Nightmare Alley - Film Noir And The American Dream (18 page)

“Even if you wipe out a man’s memory, doesn’t it stand to reason that his brain is the same, that his … standards are the same?” Or does “three years of war … change a man” irrevocably? These questions, asked in Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s
Somewhere in the Night
, offer opposing possibilities: on the one hand, that amnesiacs retain their original selves; on the other, that the self is infinitely changeable, and that experiences alter one’s identity and values in an ongoing process. Beneath them is the question I posed at the outset of this study: is identity an essence to be discovered or a malleable set of behaviors and beliefs? Though a second set of vet noirs asks this question directly, its answer is ambiguous.

Whereas the first platoon of ex-soldiers exposes the entrapping effects of unassimilable but ineradicable memories, the second explores the spaces of forgetting. In these vets the noir themes of alienation and isolation are given a material cause: along with their names or pasts, these ex-soldiers have lost all connection to the friends, lovers, and enemies who once defined them. Yet each is haunted by
his forgotten past and might echo Ole Anderson’s words, “I did something wrong—once.”
²²
Though these vets suffer from disabilities different from those discussed above, their narratives follow the same arc, as they encounter their prewar selves and relive their traumas, while attempting to give restitution to those they have harmed, redeem themselves for wrongdoing, and either integrate their new and old identities or reinvent themselves entirely. The selves these amnesiacs at once seek and flee from, notes Santos, are “uncanny doubles, ‘others’” whom they must “assimilate or destroy in order to reach psychological wholeness” (67). Indeed, these vets seek to re-member themselves in several ways: recall their previous lives; reattach that former self, like an amputated hand or leg; and rejoin humanity and American society.

As John Belton observes, “these amnesiacs epitomize the social estrangement and psychological confusion that has settled in the formerly healthy American psyche after the war. Audiences establish a troubled identification with these heroes … whose identity crises mirror those of the nation as a whole” (189–90). The United States was, of course, settled by immigrants who had abandoned their previous lives and built new selves unburdened by the past. Like the missing person films, then, the veteran-amnesia noirs probe the American ideals of self-reinvention and the pursuit of happiness. As “Immigrants in Their Native Land” (Waller 180), these former soldiers serve as synecdoches for postwar America’s efforts to recreate itself and as test cases for the viability of the American Dream.

As
Somewhere in the Night
opens, the camera floats through a hospital ward in Honolulu, then hovers over a bandaged man lying on a bed. We hear the faceless man in voice-over: “I don’t know my name. You—talk to me. Act like I was alive, not just somebody with eyes and no name. Think of a name. Taylor. Think of another name; there must be other names. Taylor. No. Taylor. No. Taylor. Taylor.” The voice is that of one George W. Taylor (John Hodiak), who has lost his memory owing to a war injury, his identity verified only by his wallet and a far from heartening letter. “I despise you now,” it reads. “I’m ashamed for having loved you. I shall pray as long as I live for someone … to hurt and destroy you, make you want to die, as you have me.” Later we learn the full story: Taylor failed to show up at his wedding with a woman named Mary; the jilted bride was then struck by a car while crossing the street. If Taylor was such a heel, perhaps his amnesia is a blessing.

Taylor explores his old LA haunts, repeatedly encountering the friends and enemies of a Larry Cravat, who left Taylor $5,000. The more we know of Cravat, the less we like him. He was a low-level but honest detective, until “somebody dropped two million clams right in his lap”—money that the Nazis had stolen. Cravat was also wanted for murder. As the characters’ names imply, the film explores identity via a clothing trope, eventually revealing that Taylor
is
Cravat, having borrowed his new name from the label inside his coat: “W. George, tailor.” Like Johnny Preston in
Dead Reckoning
, Cravat camouflaged his past by joining the military. Ironically, his plan has turned into a grim joke on himself: the man who intentionally gave himself “amnesia” now truly doesn’t remember anything.
²³

