by Mark Osteen
After Muhlbach is arrested, Paul and his friends race to the family cabin, where Curtis threatens to molest Dorothy. Wrestling with Curtis before the latter is shot and captured, Paul is knocked unconscious and experiences the dream that ends the film. In it he is walking with his mother. “Look, mother,” he declares, “we can see ahead.” They’re joined by Doc Vincent, who advises her, “Don’t look back. It’s all over.” The father is nowhere to be seen, and Paul walks out of the frame—and out of his nightmare alley—with his girlfriend, Lydia (Mary McLeod). He has convinced one father surrogate, Doc Vincent, that he’s not crazy, and he has overcome the sexual and scientific machinations of two other older males. He has made himself a man by appropriating these men’s attributes: his father’s sense of justice, the doctors’ analytic powers, Curtis’s sexual confidence.12 And he has defeated the phallic gaze of his patriarchs by borrowing their binoculars. Crafting a new identity by uniting the shards of the past and then discarding them, young Cartwright executes a feat that neither Hamlet nor many noir protagonists achieve: liberating himself from the perturbed spirits of the past.
Another young protagonist also faces Horatio’s question about revenge undertaken in the name of the father:
What if it tempt you toward the flood, my lord,
Or to the dreadful summit of the cliff?
… assume some other horrible form,
Which might deprive your sovereignty of reason
And draw you into madness? (Hamlet 1.4.75–80)
In Joseph Losey’s The Big Night George La Main (John Barrymore Jr.) watches as his father, Andy (Preston Foster), is beaten and humiliated, then seeks revenge on the man who perpetrated the beating, influential sportswriter Al Judge (Howard St. John). The film unfolds in a single night, enacting a waking oedipal dream in which a son aims to prove he is stronger than his father and in which the primal scene of a father’s beating, along with its blatant symbols (his father’s gun, Judge’s phallic cane), seems to issue from his unconscious.13 Its concise nocturnal story—set on the evening of George’s sixteenth birthday—traces a rite of passage on a Walpurgisnacht during which George evolves from child to adult by realizing the limitations of violence and testing the varieties of masculine identity.14 As in a fable, each scene stages a temptation or test.
Early in the film “Georgie” is visually diminished: after some other boys rough him up, a long shot uses forced perspective to make him look tiny. He is further diminished during the beating sequence. As his father and the patrons of Handy Andy’s Bar and Grill celebrate George’s birthday, Al Judge enters with his entourage and begins issuing commands: “Take off your shirt, La Main; I want to see some skin!” Forcing Andy to his hands and knees, Judge flogs him with his cane. Shockingly, Andy silently submits to this humiliation. Indeed, the dialogue and blocking suggest that he is not only stripping but being made to perform fellatio. Meanwhile, Flanagan (Howland Chamberlain), Andy’s live-in partner of sixteen years, holds Georgie down and crushes the boy’s glasses. These queer signifiers (which also exist in the novel) both advance the vision motif and invoke the film’s explicit themes: masculinity, love, and justice. George vows to kill Judge, both to “overcome his own insecure sense of masculinity,” writes Tony Williams, and to “disavow the shameful spectacle of his … father’s symbolic castration” (“Big Night” 101). Like Paul Cartwright, George becomes his father’s surrogate, borrowing his gun and donning his much-too-large suit to undergo tests of manhood that his father, he believes, has failed.15
Instead, George repeatedly proves his immaturity. Thus, for example, on the way to a boxing match (the two tickets were gifts from Andy), George tends a friend’s baby, while playing with his father’s loaded pistol. Oblivious to his risky behavior, the child’s mother praises George as a “real father.” Entering the arena, he is accosted by a man named Peckinpaugh (another “punitive father figure,” according to Williams: 102), then sits next to Dr. Lloyd Cooper (Philip Bourneuf), from whom he borrows binoculars (George doesn’t watch the fight; he’s spying on Judge). Cooper’s interest at first seems paternal, but mostly he uses George as an excuse to get drunk, while occasionally manhandling him.16 Later George follows Judge to a club where a black chanteuse sings with her band; from George’s point of view we watch the drummer’s hands become Judge’s hands flogging Andy, and as George remembers his birthday cake, the singer asks “Am I Too Young?”17 An intoxicated George then makes his way to Cooper’s apartment, where he passes out, to be awakened by Marion (Joan Lorring), the sister of Cooper’s girlfriend. He and Marion exchange a chaste kiss, and he tells of his father’s humiliation, concluding that he’s not “a real man,” that he “turns out just to be a fake.” Yet he naively believes he can tell with one look that Cooper is “all right.”
