by Mark Osteen
8. For an excellent account and analysis of the bebop revolution see DeVeaux.
9. Butler calls the solo “masturbatory” (62), but since “Jeannie” is pretending to enjoy it and urging Cliff to his exertions, it’s at least mutual masturbation, if not simulated intercourse.
10. In the source novel Woolrich refers to the musicians’ “possessed, demonic” faces and describes the room as a “Dante-esque Inferno,” where the sounds and abundant reefers bring “terror into her soul” (144).
11. As McCann astutely notes, the musicians’ blousy sleeves adumbrate Steve’s arm cast (124), thereby implying jazz’s role in fostering his sexual obsession.
12. These two Siodmak films employ the same song, “I’ll Remember April,” to signify nostalgia and lost love. In Phantom Lady it becomes the main musical theme after the phantom lady plays it on the jukebox during the night of the murder. In Criss Cross Anna picks out the song’s melody on the piano, giving voice to Steve’s yearning and to her own apparent regret for losing him and taking up with Slim Dundee.
13. I discuss how this fear is manifest particularly in D. O. A. in “The Big Secret” (84).
14. Cantor points out that director Ulmer, an aficionado of classical music, probably would have disapproved of Al’s playing jazz (150).
15. A perfect example of this stereotype appears in Ida Lupino’s first directorial effort, 1949’s Not Wanted, in which jazz pianist Steve Ryan (Leo Penn) impregnates the naive Sally Kelton (Sally Forrest), then abandons her. He has to “travel light,” he insists, and even if such selfish restlessness may be “a sickness,” he can’t help it. I discuss this film and Lupino’s other directorial and authorial work in chapter 7.
16. Joe’s mother provides some of the film’s best moments. In one scene Joe asks her, “How would you feel if I married a murderess?” She replies, “I wouldn’t mind, as long as she was a nice girl.” The screenplay, by hard-boiled novelist Jonathan Latimer (with help from Harrison), contains plenty of snappy dialogue: when Frances, in costume on a movie set, wearies of Joe’s accusations, she dismisses him with “Hop on your scooter, sonny boy, and blow! I’ve got to emote.”
17. The musical sequences in the film are quite believable: Duryea appears to play the piano in several scenes, and June Vincent was in fact a big band singer. The songs—solid midcentury pop—were written for the film by Edgar Fairchild and Jack Brooks.
18. The protagonist is not a musician in either the earlier film or in the source text.
19. The story makes little sense, but it testifies, like the films discussed in the first chapter, to the pervasive influence, and mistrust, of Freudian psychology in midcentury Hollywood. While perusing Belknap’s books, Bressard thumbs a copy of Freud’s Studies in Hysteria.
20. Although their music is definitely of the moldy fig variety, this first interracial jazz group to appear in noir represents a progressive vision. The fact that nobody even comments on the musicians’ race may say less about the state of race relations than about Louis Armstrong’s singular ability to cross racial boundaries.
21. The implausibility of Armstrong and company agreeing to work with such a novice (not to mention the unlikelihood of the novice’s turning them down) is hard to swallow, but we are to understand that Stan is a kid who doesn’t yet know what really matters.
22. These scenes feature other musical interludes, including a lively performance of “La Bota” and Vic Damone’s lugubrious rendition of “Don’t Blame Me,” which, despite his exaggerated emoting and flaring nostrils, effectively expresses Stan’s feelings for Jane.
23. Stan is doubled with little Artie Dell, the bratty son of one of Jane’s friends: on a ride with Jane and Stan, Artie causes a wreck by stomping on the gas pedal; Stan later pulls the same trick to escape from Sonny’s muscle men.
24. Odds is often cited as the last noir of the classic period. The film was produced by Belafonte’s own company, HarBel Productions, and its screenplay credited to African American novelist John O. Killens, though it was actually written by the blacklisted radical Abraham Polonsky. In William McGivern’s source novel Ingram is not a musician but a professional gambler.
25. Belafonte insisted on presenting Ingram as a flawed character and hoped the film would “change the way America was doing business” (Buhle and Wagner, Dangerous 184–85).
26. Wise’s previous film, I Want to Live!, also featured a dynamic jazz score by Johnny Mandel, as well as remarkable performances by an interracial bebop combo including Art Farmer and Gerry Mulligan.
