Nightmare Alley - Film Noir And The American Dream

by Mark Osteen

  There is another side to this phenomenon. Jazz is a quintessentially American music because of its improvisational nature, because it blends European harmonies with African rhythms, and because it supplies a medium for marginalized groups to “signify” upon the norms of the dominant culture. It promotes the individual soloist within a group context, thus uniting individual and collective achievement. Indeed, not only did jazz provide a path for African Americans’ upward mobility; it also served as a whitening force for Jewish musicians and composers such as Al Jolson, the Gershwins, Benny Goodman, Artie Shaw, and many others. In addition the music furnished an arena for interracial cooperation, such as when, in the 1930s, Benny Goodman hired African Americans Teddy Wilson and Lionel Hampton for his band, and Billie Holiday briefly fronted Shaw’s all-white orchestra. As Lawrence Levine has argued, jazz also expresses the “side of ourselves that strove to recognize the positive aspects of our newness and our heterogeneity” (433). Jazz can be an “emblem of American liberalism’s capacity for flexibility and innovation” (McCann 116) and thus, writes Peter Stanfield, help “to construct and negotiate the boundaries of American cultural identity” (Body 5).

  These ideals underlie the depiction of musicians in Blues in the Night, a significant nonnoir jazz film from 1941. Early in the film a group of young men, jailed for starting a brawl, respond excitedly to the exhortations of pianist Jigger Pine (Richard Whorf) to play “blues, real blues, the kind that come out of people. Real people. Their hopes and their dreams. What they’ve got and what they want, the whole USA in one chorus. … And that band, they ain’t guys just blowin’ and poundin’ and scrapin’. That’s five guys … who feel, play, live, even think the same way. That ain’t a band, it’s a unit. One guy multiplied five times … like a hand in a glove.” For Jigger, to play the blues is to pursue the American Dream. His speech, written by Communist (and future blacklistee) Robert Rossen, makes it sound as though Jigger’s ideal group ain’t a band but a labor union; nevertheless, a group of black inmates responds with, “We all got the miseries in here” and begin to sing “Blues in the Night” as if it were “real low-down New Orleans blues” (as Jigger claims) rather than a pop tune written only a year earlier by Harold Arlen and Johnny Mercer (Stanfield, Body 110).4 The song continues nondiegetically beneath a stock montage of black workers balin’, sweatin’, eatin’, and sleepin’; because they like black music, Jigger and his white friends are included in the cadre. At the end of the song we dissolve to a white trumpeter named Leo (Jack Carson) playing stratospheric high notes, then find the band at a club enjoying Jimmy Lunceford’s all-black orchestra. Boasting that he can blow them out of the joint, Leo begins to play, and Lunceford’s men yield the floor to him. Apparently white musicians are better than black players. Yet when told to get back to work by their employer, clarinetist Nicky (who claims to know “the anatomy of swing, not only musically but theoretically”) responds, “We’re coming, massa Sam.” In other words, Jigger’s boys are black when it suits them and white when it doesn’t.5 But they adhere to Jigger’s principles, acting out the title song’s lyrics by traveling from place to place and maintaining the carefree spirit denoted in their other theme song, “Hang on to Your Lids, Kids.”

  It’s not difficult to predict what happens next. After the band lands a steady gig at a club called The Jungle, we watch them rehearsing “This Time the Dream’s on Me” in the garage, then performing it in the club—but without Leo, whose horn rests on his empty chair. He is upstairs, gambling and flirting with singer Kay Grant (Betty Fields), who, Jigger complains, is “bustin’ up the unit!” Once Character (Priscilla Lane), the band’s vocalist and Leo’s wife, becomes pregnant, Leo’s conflict shifts to Jigger, torn between band loyalty and a burgeoning obsession with Kay. He even asks her to replace Character as the band’s chanteuse: a bad idea, as illustrated in a montage of the two rehearsing “This Time the Dream’s on Me” that includes a shot upward from the keys implying that the piano itself is resisting her. Alas, Jigger cannot: despite numerous warnings about two-faced women (including the title song’s), he abandons the band to join the Guy Heiser (read Kay Kyser) Orchestra. When the old outfit takes in a Heiser show, their faces freeze in horror at the insipid novelty act in which Jigger is trapped. Disgusted, Jigger quits Heiser; disappointed, Kay quits him. Jigger spirals into depression until, unable to remember how to play his “new” tune (actually a quasi-classical arrangement of “Blues in the Night”), he collapses at the keyboard. An expressionist montage, underscored by dissonant strains from the title song, displays Jigger’s diagnosis (“neuropsychiatric disorder”), and then a series of grotesque images from earlier in the film: Jigger grimly shouting his ideals; a sweating black man proclaiming that he has “got the miseries”; large, clumsy hands; a grinning Kay playing the violin, bassoon, and tenor saxophone while fronting an all-female band; a disturbing shot of Jigger as a monkey dancing to the organ-grinding Heiser; a final overhead shot of Jigger at the piano, superimposed over the black man’s face. Clearly, Kay has made a monkey of him. The montage also identifies the African American singer, the monkey, and the pianist, as if to confirm that our hero is, indeed, a Jigger—a counterfeit black man.6