At last George finds Judge in the apartment of Frances, his father’s fiancée, where Judge reveals that Frances was his sister and explains why he beat up Andy: Frances committed suicide after Andy refused to marry her. George spares Judge, but when the tables turn, with George taking Judge’s cane, Judge grabs George’s gun and threatens to kill him. A struggle ensues in which Judge is shot, apparently to death, and the panicked George appeals to Cooper for aid. His naive vision of the man is proven wrong when Cooper—his new, “all right” father—kicks him out. A truer form of loyalty is depicted next in a beautiful, wordless scene shot through a window, in which we watch Andy remove his son’s clothes, put him to bed, then don the jacket and meet the police. Andy is prepared to sacrifice his life for his son. Andy—not Cooper, and not Judge, who had abjectly begged for his life when George threatened him—is the real man, the person willing to accept blame for another. Yet Andy’s protective instincts also prevent his son from taking responsibility for himself. So as Andy is being led away, George leaps up and confesses, only to discover that Judge was only superficially wounded. In the aftermath George asks his father, “What’s the use of my living? There’s nothing matters to me anymore, and nobody I matter to.” Andy replies, “You matter to me,” and divulges his big secret: George’s mother is not dead, as he has told his son; she left Andy for another man. Because Andy is still married to her, he couldn’t marry Frances. “That’s how it is with some men,” he concludes. “There’s only one woman in the whole world for them.” He believes he merited Judge’s punishment, but George will likely receive a light sentence.18
Over the course of the film Judge and George become identified. Not only do their names sound alike, but both are, like Paul Cartwright and his father, judges: Al metes out rough justice for his sister’s death, and George presumes to judge both his father and Judge. In their final confrontation, however, George proves himself the better judge by mustering the empathy that Judge cannot. Andy and Al Judge are also counterparts: each is haunted by, and perversely attached to, a lost woman, and these allegiances trap them in an age-old ritual of punishment and revenge. George, however, is now free to forge a new identity, not by incorporating the attributes of these father figures but by sloughing off their worn-out cane and jacket. Perhaps he will see better without his glasses. In any case he has awakened from his dream of macho revenge.
Even so, the film’s definition of masculinity remains troubling. One might argue that, like his father, George wants to be punished, because in so doing he can serve as scapegoat for his father’s perceived crime and for his own violation of family roles, and because scapegoating fits the retributive justice in which he still believes. The film also leaves several vexing questions unanswered. Is Andy a long-suffering, righteous man or a pathetic fool carrying the torch for a woman who doesn’t love him? In protecting his son, is he preventing him from seeing evil or precluding him from understanding genuine goodness? Is a “real” man one who suffers for others or one who permits others to accept and exercise their own agency? And can any young man ever be free of patriarchs who stage such powerful sadomasochistic rites of protection and domination? With these questions lingering, it seems less lik
ely that George will fashion a new dream, a new self.
See No Evil
Down-and-out veteran Chuck Scott (Robert Cummings) finds a wallet filled with cash and returns it to its owner, wealthy Miami businessman Edward Roman (Steve Cochran). Roman is a little Caesar—a tyrant who abuses his wife and servants and kills a man who refuses to do business with him (he sics his enormous dog on the unfortunate fellow). Roman reserves his affection for his “adviser,” Gino (Peter Lorre). Why did Chuck return the wallet? asks Roman. “I guess I’m just a sucker,” he replies. Roman approves of his answer, and hires Chuck—whom he gives the doglike nickname of “Scottie”—as his new chauffeur. Adapted from Cornell Woolrich’s The Black Path of Fear, The Chase features a typically passive Woolrich protagonist. Though no ephebe like Paul or George, Chuck too desires to build a new self, and this lucky break offers a chance. Unfortunately, his self-description seems apt: unwilling or unable to see the evil around him, Chuck frequently plays the sucker. His partial blindness is also illustrated by the film’s dark, brooding mise-en-scène (courtesy of director Arthur Ripley and cinematographer Franz Planer) and by its repeated images of portholes, keyholes, and small windows.
