wants to control the trophy blonde Paula Haller (Lizabeth Scott), whose mother Fritzi (Mary Astor) owns the glittering Purple Sage Saloon & Casino, which recreates the riproaring casinos of the Wild West. A regal vice queen, Fritzi unofficially runs the Nevada town of Chuckawalla, treating the sheriff like a lap dog. Rich and domineering (“The wages of sin — are very high,” she gloats), she can buy her daughter everything except respectability or social acceptance, and the pampered girl bounces out of every school to which she is sent. Stifled by her mother’s possessiveness, Paula is mulish and rebellious. When she’s warned and then ordered not to get involved with a racketeer named Eddie Bendix ( John Hodiak), who is rumored to have killed his wife, she defiantly pursues him.

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The mysterious Eddie lives with a man named Johnny (Wendell Corey, excellent in his film debut), who keeps house for him and is so jealous of Paula that he threatens to kill her if she doesn’t leave them alone. The overheated intensity of its same-sex relationships has earned Desert Fury cult status. Fritzi, wearing slacks and waving a cigarette holder, appreciatively surveys the radiant Paula, commenting, “You look good, baby.... Gimme a kiss.” Her passion for her daughter seems more than maternal; she repeatedly slaps the girl, and offers to sleep with her when she’s upset by a thunderstorm. Fritzi is both overbearing and insecure, like a man trying to hold onto a beautiful, much younger wife. But while she is often wrongheaded in her methods, she turns out to be right in her judgments, and the film ends with Paula smooching not her handsome fiancé but her mom. The two men, meanwhile, have “been together a long, long time,” ever since Johnny picked Eddie up in Times Square and took him home. Eddie orders Johnny around like a servant and slaps his face, just as Fritzi slaps Paula’s, but the sinister, subservient Johnny insists Eddie will never leave him because “I come in too handy” (just as Fritzi insists Paula will never leave, because “she needs me.”) Though the implication of homosexuality is startling for the time, it is something of a red herring; the men’s inseparable, mutually dependent relationship turns out to be something far stranger and more disturbing. When Paula tells Johnny that “two people can’t fit into one life,” he disagrees: “Why should there be part of me apart from Eddie?” Everyone suffers from Fritzi’s and Johnny’s fanatical possessiveness, and the knot of relationships becomes even more snarled once it’s revealed that Eddie was once Fritzi’s lover, and there are murky hints about Paula’s uncanny resemblance to Eddie’s late wife. The only character free of sexual ambiguity or perversity is Tom Hanson (Burt Lancaster), the local deputy sheriff, and for much of the film he is the least interesting figure, a principled hero who loves Paula and wants what is best for her. But when he gets his hands on Eddie he abuses his authority to arrest and beat his romantic rival, and Lancaster gives a glimpse, unusual for this early in his career, of how scary he could be. Tom is a former rodeo champ, a man who is “all busted up inside” but still addicted to breaking horses. Applying the obvious metaphor to Paula, he tells Fritzi that the girl should be given “a long rope,” warning that if she keeps pushing her daughter around she’ll lose her. He is disgusted when Fritzi offers to buy him a ranch if he will marry Paula and thus gain her acceptance from the locals. As a man, Tom wants to earn his own money and do his own proposing; but he is just as interested in taming Paula, if by more subtle means. Undeveloped country, wild horses and rebellious girls must all be “broken.” Tom is also the only native westerner on the scene. Fritzi rose from working in the silk mills of Paterson, New Jersey, to marry a bootlegger and run a speakeasy, before moving west as a widow to make a new life for herself and her daughter. Eddie is from Brooklyn, part of the migration of mobsters involved in gambling and other criminal enterprises in Las Vegas. He disdainfully calls the desert (where he has come to rest up after some scheme gone awry) a “cactus graveyard.” Sulky and mean-spirited, Eddie hates his clinging partner precisely because he needs him, and he coldly abandons Johnny to elope with Paula. But she takes pity on her stranded enemy, and they give him a lift as they leave town (“Hop in, loose end”).

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In a diner where they stop for hamburgers, Johnny, who says he’s been “tied up too long to go on alone,” finally reveals the truth. Eddie has been merely the front man in their partnership; his reputation has been built up because he has the looks and personality, but Johnny has the brains and strength. He has done the dirty work, taken the raps; he even forced Eddie to kill his wife, who knew too much about their crimes: “Sure, I made you do it. I made you do everything. You couldn’t tie your own shoelaces. People think they’re seeing Eddie and all the time they’re seeing me,” he says as though just realizing it: “I’m Eddie Bendix.” Unable to face this unmasking, Eddie empties his gun into Johnny, then tries to kill Paula the same way they got rid of his wife, by forcing her car off a bridge. He needs to prove he can do something on his own, but he cracks up and drives off the bridge himself. The hollow shell of a tough guy, he is destroyed by his inability to either stand on his own or face his dependence on others. Tom tells Paula that what she’s looking for is the feeling he used to get from riding in the rodeo, the ecstasy of being the champ. It’s what everyone in the film is after. Each person craves autonomy and freedom, yet is enslaved to someone else. They all want to be the boss, yet are drawn to those who dominate them and push them around. Fritzi is so used to the power of her money that she believes it has no limits, that she is above the law and that anyone can be bought. She discovers the pointlessness of her authority when she can’t hold onto her daughter. Paula becomes fascinated by Eddie when she notices that he talks to her mother the way her mother talks to her, but she revolts when he treats her, too, like an inferior. Johnny has the brains and guts to succeed but has devoted himself to propping up a façade — merging his inner strength with Eddie’s slick appearance of power to create the ideal man he would like to be. No one really achieves the fantasy of independence that Paula holds up, to “be alone in the desert, with the sagebrush and the sky.” In Lonely Are the Brave (1962), Kirk Douglas plays Jack Burns, a man anachronistically devoted to the Old West ideal of unfettered freedom. The film heavy-handedly contrasts his romantic isolation and integrity with the crass machinery of the modern world, from the opening scene in which a jet plane thunders over his campsite, spooking his horse, to the final irony when he attempts to ride the same horse across a freeway and is run over by a big-rig carrying a cargo of privies. Burns quixotically determines to break a friend out of jail, only to find that the friend wants to serve out his sentence so he can get on with his life, and sees such reflexive defiance as pointless and old-fashioned. Jack Burns’s doomed, self-defeating exile from society is the essence of his heroism, as the film’s title makes clear; we’re expected to admire him for his impractical stance and his refusal to be like other people. As usual, a woman is made the voice of domesticity and practicality, the settled acceptance of things the way they are. Jack Burns once loved his best friend’s wife, but gave her up rather than settle down, explaining to her, “I’m a loner clear down deep to my guts. Know what a loner is? He’s a born cripple. He’s a cripple because the only person he can live with is himself. It’s his life, the way he wants to live. It’s all for him. A guy like that, he’d kill a woman like you. Because he couldn’t love you, not the way you are loved.” This boastful self-deprecation reflects the ambivalence provoked by loners, a mixture of envy and pity, attraction and disapproval. Lonely

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Are the Brave, like the traditional western, sharply divides the solitary outsider from the family and community, not admitting the ambiguities that film noir exposes: the way people can be together yet inhabit private, self-centered worlds of illusion; and the way men who appear self-reliant may be bound by memories and hatreds, ghosts that travel everywhere with them. Lonely Are the Brave is about a man who dies for an illusion, though the film doesn’t seem aware of this. Burns deliberately destroys fences and “No Trespassing” signs, explaining that “a westerner loves open land.” But the history of the American West, from the arrival of the first European travelers, has always been a history of fencing in land, claiming the rights of private property, mining resources, branding cattle, building roads and towns. (The chain-link fence surrounding the Golden Empire Ranch in Man in the Shadow is posted: “No Hunting. No Trespassing. Violators will be shot.”) The fact that Dalton Trumbo’s script, with its mix of ornery libertarianism and proto-hippie belief in the superiority of the simple and natural life, uses the cowboy as its hero reflects the versatile potency of this icon, which in the latter half of the 20th century has come to be associated mainly with conservative ideology and right-wing culture — condemned by liberals as embodying a “my-way-or-the-highway” intransigence. Regardless of the use to which the cowboy myth is put, it contains an insoluble paradox. The desire for land of one’s own that, in its most extreme form, led Daniel Boone to pack up and move when he saw the smoke of another cabin in the distance, led to the population of the frontier. The never-ending quest for territory to homestead made it harder and harder to find solitude or unspoiled wilderness. Just as the car that once promised escape and unlimited mobility wound up stuck in traffic jams because everyone wanted to claim the same freedom, so the perception of infinite undeveloped resources and free land in the West led to “rushes” of all kinds, bringing crowds and disputes over ownership as the land and resources quickly became scarce. Even in America space is finite — there isn’t room for everyone to live like Daniel Boone even if they wanted to, which most people don’t — but this is not the thorny part of the dilemma. Nor is it simply the difficulty of reconciling unbridled individualism with the communal needs for law and democracy. It’s something more alarming embedded in western mythology’s treatment of its central value, freedom. The western’s most fetishized symbol of liberty is the gun (“A man with a gun is a citizen, a man without a gun is a subject,” reads a preposterous but very illuminating NRA bumper-sticker), and far from being an “equalizer,” it functions by destroying equality. When one man pulls a gun on another, he asserts his own autonomy by taking away that of his victim. In westerns, every man must be constantly ready to fight to protect whatever he owns, to defend his honor and even his right to live. This is more than just the reality of a lawless territory; it is fundamental to the ethos of the West. The cowboy with his six-shooter embodies liberty not as a social value protected by reciprocity — I respect your autonomy and you respect mine — but as an individual possession to be jealously guarded. Freedom in the western is not a level plain to be shared but a pinnacle to be achieved and defended, like the rocky fortresses in Anthony Mann’s movies, with the loser plummeting to his doom. In Lonely Are the Brave, Burns’s closest relationship is with Whiskey, the beloved

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horse he is working to tame and break to harness. She is shackled at the ankles, tied to trees and fences, saddled and bridled, spurred and ordered around. Burns treats his horse exactly the way he can’t bear to be treated himself. This is not an issue of animal rights, but of how the cowboy’s prized independence is tied up with mastery over others. This hypocrisy is made explicit by The Misfits, in which cowboy Clark Gable “keeps himself free” by roping wild mustangs. That the horses are to be sold for dog food is, like the truckload of toilets, a blunt metaphor for the degradation of the West. The mustangs themselves, in their dwindling numbers, represent precisely the unbroken spirit to which Gable clings; yet rather than honor their wildness, he exultantly lassoes them, wrestles them to the ground and hogties them. In this image lurks the western’s darkest fear: that freedom is a finite resource and that the pursuit of it is a zero-sum game, a state of eternal and lonely conflict.

CHAPTER 9

Private Traps: Noir in the Mind Know what I think? I think that we’re all in our private traps, clamped in them, and none of us can ever get out. We scratch and we claw, but only at the air, only at each other, and for all of it, we never budge an inch. — Anthony Perkins, Psycho

The beach house stands alone on a bluff, silhouetted black against the moonlit dazzle of the ocean, the bare branches of a dead tree twisted over the roof. When Steve (Burt Lancaster) finds Anna (Yvonne De Carlo) waiting for him there, guarding the money from an armored-car robbery, he thinks he’s reached safe harbor, that he has everything he wanted. “I knew all the time everything would be all right,” he breathes. But when Anna learns that Steve has foolishly given away their hiding place to her husband, she starts packing her bag, snatching at the chance to make a getaway. Badly injured, with one arm swaddled in a huge cast, Steve knows she’s not going to take him with her; she’s going to leave him behind to die. Yet she wasn’t planning to double-cross him; she’s not a scheming liar; she did love him, he knows. “Love, love,” she snaps dismissively. “You have to watch out for yourself. That’s the way it is, I’m sorry.” Her voice is defensive and querulous. “You always have to do what’s best for yourself. That’s the trouble with you — it always was, from the beginning. You just don’t know what kind of a world it is.” He listens to this tirade with a dazed half-smile, finally murmuring, “Well, I’ll know better next time.” “People get hurt, I can’t help it!” she explodes. “I can’t help it if people don’t know how to take care of themselves!” Steve sits in front of French windows, with the ocean moving silently behind him, as the woman he loves reveals the small, mean, selfish core of her identity. He gazes at her as at a vision, his face soft and open. There’s something transcendent in his disillusionment, and something almost masochistic in the passivity with which he accepts his doom. Anna bustles around, hauling her suitcase to the door, her face pinched in a scowl, her voice hard and brittle. Though she’s the one who talks about knowing how the world is, she has none of his resignation. She makes it out the door but comes running back as her husband, Slim (Dan Duryea), slides out of the shadows, his gun cocked. In a final irony, Slim tells Steve, “You won out. You have her. Hold her tight,” before shooting them both. They die in each other’s arms like true lovers, and their bodies lie splayed in 214

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The edge of the world: the beach house setting for the denouement of Criss Cross (Robert Siodmak, 1949).

front of the window, with luminous clouds drifting above and the sea crawling silver below. Great noir endings are rarer than great noir films, since the Production Code and the studios’ insistence on pandering to audiences usually mandated a moral lesson, a tidy resolution, and a last-moment lurch into optimism. Criss Cross (1948), Robert Siodmak’s best film, achieves a flawless resolution: a scrim of tragic romanticism — the moonlit cloudscape, the ocean, Lancaster’s white-clad vulnerability — surrounds but doesn’t soften the bitter irony of the denouement or the knife-like thrust of Anna’s speech, with its simple negation of love: “You always have to do what’s best for yourself.” The three main characters are, in this final scene, reduced to their essences: Steve’s fatalism (“It was in the cards,” he keeps saying), Anna’s myopic self-interest, Slim’s vicious jealousy. No cops or friends are on hand to comment on the pity of it all (though Duryea’s eyes go dark as he hears the sirens closing in on him); no one strides off into a brighter future. These three come together and quietly destroy one other. There’s nothing quiet about the ending of Kiss Me Deadly, when a woman in another beach house touches off the apocalypse. When Gaby, overcome by feline curiosity, opens the mysterious box and vanishes into the hissing, boiling white flame she has unleashed, the wounded Mike Hammer and his girlfriend, Velda, escape the house and stagger across

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the beach.1 It looks like the edge as well as the end of the world: a flat expanse of sand under a flat black sky, lit by intermittent flashes that recall all those neon signs blinking outside cheap hotel rooms — only these are blinding radioactive flares. As the explosion builds, oddly consuming the house without destroying it, Mike and Velda stand clutching each other, up to their waists in the dark surf that swirls around them. The film ends, waist-deep in ambiguity: will they burn or drown? Is this the end of the world, or just the end of a corner of Malibu? Hammer’s reckless quest for the “great whatsit” is the apotheosis of an essential noir theme: how easy it is to get in over your head. (Take, for example, Steve’s plunge off the deep end in Criss Cross, when to cover up his tryst with Anna, he tells her husband he wants to team up on a robbery.) All the noir hero wants is a fast buck or a forbidden kiss, a beach house or a swimming pool, and somehow he unleashes tidal waves, and drowns in depths he never suspected. It’s on a beach at night that Jeff Bailey succumbs to Kathie — she is dangerous and immeasurable like the ocean, just as Anne is clear and nourishing like the mountain lake. (With characters named Eels and Fisher, and with fishing rods playing a role in both in romance and murder, Out of the Past displays an odd preoccupation with the aquatic.) The “mysterious force” the noir hero blames for his downfall isn’t fate, just the magnetic tides and dangerous rip-currents of the human heart.

