Ex-cons and veterans are outsiders whose stumbles into crime scenes are often forgiven or annulled. On the other hand, presumably upright characters, like policemen, doctors, bank executives—characters who should know better yet succumb to crime nonetheless—are often beyond redemption. In his pursuit of the American dream—a model home in a new suburb and marriage to a woman whose purity he wants to protect—Barney Nolan (Edmond O’Brien), the cop-gone-bad in SHIELD FOR MURDER, is polluted by greed. The film doesn’t examine what causes his downfall. Although we hear from his partner that he was once a fine cop, Barney is deep in noir, stealing and killing, right from the start of the film. He lives by night, hiding out and putting on disguises, and at the end he’s shot down in front of his tract house.
On the lam: a sympathetic and wronged ex-convict (Steve Cochran) fleeing with a dime-a-dance hostess (Ruth Roman), in TOMORROW IS ANOTHER DAY.
Doc Matson, the bad doctor (James Mason) in ONE WAY STREET who works for gangsters and decides to run off to Mexico with their money, has also turned before the story opens. But as he helps natives in a rural community, he begins to redeem himself. He returns to the noir city to confront the gangsters, and, after mowing them down, he is run over (off-screen) during a rainstorm of pestilential force. Because he has lived too long like a criminal, he’s on a one-way street on which U-turns are not allowed.
The bank executive (Joseph Cotten) in THE STEEL TRAP (Andrew L. Stone, 1952) makes a split-second decision on a Friday to escape to Rio with a suitcase of the bank’s money. By Monday morning, after second thoughts and the stinging disapproval of his wife (Teresa Wright), he returns the money, his crime undetected. Directed by Andrew L. Stone in his vivid, cut-to-the-chase style, the film has as little time for reflection as its protagonist. That the banker’s escapade may have revealed fatal flaws in his character or that his wife, who never wavers in her morality, may henceforth regard him with suspicion—these are nuances the film has no time to ponder. The focus is on process, the details of the theft and of the antihero’s harried escape.
Its lack of interest in exploring the character’s psychology may give it a B-movie patina, but THE STEEL TRAP, a minor masterpiece, is a shrewd example of conservative Hollywood ideology at work. Pointedly, the film begins and ends with a series of shots of the banker leaving his suburban home, getting on a train, arriving at the bank. The first time his routine looks humdrum, at the finale, after the banker returns the money and is reabsorbed into middle-class life, it looks like a blessing. How grateful the banker must be for the safety and familiarity of his journey from home to work, day in, day out. Tow the line, the film warns us. Remain where you are.
The sketchy psychology in THE STEEL TRAP, SHIELD FOR MURDER, and ONE WAY STREET carries a sting. In the fallen world that noir evokes, isn’t it to be expected that a banker, a policeman, a doctor would also, given the opportunity, become a thief? How much motivation, after all, is needed to account for an impulse depicted by noir as virtually universal?
“He did it for the money” could explain the misconduct of many derailed patriarchs in noir. “He did it for sex” is the corresponding theme song of the many victims snared by a femme fatale’s siren call. Often, of course, as in DOUBLE INDEMNITY and its many imitations, a protagonist is spurred by a lethal combination of both greed and lust. Among the films I watched, however, the two impulses rarely coalesced. Case in point: QUICKSAND is a straightforward enactment of the perils of desire untrammeled by greed. For a hot date with a blonde hash house waitress, a short garage mechanic (Mickey Rooney) takes twenty dollars from the company cash register and is a goner. Thrust into quicksand indeed, he ends up with a murder wrap and a staggering debt.
In WHERE DANGER LIVES, Jeff Cameron, an impassive young doctor (Robert Mitchum) is ensnared by a sultry patient, Margo Lannington (Faith Domergue) married to an older man (Claude Rains). After the woman tricks the hopeless doctor into thinking he has killed her husband, the two fugitives light out—for Mexico, of course. In SHOCKPROOF, a parole officer, Griff Marat (Cornel Wilde), falls for parolee Jenny Marsh (Patricia Knight) who is aching to go straight but is distracted by a minatory figure from her criminal past. The besotted officer forsakes his duties (as well as his blind mother and little brother) to run off to Mexico with his mistress.