Though Cravat was a shady character, Taylor seems earnest and well-meaning, which implies that Cravat has changed more than his coat and tie. Nor can we help but sympathize when he bares his soul to Christy (Nancy Guild), a nightclub singer who was the late Mary’s best friend and who now falls for Taylor. Although his amnesia may have handed Taylor what he calls a “brand new scorepad,” it also makes him an alien—one of Waller’s immigrants in his native land. “Do you know what it’s like, Christy,” he asks, “to be alone in the world? Really alone in the whole world? A billion people and every one of them a stranger.” Santos speculates that Taylor epitomizes “the ultimate existential hero” (or antihero) who can “create any identity he wishes” (82; Taylor later gives his name as “Tom Carter” to a police detective pursuing Cravat). But it’s not so simple, which becomes clear as Taylor continues, “Or what’s worse, not a stranger. Somebody maybe who knows you, hates you, wants you to die.” In other words he is not really alone, because his retailoring hasn’t removed the threads tying him to Cravat. Like other noir veterans, Taylor/Cravat is dangling between past and future, old and new selves. Christy (who, like Joyce Harwood and Gagin’s Pila, endeavors to redeem and renew her troubled vet) voices his condition in a song: “I’m in the middle of nowhere / I’m in betwixt and between.”

As he seeks an exit from nowhere, Taylor/Cravat feels he is “chasing shadows,” which the film illustrates by showing his enlarged shadow accompany him wherever he goes. In fact, the phrase fits all of noir’s amnesiac vets, each one chasing the shadow of his former self (who may also be his own bête noire), while attempting to flesh out his new silhouette. Taylor/Cravat’s chase leads him to a man named Conroy (Houseley Stevenson), who witnessed the 1942 murder of which Cravat is accused but was then run down by a car and has been incarcerated in an asylum ever since. Taylor/Cravat interviews Conroy’s daughter, Elizabeth
(Josephine Hutchinson), who speaks for Taylor/Cravat in confessing that she has always pretended that “I wasn’t dead, that I was alive. I wanted so to make believe that somebody loved me once.” He consoles her: “I know a little bit about being lonely.” Such empathetic connections may permit Cravat/Taylor to banish his shadow—or merge with it. But he is nearly denied the chance: on leaving Elizabeth’s apartment, he is nearly run down by a truck, only narrowly avoiding replaying Mary’s and Conroy’s fates. Conroy himself has anterograde amnesia: unable to form new memories, he believes it’s still 1942. An inverted Cravat, he is the shadow Taylor must banish before he can unite his new and old personae. Fortunately, before Conroy is stabbed to death by another shadowy figure, Taylor—who has retained Cravat’s detective skills—gains a key bit of information: the murdered man left a suitcase on the dock.

In the film’s most effective sequence, shot night-for-night on the docks, Taylor and Christy find the suitcase containing the money and the coat revealing his identity. Then they flee to a storefront mission, where the film appends a religious element to Taylor’s quest for redemption, and where Christy utters the lines about identity quoted at the beginning of this section. George Taylor isn’t capable of murder, but what about Larry Cravat? Does amnesia change a person irrevocably, or does one’s essential nature endure? Has Taylor, because of his war injury and resulting amnesia, discarded his Cravat and fashioned a new, improved identity? Or is our protagonist neither Taylor nor Cravat but a third self who blends Cravat’s savvy with Taylor’s honesty? The rather contrived resolution, in which Mel Phillips turns out to be the murderer, doesn’t provide answers. It is clear, however, that Taylor, with Christy’s help, achieves redemption, first by forgetting and then by remembering himself.
Somewhere in the Night
, then, ultimately affirms the ideology of self-recreation, proposing that, rather than recovering their prewar selves, Americans are better off tossing them aside like suits of outdated clothing.

Made three years after
Somewhere in the Night, The Crooked Way
is a virtual remake that is immeasurably enriched by John Alton’s striking cinematography. It opens at Letterman General Hospital in San Francisco, where amnesiac veteran and Silver Star awardee Eddie Rice (John Payne) is being interviewed: “Where were you born, Eddie? Who were your parents? … Are you rich? Poor? Got a girl? Married?” Situated to the far left of the frame, Eddie is lit only with a small light source on one side, as if reduced by amnesia to a silhouette. He hopes to meet someone who will fill in his outline, but Alton casts doubt by scoring Eddie’s face and body with shadowy lines that suggest entrapment. His doctor goes on to
distinguish between psychological and organic amnesia, noting that Eddie’s is the latter—a piece of steel lodged in his brain has erased his memory. But actually he has both kinds: like Larry Cravat, he joined the service to escape his former identity as Eddie Riccardi, who was involved in a 1942 murder but turned State’s evidence against his old friend, gangster Vince Alexander (Sonny Tufts).