The Estranging Sea: Noir on the Beach Like thundering chords of music, crashing waves predictably underscore cinematic moments of high melodrama and outbursts of unruly passion. There’s no topping the sublimely ridiculous ending of Humoresque (1946), when Joan Crawford, tanked up on booze, Dvo†ák and self-sacrifice, walks out of her palatial beach house and into the ocean, drowning in an evening dress to set her lover free. Glamour, sex, death and the troubled psyche: this one scene brings together all the metaphoric uses to which Hollywood put the conveniently located Pacific Ocean. The relationship between melodrama and film noir is often downplayed; the hardboiled style derived from gangster movies and pulp detective novels is so much more popular among noir fans that it’s commonly assumed to be a mandatory feature. Insisting on the presence of gritty urban settings, guns, gangsters, private eyes and femmes fatales leaves out some of the most powerful and essential noir films, including In a Lonely Place, Nightmare Alley, Ace in the Hole, Sweet Smell of Success and Clash by Night. Noir, like melodrama, relies on heightened emotions, extreme reactions, tortured relationships and long shadows of the past — though the tone of confusion and anxiety, the instability of character and muddiness of moral boundaries is far removed from the simplistic contests between evil and innocence in old-fashioned melodrama. Noir shares with the psychologically enhanced melodramas of the postwar years (Now, Voyager, Humoresque, The Seventh Veil) an emphasis on the pain and peril associated with change or transformation, and a fascination with the murky depths of the mind, especially its tendency to be drawn toward its own destruction.

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Jean Renoir said that he could not imagine making a movie that did not involve water; he saw a connection between the liquid element and the fluidity of film, and also saw the flowing river as a symbol of life. Boudu the tramp floats like a happy piece of driftwood, narrowly escaping respectability in Boudu Saved from Drowning; raindrops pock the smooth surface of the river in A Day in the Country, signaling the end of an idyll on its banks. The first film Renoir made after leaving Hollywood was The River, a lyrical account of a year in the life of an Anglo-Indian family, which celebrated Renoir’s release from an unsatisfying arrangement. Lacking the complete autonomy he had in France and pestered by the interference of producers, Renoir was never able to make a fully successful picture in Hollywood, where he worked from 1941 to 1947, having left France to escape the Nazi occupation. Surf smashes against rocks under the credits of The Woman on the Beach (1947), the last of his five American films. The violent conflict between ocean and shore, so unlike the gentle continuity of rivers, is appropriate for a story about people whose emotions are destructive and disconnected, who lack the bonds that usually connect Renoir’s characters to their environments. The director said of this film, “I was embarked on a study of persons whose sole idea was to close the door on the absolutely concrete phenomena which we call life.”2 This strange, messy, moody drama about three sick people was uneasily stranded amid the conventions of Hollywood romance. The film was unpopular with studio heads at RKO, with censor Joseph Breen (who deemed it unacceptable for its focus in adultery “without redeeming value”), and with audiences. It was partially reshot after a disastrous sneak preview, and still sank at the box office. The Woman on the Beach is mesmerizing, despite lines and moments that are clumsy, over-the-top or simply bizarre. It opens with a dream sequence, and the oneiric mood is carried on by images on the edge of the surreal: a horseback rider gliding silently through the fog, bare footprints making a path in the sand; a lopsided shipwreck half-buried on a beach; marshy dunes at night lit by a house on fire. After the credits, a prosaic shot establishes the location at a Coast Guard base, followed by a shot of Robert Ryan asleep in an institutional-looking bed with a barred headboard and white sheets. A harmonica is mournfully playing “Home on the Range.” It’s a simple shot but pure noir, the sterile surroundings setting off Ryan’s roiling, knotted, ugly inner life. He’s plunged in a recurrent nightmare about being on a torpedoed ship: he’s sinking down through churning waves, surrounded by wreckage and drowning men; a whirlpool sucks at him; then he’s walking over human skeletons toward a beautiful woman in a fluttering gown (an image that recalls the underwater vision of the bride in Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante); just as he reaches her everything goes up in a flaming explosion. Psychologically wounded veterans were common in films of the time, but no one could bring more tooth-grinding anguish than Ryan to the admission, “Face it, I’m not well!” He adds: “There’s something about this ocean I can’t stand.” But Lieutenant Scott Burnett doesn’t seem to want to get well. He has a blonde, angelic fiancée (though she’s introduced with an image far from nurturing, as she slices a board in half on a band saw), but he feels she can’t understand him; she’s too healthy and simple. He goes riding every day in the surf on a black horse, and passes a woman sitting by the hulk of a shipwreck, the secret hideaway where she comes to gather firewood,

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and to be alone. Scott is immediately drawn to her. She’s Peggy Butler ( Joan Bennett), the wife of a famous painter who has gone blind; they live together in miserable, mutually punishing confinement in a cottage on the beach. They lure Scott into their malignant marriage, and they offer an outlet for his sickness, which all his normal, caring friends only want to suppress. At first Peggy seems like an imprisoned princess, tied to a self-pitying, possessive cripple. She tells Scott that she has to atone because she blinded her husband during one of their drunken fights (they used to live “always at a strange pitch of excitement, offbalance,” she explains.) She advises Scott to give in to his ghosts, not to fight them; he will find a kind of peace as she has; he won’t care any more. But Peggy isn’t really so peaceful. She was unfaithful even before her husband went blind, and she keeps urging him to sell his paintings so they can live in luxury. Tod Butler (Charles Bickford) is overbearing, manipulative and creepy. The creepiest thing about him is the way he insistently pursues Scott, showing up in the middle of a thunderstorm and coercing him into coming to dinner; harping incessantly on his desire to be friends. It’s clear that for some reason he wants to throw Scott together with Peggy, knowing all along that they are attracted to each other. He appears ominously outside the porthole of the wrecked ship where the lovers meet, tapping his cane against the walls. Scott is so unnerved that he becomes convinced Tod is only feigning blindness as a way to hold onto his wife, and determines to prove it by taking him for a walk on the edge of a cliff. Tod knows what he’s up to, but plunges over the cliff anyway. He doesn’t hold a grudge, and when Scott comes to explain, the painter tries to show him a nude portrait of his wife. He gets some kind of weird charge out of the situation, telling Peggy, “I can smell your hate — it’s not so different from your love.” Nothing in the film really looks — or smells — like love. An energetic unpleasantness dominates (“Darling little boys,” Peggy says of a scrum of little savages shrieking, “I want candy! I want candy!”), and poor, nice Eve, the cast-off fiancée, hovers unnoticed on the margins. Consumed by his desire to free Peggy, Scott takes Tod out in a small boat on a stormy day. When he shows up at the house and grimly intones, “I got a boat so we can go fishing,” any blind man could see there’s murder in his heart. The two men shout at each other amid the heaving swells, Scott tries to sink the craft by smashing a hole in the hull, and both men wind up clinging to the capsized boat until they’re rescued. Peggy was in on the plan, but she has second thoughts at the last moment, after she and Tod cuddle on the sofa and reminisce about their happy days of champagne parties in front of the fireplace and breakfasts in bed. He reminds her that since he’s blind, she will always be young and beautiful to him. Despite all their rancorous battling, this nostalgic intimacy is believable; the strange bond between them has never really broken. The Woman on the Beach ends as weirdly as it began, with a final conflagration that is bafflingly inconclusive. Tod burns his paintings — and the whole house with them — because he needs to free himself from their hold. He then declares that he has been wrong to cling to Peggy and force her to live in the past with him, and that she is now free to go, and he will start a new life. But Peggy walks off arm in arm with Tod, while Scott slinks away alone on the dark dunes, his own sickness in no way healed. It might be possible to read this as a conventional, tidy ending: husband and wife are reconciled, while

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the other man will return to marry his faithful fiancée. But the abrupt and irresolute staging gives no clear impression of this. The Woman on the Beach had an extremely troubled gestation, as the story was repeatedly altered to satisfy the demands of censors and studio heads. An affair between Peggy and her husband’s doctor was dropped, along with her plan to steal her husband’s paintings and sell them as her own. A scene in which Peggy revealed bruises from her husband’s abuse was also cut, references to Tod’s infidelities were eliminated, and Scott’s plan to murder Tod became the weird confrontation in which he attempts to drown both of them. The preview version of the film had more secondary characters and placed the main players within the context of a community. In her comprehensive study of the film’s development, Janet Bergstrom argues persuasively that all the cuts ultimately helped the film, stripping it down to the essentials and give it a strangely intense, abstracted quality.3 Without the censors’ objections, the film might have been a more standard love triangle; the fact that Peggy is never clearly defined as either a villainess or an abused wife gives the story its obscure open-endedness. Renoir himself was, on the whole, happy with the film, since he wanted it to proceed more by suggestion than demonstration, as a film of “failed actions.” He deliberately set the characters in “empty landscapes,” “stripped of colorful detail,” and without ties to their environment. The Woman on the Beach, he declared, was “a perfect theme for treating the drama of isolation.” Clifford Odets took the title for his own tortured-love-triangle-on-the-beach drama, Clash by Night (written for the stage in 1941 and filmed by Fritz Lang in 1952), from Matthew Arnold’s poem “Dover Beach,” that seminal expression of modern anxiety about meaninglessness in a secular world. In Arnold’s extended, shifting metaphor, the ocean evokes the “ebb and flow of human misery.” The “Sea of Faith” has retreated with a “melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,” leaving humanity stranded on “the naked shingles of the world.” Lang and DP Nicholas Musuraca grounded the script’s symbolism with lucid, briny footage, documenting the ocean’s changing moods. The credits illustrate the title: surf breaks violently on a beach, pale foam exploding in the darkness. This turbulent imagery gives way to a calm sea full of fishing boats, pelicans and lounging sea lions. Following the orderly process by which the fish are passed through the cannery, this opening sequence shows the taming of nature and invokes the comforting, repetitive course of daily routines, gulls flocking to the boats as the catch is unloaded and women getting up at 4:30 A.M. to go to their jobs. Later, as emotional tension mounts and erupts, the shots of crashing waves return. Combining a detailed, realistic working-class milieu with flamboyantly stylized dialogue, Clash by Night illustrates the violence latent in ordinary people, the big conflicts in small lives. The catalyst is Mae Doyle (Barbara Stanwyck), who returns to the fishing village of Monterey, which she fled ten years earlier in search of a better life. Failing to land a rich husband, she has been a rich man’s mistress, and she returns because “home is where you come when you run out of places.” She’s frustrated by her options, and irredeemably conflicted in her desires. She says that all she wants now is a man who will “fight off the blizzards and the storms,” and she finds just such a sturdy protector in Jerry (Paul Douglas), a dull and homely fisherman who adores her. But her longing for security wars with her

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nature: while Jerry is a simple man content with an average life, Mae warns him that she is “one of those women who are never satisfied.” Once she’s stuck in his small house with a baby, she becomes so aggravated by the daily monotony that she succumbs to her husband’s cynical, misogynistic friend Earl (Robert Ryan). Both are unable to accept life’s drabness; Earl tells Mae, “You’re like me: a dash of Tabasco or the meat tastes flat.” Once a proud young man sure he would amount to something, Earl — a movie theater projectionist, which passes for a glamorous job in Monterey — is now embalmed in a toxic mixture of bitterness and self-pity. He’s an abrasive blowhard, his undeniable intelligence warped into constant jabs and sneers. His mix of arrogance and self-loathing is entertaining (“You can’t make me any smaller,” he tells Mae. “I happen to be preshrunk”) but obviously poisonous. Mae takes an instant dislike to him, particularly resenting the way he condescends to the harmless, admiring Jerry — perhaps because he speaks for her own private feelings. Mae is a paradox. When we first see her, walking into a bar alone with her suitcase and downing a mid-morning brandy, she is established as a poised, hard-boiled woman of the world. It’s clear she can fend for herself, yet she says, “I want to be looked after.... I want a man to give me confidence.” Earl is hardly this type: he’s so insecure that he needs to tear everyone down. Yet Mae decides to marry Jerry — even though she knows she won’t make a good wife and that it’s wrong to turn to him just for a place to rest — because she feels endangered by her attraction to Earl. She sees him for the needy, jealous lout that he is, but wants him anyway. One night Jerry brings his friend home dead drunk, and the next morning, after he’s gone to work, Mae and Earl confront each other in the kitchen. The cramped space and stifling heat exacerbate the unbearable tension between them; they’re like two tigers in a small cage, both throbbing with unhappiness and frustrated energy. When they finally kiss, Mae shoves her hands under Earl’s tight undershirt, a scorching and revealing image. But more shocking is the naked need Earl reveals when he finally cracks and drops his cynical mask, crying, “Help me! I’m dying of loneliness!” He argues that they should chase their dreams, grab their last chance at happiness, not feel sorry for anyone or worry about the opinions of “all the people who haven’t got guts enough to do what they want to do.” Responsibilities, duty and obligations are just a trap, he tells Mae as she worries about leaving her baby and abandoning her husband. “Somebody’s throat has to be cut,” he points out helpfully. Mae sees through this selfish, lazy reasoning because she has so often used it herself, believing that it’s not her fault that she is tough and others are soft. (Like Anna in Criss Cross snapping, “I can’t help it if people don’t know how to take care of themselves!”) She’s never really been Jerry’s wife, she realizes, never belonged to anyone. People like her and Earl only “love because we’re lonely; love because we’re frightened”; her voice almost breaks at the final, bleak truth: they only “love because we’re bored.” Though the movie escapes the limitations of a stage set, it preserves a mood of emotional claustrophobia. Stanwyck’s plain, understated delivery salvages some of Odets’s overcooked dialogue (“If I ever loved a man again I’d bear anything. He could have my teeth for watch fobs”), and the film’s flawless performances almost make the characters’ abrupt reversals plausible. Paul Douglas reveals the atavistic rage lurking within a dim,

