Nightmare Alley - Film Noir And The American Dream

by Mark Osteen

  In They Live by Night, Bowie (Farley Granger) and Keechie (Cathy O’Donnell) fall in love as he changes a tire. Author’s collection.

  Even more innocent than Ray’s characters are truck driver Steve Randall (Steve Brodie) and his pregnant wife, Anne (Audrey Long), in Anthony Mann’s Desperate. Mann and his director of photography George Diskant underline this ingenuousness by juxtaposing their bright apartment with gangster Walt Radak’s gloomy hideout, where a single bulb provides the only illumination. (In an eerily effective scene early in the film, Radak’s men beat up Steve as the bulb swings, lending a nightmarish quality to his predicament.) But the barriers between their worlds break down once Steve is enlisted to deliver “perishables” for Radak (Raymond Burr) and then wrongly implicated in the murder of a policeman. This turn of events reminds Steve and viewers that, as Dennis Broe points out, “working-class mobility is tenuous and can just as easily lead downward” (57).

  And so, when he and Anne go on the lam, the car they drive is not a convertible but a beat-up jalopy. After offering to fix and then buy it for ninety dollars, Steve is duped by a crooked dealer who, realizing that Steve is in a hurry and probably in trouble, ups the price as soon as it is roadworthy.6 When Steve returns to persuade him to sell it, he finds the dealer gone and steals the car, which, initially representing the Randalls’ marginal economic position and victimization, now embodies Steve’s conversion into a shady character. But Steve doesn’t want to be converted; he wants to affirm his authenticity as an honest man. And unlike the other lamming lovers, the Randalls thrive only when they stay put: while living with Anne’s aunt and uncle, for example, Steve gets a new job, and the couple are remarried by a minister. Would they be better off eschewing upward mobility for rustic stability? Radak’s appearance at the farmhouse (where the thugs’ dark trench coats, fedoras, and gangster argot contrast jarringly with the farm’s rural domesticity) renders the question moot and forces another departure.

  After Anne gives birth, the lovers formulate a plan entertained by a surprising number of male noir protagonists: to own a “filling” station.7 Popping the baby’s bottle into her mouth, Anne fantasizes about “Steve Randall’s gas station.” But after sending Anne and baby away to claim the station, Steve becomes the police’s bait for Radak, who captures and arranges to kill Steve at the very moment Radak’s brother is being executed for the cop’s murder. Their tense wait for midnight to strike (punctuated by imposing Eisensteinian close-ups) is interrupted when a neighbor knocks on the door to borrow cream. The contrast between domesticity and mobility, innocence and evil, is thus rendered in terms of fuel—milk versus gas. But despite abundant indications of his milky innocence, Steve dirties himself by killing Radak. And the Randalls’ dream of domesticity remains harnessed to the auto economy: they can provide milk for the baby only by selling fuel for others’ cars. By the end of the film, these innocents have been soiled by road grime, infected by the auto’s amoral space, altered by automobility.

  Unlike Ray’s or Mann’s ingénues, lovers Bart Tare (John Dall) and Annie Laurie Starr (Peggy Cummins) in Joseph H. Lewis’s sensational Gun Crazy never try to settle down. And unlike Keechie, who tries to dissuade Bowie from his criminal career, trigger-happy Laurie entices weak-willed Bart into ever more reckless capers: robbing diners, then hitchhiking so as to rip off lecherous male drivers. For them, cars are like guns—erotic machines that enable them to evade the fate embodied by Bart’s sister, who represents (to Laurie) the living death that is small-town domesticity (see Wager, Dangerous 101). They prefer the nearly infinite play of convertibility enacted during their crime spree, when they adopt a series of outrageous false identities and vehicles: in one scene they wear conservative suits and glasses; in another Bart dons his old army uniform. In the film’s most celebrated sequence—which unfolds for three and a half minutes without a cut—the lovers sport ludicrous carnival cowboy outfits while robbing a bank. Lewis places us in the backseat of their car as Bart and Laurie, like teens on their first date, make nervous conversation, and the camera remains in the car as Bart executes the robbery.8 Lewis thus makes us their passengers and accomplices, brilliantly evoking suspense and sympathy by inviting us to inhabit their amoral space. Indeed, as Laurie and the cop she encounters suggestively fondle their guns, we become voyeuristic partners in the lovers’ erotic escapades. Their car is now both camera and gun: it not only moves—it shoots! Not surprisingly, their string of sedans and coupes ends with a convertible.

