by Mark Osteen
Calling herself “Mrs. Smith,” Louise seeks help from a physician, who diagnoses schizophrenia and compares her to a person who can’t wake from a dream. Then Mrs. Smith asks Dean for a divorce. But he has his own cure in mind: she must face her illness by returning to the lake estate where Pauline died. Once there, Louise sees a hand close the window of Pauline’s room, then hears her buzzer and a tinny voice calling, “Louise!” She enters Pauline’s bedroom, and we hear a series of screams. Racing upstairs, Dean finds Louise standing in the corner, a shadow slashing her middle. “It’s Pauline,” she declares. “She wants me to kill myself like she did.” Louise indeed seems “possessed” by the spirit of the first Mrs. Graham, just as she has been possessed in marriage by Mr. Graham. He calms her, but Louise’s torments aren’t over, for she remains fixated on David Sutton. After Carol announces her engagement to Sutton, Louise coldly informs her that Sutton is still in love with her and vows to prevent the marriage at any cost. When Dean tells Louise that he has engaged a shrink for her, Louise screams, “You just wanna lock me up; you wanna put me away, I know!” Then she races to Sutton’s place and points a pistol at him. The arrogant Sutton can’t believe she would pull the trigger, but she does, repeatedly, killing him.
The flashback ends with Louise screaming, “I killed him! David! David!” Dr. Willard smugly concludes that Louise is what used to be called “possessed of devils” and (in a reprise of the epigraph to Spellbound) asserts that he must cast them out. He declares that Pauline’s death triggered Louise’s psychosis and that she is “neither mentally nor morally responsible for any of her actions.”39 But neither he nor Graham mentions the obsession with Sutton—the real catalyst for her illness—nor the servitude and emotional repression that fed her illness, nor the likelihood that their patronizing behavior exacerbated her disorder. Indeed, the real problem, as R. Barton Palmer observes, isn’t psychological but ideological: that the David Suttons and Dean Grahams of the world are free to enact their desires, but the world’s Louise Howells are not (166). She can revolt only by becoming insane, thereby refusing to be integrated or pacified. Alas, the hospital only multiplies the imprisonment, isolation, and alienation that Louise experienced outside its walls. Inside at last, Louise will never get out.
Similar themes are stressed in Caged, a hard-hitting hybrid of noir and social-problem film set in a women’s prison and produced by Jerry Wald for Warner Bros.40 Journalist Virginia Kellogg, who cowrote the screenplay, spent months visiting women’s prisons and even stayed in one for two weeks to obtain material. Later she wrote that the club women who visit prisons never see the “rot” inside (qtd. in Francke 73; emphasis in original).41 But Caged also exposes a more insidious rot at the core of American society. Like Possessed, it first distinguishes between the inside and outside only to conclude that there is little difference between them.
The film’s first shot puts us inside a police van filled with female convicts, looking out the window with protagonist Marie Allen (Eleanor Parker). A frightened naif, Marie seems out of place among these hardened women. Her “crime” is, again, one of complicity: she and her husband, Tom, had moved in with her mother and stepfather, but the men couldn’t get along. Desperate for cash, the out-of-work Tom held up a gas station, and when he was clubbed by the attendant, Marie tried to help him, which made her an accomplice. She received a fifteen-year sentence—all for a paltry forty dollars. “Five bucks less and it wouldn’t be a felony,” remarks the intake clerk. Clearly Marie is guilty of little more than weakness and of being a woman. Though her age is nineteen, her more important number is 93850: her new identity. Indeed, as the film proceeds, Marie is gradually stripped of everything she once called her own: privacy, free time, and—after she learns that she is pregnant and must bear her child in prison—control over her body. Her loss of agency is brilliantly rendered by director John Cromwell through a disturbing montage. A prison bell chimes, followed by a repetitive round of tasks: bell, work, bell, roll call, bell, chow, bell, end of work. Their time totally regulated, the inmates become machines.