27. About I Want to Live! protagonist Barbara Graham—a convicted killer who cultivates a taste for avant-garde jazz—Wise wrote, “Human beings … don’t come in clearly definable shades of black and white. They come in grays, and often the shades of gray are all but indiscernible” (qtd. in Butler 119). Polonsky wanted to use a simpler ending, but Belafonte sided with Wise in advocating for the explosion; see Server, Polonsky interview (91); and Buhle and Wagner, Dangerous 184.
28. Though the source novel’s premise is the same as the film’s, half of its action occurs after the failed robbery, as Ingram and Slater hole up in a farmhouse. They eventually achieve a rapprochement after Ingram refuses to abandon the wounded Slater, which enables Slater to perceive Ingram (whom he calls “Sambo”) as a human being—indeed, as a “buddy”—and incorporate him into the schema of male homo-social relations he discovered during the war.
29. Butler points out that the major influence on this new jazz scoring was Stan Kenton; Mancini and Rogers, for example, used many Kenton musicians on their soundtracks (106).
30. Stanfield argues that American films of this period frequently “represented urban decay through the trope of the burlesque dancer and stripper” (5).
31. For all its virtues James Naremore’s terrific short book on the film barely mentions the music.
32. Katz and Hamilton’s score was rejected in favor of Bernstein’s (Butler 136). Martin Milner’s guitar work was dubbed by John Pisano.
33. McCann writes that Sweet Smell presents jazz as a “model of hip interracial affinity at odds with a demagogic, and masculinist, popular culture” of Hunsecker and Falco (129). Gabbard likewise observes that the film “associates the music with idealism and a refusal to compromise with the mediocrities represented by Sidney, J. J., and most of the film’s other characters. It places Steve very much on the right side of the art vs. commerce binarism,” and thus stands as “one of the most flattering portraits” of a jazz musician ever seen in American film (128–29).
34. Lupino was in ill health through much of the troubled shoot, which may have given her performance the world-weary edge it needed (see Donati 124). Her singing was dubbed by Peg La Centra.
35. Adrienne McLean offers a list that includes Lizabeth Scott in Dark City, I Walk Alone, The Racket, and Dead Reckoning; Lauren Bacall in To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep; and Ava Gardner in The Killers (13). I would add Nancy Guild in Somewhere in the Night, Lupino in Private Hell 36, and Ellen Drew (though she doesn’t sing on camera) in The Crooked Way. Rita Hayworth also memorably asks us to “Put the Blame on Mame” in Gilda and delivers sultry melodies in The Lady from Shanghai and Affair in Trinidad. For further analyses of the role of torch singers and blues women in noir see Miklitsch (192–241).
36. Pagano also wrote the screenplay for Try and Get Me (discussed in this book’s conclusion) and the film’s source novel, The Condemned.
37. The film lacks flashback narration and the violence typical of noir. However, its nightclub scenes and multiple betrayals justify Gabbard’s description of it as a “film noir with musical characters” (269).
38. San isn’t the only troubled male in this film. Almost every male character is damaged (Sally’s husband, Roy, suffers from war-induced PTSD; neighbor Johnny has a disabled hand), weak (Joey is an ephebe trying to prove himself to his boss), or despicable (Nicky).
39. This song was so well-known, having been a hit in several different
versions, that many filmgoers at the time would have “heard” its lyrics even during instrumental versions.
40. In addition to being a dynamic actress, accomplished screenwriter, and the only female director in Hollywood at the time, Lupino was a composer and capable pianist. But she had a singing voice that one contemporary likened to a “nutmeg grinder” (qtd. in Donati 141–42). We hear the grinder again in Private Hell 36 (a film she cowrote for her company, Filmakers); her character, Lily Marlowe, seems to be a reincarnation of the Road House character.
CHAPTER SEVEN: Femmes Vital
1. Cowie similarly writes that noirs “afforded women roles which are active, adventurous and driven by sexual desire” (135), and she lists a few of the female-authored films I discuss in this chapter (136). For a list of female noir protagonists and writers see Martin 222–25.
2. According to D’Ann Campbell, between 1940 and 1947 women held more than half of all clerical jobs. Clerical work was more secure, more traditionally feminine, and less physically demanding than factory work; it also encouraged relationships with educated coworkers. In short, clerical work was “classy” (108).