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“Animals! Animals!” Earl (Robert Ryan) and Mae (Barbara Stanwyck) face off like caged tigers in Clash by Night (Fritz Lang, 1952).

amiable teddy bear; after he learns about the affair he almost strangles Earl in a frenzy, calling the lovers, “Animals! Animals!” The ending in which Mae reconciles with Jerry feels too easy and pat. It’s not hard to believe that she would return to her husband and baby rather than taking her chances with Earl, who is all too clearly branded as one of life’s losers. But her decision is a compromise, not the happy resolution the film tries to suggest; it doesn’t seem likely that she’ll achieve lasting contentment with a husband of whom she has said, “I don’t blame Jerry for what he is, that’s my cross.” Earl, for his part, just winds up sorrier for himself than ever. Jerry’s mooching uncle Vince ( J. Carroll Naish) lectures him that women are all no good and must be handled with the whip. A troublemaking freeloader, he resents Mae for displacing him after she complains about the dirty pictures he keeps in his room, and he gets revenge by telling Jerry about her and Earl. Jerry’s father is a lonely, stubborn old man who hates feeling useless; his son keeps him a virtual prisoner in the house to prevent him from drinking. Jerry recalls how his father fought incessantly with his mother, yet has never gotten over her death. Mae’s sullen, possessive brother Joe warns his feisty girlfriend, Peg (Marilyn Monroe), against copying Mae’s behavior.4 Peg admires the forthright, independent older woman, and is uneasy about her boyfriend’s domineering attitude.

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She dreams of having a trailer and traveling the country; she doesn’t want to get married and be stuck forever in the cannery. But though she tells Mae she hates to be bossed, she finds Earl’s anger and machismo exciting, and happily agrees to marry Joe after he threatens to kick down her door. As Monterey must reek of fish from the boats and the cannery, the film reeks of hostility between men and women, of jealousy, lust, disappointment, and resentment. They still seek each other because “everybody is lonely, everybody is lost.” “Dover Beach” summons faithful love (“Ah, love, let us be true / To one another!”) as the only refuge in a world that “hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain.” In Clash by Night it is lovers themselves who make the “confused alarms of struggle and flight.” Odets’s vision comes closer, perhaps, to Matthew Arnold’s poem “To Marguerite,” which contradicts Donne’s declaration that no man is an island, envisioning humanity as an archipelago, severed from each other by “the unplumbed, salt, estranging sea.” The Breaking Point opens with a tranquil, workaday ocean. “You know how it is early in the morning, out on the water,” John Garfield muses, over images of gulls flapping white wings against the sun and boats cutting through a calm sea. Being out on the water means peace and freedom and solitude — as it does to Dane Clark in Deep Valley (“I like nothing around me but open space”) and to John in Goodis’s novel Nightfall, who says, “Cities hurt my eyes. I don’t like the country, either. I like the water. I know once I get on that water, going across it, going away, I’ll be all right. I won’t be nervous any more.” The minute you’re back on land, Garfield goes on ruefully, the trouble begins. Unlike Bogart in Howard Hawks’s earlier, loose adaptation of To Have and Have Not, Garfield’s Harry Morgan is not a glamorous loner in an exotic land but just a stubborn, frustrated, hard-working guy trying to support his family in Newport Beach. In his humble bungalow Harry bickers with his wife, who wants him to give up his charter boat and work for her father’s lettuce farm in Salinas. His two daughters squabble, slam the door, and are uncomfortably conscious of their parents’ financial and personal difficulties. The strain of domestic life, of poverty and responsibilities and the threat of defeat (represented by that lettuce farm) contrasts with the ever-present dazzle of the ocean. Director Michael Curtiz shoots into the sun so that a misty blaze hangs over the water, an image of transcendence that mocks Harry, in his captain’s hat, as he stumbles from one unlucky mistake to the next. Sharply scripted and far more downbeat than Hawks’s romantic adventure, The Breaking Point offers an unusually honest portrait of a tough guy. Harry Morgan is pugnacious and reflexively independent, but he’s also firmly rooted in a very ordinary family; his irritability blends with warmth and unconcealed need for his wife and children. But he can’t resign himself to a life of wage-slavery; he can’t take orders or advice. When things go wrong and he finds himself broke and stranded in Mexico, he turns to crime — reluctantly agreeing to smuggle Chinese immigrants into the U.S. on his boat — rather than ask anyone for help. When he gets home he doesn’t tell his wife about the trouble he’s in, brushing off her pleas for the truth. She complains later, with justification, “You act like you’re all alone.” Most distressingly, he twice endangers his friend and first mate, Wesley ( Juano Her-

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nandez), by not trusting and confiding in him. When Harry bluntly refuses to take Wesley back with him from Mexico, it’s because he doesn’t want to involve him in the smuggling, and also because he’s ashamed to have his friend know how low he’s stooping. But rather than explain the matter honestly, he suddenly treats the black man like a menial employee. “Get away from me, get out of my hair!” he barks, unable to bear either sympathy or his own feelings of guilt. He drowns his sorrows in whiskey, and even toys with accepting the come-on of a seductive good-time girl (Patricia Neal). Convincing himself that he needs excitement, he goes to her room, but their long-anticipated clinch turns out to be a fizzle, leaving them both disappointed and embarrassed. (“I don’t like to think I’m not exciting,” she says, “I don’t have much else.”) Harry tells her that he used to be invincible, he felt “eight feet tall all the time,” but trouble and anxiety have diminished him. He doesn’t know how to cope with his lack of control; he falls back on “guts,” when what he needs is prudence. The Breaking Point was the next-to-last film Garfield made before his untimely death of a heart attack at 39, hastened by the stress of persecution by HUAC and his dilemma over whether to save his career by naming names. His air of haggard worry, tension and bitterness enhance the powerful simplicity of his performance. All interesting tough guys have some strong feeling buried behind their impervious façade: with Bogart it’s anger, with Mitchum it’s sadness, and with Garfield it’s fear, the look of a hunted child. That orphan quality is still present in his late performances, though they are restrained and steely. Even his radiant charm and sexual charisma came partly from need and hunger. His voice, at once fluent and biting, stretches taut and — on certain lines — snaps like a rubber band. Garfield excelled at playing thick-skulled men not well endowed with judgment. Desperate to save his boat, Harry makes a deal to provide a getaway for a gang planning a racetrack heist. When Wesley wanders up at the wrong moment, Harry again refuses to tell him the truth about the situation; he tries to get rid of him with various subterfuges, but can’t come up with a convincing lie. Wesley is still around when the gang shows up, and one of the jumpy crooks shoots and kills him. Harry looks blankly stunned, admitting feebly, “I didn’t figure that at all,” before heaving his friend’s body overboard and watching the churning wake behind the boat erase it. Harry single-handedly overpowers the gangsters, but as he lies badly wounded on a ship full of dead men, floating soundlessly in a glassy, fog-enshrouded calm, he realizes: “A man alone ... a man alone ain’t got no chance.” The ocean becomes a liquid desert, a hallucinatory vision of the isolation he has driven himself into by cutting his ties, letting down his family and friends. By the time the boat is found and brought back, Harry is, in the cold words of a Coast Guard officer, so “close to being dead it doesn’t matter.” His wife has to convince him to allow his arm to be amputated to save his life. At first, barely conscious of her presence, he stubbornly insists he’d rather die, and she pleads pitifully that she will die, too, without him — she’ll be nothing if she’s left alone. Recalling his epiphany on the boat, Harry suddenly begs Lucy not to leave him, repeating over and over, “I need you.” He agrees to lose his arm, symbolically accepting his dependence. Harry Morgan is reunited with his family, but another family is destroyed by his mistake. Everyone seems to forget all about Wesley, but his young son comes to the dock

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when the ship returns, silently looking for his father. No one pays any attention to him, and in the film’s devastating final shot he is left alone on the dock as the crowds disperse, another tiny figure stranded in empty space, invisible because of the color of his skin. Children are oddly situated in film noir. They are innocent. Their lives are ahead of them. They can’t be world-weary or haunted by the past. The few noirs with child protagonists (The Window, Talk About a Stranger, The Fallen Idol) focus on their misunderstandings the adult world, and usually end with them learning important lessons about ethics and human behavior. Wesley’s son learns a lesson, too, and has a glimpse of the life before him. He’s only a kid, but he’s already a man alone.

Behind the Veil: Film Noir and Spiritualism In his 1972 “Notes on Film Noir,” Paul Schrader identified “perhaps the over-riding noir theme: a passion for the past and present, but also a fear of the future.... Thus film noir’s techniques emphasize loss, nostalgia, lack of clear priorities, insecurity.” Schrader describes noir heroes who dread the future and retreat into the past, but even more prevalent in noir are men and women who want to shed the past but find it overshadowing the present. The implacable grip of the past in so many stories is an aspect of noir’s fundamental pessimism about the possibilities of change, free choice and absolution. “I did something wrong, once,” Burt Lancaster says in The Killers, as he lies in bed waiting passively for his executioners. This fatalism can feel punitive: noir protagonists are often victims of rotten luck that hideously compounds their mistakes. But in film noir, external circumstances are reflections or magnifications of inner states; as in dreams, people move through worlds created by their own fears and desires. In noir you can’t escape the past because you can’t escape from your own mind, which is constructed from the accretion of earlier experiences, memories that pursue you like tireless hit men. Émigré directors from Europe brought memories of their lost homelands to Hollywood, and film noir’s treatment of the past is shaped by the conflicted feelings of exiles who had escaped from the gathering horror of Nazism, and whose nostalgia blended with awareness of how long the wounds of history can remain unhealed. After the war, many noir films directly addressed the psychological aftereffects of combat, with stories about veterans suffering from amnesia or psychoses. Other films about people unable to shake off the past referred obliquely to the predicament of a world in which so many people had lost loved ones or suffered shattering experiences they couldn’t forget. The growing fascination with Freud and psychoanalysis inspired a spate of postwar melodramas about fragile minds damaged by early experiences, though Hollywood favored a simplistic, tidied-up model in which a single key unlocks and heals the troubled mind. Noir, of course, was skeptical about the promise that demons of the past can be laid to rest; as Welles concludes in The Lady from Shanghai, “Maybe I’ll live so long that I’ll forget her. Maybe I’ll die trying.” Modern ideas about trauma and buried memories blended with the traditions of Gothic melodrama, with its hidden rooms and unmarked graves. Here, the mind in peril is represented by a person — usually a woman — literally locked in, cut off from help, and tormented by malicious villains determined to drive her mad.

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Dark Waters (1944) combines all three of these influences in the story of a woman (Merle Oberon) who is one of only four survivors of a ship torpedoed by the Japanese. Having lost her parents and arrived in America where she knows no one, she is burdened by “the fear of being all alone, having no one to turn to, no one,” and by “the delirious nightmare of the open boat”— a nightmare of being trapped with strangers, physically intimate yet driven by thirst and fear to view one another as enemies, each death benefiting the survivors. She is terrified that she may be going crazy, that the memory of the ship going down and her ghastly ordeal in the lifeboat will take over her waking mind. She goes to stay with her aunt and uncle on an eerie, white-columned plantation deep in the Louisiana bayous. She’s walking into a trap, since the place has been taken over by impostors who have killed the real owners and are planning to sell the estate for a fortune. Naturally, they figure the easiest way to get rid of the inconvenient girl is to drive her to suicide by taking her to see newsreels about ships being torpedoed, rigging a phonograph to call her name from the marshes, and pulling simple Gaslight tricks like making her lamp go out. It becomes the kind of movie in which it’s just a matter of time before someone gets swallowed by quicksand, but no matter how overused it is, the plot device of mental manipulation preys on a universal fear, an awareness from childhood of the mind’s isolation and vulnerability. How can we know we’re sane? How can we ever be sure that we experience the same reality as others? If everyone around us were lying, how would we ever know? Like other psychological–Gothic melodramas that don’t quite qualify as noir (Spellbound, Rebecca, The Seventh Veil), Dark Waters has a facile resolution in which the heroine conquers her trauma by reliving it. Freed from fear, she is launched into a bright future. But for noir’s backward-looking souls, the future is often “all used up,” as Marlene Dietrich’s gypsy fortune-teller informs Welles’s bloated police chief in Touch of Evil. Mind readers, fortunetellers and spiritualists in noir exploit anxieties about the unknown future and longings to recover a lost past, reflecting the way present reality is always dominated by memory and anxiety. “I lived by feeding people’s desire to escape the present,” a fraudulent medium confesses in The Amazing Mr. X (a.k.a. The Spiritualist, 1948). “But you can’t escape for long.” The slick, debonair Alexis (Turhan Bey) preys on a wealthy widow who can’t come to terms with her husband’s death. He uses elaborate and sophisticated trickery, and has an assistant planted in the house as a maid, but his strongest ally is the widow’s fatal romanticism. Christine (Lynn Bari) lives in a white, Italianate mansion perched on top of a cliff above the ocean, with marble statues peopling the terrace like ghosts and silvery surf always crawling over the private cove far below. Yet again, waves thunder over rocks under the credits, but this time they don’t represent violent emotions, rather they evoke a kind of trance-inducing, mystical, relentless echo of the past. John Alton, who titled his book on cinematography Painting with Light, imbues the whole film with dreamy, misty, twilit, ethereal sheen, a visual complement to the hypnotic melancholy of Chopin’s “Raindrop” Prelude. Standing in her open French windows, Christine believes she hears her husband, Paul’s, voice calling to her over the ocean, which he loved. She goes walking on the beach at night in a flowing white dress, moonlight glittering on the water. It’s there she meets

