The wrong man theme: Ray Milland in The Big Clock and Jack Carson (opposite), in Mildred Pierce certainly look guilty, but they are only victims of circumstance.
Similarly, the hero’s search and entrapment in The Big Clock provide telling comments on his character. A go-getting magazine editor whose specialty is finding missing persons is all but enslaved to a dictatorial boss (Charles Laughton) and to a nagging wife, which, in noir, is a certain sign of disaster. To break his routine, he agrees to go out for a drink with the boss’s conniving mistress, who casually suggests a blackmail scheme against the boss. The editor wants no part of the deal, or of her. Laughton kills the woman in an argument, after she has taunted him with the news that she has gone out with a “Jefferson Randolph.” The boss had glimpsed a man leaving her apartment, just as he had arrived, and he employs his henchmen to find this “Jefferson Randolph” in order to pin the murder on him, little suspecting that the wanted man is in fact his ace editor and chief spy. Milland/“Jefferson Randolph” ends up trapped in the building that houses the Laughton publishing empire, cowering in the shadows of a massive clock tower. The story is told in flashback, as Milland muses that only twenty-four hours ago his life was in perfect order. His ironic search for himself forces him to question the possibility of his own moral guilt, and he feels convicted. As his life seems to close in on him, he casts a cold eye on his marriage and his job, by both of which he feels trapped.
At the end, his ordeal over, he is relieved to return to normal. The Big Clock, with its cop-out ending, is a well-made thriller with interesting psychological overtones, not a deep character study of the man in the grey flannel suit. But the investigation here approaches a search into the self, sketching in the beginnings of that journey into the heart of darkness that is at the center of the noir vision. The Big Clock dramatizes the precariousness of the normal everyday world—one of the central themes in the victim stories that constitute a second cluster of noir narrative patterns.
“I’m backed into a dark corner and I don’t know who’s hitting me”: the noir victim’s theme song, spoken by Mark Stevens in The Dark Corner, as a private eye who’s been set up as the fall guy for a crime he did not commit.
“There goes my last lead. I feel all dead inside. I’m backed into a dark corner and I don’t know who’s hitting me,” says Mark Stevens as the beleaguered protagonist in The Dark Corner, speaking for an entire gallery of noir victims. In such films as The Dark Corner, Dark Passage, The Wrong Man, Ministry of Fear, Edge of Doom, Cry of the City, characters are accused of crimes they did not commit, their lives subjected to wild reversals and inversions. Cornered, framed, set up as the patsy and the fall guy, these victims are the playthings of a malevolent noir fate.
In The Dark Corner, Stevens, a private eye, is set up as the murderer of his ex-partner Jardine by Clifton Webb, who is pathologically jealous because Jardine is having an affair with his young wife. Webb hires a thug (William Bendix) to trail Stevens, and to make Stevens think Jardine wants to kill him. In Dark Passage, Humphrey Bogart has been sent to jail for a murder he did not commit. He escapes from prison, takes on a new identity with the help of plastic surgery, and becomes once again the fall guy for a murder. With his new face, he is a wanted man all over again, living a fugitive existence in which every knock on the door induces terror. Both times he was framed by an insanely jealous woman (Agnes Moorehead) who killed his wife and then implicated him in the second murder.
In The Wrong Man, Henry Fonda, making a routine visit to check up on an insurance policy, is arrested because the women in the office think he is the man who recently held them up. The innocent man bears a striking physical resemblance to the robber, who turns up only after Fonda and his wife live through a prolonged nightmare.
