Nightmare Alley - Film Noir And The American Dream

by Mark Osteen

  The Big Combo suggests that jazz—and only jazz—adequately captures the complex emotions and motivations of contemporary urbanites. No longer consigned to basement jam sessions and out-of-the-way clubs, it is imbricated in the intimate lives of modern Americans. The music thus both emerges from and expresses the black, blue, brown—and fallen—twentieth-century world. This world is fully displayed in the scintillating late noir Sweet Smell of Success, in which big band jazz again serves as the aural equivalent of urban corruption. Elmer Bernstein’s bluesy, minor-key title theme (its triplet figures recalling “Blues in the Night”) specifically represents the domain of sadistic, Winchellesque columnist J. J. Hunsecker (Burt Lancaster) and Tony Curtis’s weaselly publicist Sidney Falco.31 Like the film’s sardonic, crackling Clifford Odets/Ernest Lehman script, its score bespeaks a world as corrupt as Brown’s (indeed, Brown kills people, but Hunsecker destroys souls). Yet Bernstein’s main theme is not the only jazz in the film. When Sidney is on the make, we hear a peppy motif that reflects his unflagging energy. More significantly, the Chico Hamilton Quintet performs in a couple of club sequences and exemplifies a more progressive image of jazz.

  Hamilton’s biracial group features an unusual front line of guitar (Martin Milner, as guitarist Steve Dallas) and Fred Katz’s cello; its modernist modal music is the polar opposite of the retro big band orchestrations in Bernstein’s score.32 Sweet Smell is thus the first film noir to include a jazz group performing music that was cutting edge at the time of its release. Guarded, cool, and serious, its musicians are also as far removed from the frenetic grinders of D. O. A. and Phantom Lady as New Orleans is from New York. Steve Dallas has nothing but contempt for the Sidney Falcos of the world. As for Hunsecker—whose sister, Susie (Susan Harrison), is dating Dallas—Steve deems him “some kind of a monster.” The film thus sharply distinguishes between the jazz of Hamilton and Dallas—an advanced, highly intellectual art—and the brand that underscores Hunsecker’s city of lies and innuendoes, a realm that lives by what one character calls “the theology of making a fast buck.”33

  Not that Hunsecker and Falco don’t try to spread this gospel. The film’s plot revolves around Hunsecker’s attempt to smear Steve so that Susie, with whom Hunsecker has a creepy, quasi-incestuous relationship, will break up with the guitarist. To keep his own hands clean, Hunsecker enlists Falco to do his dirty work. A hustler who has buried his conscience beneath mounds of smelly ambition, Sidney is a willing proxy, despite his jealousy of J. J. Believing that nearly everyone else is as much a whore as he is, Sidney even pimps out his girlfriend, Rita, to rival columnist Otis Elwell, then passes on to Elwell Hunsecker’s lie that Steve is a Communist and pothead, in exchange for J. J.’s promise of future columns. Steve is then forced to request Hunsecker’s help in clearing his name—in exchange for being “good” to Susie. Oddly enough, Falco actually respects Steve and doubts he’ll accept the favor from J. J., who asks (his face half in shadow), “What has this boy got that Susie likes?” Sidney: “Integrity. Acute, like indigestion.” J. J.: “What does this mean, ‘integrity’?” Sidney: “A pocketful of fire-crackers, waitin’ for a match.” Even Hunsecker asserts that he’d never let Susie date a man like Falco, who, he says, lives in “moral twilight.” But Falco at least feels a twinge of remorse for his acts: if he’s in moral twilight, Hunsecker is shrouded in total darkness. When Falco angrily informs J. J. that Steve had accused Hunsecker of planting the smear, J. J. feigns outrage. Yet Steve holds his ground, asks the intimidated Susie to speak for herself, and when she can’t, cusses her brother out.