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the suave Alexis, and he impresses her with his inexplicable knowledge of her innermost thoughts. That night as she lies in bed, she’s caught in a waking nightmare, staged with horror-movie panache: whispers and wandering lights, flowers that suddenly wither, a picture that falls to the floor and changes from a portrait of her fiancé to a portrait of her dead husband, a ghostly wedding dress that swoops out of the closet and chases her like a phosphorescent jellyfish. When Christine goes to see Alexis, the atmospheric lighting becomes just another of his clever gimmicks. His office is shadowy, dark-paneled, with narrow beams of light sifting in, decorated with skulls and ravens and crystal balls, tricked out with one-way mirrors and trapdoor cabinets, projections and recordings he uses during séances. Christine’s level-headed fiancé hires a private detective, a former magician who specializes in unmasking phony spiritualists. Alexis’s charm doesn’t work on the men, but he has an ace up his sleeve that he didn’t know about: Paul isn’t really dead. He isn’t Christine’s immortal beloved, either: he’s a heartless, slimy Bluebeard who menacingly boasts that since he’s legally dead, he could commit murder and never be suspected. While Alexis only wants to bilk some money out of Christine and her naïve younger sister, Paul plans to nudge his wife into suicide. He chips away at her sanity by piping Chopin into her bedroom and incessantly urging her to “join him,” then drugs her milk and leads her out onto the cliffs hoping she’ll fall to her death. People keep telling Christine that her whole life is ahead of her, that she shouldn’t waste her time clinging to what’s gone or probing into the past. What she clings to is really an illusion, which must be shattered before she can be freed. Is she better off for knowing that the great love of her life was a money-grubbing fake? Her husband comes back from the dead to rob her of her memories of him. In Otto Preminger’s Fallen Angel (1945), Dana Andrews plays Eric Stanton, a man who lives by peddling flimsy, mass-produced fantasies. Whether he’s promising urban luxury or reassuring messages from the dead, his glib insincerity is the verbal equivalent of cheap perfume, not quite masking the stench of rot. Stanton is a broke, opportunistic drifter who finds himself in Walton, a small town on the California coast, where he’s kicked off a Greyhound bus for outstaying his ticket. Spotting a poster advertising a performance by Professor Madley ( John Carridine), a spiritualist, he realizes there’s another hustler in town and muscles in on the spook racket, talking his way into a hotel room and a job with a con man’s brazen self-assurance. The Professor’s show is jeopardized by two spinster sisters, the town’s most prominent citizens, the elder of whom insists she “won’t let the poor gullible people be fooled” by flim-flammers “trading on people’s sacred feelings.” Eric shows up at their grand, immaculate white house with an unctuous line of patter, declaring that he is “here to speak on behalf of Walton’s dead,” the dear departed who want to bring a message of hope to the living. Despite his glaring phoniness, the younger of the two sisters, June Mills (Alice Faye), softens and convinces her older sister that they shouldn’t stand in the way of men just trying to make a living. With their approval, the townsfolk flock to see the Professor, a skillful faker who holds them spellbound with his resonant voice as he channels the spirits who “return to tell us how happy they are in their reward.” To spice the consolation with a bit of scandal, the Professor communes with the spirit of the town’s former mayor,

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who reveals that his daughters — Clara and June Mills — have lost most of their money to a con man. It’s a nasty bit of revenge for Clara’s sanctimony, proof that she’s the poor, gullible one. Fallen Angel turns out not to be a movie about spiritualism; Professor Madley leaves town and is never heard from again. Eric declines to continue their partnership, abandoning the lucrative spooks in favor of the very corporeal Stella (Linda Darnell), the sultry waitress at a dingy waterfront diner. He joins a small crowd of males who hover around her like wasps around a jam jar. On their first date, Eric spouts shopworn clichés, telling her she doesn’t belong in a small-town café; she ought to be in New York, at the Stork Club or 21, smothered in minks and jewels. “I like the way you talk,” she purrs, impressed by his boast about the movie stars and celebrities he knew when he ran a press agency. But Stella, whose motto is “What’s in it for me?” is holding out for a ring and a home; she knows that beneath his big talk Eric is just another tomcat with empty pockets looking for a tumble. He doesn’t give up, but starts coldheartedly wooing June Mills, intending to get hold of her money and run away with Stella. He uses similar methods on her, flattering the amateur organist and telling her she belongs in Carnegie Hall, accusing the sheltered old maid of retreating into books and being afraid of life.

“The sound of far-off places.” Eric Stanton (Dana Andrews) courts Stella (Linda Darnell) on the beach in Fallen Angel (Otto Preminger, 1945).

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On the surface, June and Stella perfectly fit the dichotomy of redeemer and temptress. It is nearly always night when Stella appears, on the tawdry side of town where wooden buildings are buckled and stained by the sea air. Her first kiss with Eric is submerged in inky shadows, and it’s an unusually steamy embrace for the period; Eric’s obsession with her is plainly and exclusively carnal. The sullen, selfish waitress who pilfers the cash register and keeps several suitors on her string is precisely the sort of flashy goods that would appeal to such a hollow man. June is always seen in bright sunlight against white backgrounds, in church or walking past the clean, gracious houses in the good part of town. She’s cultured and kind, seemingly too intelligent to fall for Eric’s mechanical, sham courtship. But he gives her a way out of the bloodless routine of her life; perhaps she’d rather be hurt than remain forever insulated in cloying security. Even Stella commands some sympathy in her desire to break out of a petty, mean existence; the first time we (and Eric) see her she is returning, footsore and defeated, from an attempt to run away. None of the men who lust after her offer her the home she wants. Her most devoted admirer is a taciturn sadist (Charles Bickford) who was kicked off the New York police force for beating a suspect. He’s pathetic too, spending his days silently drinking coffee in the diner and gazing at Stella. The small-town setting of Fallen Angel— a big change from the sophisticated, metropolitan milieu of Laura, Preminger’s previous noir — intensifies the mood of confinement and stasis. On the beach where Eric attempts to seduce Stella, he calls the noise of the surf “the sound of far-off places.” But despite the seaside location, the ocean is rarely heard or seen, and offers no promise of escape. Eric Stanton is a thorough heel, but his habitual air of discomfort hints at a more complex personality. Like Earl Pfeiffer, he’s awash in acrid self-pity: “I’m tired, like I was a million years old,” he tells June late in the film when they’re holed up in a shabby hotel room. “A million jobs behind me. Girls. Chances I never followed up.” It’s the weariness of having no core to his identity, only a series of masks and lies, pursuing an array of shiny, desirable things that are always just out of reach. He makes money but loses it gambling; gets beaten up for things he didn’t do; runs away whenever things look bad. When Stella is murdered, all he can think of is how to avoid taking the rap; his passion for her dissolves without a trace. When June tells him she loves him, for a moment before he kisses her and accepts the salvation she offers, he looks disconcerted, faced with something totally alien: honest and unselfish love. For Eric, those “sacred feelings” have always been just something to trade on. Whether playing flawed heroes or redeemable villains, Dana Andrews found his niche as film noir’s uneasy conscience. He was the most repressed of all tough guys: “It’s not difficult for me to hide emotion,” Andrews said, “since I’ve always hidden it in my personal life.” His suits seem welded to him like armor. With that boxy mid-century silhouette, further fortified by the fedora, the glass of bourbon, the cigarette that stays jammed in his mouth when he talks, he looks oppressed by the masculine ideal of granite-faced impassivity. Those critics who called him wooden or monochromatic must never have looked into his troubled eyes. If there’s a stiffness in his presence, it’s not awkwardness or inadequacy; it suits the men he plays, who keep their feelings and their old wounds locked up like their liquor cabinets. (Or, one might say, locked up in their liquor cabinets.) His conscientious heroes are marked by exhaustion, guilt, an inability ever to lighten up,

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while his charming cads are tinged with self-loathing. Even when playing an “average Joe,” as he usually did, he seems too sensitive and perceptive for his own good. He can’t close his eyes, which is why they’re so haunted. He often looks like he has the taste of ashes in his mouth. The future, rather than the past, torments the characters in The Night Has a Thousand Eyes (1948), based on a novel by Cornell Woolrich. John Triton (Edward G. Robinson) is a carnival mentalist who experiences genuine clairvoyant visions. They concern only two things: money and death. He and his partners profit by his ability to pick the winners of horse races and stocks that will rise; his best friend, Whitney Courtland, becomes a millionaire thanks to his tip on an oil field. But Triton finds only grief in his gift. He foresees deaths and accidents, but is unable to prevent them, and he can’t shake the feeling that he is somehow responsible, that he makes things happen. It’s as though, for Triton, the future is already the past: irrevocable, full of regret. He becomes “a reverse zombie,” living in “a world already dead, and I alone knowing it.” When he has a vision of his fiancée dying in childbirth, he runs away and becomes a hermit, living in an abandoned gold-mining camp in Nevada. He finds peace in the desert but is consumed by loneliness, and moves to Bunker Hill to be near Courtland, who lives in a hilltop mansion in Westwood. He married the woman Triton abandoned — and she died in childbirth anyway. (When Triton endeavors to prevent his prophecies from coming true, his own actions end up causing the event he’s trying to obstruct.) Triton might be the grim reaper: a newsboy who asks for a baseball tip is run over moments later; a man he’s in jail with commits suicide in his cell; and a cloud of doom hangs over the Courtland family. No sooner has Triton spotted his old friend than he knows he will die in a plane crash; no sooner has he met Whit’s daughter, Jean Courtland (Gail Russell), than he has a vision of her lying dead under the stars. Because of the family’s wealth, when Triton warns them and tries to avert these disasters, he’s immediately suspected of working some kind of con game. The police assume he’s trying to worm his way into their confidence in pursuit of a big payoff, that he’s a snake-oil salesman like Alexis. Up to a certain point in the film, it’s possible to believe this could be the case, assuming that the flashbacks Triton narrates are lies. But from the opening moments, director John Farrow establishes such a mournful, fatalistic tone that the viewer never really doubts Triton’s sincerity. The atmosphere is fed by Victor Young’s wistfully dreamy score, which calls on the trusty theramin whenever Triton has a flash of the future, and by the dark camerawork of John F. Seitz (who shot Double Indemnity), but it comes mainly from the performances of Robinson and Russell. Robinson was a master of worry: his Triton is a man worried raw, his nerves frayed. He becomes an outcast, because normal relationships and social contacts can’t withstand too much knowledge. A gift that sets him apart from all other men reduces him to a reclusive existence, producing parlor magic tricks to sell by mail in his crummy one-room apartment, his social conversation “not exceeding 25 words a day.” The character of Jean Courtland could have been an ordinary ingénue, but Gail Russell always brought a haunting, tragic air to her characters; her first starring role, in The Uninvited, was as a girl both menaced by and irresistibly drawn to the ghost of her

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own mother. Recruited by Hollywood scouts while she was still in high school, Russell was famously crippled by stage-fright and became dependent on alcohol. For a woman so shy that she used to hide under the piano when her parents had guests, it was it was torture to perform in front of the camera. While not a great actress, Russell had a lovely presence onscreen, luminous, gentle and vulnerable. She loved the movie business and longed to succeed, but she said: “I was a sad character. I was sad because of myself. I didn’t have any self-confidence. I didn’t believe I had any talent. I didn’t know how to have fun. I was afraid. I don’t exactly know of what — of life, I guess.” This quality defines Jean, whose fiancé complains that Triton’s prophecy has turned her into a resigned automaton sleepwalking toward her own death. The film opens in a rail yard at night, with blasts of steam flooding the screen and melting into the darkness. Jean’s fiancé searches for her through the confusion of rails and stairs and platforms, catching her just before she throws herself in front of an oncoming locomotive. She’s so frightened by the prediction of her imminent death that she wants to get it over with; she’s persecuted by the stars, which keep watching her mercilessly “like a thousand eyes.” The trains, of course, are an apt symbol for implacable fate. Triton compares the view from inside a train to the way time is perceived by ordinary people: an irreversible succession of past, present and unknowable future. He, on the other hand, is sitting on top when he has his visions, able to see the whole picture. From this potent opening, the film loses some of its gravitas, and in the latter part becomes increasingly silly. With Triton’s predictions coming true in sometimes humorous ways, and hands sneaking out from behind curtains, and barky William Demarest as a skeptical cop, it turns into a pleasant horror-comedy. But compelling moments remain, as in the scene where Triton, gazing into a mirror, touches his shirt as though feeling for blood, realizing that he, too, will soon die. This is a heightened, supernatural version of the common noir feeling of being a puppet without control of one’s own destiny. The source of angst is highly unusual: aside from the villains who turn out to be behind the plot against the lives of Whitney Courtland and his daughter, no one in the film is motivated by the usual greed or lust or desire for revenge. Instead, it is simply mortality that overshadows them. Everyone dies eventually, but the ability to know when it will come drains the life out of life. “Since the dawn of time, mankind has sought to see behind the veil that separates us from tomorrow.” Triton’s spiel, introducing his clever, phony carnival act (which gives him much greater satisfaction than his real visions) is a word-for-word repeat of a spiel heard in the previous year’s Nightmare Alley (1947). A far more ruthless film, Nightmare Alley pinpoints the irony of the mind-reading scam, in which the appearance of uncanny sympathetic understanding, a luminous glimpse into the human heart, is just a way of bilking money out of suckers. The young roustabout and aspiring hustler Stanton Carlisle (Tyrone Power) loves working in a carnival because it gives him a feeling of superiority over the yokels; a sense of being in the know, while they are on the outside. He loves the freedom of being always on the move, blowing each dump once they’ve squeezed it dry, driving through the night to the next. The traveling show sets up its tents and stalls, rides and banners and caravans on dusty, empty lots at the edges of provincial towns, offering