  Thus is introduced a characterization that will become familiar: the male jazz musician as idiot savant—childlike, unstable, and easily victimized by a scheming woman. Jigger is a set of hands with no head, his talent a gift, not a craft developed through rigorous discipline. But with the help of jazz (“my medicine, my prescription”) he recovers and is next seen performing a flashy, Art Tatum–esque version of “Blues in the Night” to an adoring crowd at The Jungle. No longer an egalitarian project, the music has devolved into personal therapy. After a melodramatic climax (Kay kills the club owner, and Jigger’s bandmates prevent him from following her), the film closes with the reunited band riding freights “From Natchez to Mobile, from Memphis to St. Joe, / Wherever the four winds blow.” Jigger’s lofty aspirations were a chimera, for musicians aren’t artists; they aren’t even adults. They’re just kids living a dream they can sustain only by enveloping themselves in a protective cocoon, away from the adult sexuality and economic compromises that would threaten to knock off their precarious lids.

  Jive Crazy

  For all its silliness, Blues in the Night at least presents jazz as a positive force. That is seldom true of noir jazz. Although jazz-club scenes appear frequently in the films, they rarely feature African American characters, and even when they do, they register no “traces of the social ferment” (Wager, “Jazz” 226) of the postwar period, when African Americans had begun agitating strongly for civil rights. Sometimes these club or jam-session scenes comment on the main story, as in They Live by Night, when Bowie and Keechie visit a New Orleans nightclub and listen to a black songstress deliver “Your Red Wagon,” whose lyrics offer them coded advice. In later noir films certain characters’ affiliation with jazz and African Americans lends them an aura of hipness. In Kiss Me Deadly, for instance, the crass Mike Hammer is humanized when comforted in his cups by a black bartender and African American singer Madi Comfort’s rendition of “Rather Have the Blues.” Most often, however, jazz-club scenes arrive laden with louche associations: sexual obsession, decadence, loss of control, violence.

  Oddly, although bebop was flourishing in the late 1940s, bop is never heard and rarely mentioned.7 Butler explains that bebop musicians’ “desire for intellectual status” rendered the style too intimidating for Hollywood (83). But race is a far more likely reason for this exclusion, for bebop, which emerged in the 1940s out of late-night jam sessions in New York clubs, was created almost entirely by young black musicians as a modernist alternative to swing. These musicians eschewed the affable, eager-to-please manner that made artists such as Louis Armstrong palatable to whites, instead adopting no-nonsense, even arrogant postures designed to challenge white audiences and project an image of serious artistry.8 New Orleans–style jazz, then undergoing a revival led largely by white
musicians (dubbed “moldy figs” by disdainful bop aficionados), was a more comfortable choice for Hollywood. Yet even nonbop jazz in noir is represented as insidiously intoxicating and dangerous.

  The earliest noir jazz sequence occurs in Phantom Lady (directed by Robert Siodmak, produced by Joan Harrison and adapted from a Cornell Woolrich novel), after engineer Scott Henderson has been convicted of murdering his wife, and his secretary, Carol “Kansas” Richman (Ella Raines), entices jazz drummer Cliff Milburn (Elisha Cook Jr.) into giving her information about the murder. Popping her gum and tarted up in a tight skirt and heavy makeup, Kansas pretends to be a “hep kitten” named Jeannie and makes eyes at Cliff during his regular gig backing a Carmen Mirandaesque singer. After the show they attend a basement jam session. Though all the musicians are white (an extremely unlikely situation in real life), they are amply blackened by shadows and by choke shots of their grimacing faces. Cliff’s notoriously suggestive drum solo is the work of a stereotypically hypersexual jazz tomcat. First planting herself directly in front of Cliff (letting him leer at her legs), Jeannie then stands over him and eggs him on throughout his increasingly frenzied solo; meanwhile Siodmak cuts to ever closer shots of his sweaty, straining visage. Although the censors dictated that Raines never move provocatively on camera (Butler 65), we don’t need to see her hips to be hip to what’s going down. As Porfirio and Butler note, she seems to be playing the solo through Cliff (Butler 66; Porfirio, “Dark Jazz” 181), exhorting him to intensify his gymnastics, until at last she motions for them to leave and finish with their bodies what Cliff has begun on the skins.9

