Nightmare Alley - Film Noir And The American Dream

by Mark Osteen

  In Out of the Past, shadows loom as Kathie Moffat (Jane Greer) watches Jeff Markham (Robert Mitchum) outmuscle his ex-partner. Kobal Collection/Art Resource, NY.

  Mrs. X

  Despite their visual and thematic riches, The Killers and Out of the Past both use their female characters primarily as plot devices or aspects of the male protagonists. But two other switched-identity noirs place women at the center, and their female-authored screenplays employ the missing person device to enable critical analyses of marriage. My Name Is Julia Ross (written by Muriel Roy Bolton) and No Man of Her Own (scripted by Catherine Turney and Sally Benson) use their Gothic plots to suggest that all married women undergo identity conversions. Though each film supplies a conventional Hollywood ending, complete with a happy couple, their critiques of marriage and gender roles linger beyond their perfunctory conclusions. Each film also scrutinizes the dream of social mobility, as their struggling lower-class protagonists are thrust into the upper class, surviving only through lies and violence. The films question the central institution of middle-class society and cast doubt on the American mythos of infinite class mobility.

  Though American-made, Julia Ross takes place in England, but if its setting universalizes its dissection of marriage, it scarcely blunts it. Julia (Nina Foch), a newcomer in London who claims to be absolutely alone (though she has a new boyfriend, Dennis Bruce [Roland Varno], who has just broken off his engagement for her), visits an employment agency and finds a job as the secretary for a wealthy family, the Hugheses.6 Upon taking the job, she is drugged, dressed up, and driven to a mansion in Cornwall, where she is told that she is really Marion Hughes, the wife of Ralph (George Macready), the lord of the manor who stabbed the real Marion to death. He and his mother (Dame May Whitty) aim to persuade Julia, along with the servants and townspeople, that “Marion” is mentally ill so that they can kill her and eliminate any lingering suspicions about Ralph (this scheme makes little sense, but never mind). When Julia first awakens in her room at their mansion, a quick survey reveals the monograms “HH” and “MH” on her bedclothes and toiletries; the large picture window opens onto a sharp drop to the ocean. Like Spellbound’s Ballantine, Julia is a pair of initials—but these are not her own. Unlike that of the male missing persons, Julia’s “amnesia” is sustained only by those around her; she remains firm in her original identity, despite the nefarious machinations of the psychopathic Ralph and his blandly sinister mother.

  These sensational Gothic trappings mask a more sober investigation of female identity and social roles. For example, in a scene not long after Julia arrives at the manor, the maid, Alice (Queenie Leonard), tells Julia that she has “a beautiful home, nice relations, pretty clothes—everything a woman would want”; she should be satisfied with these things instead of “letting [herself] be took up by illusions, letting it gnaw at [her]. … It’s all in the mind.” This canny working-class woman would abide a marriage to a man she doesn’t love, so long as she had “everything” else.7 According to Alice, “Marion” should just grit her teeth and get used to it—even if she really is Julia Ross. Later, while walking on the beach with Ralph, Julia pretends that she has accepted her new identity but can’t remember her old one. He informs her that, like Julia, Marion had no family or loved ones. In other words the real Marion Hughes was just as trapped as Julia is and was killed because she hated the husband who had forced her to take his name. (He had also lied about his income but now lives on her legacy.) As Ralph confides that he loves the sea because it “never tells its secrets. But it has many, very many secrets,” Julia peers over his shoulder, only the top half of her face visible. Santos writes that this moment indicates “the threat of her slow disappearance from the world as she fights to hang on to her reason, signified by her gaze.” This claustrophobically close shot, she continues, is a disorienting moment for the viewer, who “experiences a kind of vertigo on the cliff with Julia” (152). More to the point, the shot transforms Julia into Ralph’s appendage—just as Marion was. Julia’s plight, in short, is that of any woman, alone in the world, who marries into a wealthy family: she is at their mercy. Her condition is a synecdoche for the legal vertigo of female self-erasure through marriage. Any woman who became Mrs. Hughes would become Mrs. X.8 The switched identity plot, then, demonstrates how marriage can be a form of abduction.