According to head matron Evelyn Harper (frighteningly played by Hope Emerson), however, the inmates are just animals and should be treated as such. She puts Marie to work scrubbing the floor: “Just like the big cage in the zoo; only you clean it up, instead of the keeper.” At the other extreme is prison superintendent Ruth Benson (Agnes Moorehead), whose well-meaning liberal aims and empathy for the inmates are impotent to overturn the power structures inside and outside the prison. The inside is ruled by Harper and inmate Kitty Stark (Betty Garde), who recruits inmates to become “boosters” (shoplifters) for her gang, promising phony legit jobs and paroles for those who cooperate. She advises Marie to “wise up before it’s too late,” but Marie declines the offer. Despite these hierarchies, the prisoners unite to help one inmate, June (Olive Deering), dress up for her parole hearing, and they defend each other against informants and brutality. And whenever a train passes by, all of them stop, listen, and gaze longingly out the barred windows at the “free side.” They’re all alike in another important respect: “if it wasn’t for men,” June concludes, “we wouldn’t be in here.”
When June is denied parole and hangs herself, the shock induces labor for Marie, who delivers her baby boy prematurely. Afterward Benson threatens to fire Harper for not informing her of June’s depressed state, but Harper, who knows a highly placed politician, is immune. As she and Benson argue, the camera rests behind Harper, so that Benson’s tiny head appears to grow out of Harper’s shoulder, showing us who really holds power. Harper’s view of the inmates is also shared by the world outside, represented by the smug Senator Donnelly (Taylor Holmes), who pays a visit after an obstetrician reports the infirmary’s filthy condition, sneering at Benson’s pleas for more rehabilitation services and a bigger budget. After he departs, Benson gazes out her barred window at the street below: she is as caged as the prisoners. The fact of female confinement becomes even clearer when Marie’s mother visits. Marie implores her to take her baby, but her stepfather won’t allow it. Her mother can’t leave him, or “there’d be no one to take care of me till you get out.” So Marie must put the baby up for adoption. This lost child signifies her disconnection from the outside and the loss of control over her body and her circumstances. Mother and daughter—one outside, the other inside—are equally imprisoned by their gender.
Marie Allen (Eleanor Parker) is Caged. Kobal Collection / Art Resource, NY.
Marie’s parole hearing further illuminates her plight. The board members—all men—won’t look at her. Nor do they want to hear her story (one of them even wears a poorly functioning hearing aid), for they have already made up their minds. Deeming her “hardly more than a child,” they refuse to let her live on her own. Yet Marie’s stepfather won’t take her in. Ironically, then, Marie’s youth and innocence work against her, despite her protest that she’s not like the other inmates. Denied parole because she lacks “beneficial influences on the outside,” Marie is trapped in a Catch-22: if she is corrupted, she must stay; but if she remains innocent, she is powerless to create favorable conditions for parole. Under the guise of protecting her, then, the parole board further dehumanizes her, meanwhile sitting smugly beneath a copy of The Declaration of Independence. After Marie hears their decision, the prison bell rings loudly, and a siren sends her screaming down a corridor and into the yard, where she ineffectually tries to climb the barbed-wire-topped wall.
In the aftermath Marie is hardened, exchanging her former breathy tentativeness for a clipped delivery. The entrance of “vice queen” Elvira Powell (Lee Patrick), who gets Kitty Stark exiled to solitary confinement, disrupts the inmates’ hierarchy, and Marie’s foolish attempt to adopt a kitten prompts a riot and earns Harper’s wrath: Marie’s reward is a shaved head and a stint in solitary. Having already lost her identity, her baby, and her hope, Marie has left only her will; this new punishment crushes that as well, and we watch her weep hopelessly in the darknes
s. But what finally breaks Marie isn’t punishment but a simple look. When a group of “club women” visit the prison, Marie is arrested not by their rude comments (“it smells like a zoo”) but by the pitying stare of the youngest visitor—a woman like the one Marie might have become. Her stare mirrors our own emotions—prurient interest, followed by horror and pity—but it is cut off before it can change into moral outrage. The glare that Marie returns to the woman is also directed at us, as if to say, “Judge me if you dare.” So Marie joins Elvira’s gang. As she does, the inmates sing “Amazing Grace,” but there is no grace for Marie. There isn’t even the kind of rough justice that Kitty renders on Harper by stabbing her to death with a fork. There is only conforming. Ironically, only when Marie is finally corrupted does she receive parole. Aware that her outside job is a fraud, Benson reminds her that in a couple of months she might have been paroled and preserved her “self-respect and dignity.” Marie snarls, “What did those things ever get me? … From now on what’s in it for me is all that matters,” and sardonically concludes, “for that forty bucks Tom and I heisted I certainly got myself an education.” Marie has come of age; she has acquired a new identity, though hardly the sort promised by the Declaration’s ringing phrase about the pursuit of happiness. Prison has also taught her the same lesson Ethel Whitehead learns: use others before they use you. Marie sells out. But what choice does she have? In Caged it matters little whether one lives inside or outside the walls, for a woman is imprisoned either way.
