Nightmare Alley - Film Noir And The American Dream

by Mark Osteen

  Soon the police arrive at Emmerich’s house, inquiring about Brannom, whose body was found in the river; Emmerich claims he was with his mistress that night. After they leave, he reassures his wife with the words about “left-handed endeavor” quoted above. In their proximate context, as I have noted, the words seem a feeble alibi for amorality, but they express red noir’s larger theme that crime and capitalism, crime and law enforcement, are not just mirror images but symbiotic enterprises. About to be arrested, Emmerich kills himself. Things go further downhill from there: Louie dies from his wounds and Cobby, after Ditrich slaps him around, turns stool pigeon, leading to Gus’s arrest.44 So much for solidarity.

  That leaves only Dix and Doc, who has the jewels but no way to turn them into money. Yet he is mostly upset that all his planning has gone for nothing (“What can you do against blind accident?”) and blames himself for not killing Emmerich: “Greed made me blind.” Far from greedy, Dix gives Doc $1,000—but he never has a chance to spend it. Lingering in a diner to ogle a dancing teenaged girl, Doc is arrested. The brilliant, meticulous planner is foiled not by blind accident but by simple human weakness. Yet he scarcely matches the picture of criminals painted by Commissioner Hardy, who delivers a speech to the press after Doc’s (and Ditrich’s) arrest. “People are being cheated, robbed, murdered, raped. … It’s the same in every city of the modern world. But suppose we had no police force, good or bad? … The battle’s finished, the jungle wins. The predatory beasts take over.” Most dangerous of all, he insists, is Dix, a “hooligan, a man without human feeling or human mercy.” His words ring hollow, for we already know that Dix is generous and loyal (indeed, if anyone seems to lack human feeling or mercy, it’s the commissioner, with his brusque manner and obsession with order). A dissolve to Dix’s final moments further undercuts Hardy’s pronouncement. Although (according to the doctor who diagnoses him) Dix “hasn’t got enough blood left in him to keep a chicken alive,” he makes it back to Hickory Wood, only to collapse in a pasture. In the film’s powerful concluding shots the camera rests on the ground next to Dix’s body; his unseeing eyes stare up at the sky while a mare and colt nuzzle him. A long shot shows his tiny figure dwarfed by the vast expanse. Dix has made it home—but it’s too late to wash off the city dirt.

  The film implies, however, that Dix’s pastoral dream, his vision of an unspoiled America, has been besmirched not by crime but by urbanization and the cynicism of people like Emmerich. And when we recall the rapid collapse of Huston’s Committee for the First Amendment after the first HUAC hearings, The Asphalt Jungle seems to reflect his loss of faith in collective action. The gang has power only as a group, but fear and mistrust, along with the cash nexus, break them up. Even so, the film’s criminals—like those labor agitators who became criminals only when the laws changed—are more honorable than Ditrich, the sole policeman we see up close. Above all, the film affirms Doll’s touchingly unconditional love for Dix. They are more victims than villains, as are Louie and Gus, disenfranchised lower-class urbanites who lack even Dix’s nostalgic vision. The city has borrowed nature’s teeth and claws, and in this jungle those without education or resources inevitably end up as prey.

  The Blacklist Disguised

  Leftist filmmakers were themselves prey for red-baiters, greedy studio heads, reactionary politicians, and their own peers. If Dalton Trumbo’s placating 1970 pronouncement that “there were only victims” (qtd. in Navasky 371) in the blacklist period failed to distinguish between those who stood on principle and those who elected to save their careers, it also implied that the artists didn’t fight back. But the blacklistees did appeal to civil liberties organizations (to little avail) and endeavored to continue their careers. Of course, given that they were unable to work, it was difficult for them to respond through cinema itself. Yet one radical director, Cyril Endfield, made two films in 1950 and 1951 that attacked the blacklist as explicitly as was possible. The first, The Underworld Story, has been virtually ignored in noir criticism; I analyze the second, Try and Get Me! in the conclusion. It is remarkable that Endfield was able to get these brave films made, even as independent productions, for both movies criticize the blacklist and indict the press for contributing to the red scare by pandering to readers’ worst impulses and serving as mouthpieces for reactionary corporate interests.45