  That outburst seals his fate: Susie promises never to see Steve again, and her brother gives her a patronizing kiss. J. J. seems to have won. Yet at that moment the main musical theme is played on cello, as if to indicate that Dallas’s jazz (and integrity) has begun to challenge Hunsecker’s. And though Falco puts marijuana in Steve’s coat and gets him arrested, both he and J. J. are defeated after Susie faces down her brother, who then turns in Falco for planting the cannabis on Steve. Butler concludes that “the ‘taint’ of the decadent corruption that surrounds Steve and his band is so overpowering that the film’s audience can easily recall Steve’s progressive jazz as being emblematic of the corruption and not an antidote to it” (136). His reading is exactly backward. The film clearly presents Dallas and Hamilton as the antithesis of Falco and Hunsecker, and though the brassy Hunsecker theme plays at the end, its swaggering swing has been replaced by a determined marching thump that propels Susie’s hopeful walk into the morning, suitcase in hand. Falco and Hunsecker lose the jazz war to Steve Dallas, as moral twilight gives way to dawn.

  The stolid Dallas contrasts starkly with the grimacing, sweaty jazz musicians of 1940s noir. He is no petulant, oversensitive kid like Johnny Ingram or Stan Maxton; nor an addict, weakling, or womanizer, like Keith Vincent, Marty Blair, or Stan Grayson; nor a fatuous “jigger” who just happens to have a gift. In his person jazz is an island of integrity in a sea of corruption. Though “noired” by his association with the music, Dallas is never befouled and never merely black and blue, for he hands out as many blows as he receives. Of course, Steve Dallas is a white man. How different would the story be if Susie were dating Chico Hamilton! Hence, despite laudable progress in presenting jazz and its musicians as real artists, both this film and The Strip still depict African Americans as instruments for the refashioning of white identities and relationships. The promise of true equality in the films—as in real-world America of the late 1950s—remains mostly a dream deferred.

  As African Americans were gradually incorporated into the mainstream of American life, noir’s jazz musicians began to lose their degrading traits. When blackness needed not be translated into mental illness, addiction, or violent rage, it began to be heard as an essential—perhaps the essential—voice in the American chorus. In most 1940s noir, jazz musicians represent the secret fears and fascinations of a nation grappling with race relations and changing notions of masculinity, productivity, and gender: jazz cats were a focal point for the nation’s dreams and nightmares. In 1950s noir, however, jazz musicians are more often presented as working professionals—regular Stans or Steves—refining their art and pursuing a modest version of the American Dream. Increasingly recognized as a music requiring discipline and rigor, jazz gained respectability even as its popularity waned. It must be said, however, that Steve Dallas is a less interesting character than Marty Blair: he has shed his complexity along with his complexes. Perhaps, then, it is no accident that the music he plays betrays few traces of the blues. In serving up jazz musicians as paragons of authenticity and integrity, filmmakers risked stripping them of the depth that makes such characters so fascinating. Indeed, the blues is not only a key influence on the birth of jazz; it is also an essential element that, in two other 1940s films, permits musicians to transmute their bruises into badges of courage.

  A Kind of Poet

  In Raoul Walsh’s The Man I Love, named for the Gershwins’ famous song, torch singer Petey Brown (Ida Lupino) languidly delivers the title song’s lyrics during a late-night jam session at the “39” club in New York:

  Some day he’ll come along

  The man I love

  And he’ll be big and strong

  The man I love

  And when he comes my way,

  I’ll do my best to make him stay.

  Though she sings the song “as if she has lived it” (Stanfield, Body 136), her no-nonsense manner belies its endorsement of submissive domesticity.34 As Stan-field notes (138), it’s not Petey who is a “soul in torment” but pianist San Thomas (Bruce Bennett), the title character whose “emotive piano workouts” evince a tumultuous inner life. When Petey fails to capture San, she is not devastated by the experience, as the lyrics would suggest. Instead, though bruised by life’s knocks, she emerges with her integrity and artistry intact.

  Petey is a figure frequently seen in film noir: the female nightclub singer.35 But though her songs lament lost love
s in tones “dreamy and sad” (to quote “One for My Baby,” a song Lupino performs in Road House), she herself is pragmatic and resilient. Indeed, Petey gains strength through her voice: as Adrienne McLean notes, women who sing in Hollywood films thereby become “active communicating” subjects rather than passive, acted-upon objects, as their songs permit them to tell their stories and master their experiences (4). Two films in which Lupino plays singers, moreover, provide counterpoint to noir’s troubled male musicians by presenting jazz as a path to liberation through artistic labor. Lupino’s chanteuses extend the tradition founded by classic blues singers such as Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith, whose style turned black-and-blueness into female empowerment. As this lineage implies, Lupino’s singers are “othered” through association with blackness (also indicated by the prominent blue notes in the melodies of “The Man I Love” and “One for My Baby”); but unlike their male counterparts they are not ruined by their noiring. Instead they use it to model a progressive identity built on improvisation that embraces life as an extended jazz solo.