But Roman’s desire for a driver is odd, for—in a blatant metaphor for his domineering personality—he has rigged his car so that he can operate the accelerator and brakes from the rear while the driver steers. The world’s most annoying backseat driver, Roman uses the contraption to test Chuck’s obedience by racing a train to a crossing, only to slam on the brakes at the last second. It seems, then, that Chuck has just traded his navy uniform for the suit of a trained monkey serving a sinister master. But Roman also allows him to chauffeur his aptly named wife, Lorna (Michele Morgan), to the beach, where she gazes forlornly at the crashing waves and contemplates sailing to Cuba. She even offers Chuck a thousand dollars to take her there and away from the husband she loathes. Foolishly, Chuck agrees to do it.
After he enjoys a quick rest in his apartment, we see him through a porthole playing the piano for a rapturous Lorna; then he closes the porthole: lovers need privacy. But they remain the subjects of spying: in Havana they are abandoned by their driver, and, as they listen to romantic music in a club (“Havana, like the stars in a dream song / … you’re a promise of love”), their photo is taken. Suddenly Lorna falls dead, and the hapless Chuck pulls a knife from her body.
During the police interrogation Chuck’s memory is hazy, but he does recall purchasing a knife the previous night—but not the one the detective holds, its jade handle displaying a monkey covering his eyes. Chuck insists that he bought a different knife—“hear no evil,” not “see no evil.” But the saleslady fingers him as having bought the murder weapon. In any case both monkeys represent Chuck, so blinded by love and deafened by heartstrings that he neither saw nor heard the plot enveloping him. He pretends to confess, then escapes. What follows is decidedly weird: Chuck is hidden by a weeping, cigar-smoking woman, then finds the club photographer dead (because he had photographed the real murderer). Creeping around in the dark, he overhears Gino with the knife lady and learns that he and Roman are framing him for Lorna’s murder. When the saleslady refuses to cooperate further, Gino shoots her and then, spotting a light behind the curtains where Chuck is hiding, bursts through. Out of the frame we hear gunshots and then see Gino dragging Chuck’s body through the door. Is our hero dead?
No. A phone rings, and the camera dollies back from the receiver to show the living Chuck lying on his bed: he has dreamed the entire Cuban sequence. No wonder it seemed so illogical, its darkness so oppressive, its symbols so bizarre. Yet something is still amiss, for Chuck staggers around, swallows a handful of pills, gazes at himself confusedly in the mirror, then calls Commander Davidson, a psychiatrist, at the Naval Hospital: “It’s happened again,” he says. Davidson (Jack Holt) informs Chuck that he’s a “shock” case with an “anxiety neurosis,” or, as we would call it today, posttraumatic stress disorder. Like the traumatized vets we meet in chapter 3, Chuck experiences recurring nightmares coupled with amnesia and remembers neither how he got his new uniform nor the Cuban escape. Ripley crosscuts between Chuck and Davidson at the nightclub and Lorna at home, where she realizes that she has been “bought and paid for” by Roman. Both she and Chuck are trapped—she by her husband, he by his mental condition. But after Roman and Gino enter the club (a nicely executed crane shot reveals their proximity to Chuck), Chuck feels the ship tickets in his pocket, remembers the plan, and runs off to rescue Lorna. Discovering that Chuck and Lorna are headed for Cuba, Roman and Gino drive after them—or rather, Gino steers while Roman floors the gas pedal. But this time they don’t beat the train to the crossing, and both men die in the smash-up. In Havana for real, the lovers are chauffeured by the same cabbie and repeat the same words of love they uttered in Chuck’s dream. “Tell me again,” she implores him. “I love you,” he answers. “I want you to keep telling me that as long as we’re together.” “That’ll be forever.”