  When reporter Mike Reese (Dan Duryea) writes a story causing District Attorney Munsey (Michael O’Shea) to be shot, Reese is blacklisted by newspaper magnate E. J. Stanton (Herbert Marshall). Unable to find a job with another city paper, he borrows money from gangster Carl Durham (future blacklistee Howard Da Silva) and buys a share in the small-town Lakeville Sentinel. Reese, however, is no hero but a cynical operator who lies about his motives to co-owner Cathy (Gale Storm). Then a break comes: Stanton’s daughter-in-law, Diane, is found murdered in Lakeville. To Cathy she was a friend, but to Reese she is just a story, a lucrative one: he immediately sets up a wire-service exclusive and starts to milk it for all it’s worth, especially after Molly Rankin, an African American servant who pawned Diane’s jewelry the day of her murder, becomes the prime suspect.46 Molly appears at the Sentinel office and appeals to Cathy and Reese; he persuades her to turn herself in and tell her story to reporters and to Munsey, who, he assures her, is a “pal of mine.” The shadows on Reese, however, imply that he’s not to be trusted, and in fact he is maneuvering to get the $25,000 reward for her capture. He even tells Munsey she is guilty but cautions him about speaking by phone: “Don’t you think your phone’s being tapped, just like everybody else’s around here?” The comment doesn’t make sense in the context of the film (it is too early in the story for Reese’s phone to be tapped) and was likely dropped in to remind viewers of the real-life surveillance occurring at the time. Munsey refuses to give Reese the reward, but Reese doesn’t give up: he forms a Save Molly Committee, enlists townspeople (including Mrs. Eldridge, the banker’s wife), and solicits donations.47 He even hires expensive lawyer Becker (Roland Winters) to defend her. But Reese doesn’t give a damn about Molly; he plans to use her “human interest” story to make money and split it with Becker.

  Immediately the Sentinel starts running stories with headlines such as “Lakeville Community Doubts Rankin’s Guilt.” We more than doubt it, for we learn early on that E. J.’s son, Clark (Gar Moore), murdered his wife out of jealousy. Though appalled and angry after Clark’s confession, the senior Stanton vows to save his son. But that shouldn’t be difficult, Clark assures him: “Who’ll believe … the word of a nigger against ours?” His views are echoed by the town’s reactionary elements, represented by a character called The Major. And so Stanton smears Molly in his newspapers with headlines such as “An Eye for an Eye” and “State Claims Airtight Case.”48 Even Becker believes that “the verdict’s in. If she was white, she wouldn’t stand a chance.” Thus, Reese’s defense committee initially rakes in donations and attracts volunteers, but after a cabal of bankers and businessmen exerts covert pressure, donations dry up, committee members resign, and a rally for Molly is canceled. This, we see, is how blacklists work: nothing is out in the open, and money talks silently. Reese and Becker approach Molly with a deal: plead guilty to manslaughter and get a light sentence (so they can salvage the remaining committee funds). Becker will argue that Molly killed Diane in justified rage after her boss called her lazy and shiftless. “Think of yourself,” Reese advises her. “Like you did when you were ready to sell me for $25,000?” she retorts. “That’s a high price for a human being. I had a great-grandfather who was sold for much less.” In rejecting her commodification, she exposes Reese’s slimy tactics. He returns to the Sentinel office to find the printing press smashed. Parky, the printer, comments, “Looks like they’re burning witches again.” Turn Molly from black to red, alter Becker’s advice from pleading guilty to naming names, and the allusions are as clear as a mountain lake.

  Molly’s scolding prompts a change of heart for Reese, but on learning of evidence exonerating her
, he foolishly shares it with Clark Stanton and agrees to meet him at his office. Clark, however, has hired Durham to silence Reese in exchange for a lifetime of positive publicity from the Stanton newspapers. Extortion, blackmail, and murder? Just business. The now-righteous Reese meets with Stanton and his staff and pleads, “Here’s your chance to make those words on the Stanton mastheads about ethics and truth really mean something.” But Stanton refuses, and as he departs, Reese reads a wall engraving: “This building is dedicated to the cause of true industrial freedom and liberty under the law.” The words are a direct blast at the real-life press’s rush to judgment and its craven yielding to red-baiters and corporate flunkies (“industrial freedom” refers to the freedom to strike, the very freedom that aroused Hollywood’s right wing). But Reese’s reflection is also visible beneath the words, which apply to him—the man who used murder as a publicity stunt and slanted the news as much as the Stantons, albeit for a better cause.