  Though Bart professes his unwillingness to continue—“everything’s going so fast, it’s all in such high gear. It doesn’t feel like me”—Laurie persuades him to pull one last heist. And so the lovers take straight jobs with Armour in order to rob the packing plant’s safe, but the caper goes wrong when Laurie shoots two employees. The sequence ends in a striking scene depicting the two racing through a refrigerated chamber filled with dangling carcasses. Jim Kitses reads this scene as a “caricature of the ideal of social mobility enshrined in the capitalist trajectory” (48), but it may also be Lewis’s (and the film’s blacklisted cowriter Dalton Trumbo’s) sardonic commentary on the lovers’ consuming amorality, whereby other humans are merely carcasses serving a cold, hedonistic lifestyle in which, as Bart almost comically puts it later, “two people [are] dead just so we can live without working.”9

  In Gun Crazy, Bart Tare (John Dall) and Annie Laurie Starr (Peggy Cummins) part at their convertible. Author’s collection.

  The fugitives had originally planned to split up afterward and drive separate convertibles in different directions, but in the end they can’t do it: their car, after all, represents their bond and the incessant mobility that is the essence of being gun—and car—crazy. Despite their violent natures, there is something childish about their attitude, an idea borne out during their final fling, when they ride a roller coaster and merry-go-round like youngsters out for a lark.10 But these vehicles move only in circles, just as their lam ends where it began—in Bart’s hometown of Cashville. Significantly, they have to hop a freight car to get there, and even after they steal Bart’s sister’s car (not a convertible), they can’t escape their fate, the inevitable outcome of being car and gun crazy.

  By portraying lovers who test their society’s tolerance for extreme mobility, these lam films imply that the American dream of convertible identity can be lived only briefly, often at the cost of death. Whereas the vet noirs imply that permanent self-reinvention is possible (if only by experiencing trauma and painful recovery), and the missing-person films suggest that one cannot truly change one’s nature because it is molded by others, these lovers’ pursuit of upward mobility through automobility is presented as a speed trap contrived by a society that craves yet finally cannot abide the antisocial impulses of young lovers. And despite the fugitives’ challenges to the economic and social system that confines them, they cannot evade their own commodification as glamorous criminals in hurtling cars. Even so, the thrill of riding with Eddie and Joan, Griff and Jenny, Bart and Laurie, Bowie and Keechie seems infinitely preferable to the pedestrian lives of Cora’s husband and Bart’s boyhood friends—and even, perhaps, to the compromised stability of the Randall family. If the lamming lovers’ restlessness ends up imprisoning them, at least they felt briefly the rush of air on their faces, the passing delight in driving—indeed, being—convertibles. And if they finally have no particular place to go, at least they’ve gone there fast.

  Thumbing a Ride

  The lamming lovers temporarily exercise freedom through automobility. The hitchhikers who figure in many films noir might seem even less encumbered. But hitchhiking is a dangerous game, if we believe Al Roberts (Tom Neal), the protagonist of Edgar G. Ulmer’s brilliant B picture Detour. As Paul Cantor points out, this film “revolves around the automobile”: not only does much of the story take place during Al’s thumbing trip from New York to LA, but his journey ultimately brings him to “two distinctively American” automotive spaces: the used-car lot and the dr
ive-in restaurant (complete with those other archaic roadside icons, car hops; see Cantor 154). Like Frank Chambers, Al is a kind of picaro, a vagabond living on the edge of society.11 Yet if Al’s westward journey seems at first a plausible means of freeing him from his humiliating gig as a saloon pianist and a “perfect symbol of [American] mobility” (Cantor 154), in fact Al, like those missing persons analyzed in chapter 2, merely swaps one form of confinement for another. The film sardonically parodies Depression-era tales of escape through westward movement by presenting Al’s dream as a nightmare—a “meaningless circle or trap” (Naremore, More Than Night 148; see also Polan 270).12 Owning (or driving) a car may generate a feeling of sovereignty and autonomy, but thumbing testifies to a lack of control: it is mobility without autonomy. Hitchhiking places Al at the mercy of drivers such as Charles Haskell, a big talker whose nice suit, wad of cash, and fancy convertible can’t save his life.