  Though directed by Raoul Walsh, The Man I Love is a female-centered and -coauthored picture, with a script by Catherine Turney (and male writer Jo Pagano), adapted from the novel Night Shift by Maritta Wolff.36 It presents several realistic scenes of women working together, supporting each other, and showing strength (the exception is a woman named Gloria [Dolores Moran], who cheats on her husband, Johnny, and neglects her baby). But at the center of the film—which lies on the fringes of noir—is Petey, a sharp-tongued, sardonic woman who seems to need nobody.37 After Petey travels to California to visit her sisters Sally (Andrea King) and Ginny (Martha Vickers), she becomes involved with shady club owner Nicky Toresca (Robert Alda), for whom her brother Joey works, and eventually with San Thomas.38 Petey wants to help them but also aims to advance her career and auditions for Toresca by singing the Kern/Hammerstein standard “Why Was I Born?” in a jaunty style that contradicts its gloomy lyrics about dreaming of a lover but waking up “all by myself.” Though both this song and “The Man I Love” confess creamy romantic yearnings, Petey is more concerned with hard cheese—practical matters such as staving off Toresca’s advances and monitoring her brother’s illicit activities.

  After she meets San, the couple take a romantic stroll on the boardwalk as the title song plays on the soundtrack. Later San performs it in a flashy, two-handed arrangement (Bennett appears to be actually playing sections of the piece). But alas, he tells Petey, his recording of the song never caught on. “You were ten years ahead, that’s why,” she replies, though it offers nothing that Art Tatum and Earl Hines hadn’t already been serving up for more than a decade. San “ran down like a clock” because he “tried to make the piano do a lot of things I guess no one guy can do.” After his wife, Amanda, left him, he started drinking and lost his muse. Here is the now-familiar figure: a male jazz musician too sensitive to function in the real world. Although San claims to be comfortable with his “blank” life, the theme music contradicts his assertion by swelling extradiegetically, as if coaching him to tell Petey that she might give him back his “spark.” Sure enough, even after he warns her that he’ll make her “sing the blues,” they melt together in a kiss. Petey seems to be living out the title song’s lyrics after all. But ten days later, San stands her up for a date, and, on returning home, Petey hears him play “Body and Soul” on her piano. The tune’s famous lyrics—

  My heart is sad and lonely

  For you I sigh for you, dear, only.

  Why haven’t you seen it?

  I’m all for you, body and soul.

  —might suggest that he has fallen for Petey, but in fact he’s still carrying the torch for Amanda.39 The two embrace by the fire, but when he admits that he has tried to see Amanda, Petey breaks off the relationship.

  The film detours into a noirish plot in which Nicky uses Joey to get rid of the obnoxious Gloria, which results in her being run down by a car. Having discovered Gloria’s infidelity, her husband confronts Nicky with a gun. But Petey talks sense to him, knocks the gun from his hand, slaps him around, and calls the police. As her name indicates, she is a terrific blend of big sister and tough guy, equally able to sooth feelings and rough up villains—all while wearing a glittering evening gown! During this scene a dark, dissonant version of the title tune plays, representing the bitterness that frustrated romantic longing may engender—especially for San, for although the film’s other males are healed, San isn’t. After he departs, Petey walks alone on the pier, weeping—but only a little. She may be doomed to loneliness, but she repudiates the song’s portrait of dependency: this film is not about finding the man she loves but about giving him up to retain her autonomy. The Man I Love thus counterpoints the stereotypical depiction of San with the progressive figure of Petey, for whom music is not the sign of a nature too sensitive to survive but an indispensable means to survive. Her mastery of song signifies her mastery of the blues philosophy: an ability to remain independent and be only mildly bruised by the sexual marketplace.