  Durham, now working for Stanton, abducts Reese, but Cathy convinces Munsey—who had dismissed Reese’s panicked phone call about Stanton as just another gimmick—to send the police after them. The police fool Durham’s guards by pretending to be drunks (in another nod to the history of American race relations, the fake drunks sing “John Brown’s Body”). But despite repeated beatings, Reese won’t reveal whether he has told anyone else what he knows. Growing queasy at the violence, the elder Stanton asks Durham, “What are you?” Durham answers, “Same as you, only smarter.” He thus reiterates a primary tenet of red noir: capitalists and criminals are the same, except that “legitimate” capitalists hide their depredations behind fancy houses and fine words. In the end E. J. Stanton shoots his son as he tries to escape, the truth comes out, and Reese is hailed as a hero. Yet this denouement matters less than the film’s courageous stand against the co-optation of the press.49 The Underworld Story demonstrates compellingly how free speech and equality under the law—values codified in America’s founding documents—have been twisted into excuses for profit-taking. Truth is a matter of what we now call “spin,” and accusations require no proof so long as they are repeated frequently and loudly enough. Public opinion is easily molded by appeals to fear, and corporations, including movie studios, will do anything to preserve profits. Hence the film’s title, which initially seems a misnomer, is apt: as Humphries points out, the “underworld” refers not to ordinary crooks but to the “life-style, values and activities of the wealthy bourgeoisie” (235) who scapegoat the innocent and powerless to cover up their own crimes.50 They are, the film argues, no better than slave owners.

  It is now clear that red noir’s makers were brave, committed artists who challenged American citizens and institutions to live the values they professed to endorse: an abhorrence of tyranny, freedom of speech and the press, equality under the law for all classes and races. They defended the dignity and humanity of the poor and disenfranchised and the rights of the working class to earn a decent living without being exploited. That these artists were harassed, jailed, humiliated, blacklisted, and hounded to death testifies to the power of fear and the fickleness of public opinion. Just as guilty as the witch hunters, however, were the studio heads: it was they, after all, who perpetrated the blacklist. The HUAC hearings and the Hollywood witch hunt are black spots in American history that, we sigh in relief, are safely consigned to the past. If only that were true. In fact, among the most striking features of red noir is that its challenge to uphold American values remains viable today. Substitute Muslims for Communists, and the similarities between 1951 and 2011 are striking. As I write, Americans are again beset by hysteria about “Socialists” and cowed by reactionaries spewing lies in the media about progressive citizens. Most chilling of all is that since September 11, 2001, we have replicated the violations of privacy and liberty that occurred sixty years ago. It is these violations, red noir reminds us, that are truly “un-American activities.”

  Conclusion

  American Nightmares

  “After Hiroshima, after the death of Roosevelt, and after the [HUAC] investigations, only then did one begin to see the complete unreality of the American dream,” observed director Joseph Losey in the late 1970s (qtd. in Ciment 96). As is now clear, many, though not all, noir filmmakers shared his views. For example, certain vet noirs depict traumatized ex-GIs healing their wounds and fashioning new selves; a few jazz films hold out hope for interracial harmony and for self-making through improvisation; women writers and directors modeled female empowerment through creative labor. Other films noir criticize not the values themselves but their perversion. Thus, for instance, Body and Soul endorses upward mobility and indicates that honest labor and the support of family and community may enable a striver to fight capitalist exploiters—but only through extraordinary sacrifice and tenacity. The Underworld Story dramatizes how a free press can be a powerful instrument to combat corruption.

  For the majority of noir’s characters, however, the American Dream is a chimera. The noir canon shows that the American ideals of individual liberty and self-invention are often at odds with true community. Hence, Hollow Triumph implies that radical individualism engenders a world of alienated monads indifferent to each other’s pain. The displaced, impoverished characters in the car films—Bowie and Keechie, Al Roberts—find only small oases of freedom in the autos that, ultimately, fail to provide security or social mobility. The film Nightmare Alley dramatizes how the pursuit of happiness is transformed into a shallow consumerism by means of a therapeutic ethos that supplies cheap but ultimately unsatisfying solutions to existential questions. Red noirs such as Force of Evil depict capitalism as criminal exploitation. In general, noir’s ordinary citizens are at the mercy of powerful forces they have no chance of resisting.