Noir understands that the quick choices of these males who are clipped by desire require little explanation. Their hyperactive libidos cause havoc, but the characters in QUICKSAND, WHERE DANGER LIVES, and SHOCKPROOF are exonerated nonetheless. In QUICKSAND and WHERE DANGER LIVES, loyal but masochistic, sexually unthreatening women wait in the wings for the sadder-but-wiser miscreants. And with disaster averted at the last minute, Griff and Jenny in SHOCKPROOF are released into a life to be devoted to marriage and family.
Other than the faithless waitress in QUICKSAND, whose only desire is to own a mink coat, the sirens here subvert the femme fatale stereotype. Margo Lannington in WHERE DANGER LIVES is lethal, all right, but she’s also crazy, and the film explicitly defines her wantonness as a symptom of mental disturbance. Jenny Marsh in SHOCKPROOF shreds traces of her bad-girl past—in the opening montage she makes herself over, changing her hair from hard-looking brunette to softer-looking blonde and then buying a conservative-looking dress and hat. And at the climax, when she insists on giving herself up to the law, she shows greater common sense than her parole officer.
Insistent diagonal lines entrap the fool-for-love anti-hero(Mickey Rooney), in QUICKSAND.
Surprisingly, in the films I viewed, unregenerate gun-wielding spider women were rare. The two most typical femmes fatales, in TOO LATE FOR TEARS and DEAD RECKONING, are enacted by full-fledged noir icon Lizabeth Scott. In the former she plays a character, Jane Palmer, seized by atavistic greed when a bag full of money is tossed by mistake into her car. On a rampage—the character is a nightmarish projection of male anxieties about assertive women—Jane Palmer kills the men who stand between her and the money: her retiring husband (Arthur Kennedy) as well as a gangster (Dan Duryea) who claims the suitcase was intended for him. On her way to Mexico she falls to her death from a hotel balcony, aiming a gun at male pursuers.
Lizabeth Scott’s femme fatale in DEAD RECKONING is more masked, and interpreting her motives becomes, in fact, the chief task of the investigating hero (and of the audience). The mannequinlike, somnambulistic quality of Scott’s screen persona make her seem out of reach—a woman with secrets likely to be dangerous to men. It is only at the end, when she pulls a gun on Rip Murdock as the two are driving away (is it to Mexico?) that ambiguity is banished and her identity as a wicked woman, phallic and unloving, is fully revealed.
Because Scott seemed marked for noir, however, viewers at the time who were aware of her other roles might well have suspected her bad-woman status from the start. The dragon lady in Andrew L. Stone’s little-known A BLUEPRINT FOR MURDER (1953), however, is played by sweet-faced Jean Peters with no track record in the genre. In this salon noir Peters plays Lynne Cameron, a cool, elegant society wife who may be guilty of poisoning her stepdaughter in order to claim her late husband’s fortune. The child’s uncle, Whitney “Cam” Cameron (Joseph Cotten), who is both suspicious of and drawn to Lynne, hopes she is innocent. But she isn’t.
In noir, males pricked by desire are often sincere. But as the above samples suggest, the women who tempt them, using their allure as a strategy for gaining money and power, are usually faking. Isn’t it precisely their sexual masquerade that makes them fatal to their prey? To ensure the restoration of patriarchal power—the underlying project of most studio-era films—the dragon ladies, as here, must be eliminated.
More unusual in noir than either deadly or clinging, virtuous women are the female counterparts to the middle-class men who fall off the wagon. Typically, these women who stray from bourgeois regularity have a longer journey into noir than men do. The strongest film of this type that I discovered is a late noir, CRIME OF PASSION, in which Barbara Stanwyck plays a go-getting Sa
n Francisco columnist, Kathy Ferguson, holding her own in a man’s world. In one of those reckless moments on which noir depends, she marries Bill Doyle (Sterling Hayden), a police officer from Los Angeles whose masculine qualities are less honed than hers. When she enters her husband’s tract house in a featureless new suburb in the San Fernando Valley for the first time, she seems too large for it—it’s obvious there’s no room in this anonymous, confining environment for her outsized energy. She begins to lose her grip, seducing Bill’s boss (Raymond Burr) in the hope he will promote her husband. But when the boss passes him over, Kathy shoots to kill.
