by Mark Osteen
Reinvention
As Somewhere in the Night opens, the camera floats through a hospital ward in Honolulu, then hovers over a bandaged man lying on a bed. We hear the faceless man in voice-over: “I don’t know my name. You—talk to me. Act like I was alive, not just somebody with eyes and no name. Think of a name. Taylor. Think of another name; there must be other names. Taylor. No. Taylor. No. Taylor. Taylor.” The voice is that of one George W. Taylor (John Hodiak), who has lost his memory owing to a war injury, his identity verified only by his wallet and a far from heartening letter. “I despise you now,” it reads. “I’m ashamed for having loved you. I shall pray as long as I live for someone … to hurt and destroy you, make you want to die, as you have me.” Later we learn the full story: Taylor failed to show up at his wedding with a woman named Mary; the jilted bride was then struck by a car while crossing the street. If Taylor was such a heel, perhaps his amnesia is a blessing.
Taylor explores his old LA haunts, repeatedly encountering the friends and enemies of a Larry Cravat, who left Taylor $5,000. The more we know of Cravat, the less we like him. He was a low-level but honest detective, until “somebody dropped two million clams right in his lap”—money that the Nazis had stolen. Cravat was also wanted for murder. As the characters’ names imply, the film explores identity via a clothing trope, eventually revealing that Taylor is Cravat, having borrowed his new name from the label inside his coat: “W. George, tailor.” Like Johnny Preston in Dead Reckoning, Cravat camouflaged his past by joining the military. Ironically, his plan has turned into a grim joke on himself: the man who intentionally gave himself “amnesia” now truly doesn’t remember anything.23
Though Cravat was a shady character, Taylor seems earnest and well-meaning, which implies that Cravat has changed more than his coat and tie. Nor can we help but sympathize when he bares his soul to Christy (Nancy Guild), a nightclub singer who was the late Mary’s best friend and who now falls for Taylor. Although his amnesia may have handed Taylor what he calls a “brand new scorepad,” it also makes him an alien—one of Waller’s immigrants in his native land. “Do you know what it’s like, Christy,” he asks, “to be alone in the world? Really alone in the whole world? A billion people and every one of them a stranger.” Santos speculates that Taylor epitomizes “the ultimate existential hero” (or antihero) who can “create any identity he wishes” (82; Taylor later gives his name as “Tom Carter” to a police detective pursuing Cravat). But it’s not so simple, which becomes clear as Taylor continues, “Or what’s worse, not a stranger. Somebody maybe who knows you, hates you, wants you to die.” In other words he is not really alone, because his retailoring hasn’t removed the threads tying him to Cravat. Like other noir veterans, Taylor/Cravat is dangling between past and future, old and new selves. Christy (who, like Joyce Harwood and Gagin’s Pila, endeavors to redeem and renew her troubled vet) voices his condition in a song: “I’m in the middle of nowhere / I’m in betwixt and between.”
As he seeks an exit from nowhere, Taylor/Cravat feels he is “chasing shadows,” which the film illustrates by showing his enlarged shadow accompany him wherever he goes. In fact, the phrase fits all of noir’s amnesiac vets, each one chasing the shadow of his former self (who may also be his own bête noire), while attempting to flesh out his new silhouette. Taylor/Cravat’s chase leads him to a man named Conroy (Houseley Stevenson), who witnessed the 1942 murder of which Cravat is accused but was then run down by a car and has been incarcerated in an asylum ever since. Taylor/Cravat interviews Conroy’s daughter, Elizabeth (Josephine Hutchinson), who speaks for Taylor/Cravat in confessing that she has always pretended that “I wasn’t dead, that I was alive. I wanted so to make believe that somebody loved me once.” He consoles her: “I know a little bit about being lonely.” Such empathetic connections may permit Cravat/Taylor to banish his shadow—or merge with it. But he is nearly denied the chance: on leaving Elizabeth’s apartment, he is nearly run down by a truck, only narrowly avoiding replaying Mary’s and Conroy’s fates. Conroy himself has anterograde amnesia: unable to form new memories, he believes it’s still 1942. An inverted Cravat, he is the shadow Taylor must banish before he can unite his new and old personae. Fortunately, before Conroy is stabbed to death by another shadowy figure, Taylor—who has retained Cravat’s detective skills—gains a key bit of information: the murdered man left a suitcase on the dock.