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a whiff of urban hubbub and spectacle to the hicks. Flimsy and temporary, the carnival is all lights and lies, false fronts and ballyhoo. The only products of this movable community are deception and cheap thrills. The crowds who come are farmers in straw hats and overalls, their wives in print dresses, easily awed by Bruno the Strong Man and Zeena the Mind Reader, whom they eagerly ply with questions about their farms and families.5 Even the wised-up Stan is not immune to being suckered by a good spiel. When Pete, Zeena’s broken-down, alcoholic partner, gives a demonstration of his once-headlining act, Stan listens eagerly. Pete gazes into his “crystal” (a bottle of moonshine) and describes his vision of a barefoot boy running through rolling green hills, a dog beside him. “Yes, his name was Gyp!” Stan confirms, at which Pete reveals that it’s just a stock reading that fits anyone. “Every boy has a dog!” he laughs. Much later, when Stan has followed in Pete’s footsteps and become a drunk, he repeats the stock reading to his fellow bums in a hobo jungle, who are similarly taken in. The racket depends on the fact that everyone has the same experiences and emotions — the same beautiful grey-haired mother, the same fears of loss and illness, the same sense of being impeded by jealous rivals — yet everyone thinks himself unique. All the towns into which the carnival rolls its trucks are the same, and Chicago socialites in nightclubs prove to be no less gullible, just as drawn to sanctimony, just as eager to be told what they want to hear. From life on the road with the touring carnival, through urban hotels and then down-and-out vagrancy, Stan is never once seen in a stable setting. He has never known a home: he grew up in an orphanage, where the combination of harsh mistreatment and Bible verses instilled his profound cynicism about faith and morality. In reform school he learned to get out of trouble by feigning spiritual conversion, a gift he demonstrates as he saves the carnival when a sheriff comes to shut it down, bluffing the crude lawman with a display of “second sight.” His face shining like a choir boy’s, he spouts vague, sentimental mumbo jumbo, manipulating and feeding off the man’s predictable emotions until he’s putty in Stan’s hands — and Stan loves every minute of it, reveling in his power, the primal joy of fooling a chump. Handsome, ambitious, glib and shameless, Stan holds all the cards. He uses his wiles on the good-hearted, susceptible Zeena ( Joan Blondell), seducing her into revealing the verbal code that she and Pete developed in their highly successful vaudeville act. But from the start, his fascination with the carnival’s geek — a grotesque and pitiful last-stage alcoholic who bites the heads off live chickens for shock entertainment, in exchange for a bottle a day and a dry place to sleep it off— hints at a self-immolating streak in Stan. Devoid of a conscience, incapable of love or honesty, Stan, for all his brilliance, is like the geek (“Is he man or is he beast?”), not entirely human. He plies Pete with liquor in order to pick his brains, but accidentally gives him wood alcohol that kills him. Though the switch is apparently inadvertent, it suits Stan’s purposes so well that he never seems entirely sure it wasn’t murder. Once he’s gotten what he wants out of Zeena, Stan cheats on her with the pretty, adoring young Molly (Colleen Gray), then seizes the opportunity to ditch the carnival for a high-class nightclub act in Chicago. Though now he and Molly wear tuxedoes and evening gowns and perform for the cream of society, the fundamentals of the act are the same. But Stan has still higher ambitions: he aims to move into the spook racket, earning

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It takes one to catch one: Dr. Lilith Ritter (Helen Walker) outdoes Stanton Carlisle (Tyrone Power) as a manipulator of minds in Nightmare Alley (Edmund Goulding, 1947).

huge fees from wealthy clients to contact their dead loved ones, exploiting their longing for the absent, their need for spiritual comfort. Molly, talked against her will into impersonating a ghost, can’t bear the sight of a portly old man falling to his knees, praying and begging forgiveness from his long-dead sweetheart. Her honesty destroys the man she loves. Stan excels at manipulating the emotional weakness of others, but he’s brought down by someone who does the same to him. Dr. Lilith Ritter (Helen Walker) is a psychoanalyst who secretly records her patients’ confessions and keeps a library of priceless secrets. She becomes Stan’s partner in crime, supplying information that he can pretend to know telepathically, but she takes advantage of him just as she does her vulnerable, trusting clients. He confesses his own insecurities and the cause of Pete’s death, and she later threatens him with the recording of his incriminating statement. She cheats him of the money he gave her to hold, mocks him with the fact that she can make it look like he’s just a delusional head case, and for a coup de grâce pulls a Gaslight trick on him, making him doubt his own sanity. Hollywood psychoanalysts were generally portrayed as either benevolent miracleworkers or malevolent hypnotists; Lilith Ritter is surely the most chilling of all — indeed one of the most frightening characters in noir. Her eyes shine and her cheeks dimple with

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joy as she reveals her advantage over Stan and cruelly belittles him. Since his identity is built on his gift for making fools of people, when someone does the same to him he disintegrates, diving into a liquor bottle and rapidly sinking to such a state of degradation that he agrees to become a carnival geek, licking his lips and saying truthfully, “Mister, I was made for it.” In William Lindsay Gresham’s source novel, case-book Freudianism is much more pronounced; Dr. Ritter uncovers the real source of Stan’s perversity: his sexual attraction to his mother. The movie could not suggest this, of course, and the orphanage background was an inspired invention, but in the end the script weakens by reaching for an improving moral: Stan fell because he reached too high, committing sacrilege by using religion as another “boob-catcher.” The movie sides with Molly’s superstitious horror at the depths of her husband’s amorality: “It’s a wonder God doesn’t strike you dead!” Twentieth Century–Fox was reluctant to allow Tyrone Power to make the film, a radical departure from his usual swashbuckling image. He talked them into it and gave his best performance, brilliantly exploiting his own oily, shallow sex appeal and undergoing a more thorough de-glamorization than any other classic Hollywood beauty. Producers insisted on adding a crowd-pleasing coda in which Stan, who runs amok on his first night as a geek, is saved by the reappearance of Molly. Even if the viewer can swallow the unlikely coincidence of this meeting, the ending is far from happy: presumably Stan will now become Pete, supported by Molly as he drags out his years as a despised and useless rum-dum. “There’s only one thing this will help you forget,” Pete says of booze before he dies: “How to forget.” Until the last-minute brightening, Nightmare Alley is one of the blackest entries in the noir canon. There are no gangsters, guns, robberies, arrests or beatings; no hardboiled patter or urban menace. There is only the descent of a man for whom the world is divided between hustlers and suckers, a man who can feign connection with other people but never feel it. Like Pete, he’s trapped not in a bottle, but in his own mind, whose fragility and constraints are revealed to him by Lilith. This is the true noir landscape, the “lonely place” we see in Humphrey Bogart’s eyes as he looks up at Gloria Grahame: pleading, terrified of losing her, yet already stirring with the rage that will drive her away. It’s the place she retreats to in panicked, instinctual cowardice, buying a plane ticket to New York even as she lets him plan their wedding. With all its deaths and defeats, noir rarely breaks your heart: pessimism, fatalism and cynicism are, for one thing, a defense against heartbreak. But Nicholas Ray, with his romantic temperament, created a great and piercing tragedy with In a Lonely Place; a noir that is not about crime (though an unsolved murder acts as a catalyst) but simply about two people who find love and lose it because they can’t transform themselves. Bogart will always be ruled by his anger and Grahame by her fear, but watching their love die is devastating because it’s so alive. No film has ever captured more beautifully, more honestly, a truly adult love affair — not Hollywood’s usual, immature vision of lovers who do nothing but grapple and talk about how much they love each other. Whispering to each other in a piano bar or fixing each other breakfast, they interact with a mix of easy intimacy and continual appreciative surprise. And slowly, painfully, they pull apart, returning to their solitary orbits like two small frozen planets that briefly aligned.

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“I lived a few weeks while you loved me.” Laurel (Gloria Grahame) and Dix (Humphrey Bogart) practice saying goodbye. In a Lonely Place (Nicholas Ray, 1950).

We’re all in our private traps, as Norman Bates tells Marion Crane, distilling the essence of film noir before slashing it to bits. The office of his deserted roadside motel (“twelve rooms, twelve vacancies”) is full of stuffed birds, stilled in their flight as Marion is about to be. In Dark City, Eddie Muller asserts that classic noir “perished in a lonely motel room in California’s Central Valley.” Hitchcock’s Psycho, he argues, shattered Hollywood conventions and started crime cinema down a road of spectacle, shock violence and “vulgar excess,” away from the style of suggestion, interiority and empathy in which noir flourished. Hitchcock knew that he could kill off his protagonist and his audience wouldn’t actually care. He was not asking, but expecting people to disengage their emotions; to him, the film was a black comedy. What severs Psycho from classic Hollywood is not so much the blood as the absence of feeling or of moral judgment. There’s a world of difference between noir’s brand of hard-earned gallows humor — insolently wisecracking to hide the pain — and the tone of reflexive, perennially adolescent irony that pervades culture today. Contemporary audiences often laugh at noir’s melodramatic intensity; the laughter isn’t derisive, it’s just the way most people enjoy movies these days.6 How could youths whose lives have been more sheltered than most in human history, but who have witnessed all manner of flippant mayhem onscreen, appreciate

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stories that are driven by intense feelings of guilt or fear, by the overwhelming pull of memories or desire? Experience comes inevitably with age, but who wants to look or seem experienced in a society that has anointed youth as its supreme value? Bogart’s power and even his glamour came from his awesomely battered face; it declares that he has earned not only his disillusionment but his romanticism. Who today could get away with saying, “I was born when she kissed me, I died when she left me, I lived a few weeks while she loved me,” without sounding corny? When Bogart says it, you believe him. Mitchum was old at 27, when he said, “Places are all alike. You can’t run away from yourself.” He already knew that you have to play out your hand, and the best you can hope for is to lose more slowly. Break through the dragnet, cross the border, catch a plane to New York, sail to the smallest island in the South Seas: the trap will still be clamped tight. This is the moral in the story of Flitcraft, the strange case that Sam Spade recounts to Brigid O’Shaughnessy in The Maltese Falcon. In this book, Dashiell Hammett introduced the definitive femme fatale and the definitive hard-boiled detective, but the Flitcraft vignette, which didn’t make it into any of Hollywood’s three film versions, is the novel’s true noir heart. Spade was hired to find a man who had inexplicably vanished one day, just “like a fist when you open your hand.” Flitcraft was a solid citizen: successful, well-off, living in a suburb of Tacoma with a wife and child. One day, on his way to work, he narrowly escaped being killed by a beam falling from a construction site, and this close shave inspired an epiphany: that life is ruled by blind chance. The only way to stay in step with it, he decided, was to change his life at random. But when Spade tracked him down he was living in a suburb of Spokane, with another wife and child and a good job — in short, he was living the same life he had left, just in a different suburb under a different name. He saw a rift open in his familiar world and decided to leap into the chasm, but wound up following the same groove he had already cut. The moving man in Kiss Me Deadly could have told him that you can move from one house to another, but you can’t move out of your own body, your own mind. You can vanish from one place, but you’ll have to find yourself in another. What is an open fist but an empty hand?

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Notes Introduction

thropology of Supermodernity, Tr. John Howe (London, New York: Verso: 1995). 6. Robert Frank, in a 2004 documentary on British television (quoted by Anthony Lane in “Road Show,” The New Yorker, Sept. 14, 2009). Frank noted his surprise at discovering how blacks were treated, but added, “It didn’t make me hate America. It made me understand how people can be.” He also told the interviewers, “Coming to America felt like the door opened — you were free.” 7. Ginger Rogers, a staunch Republican, objected to dialogue like, “Share and share alike, that’s the American way,” in the wartime weeper Tender Comrade, in which Rogers’ character lives communally with a group of war brides. The film was introduced as evidence when writer Dalton Trumbo and director Edward Dmytryk were investigated by the House UnAmerican Activities Committee. 8. Democracy in America, Vol. 2, p. 810.

1. “Noir Country: Alien Nation,” in Bright Lights Film Journal, Issue 54, Nov. 2006. Morris opens by asking, “What is it about the city that encourages (or even creates) the idea of film noir? Why does every noir theorist agree on the city as a [the] fundamental element?” and goes on to argue that “noir can be read an aestheticized protest against the concepts of industrialization, capitalism, and progress.” 2. “Cycle” is the term introduced by Borde & Chaumaton in their pioneering study, Panorama du Film Noir Américain. A majority of writers on film noir (Raymond Durgnat, Paul Schrader, Robert G. Porfirio, etc.) have concluded that it should not be considered a genre. Dissenters include Todd Erickson (“Kill Me Again: Movement Becomes Genre”) and Foster Hirsch, who wrote in his book The Dark Side of the Screen: Film Noir: “The repeated use of narrative and visual structures which soon become conventional, depending on a shared acknowledgement between the filmmakers and the audience, certainly qualifies noir as a genre, and one that is in fact as heavily coded as the Western” (p. 72). His point is valid, but using a generic definition still strikes me as unhelpful, encouraging time-wasting quibbles about whether films are in or out of the canon. Another important distinction is that labeling noir a cycle defines it as a finite number of movies made during a particular period of time (roughly 1940–1958), whereas calling it a genre makes it open-ended; while genres may flourish at certain times and languish at others, they are essentially timeless. 3. Translated from the French by Alain Silver, in Film Noir Reader, ed. Silver & James Ursini. Italics in original. 4. The phrase was coined in 1939 by George Altman in a review of Marcel Carné’s Le Jour Se Leve. French poetic realism of the 1930s was another forebear of American noir, but the style never caught on in Hollywood; films that directly aped it, like Moontide (starring Jean Gabin) and The Long Night (a remake of Le Jour se Leve), lacked the grit of the originals and tended to come off as affected, stagy and sentimental. 5. Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an An-

Chapter 1 1. Conrad wrote the preface from which this chapter’s epigraph is taken for a reprint of The Secret Agent in 1920. 2. “I had not thought death had undone so many” is adapted from the Inferno, canto III, 55–57. 3. Cinema has fed our fascination with the downfall of cities from the silent era (Babylon in Griffith’s Intolerance and Fritz Lang’s futuristic Metropolis) through the countless apocalyptic fantasies of recent decades, which show cities engulfed by global warming or errant asteroids. Cities in their prime inevitably suggest their afterlife as ruins; their might and grandeur make them all the more precarious and vulnerable, and visions of their destruction are both horrific and satisfying. This perverse desire to watch towers crumble and landmarks engulfed by tidal waves has survived the actual devastation unleashed on Tokyo, Dresden and London in World War II, and the collapse of the World Trade Center on 9/11/01. During the postwar years, cities were just learning to live with the shadow of annihilation, in the wake of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. “The