Does CRIME OF PASSION imply that if Kathy Ferguson had stayed where she “belongs”—on the job and unmarried—she would have avoided the noir nets? Although the fear and distrust of powerful women that course through noir makes it an unlikely site for feminism, is it possible to read the film as a cracked, prefeminist fable that indicts conformity-ridden 1950s suburbia as a place where an independent-minded female can be driven to crime? In CRIME OF PASSION, Stanwyck’s character does indeed lose her mind in the suburbs. In the equally dotty WITNESS TO MURDER, Stanwyck as career woman Cheryl Draper is confined to a snake pit when she is unable to convince authorities that she saw a neighbor commit a fatal strangling. Skeptical males undermine her to the degree that, temporarily, she begins to think that she may not have witnessed a crime after all.
The coupling of women and madness also shows up in three other films I viewed. In SLEEP, MY LOVE (Douglas Sirk, 1948) and MIDNIGHT LACE (David Miller, 1960), wives whose husbands plot to kill them for their money are on the edge of hysteria right from the start. In THE SECRET FURY, a vengeful lawyer from out of her past, a former business partner of her father, torments well-born, fragile Ellen Manning (Claudette Colbert). In these variations on the old-fashioned damsel-in-distress prototype, the women are pliable, easy-to-topple victims of malevolent male plots.
“That Tuesday in July, there was no warning that it was to be the most terrible day of my life,” Ellen Jones (Loretta Young) announces in an opening voiceover in CAUSE FOR ALARM, the most vibrant woman-under-threat drama of the films I looked at. If, however, Ellen had been less preoccupied with maintaining a spotless house and had gotten out more, she would have seen the signs of looming disaster. An all-too-dutiful hausfrau—we see her first wearing an apron as she vacuums—she has become a virtual prisoner within her home, waiting on her husband (Barry Sullivan), a para-noid invalid confined to his upstairs bedroom. “Quiet. Illness Within,” appears on a sign on the white picket fence that circles the house, but it’s clear soon enough that illness is not limited to the man upstairs. Ellen remains passive until her husband tells her that a letter to the district attorney that she has just mailed for him contains the accusations that she and his doctor are having an affair and are plotting to murder him. Though innocent, Ellen is nonetheless fearful of being exposed; and when her husband dies suddenly, without pausing for even a moment of grief she leaves her fortress for the first time in the film in a desperate attempt to retrieve the letter from the post office. Who, indeed, is “ill” in this bright, normal-seeming house from which the usual noir repertoire of shadows is almost entirely banished?
Women over the edge: a suburban housewife (Barbara Stanwyck) cracks up in her kitchen, in CRIME OF PASSION (with Sterling Hayden); a single careerwoman (Barbara Stanwyck) is temporarilyconfined to a mental institution, in WITNESS TO MURDER; a distraughtwidow (Loretta Young) tries to retrieve an incriminating letter from a postman (Irving Bacon), in CAUSE FOR ALARM.
Films about the inner workings of the Mafia, THE GODFATHER trilogy or GOODFELLAS, for instance, or about the rise and fall of gangsters, like BUGSY, are distinctly not noir. But there are films about career criminals—about characters, that is, who would seem to have been born guilty—that have a legitimate place in a genre that, for me, is mostly about the eruption of crime within those who would seem to be exempted from it. I would say that by and large the focus of noir-tinged gangster stories ought to be on the criminals’ psychology. The best case in point of the films I watched is the infamous DESERT FURY (Lewis Allen, 1947). Eddie Bendix, a gangster from Chicago (John Hodiak) with a vague past that may include killing his wife, returns to his small hometown. He has had a failed relationship with Fritzi Haller (Mary Astor), a local small-time criminal who runs a bar and gambling den, and he tries now to seduce her daughter Paula (Lizabeth Scott), who is eager to join her mother’s underworld operations. In a truly subversive move, however, the film jettisons the characters’ criminal activities to concentrate on two homosexual couples: the mannish mother who treats her daughter like a lover, and the gangster and his devoted, possessive sidekick Johnny Ryan (Wendell Corey). The only crime in the film is at the end, when Bendix shoots his partner just before taking off with Paula. Is he, perhaps unconsciously, trying to eliminate the gay man within himself? Paula rejects her mother to run off with Bendix, but a heterosexual bond between them is beyond possibility. She notices what apparently hadn’t caught her attention before—that Bendix is pathologically jealous and controlling. To ensure her release, he must be eliminated (a car crash does the job), and she goes off with a sexually clueless lawman (Burt Lancaster) who has pined for her throughout without being aware of the free-floating homoeroticism.
“Different” in every way from noir templates, DESERT FURY is shot in the lurid, over-saturated colors that would come to define the 1950s melodramas of Douglas Sirk. As the sexual interplay among the deviant couples escalates, the colors deepen and become more pulplike, as if rendering literally the “fury” and the heat promised by the title.