Both Possessed and Caged, as their titles indicate, share a grim vision of America as a vast carceral institution that, under the guise of helping women, strips them of their souls. Although each film fits into a Hollywood genre—the psychiatry film and the social-problem picture, respectively—they also reveal how their protagonists’ gender exacerbates their ill treatment. Less hemmed in than Louise or Marie but still constrained by the studio system, writers Silvia Richards and Virginia Kellogg managed to fashion provocative feminist examinations of American ideologies and institutions.
For Richer, for Poorer
The institution perhaps most on women’s minds, however, was marriage. Femme noir probes this institution in two films, Caught and The Bigamist, which are ideal test cases, not only for their content but also for their production histories. Both explicitly address postwar conflicts about the two kinds of labor, and both depict marriage in a myriad of guises: as an economic arrangement and a prison but also as a refuge and means of redemption. Each is also the offspring of a mixed creative “marriage.” Loosely adapted from Libbie Block’s novel Wild Calendar and told from a woman’s point of view, Caught was created by a male writer, Arthur Laurents, and a male director, Max Ophuls (who took over from John Berry).42 Conversely, The Bigamist, scripted by Collier Young and directed by Ida Lupino, is told from the (male) bigamist’s point of view. Both were the brainchildren of independent production companies (Caught of Enterprise Studios, a consortium of leftist artists and businesspersons, The Bigamist by Filmakers, Inc.), two of several that sprouted in late-1940s Hollywood, providing artists with greater sovereignty and expanding the zone of permissible content.43 Both films exemplify how progressive filmmakers developed alternatives to the studio system that enabled them to critique hallowed American institutions and beliefs.
“Look at me, look at what you’ve bought!” shouts Leonora Ames (Barbara Bel Geddes) to her husband, the wealthy (and much older) Smith Ohlrig (Robert Ryan) in Caught. But Leonora wanted to be bought: she molded herself into a commodity modeled after the pages of a fashion magazine. Early in the film, as she and her roommate fantasize about landing a rich husband and wearing mink coats, Maud (her original name) decides to enroll in the Dorothy Dale School of Charm, whose credo is “look your best” to win a husband. There she changes her name to Leonora (it’s more “charming”) and learns to walk, talk, and wear clothes, which leads to a modeling job. Clearly the mink coats she wears are not the only items for sale (Doane, Desire 157). Soon she meets Ohlrig, who, as he drives her to his mansion, quizzes her coldly about her life and assumes she’ll sleep with him. Leonora declines, which only whets Ohlrig’s appetite. The next scene, a session with his psychiatrist, reveals him as a pathologically insecure man driven by an insatiable need for omnipotence. His recurrent “heart attacks” are, according to the doctor, really panic attacks, pleas for pity issuing from the loneliness and fear he hides behind his imperious manner. When the doctor challenges him about his inability to form relationships, Ohlrig vows to prove him wrong by marrying Leonora.44
A year after the nuptials, we find the miserable Mrs. Ohlrig at home, with nothing to do but look stunning in her expensive clothing: she has indeed been flattened into a magazine photo. Ophuls and cinematographer Lee Garmes brilliantly use deep focus to stress the rooms’ immense emptiness, as well as Leonora’s isolation and diminished self-esteem. Not only does she never see her husband; she is tormented by his factotum, the oily Franzi (Curt Bois), who plays awful piano and responds to her laments with a brusque “tough.” When Smith at last comes home, he treats her as a servant, then humiliates her in front of his associates when she has the temerity to laugh while he projects a self-aggrandizing movie about his accomplishments. As they argue, Leonora faces away from Smith, denying him the adoring gaze he desires and reversing her original position as spectator and consumer of idealized images.45 After she shouts, “Look at what you’ve bought,” Ohlrig notes that she’s better paid than any of his other employees.