In the film’s most effective sequence, shot night-for-night on the docks, Taylor and Christy find the suitcase containing the money and the coat revealing his identity. Then they flee to a storefront mission, where the film appends a religious element to Taylor’s quest for redemption, and where Christy utters the lines about identity quoted at the beginning of this section. George Taylor isn’t capable of murder, but what about Larry Cravat? Does amnesia change a person irrevocably, or does one’s essential nature endure? Has Taylor, because of his war injury and resulting amnesia, discarded his Cravat and fashioned a new, improved identity? Or is our protagonist neither Taylor nor Cravat but a third self who blends Cravat’s savvy with Taylor’s honesty? The rather contrived resolution, in which Mel Phillips turns out to be the murderer, doesn’t provide answers. It is clear, however, that Taylor, with Christy’s help, achieves redemption, first by forgetting and then by remembering himself. Somewhere in the Night, then, ultimately affirms the ideology of self-recreation, proposing that, rather than recovering their prewar selves, Americans are better off tossing them aside like suits of outdated clothing.
Made three years after Somewhere in the Night, The Crooked Way is a virtual remake that is immeasurably enriched by John Alton’s striking cinematography. It opens at Letterman General Hospital in San Francisco, where amnesiac veteran and Silver Star awardee Eddie Rice (John Payne) is being interviewed: “Where were you born, Eddie? Who were your parents? … Are you rich? Poor? Got a girl? Married?” Situated to the far left of the frame, Eddie is lit only with a small light source on one side, as if reduced by amnesia to a silhouette. He hopes to meet someone who will fill in his outline, but Alton casts doubt by scoring Eddie’s face and body with shadowy lines that suggest entrapment. His doctor goes on to distinguish between psychological and organic amnesia, noting that Eddie’s is the latter—a piece of steel lodged in his brain has erased his memory. But actually he has both kinds: like Larry Cravat, he joined the service to escape his former identity as Eddie Riccardi, who was involved in a 1942 murder but turned State’s evidence against his old friend, gangster Vince Alexander (Sonny Tufts).
After Eddie pays a visit to his ex-wife, Nina Martin (Ellen Drew, another nightclub singer), she informs Alexander that Eddie has returned, and, in a scene recalling The Killers and foreshadowing Alton’s later work in The Big Combo, Vince and his thugs rough Rice up as neon lights flash outside his room, perhaps representing the flickering lights of Eddie’s memory. On receiving Alexander’s ultimatum—disappear within twenty-four hours or else—Eddie stares into a mirror, which, as in Best Years and Crossfire, indicates his coexisting but uninte-grated identities. Although Nina refuses to help him, she does gaze longingly at the engraved cigarette case he gave her years earlier, inscribed “NINA / With All My Love / Till The Day I Die. / EDDIE.” This item tangibly links him to his former self; yet it also suggests that, like Montgomery, Gagin, and noir’s other disabled vets, Eddie has become a ghost or zombie. A witty moment in the film develops this metaphor. After Vince frames him for the murder of Detective Lieutenant Williams (who had determined that Eddie was innocent of the earlier crime), a fleeing Eddie is picked up by a hearse. But perhaps he still has a chance to be resurrected rather than embalmed.
Indeed, Eddie eventually persuades Nina to help him; she even takes a bullet for him. As he nurses her, she says, “You’re far away. How far?” From her point of view we see Eddie’s visage enveloped in shadow, illustrating his self-erasure. When he answers, “Five years. A lifetime,” his face is suddenly illuminated, and he wonders “what it would be like if there’d only been an Eddie
Rice.” Nina responds, “Oh, you’re good, Eddie. You’re good.” If she believes in him, it must be true. Again a woman’s love redeems a disabled vet by affirming his goodness. But in this case redemption can happen only if the vet entirely erases his former self.
At last Eddie turns for help to Petey (Percy Helton), an old acquaintance who runs a war surplus store—an appropriate place to cast off his prewar persona. Instead of reposing on the bed Petey provides, Eddie packs a blanket with an army fatigue jacket and helmet and places them on the bed. During a break in the ensuing gun battle (the first shots are fired at the camouflaged bedroll, metaphorically murdering Riccardi), Vince proposes that he and Eddie revive their partnership. While he considers the proposition, Eddie’s face is half-shadowed to suggest Riccardi’s potential resurrection, but he ultimately rejects the offer. Vince then subdues Eddie and tries to use his limp body as a shield, just as he used to do with Riccardi—now merely an empty shell—but the tactic fails, and Vince is killed. We end where we began, with Eddie Rice in the hospital, where he and Nina agree that he’ll remain Eddie Rice forever.