  Though the film omits Woolrich’s explicit references to drugs, the scene’s debauched atmosphere (and some suggestive dialogue about how Cliff spends his money) make their existence plain enough.10 Cliff himself is an instrument played by Kansas, as well as a proxy for the real murderer, insane sculptor Jack Marlow (Franchot Tone). Cliff’s hands are prosthetic extensions of Marlow’s hands—the same hands that strangle Henderson’s wife and later the hapless drummer himself. Phantom Lady thus splits the traits of the disreputable artist figure between Cliff, a walking id, and Marlow, an effete megalomaniac afflicted with headaches and dizzy spells. Jazz embodies the seedy urban domain that Carol/Kansas must navigate to save her boss. Despite her avowed distaste, however, she seems to relish the evening of slumming that enables her to unveil and exploit the sexuality that she otherwise hides: after the jazz scene her formerly restrained hair is allowed to fall freely about her shoulders.

  Siodmak uses jazz similarly in Criss Cross, when protagonist Steve Thompson (Burt Lancaster) flashes back to his encounter with his ex-wife, Anna (Yvonne De Carlo), in a nightclub where Esy Morales and His Rhumba Band are performing. Steve stares at Anna, writhing to a hot Latin vamp, the burr in the flute soloist’s tone beautifully conveying Steve’s passion; after they rendezvous, the flute becomes increasingly staccato, as if channeling her voice. The solo bespeaks Anna’s sexual charms, as well as Steve’s obsession with the woman who later lures him to participate in an armored car heist, break his arm, and eventually die.11 Criss Cross presents jazz as a sexually transmitted disease, and Steve has a terminal case.12

  The trope of jazz as infection recurs in Rudolph Maté’s D. O. A. in a remarkable scene set in The Fisherman Club, where protagonist Frank Bigelow (Edmond O’Brien), on a brief vacation (without his fiancée) in San Francisco, has accompanied a group of partying conventioneers. An all-black quintet led by tenor man Illinois Jacquet performs a hot jump blues number before a serpentine painting of a saxophone and a raucous crowd. Inserts show white audience members shouting encouragement: “Cool, really cool!” As the music grows more frenetic and the crowd more frenzied, Maté films the sweating musicians in choke shots that render them grotesque and fearsome yet sinfully appealing. Beasts with bulging eyes, these caricatured jazzmen pass blackness and sexual energy on to Bigelow (Butler 70; Porfirio, “Dark Jazz” 179).

  After the tune ends, Frank chats up a “jive crazy” rich “chick” named Jeanie, as a bluesy B-flat minor ballad plays in the background. The tune’s lyrics (“I wanted to kiss you / I tried to resist you”) reveal the real point of their coy conversation. But although Frank knows he’s fishing, he doesn’t realize he’s also bait: distracted by Jeanie (Virginia Lee), he fails to notice a mysterious man in a distinctive scarf and hat meddling with his drink. When a hungover Bigelow awakens the next morning, we hear the ballad again, but now it sounds tinny and hollow, indicating both Frank’s self-disgust and his incipient illness: having been dosed with “luminous toxin” (a radioactive chemical), he will die within days. The song thus serves as the audible residue of the club and of Frank’s desired (though incomplete) infidelity. We hear the tune twice more: when Frank finds a Fisherman Club matchbook in a deserted warehouse and again when he confronts Halliday (William Ching), the mysterious personage who poisoned him because he once notarized a bill of sale for an iridium shipment. Inadvertently, Bigelow is acting out the tune’s lyrics: “And when I met you, I tried to forget you / But you whispered, ‘Darling, I know.’” His knowledge is deadly. Robert Porfirio points to the ballad’s “lethal potential” (“Dark” 180). But it’s not just this song that carries that potential; it’s jazz itself. Thus Bigelow is punished not merely for notarizing a document, or for sowing some wild oats, but for yielding to the enticements of jazz, depicted as an aural toxin and the very voice of Satan. Though the poison itself is a luminous white, Bigelow, like Jigger Pine, has been blackened by the touch of jive.