Chuck’s dream, unlike those of most noir vets, is not a memory of war but the forecast of a future that he ultimately avoids. Yet he does little to alter his destiny and instead is saved by a deus ex machina in the form of a train. Though his dream lacks the condensed metonymies of Al Walker’s nightmare, its monkey symbolism blatantly evinces Chuck’s fear that he is fated to remain a flunky, as if his PTSD keeps him chained to his traumatized old self. A conventional reading of the conclusion would suggest that Lorna’s love enables him to pass through his oedipal stage by engineering the death of the dominant father figure, and then to enter an adult heterosexual relationship. But the dream’s details tell a different story and lay bare a different side of Chuck—his “Scottie” side, perhaps. This story acts out Chuck’s hatred not of Edward but of Lorna; indeed, given her death in the dream, one might argue that the person Chuck really desires is not Roman’s wife but Roman himself. The affair with Lorna may be a displacement of Chuck’s desire to possess her husband. After all, in his dream he confesses to killing her, maybe because doing so will end the love triangle and permit him to resume the homosocial relationships familiar to him from the navy. And though he is technically innocent, the dream exposes his guilt feelings, as if he believes he should die at Gino’s hands because he and Gino are rivals for Roman’s affections. And at the end of the dream, having acted out Roman and Gino’s murderous misogyny, Chuck must be sacrificed (by Roman’s apparent lover) for doing so. The dream thus dramatizes Chuck’s dreadful, desirable homoerotic urges, his masochism and self-hatred, while still blocking him from hearing and seeing these parts of himself. Hence, his dream is someone else’s nightmare. Though the film seeks to drown out these undertones with its heterosexual love story, the dream sequence that takes up a third of the film makes them impossible to ignore. Curiously, Chuck’s American dream can be fulfilled only elsewhere—in the dreamscape of Cuba—just as his self-hatred and sexual ambivalence must remain hidden behind a porthole cover. Because Chuck can’t remember his dream, he may be doomed to reenact it and forever chase himself.
The filmmakers present the dream as “reality,” only to pull the rug out from under us. The Cuban scenes fool us because their heavy romantic music and brooding atmosphere only slightly exaggerate the tone of the rest of the film, as if the dream and waking worlds permeate each other. Indeed, although the ending—with its gushy dialogue and sweeping score—aims to wash away the film’s unsettling residues, it seems as unreal as the dream sequence. It is no accident that the lovers speak virtually the same lines, visit the same places, and meet the same characters in the dream and in “reality,” for their dream of eternal love is just as false—or true—as Chuck’s nightmare. Moreover, the dream sequence alludes to expressionist cinema: not only does it feature the strange characters and impenetrable darkness displayed in those films (some of them the work of Planer); it even gives us Peter Lorre (famous for his role as a child-murderer in Lang’s M) as a serial killer! The filmmakers suggest, in other wo
rds, that Chuck’s paranoid dream has been influenced by motion pictures. If a movie can contain a dream, why can’t a dream contain a movie? The ending permits the filmmakers to have things both ways: to assert the reality of what we see in Florida, while acknowledging the artificiality of its Hollywood ending. A movie, The Chase suggests, is always a dream, a pursuit of chimeras by viewers whose perceptions are being controlled by a Roman (or a German) in the backseat.
The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry, produced by Joan Harrison and directed by Robert Siodmak, uses a similar ploy: a dream that becomes known as such only after the fact. Again a protagonist must decide whether to remain harnessed to the past or start over with a new self (and partner). Harry Quincy (George Sanders) lives in a large house in the small New England village of Corinth with his two sisters, Hester (Moyna MacGill) and Lettie (Geraldine Fitzgerald), the latter a valetudinarian who manipulates her siblings and tortures her sister with catty remarks. Harry seems resigned to this prison until he meets attractive young New Yorker Deborah Brown (Ella Raines) at the textile mill where he works as a designer. He takes her out, but not to the George Washington House (representing the town’s stodgy past) recommended by the sisters; instead, they attend a women’s softball game. The sporting event typifies Deborah, with her athletic build, mannish suits, and forward manner. Although she spends much of the game with a man named John, afterward she accompanies Harry to his carriage house to gaze through his telescope at Saturn and Venus. The carriage house, open at the top, is Harry’s sole domestic retreat in the stifling manse. Shown his paintings, Deborah urges him to “slash it on,” to do something stronger than drawing prim rosebuds at the mill. She also offers Harry a revitalized sexual life—an opportunity to investigate the terrain of Venus—though her assertiveness unnerves him.