If George Taylor retains some vestiges (doggedness, street smarts) of Cravat, Eddie Rice is divorced from everything of Riccardi except his wife. Yet both The Crooked Way and Somewhere in the Night suggest that prewar identities are a hindrance in the postwar world, amnesia a necessary precondition for writing a new scorepad. Indeed, insofar as it frees these vets from louche associations and illegal activities and permits redemption, the war is a blessing. But they are not just isolated cases: in these amnesiacs postwar audiences not only witnessed their own anxieties—their alienation; their lost innocence and desire to recover it; the sense that the prewar world was irrelevant, even a burden—they also watched their dreams of self-renewal fulfilled. These two films endorse the American Dream in which alienation gradually yields to self-affirmation and in which a life’s second act may redeem an original sin.
Reenactment
The final two vet noirs, however, emphasize that reinvention requires enormous sacrifices. These films’ amnesiacs embody both the complex anxieties and ambivalences left from the war and a new set of fears—of invasion, of prying and super-powerful legal and medical institutions—typical of the emergent Cold War. Curtis Bernhardt’s High Wall (scripted by Sydney Boehm and future blacklistee Lester Cole) employs its disabled veteran to question the humanity of medical and legal institutions; this vet’s restoration occurs only after he is tamed by powerful institutions. Fred Zinnemann’s Act of Violence, scripted by ex-Communist Robert Richards, is a powerful, sophisticated study of guilt resulting from the collision of remembering and forgetting; it raises thorny ethical questions about loyalty and forgiveness. Both films’ ambience of surveillance and fear evokes the paranoid atmosphere of the HUAC era, and each leaves behind a residue of anxiety.
Just after High Wall opens, a disheveled man, an unconscious woman sprawled beside him, wrecks his car. The man confesses to the police that the woman—his wife, Helen (Dorothy Patrick)—was already dead before the crash, because he had strangled her. But the man, ex-bomber pilot Steven Kenet (Robert Taylor) has previously had brain surgery, so he must undergo a psychiatric evaluation before he can be tried. His history is traumatic: wounded in the war, Kenet recovered as a result of surgery. Yet he still felt “restless,” like many veterans with PTSD, and went to Burma to fly freight planes, leaving behind his wife and young son. Another “slight crack-up” there left him with a subdural hematoma that causes severe headaches, mood swings, and memory lapses; during one of these attacks he allegedly murdered his wife. But his memory of the murder has been rendered irretrievable by the hematoma. In short, Kenet is a man cut in half, a vet who can neither remember nor forget. The doctors, including the beautiful Ann Lorrison (Audrey Totter), insist that Kenet undergo further surgery, but he refuses, thereby reinforcing the district attorney’s suspicion that he is malingering to avoid trial.24
Kenet’s resistance isn’t merely a delaying tactic: he recognizes the grim calculus of this institution, where twenty-five hundred patients are served by a paltry twelve doctors, and where patients with a wide array of illnesses are thrown together randomly. The hospital, one of Foucault’s “carceral/therapeutic” networks, thus engenders new “procedures of individualization” (305), giving inmates institutionalized identities that strip away their agency and replace it with scientifically classified data. In this world psychiatrists have donned the robes of judges; each person under their aegis “subjects to it his body, his gestures, his behaviors, his aptitudes, his achievements” (Foucault 304).25 Thus we may read Kenet’s resistance as a desire to preserve his guilt and thereby his humanity, even if doing so permits his debilitating condition to persist and subjects him to a criminal indictment.