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intimation of mortality is part of New York now,” E.B. White wrote in Here Is New York. The glamour of the postwar city was partly bravado, a hard-shelled defiance in the face of destruction. 4. In a letter to R.B. Cunninghame Graham, Feb. 8, 1899. Conrad was explaining his willingness to admire true anarchists. 5. The opening line of “The Man of the Crowd”: “It was well said of a certain German book that ’er lasst sich nicht lessen’— it does not permit itself to be read.” The narrator concludes that his inability to comprehend the unreadable heart of the man he has been following is “one of the mercies of God.” The story takes its epigraph from La Bruyere: “Ce grand malheur, de ne pouvoir etre seul.” (“The great misfortune of those who cannot be alone.”) 6. The documentary style was most prevalent in the immediate-postwar years, influenced by the many celebrated documentaries produced during the war and by the gritty naturalism of the Italian neorealist cinema. Hollywood films had been largely confined to the studio since the advent of sound in 1929, and real houses on real streets seemed proof of revolutionary authenticity. Some films, like Elia Kazan’s Boomerang! (1947) and Henry Hathaway’s Call Northside 777 (1946), were based on true stories and boasted in prologues that they were filmed to the extent possible on the locations where actual events had occurred. This fad for factuality reflected a desire for more mature movies —“hard-hitting,” contemporary and honest. The accompanying trend of stentorian, omniscient narrators likewise drew on the popularity of documentaries like the March of Time series, spoofed in Citizen Kane, as well as radio and magazines like Time and Life, that promised to deliver the state of the world in easy, predigested form. It’s a fundamentally anti–cinematic technique that lulls audiences into laziness; it was overlaid on many crime films in order to justify them as educational or improving, and it clashes jarringly with the expressionism, interiority and ambiguity of the noir style. 7. The set recreated the apartment building where Ray had lived when he first came to Hollywood. Paul’s, the restaurant where Dix is a regular, was a replica of Romanoff ’s, which Bogart frequented and where he was notorious for getting into arguments and fights. In a Lonely Place was almost a roman á clef about its makers, alluding to Bogart’s nasty temper (his violent brawls with his third wife, Mayo Methot, were legendary), and the rapidly disintegrating marriage of Ray and Grahame.

Chapter 2 1. State and city are never identified in the script, but the rural scenes were filmed in Colorado, and the city is presumably Denver. 2. The revenge killing of Myrna, who revealed the whereabouts of Bernie Tucker, was originally at the

end of the film, which would have rendered it even more downbeat. 3. Robert L. Richards, who scripted this tale of an informer’s guilt (from a story by Collier Young, Ida Lupino’s second husband and artistic collaborator) was later blacklisted after being betrayed by his own wife, Sylvia Richards. 4. “A Woman’s Place: The Absent Family in Film Noir,” in Women in Film Noir, pp. 22–34.

Chapter 3 1. On the CBS program Suspense, with Frank Sinatra, of all people, in the male lead. Mel Dinelli specialized in tales featuring Victorian houses and women in peril: he wrote the Fritz Lang film House by the River and Siodmak’s The Spiral Staircase, both period noirs. Moving into the suburbs, he wrote the terrified-housewife drama Cause for Alarm, starring Loretta Young. He also had a hand in the adaptation of The Reckless Moment. 2. In The Chase (1946, based on Cornell Woolrich’s The Black Path of Fear), the Miami mansion of a gangster is a flamboyant, over–the-top fantasia with marble heads and statues everywhere, white columns, rococo chairs and chandeliers. The gangster’s wretched, imprisoned wife (Michele Morgan) is always dressed in evening gowns inspired by classical drapery, clearly defining her, too, as an objet d’art in her husband’s collection. 3. Though Ohlrig was a thinly disguised portrait of Howard Hughes, the scene in which he orders Leonora to entertain his guests was inspired by Ophüls’s observation of Preston Sturges, who had helped the director get his first job in America, five years after he arrived. 4. In The Unsuspected (1947), an elegant murdermystery by Michael Curtiz, a diabolical radio broadcaster uses dictaphones not only to secretly record people’s conversations for the purpose of blackmail, but to provide an alibi for himself by recording a fight between a husband and wife and playing it back after the wife is already dead. The recurring use of this new technology in films (Walter Neff narrates his tale on a Dictaphone), often for sinister purposes, reflected its uncanny novelty, and the realization of how it might invade privacy and force people’s own voices to testify against them. In this case, it illustrates the megalomania of the villain (Claude Rains), whose voice rules the airwaves, smugly narrating the tale of “the unsuspected” murderer. His motive for multiple killings disguised as suicides is to keep control of a stately mansion that belongs to his ward. (She, meanwhile, suffers doubts about her sanity when a man she has never seen turns up, insisting they are married.) Rains lives there in splendor, controlling the lives around him from a padded, soundproofed office that symbolizes his deranged self–absorption. Another telephone-centric noir is The Third Voice (1960), in which Edmond O’Brien plays a man hired

Notes — Chapters 4, 5 and 6 to impersonate a businessman in order to swindle money out of his company. Holed up in Mexico, he studies reel-to-reel tapes of the man’s voice and learns to imitate it, carrying on daily conversations with his victim’s fiancée. Every improvement in technology makes identity theft easier, and the film’s twist ending adds punch to the theme of the slipperiness of identities. 5. Fritz Lang, “Director Tells of Bloodletting and Violence,” Los Angeles Herald Express, December 8, 1947. 6. From the essay “Women in Film Noir,” in the collection of the same name, pp. 35–68.

Chapter 4 1. “The Character of Sir Robert Peel,” 1856, in Biographical Studies, p. 4. 2. There are some clues that the film may actually be set before America entered the war: 1888 is referred to as “53 years ago,” which would make the year 1941. 3. “I first heard Personville called Poisonville by a red-haired mucker named Hickey Dewey in the Big Ship in Butte. He also called his shirt a “shoit.” I didn’t think anything of what he had done to the city’s name. Later I heard men who could manage their r’s give it the same pronunciation.” Hammett, Red Harvest, p. 1. Many critics cite Red Harvest as an unacknowledged source for Kurosawa’s Yojimbo, which was also influenced by American westerns and was remade (without acknowledging Kurosawa, until he sued) as the spaghetti western A Fist Full of Dollars. All of these stories involve a lone, nameless stranger who arrives in a town mired in criminal feuds and proceeds to play both sides against each other until they are destroyed. 4. In one way, Karlson’s film was a whitewash. Once he became attorney general, John Patterson (who stepped in for his slain father) banned the NAACP from operating in Alabama. He later won election as governor with the endorsement of the Ku Klux Klan.

Chapter 5 1. Coincidentally, the country-western song “Detour” was penned by Paul Westmoreland the same year. 2. The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the American Voice (New York: Picador, 2007), p. 133. 3. The chapters are titled “Youth: Dreams of Innocence, Nightmares of Experience,” “Dreams of Freedom, Nightmares of Constraint,” “Dreams of Success, Nightmares of Failure,” “Dreams of Possession, Nightmares of Being Possessed.” 4. Barrow vowed vengeance on the Texas Correctional System after he was abused and raped on a prison farm, while Dillinger, receiving a 10–20-year sentence for a first, minor robbery, declared, “I will be the meanest bastard you ever saw when I get out

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of here.” Information and quotations relating to Bonnie and Clyde in this chapter are drawn from Jeff Guinn’s Go Down Together: the True, Untold Story of Bonnie and Clyde (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2009). 5. Stone is interviewed in the documentary featurette on the DVD release of They Live by Night. 6. Robert Mitchum, who later starred in Ray’s The Lusty Men, had hoped to play Chicamaw, but it didn’t work out. He was interested in the connections to his own biography: in Anderson’s book the character is, like Mitchum, part American Indian (Mitchum’s father was half Blackfoot) and had been on a chain gang (Mitchum was on a road gang in Georgia at age 15). In the film, Chicamaw objects to the nickname “One-Eye Mobley,” but in the book it is “Three-Toed Mobley,” since he chopped off several of his toes to escape a prison farm — as Clyde Barrow did. 7. The presentation of Keechie’s character is one of the most significant differences between They Live by Night and Robert Altman’s 1974 adaptation of the same novel, which uses the original title Thieves Like Us. Shelley Duvall plays Keechie as immature, spacey, almost half-witted, so the film lacks not only the tender romanticism of the earlier version, but any moral center. 8. The Production Code supported the motif of the femme fatale, since it allowed sinful impulses to be contained within the singular figure of a “bad woman” whose death would restore order and virtue. In other words, put the blame on Mame. Noir films, however, frequently undermine this misogynistic scapegoating by making it clear that the men who are lead astray by temptresses were just waiting for a chance to go astray anyway; the women awaken a suppressed tendency toward antisocial rebellion and crime, the desire to “get away with something.” 9. Gun Crazy was produced by King Brothers Productions, directed by Joseph H. Lewis, and written by MacKinlay Kantor, author of the original story, and the blacklisted Dalton Trumbo, who did revisions under a front. Trumbo was frequently hired by the King Brothers, the spunky if disreputable masters of Poverty Row filmmaking. Originally the Kosinskis, they grew up in Los Angeles, rising from childhood jobs as shoeshine boys and newsies through the world of bootlegging, pinball and slot machines, before getting involved in “Soundies” and finally feature films, specializing in crime dramas. They were instrumental in getting the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences in 1975 to belatedly award Trumbo the Oscar he won for the screenplay of the King Brothers’ 1954 production The Brave One, which he wrote under the name Robert Rich.

Chapter 6 1. As a young boy, Robert Mitchum was knocked down by a car in Bridgeport, Connecticut. When his mother arrived on the scene, a doctor told her that her

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son had a concussion — it was obvious from his eyes. “Oh no, they always look like that,” she replied. Casting Mitchum as a character with a concussion seems like an inside joke about his legendary “sleepwalking” style of acting. 2. Few films can top this congregation of evil faces, but one candidate is Robert Aldrich’s Vera Cruz (1954), in which an outlaw, played by Burt Lancaster, leads a troop of America’s ugliest plug-uglies to hire out as mercenaries in the Mexican revolution of 1866. His cohorts are played by character actors Jack Elam, Ernest Borgnine, Charles Bronson and Jack Lambert. It is when he observes the vile behavior of these ornery louts that Gary Cooper, as another would-be mercenary who is obviously too honorable to sell himself for gold, remarks in bewilderment, “What gets into Americans down here?” 3. Welles wore extensive padding and make-up to achieve the age and bulk of Quinlan. One night he didn’t have time to remove his make-up before attending a party, and when he showed up in his guise as Quinlan (having recently returned to Hollywood after ten years away), he was greeted by cries of, “Orson! You look wonderful!”

Chapter 7 1. Lupino was married to Young, but divorced him to marry Duff, while remaining business partners after Young’s marriage to Joan Fontaine — whom Lupino would cast as her fellow wife in The Bigamist. 2. Censors would not approve a script that depicted a contemporary criminal but accepted the idea once Cook’s name was changed. Lupino interviewed one of the men held hostage in preparation for making the film. The real Billy Cook was captured by Mexican police and died in the gas chamber at San Quentin. 3. In his first version of the script for Ace in the Hole, Wilder reused the opening that had been rejected for Sunset Boulevard, with Joe Gillis on a slab in the morgue; he wanted it to begin with narration by Tatum’s corpse as he’s loaded onto a train in a pine box. Yet again, the tasteless idea was dropped.

Chapter 8 1. “Many of my statements have been smoke screen, designed to allow me to follow my own course without exposing it. I learned early in life that by telling a story far more colorful than the truth … one’s truth is let alone. I like to be let alone. I know what I am; I am a patient cynic.” Robert Mitchum, Movieland, 1948. All quotes in the previous paragraph are from Mitchum’s interview with David Frost, 1970. In Mitchum, In His Own Words, ed. Jerry Roberts, p. 42. 2. High Noon lost the best-picture Oscar to Cecil B. DeMille’s The Greatest Show on Earth; since

DeMille was one of Hollywood’s leading right-wingers and supporters of Joseph McCarthy, the upset was assumed to be politically motivated. 3. Winchester ‘73, Bend of the River and The Far Country were all written by Borden Chase, and none approach the bleakness of Mann’s masterpieces, The Naked Spur and Man of the West. Chase specialized in westerns and war movies, and was a member of the right-wing Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals. Man of the West, by contrast, was the only western penned by Reginald Rose (based on a novel by Will C. Brown), who also wrote screenplays for Crime in the Streets and Twelve Angry Men. 4. While details of the conflict are obscure, the split between Mann and Stewart came during the making of Night Passage (1957), which starred Stewart and which Mann began to direct, but did not complete. The Man from Laramie was the last of their collaborations.

Chapter 9 1. For reasons that remain murky, the scenes of Mike and Velda escaping from the house and floundering in the surf, which appear in the screenplay, were cut from release prints of the film, which ended with “The End” superimposed on the exploding house, leaving the viewer to assume Mike and Velda perished. In 1997, MGM restored the final scenes, which were found in a print that had originally belonged to director Robert Aldrich; the DVD release of the film includes the older, truncated ending as an extra. Glenn Erickson explored the mystery at length in “The Kiss Me Mangled Mystery: Refurbishing a Film Noir” in Images Journal, No. 3, 1996. 2. Renoir quotes are from My Life and My Films, pp. 244–247, tr. Janet Bergstrom. 3. “Oneiric Cinema: The Woman on the Beach,” in Film History, vol. 11, no. 1 (1999), pp. 114–125. 4. Robert Ryan played the part of Joe Doyle in the original Broadway production of Clash by Night, which starred Tallulah Bankhead and Lee J. Cobb. 5. William Lindsay Gresham, author of the novel Nightmare Alley, had a lifelong fascination with sideshows and spiritualism, and wrote two non–fiction books on these subjects, Monster Midway: an Uninhibited Look at the Glittering World of the Carny, and Houdini: the Man Who Walked Through Walls. He gleaned much of his information from a friend who had been a sideshow employee. About alcoholism, however, he had first-hand knowledge. 6. It isn’t only the quaint, dated conventions of old Hollywood that amuse modern viewers; I’ve heard an audience laugh at Raging Bull (written by Paul Schrader), responding to the harrowing account of a man destroyed by irrational jealousy and insecurityfueled violence as if it were just a pastiche of those funny, profane Italian Americans.