After Eddie pays a visit to his ex-wife, Nina Martin (Ellen Drew, another nightclub singer), she informs Alexander that Eddie has returned, and, in a scene recalling
The Killers
and foreshadowing Alton’s later work in
The Big Combo
, Vince and his thugs rough Rice up as neon lights flash outside his room, perhaps representing the flickering lights of Eddie’s memory. On receiving Alexander’s ultimatum—disappear within twenty-four hours or else—Eddie stares into a mirror, which, as in
Best Years
and
Crossfire
, indicates his coexisting but uninte-grated identities. Although Nina refuses to help him, she does gaze longingly at the engraved cigarette case he gave her years earlier, inscribed “N
INA
/ With All My Love / Till The Day I Die. / E
DDIE
.” This item tangibly links him to his former self; yet it also suggests that, like Montgomery, Gagin, and noir’s other disabled vets, Eddie has become a ghost or zombie. A witty moment in the film develops this metaphor. After Vince frames him for the murder of Detective Lieutenant Williams (who had determined that Eddie was innocent of the earlier crime), a fleeing Eddie is picked up by a hearse. But perhaps he still has a chance to be resurrected rather than embalmed.

Indeed, Eddie eventually persuades Nina to help him; she even takes a bullet for him. As he nurses her, she says, “You’re far away. How far?” From her point of view we see Eddie’s visage enveloped in shadow, illustrating his self-erasure. When he answers, “Five years. A lifetime,” his face is suddenly illuminated, and he wonders “what it would be like if there’d only been an Eddie Rice.” Nina responds, “Oh, you’re good, Eddie. You’re good.” If she believes in him, it must be true. Again a woman’s love redeems a disabled vet by affirming his goodness. But in this case redemption can happen only if the vet entirely erases his former self.

At last Eddie turns for help to Petey (Percy Helton), an old acquaintance who runs a war surplus store—an appropriate place to cast off his prewar persona. Instead of reposing on the bed Petey provides, Eddie packs a blanket with an army fatigue jacket and helmet and places them on the bed. During a break in the ensuing gun battle (the first shots are fired at the camouflaged bedroll, metaphorically murdering Riccardi), Vince proposes that he and Eddie revive their partnership. While he considers the proposition, Eddie’s face is half-shadowed to suggest Riccardi’s potential resurrection, but he ultimately rejects the offer.
Vince then subdues Eddie and tries to use his limp body as a shield, just as he used to do with Riccardi—now merely an empty shell—but the tactic fails, and Vince is killed. We end where we began, with Eddie Rice in the hospital, where he and Nina agree that he’ll remain Eddie Rice forever.

If George Taylor retains some vestiges (doggedness, street smarts) of Cravat, Eddie Rice is divorced from everything of Riccardi except his wife. Yet both
The Crooked Way
and
Somewhere in the Night
suggest that prewar identities are a hindrance in the postwar world, amnesia a necessary precondition for writing a new scorepad. Indeed, insofar as it frees these vets from louche associations and illegal activities and permits redemption, the war is a blessing. But they are not just isolated cases: in these amnesiacs postwar audiences not only witnessed their own anxieties—their alienation; their lost innocence and desire to recover it; the sense that the prewar world was irrelevant, even a burden—they also watched their dreams of self-renewal fulfilled. These two films endorse the American Dream in which alienation gradually yields to self-affirmation and in which a life’s second act may redeem an original sin.

The final two vet noirs, however, emphasize that reinvention requires enormous sacrifices. These films’ amnesiacs embody both the complex anxieties and ambivalences left from the war
and
a new set of fears—of invasion, of prying and super-powerful legal and medical institutions—typical of the emergent Cold War. Curtis Bernhardt’s
High Wall
(scripted by Sydney Boehm and future blacklistee Lester Cole) employs its disabled veteran to question the humanity of medical and legal institutions; this vet’s restoration occurs only after he is tamed by powerful institutions. Fred Zinnemann’s
Act of Violence
, scripted by ex-Communist Robert Richards, is a powerful, sophisticated study of guilt resulting from the collision of remembering and forgetting; it raises thorny ethical questions about loyalty and forgiveness. Both films’ ambience of surveillance and fear evokes the paranoid atmosphere of the HUAC era, and each leaves behind a residue of anxiety.