  I conclude this book by examining two late noirs by former Communists—Endfield’s Try and Get Me! and Losey’s The Prowler, both from 1951—that powerfully depict how the Dream has been voided. In the first, working stiff Howard Tyler, hemmed in by poverty, becomes a criminal and then a scapegoat for his community’s rage and resentment. In the second, policeman Webb Garwood is enslaved to “false values”—a belief that material wealth is all that matters (Losey, qtd. in Ciment 100). Driven by a “monstrous, all-consuming class envy,” he is a portrait of the American striver gone sour (Krutnik, “Living” 62). Their American nightmares drive each protagonist to a lonely, humiliating death.

  Groceries

  Made and released by Robert Stillman Productions, another small, independent company, Try and Get Me! was Endfield’s final American film before his forced emigration to escape the blacklist.1 Adapted by Jo Pagano from his novel The Condemned, Try and Get Me! (also released under the title The Sound of Fury) not only indicts the capitalist system that discards Howard Tyler; like The Underworld Story, it also condemns the press for fueling mass hysteria. In this film free enterprise and freedom of the press have become cloaks for the rapacious pursuit of money and power.2

  The film opens with a blind street preacher barking about the world’s evils, urging listeners to “change your directions! … Look ye blind that ye may see. … I can see a better world,” he promises, but warns that “whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.” He is ignored and knocked down by crowds hurtling blindly toward who knows what. If his words clearly apply to Howard Tyler (Frank Lovejoy), a man afflicted with moral blindness who certainly reaps what he sows, they also fit columnist Gil Stanton (Richard Carlson), who learns too late that words can be weapons.

  Out of work and increasingly bitter and desperate, Tyler gives his son, Tommy, fifty cents to attend a ballgame, even though the money is needed for food. His pregnant wife, Judy (Kathleen Ryan), voices her frustration at “begging for groceries, begging for doctors. Is that what we came to California for?” The embodiment of the American Dream of westward expansion, self-reinvention, and unlimited possibility, California has become a giant net enclosing their prospects. But a way out presents itself at the bowling alley
that night, when Howard meets Jerry Slocum (former Communist Lloyd Bridges), a vain, domineering man with a glib line of patter, who forces a snort on the abstinent Howard and whose leering war anecdotes make Howard feel inferior (Howard never saw combat). Later, Slocum prances shirtless in his room, combing his hair, while boasting that all women are partial to “green”; soon he has Howard stroking his shirt and buttoning his cuff links for him (the homoerotic undercurrent here is unmistakable). But when the “jobs” Jerry had mentioned turn out to be small-time holdups, Howard blanches and Jerry grows surly: “You guys kill me. They kick ya in the teeth and the more they kick ya the better ya like it. Whaddaya lookin’ for, handouts?” He throws ten bucks at Tyler and sneers, “Live!” The low angle on Jerry underlines his dominance over Howard, who meekly yields: after all, he only has to drive the car.

  Though Howard stays in the car while Jerry robs a mom-and-pop filling station / grocery store, we don’t. We watch the psychopathic Slocum pistol-whip the attendant and leave the elderly female proprietor in tears. Afterward, Jerry is cocky, Howard ambivalent. But the latter’s mixed feelings evaporate after he picks up Tommy and Judy from a neighbor’s, where they are watching television. Holding a large bag of groceries, he promises to buy a television set and pretends that his wad of bills is an advance on his salary at the cannery. Unable to participate in the consumer society that proffers brand-new TVs and burnished fruit as proofs of success, Howard, like so many noir protagonists, seeks in crime an avenue to the glittering prosperity promised by advertisements. Before long he is urging Judy to buy expensive shoes (even while warning Tommy that he might “put somebody’s eyes out” with his toy gun). Emasculated by poverty, he briefly feels empowered by the money the stickups bring, but he purchases this bogus manhood at the cost of submitting to Jerry’s increasingly wild schemes.