Selected Bibliography Kitses, Jim. Gun Crazy. London: British Film Institute, 1996. _____. Horizons West: Directing the Western from John Ford to Clint Eastwood. London: British Film Institute, 2004. Lewis, David L., and Laurence Goldstein, eds. The Automobile and American Culture. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, c. 1983. Love, Damien. Robert Mitchum: Solid, Dad, Crazy. London: B.T. Batsford, 2002. Mumford, Lewis. The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations and Its Prospects. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1961. Muller, Eddie. Dark City: The Lost World of Film Noir. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998. Naremore, James. More Than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Putnam, Robert B. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000. Rhodes, Gary D. Edgar G. Ulmer: Detour on Poverty Row. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2008. Roberts, Jerry, ed. Mitchum: In His Own Words. New York: Limelight Editions, 2000. Silver, Alain, and James Ursini, eds. Film Noir Reader. New York: Limelight Editions, 1996. Truffaut, François (under pseudonym Robert Lachenay). “A Wonderful Certainty.” Tr. Liz Heron. Cahiers du Cinema 46 (April 1955). Wager, Jans B. Dames in the Driver’s Seat: Re-Reading Film Noir. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005. Warshow, Robert. “The Gangster as Tragic Hero.” Partisan Review, Feb. 1948.

Andrew, Geoff. The Films of Nicholas Ray: The Poet of Nightfall. London: British Film Institute, 2004. Bacher, Lutz. Max Ophuls in the Hollywood Studios. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996. Bergstrom, Janet. “Oneiric Cinema: The Woman on the Beach.” Film History 11.1 (1999): 114–125. Beverly, William. On the Lam: Narratives of Flight in J. Edgar Hoover’s America. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2003. Caomito, Terry, ed. Touch of Evil: Orson Welles, Director. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1985. Christopher, Nicholas. Somewhere in the Night: Film Noir and the American City. New York: Free Press, 1997. Dettelbach, Cynthia Golumb. In the Driver’s Seat: The Automobile in American Literature and Popular Culture. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1976. Dickos, Andrew. Street with No Name: A History of the Classic American Film Noir. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2002. Dimendberg, Edward. Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. Eisenschitz, Bernard. Nicholas Ray: An American Journey. Tr. Tom Milne. Boston: Faber and Faber, 1993. Harvey, James. Movie Love in the Fifties. New York: A.A. Knopf, 2001. Hoveyda, Fereydoun. “Nicholas Ray’s Response: ‘Party Girl.’” Cahiers du Cinéma 7 (May 1960). Hirsch, Foster. The Dark Side of the Screen: Film Noir. San Diego: Tantivy Press, 1981. Kaplan, E. Ann. Women in Film Noir. London: British Film Institute, 1998.

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Index Numbers in bold italics indicate pages with photographs. Ace in the Hole 4, 13, 16, 170– 177, 176, 216, 240n3 Act of Violence 43–47, 44, 48, 168 Agee, James 6 Aldrich, Robert 32, 240n2, 240n1 Allen, Lewis 209 Alton, John 105, 146, 225 Anders, Glenn 151 Anderson, Edward 105, 119, 121– 122, 239n6 Anderson, Judith 101, 181–182, 192 Andrew, Geoff 123 Andrews, Dana 47, 186, 226– 229, 227 The Amazing Mr. X 225–226 Angel Face 62, 76–79 Arnold, Matthew 219, 222 The Asphalt Jungle 4, 22, 22–23, 29 Astor, Mary 45, 81, 209 Augé, Marc 11 Augur, Tracy 7 automobiles: in noir 32–33, 110, 130–131; in postwar America 110–112 Baby Face 75–76 Baby Face Nelson 116, 118 Backus, Jim 148 Bad Day at Black Rock 37, 186 Bagehot, Walter 83 Baker, Roy Ward 164 Bancroft, Anne 42, 114 Bari, Lynn 225 Barrow, Clyde 115–116, 134, 239n4 Barton, James 164 Basehart, Richard 62 Baxter, Anne 188 Belafonte, Harry 40 Bel Geddes, Barbara 9, 61, 184 Bel Geddes, Norman 9 Bend of the River 188, 193, 196, 201, 240n3 Bendix, William 46, 143

Bennett, Joan 28, 72, 109; The Reckless Moment 48–50; The Secret Beyond the Door 67–68; The Woman on the Beach 218 Bergstrom, Janet 219 The Best Years of Our Lives 47, 123 Beverly, William 116, 131 Beware My Lovely 59–61, 60 Bey, Turhan 225 Beyond the Forest 58, 78 Bezzerides, A.I. 32, 37, 39 Bickford, Charles 218, 228 The Big Heat 11 The Big Steal 137, 143–145 Bigger Than Life 71–72 Bissell, Whit 133 Blondell, Joan 231 Blood on the Moon 183–184 The Blue Dahlia 46 Bluebeard (fairy tale) 67 Blythe, Anne 73 Boetticher, Budd 179, 186, 201– 204 Bogart, Humphrey 30, 76, 82, 88–89, 133, 178, 222, 223, 233–235, 234, 238n7 Bond, Rudy 42 Bond, Ward 37, 38 Boomerang! 27, 238n6 Boone, Richard 203 Borde, Raymond 5, 237n2 Border Incident 42, 146, 193 Borgnine, Ernest 97, 186, 240n2 Borzage, Frank 98–101 Brand, Neville 147 The Breaking Point 138, 222– 224 Breen, Joseph 6, 129, 217 Brennan, Walter 183, 189 Brian, David 95 Bridges, Lloyd 15, 99 Brooks, Geraldine 50 The Brothers Rico 10, 24, 125 Bryant, Marie 122 Buchanan Rides Alone 186, 201 Bunker Hill (L.A. neighborhood) 45–46 Burks, Robert 126

243

Burr, Raymond 74, 147–148 Busch, Niven 182, 192 Cady, Frank 174 Cagney, James 10, 11 Cain, James M. 5, 72, 120 Calhern, Louis 22, 192 Call Northside 777 27, 238n6 Calleia, Joseph 156 Camus, Albert 34 Carey, Macdonald 84, 86, 92 Carridine, John 226 Carson, Jack 96 Cassell, Wally 25 Cassidy, Hopalong 179 Caught 61–62, 64, 164 Cause for Alarm! 69–70, 238n1 Chandler, Jeff 96, 187 Chandler, Raymond 1, 5, 30, 46 The Chase 123, 238n2 Chase, Borden 240n3 Chaumaton, Étienne 5, 237n2 Christopher, Nicholas 3, 28 City of Fear 29 The City That Never Sleeps 25– 26, 58–59 clairvoyants, in noir 229–231 Clark, Dane 99–100, 134, 222 Clark, Fred 145 Clash by Night 4, 16, 216, 219– 222, 221 Cleef, Lee van 147 Clift, Montgomery 209 Cobb, Lee J. 206 Cochran, Steve 90, 123–125 Collinge, Patricia 85 Collins, Floyd 171 Columbia Studio 49, 127 Comanche Station 204 Comito, Terry 153 communism 14, 88 Conrad, Joseph 19, 23, 159, 237n1, 238n4 Conte, Richard 13, 24, 109, 125 Cook, Elisha, Jr. 112 Cook, William 161, 240n2 Cooper, Gary 135, 205–206, 208, 240n2

244 Corey, Wendell 193, 210 Cornfield, Hubert 112 corruption, in noir 92–95, 186– 187 Cortese, Valentina 62, 80 Cortez, Stanley 67 Cotten, Joseph 84, 85, 87 Crawford, Broderick 54 Crawford, Joan 65–66, 72–73, 75, 81, 95, 189, 216 Crime of Passion 4, 8, 59, 73– 74, 76 Crisp, Donald 194 Criss Cross 23, 214–215, 216, 220 Cry Danger 13, 45 Cry of the City 28 Cry Vengeance 35–36 Cummins, Peggy 128–129, 132 Curtiz, Michael 72, 94, 222, 238n4 Dall, John 113, 128, 132 Dano, Royal 206 Dark Waters 225 Darnell, Linda 227 Da Silva, Howard 119 Dassin, Jules 14, 27 Davis, Bette 58, 75 Day, Doris 90 Dead Reckoning 82 De Carlo, Yvonne 214 Decision at Sundown 201, 203– 204 Deep Valley 133, 222 DeFore, Don 191 Denby, David 143 Depression (1929–1941) 13–14, 114–116, 120 Desert Fury 5, 16, 209–211 Desperate 35, 110, 119 The Desperate Hours 88–89, 97 De Toth, André 70, 190–191 Detour 10, 105–108, 107, 129, 161 Dettelbach, Cynthia Golomb 111 The Devil Thumbs a Ride 109, 126, 161 Devil’s Doorway 192, 193 Dickos, Andrew 4 Dietrich, Marlene 153, 156–157, 190, 225 Dillinger, John 115–116, 133, 239n4 Dimendberg, Edward 9, 34, 46 Dinelli, Mel 59, 238n1 Domergue, Faith 135–136 El Dorado 205 Double Indemnity 9, 19, 23, 30, 57, 71, 76, 119, 171, 174 Douglas, Kirk 13, 102 –103, 138– 139, 170, 175, 176, 177, 211 Douglas, Paul 219–220 Drive a Crooked Road 110 Duel in the Sun 182, 192 Duff, Howard 161, 240n1

Index Durgnat, Raymond 237n2 Duryea, Dan 198, 201, 214–215 Ebert, Roger 179 Edwards, Vince 29 El Dorado 205 Elam, Jack 147 Eliot, T.S. 12, 19, 159 Endfield, Cy 15 Erdman, Richard 13 Erickson, Todd 237n2 F for Fake 158 A Face in the Crowd 26 Fallen Angel 188, 226–228, 227 The Far Country 178, 188–189, 190, 201, 240n3 Farrow, John 148, 229 Faulkner, William 110 Faye, Alice 226 Feist, Felix E. 123–126 femmes fatales 76, 81–82 Fitzgerald, Geraldine 79 Flamingo Road 94–95 Fleischer, Richard 96 Flippen, Jay C. 119, 197 Fonda, Henry 116–117 Force of Evil 4, 20, 27 Ford, Glenn 53, 54, 190 Ford, John 177, 179, 186, 189 Ford, Wallace 195 Foreman, Carl 187 Forty Guns 189, 193 Foster, Preston 147, 190 Fourteen Hours 25 Frank, Nino 5 Frank, Robert 12, 16, 113, 134, 237n6 Freudianism 5, 67–68, 182, 224, 233 Frölich, Gustav 21 The Front Page (play) 176 Fuller, Samuel 97, 193, 197, 207 The Furies 189, 192–194, 199 Gable, Clark 213 gangster films 5, 7 Garfield, John 20, 27, 88, 99– 100, 121, 138, 222–223 Gates, Nancy 88 The Getaway (book) 105, 113, 138 Gomez, Thomas 144 Goodis, David 5, 27, 42, 222 gothic melodrama 63, 69, 224 Grahame, Gloria 11, 31, 54, 54– 56, 66, 233–234, 238n7 Granger, Farley 118, 121 Gray, Coleen 147, 231 Great Depression see Depression Greed 159 Greenstreet, Sydney 94 Greer, Jane 82, 138–141, 143, 188, 189, 190 Gresham, William Lindsay 233, 240n5

Grey, Zane 180 Il Grido 124 Gruen, Victor 111 Gun Crazy 4, 113, 128–133, 132 guns 128–129, 131, 199, 212 Guthrie, Woody 114 Hagopian, Kevin Jack 151 Hall, Porter 170 The Halliday Brand 186 Hammett, Dashiell 5, 92, 235, 239n3 Hart, William S. 179 Harte, Bret 187 Harvey, James 1, 52, 83 Harvey, Sylvia 47 Hawks, Howard 187, 205, 222 Hayden, Sterling 22, 39, 74, 88, 187 Hayward, Susan 208 Hayworth, Rita 151–52 He Walked by Night 27, 30 Hecht, Ben 144, 176 Heflin, Van 43–44, 101, 102, 103, 168 Heisler, Stuart 90 Hendrix, Wanda 144 Hernandez, Juano 223 Heston, Charlton 137, 153 High Noon 187, 240n2 High Sierra 133 Highway Dragnet 109 Hirsch, Foster 81, 237n2 His Girl Friday 73, 129 His Kind of Woman! 16, 137, 147– 148, 151 Hitchcock, Alfred 24, 63, 84– 86, 116, 126, 189, 234 The Hitch-Hiker 4, 16, 106, 137, 161–164, 163 hitch-hiking, in noir 106, 125, 161 Hodiak, John 16, 209 Holding, Elizabeth Sanxay 49 Hollywood, noir films set in 30–31 The House on Telegraph Hill 62– 63 House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) 14–15, 237n7 Howe, James Wong 26, 63, 180 Hughes, Howard 135, 143, 147– 148, 207, 238n3 Human Desire 53–56, 54 Humoresque 216 Hunnicutt, Arthur 166 Hunt, Marsha 133 Hunter, Kim 30 Huston, John 22 Huston, Walter 192, 194 Hyatt, Bobby 125 I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang 108 I Shot Jesse James 207 Il Grido 124