Cry of the City, Edge of Doom, and Beyond a Reasonable Doubt introduce further ironic variations on the wrong man theme. In Cry of the City, Richard Conte, who has been condemned for killing a cop (in self-defense) is framed by a crooked lawyer for a jewel robbery that he did not commit. He escapes from jail, confronts and kills the lawyer who set him up, and then spends the rest of the film on the run from a plodding cop (Victor Mature). Branded for a crime he did not commit, the Conte character becomes a true criminal, enmeshed in a web from which there is no way out. In Edge of Doom, Farley Granger, who has killed a priest to whom he has gone to ask for money to bury his mother, is picked up by cops in an all-night diner and hustled off to the police station, to be questioned about another crime of which he is innocent. Fritz Lang’s Beyond a Reasonable Doubt submits the wrong man theme to what may well be its darkest reversals. A journalist agrees to go along with his boss’s notion that an innocent man can be condemned. Their plan is to build an airtight case against the journalist (for killing a chorus girl), and then, after his conviction, to reveal their charade. But the editor is killed in a car accident and the journalist is caught by their clever scheme and convicted of murder. The final twist is that he really is guilty (the woman he killed had been blackmailing him).
“They came at me from all sides,” says Vera Miles, as the wife of a man (Henry Fonda) wrongly accused of committing a series of robberies, in Hitchcock’s deeply noir The Wrong Man.
In such films as Scarlet Street, The Woman in the Window, and Mildred Pierce, the characters wrongly convicted for a crime clearly have the capacity to be murderers. In Scarlet Street, Johnny (Dan Duryea) takes the rap for killing Kitty Collins (Joan Bennett), when it is Chris Cross (Edward G. Robinson) who is the murderer. But there is no question that Johnny is a violent man—we first see him beating up Kitty—and that he has all the makings of a murderer. His arrest and execution for a crime he did not commit represent a perverse kind of justice.
In The Woman in the Window, Duryea and Robinson enact another grim variation on the theme of the transference and exchange of guilt. Professor Wanley (Robinson) kills a man in self-defense. The murder victim’s bodyguard (Duryea), who has been blackmailing the terrified professor, is gunned down by the police, who mistake him for the murderer. The story has been a bad dream, imagined by the professor while he has dozed off after dinner at his club; yet has the dream revealed something about himself, about his latent criminal capacities? In the dream, he kills a man in self-defense and then, again in self-defense to protect his name, proceeds to act and plot like a criminal covering his tracks, as his nemesis, Duryea, blackmails him. Duryea’s character would certainly be capable of murder—the odor of foul deeds emanates from him—and it is one of the film’s many ironies that we are relieved when the wrong man is shot for a murder he was not responsible for. Yet is the professor entirely innocent?
Mildred Pierce willingly assumes the wrong man role, claiming she killed her husband in order to protect the real murderer, her daughter Veda. But everything about Mildred—her possessiveness, her intense identification with and attraction to her daughter—suggests that she would be capable of almost anything, including murder, to win her daughter’s approval. Veda pulled the trigger, but Mildred’s smothering, indulgent attitude has contributed to the girl’s crazed act, the ultimate outburst of a spoiled child not getting her own way.
Stories in the wrong man mold depend on coincidence. Henry Fonda just happens to look like a robber; Mark Stevens just happens to have an ex-partner who is having an affair with a woman whose husband is insanely jealous. To be at the receiving end of nasty chance is to induce not only paranoia, a conviction that the world is a dangerously uncertain place, but also to arouse feelings of guilt. The wife in The Wrong Man begins to feel that she has in some way deserved her horrible fate, that what she takes to be her own moral unworthiness has invited the affliction that has overtaken her.
The line between guilt and innocence in many films noirs is blurred; the “wrong” man turns out to be guilty in one way or another. Accused of violent crimes, the victim is forced to examine his own outlaw potential. Among noir’s wrong men, Henry Fonda stands out because he is clearly not capable of the hold-
ups of which he has been accused. The true criminal is only his physical double; in this case, the enemy does not reside within, but is a matter of purely blind chance, of dumb accident. And this kind of external threat is as unsettling and corrosive as the villainous alter ego that remains an ever-present possibility throughout the “innocent” victim stories.
The wrong man cornered: Farley Granger (below, left) being given the third degree about a murder he is innocent of, in Edge of Doom; and Arthur Kennedy in Boomerang, as he is hurled into a noir nightmare (below, right and opposite).