3. Molly Haskell distills the “woman’s film” into four types: the sacrificial story, the tale of affliction, the romance of choice between lovers, and the narrative of female competition (163–64). Doane offers somewhat different categories in The Desire to Desire (36): the medical case study, the maternal melodrama, the love story, and the Gothic.
4. Helen Hanson notes, however, that noir deals with “the investigation of the female, the female Gothic with the investigation of the male” (42).
5. Martin lists thirty-three noirs on which women worked as producers, writers, or directors and which also highlighted central female characters (223–24). She lists twenty-seven more involving women writers but not featuring female protagonists.
6. For more background about the negotiations between Breen and the studio see Biesen 141–42.
7. According to the IMDb entry on Mildred Pierce, seven other writers also worked on the film, including three additional women: Margaret Gruen, Louise Randall Pierson, and Margaret Buell Wilder.
8. In Cain’s novel Mildred’s first business is wholesaling her home-baked pies, which become a pungent symbol of her effort to bring the kitchen into the business world: Cain, Mildred Pierce, 74–78, 99–100.
9. The film’s buildings represent Mildred’s shifting identities: the modest Pierce home shows her initial petit bourgeois status; Monty’s cabin manifests her buried sexual desire; the restaurant embodies her social mobility; the Beragon estate represents her class aspirations.
10. See also Krutnik, Lonely 62. Grossman points out that the Warner Bros. promotional materials recast the film’s “representation of female struggle and agency as malevolent” (57).
11. The films are Phantom Lady, Nocturne, Ride the Pink Horse, and The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry.
12. Hanson writes that Carol’s investigation enables her to “ascertain the suitability of the hero as marriage partner” (26), but it’s hard to see how she ascertains anything about Henderson, who remains in jail, unchanged and unable to help himself, until the conclusion.
13. Another of the other five was Anita Loos. By 1944 no woman was on the list.
14. According to Ford the actors “discussed all possible sexual permutations … including a homosexual attachment” between the male characters. Ford also recalls that the actors didn’t know how the film would turn out: “Sometimes we would all be on the set in the morning and Virginia would come in with the script and hand it to us” (qtd. in Martin 215). For a more extensive discussion of the homosexual elements in the film see Dyer, “Resistance” 117–22. For background about the negotiations between the filmmakers and the Production Code Administration see Stokes 30–35.
15. Doane remarks of this scene that Mundson is the “stability against which Gilda is measured. He is predictable and does not deceive the eye” (Femmes 106). But Mundson is the one who changes position in the scene and thereby alters the triangle, and his opacity resists penetration by the viewer’s eye.
16. The song was written specifically for the film by Doris Fisher and Allan Roberts (Stokes 35–36). Doane asserts that Gilda’s striptease offers a metaphor for the entire narrative, which peels away “layers of Gilda’s disguises in order to reveal the ‘good’ woman underneath” (Femmes 107). I would add that Farrell is just as much in disguise as she is; her striptease also unveils his nature.
17. Doane, for example, writes that the “image of volatile sexuality attached to Gilda is too convincing” for the rushed ending to undo (Femmes 108). Andrew Spicer (103) claims that this ending was added at Van Upp’s insistence, but in support he quotes only Martin, who is merely speculating (214–15). Stokes also makes this claim but provides no evidence (29).
18. Walker had previously worked on several B pictures for Poverty Row studios PRC and Republic. One of her early scripts (1943) was for a film called Danger! Women at Work, about three gals who try to run a trucking company, a slight comedy that reflects the postwar concern about women in the workforce. Three of her Republic pictures were crime dramas; one of them, End of the Road, is a noirish story about a man falsely accused (a crime writer helps to free him: “Gertrude Walker”). Walker reused the wrong-man device in her original story for Railroaded! (adapted by John C. Higgins and directed by Anthony Mann), a frame-up tale in which beauty operator Clara Calhoun (Jane Randolph) falsely testifies about a robbery of her establishment organized by her boyfriend, Duke Martin (John Ireland). The sister of the framed man, Rosie Ryan (Sheila Ryan), becomes (like Carol in Phantom Lady) an amateur sleuth, meanwhile juggling the attentions of Martin and Detective Mickey Ferguson (Hugh Beaumont). Clara’s moral crisis and Rosie’s determination provide much of the film’s interest. Walker’s last film work was the screenplay and story for a 1951 Republic picture called Insurance Investigator. The Damned Don’t Cry, adapted from her story “Case History,” is the best film made from Walker’s writing.