  Everything Julia does seems to reinforce her kidnappers’ story. Defeated in her attempt to send a note outside, she tries to escape with a visiting vicar, but he returns her to Ralph, who, smugly believing that he has also intercepted Julia’s letter to Dennis, drives her to town in his convertible and even lets her post the letter, unaware that she has fooled them with a decoy. Increasingly desperate and unsure that Dennis will get her message, Julia fakes a suicide attempt. But instead of a doctor, the Hugheses bring in a minion named Peters (Leonard Mudie), whom Julia tells about the letter and who is then sent to London to intercept it before it reaches Dennis. That night Ralph, pretending to be Dennis, tries to lure Julia down the dark stairs and kill her. Instead, she flees to her room; following her, he finds the window open and sees Julia, apparently dead, on the rocks below. “Well, she saved us a lot of trouble,” he says with relief. To make sure, he descends to the beach and grabs a rock to brain her, but is shot dead by Dennis and a policeman (Peters was nabbed back in London; Dennis alerted the police). Julia had only faked suicide, throwing down her monogrammed robe (the symbol of her Marion Hughes identity) to fool Ralph.

  At the conclusion, as Julia and Dennis take a drive in his convertible, he tells her he has a job for her: “a combination secretary, nurse, companion, housekeeper.” “That sounds like a wife!” she interrupts, and quickly accepts. Despite her determined resistance to being Mrs. Hughes, she readily agrees to be converted into Mrs. Bruce. Her working life will be subsumed by a “job” in which he is the boss and which, judging by his description, will be a demanding one. Julia happily accepts “amnesia” about her former identity, because she has chosen Dennis. But the similarities between the two men’s automobiles, and the brief description of the first Mrs. Hughes, send a more ambiguous message about marriage: that it may constitute an abduction and a conversion, if not an utter elision, of a woman’s identity.9 Although the film’s class theme is less coherent and somewhat muffled by the English setting, it nonetheless addresses upward mobility by demonstrating how lower-middle-class women, when thrown among the grasping, amoral aristocracy, are deprived of their money and humanity. Julia is perhaps better off settling for the middle-class Mr. Bruce than trying to rise too high; maybe a job as his secretary/nurse/companion/housekeeper is really “everything a woman would want.”10

  Two young pregnant women—one newly wedded to a wealthy man, the other abandoned by her sleazy lover and left with only a railroad ticket and five dollars—share a train compartment. The carefree newlywed, Patrice (Phyllis Thaxter), generously allows the other woman, Helen (Barbara Stanwyck), to wear her wedding ring. As luck would have it (and just as Patrice declares, “I couldn’t have bad luck”), the train crashes, killing Patrice, her husband, and their unborn child but sparing Helen, who gives birth to a son in the hospital. She remains unconscious, her wedding ring identifying her as Patrice Harkness. Having never seen her or even her photograph (their son, Hugh, married Patrice in Europe), her new in-laws will readily accept Helen as Patrice. Should she reveal her true identity or impersonate the heiress? This is the ingenious premise of No Man of Her Own, adapted from Cornell Woolrich’s novel I Married a Dead Man by Benson and Turney.11

