Nightmare Alley - Film Noir And The American Dream

by Mark Osteen

  7

  Femmes Vital

  Film Noir and Women’s Work

  “One night she started to shim and shake, / That brought on the Frisco quake,” sings the shimmying Rita Hayworth in Gilda. “So you can put the blame on Mame, boys, / Put the blame on Mame.” Gilda’s sarcastically delivered lines describe the quintessential femme fatale—a character type, embodied in women like Kathie Moffat and Phyllis Dietrichson, that has become identified with film noir. However, as Julie Grossman has shown, such femmes fatale appear less frequently than casual viewers of noir may believe. Overinvested in this stereotype, critics have ignored the wide array of women’s roles that noir actually presents (5).1 Noir does offer its share of amoral seductresses and conniving criminals, but it also gives us wives, mothers, and nurses; businesswomen and writers; secretaries, singers, sleuths, and social workers; psychologists, physicians, prison guards, wardens—and even professors. In fact, most women in film noir work, and their forms of labor closely reflect the actual postwar US female workforce.

  Just as important as the women working in films noir, however, were the women working on films noir—the females who performed in, wrote, produced, and even directed the movies. Their presence is one reason why noir portrays so many working women and why the films address many of postwar women’s chief concerns: sexism; the conflict between traditional domestic duties and newfound labor power; the anxieties and possibilities implicit in shifting gender roles; changes in courtship, marriage, and motherhood. The films on which these women worked—which I’m calling femme noirs—furnish complex, critical, and generally progressive analyses of American mores and institutions. While facing the same obstacles dramatized in the films, these female filmmakers nudged Hollywood toward more enlightened views about gender and, in one case, helped to redefine cinematic authorship. Far from femmes fatale, these women were femmes vital: indispensable presences whose creative labor modeled an alternative to traditional female labor—childbearing and -rearing—and injected a protofeminist note into male-oriented genres.

  In Labor

  Women went to work with a vengeance during World War II: more than six million took new jobs, increasing the female labor force by more than 50 percent (Renov 40). By 1944, women composed more than 36 percent of the total labor force, up from 25 percent in 1941 (Walsh 1, 53). Defense jobs spelled “significant social mobility,” as many women traded low-paying employment in restaurants or laundries for wartime production work that as much as doubled their wages (Blackwelder 124; Walsh 57). Rosie the Riveter notwithstanding, the majority of working women held clerical positions during the war: for every female factory worker there were two women in office employment.2 These conditions changed rapidly once the war ended: in 1946, although 80 percent of wartime women workers were still employed, only 40 percent still held their wartime jobs, and overall employment declined from 19.5 to 15.5 million, with wages plummeting along with employment (Walsh 78). Michael Renov notes that by late 1944 government agencies were encouraging female withdrawal from the workforce (33). Nevertheless, the war permanently altered women’s expectations: polls showed that almost 75 percent of women workers wished to remain employed after the war (Walsh 75). Perhaps more significantly, the kind of women who worked had permanently changed. Whereas before the war single women outnumbered married workers, by 1947 more married than single women worked, a pattern sustained ever since (Blackwelder 124).

  But it would be a mistake to believe that the increased presence of working women by itself overturned prevailing ideologies; rather, it fostered dissonance and contradiction. Thus, although more women expected to work, movies and magazines continued to stress domestic obligations. Analyzing a wide range of popular periodicals, Joanne Meyerowitz finds that “domestic ideals coexisted in ongoing tension with an ethos of individual achievement that celebrated nondomestic activity, individual striving, public service and public success” (231). Although a great many of these portrayals presented marriage and motherhood as proper women’s roles, a significant minority (anticipating Betty Friedan) depicted domesticity as “exhausting and isolating, and frustrated mothers as over-doting and smothering” (Meyerowitz 242). Perceptions of marriage, too, underwent renovation: in women’s magazines, marriage was often depicted, perhaps wishfully, as “an equal partnership, with each partner intermingling masculine and feminine roles” (243). The war and aftermath intensified trends toward companionate marriage and serial monogamy, and increased expectations about intimate communication and friendship between spouses (Walsh 67). Yet, as I noted about the vet noirs, most men who had spent the war years without women reentered civil society with their prewar ideas about gender intact or even exaggerated.