  D. O. A. links two of the period’s pervasive cultural anxieties. First, it dramatizes the allure and fear of African American culture, which, in the form of jazz, emancipates the primal impulses of the world’s Frank Bigelows. As an instrument for blacks to repay whites for commodifying and sexualizing their bodies, jazz offers a more insidious brand of rebellion than the riots and protests that eventually yielded progressive social changes. Second, jazz is associated with the anxiety about atomic energy, materialized in the luminous poison.13 In sum, the Fisherman band embodies the mix of desire and dread that marked American attitudes toward two dangerously intoxicating entities: blackness and the Bomb. Far from fusing the “whole USA” into one chorus, here jazz splits the nation into two camps: infected victims and poisonous perpetrators.

  So Black and Blue

  “That tune! … Why was it always that rotten tune? Knocking me around, beating in my head, never letting up. Did ya ever want to forget anything? Did ya ever want to cut away a piece of your memory or blot it out? You can’t, ya know. No matter how hard you try.” Thus speaks the hapless Al Roberts, erstwhile saloon pianist in Detour. The tune that makes him feel so black and blue is “I Can’t Believe That You’re in Love with Me,” an innocuous pop song from 1927 that is forever associated in his mind with his ill-fated journey to Los Angeles to meet his fiancée, Sue, and the nightmarish events that followed: the death of Charles Haskell and his unfortunate decision to assume Haskell’s identity, his killing of Vera, and his subsequent flight. But whereas Al wants to forget this song, other noir musicians can’t remember important songs. Just as the ballad in D. O. A. becomes a vestige of the night of Frank Bigelow’s murder—a memory of an ineradicable but mysterious trauma—so in many noirs melodies provide mnemonic clues to the plot’s initiating events, which are often the protagonist’s own crimes. In these films jazz is linked to violence, fear, and rage.

  Gorbman demonstrates how romantic/classical film scores establish “motifs of reminiscence” that enable audiences (unconsciously or consciously) to link disparate moments of the narrative (28). According to Caryl Flinn, musical themes often signal “temporal disphasures, especially those associated with the flashback” (109), which express a wish to “reach back from an unlovely present to the past, and therefrom to construct a lost beauty.” This “utopian function” of film music, she argues, creates a “conduit to connect listeners … to an ideal past” (50). Noir likewise employs musical motifs to
indicate temporal disphasures; however, rather than revealing “lost pleasure and stability” (Flinn 117), these films record their impossibility. In noir jazz films traumatic events—occurring before the narrative itself or at its outset—become repressed memories that can be retrieved only through nightmares, posttraumatic flashbacks, or forced reenactments similar to those plaguing disabled vets. These half-remembered melodies violate the principle of inaudibility by invoking memories both for the audience and for the characters.

  In Detour “I Can’t Believe That You’re in Love with Me” prompts the flashback that frames the narrative. A sign of both a utopian past and a lost future (Flinn 124), the song embodies Al’s mistake in believing that he could escape his club gig and start a life with Sue in Hollywood. Its lyrics don’t promise love or success but rather profess incredulity that someone so wonderful could love the song’s speaker; even so, Al balks at serving as Sue’s accompanist and playing for little money (a ten-buck tip is a “jackpot”) and less respect at the Break o’ Dawn Club. He should complain, for he is clearly possessed of great talent, displayed when he ingeniously transmutes Brahms’s “Waltz in A Major” into an improvised boogie-woogie. Flinn writes that this scene indicates that jazz signifies failure for Al (125).14 But it also shows Al using improvisation the same way that the black inventors of jazz did: to turn confinement into liberation. Al’s hitchhiking (geographic improvisation) further indicates that he enjoys playing things by ear. Perhaps sensing that life with Sue would be as insipid as the song, he doesn’t really want to join her. His ambivalence is suggested in a shot that occurs just before his nightmare begins, as he gazes into the rearview mirror of Haskell’s convertible and pictures Sue in Hollywood, singing “I Can’t Believe” before a shadowy band. The shot’s placement within the mirror implies that Al will never achieve his dream, the song and all it stands for immuring him, as Flinn suggests, “in much the same way that the film’s claustral visual style and narrative structure confine him” (127). Later, while waiting in a stifling hotel room with the predatory Vera, Al tries to phone Sue; as he waits to speak, “I Can’t Believe” swells, only to dissolve into dissonant fragments as he hangs up, unable to complete the call. Al really can’t believe that Sue’s in love with him; moreover, he probably prefers his improvised life to the suffocating future promised by “I Can’t Believe.” Although the tune haunts him as a symbol of his fatal detour, this restless musician would never have been satisfied playing Sue’s sideman for life.