  Lily Stevens, Lupino’s character in Road House, is even tougher: when we first see her, newly arrived from Chicago in the small town of Elton, she sprawls, a cigarette hanging from her mouth, one shapely leg resting on a table, playing solitaire and trading quips with Pete Morgan (Cornel Wilde), the manager of Jefty’s Roadhouse. A few minutes later we find her at the bar beneath a stuffed deer’s head, illustrating her recognition that “this is a moose trap all around.” The club’s spoiled owner, Jefty (Richard Widmark), certainly thinks of her as his prey and, to make her easier to capture, agrees to pay her $250 a week to sing. Lily downplays her abilities, informing Jefty that she has a “small voice.” She isn’t being falsely modest. Early in the film Lupino plays piano and sings “One for My Baby” in a voice that is okay, according to the barmaid Susie (Celeste Holm), if you “like the sound of gravel.” Yet Lupino’s raspy voice and unsentimental delivery generate a compelling authority and authenticity; even Susie (who has a crush on Pete) admits that she “does more without a voice than anybody I’ve ever heard.”40 Lily seems to have lived the world-weary lyrics of Arlen and Mercer’s saloon song, as well as its stoic attitude toward the world’s slings and arrows: as Jefty affirms, she is “a kind of poet” with a “lot of things to say.” Better than any other noir jazz figure, she enacts Ellison’s blues impulse, keeping “the painful details … of a brutal experience alive” but transcending it by “squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism” (79).

  Lily expresses this philosophy through her sexuality and clothing. A striking sight in Elton with her sophisticated mien and alluring garb (evening gowns, tight halter tops, short shorts), she draws big crowds—but doesn’t appeal to Pete, even when she sings the film’s hit, “Again,” directly to him. She has better success during a “fishing” outing with him and Susie. Having neglected to bring a swimsuit, Lily disappears behind a bush only to reappear moments later clad in a brief two-piece outfit she has fashioned out of scarves. Lily likewise crafts her identity from scraps and ad libs. Such performances can be misinterpreted: when Dutch, a burly roadhouse habitué, thinks she’s singing “The Right Kind of Love” just for him and Lily rebuffs him, he starts a brawl. But at least Dutch is honest about his urges, unlike both Pete, who pretends not to be falling for Lily, and Jefty, who camouflages his sadism with jokes and phony bonhomie. Yet the brawl brings Lily together with Pete, with whom she shares her painful life story: her “old man” pushed her to become an opera singer, so she practiced every night while working by day in a factory, until overwork destroyed her voice. Since then, Lily has treated life as a tragicomic jazz solo, as a constant process of improvisation.

  Insanely jealous of Pete, Jefty frames him for stealing money from the club, but after his conviction Jefty volunteers to supervise his parole—so he can prevent him from possessing Lily. There will be no more improvisation now that Jefty calls the tunes. But even he recognizes that under his direction Lily’s “voic
e doesn’t sound the same”: absent autonomy, she can’t sing. And once Jefty arranges a “little vacation” for the four of them to celebrate his dominance, Lily is reduced to relying on Pete, until the film’s climax, when she guns down Jefty. This act is not out of character. As one commentator in the DVD featurette explains, Lily is in many respects the film’s “male-coded character”—the stranger who comes to town and shakes things up. Unlike The Blue Gardenia’s Norah Larkin, she resists becoming prey. Even more than Petey Brown, Lily Stevens offers a powerful, positive alternative to the weak, tormented male jazz musicians who populate noir. Like Petey she overcomes professional and personal obstacles by employing her wit and husbanding her emotional resources. Her success stems not from musical technique but from inner strength and flexibility. More complex than Steve Dallas and more successful than Johnny Ingram, Lupino’s singers best exemplify how jazz can be not merely a way of playing but a way of living, a poetic enterprise founded on the principle of improvisation, that “survival technique … suitable to the rootlessness and discontinuity … of human existence in the contemporary world” (Murray 113). Petey and Lily jazz the world instead of being jazzed by it.

  Lily Stevens (Ida Lupino) improvises with Pete (Cornel Wilde) in Road House. Kobal Collection / Art Resource, NY.

  At once resilient and resistant, Lupino’s torch singers model a realistic but inspiring American identity that incarnates a spectrum of blackness, whiteness, and blueness. Hybrids who epitomize the American values of equality, flexibility, and freedom of expression, they sing of Franklinesque self-fashioning. Neither disabled nor pathetic, they embody how improvisation may foster individual achievement within a collective and demonstrate how Americans of any race or gender could endure through the blues. These tough but sensitive artists’ improvised lives show how jazz can indeed encompass “the whole USA in one chorus.”