  Of course, working women weren’t working all the time; among other activities, they were also attending movies. Then, as now, women made up more than half of the viewing audience. To attract this audience, studios increasingly turned to the so-called woman’s film: melodramas set in bourgeois domestic spaces, featuring female protagonists struggling with complex moral questions and competing emotional bonds (see Walsh 24).3 One subgenre aimed at women (and often female-authored) was the Gothic, in which a female protagonist is confined to a house, menaced by a mysterious male figure, and oppressed by a secret from the past. Though usually perceived as a masculine genre, noir is not entirely distinct from Gothic: the two forms overlap stylistically, narratively, and thematically. In addition to their dark visual styles, both frequently employ retrospective narrations, deal heavily with questions of guilt and complicity, incorporate sexual violence, and involve investigation.4 Several films I have discussed (e.g., The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry, No Man of Her Own, My Name Is Julia Ross) employ Gothic conventions. Hence, as Steve Neale declares, “any absolute division between noir and the gothic woman’s film is unsustainable” (164). More important for our purposes is that, as Lizzie Francke points out, hybrids of melodrama and film noir “became a staple genre for female screenwriters” (51). Femme noirs—that is, films noir written, produced, or directed by women—share many traits with the “woman’s film”: female protagonists; gender anxiety; ambivalence, or downright cynicism, about marriage.5 In addition to treating women’s issues, then, these films blurred generic boundaries and brought strong women characters into formerly male territory.

  One of those issues is motherhood. Most noir mothers exist primarily to shed light on the male protagonists: Cody Jarrett’s smothering ma exposes his Achilles heel in White Heat; Bart Tare’s sister, Ruby, in Gun Crazy, serves as Annie Laurie Starr’s foil. Even less evident than mothers are children, who also function as plot devices or symbols: Dave Bannion’s daughter provides a pretext for his revenge campaign in The Big Heat; Frank Enley’s toddler son, in Act of Violence, mirrors his own entrapment. In the femme noirs, children still appear in mostly symbolic roles—as measures of the mother’s morality, as signs of attachment to the past, as emblems of fresh beginnings, as psychological scars—and rarely as real people. Most often, children—those products of female labor—represent the conflict between domesticity and nondomestic work. Femme noir’s many dead or damaged children not only motivate the action; they also indicate conflicting views about a woman’s place.

  A Woman’s Place

  “Writers are the women of the film industry” (qtd. in Francke 2). This quip, overheard by screenwriter Eleanor Perry, both indicates the low prestige of writers in Hollywood and points to a prime reason why women were the writers of the film industry. As “middle-level executives in a large collective enterprise,” writers earned much less than directors or actors (Ceplair and Englund 8); female writers generally earned less than their male counterparts (Ketti Frings, whose work I discuss below, was an exception). Studios could use these women’s expertise without threatening the male power structure. This pattern was well-established by the 1930s and explains why even film scholars may not recognize all of these names: Marguerite Roberts, Lenore J. Coffee, Ketti Frings, Silvia Richards, Cat
herine Turney, Sally Benson, Lucille Fletcher, Lillie Hayward, Gertrude Walker, Leigh Brackett, Virginia Kellogg, Bess Meredyth, Dorothy Hannah, Eve Greene, Muriel Roy Bolton. Yet each of these women wrote at least one screenplay or original story for a completed film noir, and almost nothing has been written about any of them.