Once noir’s wronged men have been singled out by a dark and capricious fate, they are hurled into an abyss, their lives fatally disrupted, their personalities inevitably stained and transformed. Their entrapment may spring from guilty thoughts more than guilty deeds, and from an unconscious masochism; the wrong man may be a born victim, a crisis-oriented personality led to expect disaster. At least glancingly, then, the wrong man stories deal with the possible connections between the victim’s neurotic character traits—his burden of guilt, his leanings toward schizophrenic behavior, his innate capacity for violence, his pent-up rage—and his present misfortune, his accidental bad luck.
“Every time we get up, something comes along and knocks us down again,” says Vera Miles, at the beginning of The Wrong Man, before the chance encounter that is to destroy their lives has occurred. This could well be the epigraph for all the victims in noir, for all the characters who are defeated by circumstance.
Most of the wrong man stories conclude with at least a token restoration of the moral order. The real villains are apprehended, while the technically innocent are allowed to return to their normal lives. But the stories imply a world in which good is decidedly not rewarded and evil remains unchecked. Henry Fonda imprisoned for crimes he did not commit and Vera Miles in permanent residence in an insane asylum would be too subversive even for Hitchcock to consider as a serious story possibility. Nonetheless, the triumph of darkness underlies the material: these stories of innocence betrayed are unsettling.
In the wrong man stories, the victims do not appear to earn their misfortune. But in another, closely related noir mold, rather than being stick figures wounded by the random and ferocious finger of destiny, the characters are victims of their own past actions. In Out of the Past, The Killers, Kiss of Death, and The Woman on Pier 13, characters are convicted by who they once were, in a past they have tried to overcome. Once their history catches up with them, they are as helpless as the wrong men. In Out of the Past, Robert Mitchum is a former private eye who has left the big city for a small town, where he runs a gas station. In the dark past, he was hired by a gambling kingpin to find a woman. He found her, fell in love with her, was betrayed by her, and then tried to forget her. When the gangster sends messengers to find him, to call him out of “retirement” for one last gig, the pressure of the past is as fateful as in a Greek tragedy. Repeating the past, he becomes involved once again with the femme fatale, and is sucked into a complicated criminal scheme that results in his death. In The Woman on Pier 13, an ex-communist, now a thriving capitalist, is blackmailed into working for the party. His past entrammels him, as he sinks deeper into the communist world, which is depicted as a criminal underworld, with hoods meeting clandestinely in garages and abandoned waterfront warehouses. Unable to escape or to deny his past, the ex-communist is a fated noir victim.
In Kiss of Death, Victor Mature is an ex-con who goes straight. Caught and sentenced for his role in a jewel heist in the Chrysler Building, he is released from prison after he agrees to testify against his cell mate (Richard Widmark). He installs his wife and child in a quiet, tree-lined neighborhood in Queens and is all set to lead a regular life when, through a technical fluke, his nemesis escapes prosecution. But even before his nasty turn of fortune, Mature was a marked man—noir tells us again and again that a man cannot escape his past, and surely an ex-con will be haunted all his life by what he once was and might become again.
No way out: Victor Mature, an ex-con, can’t escape his past, in Kiss of Death; in No Way Out Richard Widmark and Linda Darnell, like characters in a naturalist novel, are victims of heredity and environment.