  While Haskell sleeps, Al gets behind the wheel. But he’s not really driving; fate is. Haskell’s untimely (though apparently natural) death in his convertible catalyzes Al’s conversion from disgruntled musician to victim of destiny.13 After discovering that Haskell is dead, Al stands beside the car in a driving rain and makes the first of several tragically foolish decisions: to hide Haskell’s body and then take his money and driver’s license. It’s almost as if the car forces the transformation: had it not been a convertible, Al wouldn’t have had to stop to put up the top; Haskell wouldn’t have fallen out, may not have died; and Al might have fulfilled his original plan (although, as I suggest in chapter 6, he may not have really wanted to join Sue in LA in the first place).14 Al’s new plan is foiled when he picks up the hitchhiking Vera (memorably played by Ann Savage), the “dangerous animal” responsible for the gruesome scratches Haskell earlier displayed (“What kind of dames thumb rides?” he’d asked Al. “Sunday school teachers?”). More important, she is a person who knows Al isn’t Haskell. And so Vera becomes Haskell’s “ghostly reincarnation” (Naremore, More Than Night 149)—as if, Al tells us, he were “sitting right there in the car laughing like mad while he haunted me.” Vera first demands that Al sell Haskell’s convertible to avoid having it traced but then arrives at a more ambitious scheme: to collect Haskell’s inheritance from his dying father. How will Al prove he’s Haskell? With his car and driver’s license, of course. But though they keep the convertible, Al still isn’t in the driver’s seat and ends up (semiaccidentally) strangling Vera with a phone cord. Al’s hitchhiking—he’s doing it again at the film’s conclusion—determines his character: he will remain forever subject to the wishes of others, whether they be club patrons or conning car owners. Al’s American dream is foiled by his lack of agency; he can’t remake himself because he has so little self to begin with. Not everyone is truly convertible.

  In Detour, hitchhiking subjects the thumber to vicissitudes of the road, whims of fate, and eruptions of coincidence. In most subsequent noir hitchhiking films, however, the roles are switched: the hitchhiker is an invader who seizes control of the car, thereby embodying the fears of Cold War Americans—their terror of invasion and loss of freedom—as well as the recognition that their new prosperity cloaks a churning desire for lawlessness. In The Devil Thumbs a Ride, for example, the handsome gray 1941 convertible owned by traveling salesman Jimmy Ferguson (Ted North) seems to express his willingness to pursue the upward mobility—represented by Emerald Products (a line of ladies’ lingerie)—urged on him by his wife. In contrast the car represents the possibility of escape for Jimmy’s hitchhiker, psychopathic robber and murderer Steve Morgan (Lawrence Tierney), as well as for the two women, Agnes (Betty Lawford) and Carol (Nan Leslie), who later hitch a ride with them. But the car apparently doesn’t satisfy Jimmy, who is drunk throughout most of the film and seems well on his way to alcoholism. Indeed, the ease with which Morgan persuades Jimmy to let him take the wheel indicates a thirst for adventure running beneath Jimmy’s dream of conventional success; the convertible embodies Jimmy’s unspoken desire to defy the law and live, like Morgan, on the fly. This desire is played out after Morgan—a much better salesman, in his way, than Jimmy—convinces him to hole up at a friend’s beach house, then punctures the car’s tires to prevent their departure. After Morgan murders Carol (who has learned that he’s on the lam) and the sheriff appears, Morgan uses Jimmy’s driver’s license and car keys to convince the lawman that he’s Ferguson. The doubling of the two characters thus becomes explicit—Morgan incarnates Jimmy’s own lawless impulses—with the convertible again acting as catalyst.

  Eventually a detective and his deputy (a gas station attendant named Kenney) expose the true identity of Morgan, who is apprehended and killed, thereby restoring order. At the end Jimmy’s wife reveals that she is pregnant and drives the convertible toward home. But though the car now seems to indicate Jimmy’s reconversion to uxorious husband and law-abiding lingerie vendor, its weaving progress in the concluding scene suggests that Jimmy’s transgressive impulses are merely quiescent, liable to resurface as soon as he fails to please his grasping wife. Jimmy’s convertible, first a sign of his mobility and then a vehicle for Morgan’s, represents the instability of conventional values and the fragility of Ferguson’s middle-class male identity.