  A case in point is Turney, who wrote scripts for MGM in the 1930s (including the one for Dorothy Arzner’s The Bride Wore Red) before being hired by Warner Bros., which boasted a roster of female stars who sought roles “in which they weren’t just sitting around being a simpering nobody.” Turney, whose forte was writing stories about women “battling against the odds,” could provide them, as she did for Ida Lupino in The Man I Love (Turney, qtd. in Francke 47). At Warner Bros., where she was the only woman writer on-site, Turney was charged by ambitious young producer Jerry Wald with adapting James M. Cain’s novel Mildred Pierce. Wald, who went on to produce several femme noirs, was eager to capitalize on the loosening of censorship signaled by Double Indemnity, and he hoped to transform Cain’s chronicle of a female restaurateur and her monstrous daughter into a murder mystery with a flashback narrative.6 Resistant to both changes (no murder or flashback exists in the novel), Turney was more intrigued by the story’s female characters and relationships but after three months was removed from the project; after Albert Maltz beefed up the murder plot, she was brought back with strict instructions to follow his outline (Francke 51). Although Turney eventually left to write the Bette Davis vehicle A Stolen Life (leaving the credit to Wald favorite Ranald MacDougall), her stamp remains on the film’s female-centered workplace, supportive female friendships, and its complex portrayal of Mildred’s ambition and resilience (traits that also appear in Turney’s script for The Man I Love).7

  Biesen attributes the finished film’s blend of women’s melodrama and noir to its having been “rewritten, produced, and directed by males to reinforce a macho crime ethos” (138–39). Yet Cain himself believed that the story was about “one woman’s struggle against a great social injustice—which is the mother’s necessity to support her children even though husband and community give her not the slightest assistance” (qtd. in Biesen 139). Joan Crawford, who won the role after Davis and Barbara Stanwyck had turned it down, perceived Mildred not only as her ticket back into the Hollywood pantheon (MGM had dropped her after several flops) but as an alter ego, for Mildred’s life mirrored that of poor young Lucille LeSueur, who remade herself through grit and relentless energy into a Hollywood icon. Mildred Pierce displays both the conditions of its creation and the period’s ambivalence about a woman’s place. Hence, the noir mise-en-scène—sharp diagonal lines, heavy shadows, an aura of doom—dominates the first few minutes, as Mildred’s playboy husband, Monty Beragon (Zachary Scott), is shot in her (actually Curtiz’s) beach house, after which Mildred attempts to frame her associate Wally Fay (Jack Carson) for the crime. But the rest—comprising Mildred’s recollections at the police station—adopts a more orthodox style.

  With or without the murder the film is a piquant study of social mobility and a scathing critique of capitalism. When Mildred’s first husband, Bert (Bruce Bennett), loses his real-estate job and admits his affair with a Mrs. Biederhof, Mildred kicks him out, leaving her without money or skills, aside from her well-developed homemaking prowess (“I felt as though I’d been born in a kitchen and lived there all my life,” she proclaims).8 Doggedly seeking work despite numerous rejections, Mildred finally lands a waitressing job, but wearing a uniform and taking orders from others offends her bourgeois sensibilities. Yet that job launches her rise to successful owner of a restaurant chain. Even before her success, however, Mildred pushes daughters Veda (Ann Blyth) and Kay (Jo Ann Marlow) to take ballet and piano lessons and dress above her means. Although Mildred disavows Veda’s pretensions, early in the film Curtiz cuts from a montage of Mildred at work directly to the girls at their lessons to suggest that Mildred is fashioning a new identity for herself through them. The girls are a vehicle for her self-expression; like the restaurant she buys, they are her properties.

  Poor little Kay, who dies of pneumonia contracted while Mildred spends a romantic weekend with Beragon, is sacrificed for her mother’s aspirations; Veda becomes an insufferable snob who sneers at the smell of grease. She is sacrificed in a different way, as her humanity is scorched out of her by Mildred’s burning drive: not only does Veda hurl insults at Mildred, but she extorts $10,000 from a wealthy boyfriend by claiming to be pregnant and eventually has an affair with Beragon. In the film, as Veda is sent to jail for murdering Monty, she insists to her mother that “It’s your fault I’m the way I am.” Perhaps Mildred has been too busy to notice that her daughter has become a gorgon or is simply too weak to say no to her. A more likely explanation is that she cannot separate Veda from herself, for she is Mildred’s class aspirations come to monstrous life. Mildred says she loves Veda more than herself, but, as Haskell observes, her love masks a “hatred so intense it must be disguised as love” (32): a hatred, I would add, not just of Veda but of herself.