  Touted in promotional ads as “the story of a woman who lived a magnificent lie” (Paramount press sheets), No Man of Her Own went through several title changes (it was called The Lie almost until its release) and numerous drafts. Benson’s first draft opens with a long prelude describing Helen and her former lover, Steve Morley (Georgesson in the novel). Turney’s versions, however, begin with a prologue set after the main action, with “Patrice” having already married Hugh’s brothe
r, Bill.12 The bulk of the film is her flashback, and this structure more effectively highlights the story’s central deception and its legal and moral implications. Those implications seem straightforward: impersonating Patrice is fraud. Yet we cannot help but sympathize with poor Helen, unwed and pregnant, with exactly seventeen cents to her name. Moreover, the identity switch happens without her knowledge, as rendered by director Mitchell Leisen via a bewildering blur of flashing lights, keening sirens, masked faces, and cryptic phrases. Upon learning of the error, Helen weakly protests, but a nurse reads her a note from her in-laws: “You are all we have now, you and the little fellow. … Hugh’s legacy to us.”13 Like an heirloom or piece of property, she has been willed to the Harknesses. Would she have been placed in this lovely private room if the baby weren’t their grandson? Helen asks. Hardly, answers the nurse: “We’d put you right into one of the wards.” The class implications couldn’t be clearer: heiresses and homeless, unwed mothers receive different medical treatment, and so do their children. Hence, although on the train ride to meet the family Helen tries to persuade herself that she can “still back out,” one look at her son overrides her compunctions: “for you,” she vows in voice-over, “for you” (these lines were Turney’s additions). No longer merely a way to move through space, the train has become her vehicle for upward social mobility.

  Helen assumes the identity of Patrice (a fitting name for a patrician family) to give her baby a better life than she has. It’s a shortcut, but so what: isn’t she living the American Dream? Yet she remains haunted by the disparity between her new self and the old Helen symbolized by those seventeen cents. When the nurse asks her, “Are you trying to tell me he isn’t her grandson?” a dissolve over Helen’s face shows her holding the seventeen cents. “Patrice’s” counterfeit nature is even clearer in the novel, where Woolrich contrasts Helen’s memory of the seventeen cents with the fifty dollars found in Patrice’s handbag after the accident (837). As Helen considers whether to assume Patrice’s identity, she fingers the coins. “An Indian-head penny. A Lincoln-head penny. A buffalo nickel. A Liberty-head dime”: all of them signify American history and the national creed of honesty, enterprise, and freedom (842). These icons suggest, in other words, that she is simultaneously living out and betraying the American Dream. Is class mobility possible only as a kind of counterfeit money, which, as Marc Shell notes, is always a tale of false origins (160)? If (as I have shown in detail in an article about noir counterfeiting films) counterfeit and legitimate money depend on each other (each one ratifying the other’s value), so Helen’s impersonation relies on a faith in Patrice’s genuineness—and vice versa.14 Yet was Patrice, herself a woman with no family and no apparent wealth who married into money, any less a counterfeit than Helen? The coins raise the possibility that Helen and Patrice aren’t opposites but rather mirror images (as also implied when they gaze in the mirror together in the train compartment) and together represent the common condition of the newly married woman.15 Both novel and film thus ask whether class, like modern money, is merely a fiction based on expectation and belief. After all, if a nobody like Helen Ferguson can pass herself off as a member of the elite, then social class must be no more than a masquerade. Or is there some essence that members of the elite recognize in each other that an impostor can never duplicate? In other words, is a woman “born that way?”

  Helen is immediately accepted by the Harknesses—a remarkably generous, loving, and trusting family—but she makes mistakes, briefly alluding to a childhood in San Francisco that the real Patrice didn’t have and failing to recognize Hugh’s favorite song (“Barcarolle” in the novel [856]; an Irish folk song in the film).16 Yet most of “Patrice’s” anxieties and awkward moments are identical to those any young bride might feel in the presence of wealthy in-laws: Am I saying the right thing? Do they love me for myself or only because I married their son and am the mother of their grandchild? Indeed, the real Patrice confessed just such fears to Helen on the train: “Do you think they’ll like me? Suppose they don’t? Suppose they have me built up in their expectations as someone entirely different?” (cf. Woolrich, I Married 822). Like Julia Ross, then, this film and novel propose that all women who marry undergo a kind of adoption, efface their former selves, and perform an impersonation.