The next day she quits this “job” to seek one as a receptionist in the office of Doctors Hoffman (an obstetrician) and Quinada (James Mason as a pediatrician; the doctors’ specialties point to her possible future), whose small, noisy waiting room contrasts starkly with Ohlrig’s sterile Brobdingnagian manse. Leonora charms Quinada into giving her the job, only to quit two weeks later after he scolds her for parroting Dorothy Dale dogma to a little girl. A chastened Ohlrig visits Leonora’s tiny apartment, imploring her to come back to him and pledging that things will be different (but as they speak, she is repeatedly framed in doorways that make her resemble a doll in a box). However, when she learns that the honeymoon Smith had promised is actually a business trip, she leaves her mink coat at the mansion, returns to Quinada, acquires secretarial skills, and accompanies him on a house call. Shocked at her lack of an overcoat, Quinada offers to buy her one; but this time she won’t be lured by new clothes. As they talk, they stand before a store selling “New and Used Merchandise”: used merchandise herself, Leonora has learned a few things. Soon the doctor proposes, but Leonora, pregnant with Ohlrig’s child, must first get a divorce. Quinada follows her to Ohlrig’s mansion, where he looks puny within its vast spaces, and where Ohlrig informs him that Leonora is still his “employee.” As the men argue, the camera pans back and forth to track Leonora’s pacing, illustrating her role as a shuttlecock in their battle for control. (The metaphor is apt, for Ohlrig is addicted to games.) Her husband seems to win by refusing to divorce her unless she gives him sole custody of the baby. He claims to despise her for her weakness, but what he really hates is his own weakness: his inability to make her love, honor, and obey him. Leonora shuts herself in her room and refuses to come out, despite Ohlrig’s insistent phone calls and Franzi’s blandishments. At last even Franzi grows fed up with Ohlrig’s brutality and quits.
From her bed Leonora hears a crash and dashes downstairs to find Ohlrig lying helplessly beside his beloved pinball machine. She looms over him, then walks away as he begs for water. In the aftermath, tortured by guilt—“I wanted him to die,” she cries (though he doesn’t die)—she goes into labor. Beside her in the ambulance, Quinada exultantly tells her that she is “free to start living again.” Yet, as Doane observes, the blocking and camera movements contradict his words: as Quinada cheers her up, he moves closer and closer, finally nearly lying upon her, and the camera closes in on Leonora, as if to imply that she is “caught in the pincers” of marriage (Desire 172). The last shot
of Leonora, lying in a hospital bed, writes Doane, depicts her as another Louise Howell, “a helpless, bedridden object of the medical gaze” (174). The film’s tone, however, contradicts this reading; indeed, what is most disturbing here may be the cavalier, even jocular manner with which everyone treats the death of her premature baby, as if to acknowledge that the child was a mere plot (in)convenience in the first place. Along with the baby, “Mrs. Ohlrig” dies too. Perhaps she can now give birth to a new self.46
In Caught, Dr. Quinada (James Mason) is dwarfed by Smith Ohlrig (Robert Ryan) and his mansion. Kobal Collection / Art Resource, NY.
One would like to believe that Leonora has traded her alienated labor as Ohlrig’s captive for Quinada’s love and has cast off her shallow aspiration to be a magazine picture. But one need not entirely agree with Doane to find the film’s conclusion unsatisfactory. Even putting aside the ending’s rushed pace (perhaps owing to the demise of Enterprise midway through the shoot), Leonora still marries a man who is also her boss.47 Her relationship with Quinada is based on the same conflation of roles that characterized her marriage to Ohlrig. As Doane remarks, she “becomes the object of exchange, from Smith Ohlrig to Dr. Quinada” (173). Hence, the film indicates that Leonora cannot be independent because marriage, even when motivated by love, remains an economic arrangement in which men control the purse strings.