Index Impact 16, 35 In a Lonely Place 30–31, 39, 40, 216, 233–235, 234, 238n7 Inferno 164 Invasion of the Body Snatchers 14, 32 Ireland, John 164, 207 It Happened One Night 106 It’s a Wonderful Life 83 Jaffe, Sam 22, 23 Jagger, Dean 182 Jefferson, Thomas 20 Jeopardy 137, 160–161 Jones, Carolyn 118 Kansas City Confidential 137, 146–147 Kantor, Mackinlay 128 Karlson, Phil 24, 93, 146, 239n4 Kazan, Elia 26, 29, 238n6 Keith, Brian 42 Kelly, Paul 166 Kennedy, Arthur 190, 195–196, 201, 208 Kennedy, Burt 201–202 Kerouac, Jack 12, 111 Keyes, Evelyn 29, 168 The Killer That Stalked New York 29 The Killers 224 King Brothers 239n9 King Lear 193 Kipling, Rudyard 69 Kiss Me Deadly 20, 32–33, 215– 216, 235, 240n1 Kitses, Jim 132–133, 179, 197 Knight, Patricia 127 Ku Klux Klan 90–91, 239n4 Kunstler, James 111 The Lady from Shanghai 149– 152, 150, 153, 224 Lake, Veronica 190–191 “lam story” 108–110, 113–114 Lancaster, Burt 26, 64, 210, 214–215, 224, 240n2 Lane, Anthony 75 Lang, Fritz 5, 20–21, 28, 53– 54, 67, 80, 89, 116–118, 123, 190, 219 LaShelle, Joseph 187 Laura 4, 9, 228 The Lawless 92 Leave Her to Heaven 5, 78–79 Le Corbusier 9 Leigh, Janet 44, 153–154, 199 Levant, Oscar 30 Levitt, William 8 Lewis, Joseph H. 128 Litvak, Anatole 64 Lomax, Alan 39, 120 London, Julie 149, 205 Lonely Are the Brave 211–213 Lord, Jack 206

Los Angeles 30, 32; noir films 30–33, 48 Losey, Joseph 15, 92, 167–168, 170 Love, Damien 138 Lovejoy, Frank 15, 161, 163 Lupino, Ida 35, 63, 80, 238n3, 240n1; Beware, My Lovely 59– 60; Deep Valley 133–134; The Hitch-Hiker 161–163; Lust for Gold 190; On Dangerous Ground 38–39 Lust for Gold 190 The Lusty Men 175, 182, 207–209 lynching 89, 186 Macao 148, 152 Mackendrick, Alexander 26 MacMurray, Fred 57, 72 Mainwaring, Daniel 140 The Maltese Falcon (book) 235 The Maltese Falcon (1941 movie) 9, 81–82 The Man from Laramie 189, 193–197 Man in the Shadow 187, 212 Man of the West 193, 205–207, 208, 240n2 The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance 177 The Man with the Gun 184–185 Mann, Anthony 35, 105, 133, 146, 179, 188–189, 192–201, 202, 205–206, 212, 240n3–4 March, Frederic 89 Marcus, Greil 106 Marvin, Lee 96, 184, 202 Mason, James 48, 62, 71–72, 145 Mature, Victor 97 Mayo, Virginia 10 McCambridge, Mercedes 153, 165 McCrea, Joel 191, 205, 207 McIntire, John 189, 201 McMahon, Aline 196 McNally, Stephen 96–97, 166, 198 Meeker, Ralph 33, 160–161, 199 melodrama 216 Men in War 196 Metropolis 20, 21, 25 MGM 120–121, 161 Mildred Pierce 72–73 Milestone, Lewis 101–103 Miller, Arthur 209 The Misfits 209, 213 Mitchell, Cameron 188 Mitchell, Millard 13, 198, 199 Mitchum, John 180 Mitchum, Robert 1, 34, 76, 137– 138, 143, 177, 179–180, 205, 223, 235, 239n6, 239n1, 240n1; Angel Face 62, 77–78; The Big Steal 143–144; Blood on the Moon 183–184; His Kind

245 of Woman! 16, 147–148, 151; The Lusty Men 175, 207; THe Man with the Gun 184–185; Out of the Past 1, 2, 82, 138– 142, 141; Pursued 180–183, 181; Where Danger Lives 135–136; The Wonderful Country 149 Mix, Tom 179 Monroe, Marilyn 209, 221 Montalban, Ricardo 146 Montgomery, Robert 144 Moonrise 4, 99–101, 100 Morgan, Harry 99 Morin, Alberto 22 Morris, Gary 4, 237n1 Muller, Eddie 3, 30, 234 Mumford, Lewis 3, 8, 12, 19–20, 33, 52 Musuraca, Nicholas 140, 162, 166, 183, 219 Nabokov, Vladimir 111 Naish, J. Carroll 96, 221 Naked Alibi 137–138 The Naked City 27 The Naked Kiss 97–98 The Naked Spur 199–201, 200, 206, 240n2 Naremore, James 5 Neal, Patricia 223 Neal, Tom 105–107 Negulesco, Jean 133 Nevada 180 New Orleans 29 New York City 9, 20, 30 New York Confidential 23–24 Newman, Joseph H. 187 Nicol, Alex 195 Night and the City 19, 26, 28 The Night Has a Thousand Eyes 46, 229–230 The Night of the Hunter 67, 101 Nightfall (book) 5, 27, 114, 222 Nightfall (film) 41–43, 151 Nightmare Alley 216, 230–233, 232 North, Ted 109 Nothing Sacred 83 Notorious 63, 86 nuclear weapons 32–33, 165– 167 Oberon, Merle 225 O’Brien, Edmond 161, 163, 238n4 Odd Man Out 28 Odds Against Tomorrow 37, 40– 41 Odets, Clifford 219–220, 222 O’Donnell, Cathy 118, 121, 196 O’Keefe, Dennis 133 Olson, Charles 3, 160 On Dangerous Ground 4, 16, 36– 40, 38, 41 On the Bowery 151

246 One Way Street 145 Ophüls, Max 28, 47–49, 51, 61– 62, 84, 238n3 organized crime, in noir 23–24 Out of the Past 1, 2, 10, 41, 43, 82, 137, 138–143, 141, 144, 150, 216 Outcasts of Poker Flat 187–188 The Ox-Bow Incident 186 Palance, Jack 65–66 Panic in the Streets 29 Parker, Bonnie 115–116, 134 Payne, John 147 Peckinpah, Sam 205 Perkins, Anthony 214 Perrault, Charles 67 The Petrified Forest 166 Phantom Lady 25, 80 The Phenix City Story 92–94, 93 Piranesi, Giovanni Battista 27 Pitfall 4, 8, 70, 70–71, 88, 97 Place, Janey 81 Plunder of the Sun 138 Plunder Road 112–114, 131 Poe, Edgar Allan 25, 238n5 police, in noir 16, 36 Porfirio, Robert G. 237n2 Possessed 81 The Postman Always Rings Twice 4, 16, 23, 120–121 Powell, Dick 13, 70, 144, 165, 188 Power, Tyrone 230, 232 –233 PRC (Producer’s Releasing Corporation) 105, 107 pre–Code movies 6, 75, 81 Preminger, Otto 28, 76, 226, 228 Preston, Robert 184 Price, Vincent 148 Production Code 6–7, 52, 91, 108, 121, 215, 239n8 The Prowler 4, 15, 167–170 psychiatry, in noir 5, 224, 232 Psycho 86, 153, 214, 234 Pursued 180–183, 181, 191 Putnam, Robert D. 14, 83 racism, in noir 40–41, 91–92 Raines, Ella 79–80 Ramrod 189, 190–192 Rancho Notorious 189–190 Raw Deal 133 Ray, Aldo 41–42, 114 Ray, Nicholas 71–72, 189; In a Lonely Place 30, 31, 233, 238n7; The Lusty Men 175, 207–209; On Dangerous Ground 36–40; They Live by Night 118–123 Raymond, Gene 112 Reagan, Ronald 90 Rebecca 63, 225 Rebel Without a Cause 40

Index The Reckless Moment 47–52, 50, 84, 238n1 Redgrave, Michael 67–68 Renoir, Jean 53, 217, 219 Ride Lonesome 201 Ride the High Country 205, 207 Ride the Pink Horse 16, 144–145 Rio Bravo 179, 187, 188 RKO 80, 147, 180, 207, 217 Road House 35 Roberts, Pernell 201 Robertson, Dale 188 Robinson, Edward G. 28, 80, 87, 229 Rodgers, Gaby 33 Rogers, Ginger 90, 237n7 Roland, Gilbert 193 Roman, Ruth 124–125, 189, 190 Rooney, Mickey 110, 118 Rossetti, Christina 46 Rouse, Russell 91 Ruby Gentry 95 Run of the Arrow 197 Russell, Gail 99–100, 202, 229– 230 Russell, Jane 148 Ryan, Robert 37, 240n4; Act of Violence 43–44; Beware, My Lovely 59–60; Caught 61; Clash by Night 16, 220–221; Inferno 164; The Naked Spur 199–201, 200; Odds Against Tomorrow 40–41; On Dangerous Ground 16, 36–37, 38; The Woman on the Beach 217 Sanders, George 79 Sarris, Andrew 202 Sartre, Jean-Paul 30 Savage, Anne 105–107 The Scarf 164–165 Scarlet Street 29, 80 Schickel, Richard 186 Schrader, Paul 224, 237n2 Scott, Lizabeth 71, 82, 103, 143, 209 Scott, Randolph 201–204, 205, 207 Scott, Zachary 95 The Searchers 179, 185, 197–198 The Secret Beyond the Door 67– 69, 68 Seitz, John F. 229 Seven Men from Now 202 The Seventh Veil 216, 225 The Seventh Victim 30 Shadow of a Doubt 84–87, 85 Shane 179, 186 Shearer, Lloyd 5 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 164 Shockproof 127 Sidney, Sylvia 96, 116–117 Siegel, Don 32, 118, 143–144 Simmons, Jean 76, 77 Sinatra, Frank 88, 238n1

Siodmak, Robert 5, 28, 79, 215 Sirk, Douglas 51, 72, 76, 127 The Sleeping City 29 The Sniper 29 Soderberg, Robert 49 Somewhere in the Night 46 Sorry, Wrong Number 64–65 The Sound of Fury 15–16, 46, 59, 89 Spellbound 182, 225 Spillane, Mickey 32 spiritualism, in noir 225–227 The Spiritualist see The Amazing Mr. X Split Second 165–167, 173 Stagecoach 188, 205 Stahl, John M. 78 Stanwyck, Barbara 57, 72, 75– 76, 189; Clash by Night 219– 221; Crime of Passion 73–74; The Furies 192–194; Jeopardy 160–161; Sorry, Wrong Number 64–65; The Strange Love of Martha Ivers 101–103, 102 Station West 188, 189, 190 Steele, Karen 201 Steiger, Rod 197 Steinbeck, John 114 Sterling, Jan 167, 170, 173, 185 Sternberg, Josef von 148, 151 Stevens, Mark 35 Stewart, James 178, 188–189, 195–196, 198–201, 200, 205, 240n4 Stone, Oliver 119 Storm Warning 90–91 The Story of G.I. Joe 180 The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry 79–80 The Strange Love of Martha Ivers 20, 76, 101–104, 102, 168 The Stranger 87 Stranger on the Third Floor 24, 183 Stroheim, Erich von 159 suburbs 7–8; critiques 8, 52; noir films 15, 43–44, 47, 69– 74 Sudden Fear 65–67, 77 Suddenly 88 Sullivan, Barry 160, 193 Sunset Boulevard 30, 170, 171, 240n3 Suspicion 63 Sweet Smell of Success 19, 26, 176, 216 The Tall T 203 Talman, William 162–163 Tamblyn, Russ 128 Tamiroff, Akim 153 The Tattered Dress 95–96 Teal, Ray 125, 173 Tension 7 Terror in a Texas Town 187 Theodora Goes Wild 83

Index There’s Always Tomorrow 72 They Live by Night 4, 9, 40, 118– 123, 121, 127 Thieves’ Highway 13, 14, 32, 80 Thieves Like Us (book) 105, 119, 121–122 The Third Man 27–28, 87, 156 The Third Voice 112, 238n4 Thompson, Jim 105, 113, 138 Thomson, David 196 Thunder Road 34, 53 Tierney, Gene 78–79 Tierney, Lawrence 109 To Have and Have Not (book) 138, 222 Tocqueville, Alexis de 16–17 Tomorrow Is Another Day 123– 127, 125 Touch of Evil 137, 152–158, 154, 157, 225 Tourneur, Jacques 1, 41, 139 Towers, Constance 97 Tracy, Spencer 186 Treasure of the Sierra Madre 138, 190 Trevor, Claire 133 Turner, Lana 120 Tuttle, Lurene 125 Truffaut, François 37, 42 Trumbo, Dalton 169, 187, 212, 237n7, 239n9 Try and Get Me! see The Sound of Fury Twain, Mark 24, 113 Twentieth-Century–Fox 187, 233

Ulmer, Edgar G. 67, 105 The Unsuspected 238n4 Updike, John 178 urban design 9, 20, 27 Vera Cruz 135, 138, 240n2 Vertigo 86, 189 veterans, military 13, 43–47, 144 Violent Saturday 96–97 Virtue 83 Walker, Helen 232 Walsh, Raoul 10, 180 Ward, Elizabeth 144 Warshow, Robert 7, 11, 176–177 Wayne, John 187, 197, 204– 205 The Well 91 Welles, Orson 87, 187; The Lady from Shanghai 149, 224; Touch of Evil 151–152, 154 –156, 158, 225, 240n3 Wellman, William 180, 186 West, Nathanael 32 West of the Pecos 180 When Strangers Marry 1 Where Danger Lives 135–137, 136, 148 While the City Sleeps 29 White, E.B. 24, 238n3 White Heat 10, 11, 23, 112, 123, 131 Whitman, Walt 2 Whyte, William H. 8 Widmark, Richard 35 Wilde, Cornel 127

247 Wilder, Billy 28, 30, 123, 170– 175, 240n3 Wilder, Thornton 84 Williams, Frances E 50, 51 Wilson, Richard 184 Winchester ’73 193, 198–199, 201, 240n3 The Window 25, 224 Wise, Robert 40, 62, 183 Wolfe, Thomas 180 Woman in Hiding 63, 97 The Woman in the Window 28, 29, 80 The Woman on the Beach 217– 219 “women’s pictures” 73 The Wonderful Country 137, 149 Woolrich, Cornell 5, 25, 229, 238n2 World War II 6, 13, 84; in noir 45, 224 Wright, Frank Lloyd 9, 31 Wright, Teresa 84, 182 The Wrong Man 24, 85 Wyatt, Jane 70 Wycherly, Margaret 10 You Only Live Once 116–118, 117, 127 Young, Collier 161, 238n3, 240n1 Young, Loretta 69, 87 Young, Victor 229 Zinneman, Fred 43 Zola, Emil 53

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