  Helen almost ruins it all while shopping with Bill (John Lund), who has taken a shine to her. Trying out a new pen, she unthinkingly writes “Helen F.,” before stopping in horror. Bill looks at her peculiarly; later we learn that he has suspected all along she isn’t really Patrice. As in Spellbound, writing certifies identity both legally and morally, a theme that becomes clearer when Helen/Patrice receives a telegram from Steve (Lyle Bettger), asking, “Who are you? Where did you come from? What are you doing there?” Writing also verifies the legality of marriage, which is essential to Steve’s plot to blackmail “Patrice” by threatening to divulge her fraud unless she marries him. As her husband, when “Patrice” inherits three-fourths of the Harkness estate (Bill changed the will to ensure that), Steve would own that property. In the meantime he forces her to open a bank account and write a check to him to use as evidence if he ever needs it. Then he drives her to a justice of the peace in a different town. Helen/Patrice resists, but when Steve phones her mother-in-law (Jane Cowl), she yields. The ironies thicken during the ceremony, when the ring—the real Patrice’s wedding ring—is described as a token of “sincerity, affection, and fidelity” (in early script drafts, the film was titled With This Ring). But Steve has already assured her that “I don’t want you; I want what’s coming to you.” Their marriage will be a sham undertaken for legal and financial purposes only—like Helen/Patrice’s marriage to Hugh. Again marriage is depicted as abduction or blackmail, at best a mercenary arrangement by which men acquire female property worth considerably more than seventeen cents.

  Seeing no other way out, “Patrice” pilfers the family revolver, finds Steve in his shabby room, and shoots at him, only to discover that he is already dead. Bill, who had followed her after his mother told him about the aborted phone call, helps her dispose of the marriage license and the body in a tense, night-for-night scene. Where do they dump Steve’s remains? On a railroad car. Initially the vehicle for the film’s social mobility metaphor, the train now sardonically comments on Helen’s American dream: yes, you can move into the upper class but only by leaving a trail of bodies behind you. Throughout the film, indeed, the impending arrival of Steve or any other threat to Helen’s impersonation is signaled by a train whistle. It is a reminder that one can never leave behind one’s lower-class identity, a call from the conscience that screams, “I did something wrong once.” The whistle continues to speak to the lovers even after Bill confesses that he knew all along that she wasn’t really Patrice. “I don’t care who you were or what you’ve done,” he professes. “I love you, not a name. … As far as I’m concerned, you were born the day I met you.”17 Helen knows better: “No matter how much you love me,” she tells him, the things they’ve done “will always be there, like … a sword hanging over us ready to drop. We’ll never forget.”

  She’s right. As I noted earlier, the beginning of the film takes place three months after the major events. Helen (as Patrice) and Bill have married, but their guilty secret drives a wedge between them and prevents them from enjoying their comfortable upper-class life. At the film’s opening, “Patrice” tells us in voice-over that the summer nights in Caulfield, where they live, are pleasant, “but not for us.” Their fulfillment of the American Dream is tainted by the crimes and compromises committed to obtain it; their beautiful street is really a nightmare alley. The novel and film both depict this situation but differ in their denouements, and the various script drafts show the writers struggling to come up with a conclusion that would both salvage plausibility and satisfy the censors. In both novel and finished film a deathbed letter from Mother Harkness is uncovered in which she confesses to killing Steve after finding out about the forced wedding. In the n
ovel she writes a second letter retracting the first, but in neither version is she prosecuted, for her first letter is a lie. In the novel she offers the retraction as her “wedding gift” to “make your happiness even more complete” (970); it’s not clear if she is being sardonic. In Benson’s first draft Mother Harkness’s letter admits that she knew about Helen’s impersonation; we never learn for sure who kills Steve Morley, but we infer that Bill’s mother did it.18 In Turney’s draft of May 5, 1949, the letter includes a line saying, “I committed it in anguish and desperation, against everything I ever believed was morally right.” These lines were probably added to placate the Breen Office, which had requested a rewrite that would include a condemnation of murder. Ironically, the lines are deleted from the final “censorship dialogue” script of December 16, 1949.19 These gestures do little to mitigate the ending’s implausibilities, but they do demonstrate the slippery moral question at issue: sweet Mother Harkness, symbol of loyalty and devotion, is either a liar or a murderer, or both, and her “help” would contaminate her son’s marriage and grandson’s future life. The problem, however, is not with her but with the institution of marriage, which, both novel and film suggest, is founded on deception.