The spectral past is only one of the many means of entrapment for the noir victim. In No Way Out, the characters cannot escape the pressures of environment and race. In The Dividing Line, the hero is victimized because of race prejudice. In Ace in the Hole, the main character feels trapped by a job. Pressures of both job and environment combine in the several films noirs set in a boxing milieu, where the fighter becomes a symbol of noir victimization. In all the films where characters are pressed by circumstances, there is no way out as the protagonists stare mutely at lives of absolute dead-ends. “I used to live in a sewer. Now I live in a swamp. I’ve come up in the world,” says an embittered Linda Darnell, playing white trash in No Way Out. “You never get out of Beaver Canal,” she says. “The stink never gets out of you.” In Ace in the Hole, Kirk Douglas is a newspaperman who has been stuck for a year in Albuquerque. “Where’s the big story that’s going to get me out of here?” he asks. Then he hears about a man trapped in a cave and he sees the story as a chance to climb out of his rut. He remembers what happened to a reporter who covered a similar incident of a man trapped in a mine: “He crawled in for the story and crawled out with a Pulitzer Prize.” Douglas begins playing up the local incident, capitalizing on someone else’s misfortune. “How’s that for an angle: ‘King Tut in New Mexico: White man half-buried by angry Indian spirits.’ ” The journalist identifies with the trapped man. “There’s three of us buried here,” he says to the cave victim’s hard-boiled, money-grubbing wife (Jan Sterling). “I’m going back in style,” he promises. But as the accident becomes a shabby, manufactured cause célèbre, his chances for a new start slip away. Fatally stabbed by the black widow, he winds up horrified by his own cheapness. “I’m a $1000-a-day newspaperman; you can have me for nothing,” he announces just before he dies.
Billy Wilder, at his most cynical, depicts the crowds who come to gape at someone else’s catastrophe, as well as the hustlers who try to make a fast buck by turning the cave site into a jerrybuilt amusement park, with the leering twisted features of Hogarth caricatures. In Ace in the Hole, noir victimization is writ large, to epic proportions, as it becomes clear that all the characters are as trapped as the man in the cave.
In No Way Out and The Dividing Line, as in Ace in the Hole, the victim theme has a social conscience. The black doctor in No Way Out is attacked by a rabid racist and the Mexican boy in The Dividing Line is accused of being a rapist and a cop killer, but the films’ beleaguered heroes recover from white hostility. Major studio noir is not prepared to depict a black man or a Mexican as a hopeless victim, a born loser, or a social menace. In No Way Out, the doctor’s wife says, “We’ve been a long time getting here. We’re tired, but we’re here. We’ve got a right to be happy.” And the film, in which Sidney Poitier is a very dignified doctor, supports her claim. Against all the odds, the nice black family triumphs over the nasty white bigots.
Like race, the fight game provided film noir with some of its most pious victims. In such pictures as Body and Soul, Champion, and The Set-Up, the ring is the symbol of a tough world, a metaphor for the hero’s struggles in a dog-eat-dog environment. In Champion, the boxer is contaminated by his success and by what he had to do in order to make it; in The Set-Up, the fighter is the pawn of his managers. The protagonist’s moral crisis inevitably centers on a climactic fixed fight in which the victim-hero is paid to lose. At the end of Champion, the boxer (Kirk Douglas) fights like a mad man, symbolically battling all the people who tried to obstruct his rise. Against terrific odds, he KOs his opponent—and then dies of brain damage. His disapproving brother bitterly pronounces his epitaph: “He was a champ.” The boxer in The Set-Up (Robert Ryan) is so clearly on his last legs that his managers count on his defeat simply as a matter of course and don’t even bother to tell him that he has to
lose. Bounding back from his losing streak with unexpected force, however, he wins the fight. His reward is to be trapped in the empty arena as thugs track him down. With its innocent victim squared off against his inhuman oppressors, and the faces of the crowd twisted in perverse delight at the sight of blood, The Set-Up is as rigged as the fight racket itself.
Noir dramas set in prison suffer from the same symbolic insistence as the fight pictures: prison, like the boxing ring, is too literal, too facile a setting for dramatizing stories of noir victims whose lives seem to be closing in on them. In Jules Dassin’s schematic Brute Force, Burt Lancaster and his cronies plan an escape but are betrayed by a fellow convict. At the climax, Lancaster and a sadistic guard (Hume Cronyn) kill each other in a fight as the prison doctor, standing behind a barred window, intones the film’s theme: “There is no escape.” Through dialogue, action, and image, the film enforces the point that the prisoners are doomed men, caught both within and outside the prison walls. The outside world, overrun with two-timing dames and avenging con men, is as fierce and as enclosed as the prison society, a point made with equal force in Joseph Losey’s equally schematic English thriller The Criminal (U.S.: The Concrete Jungle) (1960).
The Dark Side of the Screen: Film Noir Page 20