  The figure of the hitchhiker as a threat to middle-class values and masculinity appears even more forcefully in Ida Lupino’s The Hitch-Hiker (its taut screenplay was cowritten by Lupino and Collier Young). This film begins with a precredit introduction establishing its veracity: “This is the true story of a man and a gun and a car. The gun belonged to the man. The car might have been yours—or that young couple across the aisle. What you will see in the next seventy minutes could have happened to you. For the facts are actual.” By grounding the tale in documentary detail, the prologue heightens the eruptive force of the hitchhiker. What follows—a series of montages showing the hitchhiking psychopath Emmett Myers (William Talman) at his deadly work—reinforces a sense that cars automatically generate the risk of invasion. The next sequence depicts the back of a Dodge convertible pulling up beside a man and picking him up. Darkness falls. A second car pulls up to the same man; we hear gunshots and a woman screaming, see the hiker’s hand as he examines books and papers that have fallen from the car, then his walking feet. Another car picks up the hitchhiker, who appears again only as feet and hands. Finally, we’re riding with ordinary guys Gilbert Bowen (Frank Lovejoy) and Roy Collins (Edmond O’Brien), who (without telling the folks at home) decide to take a detour from their fishing trip to pursue happiness by gawking at the decadent sights in a Mexican border town. The introduction thus triangulates the characters: Myers, who views human beings as body parts, as objects of demonic automotive fishing, is the sinister alter ego of Bowen and Collins, whose outlaw urges are channeled into guilty, giggling voyeurism.

  Myers seems to have been conjured to punish them for their foibles. As he rides in their backseat, his face pokes into the light, revealing a paralyzed eye and a pistol barrel: “face front and keep driving,” he snarls. With the gun and commandeered car, he now possesses the full trinity of masculine power. So armed, he proceeds ruthlessly to strip away the fishermen’s defenses and masculine strength. First he plays humiliating mind games, forcing Bowen to shoot at a can Collins is holding. Then he mocks their values, calling them “suckers” who are “up to [their] neck in IOUs,” and boasts that he doesn’t “owe nobody”: he just takes the things he wants. “I didn’t need any of ’em. … If you got the know-how and a few bucks in your pocket, you can buy anything or anybody. ’Specially if you got ’em at the point of a gun.” This consummate individualist exposes the limitations of that venerated American ideal. And in appropriating their auto, Myers robs them of the sense of sovereignty cars are designed to produce. They are now prisoners in their own vehicle—ironically, a Plymouth, a brand named after an icon of American liberty. Thus Myers stands as a grotesque exaggeration of the principles by which these men live. His power reaches its apex when
Bowen and Collins try to escape, and Myers finds them by using the car’s headlights. The point of view given him as he spotlights the men suggests that the car has indeed become his prosthesis, a mechanical extension of his evil eye. Myers, in short, is a car, a Frankenstein’s monster assembled from the prized technologies and ideologies of postwar America.

  That Myers, like Steve Morgan, also represents the fishermen’s repressed subversive impulses (the same impulses that impel policeman Cal Bruner to steal in the Lupino-Young script for Private Hell 36) is displayed when he forces Collins to exchange clothes with him. Indeed, as the film proceeds, Collins—angry and embittered, dragging his left leg—comes more and more to resemble Myers. Near the end of the film he glowers at the hitchhiker and seethes, “You stink, … just like your clothes. … You haven’t got a thing except that gun. You better hang on to it, because without it, you’re nothing.” Later he punches Myers in the face while the police hold the erstwhile hitcher. In this film, then, the car becomes a stage where the men enact a crisis of masculinity that, I have argued, appears in so many noirs. By abducting them, Myers forces them to discover previously hidden portions of themselves, to abandon the masks of civility they weren’t brave enough to discard on their own. Myers’s presence reveals that guns and cars, those prosthetics with which American males bolster their identities, are signs not of power but of anxious vulnerability. In short, here guns and cars function like the extra wife acquired by Harry Graham in Lupino and Young’s The Bigamist—an ineffective means of empowering himself and of restoring his wounded masculinity. Unlike Graham’s second marriage, Myers’s ominous existence forces an inner conversion: a mobility that is not social but psychic.