Nightmare Alley - Film Noir And The American Dream

NIGHTMARE ALLEY

FILM NOIR AND THE AMERICAN DREAM

MARK OSTEEN

© 2013 The Johns Hopkins University Press

All rights reserved. Published 2013

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Osteen, Mark.

Nightmare alley : film noir and the American dream / Mark Osteen.

      p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4214-0780-7 (hdbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-4214-0832-3 (electronic) — ISBN 1-4214-0780-9 (hdbk. : alk. paper) — ISBN 1-4214-0832-5 (electronic)

1. Film noir—United States—History and criticism. 2. Motion pictures—Social aspects—United States—History—20th century. 3. American Dream in art. 4. National characteristics, American, in motion pictures. I. Title.

PN1995.9.F54O88    2013

A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.

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List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Film Noir and the American Dream

1
    “Someone Else’s Nightmare”: Exploring Noir Dreamscapes

2
    Missing Persons: Self-Erasure and Reinvention

3
    Vet Noir: Masculinity, Memory, and Trauma

4
    Framed: Forging Noir Identities

5
    Noir’s Cars: Automobility and Amoral Space

6
    Nocturnes in Black and Blue: Memory, Morality, and Jazz Melody

7
    Femmes Vital: Film Noir and Women’s Work

8
    Left-Handed Endeavor: Crime, Capitalism, and the Hollywood Left

Conclusion: American Nightmares

Notes

Filmography

Works Cited

Index

The geek is a main attraction in
Nightmare Alley
’s carnival

The dream sequence in
Spellbound
features an array of disembodied eyes

Ole Anderson (Burt Lancaster) and Kitty Collins (Ava Gardner) in
The Killers

Jane Greer as femme fatale Kathie Moffat in
Out of the Past

In
Dark Passage
Vincent Parry (Humphrey Bogart) connects with Irene Jansen (Lauren Bacall)

John Muller (Paul Henreid) prepares to cut his own face in
Hollow Triumph

Floyd Bowers (Steve Brodie) and Montgomery (Robert Ryan) in
Crossfire

In
Act of Violence
Frank Enley (Van Heflin) confesses to his wife, Edith (Janet Leigh)

Detective McPherson (Dana Andrews) dreams of the eponymous Laura (Gene Tierney)

Hardy Cathcart (Clifton Webb) tries to control his wife, Mari (Cathy Downs), in
The Dark Corner

Professor Wanley (Edward G. Robinson) is entranced by a portrait in
The Woman in the Window

In
They Live by Night
, Bowie (Farley Granger) and Keechie (Cathy O’Donnell) fall in love

Bart (John Dall) and Annie (Peggy Cummins) at their convertible in
Gun Crazy

Emmett Myers (William Talman) abducts Bowen (Frank Lovejoy) and Collins (Edmond O’Brien) in
The Hitch-Hiker

Opening “The Great Whatsit” in
Kiss Me Deadly

Lily (Ida Lupino) improvises with Pete (Cornel Wilde) in
Road House

Rita Hayworth as Gilda ironically urges us to put the blame on Mame

Marie Allen (Eleanor Parker) is
Caged

Dr. Quinada (James Mason) is dwarfed by Smith Ohlrig (Robert Ryan) in
Caught

The heist gang plans a “left-handed endeavor” in
The Asphalt Jungle

In
The Prowler
Webb Garwood (Van Heflin) wants what he sees in the Gilvray house

This project has been long in the making, and many people have contributed to its completion. To thank everyone would require far too much space, but I would like to acknowledge and express my gratitude for the help of several people in particular.

I’m grateful to Professors Julie Grossman and Paul Saint-Amour for their support. My colleagues in the English Department at Loyola University Maryland have furnished a lively intellectual community where I could test the ideas found herein. I’m particularly grateful to my colleague Paul Lukacs for suggesting the Franklin and Emerson connections. My department’s support also included encouraging me to teach courses in which my embryonic notions could grow; the students in those courses helped me develop those notions. To them I offer my hearty thanks.

Barbara Hall and the staff at the Special Collections Department of the Margaret Herrick Library deserve a special note of gratitude. The resources and staff at that institution—which for film scholars comes pretty close to heaven on earth—have deepened and enriched this project immeasurably.

I’m grateful to the anonymous reader for the Johns Hopkins University Press for perusing the manuscript so promptly and thoroughly; such alacrity is both laudable and rare.

As always, my greatest debt is to my wife, Leslie Gilden, for providing a patient ear as I rattled on about sometimes obscure films, for providing a second set of eyes as we viewed the movies together, and for voicing challenges that helped me to refine my ideas in our many and various discussions of these films.

An earlier version of
chapter 4
was published in the
Journal of Film and Video
; an earlier version of
chapter 5
was published in the
Journal of Popular Film and Television
.

All illustrations, except those in
chapter 5
, were purchased from the Kobal Collection. The rest come from Jerry Ohlinger’s Movie Material Store. I thank these vendors for their assistance.