  Why does Mildred hate herself? Because she is torn between the myth of domesticity, in which a woman’s worth is certified by her credentials as wife, homemaker, and mother, and the emerging postwar ethos that encouraged women to boost their self-esteem (and independence) through nondomestic labor. Just as Mildred’s homemaker self despises the ambitious entrepreneur, so Veda’s snotty remarks about grease express Mildred’s own self-disgust. The film is similarly riven. Thus Mildred’s restaurants are depicted as lively, collegial, female-dominated environments—welcome respites from men and her stifling home. The restaurant also lets Mildred find her voice: when she tries to purchase the restaurant property from Beragon, Wally, who has engineered the deal, won’t let her speak; only when she makes her own plea does Beragon agree to sell. Soon after that scene, however, Curtiz dissolves from Mildred’s face to Mildred’s place: she becomes the restaurant.9 By commodifying herself, the film suggests, she loses both her femininity and her humanity. Veda’s fake-pregnancy scheme thus reflects lessons learned from her mother: to get ahead, you must sell yourself.

  Indeed, everyone is a commodity in Mildred Pierce. Not only does Mildred turn herself into a restaurant; she also buys Monty, gradually increasing her “loans” to him until he becomes little more than a gigolo, then purchasing him as a present for the estranged Veda (“Sold. One Beragon,” Mildred remarks). Veda uses her body to get money; Wally betrays Mildred for money. By working outside the home, the film implies, Mildred merely exchanges one form of objectification for another; in prostituting Beragon, she also prostitutes herself. In short, her American dream is self-sabotaging: as Cain commented, the story proposes that “a dream come true may be the worst possible thing that can happen” (qtd. in Als 111).

  Both forms of female labor, then, seem poisonous in Mildred Pierce. At the conclusion Mildred is back with Bert, and as they walk from the police station, they pass two cleaning women on their knees—images of a woman’s proper place, perhaps. Several critics therefore argue that the film condemns Mildred and demonstrates Hollywood’s efforts to “rechannel working women back into the home” (Biesen 143).10 The film is, however, as Walsh points out, far from univocal (133). After all, Mildred is as much victim as perpetrator. Because males exploit her, her business fails. Because society is suspicious of female entrepreneurs, Mildred must work twice as hard to succeed. Because the community stigmatizes divorcees, she gets no help in raising her daughters. Yet despite these obstacles, she bounces back again and again. Indeed, the restaurant scenes, with their female workers bursting with industry and purpose, resonate beyond the chastening conclusion. Mildred Pierce epitomizes Jeanine Basinger’s argument that even retrograde or ambiguous films can foster progressive ideas. To convince women that marriage and motherhood were desirable, she writes, Hollywood had to show women doing something else. “By making the Other live on the screen, movies made it real. By making it real, they made it desirable. By making it
desirable, they made it possible” (6). By asking what women should do, Hollywood implied that there was more than one answer. Mildred Pierce thus demonstrates how female artists and protagonists, even when supervised by males, exerted pressure on Hollywood’s industrial system and generic conventions.

  Female Properties

  Other women managed to exercise more creative control. Two women—Joan Harrison and Virginia Van Upp—even became producers. The Oxford-educated Harrison began as Alfred Hitchcock’s production assistant, learning the business from Hitch and his wife, writer Alma Reville. Harrison earned cowriting credits on five Hitchcock films before striking out on her own as a screenwriter. She eventually became a producer at Universal and RKO, where she supervised several noirs, four of which I have already discussed. Because I treat her films at length elsewhere in this book, here I will merely glance at her work.11 I have already pointed out how films such as Nocturne, Uncle Harry, and Ride the Pink Horse challenge gender norms and macho posturing by harnessing these themes to crime stories. Indeed, Harrison insisted that she was “proud of being a [crime] specialist” (qtd. in Francke 57), but despite her hard-boiled oeuvre, news stories and studio publicity releases invariably emphasized her “ah-inspiring legs,” “wavy blonde hair, dimples and … 24-inch waistline” (qtd. in Francke 59). More insidious was the institutional sexism she faced: as Harrison confessed to the Boston Sunday Post in August 1944, studio heads “simply do not want to give a woman authority. … They recognize women writers but prefer to keep us in prescribed groves [sic]” (qtd. in Francke 60).