19. The scene in which Ethel is interviewed by an employment agency closely resembles two scenes in Cain’s Mildred Pierce: both women want higher-class jobs than their qualifications allow; both turn down jobs as housemaids. It seems likely that Wald, who produced both films, borrowed the scene from Cain’s novel. See Cain, Mildred Pierce 43–50.
20. The slapping scene drew the attention of the censors, who insisted that the beating be softened and shortened (“The Damned Don’t Cry” PCA file).
21. Frings also authored the original story for Hold Back the Dawn and the screenplay for the Gothic Guest in the House (1944) before moving to Paramount. Her most celebrated cinematic work was the screen adaptation of William Inge’s play Come Back, Little Sheba. After retiring from movie work, she wrote for television and then returned to theater. Her adaptation of Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel enjoyed a successful Broadway run in 1958–59 and won her the 1958 Pulitzer Prize for Drama (“Ketti Frings”).
22. Frings’s other noir, Dark City, also depicts complicity. In it Dan Haley (Charlton Heston) is complicit in the suicide of a tourist named Arthur Winant because he fails to stop his associates from cheating Winant in a card game.
23. The trial scenes were drastically shortened in the course of script revisions. Frings’s first draft (dated Nov. 18, 1948) does not depict Cleve and Thelma discussing her testimony, as in the finished film; this material was introduced in the version dated Jan. 4, 1949. File on Thelma Jordon script files.
24. This gambit went through various versions. In the first drafts Thelma cuts the car’s lights to cause the crash. Apparently feeling that wasn’t sufficient, in the draft of Feb. 7, 1949, Frings has Thelma both cut the lights and burn Tony with the lighter! The lines about the chameleon appear in the first draft, dated Nov. 18, 1948 (Frings, File on Thelma Jordon script files).
25. Yet ads for the film presented Thelma as a femme fatale with lines such as “Nothing stops Thelma Jord
on. … She’ll lie … kill … or kiss her way out of anything” (Paramount press sheets). Successive screenplay drafts show Frings softening Thelma’s character. For example, in the first two drafts Thelma herself suggests that Cleve hire Willis. In the “final white” version (Feb. 7, 1949), Cleve comes up with the plan (File on Thelma Jordon script files).
26. The novel lacks this flashback, as do earlier drafts of the screenplay by Barre Lyndon and Jonathan Latimer. Lyndon’s initial version (dated Jan. 6, 1947) and Latimer’s draft (Jan. 15, 1947) begin, like the source novel, with the exam. Lyndon’s second draft (July 25, 1947) starts at the moment of Wilma’s near-rape. Lyndon’s first draft lacks the necessary hook—why is this woman acting so strangely?—and his second iteration risks undermining viewers’ sympathy for Wilma before the story even starts. Frings’s first draft (Feb. 18, 1948, under the title “Strange Deception”) cannily places the flashback where it stands in the film and thus thrusts the audience immediately into a dramatic situation.
27. In the epigraph to the source novel, Be Still, My Love, author June Truesdell writes that Wilma “is the victim of CONDITIONED REFLEXES just as surely as the test animals in her own laboratory” (5).
28. The near-rape scene, shot on May 28, 1948, was the final scene filmed, according to Hal Wallis’s script notes. As one might expect, the scene was a bone of contention between the studio and the Breen Office. Stephen Jackson, a PCA administrator, wrote to Wallis in February of 1948 that the film could not show any struggle preceding the near-rape; another letter of March 8 reiterates the complaint. After assurances from the studio the PCA approved the film in April. In May, though, Jackson wrote angrily to Wallis, protesting that he and director William Dieterle had refused to let the PCA representative on set as the scene was shot. In none of the screenplay drafts, however, is there any indication that Wilma complies with the young man’s advances. In Truesdell’s novel she doesn’t resist but seems to grow passive as Bill (named Frank) kisses her: “She rested there, her lips slightly parted, her heart lost in the surging sound of his pulse” (25).