NIGHTMARE ALLEY

“Is a guy born that way?”

Stan Carlisle (Tyrone Power), the protagonist of Edmund Goulding’s
Nightmare Alley
, asks this question about the geek, an abject figure on the lowest rung of the carnival hierarchy, whose chief task is to bite off the heads of chickens. One of the darkest films in the noir canon,
Nightmare Alley
traces Carlisle’s rise from carny assistant to slick mentalist performing in chic hotels, followed by a fall into destitution, which ends as Stan, now a groveling alcoholic, is hired as a carnival geek. The answer to his question is ambiguous: Stan’s cynicism, arrogance, and greed motivate the bad choices he makes, as does his relationship with the scheming psychologist Lilith Ritter. Yet the film’s circular structure and motif of tarot cards imply that Stan was indeed “born that way”—that he always has been a geek.

Carlisle’s quest for fame is a quintessentially American tale that depicts the pursuit of happiness through individual striving, but it is an anti–Horatio Alger fable of the perils of ambition, a warning that transforming the self may also empty it of meaning. More broadly, the geek figure offers an opportunity to assess critically the American ideals of self-creation, individualism, free choice, and upward mobility. Though the geek’s pursuit of happiness is drastically attenuated—he will do anything for a drink—it nonetheless resembles those of many film noir protagonists, obsessed with a desirable goal or object—a falcon sculpture, a seductive woman, a big score—or fleeing, like Stan, from a traumatic event. Indeed, Stan Carlisle’s life evokes questions that have troubled Americans since before the nation even existed: what is the relation between personal history and present character? Is it possible to escape from one’s past? Is identity inborn or a set of masks or performances?
Nightmare Alley
provides one answer to the question that lies at the heart of this book: what does film noir tell us about the American Dream?

In his study of that overused but little-understood phrase, Jim Cullen lists four dreams: those of upward mobility, equality, home ownership, and the West as a symbol of undying hope, best epitomized by Hollywood (8–9). I would add to his tally the ideals of free enterprise and personal liberty. Beneath each of these values lies an enduring faith in what the Declaration of Independence calls “the pursuit of happiness,” a phrase that, Cullen proposes, “defines the American Dream, treating happiness as a concrete and realizable objective” (38). Underpinning even that goal is the ideology of individualism—the belief that personal effort enables one to determine one’s own destiny and character; throw off the fetters of history; overcome class, gender, and racial barriers; and gain wealth and prestige. The crime films made in Hollywood between 1944 and 1959 challenge these beliefs by portraying characters whose defeat or death seems fated; by dramatizing the obstacles to class mobility and racial or gender equality; by asking whether anyone—whether detective, war veteran, or homeless woman—can truly reinvent him- or herself; by questioning whether new consumer products and technologies such as fast cars really liberate us; and by raising a skeptical eyebrow at the midcentury faith in psychoanalysis and the therapeutic ethos that supports it.

Stan Carlisle’s question has been answered in two conflicting ways throughout American cultural history. One answer, perhaps best represented by Benjamin Franklin’s
Autobiography
, portrays identity as an endless process of entrepreneurial invention. Thus young Ben leaves his childhood home in Boston to make his way to Philadelphia where, in part 2, he deliberately sculpts a new self through the sedulous application of reason and industry (see 79–86). For the rest of his life he constantly remakes himself: first a printer and publisher, he becomes at different periods a musician, an inventor, a scientist, an ambassador, a military leader, and a legislator. Franklin also inserts into his life story a letter from a friend, Benjamin Vaughan, who writes that Franklin proves “how little necessary all origin is to happiness, virtue, or greatness” (72). In this archetypal American success story, one’s past is irrelevant to one’s present and future: an American can be anything he or she wishes, so long as he or she maintains resilience and curiosity. Franklin’s story is the Protestant conversion narrative—a narrative of being born again—shorn of supernatural trappings. Whatever a Franklinesque American becomes, he or she is never merely “born that way.”

Set against this model of infinite reinvention is the philosophy presented by Ralph Waldo Emerson in his influential essay “Self-Reliance.” For Emerson, a person cannot reinvent him- or herself; instead, one must discover and refine his or
her true nature by looking within. Emerson holds that “a man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages” (29). The self must be free of fetters—on this Franklin and Emerson agree—but unlike Franklin, Emerson argues that “no man can violate his nature” (35). Self-reliance thus presumes the existence of an authentic self to be relied upon. That “aboriginal Self” cannot be escaped, for it underlies “every former state of life and circumstances, as it does underlie my present” (38, 41). Nor does mobility make a difference. Emerson writes, “I pack my trunk, … embark on the sea, and at last wake up in Naples, and there beside me is the stern fact, the sad self, unrelenting, identical, that I fled from” (48). The precept that no one escapes his or her nature is indeed the lesson of the “missing person” noirs I discuss in
chapter 2
.