But after the death of Kenet’s mother, who had cared for his six-year-old son, Dickie, Dr. Lorrison coldly informs him that the boy will be sent to the county orphanage. “Do you know what life is like for an orphan in a public institution?” she asks threateningly. Having experienced a taste of institutional life, Kenet recoils in horror. She has recognized his hidden motive for resisting—shame. If he never stands trial, he’ll never have to face the son he abandoned. And so Kenet agrees to the surgery, which does palliate his headaches. But the doctors aren’t finished; next he must undergo “narcosynthesis”—injection with sodium pentothal—to uncover the truth about the murder they believe he is concealing.26 During the interrogation Kenet is pushed into the corner of the frame and filmed from behind the questioner’s shoulder, so that his head appears to sprout from the doctor’s body: he is now their creature. Kenet doesn’t deny his guilt; he merely wishes to preserve his own “rights” to provide for his son’s future. Yet when the doctors offer to bring Dickie to him, a panicked look crosses Kenet’s face, followed by irate shouting: “You can’t push people around like this! What kind of doctors are you?” At his words the camera rises and pulls back, leaving him diminished and alone at the edge of the frame—one of many shots in the film that invoke the title and expose how institutions squash human autonomy.27
Under the drug’s influence Kenet recalls visiting the apartment of Helen’s employer, religious publisher Willard Whitcombe (Herbert Marshall), where Kenet found her in a compromising position. From Helen’s point of view we see Kenet’s haggard face, its right side bathed in shadow, then a close-up from his point of view of her terrified face. Kenet began to strangle her but desisted when his headache became too intense and then passed out. A now-familiar expressionist montage shows a whirlpool image, which dissolves into a spinning merry-go-round, along with tinkling music. Awakening, Kenet found the room in disarray and Helen lying dead. This flashback both disrupts and propels the narrative, at once knocking a hole in the story and providing it with a motive, as Kenet must prove he didn’t kill his wife in order to convince his son he is a good man. So he and Dr. Lorrison return to Whitcombe’s apartment so that Kenet can reenact the crime—with the doctor playing Helen. As Nadelson reminds us, Kenet is attempting to “repeat the experience to achieve mastery, this time” (88). The reenactment yields missing evidence: a carousel music box and Helen’s monogrammed night bag.
Kenet’s amnesia derives from a paralyzing double-bind: he wants to be both guilty and innocent, yearns both to remember and to forget. He wanted to kill his wife, but Whitcombe did it for him. Both of them have “amnesia”: Whitcombe pretends not to remember killing Helen.28 Earlier in the film, Whitcombe served as both Kenet’s guilty conscience and his satanic tempter, urging him to plead temporary insanity and then taunting him that any accusation against Whitcombe would be ridiculed as the “ravings of a pitiful lunatic.” At the film’s conclusion, however, Kenet and Lorrison capture Whitcombe and, with the aid of sodium pentothal, induce him to confess to Helen’s murder.
Though the film ends with the promised father-son reunion and a kiss between Kenet and Ann, it leaves a sour aftertaste. Kenet ultimately remembers his past and is re-memb
ered into society, but he has left large parts of himself behind. And his “redemption” occurs only after he has submitted to the combined forces of the medical establishment and the police, whose enforcement technologies—depicted in a montage of teletypes, radios, and phones during the pursuit of Kenet—appear omniscient. Indeed, compared to the potency and ubiquity of these medical and legal institutions, Whitcombe’s sordid little murder seems tame. And though our hero achieves the American dream of a reconstituted home (complete with son and psychiatrist wife to care for him), we have peeked behind the curtain to glimpse what the dream hides: oppressive technologies that regulate and shape desire in socially acceptable ways. Although this atmosphere of suspicion may owe a good deal to director Bernhardt’s experiences in Nazi Germany, the film’s aura of surveillance and control also heralds the Cold War, when citizens (including one of the film’s writers) were monitored and punished for alleged subversion.29 High Wall, then, tells a story of containment in which a disabled body—its impairments the product of an increasingly forgotten war—is segmented, disciplined, and fixed so that its possessor can be remolded into a docile bourgeois subject. He achieves the American Dream but only by subjecting himself to forces that undermine the Dream’s celebration of individual liberty.
Although the ostensible topic of Fred Zinnemann’s Act of Violence is the ethics of forgiveness, it also expands the paranoid atmosphere of High Wall. And if its theme of loyalty and the morality of informing is germane to World War II, it is even more pertinent to the mood of the late 1940s and early 1950s, when leftist filmmakers were encouraged to inform on each other, and when many were afflicted with “amnesia” about their previous political activities.30 Further, Joe Parkson’s sinister invasion of Frank Enley’s home strikingly stages Americans’ fears of being invaded or spied on by former wartime allies. These elements provide unmistakable subtexts for a story about the confrontation between veterans Enley (Van Heflin) and Parkson (Robert Ryan) over an incident that occurred when both were German POWs.