“Forbidden” love: mother (Mary Astor) and daughter(Lizabeth Scott) in DESERT FURY; the hunter (Barry Sullivan) dreams about his prey (Vittorio Gassman), in CRY OF THE HUNTED.
“MGM’s drama of love and thrills in the dangerous waters of the Louisiana bayou,” claims the tagline for CRY OF THE HUNTED. The “love and thrills” the film delivers, however, are surely not what contemporary audiences expected, and certainly not from MGM. An escaped criminal on the lam in bayou country (Vittorio Gassman dressed in tight-fitting, usually wet pants and T-shirt) is pursued by a lawman (Barry Sullivan). Although both characters are married, their wives seem irrelevant; it’s the bond between the hunter and his prey that counts. Their unacknowledged and unspeakable mutual attraction (in an era when “forbidden love” was banned from the screen) is expressed obliquely, in fights where punches and kicks and the press of their bodies against each other carry an erotic charge. During one furious combat, in the muck and slime of the bayou, when Lt. Tunner falls into quicksand Jory saves him—a show of respect for the man who the criminal claims has been more decent to him than anyone else ever has. Returned to the custody of the law, Jory serves his time. Waiting for him upon his release—and thereby occupying the narrative position of a patient, loving spouse—is Lt. Tunner. As in DESERT FURY, love that could not speak its name in classic-era noir is hiding in plain sight.
In other films among my noir sampler about born-to-be-bad criminals the spotlight is also existential—how the characters live and die. The madman killer in HE WALKED BY NIGHT is a quintessential noir loner. The jewel thief in THE BURGLAR desires his own death. The criminals in HE RAN ALL THE WAY and HOLLOW TRIUMPH are the pawns of an ironic noir destiny.
Cowering behind shuttered blinds in a bungalow apartment, a dog his only companion, Morgan (Richard Basehart) in HE WALKED BY NIGHT has no history. He is what he does, an electronics wizard who steals parts that he needs and is ready to kill whoever gets in his way as he stalks an eerily empty nighttime city. Morgan leaves no prints or clues at the scenes of his crimes and has a seemingly superhuman capacity to disappear. Cinematographer John Alton’s painterly light and shadow compositions transform him into a demonic figure who, like a monster of a horror or science fiction movie, embodies pure threat. At the end he’s trapped in a tunnel that looks like the lair of the giant atomic ants in THEM!.
A killer
(Richard Basehart) entrapped by policeman, a tunnel, and cinematographer John Alton’s orchestral arrangement of light and shadow, in HE WALKED BY NIGHT.
The jewel thief Nat Harbin (Dan Duryea) in THE BURGLAR seems committed to his own extinction. He’s a half-hearted crook, more dedicated to protecting the honor of his stepsister Gladden (Jayne Mansfield) than to masterminding a well-planned heist. On the job, stealing a necklace from a mansion, Nat absent-mindedly leaves his car parked on the street. When the police stop, he interrupts his work in progress to chat them up, pretending his car has stalled. (Later, one of the cops says that it seemed as if he wanted to be caught.) After the job is completed, Nat doesn’t get out of town as he should, but rather hangs out in a bar where he allows himself to be picked up by a woman (Martha Vickers) whose masquerade—she’s working with a crooked cop to steal the necklace—he never suspects. When he’s killed in a shootout on Steel Pier in Atlantic City, the thief seems finally to have fulfilled his death wish. The character’s world-weariness is enhanced by the weathered face and drooping figure of Duryea, well past his prime as the pencil-thin ramrod stud in SCARLET STREET and THE WOMAN IN THE WINDOW.
Criminals on the lam in HE RAN ALL THE WAY and HOLLOW TRIUMPH are dipped-in-noir born losers. The thief in the former (John Garfield) is killed because he trusts no one, neither his floozy mother nor his partner-in-crime, whom he abandons during a failed heist, nor the needy young woman who might be able to save him, nor, most of all, himself. John Muller (Paul Henreid), who assumes the identity of Dr. Bartok in HOLLOW TRIUMPH, fails for an opposite reason: his overweening arrogance. Just as he thinks he’s outwitted his pursuers, he’s gunned down by unexpected opponents and, in one of the most ironic endings in the genre, passersby hurrying to their own destinies ignore his corpse.
The Dark Side of the Screen: Film Noir Page 26